My throat has been kicking my ass since Friday night, I think. It's all a little unclear. I'm pretty sure it was Friday. All of the things capable of pushing me to the edge have combined together to make me utterly miserable. I'm good until I feel like I can't breathe, then the test of my mental strength begins. I am not enjoying it.

While watching a movie as distraction last night, political ads kept popping on. I wasn't surprised by the brutality nor the lying. What did surprise me was the network airing the nonsense. I don't care what someone's beliefs are as long as they're not harming anyone, but I do care about decency. I'd also like the people in charge to have at least half a brain cell that still works or ever worked to begin with.

OK, brutal honesty here — I think everyone who tries to hold a political office should have to pass a challenging test that covers more than the basic requirements of their job. I don't care if that means Billy, Peg, and Sue aren't qualified. They can educate themselves on the topics if they wish to be qualified. Furthermore, they need to demonstrate the ability to be able to separate church and state in their mind. I do not think billionaires should be allowed to hold such positions because they do not live in the same reality as everyone else. Nor do millionaires for that matter. What would be the cut off? Maybe around $10 million. Senators and Congressmen could hold two terms max on rotation. Don't get me started on Supreme Court appointments. Most on it now wouldn't qualify under how very strict my policy on that particular branch of service would be.

There wouldn't be known donors. You want to donate to the cause? Great! It's anonymous and all goes to the same place...to help your fellow citizens. How incredibly disgusting is it the amount of money being spent on ads and campaigning that equals the idiocy of an elementary school bully.

I'm really just over the adults with so much power behaving like absolute and complete imbeciles. In fact, keeping this totally real, if you can support MAGA anything after listening to the hateful bullshit coming from the horse's mouth, it is impossible for me to have any respect for you because condoning the most hideous and disrespectful of actions out there. It's as simple as that. At first, I gave leniency because most people are uneducated and ignorant on the various topics of government. At this point, if someone's still supporting all of that, they have some serious mental health and hatefulness issues as far as I'm concerned. And if someone dares to tell me they support it because they're Christian, I will laugh in their face. Sure you are. Sure you are. Rocking that old testament hate and bigotry, are you? Who am I kidding? MAGA looks very much like the Christian world I've known. It's nice to see the true colors flying. (There's exceptions to this, though few and far between. They do shinewhen seen.)

Those commercials really annoyed me. I muted them each time, but it's not the point.

I am trying to motivate myself to be busy today. It's challenging at the moment. I should go take a cold shower. That would pep me right up. I had high hopes my allergies weren't going to ride me too hard this season. The season has barely started and I've already cut and blunted my nails. That's ok. At least it's a familiar fight. Time to go make some bone broth.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not proofread nor edited.

Rook, Bishop, Knight Combination Checkmate

One of the Correspondence Chess games I won playing as Black over this past weekend finished with my h3 Rook, f4 Knight, and b6 Bishop combining forces to Checkmate the White King. Position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and our full move record follows: 1. d4 h6 2. e4 a6 3. b4 e5 4. c3 Nf6 5. Nf3 Nc6 6. h4 exd4 7. cxd4 Bxb4+ 8. Nfd2 Nxe4 9. f3 Ng3 10. Rh3 Nf5 11. a3 Ba5 12. Bb2 O-O 13. g4 Nd6 14. d5 Re8+ 15. Kf2 Bb6+ 16. Kg3 Ne5 17. f4 Ng6 18. h5 Re3+ 19. Kf2 Rxh3+ 20. Kg2 Nxf4#

And the adventure continues.

There is a powerful image in the shape of: maimed dove feet in Paris, due to the hostility infrastructure towards birds, so that people below won’t get shat on! It’s the same faceless evil as these benches made unable to sleep on, to ward poor people off.

And the thing with doves, is that they carry the message of, and are the symbols of peace!

I know that is no coincidence, having experienced this first-hand

In Gamla Stan, I was having an argument with my wife. I’m sure I was being an ass.

Before the situation could escalate, I was shat on the head by a dove however, and the argument was brought to an abrupt stop.

This would never have happened in Paris.

In the discussions over whether the chatbot is “intelligent” or “super intelligent” or “artificially intelligent” (No.), let's not overlook the actual conclusion: “Intelligence” has always been a mostly useless concept, since it is so poorly defined and overwhelmingly a social construct of white supremacy. We should have gotten rid of it long ago, and everyone using “intelligence” as a concept should be viewed with suspicion.

