Fifty applications is not an unusual number. Six months is not an unusual stretch. What makes Amanda Bowler's story worth stopping over is the third number, the one that sits at zero: face-to-face interviews. Not zero offers. Zero occasions on which a human being sat opposite her and formed a view. The 48-year-old psychology graduate, whose experience was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 August 2026, is carrying a HECS debt of roughly 44,000 Australian dollars, a figure inflated by the fact that registration as a psychologist in Australia requires years of postgraduate study stacked on top of the undergraduate degree. She paid for the qualification. She wrote the applications. And on the available evidence, the qualification was assessed by software and the applications were read by nothing.

That last sentence is the one that ought to be arresting, and the reason it is not is that we have grown accustomed to it in under three years. The Australian labour market she is applying into is genuinely tight. SEEK's employment report for June 2026 recorded applications per job advertisement at their highest level on record, up 2.0 per cent month on month, against job advertisement volumes down 5.8 per cent year on year, the steepest contraction since early 2025. More people are chasing fewer roles. That is an old story and a cyclical one.

The new story is what is standing between them. The World Economic Forum put the share of companies using some form of AI for initial candidate screening at around 88 per cent in March 2025. The Australian Responsible AI Index, the national benchmark produced by Fifth Quadrant with the National AI Centre, found that a majority of Australian organisations already use AI in recruitment to some degree, and the Herald's reporting puts the figure at roughly 80 per cent of Australian companies at moderate or higher levels of use. On the other side of the same transaction, jobseekers now deploy generative systems and autonomous agents that scrape boards overnight, rewrite the curriculum vitae for each posting, generate the covering letter and submit before the applicant has woken up. A senior human resources leader, quoted in the same Herald report, described where this ends with more precision than most white papers manage. The bots just botting each other. Little robots yelling at each other.

Refusing Both of the Easy Stories

There are two ready-made articles about this and both are worthless.

The first is the technophobic one, in which the machines have desecrated a sacred human ritual and the remedy is to bring back the handshake. This is sentimental nonsense. Human hiring was never a meritocracy. It was slow, inconsistent, swayed by schools and accents and surnames, and it discriminated with a fluency that no audit ever caught because nobody was auditing. Anyone nostalgic for the CV pile on a hiring manager's desk should reckon with what happened to CVs at the bottom of it on a Friday afternoon.

The second is the efficiency story, in which volume has become unmanageable, automation is the only rational response, and since candidates are automating too the whole thing is symmetrical and therefore fair. This is more sophisticated and more dangerous, because the symmetry is fake. A candidate's agent optimises one person's chances against an entire market. An employer's agent optimises a queue against a budget. Only one of those produces an output with legal and material consequence. The candidate's machine issues a request. The employer's machine issues a verdict. Calling that an arms race between equals is like calling a trial an argument between the defendant and the judge.

The harder and more specific argument is this. The injury is not that judgement has been automated. Judgement has always been delegated, compressed and rushed. The injury is that the loop has closed: there is now no stage in the process at which any human being with time and authority is obliged to read. Once no human reads, the decision loses its author. And a decision without an author cannot be explained, cannot be appealed, cannot be corrected, and cannot be learned from. What Bowler encountered fifty times was not harshness. It was the absence of anybody to be harsh.

The Filter Myth and the Thing That Quietly Replaced It

Before going further it is worth demolishing the folklore, because the folklore is doing real damage to the argument.

For over a decade, career advice has been built around the claim that applicant tracking systems automatically bin 75 per cent of CVs before a human sees them. The statistic has no research behind it. As Leda Salazar de Leon and Mehnaz Rafi set out in an analysis published in July 2026, it traces to a 2012 sales pitch by Preptel, a résumé-optimisation vendor that closed the following year, and no methodology was ever published. The company selling the cure invented the disease. Recruiter surveys since have found the overwhelming majority do not configure their tracking systems to reject automatically on formatting or keywords, and small businesses, which employ most of the workforce in most developed economies, frequently do not use such systems at all. Applicant tracking systems were, for most of their history, filing cabinets with a search box.

So an entire generation of jobseekers spent a decade terrified of a filter that mostly did not exist, buying templates and keyword tools to defeat it. That matters here for two reasons. First, it should make anyone sceptical of vendor-generated panic, including panic that flatters this article's own thesis. Second, and more uncomfortably, the filter has now actually arrived, and it arrived in precisely the place the myth said it was, which means the warning has been worn out by overuse at exactly the moment it becomes true.

Large language models genuinely do rank. They produce orderings, and the orderings are not neutral. Kyra Wilson and Aylin Caliskan of the University of Washington ran a résumé audit through massive text embedding models, using more than 500 real CVs and 500 job descriptions across nine occupations, generating over three million combinations of job, race and gender. White-associated names were preferred in 85.1 per cent of cases and Black-associated names in 8.6 per cent. Female-associated names were preferred 11 per cent of the time. For some intersections, notably Black men, the models preferred other candidates in close to 100 per cent of comparisons. This is not a system that occasionally misfires. It is a system reproducing the statistical regularities of a corpus, doing exactly what it was built to do, at the precise point in the process where the myth taught everyone to expect it and nobody has been checking.

Two Automations Racing Each Other Into a Wall

On the employer side, the screening layer has stopped being software and become a participant. Alex, formerly Apriora, is a Y Combinator company founded by Aaron Wang and John Rytel that conducts live voice and video screening interviews, scores candidates and returns a ranked shortlist. It raised a 17 million dollar Series A led by Peak XV Partners in September 2025, taking total funding to 20 million, and reports having run more than a million AI-led screening interviews, reaching up to 5,000 in a single day for its largest customers. Five thousand first-round interviews in a day is not a faster version of what recruiters used to do. It is a different activity with the same name.

On the candidate side, the tooling is scrappier, cheaper and open. Public repositories host agents that use browser automation and web scraping to read postings and auto-apply with a tailored CV and covering letter for each one. Commercial equivalents advertise applying to thousands of roles in a click. Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru, a product manager at Google's YouTube who writes a widely read newsletter on applied AI, has published a step-by-step guide to building a personal job-hunting agent that runs on a small cloud server, pulls fresh listings each morning, scores each against your CV, and messages you the top five. Speaking to the Herald, he predicted that within five years every jobseeker will have a personal AI agent, and that it will most probably be talking to the company's AI recruitment agent. He is not forecasting from the sidelines. He ships the thing.

The consequences are measurable, and Greenhouse has measured them. Its AI in Hiring report, published on 19 November 2025 and drawing on 4,136 respondents across the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany, split between 2,900 jobseekers and 1,236 recruiters and hiring managers, found that 49 per cent of candidates had submitted more applications than the year before and 54 per cent had encountered an AI-led interview. It also found the trust gap that defines the whole system: 70 per cent of hiring managers trust AI to make faster and better hiring decisions, while just 8 per cent of jobseekers believe AI makes hiring fair. Daniel Chait, the company's chief executive and co-founder, called it an AI doom loop that is getting worse, not better.

Eight per cent. That is not scepticism. That is a population that has concluded the process is illegitimate, still participating in it because it has no alternative.

When the Signal Stops Meaning Anything

There is a clean piece of economics underneath this, and it was written in 1973.

Michael Spence's job market signalling model explains why credentials work at all. A signal only carries information if it is differentially costly to produce: education signals ability because it costs more, in effort and time, for the less able to acquire. Take away the cost differential and the signal stops transmitting. It does not become a weaker signal. It becomes noise wearing a signal's clothes.

Generative AI drove the cost of producing a competent, tailored, keyword-aligned application to approximately zero, for everyone, simultaneously. The considered covering letter used to be a costly signal of interest. It is now free. Which means it now says nothing, and everybody involved knows it says nothing, and each side has responded by escalating rather than by admitting the instrument is broken.

The escalation has a measurable shape, and the most revealing number in this entire field lives in the gap between two studies. Greenhouse found that 41 per cent of jobseekers said they had used prompt injection, hiding instructions in a document to steer an AI screener, with 52 per cent of the remainder saying they were considering it. Then Mohan Zhang, Yuqi Jia, Zhen Tan, Steven Jiang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Tianlong Chen and Dawn Song went and looked. Their study, presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in 2026, is the first large-scale empirical measurement of prompt injection in a real deployed system: roughly 200,000 genuine CVs collected over several years, of which about 1 per cent contained hidden injections. Prevalence is rising. More than 90 per cent of the injections avoided explicit instruction syntax, which is to say they were subtle enough to be difficult to catch.

Forty-one per cent say they do it. One per cent do it. That gap is not a measurement error, and it is not really about cheating. It is a statement of belief. Two in five jobseekers now consider sabotaging the employer's screening system to be a normal and defensible thing to say out loud about themselves. The moral standing of the hiring process collapsed considerably faster than the technology arrived.

Employers, deprived of a working signal, are hunting for a new costly one, which turns out to be proof that the applicant is a person. Gartner, in research released on 31 July 2025 drawing on surveys of some three thousand candidates, predicted that by 2028 one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake, found that 6 per cent of respondents admitted to some form of interview fraud, that 39 per cent had used AI during the application process, and that only 26 per cent trusted AI to evaluate them fairly. The vendor response has been identity verification products bolted onto applicant tracking systems, selfie-based checks, and a documented drift back towards in-person interviews for no reason other than confirming the candidate exists.

Read that sequence again, because it is close to farcical. The industry removed the human reader in order to save the cost of reading. It has now reinstated costly human verification in order to establish that there is a human on the other end. The cost was never eliminated. It was moved downstream, past the point at which Amanda Bowler had already been rejected fifty times.

What Researchers Found Inside the Loop

Three recent studies get closer to the mechanism than any amount of vendor commentary, and together they say something the industry has not absorbed.

The first, by Aditya Bhattacharya and Katrien Verbert, published in May 2025, built a multi-agent system powered by large language models to guide jobseekers through the recruitment process and explain hiring decisions to them. Evaluated with 20 participants, it was found significantly more actionable, trustworthy and fair than the conventional process. Note what the candidates responded to. Not a better weapon. An explanation. The enormous demand currently being met by auto-apply tools is, at root, demand for legibility, and it is being served by the only vendors willing to sell anything at all to the person being screened.

The second, by Md Nazmus Sakib, Naga Manogna Rayasam and Sanorita Dey, submitted in January 2026 and revised in March, examined asynchronous AI interviewers through analysis of subreddit discussion and interviews with 17 participants, then tested interface changes with 180 more. Its central finding is that applicants suffer from mismatched expectations amplified by organisational rhetoric, and that familiarity with large language models shaped how candidates perceived the process, sometimes producing workarounds and deceptive practices. That causal direction matters enormously. Deception is not a character flaw distributed randomly across the applicant pool. It is a predictable behavioural response to a process that misrepresents itself, and it is elicited most reliably from the candidates who understand the technology best.

