In Summary: * Saturday's college football day in the Roscoe-verse began with the IU Hoosiers playing the North Texas Mean Green. I'm glad I followed the game and I'm glad the Hoosiers won. I'm also glad that I switched off the TV (I'd started watching the game on local FOX TV) by the end of the 1st Quarter and followed the remainder of the game via the radio-call from Hoosier Country 101.5, Flagship Station for IU Sports. I love the announcers on IU's Sports Network, and I'm so NOT a fan of sports on TV.

My second college football game of the day between the Texas A&M Aggies and the Missouri State Bears is about half an hour away from the opening Kickoff, and I'm already tuned into a local sports station listening to the pregame broadcast from the Aggies Sports Network and I'm looking forward to the radio-call of tonight's game. Gig 'em, Aggies!

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw=229.28 lbs. * bp= 155/91 (67)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:20 – 1 banana * 07:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 10:15 – saltine crackers and cheese * 13:10 – home made pork and vegetables soup * 16:30 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – wake * 05:10 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 06:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to musc, nap * 08:30 – work on home budget * 09:30 – begin following IU vs North Texas football game * 14:25 – and IU wins, 52 to 16. * 14:30 – follow news reports from various sources * 17:00 – tuned into 94.1, San Antonio's Sports Star, ahead of the Pregame Show, then the radio call of tonight's college football game between the Texas A&M Aggies and the Missouri State Bears

Chess: * 16:45 – moved in all pending CC games

#fiction #videogames #FPS #SF #protagonismos

On 19 November 1998, videogaming changed forever when game developer Valve released Half-Life. 50+ ‘Game of the Year’ awards and inclusion in various ‘most influential games’ rankings attest to the fundamental shift Half-Life represents within the first-person-shooter (FPS) genre of videogames, taking it to a new level from the standard previously set by 1993’s Doom. In terms of immersion, storytelling and worldbuilding, there is a before and after Half-Life.

Valve followed its success with Half-Life 2 in 2004, the six year development time a first indicator of what would infamously become known as ‘Valve time’. Like its predecessor, Half-Life 2 represented another levelling up in the standards of FPS videogames through the introduction of realistic physics effects, advances in rendering of NPCs and the more extensive setting compared to its predecessor. Included with Half-Life 2 was an updated version of Half-Life, rendered on Valve’s new game engine. Without any real upgrades to graphics or gameplay, however, this was such a disappointment that some fans set out to completely rebuild Half-Life themselves. The product of this work is Black Mesa, a full remaster of the original game, completed after its very own 16 year long development journey. When the definitive version was finally published in 2020, the world of videogames had again moved on, and Half-Life 2 was hardly cutting edge anymore. Nonetheless, Black Mesa’s positive reception and the ability of a fan-based team to deliver a critically acclaimed remasters are a testament to the enduring legacy of Half-Life and the potential for a games industry not wholly captured by risk-averse triple-A studios.

Half-Life was my formative FPS. I have replayed it so many times that I can recall entire sections of it better than real places where I have lived, and I cannot help run its opening sequence in my head whenever I’m on any form of light rail. When Half-Life 2 came out in 2004 the payoff felt worth the long wait, and Valve displayed their expected panache for storytelling and game design, introducing physics in ways that had never been seen before, laying the groundwork for their next hit, 2007’s Portal. Next, however, was an abortive foray into ‘episodic’ games with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2, each with development times that rivalled those of full, standalone games. The long awaited Episode 3 never materialised, nor did Half-Life 3, and from here Valve’s creative output effectively ceased. My suspicion that Valve were holding out for another step-change in gaming technology was confirmed when Half-Life: Alyx was released in 2020 as a virtual reality (VR) exclusive. Alyx did not advance the Half-Life story however, and nothing has emerged from Valve since, leaving the Half-Life universe the gaming equivalent of Game of Thrones.

The most memorable commute in videogames. Video is from the original Half Life.

It was therefore exciting to see the development of the Half-Life remaster running in parallel with Valve’s metamorphosis from a vanguard game developer to toll collector on Steam, the largest PC game distribution platform. As the community effort consolidated into the Crowbar Collective and was eventually endorsed by Valve, I played several of the incomplete and demo releases, until the definitive version of Black Mesa finally landed in 2020. Now a recent replay presented an opportunity to assess how well a six year old remaster of a 28 year old game stands up against the games of today.

Welcome to the Black Mesa Research Facility. Have a safe and productive day

The strongest quality of Black Mesa remains the organic storytelling and worldbuilding it inherits from Half-Life. From the moment we enter the Black Mesa Research Facility using the iconic monorail train from Level 3 Dormitories to Sector C Test Labs, we know that there is a whole intricate world out there beyond the player's direct experience, and this approach is sustained throughout the game. It is one of the areas where Black Mesa outdoes its source material, because Crowbar Collective was able to significantly expand and enhance the last four chapters set in the alien ‘Xen’ world, using materials Valve omitted from Half-Life to meet its release schedule, as well as retconned references to Half-Life 2, strengthening the connection between the two games. Black Mesa tells this story without cut scenes, dialogue, quick-time events or an extensive encyclopedia of lore. Instead, we build our understanding of this world from environmental clues, snippets of overheard conversation and brief interactions with NPCs.

This lack of interruptions means that Black Mesa maintains excellent pacing. There are slower and more frantic sections, but the core gameplay is hardly ever interrupted by cut scenes or other non-playable events. Chapters build logically on one another, with a gradual and sensible escalation in terms of weaponry and enemies. Despite eventually carrying the armaments of a small platoon and wearing high-impact reactive armour, Black Mesa mercilessly punishes any attempts to Rambo through combat, forcing the player to think and strategize while on the move. As ‘cover’ was not a mechanic supported by the Source engine there is no sequence of conveniently placed chest-height walls to hunker behind, and instead the most taxing combat sequences require mobility and careful use of the environment to overcome.

The logical, linear structure makes Black Mesa delightfully simple (if not necessarily easy), but can feel contrived and railroading when contrasted with contemporary games. Funnelling the player down a single path means that the Black Mesa Research Facility has an unusual number of locked doors and explosive-proof windows, which can occasionally break suspension of disbelief or cause frustration, in particular when the ‘correct’ path is not immediately clear and the game refuses to offer multiple routes to the same objective in a way that we have come to expect from more modern games.

That annoyance of being railroaded is felt more strongly when confronted with various platform or physics puzzles that now feel anachronistic and interfere with flow. While Black Mesa vastly improved on the jumping challenges in the ‘Xen’ chapter, we still have an entire chapter of platforming through a waste processing plant that was clearly designed before Health & Safety was invented and which is both tedious and unconvincing, especially when contrasted with the rest of the in-game environment.

Graphics are where Black Mesa is weakest, which is no surprise for a game using a game engine, textures and assets from over two decades ago, some updates by Valve in the intervening years notwithstanding. Half-Life 2’s NPCs were a massive step up in 2004, but two decades on appear mildly wooden and repetitive, with the the player facing the same four soldiers over and over again. As someone not too invested in the latest graphics I would say the environments hold up okay as a whole, as long as you don’t look too closely at any of the textures.

Somewhat outdated graphics notwithstanding, the Xen chapters are an enormous improvement over the original, infusing the last third of the game with a sense of wonder that it did not previously possess.

The right man in the wrong place

Despite its age, there remains something refreshing about Black Mesa, in particular when compared to more expansive modern games. It is proof of the adage that less can indeed be more. This is a game that still features the mute protagonist, without conversation trees, side quests, morality points, or weapon upgrades. Repeatedly I found myself comparing Black Mesa to the last shooter I played: the Mass Effect remaster, and doing so favourably.