It is an interesting speculation by what means the Book lost its old position in this country. This is not only an interesting speculation, but one which nearly concerns a vital matter. For if men fall into the habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization, the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will be subject, must increase.

To take but one example: history. The less the true historical book is read and the more men depend upon ephemeral statement, the more will legend crystallize, the harder will it be to destroy in the general mind some comforting lie, and the great object-lesson of politics (which is an accurate knowledge of how men have acted in the past) will become at last unknown.

— Hilaire Belloc, “On the Decline of the Book”

#history #reading

Arvoisa Kirjailijaliiton hallitus,

Yksi suhteellisen tuoreen kirjailijanurani huojentavimmista ja onnellisimmista hetkistä oli se, jolloin sain postilaatikkooni Kirjailijaliiton hyväksymiskirjeen. Se tuntui viralliselta leimalta passiin, jolla alan ovet oikeasti aukenivat: nyt minä olin ammattimainen kirjailija. Sain päätöksen alkukesästä 2025, kolmen julkaistun kirjan jälkeen.

Hain itse liittoon kahdella korkeafantasiateoksella ja yhdellä viihdekirjalla. Kävin toimittamassa kirjat henkilökohtaisesti ja sain ovella kuulla ystävälliseen sävyyn, että hakemustani oltiin jo odoteltu. Se ilahdutti, ja koin tulleeni kohdatuksi, vaikka missään nimessä mitään takeita siitä ei annettu, tultaisiinko hakemusta hyväksymään. Hakeminen itsessään otettiin kuitenkin ilolla vastaan, ja niinpä odottelin päätöstä levollisin mielin. Vähän kuukautta myöhemmin se tulikin postissa tiedoksi, ja koska olin kuullut huhuja liittoon pääsemisen vaikeudesta, nosti tieto kyyneleet silmiin: minäkin olin oikea kirjailija.

Sittemmin mielikuvani on valitettavasti muuttunut, sillä kun kriteerit ovat salaiset, olen joutunut hämmentyneenä seuraamaan useaan otteeseen, kuinka lahjakkaat ja minua rutkasti pidempään alalla olleet kollegat ovat jääneet ulkopuolelle. Yksi heistä on esimerkiksi asiasta julkisesti puhunut Pontus Purokuru, jonka Haavamaa ja Keskeytysten arkisto ovat kumpikin kaunokirjallisina teoksina inspiroineet omaa kirjoittamistani suuresti.

Toinen kollegani puolestaan opettaa työkseen kirjoittamista yliopistossa ja on kirjoittanut jo useamman erinomaisen lasten- ja nuortenkirjan, mutta hänellekään ovet eivät ole auenneet.

Tästä aiheesta on vaikea puhua julkisesti, sillä kukapa meistä tahtoisi kirjailijana polttaa siltoja järjestöön, joka pitää puoliamme, on arvostettu toimija, ja väsymättä nostaa yhä uudelleen ja uudelleen esiin kirjailijan työhön liittyviä haasteita, jotta ne eivät pääse päättäjiltä ja lukijoilta unohtumaan? Kuka tällä alalla tahtoisi tai uskaltaisi olla hankala, kun apurahoista, kustannussopimuksista ja työkeikoista pitää muutenkin kilpailla kollegoiden kanssa? Kenellä meistä on siihen varaa?

Ei minulla ainakaan, sillä olen vasta urani alussa, ja kirjoitan fantasiaa ja viihdettä, joita ei kirjallisuusalalla Suomessa perinteisesti usein pidetä korkeakirjallisuutena. Kirjoitan pienehkölle kustantamolle (joka tosin on ihana, enkä sitä hevillä vaihtaisi), eivätkä kirjallisesta työstäni saamani tulot riitä elämiseen, joten teen kirjallista työtä päivätyön ohessa. Vaikka olen siinä mielessä onnekkaassa asemassa, että minulla on paljon sitoutuneita lukijoita, hyvät verkostot ja paljon pieniä keikkatöitä, onpa jopa ensimmäinen puolivuotinen apurahakin, kirjoittamisella en mitenkään tule (vielä) toimeen.