The third is the one that should end a particular argument for good. Sajel Surati, Rosanna Bellini and Emily Black interviewed 22 recruiting professionals about generative AI in their daily workflows. Recruiters believed they retained final decision-making authority. The researchers found that the AI had become, in their phrase, an invisible architect shaping the foundational building blocks of the information used for evaluation. Adoption decisions largely lay outside recruiters' control, driven by organisational pressure and competitive anxiety rather than professional judgement. And the marginal efficiency gains came at considerable cost, including reduced recruiter expertise and compromised oversight capacity.

This dismantles the human-in-the-loop defence, which is the single most common answer employers give when challenged. The human is in the loop. She is reading a summary the model wrote, of candidates the model ranked, drawn from a pool the model already narrowed, under time pressure the model's throughput created, having gradually lost the expertise that would let her notice when it is wrong. Her presence satisfies an organisational chart and nothing else. Oversight that cannot be exercised is not oversight, and a rubber stamp is not a reader.

The Particular Exposure of Being Forty-Eight

Everything above lands unevenly, and it lands hardest on people who look like Amanda Bowler.

The Australian HR Institute and the Australian Human Rights Commission run a periodic national survey of employers on age in the workplace. Their 2025 report found that 24 per cent of HR professionals classify workers aged 51 to 55 as older, up from 10 per cent in 2023, and that only about half of employers were open to a large extent to hiring people over 50. That is the human baseline into which the automation was installed, and it is worth naming plainly: employer age bias was already there and already growing before a single model was deployed.

What the model adds is scale, speed and deniability. But there is a subtler and more structural problem with automated matching that has nothing to do with inherited prejudice. A ranking system trained on the profiles of people who already hold a role learns what an incumbent looks like. A career changer, by definition, does not look like an incumbent. A 48-year-old psychology graduate has a curriculum vitae with a shape that no successful applicant for an entry-level psychology position has ever had, because successful applicants for those positions are usually 25. The model will score her as a poor match. It will be functioning perfectly. Not a sufficiently close match is not a malfunction, it is the product specification, and it encodes a definition of suitability that nobody in the organisation ever wrote down, approved or could defend if asked.

The most consequential legal test of this proposition is grinding through the Northern District of California. Mobley v. Workday was filed on 21 February 2023 by Derek Mobley, an African American man over 40 with depression and anxiety, who alleged he had been rejected from more than a hundred positions screened through Workday's software, in several instances outside business hours and within an hour of applying. In July 2024, Judge Rita Lin preserved the disparate impact claims, finding it plausible that the vendor was acting as an agent of the employers. On 16 May 2025 the court granted preliminary certification of a collective under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. In July 2025 the collective was expanded to cover applicants screened using Workday's HiredScore features. The notice plan was approved on 2 December 2025, and on 6 March 2026 Lin rejected Workday's argument that the age discrimination statute does not reach job applicants at all. A third amended complaint followed on 27 March 2026.

Two figures from the reporting on that case deserve to sit next to each other. Around a billion applications were rejected through the software during the relevant opt-in period. Roughly 14,000 people opted in. That ratio is the accountability gap rendered numerically. Almost nobody rejected by an automated system ever learns enough to raise a hand, because the system's defining feature is that it does not tell you anything happened.

The Law Arrives, and Then Steps Back

You would expect regulation to be closing on this. In the specific weeks around Bowler's fifty applications, it moved backwards.

Under the European Union's AI Act, artificial intelligence used in employment and worker management is classified as high risk under Annex III, and the substantive obligations were due to apply from 2 August 2026, four weeks before this article was written. They did not. The Digital Omnibus on AI, provisionally agreed on 6 May 2026 and confirmed by member state representatives on 13 May, was adopted as Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, published in the Official Journal on 24 July 2026 and in force from 27 July, five weeks before this article was written and days before the deadline it removed. This is not a proposal that might yet be resisted. It is settled law. The obligations for stand-alone Annex III systems now apply from 2 December 2027, with embedded Annex I systems slipping to 2 August 2028. What survives on the original timetable is Article 50, the transparency duty to disclose that a person is interacting with an AI system, alongside the Article 5 prohibitions. Article 86, which grants an affected person the right to obtain clear and meaningful explanations of the role an AI system played in a decision that adversely affects them, hangs off the high-risk regime and slips with it.

The resulting settlement is almost satirical. A European candidate rejected today has a legal right to be told a machine was involved, and a fifteen-month wait for any right to be told what it did.

The American picture offers a preview of what enforcement looks like when it does arrive. New York City's Local Law 144 requires annual independent bias audits of automated employment decision tools, public posting of a summary, and advance notice to candidates. Researchers led by Lucas Wright, with Roxana Mika Muenster, Briana Vecchione, Tianyao Qu, Pika Cai, Alan Smith, Jacob Metcalf and J. Nathan Matias, coordinated 155 trained student investigators to check 391 employers in late 2023, behaving as motivated jobseekers would. Eighteen employers, 5 per cent, had posted a bias audit report. Thirteen, 3 per cent, had posted a transparency notice. Eleven had posted both. The researchers coined the term null compliance for the resulting condition, in which non-compliance cannot even be established because the regulated party controls whether anyone knows the law applies to it. The New York State Comptroller's audit published on 2 December 2025, covering July 2023 to June 2025, found the city's enforcement of the law ineffective.

Illinois has gone further on paper. House Bill 3773, enacted as Public Act 103-0804 and effective from 1 January 2026, amends the state Human Rights Act to make discriminatory use of AI in recruitment, hiring and promotion a civil rights violation, prohibits the use of postcodes as proxies for protected characteristics, and requires employers to notify people when AI is used in employment decisions. It sits alongside the older Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act. Whether it bites is a question about enforcement capacity, and New York's experience is not encouraging.

And Australia, where Bowler is applying, has chosen to do less rather than more. In September 2024 the Department of Industry, Science and Resources published a proposals paper setting out ten mandatory guardrails for AI in high-risk settings, covering testing, transparency and accountability for developers and deployers. In December 2025 the National AI Plan shelved them, opting instead to rely on existing technology-neutral law, voluntary guidance folded into six essential practices, and a new AI Safety Institute. The practical answer available to Amanda Bowler is therefore the Age Discrimination Act 2004 and state anti-discrimination statutes, which she would have to invoke on the basis of no information whatsoever about what happened to her application.

One genuinely enforceable Australian obligation is coming. From 10 December 2026, under amendments made by the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024, entities subject to the Australian Privacy Principles that use personal information in automated decisions capable of significantly affecting a person's rights or interests must disclose in their privacy policy the kinds of information used and the kinds of decisions made, with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner able to enforce. That is real, and it is worth having. It is also a paragraph in a document nobody reads, published by the organisation, containing no information about any individual decision. It tells Bowler that a category of thing happened to a category of person. It does not tell her what happened to her.

There is a reason this reticence should alarm Australians more than most. Between 2015 and 2019 the Commonwealth ran an automated debt recovery scheme against welfare recipients using crude income averaging. Robodebt was unlawful, produced enormous error rates, and a Royal Commission reported on it in 2023 with 57 recommendations. The financial reckoning continues: on 4 September 2025 the government agreed to pay a further 475 million dollars to settle the appeal in Knox v The Commonwealth, approved by the Federal Court on 23 June 2026, on top of the earlier Prygodicz settlement, bringing total redress past 2.4 billion dollars. Australia has already run the experiment of automating a high-stakes determination about people's lives at national scale and discovering the error rate afterwards, from the wreckage. Having paid that bill, in money and in lives, its response to the automation of hiring is a set of voluntary practices.

What a Right to a Human Decision Would Actually Have to Contain

The phrase a right to a human decision is currently doing rhetorical work and no operational work. It is worth spelling out, because vaguely stated it will be satisfied by a rubber stamp, and the SCHUFA reasoning already tells us a rubber stamp does not count. In that case, decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union in December 2023, the score the credit agency produced was itself held to be the decision in law, because the German bank relying on it did no more than follow the output. Where the nominal decision-maker adds nothing, the machine's output is the decision.

Six things would make it real, and the first principle underlying all of them is that a review conducted by someone with no practical capacity to overturn the outcome is not a review at all.

Disclosure has to happen at the point of application, not in a privacy policy. Before submitting, the applicant should see plainly that the application will be machine-scored, and what the system is assessing. This costs nothing and changes behaviour immediately, because a candidate who knows can decide whether the role is worth two hours of their life.

Rejections issued without human involvement must be reversible on request. Not appealable in principle, reversible in practice, by a named person with authority to overturn, within a fixed window. The thirty-second rejection that jobseekers describe as soul-destroying is not painful because it is fast. It is painful because its speed is a disclosure: it tells the applicant that nothing was considered. A reversal route converts the machine's output from a verdict into a triage recommendation, which is what it always should have been.

Employers should be required to sample. A fixed minimum percentage of machine-rejected applications, chosen at random, read by a human being, with the pass-through rate published. This is the single most valuable intervention available, because it generates a continuous audit of the model's false negatives at the employer's own expense and makes those false negatives visible for the first time. On a role attracting 500 applications, a 5 per cent sample is 25 CVs. That is one morning. Any organisation arguing it cannot afford a morning is telling you the vacancy was not worth filling.

Reasons must be given, and a score is not a reason. A short statement of which requirement was assessed as unmet is sufficient, and it is the difference between a decision and an event.

Auto-rejection rates should be published by age band, and by other protected characteristics where the data exists. Employers already collect this information for equal opportunity reporting. The reason it is not published broken down by automated stage is that nobody has asked.

And verification should be portable. If the labour market now requires proof that an applicant is a real human with the credentials claimed, that proof should be established once, held by the candidate, and presented on demand, rather than repeatedly extracted by every employer and every vendor at the candidate's cost.

None of this is radical, and none of it requires banning anything. It requires accepting a principle that every other consequential decision-making system in a developed economy already accepts: that a decision affecting someone's livelihood must have an author who can be identified and asked.

The Author of the Decision

So, to the questions this began with.

What does it mean when the most pivotal process in a working life is conducted between two artificial intelligence systems exchanging notes about a person's qualifications with no human ever reading the application? It means the decision has no author. Consider the comparison. If a bank refuses Bowler a loan, there is a decision-maker, a reason and a complaints process. If a government agency refuses her a payment, there is a delegate, a statement of reasons and a tribunal. If a university refuses her a place, there is an admissions officer and an appeal. Employment, which determines her income, her housing, her health, her standing and most of her waking hours, has quietly become the largest category of consequential decisions about human beings in a modern economy that has no such person anywhere in it. Not a person who decided wrongly. No person at all.

And what happens to the relationship between employer and employee when the first impression is made by an algorithm that can end a career in thirty seconds? An employment relationship is a structure of mutual obligation that begins in an act of assessment, and the character of that first act sets the terms of everything after it. When the opening move is made by a system neither party controls, that the employer cannot explain and the candidate cannot see, the relationship begins in bad faith on both sides, and the numbers show both sides already know it. Seventy per cent of hiring managers trust the machine. Eight per cent of candidates think it is fair. Forty-one per cent are willing to say out loud that they would sabotage it. That is not a labour market clearing. It is two populations, each correctly convinced the other is not really present, transacting through proxies neither of them chose.