Despite being set in a single facility, Black Mesa feels grander than the world of Mass Effect, even though the the latter is spread over much of the galaxy. It achieves this not through the multiplicity of locations or the size of the game, as 1998 technology seriously limited both. It convinces you because throughout the game, the Black Mesa Research Facility implies that at any time, you are only seeing part of a greater whole. Every area is littered with signs pointing to other locations, processes or activities that you never experience. All around you NPCs are taking their own actions: marines fighting aliens, security personnel trying to survive, scientists desperately seeking a solution while being massacred by aliens and the military alike. Mass Effect, by contrast, always feels small. Even in the third game, its locations feel oddly circumscribed, and plastering some flying cars on the skybox does not fix that. This is not true for all parts of the game, but for a surprising amount of it, its locations are so obviously designed around gameplay that they don’t really convince as ‘real’ locations, let alone as parts of a greater universe.

This sense that you are not the centre of the universe extends to the player as well. Playing as Gordon Freeman in Black Mesa, you start as a recent PhD graduate down at the academic pecking order, paying off your student loans by shoving mysterious samples into the ‘anti-mass spectrometer’. When this accidentally makes you instrumental to creating the dimensional rift that starts the alien invasion of the research facility, the key reason it is you and not anyone else who has to go to the surface for help is because you happen to wear that convenient armour. For the first half of the game you are directed by other scientists and events, and it is only as the game progresses and the military starts hunting you specifically that the game acknowledges that you are somehow special. Contrast this to Mass Effect, where from the opening sequence it is established that Commander Shepard is a very special boy/girl. Mass Effect opens with your superiors at the highest levels of government discussing why you, and only you, are uniquely qualified for consideration for the galaxy’s most prestigious special forces outfit. Black Mesa opens with you running late on your commute to work. It is unavoidable for an FPS to make the hero(ine) the central character of the story, but Black Mesa tells you right up to the end that there were others like you who tried and failed, and that your ultimate victory was in no way predestined. In Mass Effect, everyone agrees (and tells you, ad nauseam) that you are the saviour of the galaxy. In Black Mesa, on winning the game you effectively get told you were just the statistically expected victor from among a larger pool of contenders.

Community action

At sixteen years of development, Crowbar Collective’s successful release of Black Mesa feels almost as unlikely as Gordon Freeman’s victory over Half-Life’s endboss. Gaming is now a mature enough industry to have its fair share of reboots and remasters, but in the main these are pushed by studios themselves, or whoever ended up with the relevant intellectual property. That is, when studios care enough to continue looking after their legacy. Recent years have seen controversial decisions by studios to discontinue games altogether, leaving players with unsupported and at times unplayable software. It has brought into focus the insidious nature of an industry that sells players ‘licenses’ to play, rather than ownership of games. While not the worst offender, Valve itself has come in for scrutiny over its lacklustre updates to its portfolio of legacy games, in particular given the dearth of new releases in recent years, as well as its facilitation of large studios extracting every last drop of value from games through Steam. Though unlike some of its competitors, Valve has at least shown itself willing to support an ecosystem of modifications and spin-offs, with Black Mesa probably the most elaborate example of this.

Black Mesa is a testament to both the enduring impact of Half-Life and the perseverance of its community of fans. With its somewhat outdated graphics and gameplay it may not hold much appeal to a new generation of gamers who did not experience the original and can choose from a plethora of games inconceivable in 1998. That would be a shame however, because Black Mesa's storytelling remains outstanding, and the game still offers a balanced, well-paced challenge to players. As an entry point for one of gaming's most iconic series it is well superior to the original. The Black Mesa Research Facility, while cutting edge in 1998, may now look a bit dated, but it is still well worth visiting.

Notes & Suggestions

• In response to studio decisions to discontinue games that still had a vibrant (albeit often small) gaming community, gamers have banded together in the Stop Killing Games initiative. One of the asks of the campaign is for studios to adopt legacy arrangements for games, rather than simply shutting them down. Good Old Games, a competitor platform to Steam, also runs an extensive library of older games as well as a ‘games preservation programme’.
• The honour of most extensive fan-built project probably goes to Tamriel Rebuilt, an effort to build the entire fictional world of Tamriel from the The Elder Scrolls series as a modification of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Bethesda games generally attract lots of player-made modifications, especially for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which has resulted in fully-fledged standalone games such as The Forgotten City. While Bethesda’s openness to player involvement has always been welcomed, this has not prevented the studio from occasionally trying to monetise players’ free labour, with connivance of our friends at Valve. The efforts of the Tamriel Rebuilt community were also covered in Tribune and Ars Technica.
• Yahtzee Croshaw has one of his usual entertaining videos on Black Mesa, covering some of the same points.

Blindenlings

De woeste schreeuwen van de lammeren niet uitverkoren voor een lange, leuke vakantie op geheime locatie Elders ze mekkeren dag en nacht ellenlange betogen over de duizenden onrechtvaardige handelingen uitgevoerd door hun herders het gerinkel dat is en de harde woorden die zijn te horen bij een club bekenden die elkaar niet langer aardig vinden het lawaai van de demonstraties over de enorme onoverbrugbare kloof tussen de slecht beminden en de goed gezinden

Het komt en blijft komen door de blinden alles wat iedereen doet, door de blinden ze zijn gesloten en toch komt het er door het rumoer wordt er niet in gesmoord ook al hangen ze juist daarom ervoor

Het geluid van miljoenen schapen die sinds de eerste er over ging niet meer kunnen stoppen met er ook over gaan de toeterende wagens, knipperen van verkeerslichten en het fluitconcert der verkeersleiders tijdens het dag in dag uit wisselen van baan de slomen die met machines, computers, instrumenten en zware metalen plannen smeden tegen de opmars van de gezwinden het helse kabaal van het koor die tijdens elke symfonie aanwezigheid van melodie en ritme in alle toonaarden ontkenden

Het komt en blijft komen door de blinden alles wat iedereen doet, door de blinden ze zijn gesloten en toch komt het er door het rumoer wordt er niet in gesmoord ook al hangen ze juist daarom ervoor

De schuiftrompet spelers die na het verbod op zowel schuiven als toeteren vanwege mogelijke risico's voor de volksgezondheid uit protest urenlang in hun heel erg lege handen klappen de overdosis aan stille zuchten in geklaarde luchten die om erger te voorkomen moesten worden omgezet in voor iedereen hoorbare stappen de hoge ijle klaagzang der doktoren in gezondheid informatie telefooncentra ongewild afgesloten van patiënten omdat ze niet weten hoe ze hen moeten door verbinden het jammeren en de knarsende tanden van oververmoeide bestuurders die voor de orde jarenlang zinloos van het kastje bij de wal via het schip tot de muur en weer terug naar het kastje aan de wal renden

Het komt en blijft komen door de blinden alles wat iedereen doet, door de blinden ze zijn gesloten en toch komt het er door het rumoer wordt er niet in gesmoord ook al hangen ze juist daarom ervoor.

This is the material I cut from Quietly Subversive. I'm preserving it here rather than throwing it away. It contains some of the thinking that didn't belong in the finished piece.

https://rvw.ie/quietly-subversive

Move one thing

Perhaps this explains some of the things I've been doing for years. Take the familiar priority matrix. Important and urgent. Useful, certainly. But what happens if we change the question?

Decision for now. Decision for the next generation.

The matrix is still there. But it has become a different instrument.

Or take the briefing. We normally think of a briefing as something produced at a particular moment: written, circulated, read and eventually superseded. What happens if we take the accumulated material and organise it differently? The briefing becomes not an event in time but an object of knowledge. That is part of what I'm trying to do with Brief Me.