Tarvitsen siis ehdottomasti Kirjailijaliittoa, aivan kuten tarvitsee kirjallisuuskenttä ylipäätään. Koen silti, että ei ole oikeudenmukaista, että jollakin myyttisellä tavalla olen onnistunut luikertelemaan sen sisään, vaikka samaan aikaan kokeneemmat ja vähintäänkin yhtä pätevät kollegat ovat jääneet ulkopuolelle. Ajattelen, että arviointiperusteissa tarvitaan lisää läpinäkyvyyttä, jotta liiton toiminta on aidosti oikeudenmukaista.

Yksi taiteen tärkeimmistä tehtävistä on rohkaista ihmisiä ajattelemaan ja keskustelemaan. Sen tehtävänä on herättää kysymyksiä ja kyseenalaistaa. Kirjailijaliiton jäsenarviointikriteerien sen sijaan ei kuitenkaan pitäisi tuntua mystisiltä tai monitulkintaisilta, vaan sääntöjen pitäisi olla selkeät, yhdenmukaiset ja reilut – ja samat kaikille.

Suhtaudun Kirjailijaliiton toimintaan mitä suurimmalla arvostuksella ja kunnioituksella, mutta haluan olla jatkossakin ylpeä jäsenyydestäni, ja jotta niin voi olla, jonkin on muututtava. Haluan kuulua sellaiseen liittoon, jossa koen jäsenyyteni olevan aidosti ansaittua – ja niin en voi kokea, mikäli vaikuttaa siltä, että minua aiemmin alalle tulleet, aivan yhtä pätevät kollegat eivät pääse ovista sisään.

Kunnioittavin terveisin,

Vehka Kurjenmiekka kirjailija

The essayist's task is not merely to notice what is broken or uncertain. It is also to recognise those rare moments when the world quietly discloses that things are, for now, enough.

JOURNAL 26 octobre 2026

Pas d'alerte pour le moment. On a bien dormi quand même. La pluie n'a pas cessé de la nuit et ça continue.

On a un gentil message de T chan. Elle est contente de sa rentrée au collège, elle s'est fait des amies. deux sœurs qui habitent à côté elles vont au collège ensemble Les garçons sont gentils mais elle se méfie d'eux “maintenant qu’elle sait ce qu'ils ont dans la tête” Elle envoie plein de cœurs “à toutes ses grandes sœurs”. C’est très touchant.

J'ai commencé à écrire mon dernier message que je n'aurai qu’à restaurer pour l'envoyer rapidement quand on échangera nos téléphones au moment du départ. C’est pratique . On est un peu désœuvrées, forcément. En attendant le début de la pièce, on évite de trop penser, ça sert à rien. On verra bien.

Toujours pas d'alerte. On tourne un peu en rond. On n’ose pas commencer un truc de peur de devoir interrompre. Dans une action le plus dur c'est l'attente du début. Yoko izumi midori et hayame vont venir dîner. Comme on fait maintenant chacune apporte un truc c’est très amusant. Si on doit partir on leur laisse les clefs. D'ailleurs il n’y en a pas.

Les filles sont parties ça ressemblait à une soirée d'adieu. Dommage que Asu et ka chan pouvaient pas venir. On les a eues avec le téléphone. Toujours pas d'alerte on va se coucher ici il est 22 : on fait des calculs si on part cette nuit ça pourra pas être de narita, il y a pas de vols de nuit à partir de 0:00 donc ça serait haneda c’est 1:½ d'ici ça me laissera largement le temps de vous dire à bientôt. De toute façon j’ai déjà écrit mon message final j'ai qu'à le restaurer et l'envoyer. Vous aurez une relation jusque-là. C’est pas du beau travail ça mesdames messieurs ?

#Ukraine #Tchan

Het Werpro666

Welkom studenten van de VVA academie voor universele handelingen overal op ons grondgebied. Vandaag bestuderen we het werkpro666 van alle bedrijven overal op aard bezig met winnen van alles overal uit. Waar begint het en waarom houdt het nooit een keer op, nou dat eerste is een stuk eenvoudiger dan het laatste.

Het begint met de wil, het maken er van, het tonen er van, het laten zien, horen, voelen, ruiken en proeven van de wil, bijvoorbeeld de vrije. Hier heb je niks en dan is het er in eens, het is daar voor je, een totaal compleet product. Zo zit je te zitten met je zelf in je lijf en zo zie je iemand iets doen, laten met iets erbij, krijg je te horen dat je dit ook kan doen, mag en dan wil je het ook nog. Net zo, bijna automatisch maar toch net wat anders, automatisch mogelijk met promotie, de wil achter de wil.