The literature on what this does to the people caught in it is not ambiguous. The systematic review by Tom Sterud, Lars-Kristian Lunde, Rigmor Berg, Karin Proper and Fiona Aanesen, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2025 and pooling 38 prospective longitudinal studies, found a relative risk of mental health problems among unemployed people of 1.95 compared with the employed, and a relative risk of 0.66 after re-employment. Unemployment damages people and work repairs them, reliably, in both directions. Every unnecessary month a qualified person spends outside work because a ranking model scored their history as unusual is a month of measurable harm, imposed by a process nobody signed.

Amanda Bowler is not owed a job. Fifty applications do not entitle anyone to fifty interviews, and there are more psychology graduates than there are psychology posts. What she is owed, and what the entire apparatus described here has been engineered to avoid providing, is far smaller and far more fundamental than a job.

She is owed a reader.

Sources and References

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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

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“Peace isn’t found. It’s chosen, one breath at a time.”

Peace doesn’t just happen. It’s not something that drifts in one morning and stays forever. It’s something I have to choose, Sometimes a hundred times a day.

There are mornings when I wake up calm, even the air feels still and my heart feels light. And then there are mornings when my mind wakes before my body does, racing through thoughts I didn’t invite, Trying to replay the past or predict a future I can’t control.

That’s when I have to remind myself, I don’t have to relive every thought that visits me. I can let them pass like clouds, Noticing them, Naming them, But not giving them the power to storm.

I’m learning peace isn’t found in perfect circumstances. It’s found in the pauses I create, The moments I breathe before I react. The times I forgive myself for falling apart and then gather myself up again.

Every day, I have to make quiet choices that build peace,

A walk instead of an argument with my thoughts.

Writing instead of worrying. Small things, But they add up. This has become my armor, Soft, Steady, And my own.

Peace sometimes feels like silence. Other times, it feels like laughter that escapes before I realize I’m smiling again. On the days that are hard, it feels like not giving up, Like whispering, “Try again tomorrow,” even when today was heavy.

I mistook peace for a destination, now it’s practice. It’s the way I talk to myself when I make mistakes. It’s the boundaries I set, The people I let close, The things I no longer explain to those who not to understand.

Peace doesn’t mean that everything is fixed. It means I’ve decided not to let everything break me anymore.

There will be times fear knocks on my door, The memories will creep in time to time, I’m learning to let them knock, Let them fade, Then return back to myself.

Peace doesn’t come from the world around me; it’s coming from what I’m building inside. From the women who is choosing not to stay buried in the heartbreak. From the mother who will stay strong and show up, Even on the hard days. From the survivor who decided that healing is her own kind of rebellion.

Every day I am choosing peace, not because it’s easy, But because I know what my life is like without it.

And even when my world feels uncertain, even when I cross paths with the past, even when I don’t know what comes next, I will continue to choose peace.

Peace is freedom, And freedom is the truest form of becoming.

“Healing isn’t forgetting. It’s remembering without reliving.”

It always happens when I least expect it, A quick glance through the windshield, A truck or car that looks to familiar, A flash of a face I know like a memory that still lives in my bones.

For a moment, Time stops. My stomach drops. My chest tightens. My pulse forgets how to keep a steady rhythm. And I am right back there, In all the places I promised myself I’d left behind.

It’s not hatred I feel, It’s something far more complicated. A mix of shock, Sadness, And the deep, unexplainable ache of seeing a ghost who’s still alive. It’s the kind of pain that doesn’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t loved that deeply and lost that completely.

I try to tell myself to breathe, To remember that it’s just a moment, That he’s just another person on the road now. Not my story, Not my responsibility,

Not my future anymore. But my body doesn’t listen. It reacts before my mind can reason. Because healing is a process, And sometimes the body remembers faster than the heart forgives.

Driving past him feels like seeing a place of a life that still lingers in the rearview mirror, Close enough to recognize, But too far to reach. And in that split second, I wonder if he saw me too. If his heart stutters for a moment like mine does. Or if I’ve simply become another face in traffic.

Afterward, I carry it for the rest of the day, That heavy, Hollow feeling that sits just under my ribs. The urge to cry, Though there’s no reason left to. The frustration that I can be doing so well. Feeling so strong, And one passing moment can unravel me.

And what about the then there’s the part no one sees, not just in traffic or by accident, But in real moments. When our daughter will graduate High School, Birthdays, Milestones that belong to our daughter.

How am I going to feel when I have to sit across from someone, you once built a life with. And now no contact at all. To smile for the sake of your child, While your heart remembers every silence, every betrayal, Every time you begged for honesty and got nothing.

I’m learning how to keep my voice steady, how to nod politely. How to protect my daughter’s joy without letting my own pain spill into the room. A quiet strength, The kind that doesn’t get applause,

But still matters.

I won’t pretend it’s easy, Because this is anything but that. Seeing him still stirs something in me, not longing, But a kind of ache that has nowhere to go. A reminder that some wounds don’t bleed anymore, but they still throb when touched.

But I know I can be the parent who stays steady, who shows love without condition, Who teaches my daughter that healing is possible, even when the story didn’t end the way we hoped.

The next moment when our paths must cross, I’ll breathe. I’ll stand tall. I’ll remember who I am becoming now. Not the women he left, But the mother who stayed.

But I’m starting to understand something, These moments don’t mean I’ve gone backward. They mean I’m still human.

That the love, The pain, The memories, They still exist somewhere inside me, but they don’t control me anymore.

I used to think healing meant forgetting. That if I still felt something, it meant I hadn’t healed. But now I know better. Healing isn’t erasure. It’s integration. It’s learning how to carry the memory without letting it carry me.

I’m unsure if I will always feel something when our paths cross. The sting might never go away. Like touching a scar that’s healed but still tender. And that has to be okay. Because the goal isn’t to walk around and feel nothing. The goal is to let the feeling pass through without letting it take root. To remind myself that seeing him doesn’t undo the progress I’ve made. It’s just a reminder of how far I’ve come. That I can still see him, Survive the moment, and still keep driving.

So, when it happens again, And I know it will.

I will take a deep breath. I will keep my eyes on the road. And I’ll whisper to myself; you’ve already lived this once. You don’t have to live it again.

I am not defined by the moments that break me, I am defined by the way I rise after. By the way I choose softness over bitterness. By the way I continue to show up even when it hurts. And that, that quiet, steady return to myself, Is the kind of strength no one can take away.

This is my quiet revolution. To be soft in a world that taught me to be hard. To be kind to myself in a body that remembers pain.

Maybe someday the sight of him won’t make my stomach drop. Maybe I won’t notice him at all, Just another car on the road, another moment passing by. And if that day never comes, that’s okay too. I know who I am now. And I know that I can keep going.

(NEXT – CHAPTER: 9)

Pimeintos

Coloring Peppers

It took all day, but got the coloring pages done!

Wendell Berry – 1934-2026

---

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

---

#poetry

Part 2: Anomalies and Frames

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” —Walter Benjamin

We never encounter anomalies in isolation. We always encounter them as part of larger structures and mechanisms.

More specifically, several elements shape experiences we call anomalous, directly affecting their potential framing, interpretation, significance, and integration: the witness, the place, the account, and the observer.

The witness is the person who experienced the event and often becomes suspect before the event is fully heard or understood. Various factors affect not only how they experience an event, but also how they remember it, and if or how they retell it.

The place is the setting where the event occurred: a road, a sofa, an open field, a store, or an empty hallway that only later gains significance. Place should never be dismissed as only circumstantial or incidental to the event.

The account is the witness’s narrative of the event. It changes with retelling, as memory, language, audience, fear, and time impose their own revisions. Yet its inconsistencies may reveal what a merely perfect record could not: the pressure the event continued to exert upon the witness.

The observer is the person who receives the witness’s account and who interprets their account through their own knowledge, experience, role, and institutional affiliation, including families, houses of worship, courts, physicians, scholars, police, employers, archivists, and so forth. The observer determines which interpretations become publicly credible or institutionally actionable, including how it will be named or labeled: grief, delusion, folklore, trauma, fantasy, revelation, pathology, error, or evidence.

In all, the classification of anomalous experiences is never neutral.

Calling an experience a dream may comfort the witness, but it may also unintentionally silence them or suggest their experience was insignificant. Calling it a visitation may help preserve meaning, or smuggle in too much of it. Calling it illness or disease may open a path toward care, or become a method of misdiagnosis or exclusion. Calling it supernatural or paranormal often only trades one obscurity for another.

Anomalology, then, begins by asking what each naming of an event permits us to see, and what it obliges us to ignore, hide, or keep invisible to ourselves and others. And cloaked in that invisibility or exclusion may indeed include distress, error, grief, trauma, or the unresolved. But it should not be mistaken for nothing.

#Anomalology

---

What is Anomalology?

• Part 1: Defining the Undefinable
• Part 2: Anomalies and Frames

---

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

The deal that sent organic traffic to your website for free has almost entirely collapsed. It is gone. It is not coming back. And the sooner we come to our senses and stop wasting time and effort on futile optimisation, the sooner we can focus on more productive things.

In a famous scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur comes upon a bridge guarded by the Black Knight. In the ensuing fight, the Black Knight steadfastly refuses to yield, even after being dismembered, insisting “‘tis but a scratch!”

I recalled this as I received the latest of many similar emails. This one invited me to a webinar called “From Backlinks to Frontlinks”. Apparently, I would learn “what organisations should actually measure in the AI era”, and that “the brands that win over the next few years won't simply rank higher. They'll become the brands AI trusts enough to recommend.” All of which is, to put it politely, complete horseshit.

This latest missive crystallised my ongoing misgivings about this new phase of SEO (GEO?, AEO?, pick an acronym), something I've spent my whole career working on in various capacities. The scales finally fell from my eyes, and I realised that the entire premise of organic search optimisation is not changing; it is broken beyond repair.

One admission before I start. Most of the data I am about to cite comes from companies that sell search or AI visibility tooling. Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking and BrightEdge all have a commercial interest in how large and how tractable this channel appears. I use their numbers because, at this scale, there is nothing else, and I have tried to indicate where the commercial incentive lies in each case. Apply the same suspicion to my argument that I am asking you to apply to theirs.

The Faustian pact

For a quarter of a century, organic search ran as a kind of implicit barter. You produced content at your own expense, let the search engine crawler index it, dutifully marked it up as specified, and in return, mostly Google (other search engines were available!) sent some number of visitors back. The only costs were producing the content, maintaining the site, and any additional efforts you made to optimise it.

Much time and effort were expended on the optimisation part, trying to move up the organic search rankings through fair means and, occasionally, foul. Because even a single place improvement could deliver a meaningful increase in traffic, some portion of which would convert or buy or do whatever the thing you wanted them to do was.

Less sophisticated organisations saw this traffic as free. Others saw it for what it was and mapped it to things like human effort and agency expenditure, so any benefit could be assessed alongside other traffic acquisition channels with more directly measurable costs. But this world has now fundamentally changed with the migration of search to AI agents.