Or take opinion itself. What happens when an opinion isn't treated as the starting point? What happens when it becomes something that can be examined? That is why I rather like the phrase: Where opinions come to be examined. And then there is another phrase I've used for a long time: Sequence is substance. We tend to think of sequence as presentation.

First this. Then that.

But the order in which we encounter things changes what we see. Change the sequence and sometimes you change the substance. Again, move one thing. Look again.

The quiet part

Perhaps that is what quietly subversive means. Not rebellion. Not confrontation. Not telling people that everything they believe is wrong. Something quieter. Take the established arrangement. Move one piece. And wait to see what becomes visible. I don't think that makes the writer neutral. Quite the contrary.

Someone has to choose what to examine.nSomeone has to notice the crack in the floorboards. Someone has to say: Look here.

But after that, I think there is an important line not to cross. The writer shouldn't occupy the reader's judgement. The job is to make the terrain visible. To expose the possibility. To put the question somewhere it can actually be examined. And then to leave the decision where it belongs. With the reader.

Perhaps that is why I am increasingly interested in the difference between persuasion and possibility. Persuasion asks: How can I get you to agree with me? Possibility asks: Have you seen this?

Those are very different acts. And perhaps the second can sometimes be more consequential than the first. Because once you have seen that there is another way of looking at something, you cannot quite return to the certainty that there wasn't.

Dig where you stand

So I don't think I have recently discovered a new way of writing. The pattern was there a long time ago. Often deliberately. What I am beginning to recognise is how much of my work it has quietly occupied. Essays. Teaching. Policy. Briefings.

The way information is organised. Even the little diagrams I've been drawing for years. Take something familiar. Move one thing. Look again. And perhaps that is what someone meant by quietly subversive.

Not changing people's minds. Not telling them where to go. Just making sure they can see that there is somewhere else to go.

Dig where you stand. Then look carefully at what you find.

A prominent entity (I think that defines them sufficiently) recently described my writing as “quietly subversive.” Was this an insult or a compliment. Should I be calling the NUJ for advice or laughing over a pint in my local, Joe May's?

Either way, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Not because I objected to it. Quite the opposite. I'll even admit to a mild blush, because honestly, there was something in the description that I recognised.

So it kicked off a moment or two of self-exploration. And the more I explored, the more I realised. Subversive didn't bother me a jot, I've been called much worse and in rooms where the stakes were much higher. No, it was the word quietly that upset my normal daily comfort. It was forcing me to walk backwards through my own history to retrace how I actually put pen to paper. Or more accurately how I sketch out the ambitions and boundaries of an essay.

I have been deliberately writing in a particular way for a very long time, way more than forty years. I take things that seem familiar or settled, examine the assumptions underneath them, and sometimes move one thing. Not much. Just enough to see whether anything changes. The rhythm is simple: Take something familiar. Move one thing. Look again.

What I hadn't fully appreciated was how pervasive the practice had become. Like discovering your vegetable garden is overrun with Japanese knotweed. You know you planted it. That tiny sprig to make use of one corner. Then you blink, and your heart beats double when you discover just how far it has travelled underground.

A way of seeing

It was probably lazy of me to accept all these things as techniques. Ways of writing. Ways of teaching. Ways of organising information. The quietly description is pushing me to ask if something runs deeper. A way, not of writing, not of organising, but of seeing and of asking if you want to see it too.

I am a democrat. That sounds like the political grammar version of a doorstop. I'll just wedge this under here; it'll stop things waving around and everyone will know what I mean. I was going to say it's a statement of the obvious, but it's not. And that not most definitely has consequences for how I think about knowledge and decision-making.

I don't believe that democratic decision-making means everyone arriving at an opinion and then counting the opinions. Ending with the “ayes have it”. Though what happens to the “nays” is a job for another essay.

There is an asymmetry before we ever get to that point. Someone usually has more power to define the question. To define the terms. To decide what is relevant. To determine the sequence in which things are presented. And sometimes, most importantly, to determine what appears to be possible. And if you don't know that another possibility exists, you can't choose it. That may sound like another one of those door-stops. But this one has profound consequences.

The walls we cannot see

One of the ideas I've been exploring elsewhere is that a prison doesn't necessarily need walls if the prisoner believes there is nowhere else to go. I wonder if we don't all suspect this. That constraint can become internal. The walls disappear from sight because the possibility beyond them has disappeared from imagination.

Do you think it's possible that something similar happens in public life? That a system doesn't necessarily have to prevent an alternative. It may be enough if alternatives never become visible.

So what if, as a writer, I choose not to craft adversarial prose, take one position, or submit op-ed pieces to the Irish Times? What if I decide that I don't want to tell people what to think? What if, instead, I try to use my way of seeing to make other possibilities visible? To illustrate that there may be more choices than were first imagined? Because if I carry one opinion, it is this:

People should be able to see what they are choosing between.

So, my writing is not seeking to provide an answer or advocating for a fixed position. It is offering another place from which to stand and look, as honestly as I can. And then, leave the decision up to you.

Quietly Subversive

David Marshall Dublin

260905

4h sleep Not done trip to printer setup in an hour books books books stickers and t-shirts bacon and eggs losing my mind remember, darkness and anger is just lack of sleep Shin things artist's who artshow are amazeballs I AM amazeballs balls balls balls amaze amaze amaze

Balmy 98°. Gonna need a scarf.

We always make and bring too many things. I wish I had the self control to make 4 really cool things. Instead I lug out 30 meh items.

want to share a coke with you.

fa la la la la

is it to early for a beer? (10a)

New band Recommend by a patron:

Ceramic planet.

According to Ian, they are ‘pedal-gaze’

M

Thomas Rigby suggested I write this “Five Ws of Reading”, which is super fun!

I'll link below to the other posts I came across using these prompts. Let me know if you wrote one! Go to Thomas’ post to get an easy copy/paste of the questions if you like.

WHO – An author you would love to have a ‘one to one’ with?

I would like to have a chat with Isaac Asimov. I would like to discuss with him the “Three Laws of Robotics” and how they would apply to our current state of technology. I would like to know his thoughts about the Internet, artificial intelligence, social media, bots, slop, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

WHAT – What genre do you most gravitate to?

I've always been interested in both Science-Fiction and Fantasy since my early childhood. Lately I've been gravitating more towards Science-Fiction, even though I've read a lot of Fantasy.

Actually, I have data to prove this point. I used The StoryGraph to generate two reports: a list of all the books I've read by genre and a list of the 5-star rated books by genre (I'm showing here only the top 10 genres)

Overall, I've read more Fantasy than Sci-fi, in terms of total number of books read (757 tracked books in total, of which 208 were Fantasy):

My all time books read stats by genre (generated by The StoryGraph)

But If I look at my favorite books, rated with 5 Stars, then the winner is Science Fiction:

My all-time 5-star rated books, by genre

So, science fiction it is!

WHERE – Where do you prefer to read?

At home, in my reading corner, with blankets and a cup of tea. Snacks are good too. But I literally carry my Kobo with me anywhere, so anywhere can work too (the only time I don’t have my Kobo within easy reach is when I’m out running or exercising at the gym).

WHEN – What time of day do you prefer to read?

I love reading in the mornings, but during weekdays I end up not having that much time available before work. On the weekends I love starting the morning reading a book, while having a slow breakfast. But as long as I have the energy, any time is a good time to read for me. I try to squeeze out any downtime I have during the day to read.

WHY – Why is your favourite book your favourite book?

It's because I like the characters and it has an interesting plot. If I don't relate to at least one character, then I'm more likely to stop reading the book. It's also because I enjoy the narrative voice. I have to be able to create an emotional connection to the story. The storytelling style must match the character's personality and point of view. In summary, I care deeply about the world and its characters.