Op deze manier leer je dingen te willen, ik noem een aantal dingen op die je zou moeten willen volgens de pro-motoren, je wil geld, auto, mobiele smartphone, een data centrale, wapens (en dus munitie), invloed hebben op anderen, een verzekering, spaarrekening, gezondheid, boek met hardcover, een applicatie op je telefoon, fiets met 70 versnellingen, een fatbike op dieet, inzet, een archief, tempel, en nog veel meer dat er nu is, een succesvol gebied, gevuld met dat eens op een zekere moment in je setje werd gepromoot, datgeen om te willen, moeten, doen, hebben en dergelijke. Het is er, het is ontstaan vanuit dat ene. De oerbron van het willen, de controle over een anders hebben en houden, angst voor de ander controleren met middelen, iemand in de gaten kunnen houden, binnen de perken, met bepalen, het vrezen voor verlies, kwijting, de alom door afwezigheid en monumentale herhaling aanwezige dood, iets missen tijdens je lange leven rondom draaien om de zondagen, alles wat er al was en wat er daardoor weer bij kwam en wat er vervolgens bij komt vanuit het setje in het andere setje via de setting. Het eeuwige, altijd leven in aanpassing van die eerder aanwezige zaken, sneller, hoger, dieper, langer, verder en dergelijke woorden nodig om de verandering van hetzelfde te accepeteren als beter of beter nog nodig te betitelen en dat geloven, loven van de behouden vaartjes in vaatjes en vatjes.

Goed, het is er, we hebben het al, dus moeten we verdienen aan de veranderingen, dat verdienen, belonen, reguleren met middelen via een inkomend bericht, is zo'n eerder met succes gepromoveerd handels model. Je mag zonder niet zomaar ergens leven, ademen, eten, drinken, dan laten andere mensen als straf verhongeren, langs vuilnisbakken eten, dat vinden ze heel goed, hun verdiende loon naar niet verdienen aan hetzelfde middel dat zij dag in dag uit dienen, slaven en verslaafden van het inkomen, handelingen gelinkt aan salaris, uitkering, de gunst geleverd door te doen zoals je gezegd is, opgedragen, de vakken vervuld. Zeker wel, vast ook. Dus dan bouw je dingen voor anderen niet uit vrije wil maar omdat je anders geen wc en bijbehorend papier kunt aanschaffen zodat je met een schone bips verder gaat met wonen in je vaste goed. Dat is dan ook weer nodig zodat jij je eten kan aanschaffen op een plek waar andere mensen de kost ook al verdienen en daarmee die kost niet alleen verdienen ook weer aanschaffen met dat zelfde middel waarom ze daar gaan zitten hun tijd en leven verdoen rondom in plastic gewikkeld spul, dat ons eten, mensen voer, moet voorstellen en waarvoor weer andere mensen hun leven besteden ter fabricage van de waarheden in grote en kleine fabrieken aan lopende banden allen gelinkt aan de stroom opgewekt uit de oudheid, aangepast natuurlijk, stroom der verandering, zonder verandering, doet produceren en houdt het daad bewerkelijk gaande. De wil aan het werk, het grote aardse humane, persoonsgebonden, geknecht, de doe/laat zoals is opgedragen door herhalen van de zin pro666.

Goed, je hebt het, het is er, de realiteit is succesvol aangepast. Stap 1 van het werkpro666 stap 2, je laat het aan anderen zien, Kijk ik heb iets en ik doe dit er mee, nu kan ik twee keer zo snel van a naar b, later c, maar dan hardloop ik op deze zaak te snel te ver vooruit, Eureka, ik heb het object voor sneller gaan en kijk mij eens rap voortbewegen, veel sneller dan jullie onder alles kruipen, maar weet je, ik gun jullie ook wel wat als jullie dan in ruil voor dit gedoe levenslang voor mij zorgen, me voeding geven, liefde, een lapje grond en dan nog een lap, en nog eentje, lap erop, en jullie gemeenschap in ruil voor dit schitterende voertuig. Ergens op een zeker soort dag is dit dan een succes, de anderen schaffen in ruil voor heel veel meer dit unieke speed object aan om dan twee keer zo snel van a naar b te gaan, ze beginnen te wennen aan de versnellingen, gaan twee keer zo snel naar posities elders, c, d, e, stap drie is dan de vermenigvuldiging van de eerste handeling, de mobiele eenheid vloeit in verhoogde vaart naar die posities elders, de mogelijk gelovige erin gemeenschappen, en doen daar wat hun eerder is aangedaan, dat ze met effect is aangeleerd, leren is herhalen en herhalen en herhalen tot je een ton weegt..

