CURRENT MISSION
Me; we.

ABOUT ME
quiter (cf louder),
listener (cf talker), but this can change without notice.
like to potter, cafes are good.
history books (cf newspapers)
there's this thing called linux, and ..........
a great film is a great thing
not really a worker.
honest, but maybe kinda hopeless.
good with people, kids and cats (seem to) like me

PHILOSOPHY

- The world is vastly more interesting, amazing and beautiful that I'll ever be (of course)

- Anyone who tries to fight or dominate just has not been paying attention

- Go easy on your joints.

- Life is those events that you, or someone near to you, makes.

- I love my 8-year old son, Yunus.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING
I have hosted 10 maybe 15 people,
I meet travellers for coffee,
I visit people
I surf people's couches

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE
Hosted 10 or so people,
met a few people in a few countries and continents,
know a few couchsurfers,
been to some couchsurfing events.
I guess I'm an oldtimer.
I have warmed a few couches in my time, and supplied friendly accommodation to homeless and stranded.

Interests

great films
how the world is, 20th century and other history
starting projects
talking about amazing things.
talking about mundane things.
other people's successes.

• books
• beauty
• coffee
• movies
• music
• chemistry
• history
• software
• art
• metal
• alternative
• installations
• digitalnomad
• sludge

Music, Movies, and Books

---music (heavy)

- I extra-super-like at least one album from each of these bands
- I'm generally into sludge, grindcore and groove metal.
- Can't relate to anything progressive, any doom (though I like the idea) and I have absolutely no interest in traditional ripped-jeans metal

Abraham; Admiral Angry; Alaskan; A Life Once Lost; Amenra; Anaal Nathrakh; Art Of Burning Water; A Storm of Light; Beastwars; Bird Eater; Bitch Magnet; Black Boned Angel; Blacklisters; black sheep wall; Blessing The Hogs; Blindead; Blindfolded and Led to the Woods; Brujeria; Brutal Truth; Buried At Sea; Buried Inside; Celeste; Cherubs; Coalesce; Conan; Converge; cult leader; Cult of Luna; Cultura Tres; Daughters; Deafheaven; Decapitated; Depths; Dirge; Domkraft; Downfall of Gaia; Drunks with Guns; Every Time I Die; Facedowninshit; Fejhed; Fight Amp; Förstöra; GAZA; Gift of Tongues; gilla bruja; Godflesh; Grinding Fortune; Hammerhands; Helms Alee; Heresiarch; Indian; Insect Warfare; Izah; KEN mode; Knut; Kowloon Walled City; Kylesa; Lamb of God; landed; Leechmilk; Liturgy; Lord Mantis; Love Sex Machine; Maruta; Meshuggah; moloken; Mouth of the Architect; Nadja; Napalm Death; Oathbreaker; Obscure Sphinx; old man gloom; Omega Massif; Opium Lord; Part Chimp; Phlefonyaar; pig destroyer; Pitch Black Forecast; Primitive Man; Rinoa; Rorcal; Senior Fellows; Set On End; Six Finger Satellite; slabdragger; Slugdge; Sumac; Sunn O))); The Abominable Iron Sloth; The Berzerker; the body; The Christpunchers; The Stranglers; This gift is a curse; Tigerscout; Tombs; Torche; tribes of neurot; Unsane; Vaginal Diarrhoea; Weltesser; Whores; YOB;
- also
Bach (St Mathew's Passion, Mass in B minor, St John's Passion, some of JSB's many cantatas, Goldberg Variations played by Glenn Gould, a lot of Bach played by Glenn Gould, Bach's organ concertos

--- films
12 Monkeys; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; 8½; A Clockwork Orange; A Prairie Home Companion; A Separation; Aguirre: The Wrath of God; All That Jazz; Alphaville; American Beauty; Amores Perros; An education; Andrei Rublev; Apocalypse Now; Aquire the wrath of god; Avatar; Barry Lyndon; Barton Fink; Blade Runner; Breathless; Burn after reading; Children of Men; City of God; Dancer in the Dark; Dark Days; Dogville; Easy Rider; Elephant; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Farewell My Concubine; Fargo; Gone with the Wind; Gosford Park; Happiness; Howl's Moving Castle; I'm a cyborg , but that's ok; Inside Llewyn Davis; Into the Spiderverse; Italian for Beginners; King Kong (2006); Kung Fu Hustle; L'Enfant; La Dolce vita; La Haine; Lawrence of Arabia; Le Armor de Pont Neuf; Leaving Las Vegas; Loose Change: Second Edition; Léon: The Professional; M*A*S*H; Man on Wire; Me and You and Everyone We Know; Memento; Metropolis; Mifune; Miller Crossing; Monsoon Wedding; Monsters Inc; No Country for old men; Oldboy; Paris Texas; Pulp Fiction; Quest for Fire; Raging Bull; Raise the Red Lantern; Rocky; Rome, Open City; Rosetta; Santa Sangre; Satryicon; Saving Private Ryan; Sin City; Singin' in the Rain; Slumdog Millionaire; Snatch; Some Like It Hot; Spirited Away; Stalker; Straight Story; Sunset Blvd.; Taxi Driver; Terminator 2: Judgment Day; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; The Border; The Breakfast Club; The Class; The Gold rush; The Handmaiden; The Incredibles; The Last Picture Show; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; Return of the King; The Two Towers; The Matrix; The Phantom of Liberty; The Piano; The Player; The Shining; The Terminator; The Thin Blue Line; The White Ribbon; The Wind That Shakes the Barley; The man who wasn't there; Toy Story; True Grit; True Romance; Up; Vertigo; WALL·E; When We Were Kings; Woman in the Dunes;