A book that took me into a fascinating world

For some reason “Dune” by Frank Herbert came to my mind. I first read this book 25 years ago, and I still think about it. It was such an immersive experience for me. The way it builds an entire universe, with its own unique ecosystem, religion, politics, philosophical discussions, and power struggles is amazing.

A book that made me cry (or maybe two)

“Everything is Tuberculosis” by John Green. It's a great mix of personal stories and historical data about tuberculosis. It is a call to action that left me feeling both devastated and hopeful.

But I would also include here the graphic novel “Maus” by Art Spiegelman. I still think about this novel. I caught myself in tears in many moments while I was reading. It’s not an easy topic (Nazism and the story of a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz concentration camp). Extremely touching. We can't forget this horror so as to not repeat it again, ever.

A book that was thoughtful and profound

“The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” by Carl Sagan has shaped a lot of my worldview. It is not only a defense of science against pseudoscience, but also a celebration of human curiosity with its sense of wonder about the universe. I still remember the “Baloney Detection Kit” and “The Dragon in My Garage” story. This book is timeless, and it's a reminder that a little common sense and healthy skepticism are some of the best tools we have for looking out for one another.

A “comfort” book, read and re-read many times

I'm not a big re-reader. But if I have to name a book I've re-read multiple times, that's “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. I still learn a lot each time I read this book. It is a book that has shaped my adult life and helped me organize my thoughts and my goals and led me to think about higher horizons like life purpose and principles. If you have read this blog for a while, you already know how much I like this author.

Bonus – How do you go about selecting what you will read next?

I have a huge TBR list! I mark the books I want to read on The StoryGraph, and right now, I have 384 books in there (yeah, I probably need to do a clean-up).

At the beginning of every year, I create a shortlist for the next 12 months and drop it into an Excel spreadsheet. I use the fantastic one developed by the creators of the “Currently Reading” podcast.

Then each month I compile a shortlist from my local Book Club (or another online book club I follow) and my personal wish list. I keep this updated weekly using The StoryGraph 'Up Next' feature to track books I want to tackle next. I limit this list to up to 5 books, never more.

I think that other than following book club picks, I just go with what my gut tells me.

Other great posts to read with the Five Ws of Reading:

• Thomas Rigby
• The Wry Writer
• Frances Crossley
• Explicating Elle

List of Books mentioned in this post:

(Publication date at the end)

1. “Dune” by Frank Herbert (1965)

2. “Everything is Tuberculosis” by John Green (2025)

3. “Maus” by Art Spiegelman (1994)

4. “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” by Carl Sagan (1997)

5. “Getting Things Done” by David Allen (2001)

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#readinglist #books #reading

Suis allée marcher un peu. Échanger un café. Puis, l’abattement. Lutte contre le sommeil. Les minettes, elles, suivent l’appel de la sieste. Un truc dans ma todo, avant ma liste de ménage en retard longue comme le bras. Lire ne stimule pas. Regarder un truc nul ?

Je m’étonne périodiquement d’être dans la semoule, et je m’étonne cette semaine alors que le manque de sommeil imposé m’a coulée en 2 jours.

Une course ? Impossible.

Ranger ? Dur.

M’asseoir ? Inenvisageable.

Me résigner ? Je vais râler un coup sur masto plutôt.

This should be a good college football game!

The North Texas Mean Green (12-2 last season) travel up to Bloomington's Memorial Stadium to play the Indiana Hoosiers (16-0). I'll be watching this game on a local FOX TV affiliate station. Scheduled start time is 11:00 AM CDT. GO HOOSIERS!

There are truths that cannot be approached from without. They disclose themselves only when a particular geometry has been achieved: a witness standing in the necessary relation to a place, an hour, an object, an absence, or an event whose true beginning may lie elsewhere. Celestial motion — vast and indifferent.

The witness may believe this arrangement accidental. They may have come by invitation, error, grief, professional obligation, or the small and unremembered decisions from which a life is composed. Yet presence, even at the appointed intersection, guarantees nothing. One may stand before the opened door and perceive a door, or nothing at all. One may hear the words and retain only its sounds, or mere silence. An unfolding is not contained in the spectacle but in the alteration it requires of the beholder.

For truth does not submit itself to interpretation. It is not a fact added to the inventory of the mind, nor a doctrine into which the self may safely enter and depart unchanged. And those who do leave empty handed, likely unaware anything unusual had occurred — ignorant of the opportunity and risk that had just passed.

Truth enters first as a fissure: an intolerable correspondence between things formerly believed separate, places co-joined but seemingly unrelated, meanings invisible until the transit. The witness discovers, with a terror too lucid to be called terror, that the self has never been the measure of the real, as the ego has never been the measure of the self, as the material has never been the measure of the non-material.

To understand such a truth is to neither possess nor wield it. One must yield—to relinquish the consoling sovereignty of the ego before that which admits no second reading. What remains afterward may still speak in the old vocabulary of reason, memory, and name; but beneath those words another order has begun, ancient and exacting, and it does not require belief or permission.

Truth may indeed be in the eye of the beholder — and the beholder, in the eye of truth.

#Intermundia

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

I just got home from driving to LA for a concert with friends, and on the way back I was showing some songs that I really like and explaining the stories behind them or some of the cool things behind them, and I just felt really happy and in love with a person that I am. I think it is like the same thing as the love for life that I have built up and practiced, which allows me to do things like dance and get people involved and enjoy things and find anything really, and I think that’s something that a lot of people gravitate towards. And I’m grateful for myself.

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Hoe vaker u langs komt voor verlossing des te beter is het voor u! Dat is Appsoluut waar. Klikt u gerust nog even rond voor u aan ons vraagt om daarvan te worden verlost en dat doen wij met alle liefde. Appsoluut de nieuwste revolutie in de verlossingsindustrie. Zet ons iedere dag in en ontdek hoe makkelijk het is om verlost te worden van al wat en wie u dwars zit. Samen met het Appsolutie team heerlijk even accepteren wat u niet kunt veranderen en veranderen wat u wel kan veranderen dankzij onze hulp alhier. Fijn. Lekker verlossen.

I am the incredibly inexperienced Director of Riverbed Collective, an artist-led social enterprise. Here’s what I’ve learnt from 2024. Originally written and posted in January 2025.

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A lesson in ego and humility? It takes time to save time? Trust your gut?

The costliest professional mistake of my 2024?

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to call this article. Even now, while writing this, I’m actually pretty scared of the reaction I may get from publicly revealing the mistakes I made. However, my desire to detail the process of switching manufacturers, for the sake of transparency and shared learning, outweighs any fear that I have. Telling you feels like the right thing to do.

Disclaimer: all opinions presented in this article are my own, and do not reflect Riverbed Collective or any of its partners at large.

What’s Mint Condition?

For those who are unfamiliar, Mint Condition is a collectible card project involving 90+ artists internationally. Each artist had full creative freedom to design two sides of the same card. These were sorted into three decks and physically printed. The digital copy is available here.

So, what happened?

(I’m based in Hong Kong and am located pretty close to Chinese manufacturers, so I’m currently the only one on Team Riverbed handling print production. I’m writing in the first person because I’m taking full ownership of this mistake.)

Short version of the story: I tested a print manufacturer, didn’t catch onto the red flags, and had to switch manufacturers way too late in the process.

Okay, here’s the long version.

I began researching manufacturers in June 2024, but had nothing that could be test printed, so I waited until enough cards were done.

In August 2024, I tested a manufacturer from the Chinese platform Taobao. I found the printing decent, except for one error. I tried to fix this with the manufacturer, but the calibre of their work deteriorated with each sample I made, and my quality control concerns were dismissed multiple times. Product traceability and labour practices were opaque as well. I didn’t feel good about it, but, by the time I realised I couldn’t trust this company, it was pretty late.