Goed, drie stappen, 6.1, het object 'wil', 6.2 'het object wil' aan de andere brengen, 6.3 de ander herhaald dit, feitelijk is dat je van het, dit is de totale cultuur in de notendop terug in je blikveld. Daarmee kan ik jullie met opgelucht hart een poosje verlaten met de intentie om later terug te keren op dit broeinest, het beste educatie, informatie orkestratie en complete deformatie oorblog Van Voorbijgaande Aard 'Lastige gevallen in de Rede' echt een plek waar je voor de duivel niet bang hoeft te zijn net alsook zijn tegenpool vrezen, de upgrade en de downgrade, in wil_lekeurige volgorde gepresenteerd in het blikjes veld vol kleine en grote pupillen.

Daag huis, tuin en opbergschuur bewoners, daaaag. Tot de volgende macabere demon_stratie.

Boots on the Ground is a cool protest band

About a year ago, Keri and I went down to Houston to record protest music at the studio of bkbirge. We made two songs and ate great food. We will do it again. I wanted to reflect a bit on those two songs. I just listened to them again and I still love them. So I thought, being an election cycle, it would be fun to bellow some interest in them if I could. I am still proud of them. They still hit, for me.

Chosen by Boots on the Ground

This is an ICE protest. The three of us are different characters. We all wrote our own parts for this project. So we each wrote our own characters here. The video highlights the words of each character in a different color. I think it came out effective. Let me know what you think. Also, fuck ICE.

Pill Party by Boots on the Ground

A friend called this tune a “sad fiesta.” This song is truly a soundtrack for end times. What do you do? Party? To me, this song is validating. If you don’t think anything is wrong, perhaps you should be the one on medication.

Doc is having a sale!

I love both of these tunes a lot, still. I love working with the doc. (I call bkbirge “the doc” because I watched “Back to the Future” too much.) I’d like to tell you the doc has a great collection of gear for his studio. He is selling some off at the moment. I am shopping, and a couple of friends are shopping. You are welcome to join us here on Reverb. 

Here is the Boots on the Ground Bandcamp

I hope you get a chance to hear these tunes. We recorded all analog, had fun together, made some points, and got some of the poison out. I think the lead on “Chosen” still vibes hard with me. I think the mood on “Pill Party” is perfect for right now. I think these songs have relevance still. They are still my mood. 

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

Djembe Funk

The Kintners

If you run a developer community, sponsor events, or just want to know which Python, AI, or data meetups in your city are actually growing, Meetup is the obvious source. The catch is that Meetup closed its free public API to most people years ago. Today the practical options are a paid Pro account with GraphQL access, or reading the same data the website already sends to every logged-out visitor.

This guide takes the second route. We build a small Python Meetup scraper that:

1. Searches events by keyword and city
2. Reads a group's member count, rating, and past events
3. Saves RSVP counts to SQLite on every run
4. Shows which upcoming events are filling up fastest

Everything here works without logging in, and that's where it stops. Member lists, attendee names, and private groups need an account, and they're off limits for this kind of tool anyway.

A quick note on manners: stick to public pages, keep the request rate low, cache what you fetch, and don't collect personal data about attendees. Meetup's terms apply to you, not to me.

Where the data actually lives

Meetup's website is a Next.js app. Every server-rendered page ships a <script id="__NEXT_DATA__"> tag, and inside it sits __APOLLO_STATE__: the Apollo GraphQL client cache the page was rendered from. That means you don't parse HTML at all. You get the same normalized objects the frontend uses:

• ROOT_QUERY holds the query results, keyed by the query and its variables, for example eventSearch:{...} or groupByUrlname:{...}
• Event:317054890, Group:14064142, Venue:..., and Member:... hold the actual records
• Records point to each other with {"__ref": "Group:14064142"} instead of nesting

Event pages also carry schema.org Event JSON-LD, which is handy for name, start and end time, and status. But the JSON-LD has no RSVP counts and a truncated description, so the Apollo cache is the better source.

