On this day in 2013, Turkish protesters began occupying Gezi Park to oppose its demolition, an act with led to widespread protests and strikes with approximately 3,500,000 participants, 22 deaths, and more than 8,000 injuries.
The wave of civil unrest across Turkey began after the park occupation was violently evicted by police, who used to tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannons to try and break up the protests, injuring more than one hundred people and hospitalizing a journalist.
The protest quickly grew in size - by May 31st, 10,000 gathered in Istiklal Avenue. In June, the protests became national in scope and transcended any particular demographic or political ideology. Among the wide range of concerns brought by protesters were issues of freedom of the press, expression, and assembly, as well as the alleged political Islamist government's erosion of Turkey's secularism.
Millions of Turkish football fans, normally divided by intense sports rivalry, marched in unity against the government. Protesters displayed symbols the environmentalist movement, rainbow banners, depictions of Che Guevara, different trade unions, and the PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan.
On June 4th, Taksim Dayanışması (Taksim Solidarity) issued a set of demands that included the preservation of Gezi Park, an end to police violence, the right to freedom of assembly, and an end to the privatization of public spaces. Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç met the group on June 5th and rejected these demands.
Erdoğan blamed the protests on "internal traitors and external collaborators", demonizing his political opposition as the former. Despite the popular mobilization, Erdoğan remained in power and no major concessions were won from the government.
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I've been playing The Outer Worlds recently, and if I'm being honest it's a little bland.
The hypercapitalist space dystopia is fun to laugh at and all, but after reading the nth message log about a company cutting corners and abusing their workers for greater profit it gets monotonous. Also, it's all so similar to Fallout that it could almost be called plagiarism. They even do a kind of 50s/60s aesthetic.
The item system is cluttery, there's too much of the generic consumables you need like ammo, lockpicks and weapons, and there isn't much excitement in scouring boxes with loot. When you find a new weapon type, there's bound to be 5 others of the same type close by.
I'm playing on hard difficulty, and apart from the early parts of the game the combat hasn't really been much of a challenge. I try to do stealth kills for fun, but honestly at level 20+ I could just run up to a bandit or monster group and take them all out with a machine gun without them getting much chance to do any damage.
The colourful environments are nice though, and you can tell that the artists put a lot of effort into it. The Unreal Engine really shines in indoor environments.
Thank you for reading.
I'd recommend Outer Wilds instead
I'm in a similar place with CP2077. I'm stealthing around with almost no stealth perks or items, using hacking to turn off cameras and distract people, trying to play it as more or less Thief: The Dark Project: Terrible Fashion Sense Edition. It's... okay. I have mods on to make the game "hardcore", ie if you don't have a ton of armor a rifle will drop you in 2-3 shots, so technically the gunplay is hyper-lethal but most badguys don't expect to have their eyes remotely turned off right before someone shoots them, so even though i die in a hit or two combat is still mostly trivial. I'd not going to be nostalgic about this the way I am for having played thief twenty years ago. : (