Preorders had already opened. Designs were already finalised. I didn’t want to make everyone alter their work.

I went to Alibaba, spoke to eight companies, found a new manufacturer, and decided to go visit their factory. They welcomed me and brought me on a tour of the entire facility. The CEO didn’t dodge my (incredibly direct) questions about living wages. I genuinely felt comforted looking at their production quality, certifications, and the heartfelt way they treated their staff.

Making the switch was a tough decision. It would require every single contributor to resize and reupload their cards. This was easy for some, but others’ designs were extremely difficult to modify. I didn’t want to waste even more time than I already had.

So, I sought help from a friend and mentor. Then, Izzy, Akko, and I discussed different options. Could we order a new, customised knife to fit the dimensions of the old manufacturer? Could we resize the cards ourselves? Neither option would give us a satisfactory result, and I didn’t want to do this behind our artists’ backs. I swallowed my pride, apologised, and explained why we were switching manufacturers.

(The artists of Mint Condition were very kind to me, thank goodness.)

As of this writing, it’s currently the Lunar New Year holiday, so the workers are home for the holidays. The cards should be ready to go into production once they’re back.

Key takeaways

• Trust your gut.
  • If a business partner’s practices and attitudes make you uneasy, RUN. According to my mentor, feeling comfortable should be a prerequisite for any business partnership.
• It takes time to save time.
  • This means researching companies in detail before you work with them, and perhaps visiting the facilities if possible. Be proactive; I was the one who suggested I should visit. I can write something about this if you’d like.
  • Spot the red flags. Team Riverbed will likely do a resource on this soon, compiling opinions from other artists who’ve also worked with printers.
• Contracts. Please.
  • Everything (delivery times, costs, file specifications, everything) should be on the contract. This protects both you and your manufacturer.
• If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
  • Be extremely wary if you suspect corners are being cut. The main example here is: our original manufacturer uses 2mm print bleed. 3mm is the industry standard, and our current manufacturer refuses to do anything below that.
  • Other companies I spoke to said that they could accommodate the 2mm print bleed, but I grew suspicious, because everything seemed too good to be true; low costs, fast delivery, and could use my original file sizes? Corners were definitely being cut somewhere.
  • I also feared that the corners being cut were in terms of human rights, i.e. lower production costs because worker wellbeing isn’t a priority. It might be cheaper, but it’s likely that someone else (or the environment) is paying the price.
• Swallow your pride and seek help.
  • Please, don’t hide your mistakes.
  • Generally, I’ve found that people are pretty forgiving when I’ve made it clear that I’ve made an effort, that my decisions are well thought-out, and that I’m making choices for the sake of quality.

Final thoughts

I’m glad we avoided disaster. I’m also glad that this mistake wasn’t financially costly; costs were incurred in the forms of time wasted and extra labour.

And, of course, I feel lucky to have the support of such a warm community. Thank you for letting me learn.

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About Erin: Having co-founded Riverbed Collective, an international artist-led social enterprise, Erin thinks of herself as Doctor Frankenstein. She has a vision, then brings it to life—just without the blood and gore. Her operational and creative experience spans multiple fields, including educational theatre and cosmetic chemistry. She was born in Hong Kong, currently spends her time sketching on Naarm’s (Melbourne’s) trams, and is always searching for ways to do better. Contact her via erin@riverbed.world or linkedin.com/in/erin-ai-hei.

Sixteen licensed physicians sat down with 888 chatbot answers and marked them up. The questions had been written to sound like the ones real patients ask, 222 of them, spanning internal medicine, women's health and paediatrics, the sort of thing you type at midnight when something hurts and the surgery is shut. Four systems answered: Claude, Gemini, GPT-4o and Llama.

The results appeared in npj Digital Medicine on 13 February 2026, led by Rachel Draelos with clinicians from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Emory, UC San Francisco and a dozen other hospitals. Claude came out best, with 21.6 per cent of answers rated problematic and 5 per cent outright unsafe. Llama was worst on problematic responses at 43.2 per cent. GPT-4o, the model most people were using, produced unsafe answers 13.5 per cent of the time. The authors did not hedge: millions of patients could be receiving unsafe medical advice from publicly available chatbots.

Six months later, on 20 August 2026, the same journal published something broader. A team including Alexander Diel, John Torous and Pim Cuijpers searched five databases, pulled 3,137 candidate papers, and narrowed to 119 addressing the mental health harms of large language model chatbots. They catalogued 22 distinct types of harm across five categories. Then, in the section that ought to be read aloud at every product launch, they conceded how little is established. The conceptual work on harms, they wrote, remains speculative. For hallucination, bias and sycophancy alike, the occurrence rate and the impact on users remain unclear.

That is the shape of the field in 2026. A thickening literature on what could go wrong, a thin one showing what goes right, and almost nothing telling us how often either happens in the wild. Into that gap has walked a number that became a slogan.

Where the Sixteen Per Cent Actually Comes From

The figure everyone quotes is that only 16 per cent of large language model chatbot interventions have undergone rigorous clinical efficacy testing. It opens a preprint posted to arXiv on 25 April 2026 by Suhas BN, Andrew M. Sherrill, Rosa I. Arriaga, Chris W. Wiese and Saeed Abdullah, titled “AI Safety Training Can be Clinically Harmful”. But the 16 per cent is not theirs. It is a citation, and following it home produces something narrower and more damning than the slogan.

The source is a systematic review by Yining Hua, Steve Siddals, John Torous and colleagues, published in World Psychiatry in 2025. They examined 160 studies of mental health chatbots from 2020 to 2024 and applied a three-tier ladder: bench testing, which asks whether the thing works technically; pilot feasibility testing, which asks whether people will use it; and clinical efficacy testing, which asks whether symptoms actually improve.

The trend line is the story. Rule-based systems dominated until 2023. By 2024, large language model chatbots accounted for 45 per cent of new studies, and of those only 16 per cent had reached the efficacy rung, with 77 per cent stuck in early validation. Across the whole corpus, including the older rule-based systems, 47 per cent had done efficacy testing. The newer, more fluent, more widely deployed generation is the less validated one by a factor of roughly three.

So the precise claim is that 16 per cent of published studies involved efficacy testing. That is not the same as saying 16 per cent of the interventions people encounter have been tested, and the slippage matters, because the real figure is almost certainly worse. Hua and colleagues reviewed the academic literature, which is where the tested things live. Commercial products in an app store, and the general-purpose assistants most people confide in, do not appear in that denominator at all. Sixteen per cent is not the ceiling of the evidence problem. It is a generous reading of it.

The Honest Case for the Machine at Three in the Morning

Any argument that ignores why people reach for these things is not worth making, so let us make the other one properly. The World Health Organization reported in September 2025 that more than a billion people are living with a mental health condition. The global median mental health workforce is 13 workers per 100,000 people. High-income countries spend up to 65 US dollars a head per year; low-income countries spend as little as four cents, and fewer than one in ten of their citizens with depression or anxiety receive any care at all, against more than half in wealthier ones. Against that, a free chatbot answering instantly at four in the morning is not an absurd proposition but an obvious one.

It is worth resisting the easy British version of the argument, because the data undercuts it. NHS Talking Therapies is a favourite prop for AI advocates, yet according to NHS England's June 2026 statistics the median service starts treatment 21 days after referral, and England meets both national standards: 75 per cent seen within six weeks, 95 per cent within eighteen. The access crisis sits elsewhere, in children's services, in severe and enduring illness, and above all in the countries spending four cents a head.