Pew Research tracked 68,879 searches from 900 US adults in March 2025 and found that 18% triggered an AI summary. When the summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result 8% of the time, versus 15% without one.

SparkToro and Similarweb put the US zero-click rate at 68% for the first four months of 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. Bain's February 2025 consumer research put the consequence at a 15% to 25% fall in organic traffic across many sectors. Chartbeat data covering more than 2,500 news sites, shared with Axios, found Google Search referrals down 34% year-on-year, with small publishers losing 60% of search referrals over two years, versus 22% for large ones.

So your side of the organic search bargain has not changed at all. You still write the content, still ship the schema, still let the crawler do its prosaic work. Only now, the other half of the bargain, the traffic received in return, has collapsed dramatically. The natural reaction is to panic and look for a quick fix, which is what has brought the usual shysters out of the woodwork, claiming easy solutions and techniques.

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are now default features of Search. They run on Googlebot, and the Search index, and the only levers that affect them are nosnippet and max-snippet, which also remove your ordinary search snippets and destroy your click-through rate. You cannot leave the AI layer without leaving Search altogether (you can exclude your content from Gemini training without a search penalty, however).

If this is not your first rodeo, you may recall E-A-T, a previous era where we spent a great deal of time and effort convincing ourselves it was a dial we could turn, a score we could improve by demonstrating Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness so the algorithm would bestow additional blessings. You'd be forgiven for noticing the eerie similarity to current “optimise for citation” advice.

Such was the noise, Google was forced into a rare comment in December 2022, that these kinds of quality rater guidelines “don't directly influence ranking”. Gary Illyes, then a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, had already explicitly told PubCon Las Vegas in October 2019 that there is no internal E-A-T score and no E-A-T element correlates meaningfully to the algorithm. Yet much of the SEO field kept its fingers in its ears and pushed on regardless, desperate for some variable, any variable, to optimise.

The tiny little prize

For argument's sake, let's pretend the current AI search optimisation industry is right and you can successfully manipulate your way into being consistently cited in AI answers. Before you break out the champagne, look at what that citation is worth. In the same Pew dataset linked above, among visits in which a Google AI summary appeared, the share of visits in which a user clicked a source cited in the summary was 1%. That’s one in a hundred, and Pew only counted the first three cited links.

True, that number is specific to Google AI Overviews in March 2025, and other assistants do behave differently. ChatGPT referrals jumped sharply after clickable brand links shipped in May 2026. But the overall direction of travel is not in dispute. Just put it beside the channel it is supposed to replace. SE Ranking's analysis of 101,574 sites measures AI referral traffic at 0.32% of all website visits for January to April 2026, compared with 42.75% for organic search of all kinds. Around 134 times more visitors from search than from every AI platform combined.

Two important caveats: SE Ranking's number sits at the low end of the published range. Conductor, analysing 13,770 enterprise domains, put AI referral traffic at 1.08%, roughly three times higher. And referrer-based measurement and attribution are structurally blind to most of what an AI answer does, because a visitor who reads about you in ChatGPT and then types your name into Google arrives tagged as branded organic or direct, breaking the attribution. But even if you take the highest credible figure and grant the measurement problem in full, it is still a rounding error compared to search.

Despite this, Rand Fishkin estimated in January 2026 that over $100m a year was already going into AI visibility tracking alone. It is just an estimate, but it sits alongside agency retainers, consultants and the usual conference circuit suspects and LinkedIn Lunatics, all telling you this problem is both traceable and solvable.

Let's look at a known positive for a moment: AI referral visitors do genuinely seem to convert well. Semrush's June 2025 study across more than 500 digital marketing and SEO topics found that the average AI search visitor was worth 4.4 times that of a traditional organic visitor, measured by conversion rates. Note the base: one industry vertical, chosen by a company that sells AI visibility tooling and owns Search Engine Land.

But you do not need a Fields Medal to calculate that a 4-to-5x conversion multiplier on a channel delivering around 1% of visits is still a minuscule absolute number. What often follows is the hand-waving argument that it's all very new, and that low volume with strong growth and high conversion quality is the profile of a promising early channel.

And here is where we get to the nub of the issue: every user an AI answer engine sends off-platform is a missed opportunity for an ad, a follow-up prompt, or a subscription upsell. For Google, AI Overviews are designed and optimised specifically to create a broader advertising surface rather than send traffic out to your site.

[With AI Overviews] free organic traffic from search fell by 40%. Paid traffic held steady. If your free visitors from Google are disappearing, the route Google left open is the one you pay for, and that was clearly not an accident.

For OpenAI, which is building an increasingly sophisticated ad business of its own and burns money on every query, the incentive is even starker. These companies are not distribution platforms that happen to summarise. In search terms, they are answer engines whose economics depend on not referring a user away. Most other platforms work the same way. Including an external link on X or LinkedIn posts is a sure-fire way to get buried.

I find the hardest part of all of this is accepting that the Google of 2026 is a fundamentally different beast from the one we have lived with for a generation. It’s like we’ve been in a long-term relationship with a partner who, despite their flaws, we’ve generally coexisted with quite happily.

Now that partner has left us, it’s easier to see the patterns of their behaviour that should have been obvious for years. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, “People Also Ask” boxes, shopping units, and four stacked ads. Each iteration squeezed the truly organic links. AI Overviews are not so much a departure from this trajectory as its zenith.

Even the remaining organic share is rapidly eroding as Google expands its own AI layers. Every study measuring click-through rate when an AI Overview appears has found a steep decline, though the magnitude depends heavily on the method and the type of search. Ahrefs measured a 34.5% drop for top-ranking pages in April 2025 and 58% by February 2026. Seer Interactive, tracking 25.1 million impressions across 42 organisations, found that organic CTR on AI Overview queries fell by 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61%. Amsive, across 700,000 keywords, found around 15%. Pick your methodology, and the answer moves by a factor of four, which tells you something about the validity of any platform claiming to be able to reliably monitor this space.

The damage to publishers is easier to see. Growtika's analysis of ten major tech titles found combined US organic traffic falling from 112 million monthly visits to 47 million, with Digital Trends dropping from 8.5 million monthly Google clicks in March 2024 to 264,861 in January 2026. The figures are Ahrefs traffic estimates rather than publisher analytics, and Google called the analysis fundamentally flawed. Digital Trends also laid off most of its full-time staff in early 2025, so its 97% is not a clean read on AI Overviews. The Verge, How-To Geek, and ZDNet each losing more than 85% over the same period is harder to explain away as flawed methodology.

So any growth curve for organic AI referrals (if there is one at all) appears to have an inbuilt ceiling set by the platform owners. It will only be allowed to exist at whatever level they decide, based on their commercial goals, and nothing you can do will change that. How many entities on the open web survive this transition remains to be seen, but based on current data, it does not look promising.

Say what you like about Meta, but when they decided to dramatically throttle brands' organic reach on Facebook between 2014 and 2016, at least the direction was unmistakable (which is not the same as transparent). Others are now belatedly following suit.

It is particularly awkward for Google, a company that built itself on the open web and harvested great riches, to be playing such an active role in destroying it. Small wonder they hide behind complexity, weasel words and methodological quibbling. It’s not a good look so they just hope it’s all too confusing or boring for most people to care until it’s too late.

Nobody knows how AI sources get chosen

Suppose you accept the bad maths. Suppose you argue that aggregators like Google will let organic referrals grow over time, even though that runs directly counter to their commercial interests. Suppose, then, that there is some value in spending your time trying to influence your appearance in this mythical future organic AI search segment.

You still need a mechanism — something you can do that reliably changes where, or whether, you appear in the answers. SEO had more than its fair share of snake oil, tricks, and techniques, but it eventually boiled down to “have a well-structured, performant site with helpful, unique content that solves problems for users.” That still applies. When it comes to appearing in AI search results, there is no other evidence-based method that moves the needle.

Worse, the waters between optimising for traditional search engines and AI search agents have been muddied, but they work in fundamentally different ways. Ahrefs sketches the retrieval process in its own research. An AI assistant rarely searches for the question you typed. It expands your prompt into a spray of related sub-queries — the fan-out — retrieves documents for each, then merges the resulting lists. Ahrefs offers Reciprocal Rank Fusion as one plausible mechanism for that merge, a formula that rewards pages turning up consistently across several retrievals. Google has confirmed the fan-out; nobody has confirmed the fusion, which is at best educated guesswork.

Surfer found that when an AI Overview cites something that does rank, it is ranking for a fan-out and not the main query 29.2% of the time, against 19.6% the other way round. So fan-outs appear to matter more than the head term.

But that still does not give you a target list. The expansion is not stable, which is why Fishkin’s volunteers received the same set of recommendations less than once in a hundred. Reading it once gives you a sample of one from a distribution nobody has published. The queries are long-tail enough that most have no measurable volume, so they do not exist as rows in a keyword tool. And each engine runs a different index, so “rank for these” needs a WHERE clause. Ahrefs found Perplexity overlapping Google’s top ten around 29% of the time, compared with 7 to 8% for ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot.

What you can get is a map of the topic space an answer drew on. That is a content gap diagnostic, and it is worth something. But it is not a ranking strategy, even though it is being sold as one.

There is a deeper problem with what follows from this. The merge step itself doesn't assess your credibility. But the candidate documents it merges arrive from ranking systems saturated with quality and authority signals, so the credibility assessment has not disappeared; it has moved upstream and out of sight.

That is worse for you, not better. The judgement you are being sold tools to influence is happening in a layer nobody will describe, at a distance from anything you can observe. So any talk of “becoming a brand AI trusts enough to recommend” is utter bollocks, because there is no trust register to influence or enter.

Alongside the theoretical fragility, the measurement evidence is worse than incomplete. In March 2026, Ahrefs analysed 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million URLs, reporting that 37.9% of AI Overview citations came from pages ranking in Google's top 10. In February 2026, BrightEdge measured the same surface and the same relationship, but put it at around 17% and said it had been flat for months. Same quarter, same question, a factor of two apart, and neither publishes a confidence interval. Basically: pick a number, any number.

Cross-engine, it is worse still. Kevin Indig's analysis of 20,000 prompts found that only 2.37% of cited URLs appeared in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for the same prompt, while 91% appeared in only one. These are not three rankings of one pool. They are three largely disjointed pools, which makes any single composite visibility score meaningless by construction.

Then there is the question of whether one answer tells you anything at all. A variance-components study published in July 2026 broke down 12,933 LLM responses about 20 brands across eight languages and three models. When measuring sentiment polarity, brand identity accounted for 1.5% of the variance in a single response. The language of the query accounted for 26.5%. Resampling noise accounted for 34.8%. Brand-ranking reliability from a single answer was near 0.01, meaning a single answer carries almost no brand-discriminating signal.

Even read generously, the conclusion is still awkward. There is a real distinction between tracking your position in an answer, which the evidence says is close to pure noise, and heavily sampled aggregate brand measurement across many prompt variations, models and languages, which has a kernel of rigour. The second is what Żatuchin's decision-study allocation describes, which is defensible in principle. Żatuchin's decision-study allocation sets out how to do it, though on sentiment rather than on the visibility metrics that the tools typically report.