Three URLs cover most needs:

• Search: https://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=python&location=gb--london&source=EVENTS
• Group upcoming events: https://www.meetup.com/<urlname>/events/
• Group past events: https://www.meetup.com/<urlname>/events/?type=past

The location value is a slug like gb--london or us--ny--new-york. Open the search page in a browser, pick a city, and copy it from the address bar.

Setup

You only need requests:

pip install requests

Fetching a page and unpacking the Apollo cache

import json
import random
import re
import sqlite3
import sys
import time
from datetime import datetime, timezone

import requests

HEADERS = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 "
                  "(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0 Safari/537.36",
    "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
}
NEXT_DATA = re.compile(
    r'<script id="__NEXT_DATA__" type="application/json">(.*?)</script>', re.S)

session = requests.Session()
session.headers.update(HEADERS)


def get(url, params=None, tries=4):
    for attempt in range(tries):
        res = session.get(url, params=params, timeout=30)
        if res.status_code == 200:
            return res.text
        if res.status_code in (429, 500, 502, 503, 504):
            time.sleep(2 ** attempt + random.random())
            continue
        res.raise_for_status()
    raise RuntimeError(f"gave up on {url} after {tries} tries")


def apollo_state(html):
    m = NEXT_DATA.search(html)
    if not m:
        raise ValueError("no __NEXT_DATA__ on page (blocked, or layout changed)")
    data = json.loads(m.group(1))
    state = data["props"]["pageProps"].get("__APOLLO_STATE__")
    if not state:
        raise ValueError("page has no Apollo cache")
    return state


def deref(state, value):
    """Follow {"__ref": "Group:123"} pointers into the cache."""
    if isinstance(value, dict) and "__ref" in value:
        return state.get(value["__ref"], {})
    return value or {}


def root_field(state, prefix):
    for key, value in state["ROOT_QUERY"].items():
        if key.startswith(prefix):
            return value
    return None

The deref() helper is the important part. Without it you end up with half your fields as {"__ref": ...} dicts and you'll wonder where the group name went.

root_field() matches keys by prefix because the full key includes the variables Meetup used, including a timestamp and a guessed lat/lon. That key changes on every request, so never hard-code it.

Searching events

def search_events(keywords, location):
    html = get("https://www.meetup.com/find/",
               {"keywords": keywords, "location": location, "source": "EVENTS"})
    state = apollo_state(html)
    conn = root_field(state, "eventSearch")
    if conn is None:
        return [], None
    rows = []
    for edge in conn["edges"]:
        ev = deref(state, edge["node"])
        group = deref(state, ev.get("group"))
        rows.append({
            "event_id": ev["id"],
            "title": ev.get("title"),
            "starts_at": ev.get("dateTime"),
            "type": ev.get("eventType"),
            "url": ev.get("eventUrl"),
            "going": (ev.get("rsvps") or {}).get("totalCount"),
            "max_tickets": ev.get("maxTickets"),
            "group": group.get("urlname"),
            "group_rating": ((group.get("stats") or {}).get("eventRatings") or {}).get("average"),
        })
    return rows, conn.get("totalCount")

When I ran this for python in London it returned 14 events, led by a PyData London meetup with 201 people going. It also returned a badminton session and a social media event. Search is ranked by relevance across titles, descriptions, and group topics, and it's loose. If you're building a list of tech events, filter on title or group name afterward instead of trusting the keyword.

Two other things to know:

• Only the first page is server-rendered. The cache includes pageInfo.hasNextPage and an endCursor, but loading page two happens in the browser through Meetup's internal GraphQL endpoint. You can replay those calls, but it's undocumented and changes without warning. For a weekly “what's on in my city” check, page one, sorted by date, is often enough.
• dateTime formats vary. Search results come back in UTC with a Z, while group pages use the group's local offset, like +01:00. Parse with datetime.fromisoformat() and compare as aware datetimes.