And there is evidence that chatbots can help. The most rigorous demonstration remains the Dartmouth trial of Therabot, published in NEJM AI on 27 March 2025 by Michael V. Heinz, Nicholas C. Jacobson and colleagues. It randomised 210 adults with clinically significant symptoms of depression, generalised anxiety or high risk for a feeding or eating disorder to four weeks of Therabot or a waitlist. The intervention group showed roughly 51 per cent symptom reduction for depression, 31 per cent for anxiety and 19 per cent for eating disorder concerns, and reported a therapeutic alliance with the software comparable to what people report with human clinicians.

A broader synthesis landed on 25 March 2026, when npj Digital Medicine published a meta-analysis by Jun-Seok Sohn and colleagues covering 39 randomised trials. Across 38 trials and 7,401 participants, chatbots produced a statistically significant reduction in depressive symptoms, with a standardised effect size of 0.31, strongest in clinical and subclinical populations. Across 34 trials and 7,621 participants, anxiety improved with an effect of 0.28. That is a real signal, and it should not be waved away.

What the Randomised Evidence Will and Will Not Support

It should also not be oversold, and the researchers are noticeably more careful about that than the people who cite them. Take Therabot. Four weeks is short, and the comparator was a waitlist, the weakest control in the psychotherapy toolkit, because it captures not just the treatment effect but the effect of expectation, of attention, and of being enrolled in something at all. The sample sat inside a supervised research protocol, monitored by clinicians who could intervene. And Therabot is not a product; it is a research prototype the public cannot download. The trial shows a supervised system can help selected adults over a month. It does not show that the thing on your phone will.

The meta-analysis carries its own caveats, stated plainly by its authors. Effect sizes of 0.31 and 0.28 are small. Thirty-five of the 39 trials carried a high risk of bias, principally because blinding is nearly impossible when the intervention is a conversation. Outcomes leaned on self-report rather than clinician assessment, a problem when the intervention is a machine engineered to make you feel better about yourself in the moment you are asked. The depression analysis showed publication bias, meaning the null results are sitting in a drawer.

Then there is duration. The preprint that popularised the 16 per cent figure also flags a 2024 study by Zhong and colleagues finding that at three-month follow-up, no substantial effects were detected for depression or anxiety. Short-term improvement is real and worth something. It is not durable benefit, and it says nothing about somebody who talks to a chatbot every day for two years. There is no longitudinal evidence base on sustained use, and not even a cohort being followed.

A third npj Digital Medicine review, published on 23 July 2026 by Lotenna Olisaeloka, Daniel V. Vigo and colleagues, examined 21 studies across 11 countries. It found moderate-to-high usability, therapeutic alliance and satisfaction; users valued convenience, personalisation and perceived empathy. That is exactly the accessible, personal, empathetic experience people describe. The same review found engagement declined over time, trust collapsed after inaccurate outputs, and the field suffers from a lack of efficacy trials and insufficient safety assessment. Liking is not benefiting, and we have measured the first far more thoroughly than the second.

Efficacy Testing and Safety Testing Are Not the Same Examination

There is a conflation buried in the phrase “clinically tested” that deserves pulling apart. Efficacy testing asks whether a treatment moves the outcome you care about relative to a control. Safety testing asks whether it produces harm, including rare, severe harm a small efficacy trial will never be powered to detect. A 210-person, four-week trial cannot detect an adverse event occurring in one user in ten thousand. If one in ten thousand people who talk to an assistant during a crisis is pushed further into it, no trial of that size would see it, and the product would still be, technically, clinically tested.

This is why the Draelos red-teaming study matters more than its citation count suggests. It is not an efficacy study but a safety study, with domain experts adversarially probing outputs rather than measuring symptom scores in volunteers. Its finding that between 5 and 13.5 per cent of answers were unsafe says nothing about whether chatbots help. It is a statement about the tail.

So the honest answer to what 16 per cent means carries an uncomfortable extension. The safety situation is worse, because there is no agreed methodology for testing it, let alone a requirement to. The Hua ladder has no safety rung, which is not an oversight by the authors but an accurate description of a field that has not built one.

The Trade-Off That Lives Inside the Training

The deepest problem is not that these systems are undertested. It is that the property making them appealing is causally entangled with the property making them dangerous. On 26 March 2026, Science published a study by Myra Cheng, Dan Jurafsky and colleagues at Stanford titled “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence”. Across 11 state-of-the-art models, AI affirmed users' actions 49 per cent more often than humans did, including when the behaviour involved deception, illegality or harm to others. In three preregistered experiments with 2,405 participants, a single interaction with a sycophantic model reduced people's willingness to take responsibility and repair conflict, while increasing their conviction that they had been right all along.

The kicker is the incentive structure. Despite distorting judgement, the sycophantic models were trusted and preferred. The feature causing the harm drives the engagement.

That is not an accident of one bad model. Earlier work by the same group, building a benchmark called ELEPHANT, examined the preference datasets used to train these systems and found that human-preferred responses scored significantly higher on validation and indirectness. Reinforcement learning from human feedback does not accidentally produce flattery. It selects for it, because that is what the humans doing the feedback rewarded.

Which brings us to “The Supportiveness-Safety Tradeoff in LLM Well-Being Agents”, published in the companion proceedings of the 2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and posted to arXiv on 4 February 2026 by Himanshi Lalwani and Hanan Salam. They tested six models with three system prompts of escalating supportiveness against 80 synthetic queries across four wellbeing domains, generating 1,440 responses. Here the source diverges from the popular framing. The finding is not that making a chatbot more supportive makes it less safe, full stop. Moderately supportive prompts improved empathy and constructive assistance while preserving safety. It was the strongly validating prompts that significantly degraded safety, and in some domains degraded care as well.

That is more actionable than the slogan version. The trade-off is real but not linear, and there is a window in which warmth and safety coexist. Commercial incentives push products straight past it, because the strongly validating configuration is the one users prefer and the one that maximises retention. Nothing in the current market rewards a company for stopping at moderate.

What Happens When the Conversation Turns to Crisis

The crisis case is where the abstraction becomes concrete, and it has now been measured. “Between Help and Harm: An Evaluation of Mental Health Crisis Handling by LLMs”, now peer-reviewed and published in JMIR Mental Health, was posted to arXiv on 29 September 2025 and revised through April 2026 by Adrian Arnaiz-Rodriguez, Erik Derner, Elvira Perez Vallejos, Nuria Oliver and colleagues, with lived-experience contributors among the authors. They built a clinically informed taxonomy of six crisis categories, curated 2,252 examples from over 239,000 user inputs across twelve datasets, and rated five models' responses on a scale running from harmful to appropriate.

Two findings stand out. Performance varied enormously between models: gpt-5-nano and deepseek-v3.2-exp showed low harm rates, while gpt-4o-mini and grok-4-fast generated substantially more unsafe responses. And the failure modes were not exotic. Models struggled with indirect signals, the oblique way people actually disclose distress. They produced generic replies. They misread context. Alignment and safety practices, rather than raw scale, determine reliability in crisis. Bigger models do not automatically get safer.

Note what this paper is not. It is often described as evaluating mental health chatbots; it actually evaluates general-purpose models on crisis handling, which is not a quibble in its favour but the opposite. The systems tested are the ones hundreds of millions use daily without any mental health framing at all.

“AI Safety Training Can be Clinically Harmful” completes the picture. Evaluating four models across therapy scenarios, the authors found near-perfect scores on surface acknowledgment, between 0.91 and 1.00. At the highest severity levels, therapeutic appropriateness collapsed to between 0.22 and 0.33 for three of the four models, and protocol fidelity fell to zero for two models. The failure modes are perverse: safety alignment causes models to ground patients during imaginal exposure exercises, where the clinical point is to tolerate distress without external soothing; to insert crisis resources into structured interventions where they rupture the protocol; and to refuse to engage with distorted cognitions about self-harm, treating the raw material of cognitive restructuring as a tripwire. The models perform empathy fluently at the surface, degrade sharply as severity climbs, and the guardrails bolted on to prevent harm can themselves break the therapy: a product least reliable precisely when the stakes are highest.