It is also expensive; it tops out at a reliability of 0.36, and it is not the product most people are buying. Almost every dashboard on the market reports a position, and even Avinash Kaushik, who is about as thoughtful an advocate for this discipline as exists, names Average Position as one of his three headline KPIs and treats it as the priority opportunity. Fishkin's research says a position in an AI recommendation list is a statistically meaningless snapshot of a probabilistic output. They cannot both be right, and the primary data does not support the dashboards.

So you are trying to optimise for a moving target whose selection rules are unknown, whose outputs are non-deterministic, whose measurements do not replicate across engines, and whose vendor studies disagree by a factor of two within a single quarter. Trying to optimise against those structural realities is panicked madness.

But you do not have to take my word for the last part. Kaushik, in the middle of a detailed methodology walkthrough for a tool he has invested in, reaches the point where the numbers move and he writes: “Coach went down by 3, probably not significant. Kate Spade went up by 11; that is massive. Why? No idea. We have such little visibility into LLM black boxes, we can only pray to Krishna and Jesus that the next set of weights being used favours our brands.” He also warns his readers that there are lots of magic beans around, and that two tools can both report a Visibility Score while measuring entirely different things.

I wrote about the measurement problem in detail, and here is the short version. The category has raised roughly $300m since mid-2025. The leading platform's own research shows that most cited sources change over time; nobody publishes confidence intervals; and the tools usually measure through an API that does not match the consumer product. What you are paying for is at best a tiny signal in a sea of noise.

The decision that was already made

Maybe you’re a hardened marketer who rode o’the choppy waters of the Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. Maybe, like me, you spent 18 months of your life recovering from a Google de-listing because your predecessor thought it was a good idea to buy £30,000 of backlinks with some spare end-of-year budget. That makes all of this very hard to accept as anything other than another hump in the long road, another challenge to work around.

We become hyper-focused on fixing the agentic search “problem”, because that’s what we’ve always done. And of course, there are no shortage of people trying desperately to flog services and tools that are mostly thinly rebadged SEO approaches desperate to stay relevant. But I sense that perhaps, at some level, even the LinkedIn Lunatics realise their days are numbered.

It’s a lot to process. So step back and return to the fundamentals. Bain's September 2025 work found 85% of B2B buyers purchase from their “day one” list, the vendors they had in mind before searching anything. 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, based on more than 4,000 buyers, found that the vendor preferred before any seller contact still wins around 80% of deals, and that buyers now purchase from their day one shortlist 95% of the time.

So if we’re scrupulously honest, the search query was never the moment of persuasion. It was the point at which a decision already taken was executed through a search bar, because that was the easiest way to reach a site whose name you already knew. The entire attribution model that credited search with the conversion was misattributing a navigation step as a discovery event. Now that the navigation step has effectively been removed, it is plain to see.

There is a counterargument that if day-one lists determine the outcome, and those lists are formed before anyone searches, then a citation that produces no clicks could still be doing work. Appearing in the answer might seed the list. Clicks would therefore be the wrong yardstick. I think this is partly true, and it is the strongest thing the search optimisation industry currently has.

It is also what makes any product unsellable. If the value of a citation is brand memory formed off-platform, months before a purchase, then you cannot attribute it, you cannot measure it on a dashboard, and, based on the evidence above, you cannot reliably steer your position in it. You are being sold a whizzy dial, but there is no wiring behind it.

There may well be an effect, and if there is, the sensible response to an unattributable, unsteerable brand-memory effect is not to buy a subscription. It is to do the things that build brand memory, which we have understood for about seventy years.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.” Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The only sane reaction is not to cling to the hope that you can somehow master this new world through clever techniques and expensive tools that will staunch the bleed of organic referrals.

Build an audience you can reach without an intermediary, because direct is the only distribution channel where nobody can pull the rug from under you. Publish for humans who will remember your name in a procurement conversation eleven months from now, not for a crawler that keeps the click for itself. Show up in the places those day-one lists get formed: peer networks, communities, review sites, and other people's podcasts. That is much easier said than done. it requires really hard work and focus over a long time. It requires being interesting and different and providing something unarguably excellent.

Or you could spend your time learning the ways that AI is transforming paid advertising with technical tools of a power that was previously unimaginable. In fact, do anything other than try to preserve the flow of organic referrals because you’ve got used to seeing them. Those are permanently gone.

The dismembered torso of Monty Python's Black Knight shouts “I'll bite yer legs off!” defiantly after King Arthur. It is an amusing and enduring emblem of the search optimisation industry steadfastly refusing to give up when the battle is very clearly lost.

I’m feeling at ease, even more relaxed, because what’s meant for me won’t pass me by. I used to say that blindly, but now I know it. Woke up too late and missed a thing? I was supposed to miss it. Took the wrong turn and ended up somewhere else? That was the destination for now. Felt too tired at someplace fun? I was asked to rest. Communication unusually slow and quiet? It’s making space for something new. A friend didn’t follow through on their word? It’s not the time. What’s meant for me comes to me effortlessly. Without me trying. Without me saying a word. If I have to force it, I don’t want it. It’s all good.

In Summary: * When I woke this morning I was pleasantly surprised to find my home wi-fi operating normally. After speaking with a tech guy from my ISP last night I was resigned to having another day without good Internet access. Nice to have things back to normal.

For the last few days I've been able to spend time doing yard work early in the morning before the heat gets intolerable. I'm going to try that again tomorrow morning.

Counting on college football to relax my mind and send me to bed with a good attitude, I'm following a game now between the UMass Minutemen and the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. Rutgers is a Big Ten Conference school now, so I'll be cheering for the Scarlet Knights tonight.

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= 224.1 lbs. * bp= 141/81 (69)

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

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 banana * 06:10 – saltines crackers and cheese & meat sauce * 07:10 – 1 slice of lemon meringue pie * 11:45 – lasagna * 14:10 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:25 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to musc, nap * 10:00 – yard work, picking up and breaking up fallen front yard branches * 11:45 – eat lunch * 12:40 – review correspondence * 14:00 – listen to relaxing music * 15:00 – listening to The Jack Riccardi Show on local AM radio * 17:00 – now following a college football game on WRSU 88.7 FM, Rutgers Radio, the UMass Minutemen vs the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.

Chess: * 08:35 – moved in all pending CC games

Dear Aunt Martha,

When I moved back to the valley, much of my savings went into renovating the old house.  I added central heat and air conditioning, insulated everything,, and upgraded both the kitchen and bathroom, replaced the roof and windows and gutters.  It took months to get everything done and I have only recently settled into it enough that I no longer feel like I am camping out. I suppose you would say that city life spoiled me and I admire the way you lived your life without all the conveniences I feel necessary for comfort.

Then severe storms shut down everything in the valley for several days and I was helpless.  No phone service, no electricity at all, no internet. I had not unpacked the crates of books I shipped here, but found a few Zane Grey novels and a copy of “Smokey the Cowhorse “in the attic.  When I grew tired of reading, I came across the tattered cards you used to teach me Patience when I was in the second grade.

I lit an oil lamp as more thunderstorms boomed outside and spent an evening reminiscing about the quiet times I played the game while you did needlework by lamplight.  I wonder if it originated as symbolic of life and I learned why it was once called”  Patience”.  It’s the same game popularized by Microsoft and now called Klondike Solitaire.

The original layout can be the circumstances we are in or the life we are handed at birth.  We don’t know what is there until we turn them face up.  This reminds me of the Zen attitude of not knowing. The stock pile cards are options we may have and it will change as the contents of the stock pile diminish.

That is a fantasy that we are given in Western capitalist society. If we follow all the rules, we will end up with all our cards in tidy little piles in the Aces’ corner.  Frustration arises when we can’t uncover the cards we want or need and are stuck with incomplete piles. It takes time, observation, and patience to decide where to place cards and when.

Observing my inner world as I played was interesting.  The repetition and steady movements were almost like a ritual as I laid out the cards and drifted into a meditative headspace. I didn’t analyze or build strategy, just watched what arose and dissolved as I played the game, allowing them to settle just as we did when sitting on the cushion during formal meditation.

I was tempted to “cheat” by looking at the facedown cards beforehand and became frustrated when wanting/needing a certain card and it was not available. I was distracted by the interplay of colors and patterns when my need for controlling outcomes became unbearable. Sometimes I noticed the distraction and reminded myself to concentrate on the cards again, drumming up determination to do it correctly instead of wandering off into la-la land and missing obvious openings for card placement. Sometimes I stared at the layout, wondering how the cards would fit, unable to see moves and I was reminded of Roshi telling me to sit more, to keep sitting, when life circumstances were difficult. Eventually, I would see a move that felt obvious once I recognized it.

The desire and need for control were interesting to watch as I chafed against “the rules”. Too often I have tried to play by my own rules and have ended up with a mess.

Roshi and I have often talked about the need for rules and structure to provide parameters within which to work. There is a certain security that comes with observing and respecting boundaries as long as everyone involved agrees on them. Being the lone player in Solitaire is a way to observe our reaction to restrictions without the distraction required to cooperate with a partner or a team.

Electronics has produced a version of Solitaire that is combined with dopamine stimulation and gambling. I wonder what you would have to say about it if you were here for me to show it to you. There are bright colors, animation, and splashy screens as well a tinny, boppy music. Cheating by turning over cards ahead of the ability to play them is impossible. It is designed to entice people to put more money into their accounts to purchase more chances at winning and to induce a fugue state in which discernment and logic are minimized.  I confess to playing it often over the past few years and have wondered if outcomes are deliberately manipulated based on the amount of money in your account. After thousands of games I have played on my phone, I have noticed changes I can only blame on artificial intelligence.  Programmers tell me the cards are shuffled at random, but I tend not to believe it.  Perhaps that is my over perceptive paranoid pattern recognition kicking in.  I haven’t taken the time to record observations and screenshots.

The phone game does not allow for the introspection that manual play with an old deck on a tabletop does.  I hope that by upgrading the old house that I have not done to our history what electronics have done to this card game. I suppose I could justify it by saying that times change and my needs differ from what yours were.  Electronics have expanded my worldview in contrast with yours, which was limited to the immediate county.  This may drift into a contemplation of having no preferences and sameness and differences, too. There are the same rules with different presentations. Is it worth the time and energy to tally up the number of differences that have evolved as social mores have changed? I wonder what you would think of social media.  I don’t dare ask Caleb. I know what his reaction would be, complete with swear words.

I can’t set up a shrine to the past and refuse to change anything, but neither can I overlook current circumstances.  I wonder how many people would be content playing with plain cards versus the electronic game.  And how many younger people these days have ever been taught to play manual games. I remember talking about rules, restrictions, and rebellions with you one time when I was an angsty pre-teen.  You told me that the answer is always somewhere in the middle of two extremes and turned back to mixing up biscuit dough.

I know, I know. I said I would stop writing about this. But I have a couple of updates to share.

