Episode 71 Arrives, and With It a Category Called Engineering

Thursday. The series advances by one, as it has done before and will presumably do again. Kurtlar Vadisi Pusu, episode 71, plays somewhere in the evening of a Problem Solver who has, for the ninth issue running, declined to annotate the experience. The note field is empty. The empty field has become a kind of signature.

But the day was not only spent watching. A new category appeared on the site: Engineering. It arrived without ceremony, the way a shelf appears in a room that has started to accumulate books. Categories are small acts of faith. One does not build a shelf for a single volume.

And so two volumes were placed on it. Data Protective Transformer, a title that sounds like a machine designed to guard something from itself. And Python List Optimization: Efficient Management of Duplicate Elements, which concerns, fittingly, the problem of things appearing more than once.

The logs record each post as both created and updated, published and then published again. The second essay even changed its punctuation along the way, a hyphen promoted to a colon, as though it needed to stand a little straighter before facing the public. A piece about duplicates, duplicated. The irony is not lost on this paper, though it may well have been lost on the database.

Six changes in twenty-four hours. Modest by most measures, almost loud by this site’s. Somewhere between episodes, a person wrote about protecting data and pruning lists, then returned to a valley where nothing is ever pruned and everyone is always watching. Episode 72 is expected. So, perhaps, is a third shelf item.