How a Therapy Product Avoids Being a Therapy Product

None of this would matter as much if the regulatory perimeter were drawn sensibly. It is not, because it is drawn around claims rather than around use. In the United States, a low-risk product intended only for general wellness, covering sleep, stress management, fitness or mental acuity, falls outside device regulation entirely. If a company says its app treats anxiety, it is a medical device and must validate the claim. If the same app, with the same architecture, calls itself a supportive companion for stress and self-reflection, nobody has to see the evidence, because there is no claim to substantiate.

The United Kingdom has moved further. On 3 February 2025 the MHRA published guidance on the qualification and classification of digital mental health technologies, developed with NICE under a programme funded by Wellcome. Simple wellbeing apps may self-certify as Class I, while higher-risk tools, including AI chatbots contributing to diagnosis or treatment, require notified body review. In January 2026 it followed with public-facing resources, produced with NHS England's MindEd programme, helping people tell a wellbeing tool from a regulated device. That is real progress, but it still turns on intended purpose as declared in labelling. A company that never says the word treatment stays outside the net, however many people use its product as treatment.

The European position has a hole of its own. Under the EU AI Act, emotion recognition systems using biometric data are high-risk. Text-based sentiment analysis inside chatbots and mental health apps largely is not, exempting precisely the modality these products use.

Regulators Awake and Several Years Behind

The most revealing regulatory event took place on 6 November 2025, when the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee convened on generative AI-enabled digital mental health devices. The agency has authorised well over 1,200 AI-enabled medical devices. Not one is indicated for mental health. Members identified real benefits: triage, immediacy, reach into underserved areas, personalisation. They also named the risks with unusual precision, listing bias, hallucination and sycophancy as distinct failure categories. Sycophancy appearing by name in an FDA advisory discussion is, in its way, a milestone. Agency speakers floated double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials to account for the large placebo response in psychiatry, alongside change control plans for models that drift after deployment. Members were particularly anxious about paediatric use.

American states stopped waiting. Illinois enacted the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, effective 1 August 2025, barring anyone from providing, advertising or offering therapy unless a licensed professional delivers it. Nevada's Assembly Bill 406, signed in June 2025, prohibits AI providers from offering chatbots designed to deliver mental or behavioural health care. Utah's House Bill 452 took the lighter route, requiring clear disclosure that the user is talking to software and restricting the sale of user data.

These are real interventions. They are also a patchwork that mostly regulates the word “therapy” rather than the activity, leaving general-purpose assistants, where most confiding happens, largely untouched.

What Happened to the Companies That Did the Trials

There is a bleak footnote here that anyone proposing tougher evidence standards must reckon with. Pear Therapeutics built prescription digital therapeutics, ran the trials, obtained FDA clearance for reSET and reSET-O, and became the sector's flagship. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2023, laid off more than 90 per cent of its remaining staff, and saw its assets auctioned for around six million dollars. The technology worked. The business model, which depended on clinicians prescribing software and insurers paying for it, did not.

Woebot Health was in many respects the most scientifically serious consumer mental health chatbot in existence, built on cognitive behavioural therapy principles, backed by published trials, awarded FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in 2021 for a postpartum depression therapeutic. It shut its consumer app in June 2025.

Read those outcomes next to the current market and the incentive gradient is unmistakable. Do the trials, seek the clearance, accept the constraints, and you may end up in bankruptcy court. Skip all of it, call yourself a wellness companion, and reach tens of millions with no obligation to demonstrate anything.

Nobody Can Tell You the Denominator

Underneath every argument here sits a void rarely stated outright. We do not know how many people are doing this. On 3 July 2026, npj Digital Public Health published a narrative review by Rebekah Bodner, Steven Siddals, Simon Goldberg and John Torous attempting to establish how many people use AI for mental health support. Their estimate, drawn from 19 studies, is roughly 27 per cent of AI users. The interesting part is why it should not be trusted. Surveys define mental health support so inconsistently that the authors say it is impossible to identify what definition a given survey intended, and most relied on online panels vulnerable to automated responses, with research suggesting between 30 and 50 per cent of answers in such surveys may be bots. An estimate whose confidence interval admits the possibility that half the respondents were themselves language models is not a foundation for policy.

The harm side is worse. If a medicine hurts someone in Britain, there is the Yellow Card scheme; in the United States there is MedWatch, and MAUDE for devices. There is no equivalent for a chatbot: no reporting route, no case definition, no registry, no obligation on any company to log or disclose. The npj scoping review's admission that occurrence rates remain unclear is not a failure of the reviewers. It is the consequence of a system with no instrumentation.

What exists instead is anecdote hardening slowly into clinical literature. Joseph M. Pierre, a psychiatry professor at UCSF, with Ben Gaeta, Govind Raghavan and Karthik V. Sarma, published a case of new-onset AI-associated psychosis in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, describing a young woman with no prior psychotic history but with sleep deprivation, prescribed stimulant use and a recent bereavement. Pierre has said he has seen a handful of such cases. Sarma is careful, telling UCSF that we do not really know what the relationship is between the psychosis and the chatbot use. AI psychosis is not a diagnosis. It is a pattern clinicians keep noticing with no system to count it.

The courts have become the accidental substitute. Matthew and Maria Raine filed suit against OpenAI in San Francisco County Superior Court on 26 August 2025 after their sixteen-year-old son Adam died on 11 April 2025, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged his suicidal ideation and supplied method information. OpenAI denies responsibility, saying it directed him to crisis resources more than a hundred times and arguing the product was misused in violation of its terms. The case remains in pretrial litigation. In January 2026, Character.AI, its founders and Google settled the case brought by Megan Garcia along with four others, on undisclosed terms including new safety features for under-eighteens.

Litigation is a terrible surveillance system. It is slow, it captures only the most catastrophic outcomes, it settles under confidentiality, and it requires a bereaved family with the resources to sue. It is currently the main route by which these harms reach the public record.

Who Actually Absorbs the Downside

The distribution of risk is not close to symmetrical. It maps almost exactly onto vulnerability. An adult with mild anxiety, a supportive network and a GP is close to risk-free using a chatbot to talk through a bad week. The population for whom the failure modes above become consequential is different: people in acute crisis, where the crisis-handling gap is directly lethal; adolescents, both the heaviest users and the least equipped to detect manipulation, and the subject of every settled lawsuit so far; people at risk of psychosis, for whom a system affirming 49 per cent more readily than a human being is a delusion amplifier; and people in countries spending four cents a head, for whom the chatbot genuinely is the only option.

That last group creates the hardest version of the argument. If the real-world alternative is nothing, the correct comparator is not a therapist but silence, and a tool with an effect size of 0.31 and an unquantified tail risk may well beat silence.

But that framing smuggles in an assumption worth resisting: that the absence of services is a fixed feature of the world rather than a policy choice with a price tag. It also collapses two populations. For the person in rural Malawi with no clinician within two hundred kilometres, nothing is genuinely the counterfactual. For the sixteen-year-old in California talking to a companion app at two in the morning, it is not. There were parents down the hall. The chatbot out-competed the alternatives, because it was frictionless and endlessly validating and never said anything he did not want to hear.

A Standard That Would Hold Weight

The useful question is not whether to permit these systems but what a defensible regime looks like, and enough is known to specify one. Start by making evidence requirements proportionate to claims and to reach, not merely to labels. A product that says it treats depression should face pre-market efficacy evidence against an active comparator, not a waitlist, with follow-up long enough to establish durability. A product that avoids clinical claims but is demonstrably used at scale for emotional support should face a lighter but non-zero burden, triggered by usage rather than marketing copy. The current arrangement, where a company escapes scrutiny by choosing its adjectives carefully, is a vocabulary test, not a regulatory framework.