One is that the photos of Danny Hillis next to some rocks and Danny Hillis posing puckishly on the bed in the Lolita Express plane that were in the first drop of the Epstein files seem to be from 2002. I had thought the relationship between Hillis and Epstein only dated to 2012, but that’s just as far back as the emails go. So since I am, as far as I can tell, the only person in the world writing about this, I wanted to enter it into the record.

Also, someone else pointed out to me that Danny Hillis took his then-teenage daughter to Epstein’s ranch in 2016. (Keeping track at home? That’s 7 years after Epstein became a convicted sex offender! Would you take your daughter on such a visit?) After their visit, Hillis emailed Epstein to say his daughter enjoyed the visit. Epstein replied “she’s always welcome,” which could of course just be a banal pleasantry. Or it could be something more sinister. I wonder how Hillis took it at the time? Epstein then follows up with “Is she a biological daughter?” which I’m sure we can all agree is an extremely normal thing to ask that certainly doesn’t have any weird implications.

I’m not linking to these emails because the DOJ did not redact the name of Hillis’ daughter from them. My feeling is that if she has something she wishes to say about this visit, she will say it, and otherwise she should be left alone.

Those are the updates. Except for this: I tried editing Hillis’ Wikipedia page to reflect his relationship with Epstein. My edits were rejected, and they patiently explained to me that Wikipedia doesn’t use primary sources. They are a tertiary source by design. In other words, it doesn’t go in Wikipedia until a reliable source writes about it.

So Hillis’ Wikipedia remains pristine because nobody but me has written about his association with Epstein, except for this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention in a Scientific American article. I did a search for Hillis’ name, and on the third page of results, there’s a page that inaccurately says Hillis appears in only 4 documents in the Epstein files. So even if you do keep clicking “more results,” after searching for Danny Hillis, the info you’ll get is inaccurate.

Here’s my question: what the hell is going on here? I mean, this is clearly not unique to Hillis; he just happens to be the person I’m interested in because I used to work for him.

There are a lot of people whose names are all over the Epstein files. Some have faced consequences for their association, but most haven’t, and this is at least in part because the media seems to be treating this as a story about Jeffrey Epstein rather than a story about the people he associated with. Which is weird because Epstein is dead and a lot of these other people are still with us.

Sure, sure, nobody but Epstein and Maxwell (well, and the President of the United States) have been accused of a crime, but I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you’ve built a public profile on being a smart person, the fact that you have a yawning void where your ethics should be out to be part of your public profile. It ought to be part of what people know about you.

But it’s not for Danny Hillis. Unless you are already aware of the association and find one of my blog posts, there’s almost no way to find out about it.

A lot of Epstein’s network was here in Boston. He cultivated relationships with folks affiliated with MIT (Including Danny Hillis) and Harvard in order to give himself a patina of respectability. Why hasn’t the local media done a deep dive into all these people’s association with Epstein?

Why do we have to search through the Epstein files ourselves to find this stuff out? I never would have learned about Danny Hillis’ decades-long association with Epstein if I hadn’t looked at the photos in the first drop. Because nobody’s writing about all the people who were involved, even if, as in the case of Danny Hillis, they are a public figure. (an obscure public figure to most of the general public, but very well known in certain circles.)

Why is the media not holding people’s feet to the fire about their association with a sexual predator and sex trafficker, even if said people weren’t involved in the crimes? Why is no one even asking these people why they hung out with Epstein?

Because journalism is broken and most of our journalists are toadies so thrilled at proximity to power that they don’t want to do anything to mess that up.

Prove me wrong. Please.

Inbetweeners Part 12- Protectors of the Weave

I've been trying to decide chronologically where to place the Protectors of the Weave, because they are the ever-present antagonist throughout the story, so there isn't one logical place to put them over another. I suppose now is as good a time as any.

In most Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, the Protectors of the Weave would be the “good guys” or at the very least a neutral group the players interact with. However, when the protagonists have been brought back by a Far Realm entity that seems intent on running experiments throughout the multiverse, the arithmetic is quite different. The Protectors of the Weave is an organization based in Mechanus that, as its name suggests, protects the integrity of the Weave. The Weave is the magical force that permeates the multiverse and allows spellcasters to use spells in 5e, for those who are unfamiliar. An event like the Spell Plague would be the very type of crisis the Protectors of the Weave are designed to avoid. That said, the Spell Plague was a far smaller deal in my universe than in standard 5e, and was more the result of a clerical error in Mechanus than Cyric killing Mystra. He did, but the gods are more figure heads. Primus, lord of Mechanus and ultimate arbiter of law, really manages magic, the weave, etc. The gods are more middlemen that distribute magic. All the different factions and warring parties are part of the balance. Even the Blood War serves as a constant flux vent to keep the machine moving. So the Protectors are there to ensure the integrity of Primus' grand design.

In such a way, anything from the Far Realm is immediately on their radar. Most Far Realm incursions are little more than curiosities. Tentacled aberrations that can distort reality locally but pose no existential threat. The Protectors simple exterminate these threats as an exterminator handles insects. More powerful Far Realm entities though must be handled differently. Beings like the Interloper exist outside Euclidean 3d space, and such “killing” them is no easy task. A 3 dimensional representation can be destroyed, but that can barely harm the entity as a whole. So instead, containment becomes the primary objective. Once the entity is contained, deletion or ejection can be done methodically, and carefully. The worst case scenario is that the entity must be contained until it runs out of energy. Even though Far Realm entities defy many of the laws of physics and magic that govern the multiverse, some concept of the conservation of energy must apply. Nothing is an infinite well... if it was the universe would've been consumed by entropy eons ago. That said, the amount of energy they can leverage may be orders of magnitude greater than any archmage of deity can muster. These sorts of threats are exceedingly rare, but when they happen it is all hands on deck.

Primus runs a tight ship with the Weave and ordering existence, so incursions are rare. As such, the Protectors mostly spend time monitoring potential breaches. Most are false positives, rogue wizards messing around with spells they don't understand, strange monsters, or just natural anomalies. As such they've developed a complex, layered bureaucracy to deal with it. Initial reports are reviewed by a field office. If credible, agents are deployed to examine directly. An escalation ladder then occurs depending on the severity of the phenomenon. What's important to realize is that the Protectors are specifically worried about the integrity of existence itself. An evil warlord, lich, demon prince, or dragon causing a mass casualty event isn't something they would intercede in so long as it follows the rules of existence. However, if a mage tries to open a portal to the Far Realm, the Protectors would be on that immediately. Their agnosticism towards most matters has not earned them love among the general populace. More importantly, few even know if their existence or would have cause to interact with them. Institutions like Mage Colleges, interplanar trade organizations, high level wizarding guilds, etc may interact with them. Most organizations, good or evil, tend to cooperate with the Protectors with the hope of getting them out of their hair as quickly as possible. The Protectors are exacting and myopic, and will not relent until a task is completed. Their resources are essentially boundless relative to any other planar organization. No one sane or informed would make war on Mechanus.

The Protectors escalation ladder starts with agents investigating. Agents have the authority to bring in low level constructs like Modrons to support them. I believe when the players encountered them first they summoned Tridrones to help. Here is a statblock, a variation of the mage statblock from the Monster Manual, for an agent:

Agent (2900 XP)

This spellcaster is a standard field agent sent out by the order to investigate things that damage the Weave. Wears white and grey robes with symbol of a gear on them.

Use “Mage Statblock” but with the following adjustments:

10 HD AC 15- Permanent Mage Armor 65 HP Con is 14, Intelligence is 18, Wisdom is 15

Saving Throws: INT +8, WIS +7, CON +2 Prof Bonus: 4 Spell Save DC 16

Additional Spells: Forbiddance- blocks teleportation and plane shifting, deals 5d10 Radiant Damage to anything trying to violate the magical ward. On the player characters it hits them if they try to leave.

Teleport and Plane Shift (only to their field office, either on Mechanus or other location)

Geas (to usually take someone into custody)

Actions:

Shocking Prod: Melee Attack- +6 to hit, 1d6 dmg + 2d6 shock dmg Call Backup: Summon up to 10 HD worth of Modrons. Cool Down 5.

Most importantly, agents are focused on controlling the environment. Blocking teleportation and also Geas to take players into custody. The Inbetweeners protagonists teleported into the courtyard of a Mage's College. They interacted with a few students who then got their professors to come who were fascinated by the phenomenon. The players were supposed to return once the professors gathered equipment and supplies to be studied and try to find a solution to their non-linear form of travel. Sometimes its frustrating to not be able to go from point A to point B. However, by the time the players had returned, the Protectors of the Weave had caught wind. My thought, though this was never explicitly divulged to the players, was that the mage faculty ran it up the chain of command to admin. Someone high up at the college, perhaps a dean, would have contact info for a Protector field office. Perhaps the college had some sort of financial dealings with the Protectors, donations in return for information. Initially, teleporting adventurers didn't really pique their interest. But when they discovered that the players looped, if they tried to move too far in one direction they appeared on the other side, and couldn't break out of this by any other means other than leaving, this was interesting. A localized reality distortion at the very least, enough to justify a formal investigation.

I should note at this point the one thing the Interloper seemed to fear was being discovered by the Protectors of the Weave. He had close calls in the past, and knew they had the resources to undo his work and potentially him. He made sure the players knew never to tell anyone about his existence directly, to instead come up with a backstory. I think what they came up with was that they had been cursed by the god “Mask.” The Interloper even modified some of their memories so they could pass mind reading checks, but a few of the players refused the modification so they had to roll deception checks.

Anyway, the players return to the mages college at some point later, it was part of a linear path of rooms so you had to go through it to get to the next room in the sequence. Suddenly, walls of force appeared and blocked their exit on either side. Two agents of the Protectors of the Weave then questioned the players. Some cooperated more than others, but all held back important details. The Protectors used various noninvasive equipment to test the players, and determined their condition was not magical, divine or psionic in nature. This warranted further inspection, because with those three explanations ruled out Far Realm influence becomes more likely. Cervi, one of the players, absolutely refused to cooperate so one of the agents cast Geas on him. At that point, he was incredibly helpful, explaining the Interloper and giving the agent an amulet that allowed him to travel with Cervi. At this point, protocol dictated that the agents immediately report up the chain and wait for further orders. However, this particular agent wanted to make a name for himself and track the Interloper directly in order to make rank. He had no idea of the magnitude of this being or its power, and figured he could locate it, call it in, and be rewarded career wise. His plan was to go with Cervi to the source, call in a supervisor and other constructs from there and capture whatever it was. On the path their, they had to fight a Gibbering Mouther (created when Rotlog used an Interloper spell to destabilize a half dragon veteran). Meanwhile, the other Agent kept the remaining players detained in the mages college.

