Ayten Yesim Semchenko, Ph.D.

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Narratives & Notions

Coffee Talk

Posted on August 21, 2025August 26, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

There is a coffee corner open only at night in Seattle. And it rains every night. One can order a variety of coffee, tea, and more. Chat with the barista. Chat with other customers. Or listen to their conversations.  That is the cozy environment that this game puts you in. The sound of the rain…

Six Crimson Cranes and The Dragon’s Promise

Posted on August 5, 2025August 7, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

There is a ‘Booktok’ table in the library that I most frequently visit. (As a clueless millennial!) I believe that it refers to the books that are popular on Tiktok. There, I saw a book titled Six Crimson Cranes, and I wanted to give it a shot. There is magic, dragons, and traditions in the…

Finding your own voice

Posted on July 29, 2025August 25, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

Reading was a way of transporting myself to different worlds as a child. From the outside, you would think that – I was walking from one room to another with a book in my hand. When in fact I was travelling from my house to another land, experiencing another season, and another life.  I could…

About the recent study focusing on AI counselling

Posted on July 22, 2025July 22, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

After playing the game Eliza, I came across a study from this year. They found strikingly interesting results (particularly the first one), quoting from their abstract: ‘In a large sample (N = 830), we showed that a) participants could rarely tell the difference between responses written by ChatGPT and responses written by a therapist, b)…

Eliza

Posted on July 22, 2025July 22, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

Ever thought about what therapy with an AI might actually feel like? In 2025, it’s not that wild an idea, but when the game Eliza dropped back in 2019, it probably was pretty futuristic. Here’s the twist: instead of chatting to a computer screen, you sit across from a real person, a proxy, who reads…

What is a visual novel?

Posted on July 14, 2025August 25, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

Visual novels are unique genre of games that invite you to step inside a story and shape its direction through the choices you make. Each decision leads you down different narrative paths, allowing you to explore various outcomes. The level of agency you have can vary from game to game, offering everything from subtle influence…

Reflections on The Widow’s Boutique

Posted on July 10, 2025July 14, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

The Widow’s Boutique is a historical visual novel set in Christiana (modern-day Oslo) during the 1820s. The narrative is meticulously researched and thoughtfully crafted, which is no surprise given that the writer, producer, and CEO holds a PhD in history. This expertise is evident in the authenticity of the storytelling. I spent nearly 11 hours…

Web scraping and Beautiful Soup

Posted on October 29, 2022July 14, 2025 by Yesim Semchenko

If you want to search for a course to take, with so many options on the Internet, you can have choice paralysis. To simplify your decision-making, if allowed, you can scrape the data and make comparisons more conveniently. Let us say that you are searching for online data science courses on Reeds. And this is…

Sending personalized mass emails via Python when the email list is taken from the Postgresql database

Posted on May 1, 2022May 1, 2022 by Yesim Semchenko

Hello! In one of my previous blog posts, I wrote about how to send personalized mass emails. However, in that blog post, we were taking the list of emails from a csv file. What if you have your list of emails in the PostgreSQL database? Imagine that you have a schema and under that schema,…

Getting a nutrition analysis via EDAMAM’s API

Posted on April 2, 2022April 2, 2022 by Yesim Semchenko

Hello! I recently came across EDAMAM and found out that it offers a free API for developers (not unlimited though) for nutritional analysis! After signing up, you create an app, and get an app id and app key. By using those along with the endpoint, it is possible to find out the nutritional analysis of…

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