--- podcasts
99% invisible; a16z; American Dissent (?) voices; American intelligence Media; Black op radio; Bloodlines Radio; Boiling Frogs (Sibel Edmonds); Carnegie Endowment; Chips w Everything (Guardian); conversion cast; Corbett Report; Counterspin; Darknet dairies; Data Skeptic; data stories; Disinfo Wars; Everyday Espionage; Federalist Radio Hour; Foreign Affairs Unedited; Gnostic Lectures; Guardian Long Reads; Guns and Butter; Hack to Start; hidden spirit; Humanitas University; In our spare time (Oxford); Intelligence Squared debates; Lamphams Quarterly; manufacturers Reps; media matters; NASACast This Week; Ottoman History Podcast; Oxford sparks; Packet Pushers; Python Bytes; Radio Diaries; radio who, what, why ; Regrets of the Dying; revisionist history; Rune Soup; Rutherford Report; Security Mgmt Highlights; Shadow Citizen Online; Talk python to me; techdirt; techno-scheptic; Tech Talk (NY Times); The Corbett Report; The Economist; uncommon knowledge aka 'War Lectures' ; unwelcome guests; Write The Docs; You are not so smart;

------ books -----------

- these are my goodreads 5-star books
- for 4-star, 3,2,1-star books, see https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/43870930-strong-extraordinary-dreams

A Clockwork Orange; A History of Western Philosophy; A Man Called Intrepid; A Man Called Ove; A World Lit Only by Fire; America's Retreat From Victory; American Psycho; Autumn Testament; Blood Meridian; Brighton Rock; Cannery Row ; China Goes Global: The Partial Power; Churchill, Hitler and "The Unnecessary War": Collected Poems of James K. Baxter; Cryptonomicon; Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right; Debt: The First 5,000 Years; Deterring Democracy; Diaspora; Easy Riders, Raging Bulls; Evolution, Thermodynamics, And Information; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Fiasco; Freedom; Future Shock; God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican; Hamlet; Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics; How to Break and Train the Western Horse ; Imperium; In Fires Of No Return: Poems; In God's Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I; JFK and the Unspeakable; Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English; Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption; Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA; Life (autobio of Keith Richards); Lolita; Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention; Masumiyet Müzesi; No Country for Old Men; Notes of a Dirty Old Man; Of Mice and Men; One Hundred Years of Solitude; Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia; Political Order and Political Decay; Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945; Rock Woman; Rule by Secrecy; Second-Hand Time; Slaughterhouse-Five; Some Other Country: New Zealand's Best Short Stories; Stories of Your Life and Others; Storm of Steel; Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting; Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human; The Andy Warhol Diaries; The Anglo-American Establishment; The Art of the Start: The Baron in the Trees; The Bell Jar; The CIA as Organized Crime; The Character of Physical Law; The Corrections; The Cyprus Triangle; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; (Vols 1 to 6) The Evolution of Civilizations; The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality; The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East; The First Circle; The Goldfinch; The Great Heresies; The Gulag Archipelago Books I-II; The Gulag Archipelago Books V-VII; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame; The Japanese Haiku; The Key of the Mysteries; The Luminaries; The Master and Margarita; The New Zealand experiment: a world model for structural adjustment?; The Painted Bird; The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse; The Rise of the Fourth Reich; The Road; The Secret History; The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; The State of New Zealand's Environment, 1997; The Story of B; The Subterraneans; The Tin Drum; The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy; The Trouble with Physics: The Vietnam War: An Intimate History; The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time; Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging; Tropic of Cancer; True History of the Kelly Gang; Turkish Grammar; Ulysses; Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West; Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty; World History: A New Perspective;

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Lived in Istanbul for 8 years.

Traveled, lived, survived (somehow).

two week motorcycle journey, Vientienne to Luang Prabang and back. Reissued classic kaiwasaki. Beautiful country, friendly, friendly people, great bike, and a few crazy adventures.

for "amazing things I've seen" someone else said "magnetism". I agree. Magnetism, magnetism is an amazing thing that I have seen. And civil engineering. And most physical chemistry, and airplanes, and humans: the majesty of the human race!

The majesty of the human race: that's an amazing thing that I have seen.

Another amazing thing is forgiveness, and an amazing thing that I have done is 'to have forgiven'. Or maybe I didn't forgive; I just forgot. Forgiving is pretty big.

Teach, Learn, Share

I have been a technical writer on and off for the last 20 years. During the "off" times, I edited documents translated into English. Am happy to help most people with their English, and especially with their writing.

In a former life I was a computer programmer, like everyone else, but actually I am a terrible programmer, slow and stupid: I don't plan, I don't even read over my code, I take days to do what any clear-thinking programmer would do in 30 minutes (or even not do at all). Do *not* take my programming advice.

What I Can Share with Hosts

English
Good times
A DVD, usb or download of lots of far out, intense music you have __NEVER__ heard
Advice about visiting and living in New Zealand, Australia and Turkey
Going out to a gig
A DVD of music I've made - quiet, detailed, melodic. Maybe kinda far-out cafe music.

Countries I’ve Visited

Bolivia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Ecuador, Egypt, Greece, Laos, Mexico, Syrian Arab Republic, Thailand

Countries I’ve Lived In

Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States

• 

•