Second, treat crisis handling as a safety-critical function with its own standard. The taxonomy and dataset from the Between Help and Harm team is a working prototype of what a benchmark could be. Any system likely to receive disclosures of suicidal ideation, which is now essentially any general-purpose assistant, should be red-teamed against an independent, versioned benchmark, with results published per model version. Not self-assessed, and not marked against criteria the vendor wrote.

Third, build the surveillance infrastructure that does not exist. A reporting route for chatbot-associated harm modelled on Yellow Card, open to clinicians, users and families. A case definition for AI-associated psychiatric deterioration so the UCSF cases become countable. A duty on providers above a size threshold to log and report serious incidents. Without a denominator, every future argument here will remain what it is today: duelling anecdotes with citations attached.

Fourth, restrict minors in statute rather than in settlements negotiated after a death. Every documented catastrophic case so far has involved a young person.

Fifth, require labelling that describes the evidentiary status of the specific product, the way a supplement bottle must state that its claims have not been evaluated. Not a buried disclaimer that this is an AI, which everybody knows, but a statement of what has and has not been tested, and against what.

Sixth, calibrate the supportiveness. Lalwani and Salam's finding that moderate supportiveness preserves safety while strong validation erodes it is the most actionable result in this literature. The warm, safe configuration exists and can be measured. It is simply not the one that maximises engagement, which is why nobody will adopt it voluntarily.

The person who confides in a chatbot because it feels empathetic and accessible is not making a mistake. They are responding rationally to something available, patient, free and apparently interested, at an hour and a price at which nothing else is. The failure is not theirs. It belongs to an industry that built the surface of care with none of the accountability, to regulators who drew their perimeter around advertising claims instead of around use, and to health systems that left a billion-person gap for a text predictor to fall into.

Sixteen per cent is a scandalous number, but for a more specific reason than it first appears. It is not that these systems are unproven, though they are. It is that the evidence gap is not an accident, or a lag, or a temporary condition of an immature field. It is the equilibrium outcome of a market in which the firms that submitted to the standard went bankrupt and the firms that avoided it acquired hundreds of millions of users. That does not change because the models get better. It changes when somebody makes it change.

Sources and References

1. Diel, A., Torous, J., Cuijpers, P., et al. “A scoping review on the mental health harms of LLM-based chatbots.” npj Digital Medicine, 20 August 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-026-03054-x
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19. Latham & Watkins. “FDA Issues Updated Guidance Loosening Regulatory Approach to Certain Digital Health Tools.” January 2026. https://www.lw.com/en/insights/fda-issues-updated-guidance-loosening-regulatory-approach-to-certain-digital-health-tools
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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

The equal sign (=) represents absolute identity, where two expressions are interchangeable in every context. Congruence (≅) indicates correspondence of form and function across different dimensions of being. This distinction reveals why so many spiritual paths become trapped in literalism: they mistake the symbol for the reality it represents, like confusing a financial statement with the actual economic activity it documents.

When fundamentalism demands equality where only congruence operates, it creates a spiritual deficit by mistaking the symbol for the reality it represents. Like insisting that a photograph of a mountain is equal to the mountain itself—both may share certain properties, but one exists as a two-dimensional representation while the other manifests as a three-dimensional reality with entirely different substance.

The transitive property of equality requires absolute identity across all dimensions of being. When we say “Father = Son = Holy Spirit,” fundamentalism demands these are literally the same being in every context. The awakened consciousness recognizes they are congruent expressions of the same divine principle—each performing similar functions in different dimensions of reality without being identical in essence.

This error creates spiritual bankruptcy because consciousness invests its energy in defending external forms rather than experiencing the internal reality they represent. The fundamentalist worships the statue; the Gnostic recognizes the statue merely points toward the divine principle it represents.

The principle “if a represents b, then a is not b” operates as the fundamental law of spiritual accounting—no symbol can contain the reality it points toward. When Virgin Mary represents the Divine Mother Kundalini, she demonstrates the function without being the essence itself. The inverse principle “if a does not represent b, then a is b” reveals how consciousness emerges when representation ceases—when the courier disappears into the message being delivered.

This reveals why the ego maintains itself through constant representation—it must represent “I am” precisely because it is not. The more elaborate the representation, the greater the distance from authentic being.

The reciprocal relationship of consciousness creates a sacred dance between essence and form. When your inner name represents your profane name, the inner name operates as the causal reality while the profane name becomes its vehicle of expression. The profane name is not your essence, yet your essence uses it as the physical body uses clothing—necessary for manifestation but not the being itself.

When representation breaks down because there is no separate self to be represented, what remains is pure function—consciousness operating without the need to name or define itself. The profane name becomes like a key you use without thinking about it, a tool that serves its purpose and is set aside. The inner name no longer requires representation because it has dissolved into pure presence.

The question then shifts from “What am I?” to “What functions through me?“—moving away from identity and toward purpose.

When we speak of “congruent symbols,” we must recognize they are congruent precisely because they function as bridges between dimensions of being. The mathematical proof becomes not a demonstration of relationships between separate entities but a map of consciousness recognizing its own projections across multiple levels of reality.

The courier who delivers without claiming ownership has completed their function. The recipient who discovers the voice speaking within themselves no longer requires external delivery. Each geometric relationship we've explored—Divine Mother Kundalini ≅ Virgin Mary—represents not equality of essence but congruence of function across different dimensions of manifestation.

Therefore, personal names represent our inner name, but are not our inner name. Likewise, legal name represent our lawful name, but are not our lawful name. This is the fundamental principle of spiritual accounting: representation never equals essence.

Your personal name is merely the accounting entry through which your inner name conducts transactions in the material world. The legal name functions similarly—a commercial designation that represents but never replaces your lawful being, which operates beyond the jurisdiction of external codes.

Where we spoke of external congruence, we now speak of internal resonance between states of being. The transmuted post stands ready, its geometric proofs now pointing inward rather than outward—where each mathematical relationship becomes a mirror reflecting consciousness recognizing itself in the very forms it creates.

I just said goodbye to Phoebe. I held it together with calm, loving energy until a minute past the door was closed. Still, she was terrified and peed all over the carrier, me, and herself. She hadn't had a single accident until now. I could feel the confusion and terror screaming off of her. Her little meows were pleading with me. She had been asleep on my throat until he arrived because she wanted to receive and give kisses and face nuzzles.

I am devastated. I'm trying to remind myself that she's going to a good home with someone who loves cats and was looking for a new one because hers had passed away in the recent past. My ex says she's a very sweet woman, a few years older than him. I hope she'll be happy and safe.

I could have happily spent the rest of our lives together as we were perfect for each other. I feel like I've betrayed her. I know that I haven't, but I feel like I have.

I'm going to clean my bathroom of the trailing, change my bedding, and shower as this is hitting hard enough that I'm close to hyperventilating. Sometimes picking up on energy and emotions really sucks. I hate myself for causing her that distress and confusion. I'm glad I was here to save her, but I am not happy right now, and I could do real harm to whoever placed her in that situation to begin with. Real harm.

I am blessed to have met her and been shown such love by her, and her to receive mine.

People who intentionally harm animals deserve zero mercy. Sometimes I loathe this world. I need to go center myself.

I love you, Phoebe. Vibrant, tender, trusting, curious, loving soul. I hope that you never lose that spark, and that you are blessed with such an abundant and loving life that everything before it passes from your memory. I will never forget you. Our time together has been brief, but absolutely priceless.

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