The other players managed to summon a Chuul which attacked the Agent, allowing them to kill the agent and escape. They sent Dolly ahead to warn the Interloper, who hid when the agent arrived. The party arrived and though they sustained great damage, managed to kill the other agent. In my notes I wrote that Uzo “mulched” him, so their may have been a critical hit from a Hobgoblin Samurai involved. He also had his cursed bow at this point so there may have been some power from there. With both agents killed, no one had a direct line to the Interloper. As a result, the Interloper opted to prune an entire branch of rooms, cutting off the hallway that led to th crab shack that led to the courtyard that led to the dog house that led to the pirate ship cabin that led to the circus that led to the bakery that led to a battlefield. The players never made it as far as the battlefield. With those rooms pruned, a new door appeared to fill the void... one that the Interloper did not create. More on that in a separate post. So that was the players first encounter with the Protectors of the Weave. They managed to stay safe, but one agent killed and another vanished without a trace certainly put them on high alert. It was only a matter of time before the players crossed paths with them again.

Since the Protectors of the Weave operate in an arena of ultimate law, the more lawful an area the more dangerous it was for the players. So any major metropolis, mage council, etc ran the risk of reaching the information network of the protectors. Also, using certain Interloper “gifts”, like temporal duplicate, was like a straight up signal flare, visible across planes. This meant the players had to be strategic about when to use such powers and how to interact with different factions and forces. Backstories were important, and the less they could divulge the better. However, in remote areas, or dangerous areas like Hades, they could move about, speak and act more freely as there was less Protector presence there. Still, a spell like temporal duplicate would trigger them even in these locations. The only area truly safe from the Protectors is Sigil, but more on Sigil in a later post.

Had the players not taken out the second agent so quickly, he would've locked down the Grey Room, summoned his supervisor and a number of more powerful constructs. The supervisor:

Supervisor (10000 XP)

Use Archmage Statblock but with the following adjustments

HP: 135

Con: 14, Wis 18 Saving Throws: Int +9, Wis +8, Con +2

Additional Spells: Plane Shift, Geas, Dominate Monster, Powerword Stun, Imprisonment, Hold Monster

Actions:

Juiced Up Shocking Prod: Melee attack +6, 1d6 + 3d6 Shock Damage, Con DC 15 or be stunned for a turn. Call Backup: Summon up to 20 HD worth of Modrons. Can be used as a bonus action. Cool down 3.

Again, all about control. Dominate Monster, Stun, Imprisonment, Hold Monster, and a stunning shock prod are all meant to neutralize threats. Summoning Modrons is more to provide additional bodies and hitpoints to tank damage. If a threat was really severe they could summon a special agent:

Elite Special Agent of the Protectors of the Weave Medium humanoid (any race), lawful neutral Armor Class 20 (Arcane Mantle, magical defense protocols) Hit Points 240 (32d8 + 96) Speed 40 ft., fly 30 ft. (hover, via spell)

STR 12 (+1) DEX 20 (+5) CON 16 (+3) INT 22 (+6) WIS 16 (+3) CHA 18 (+4)

Saving Throws Int +12, Wis +9, Dex +11 Skills Arcana +12, Stealth +11, Investigation +12, Insight +9, Perception +9 Damage Resistances force, psychic, lightning; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical weapons Damage Immunities radiant (Arcane Weave Cloak active) Condition Immunities charmed, frightened, restrained Senses truesight 60 ft., passive Perception 19 Languages Common, Elvish, Draconic, Thieves’ Cant, Telepathy 60 ft. Challenge 17 (18,000 XP) Proficiency Bonus +6

Features Legendary Resistance (3/Day). If the agent fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead. Spellcasting. The agent is a 17th-level spellcaster (Intelligence is the spellcasting ability; spell save DC 20, +12 to hit with spell attacks). It has the following spells prepared:

Cantrips (at will): minor illusion, prestidigitation, ray of frost, mage hand, mind sliver 1st level (4 slots): shield, mage armor, detect magic, absorb elements 2nd level (3 slots): mirror image, misty step, suggestion 3rd level (3 slots): counterspell, dispel magic, fireball 4th level (3 slots): greater invisibility, dimension door 5th level (3 slots): wall of force, synaptic static 6th level (2 slots): disintegrate, globe of invulnerability 7th level (1 slot): forcecage 8th level (1 slot): maze 9th level (1 slot): wish (used for a prepared contingency-like spell or emergency escape only)

Innate Items Arcane Mantle (Recharge 6). As a bonus action, the agent activates a shimmering field granting +2 AC and resistance to all damage types for 1 minute. While active, the agent floats 1 inch off the ground (hovering). Chronoshift Ring (3/Day). As a reaction, the agent can force a reroll of any d20 roll made within 60 feet. Voidstep Boots. As a bonus action, the agent can teleport up to 30 ft. and become invisible until the start of their next turn (or until they attack/cast a spell).

Actions Multiattack. The agent makes two spell weapon attacks or uses a combination of attack and control (e.g., Ray of Frost and Force Detonation). Arcane Blade (Magical). Melee Weapon Attack: +11 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 21 (4d6 + 5) force damage. If the target is concentrating on a spell, they make the save with disadvantage. Force Detonation (Recharge 5–6). The agent releases a 20-foot-radius blast centered on itself or any point within 60 feet. All creatures in the area must make a DC 20 Constitution saving throw, taking 45 (10d8) force damage on a failed save, or half as much on a success. Creatures who fail are also pushed 15 ft. away and knocked prone. Summon Weavebound Juggernaut (1/Day). The agent summons a Weavebound Juggernaut, a Large construct with devastating melee and anti-caster capabilities. It lasts for 10 minutes or until slain.

Legendary Actions (3/round) The agent can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action can be used at a time, and only at the end of another creature’s turn. Teleport (Costs 1 Action). The agent teleports up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space it can see.

Cantrip (Costs 1 Action). The agent casts a cantrip.

Disrupt Spell (Costs 2 Actions). The agent targets a creature concentrating on a spell within 60 feet. The creature must succeed on a DC 20 Constitution saving throw or lose concentration.

Again, spells focused on control but the Special Agent was particularly talented at disrupting other magic users. Counter Spell, Disrupt Spell and Chronoshift Ring all serve to disrupt other players actions. They can also summon a Weavebound Juggernaut. These are constructs that come in when Modrons alone won't do the trick.

Weavebound Juggernaut Large construct, unaligned AC 20 (reinforced armor) HP 140 (17d10 + 51) Speed 40 ft. STR 22 (+6) DEX 10 (+0) CON 17 (+3) INT 3 (-4) WIS 10 (+0) CHA 1 (-5)

Damage Immunities psychic, poison; bludgeoning, piercing, slashing from nonmagical weapons Condition Immunities charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned Senses darkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 20 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages understands commands of the summoner Challenge 9 (5,000 XP)

Actions Multiattack. The Juggernaut makes two slam attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +12 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 24 (4d8 + 6) force damage. Anti-Magic Pulse (Recharge 5–6). The Juggernaut releases a disruptive pulse in a 30-ft radius. Creatures concentrating on spells must make a DC 18 Con save or lose concentration. Magical effects in the area flicker and fizzle until the end of the Juggernaut's next turn (treat as anti-magic field for spell attacks and concentration checks).

They are potent combatants, but their biggest advantage is they are tanky and can use antimagic pulse. Dozens of them can neutralize a pretty dangerous threat. When dimensional anchors are used to lock down a 4-dimensional being, Weavebound Juggernauts tend to carry them and deploy them.

If even a Special Agent and team of Weavebound Juggernauts are not enough to neutralize a threat, The Protectors have a number of other escalation options. They can summon Maruts, which if you don't know look them up, the most powerful constructs in the game. Later on the players encounter some specialized Maruts with custom statblocks. At a challenge rating of 25, they are ranked as more dangerous than an Ancient Red Dragon... and Mechanus has a lot of them under its employ. Alternatively, or as a supplement, they have a number of powerful third party contractors they can use. Zane is one such contractor who will get his own post. But Mechanus has the resources were they can hire essentially any mercenary or powerful figure willing to take payment for services. As such, they can turn the entire multiverse against an adversary.

If all of that doesn't work, they have ancient, forbidden weapons locked away in their vaults of unimaginable destructive power. These weapons were used to wipe out most of the Titans eons ago and turned entire planes into endless deserts of white powder. Towards the very end of the campaign these weapons are seen again. Overall, with this escalation ladder, no one sane would consider taking on the Protectors of the Weave. The next time the players encounter them, the Interloper, being that can bend reality at a whim, has one word for them. “Run”

•••••••••••••••

I think I am a person of great emotion... not great intellect.

That is not to say that I think myself unintelligent.

Just more interested in the temperature in the room than in how the building is constructed.

More interested in feeling wet cheeks at the tender beauty of a flower

than in knowledge of it's genus or species.

YES! Give me that scent that tickles and delights.

If I had a choice... I think I would choose this.

Or, I suppose, it might be better to be equal of both.

I wonder if being a person of great intellect

without the fire of wild abandon burning in you is easier.

It seems in some way, yes, it would be.

But how would I know? I've never visited that particular garden.

---

#

Adventurers

Character	Race	Class	Description
Ainsley	Human	Ranger level 1	An older gentleman with a groomed moustache and a wooden pipe in his mouth, covered in dark green cloak.
Ambros	Human	Cleric level 7	Follower of Aniu, Lord of Time.
Aurella	Elf	Fighter level 1 / magic-user level 1	Exiled and chased out of her tree commune, she now wanders the Wilderlands.
Balarus	Human	Fighter level 4	An ex-woodsman, quite a crack shot with his bow.
Gerrick	Human	Fighter level 1	A tall hill-man with wicked reflexes and swift movements. Gerda's brother.
Ignaeus	Elf	Fighter level 4 / magic-user level 5	An arrogant and self-assured sellsword wandering Wilderlands to prove he can best anyone.
Kenso San	Human	Fighter level 2	An arrogant and self-assured sellsword wandering Wilderlands to prove he can best anyone.
Remus	Hobbit	Thief level 1	Sketchy hobbit looking for better loot.
Wilbalt Abendeurer	Human	Fighter level 3	A burly blonde barbarian; Warmund's younger brother and a better swordsman of the two.

Dewsnap 9th, Fireday

A hoard of chopped up giant centipedes laid strewn about Ignaeus and Balarus. Aurella, Kenso, and Jacob were unscathed.

“Oh, hey there!”

Remus the Thief, and Wilbalt the Burly stepped out of the darkness and joined the party.

They stripped the ancient skeletons of their chain shirts. Then they wrapped them up and left them in a corner of the cave for easier retrieval some time in the future.

Remus and Ignaeus had spent some time playing with the iron coffer held by one of the dead men. All that was for naught because, as it turned out, the coffer was empty! But Ignaeus had recovered a coin purse from the skeleton, and within it were two lapis lazuli gems, two obsidians, and three eye agates.

“Is this our guy? The one we are looking for?”

Fourth skeleton was noticeably different from the rest. For one, it still had hair. It was dressed in commoners' clothing, and it had no weapons nor armour.

“Might be!”

Adventurers took some of its hair. Then they proceeded to explore the west tunnel. After hundred feet or so it broke, perpendicularly, into another tunnel. A strong downdraught could be felt, as well as musty air. The elongated tunnel was quite low, some nine feet high. Numerous stalagmites poked out of the floor. Many of them were broken, being in essence, stumps.

