Intro
Finally back home after around two weeks in İzmir. Trying to get back on my usual routine while making sure things are under control and I’m not missing any important stuff. And trying to rest as much as possible because the past two weeks were a lot harder and physically exhausting than it should be.
Just in case if you reached out to me for anything and I haven’t returned back to you, this is a good week to write me back again.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 293 (Will return to cleaning it tomorrow.)
RSS Reader: 3115
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 0
- Good part of this week will probably about catching up and resting.
- Also planning to set some time aside to start on end-of-year admin work.
- Have couple of ideas I want to work on to see where they will go.
From Last Week
- An opinion piece about how information control has become an important political tool around the world published on Turkish newspaper Evrensel’s Saturday paper.
- Recorded a really fun and definitely worth your time podcast episode about futuring and futures literacy in Turkish for my good friend Tansel Erdem Yılmaz’s podcast series Dinlesen Seversin. I’ll link it here and other places when it’s out.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Season of Forecasts
This is one of my favorite times of the year. Every year around late November and early December, the whole internet gets filled with all kinds of next year forecasts, trend reports and similar things. People love writing it and I love reading them. And things got much easier for me in the recent years because a group of crazy people (complimentary) decided to collect as many of those reports as possible and share them with everyone.
I always keep track of these kinds of reports not just because I feel like it’s a professional obligation but I actually enjoy reading about people’s expectations and forecasts about the year ahead. There’s always some interesting ideas and a lot of insight about what they’re expecting or hoping from the next year. Plus, when you have a bunch of PDFs lying around, you can play with them in many different ways — and tools like Notebook LM opens a completely different playing field.
But I’m not just reading the reports talking about 2026 forecasts and trends. I also love returning to the publications about 2025. Reading the forecasts about the year we’re at the end of it is a lot like reading an old sci-fi novel talking about the years you’re in. The main difference is most reports are not a fun read (unless you’re a weird one like me).
I’m not sure when exactly I started this habit but I’ve been doing this end-of-year revisit for a while now and it always teaches me things about how to practice futures and foresight. You can see how their forecasts fall short because they didn’t expected a major event or how they noticed a major trends because they were aware of the early signals.
Reading those forecasts to see what they did get right or wrong, why they did get those things right or wrong feels a bit like Hunter S. Thompson rewriting classic novels to improve his writing. (Considering how much I love HST’s work and how little I remember about starting this habit, he might be the influence behind it.)
Depending on how many interesting or fun stuff I’ll find this year, I might end up writing a post collecting them. But if you’re in or around this practice (or just curious about it) it’s worth giving a try.
Song of the Week
Most people around me probably knows that I’m a bit obsessed with Fred again.. for many reasons* and really enjoy his music. This song from his upcoming album(?) USB entered my regular rotation since its release. And I agree with one of the commenters under the video about the final part of the song being cut too early. People need to hear the full version Fred!
As a bonus, here’s my top 100 most listened songs of 2025 playlist on Apple Music.
*: I’ll probably write about him and why I got obsessed with him soon.
Reading Log
Honestly, I was barely reading anything last week so there’s not much to share with you other than this article about Palantir and what it actually does. Because I know so many people talk about the company but almost no one actually explains what they do. And everyone should know what they’re doing because they’re also doing stuff like this as well.
“What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems. To do that, Palantir often uses the language and aesthetics of warfare, painting itself as a powerful, quasi-military intelligence partner.”
What Does Palantir Actually Do? — Caroline Haskins
Outro
I probably can’t do everything I planned for the start of this week but considering I’m really tired, trying not to get ill, and just returned back to home after two weeks I’ll take anything as a win. You should do that as well, don’t go too hard on yourself.
Take care and I’ll see you around!
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