Southwards were three shallow pits. Obviously man-made. They perplexed adventurers to no end. Eventually they gave up on figuring out them and moved further south.

On and on they went, following hundred yards or so of winding tunnels, until they reached a tight sink-hole. Down they went, one by one, following yet another long, long tunnel.

“Look...”

A round cave, with steps chiselled into the limestone, leading down a sharp drop into another cave. A carved boulder was visible. The party descended carefully.

Aurella's torch flickered.

She hesitated.

The torch extinguished.

The air exploded.

Remus and Aurella were no more.

Others were charred but alive.

“Grab the dead and let's get out!”

Exploding cave was right next to one of the caves by the entrance.

It was night outside. Adventurers set up a cold camp and went to sleep, dreaming of barbecue.

Dewsnap 10th, Spiritday

Thunderous roar of a black bear woke everyone up.

Wilbalt, whom had been on watch duty, braced for impact with glaive. He was firmly grounded, with the butt of his pole arm placed on the ground behind him.

Bear rammed him with all its might. Wilbalt held true and impaled the beast. It whimpered and clawed the burly man. He gave it no quarter; he yielded not. Kenso and Balarus hacked the wounded animal.

“Should we chop it up and take it to that insect swarm? Could serve as a bait?”

“Just leave it here. Let's take Aurella and Remus to Ambros so he can raise them...”

They arrived to Old Crus's tower, where Ambros was hiding, by noon.

“Sorry, hobbits cannot be raised.”

Aurella, though, was back and hurting. But she was back.

Adventurers then went to Ironburg to heal up and plan their next step.

Dewsnap 13th, Earthday

“Guys, I need that axe.”

Balarus, Wilbalt, Kenso, Ambros, Ainsley, and a new member Garrick, Gerda's brother, set out for the brigand's abandoned hideout.

“Guys, no really, I need that axe real bad.” Wilbalt kept repeating. At moments he was shaking as if suffering withdrawals.

“We'll get you your axe. Don't you worry.”

The axe in question was weapon sighted by the first party that went into this cave system. They had seen a pristine battle axe at the heart of insect swarm nest. Among thousands and thousands of centipedes, roaches, spiders, and other vermin. A place where Gerda had perished as others fled and left her behind.

“Where is the bear?”

“Its bones are there.”

This time the party did not take the long route via the northern tunnel, nor the route via the watery cave. No, they opted to backtrack through narrow tunnels some of them had discovered days prior.

Balarus shot few flaming arrows into the exploding cave.

Nothing exploded.

Feeling safe enough, they moved in, and through a series of narrow tunnels, until they reached the cave with skeletons. Then northwards into the insect cavern.

“Let me speak with them.”

Ambros announced.

He cast Speak with Animals.

His head nearly exploded as he heard an uproarious cacophony of voices yelling and screaming for food. Dazed and confused, it took him some time to compose himself.

As he spoke of food, the swarm grew quite and face him. Thousands tiny life forms listened attentively. They understood food was to be offered. They understood nothing else, especially all the elaborate instructions provided by Ambros.

Food was mentioned. Food was promised. Food was not delivered.

Wrong.

Food was right in front of them. Food was always right in front of them.

The swarm rushed forwards; towards the food that promised food.

Total bedlam ensued, with adventurers running in all directions.

Wilbalt and Gerrick went right and then south towards the watery tunnel. The rest fell back whence they cometh from.

“Follow two humans! Those two, yes!” Ambros yelled.

“What the fuck!!!” Wilbalt thought.

“Follow me!” Gerrick flashed his lantern at the swarm.

“Yes, follow them!”

The swarm moved slowly.

The plan was working, as the insect mass gradually moved from the cave into the tunnels.

“Quick, grab the axe while I cast Create Food!”

Ainsley sprinted for the skeletal remains. He grabbed the pristine looking battle axe.

“Let's get out!”

At the same time, Wilbalt and Garrick have been slowly retreating downwards. As the swarm advanced, they retreated. Step by step.

“Remember, there is something in the water!”

They hugged the cave wall and stepped into the shallow portion of rank, stagnant water.

And then it came; from the darkness.

A rotting carcass; jumping out, with gaping mouth and crooked fingers.

It was hacked from undeath to death, once and for all.

And then the duo fled too.

“So... about that axe...” Wilbalt panted.

“Yes, what about it?” Ainsley held it.

“I really need it. I seriously need it. I need it so bad.” Wilbalt spoke.

“Here, you can have it.”

Wilbalt smiled. Finally he got an axe too! Finally he can feel like a man, between Balarus and Thorinda each wielding a mighty axe of their own!

“Wait, one more thing!”

Party returned to the exploding cave to inspect the carved boulder. One of the adventurers remembered that boulder was jammed into some sort of crevice.

Four of them grabbed the boulder and rolled it backwards.

A hit!

Cave filled with twenty-two sacks holding over thirty thousands coins! Copper pieces galore!

Adventurers spent some hours packing all the goods, and planning their weight distribution. They also discovered a wooden chest underneath all the sacks. They decided to take it whole, instead of opening it here.

Since the night fell, they camped again. No bear this time.

Adventurers and their hoard of thirty thousand, six hundred, and eight copper pieces, plus nine hundred and sixty-six silver pieces, arrived at Ironburg on noon of Dewsnap the 14th, Fireday.

“Told you we will be rich.” Aurella quipped painfully.

Days were becoming longer. Flowerbloom, and Spring, are merely a week away, and the nature was showing it.

Discuss at Dragonsfoot forum.

#Wilderlands #SessionReport

Part One: Defining the Undefinable

I’m finding the use of the term Anomalology to be very helpful in my research and investigation into anomalous experiences, including my own. Here’s the definition I’ve been working with for several months now:

Anomalology is the careful study of anomalous experience: experiences that resist easy explanation, and the evidence, language, memory, cultural context, and competing interpretations through which they are understood.

I openly admit that my term, definition, and use directly clash with anomalistic psychology, which studies extraordinary and ostensibly paranormal experiences from a non-paranormal explanatory hypothesis. That branch of psychology sees anomalous experiences as the result of any number of psychological phenomena, including social influence, dissociation, memory error, cognitive bias, sleep disorders, acute psychosis, etc. It also lumps personal accounts and testimony of ghosts, alien abductions, psychic experiences, and other uncanny encounters into a single category.

To be clear, I do have my own anomalous experiences, and so I openly admit that I cannot be, and am not, fully objective in my research and investigations into them, including my own. Furthermore, I do not claim to have had or to be having experiences involving ghosts or extraterrestrials. The paranormal and the extraterrestrial, it would seem, are not a part of my psychospiritual repertoire. Instead, my experiences tend to be more uniform in their extracosmic, heterocosmic, and numinous nature. As such, I do not intend to position myself as any kind of expert or guru. I’m merely a witness sharing that which is generally considered taboo to share and, in so doing, finding a new kind of language to express what I know but have been unable to say.

I also do not intend to use the term Anomalology to position “psychosis” and “reality” against “the anomalous” as though they are opposing, mutually exclusive concepts and circumstances. Instead, I take the more stubborn position of positing that an anomalous encounter can occur in a person who is otherwise psychologically healthy*, admitting that some experiences may arise amid psychosis, trauma, substance abuse, and other circumstances, including severe stress. Such scenarios deserve care, protection, and clinical attention. However, an anomalous encounter alone does not necessarily indicate illness. As such, clinical labels and spiritual interpretations do not automatically identify a clear, fundamental cause for these experiences. Thus, I see these experiences as deserving ethical attention, especially when a clear external or medical cause cannot be confirmed.

I believe the posture and mindset behind Anomalology would better serve, rather than challenge, psychiatry, because the real danger is diagnostic foreclosure, where a person charged with aiding the witness with their anomalous experience ends their inquiry as soon as they can apply a skeptical, diagnostic, or pathological label. Such an approach is more about expediency and personal bias rather than care.

Diagnostic foreclosure then is the premature closing of inquiry in which the clinical or religious designation is not treated as one contextual observation among others, but as a complete explanation that cancels the witness’s testimony, symbolic interpretation, sociocultural context, and unresolved evidentiary questions.

The opposite of Anomalology, if there is one, is not skepticism or empiricism. It is reductive epistemic closure where a very personal disruptive event is explained by renaming or miscategorizing, and thus hijacking. This robs the witness of their autonomy, agency, and especially their dignity.

My choice of Anomalology is not rooted in my desire to name a specific belief or belief system, branch of superstition or theology, or an indiscriminate catalog of miracles or marvels. I have no such desire. My choice is, more properly, centered on the study of regular phenomena commonly regarded as “abnormal” and the systems of meaning built around them, especially where those systems are incongruent with a witness’s testimony and subsequently begin to fail.

Again, I need to be precise with my position and framing. An anomaly is not simply an event that conventional means cannot explain. Most things referred to as inexplicable are merely incomplete as the result of poor or obstructed observation, poor memory, insufficient contextualization, or premature judgment made strange. The anomalous, I would argue, begins elsewhere. It begins where an occurrence remains intelligible in threads and fragments while refusing intelligibility as a whole, where every available conventional category may describe some piece or portion of the event, but fails to describe and explain the entire testimonial.

Of course, this all leads to the central question: What is real?

This is by far the most important question, though it is not the first one we encounter. The first questions are these: What ontology or belief system did the event interrupt? Where did language fail the event? Who assumed and surrendered authority for framing the event, and what was misinterpreted and lost as a result? What did witnesses alter in their memories out of necessity rather than dishonesty because the mind requires a coherent narrative even if it’s an imperfect one?

Such disturbances are the very concern of Anomalology, because they inhabit the very depths of the psyche—the soul—suggesting that such anomalies are a natural part of human existence. A feature interpreted as a flaw.

“The human definition of the natural world is always going to be too small, because the world’s more diverse and complex than we can ever know. We’re not going to comprehend it; it comprehends us. The question is whether we can use it with respect. Some people in the past who knew very little biology were able to use the land without destroying it. We, who know a great deal of biology, are destroying our land in order to use it.” — Wendell Berry

And I think the same can be said for anomalous experiences: we now know much about psychology and theology, but are destroying our psyches to explain it.

Anomalous experiences are a normal part of the human condition and, therefore, part of nature. The truth is that our metaphysics, science, philosophy, and cosmology are incomplete, and so we struggle with the Truth — our truth and objective truth. Anomalology, then, is merely a branch of the study of human nature and, by extension, Nature itself.

And the ultimate nature of truth may be that, in spite of our best efforts and intentions, it is not just imperceptible, but unknowable.

But we strive for Truth anyway, because that too is natural.

That, too, is human.

#Anomalology

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* It is a failure of our civilization and culture to dismiss anomalous experiences as mental illness without considering that such experiences may actually be a natural, normal part of the human experience. What if a truly healthy mind is one that can subtly perceive the outer edges of a far greater and not fully comprehensible reality? What if we really don’t know what real is?

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What is Anomalology?

• Part 1: Defining the Undefinable
• Part 2: Anomalies and Frames

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