Group stats and past events

def group_summary(urlname, past=False):
    url = f"https://www.meetup.com/{urlname}/events/"
    html = get(url, {"type": "past"} if past else None)
    state = apollo_state(html)
    group = next(v for k, v in state.items()
                 if k.startswith("Group:") and v.get("urlname") == urlname)
    stats = group.get("stats") or {}
    events = []
    for key, ev in state.items():
        if not key.startswith("Event:"):
            continue
        going = (ev.get("going") or {}).get("totalCount")
        events.append({
            "event_id": ev["id"],
            "title": ev.get("title"),
            "starts_at": ev.get("dateTime"),
            "status": ev.get("status"),
            "going": going,
            "max_tickets": ev.get("maxTickets"),
            "url": ev.get("eventUrl"),
        })
    return {
        "urlname": urlname,
        "name": group.get("name"),
        "city": group.get("city"),
        "members": (stats.get("memberCounts") or {}).get("all"),
        "rating": (stats.get("eventRatings") or {}).get("average"),
        "ratings": (stats.get("eventRatings") or {}).get("total"),
    }, events

For PyData London this returns 16,599 members, a 4.74 average rating from 2,750 ratings, and 10 past events on the first page, each with a going count. Note the field name changes: on the search page the RSVP total is under rsvps.totalCount, on group pages it's going.totalCount. Same number, different query, different cache shape. Expect this kind of thing anywhere you read a frontend cache.

Past events are the most useful part for analysis. Turnout compared with maxTickets across the last year tells you more about a community's health than the member count, which only ever goes up.

Tracking RSVPs over time

A single snapshot says little. Running the search daily and storing counts shows which events are filling up:

SCHEMA = """
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS rsvp_snapshots (
    event_id   TEXT NOT NULL,
    seen_at    TEXT NOT NULL,
    title      TEXT,
    starts_at  TEXT,
    going      INTEGER,
    max_tickets INTEGER,
    PRIMARY KEY (event_id, seen_at)
);
"""


def save(db, rows):
    now = datetime.now(timezone.utc).strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M")
    db.executemany(
        "INSERT OR IGNORE INTO rsvp_snapshots VALUES (?,?,?,?,?,?)",
        [(r["event_id"], now, r["title"], r["starts_at"], r["going"], r["max_tickets"])
         for r in rows])
    db.commit()


def movers(db):
    return db.execute("""
        SELECT title, MIN(going), MAX(going), MAX(going) - MIN(going) AS delta,
               MAX(max_tickets)
        FROM rsvp_snapshots
        GROUP BY event_id
        HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
        ORDER BY delta DESC
        LIMIT 10
    """).fetchall()

The primary key on (event_id, seen_at) with minute precision makes reruns harmless. Run it from cron once or twice a day. Meetup RSVP counts don't change fast enough to justify more, and fewer requests keep you well clear of rate limits.

Putting it together

if __name__ == "__main__":
    keywords = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "python"
    location = sys.argv[2] if len(sys.argv) > 2 else "gb--london"
    rows, total = search_events(keywords, location)
    print(f"{len(rows)} of {total} events on page 1")
    for r in rows[:5]:
        print(f'{r["starts_at"]}  {r["going"]:>4} going  {r["title"]}')
    db = sqlite3.connect("meetup.db")
    db.executescript(SCHEMA)
    save(db, rows)
    for title, first, last, delta, cap in movers(db):
        print(f"+{delta:<4} {first} -> {last} (cap {cap})  {title}")
    if rows:
        info, past = group_summary(rows[0]["group"], past=True)
        print(info)
        print(len(past), "past events on the first page")

python meetup_scraper.py python gb--london
python meetup_scraper.py "machine learning" us--ny--new-york

Pitfalls I hit

• No __NEXT_DATA__ means you were blocked, not that the layout changed. Meetup sits behind a bot filter. A plain browser User-Agent and a slow request rate work for small jobs. Hammer it and you'll get challenge pages, so back off instead of retrying in a loop.
• Query keys contain timestamps. Match by prefix, as above.
• Field names differ between pages for the same concept (rsvps against going).
• Group status: PAID means the organizer pays for the group. It doesn't mean the events cost money. Check feeSettings on the event for that.
• Online events have eventType: ONLINE and a placeholder venue. Filter them out before plotting anything on a map.
• Cancelled events stay in past listings with status: CANCELLED. Exclude them, or your turnout averages will dip for no real reason.

When the DIY version stops being enough

For one city and a handful of groups, this script is fine. It gets tedious when you need many cities, deeper pagination, or member profiles, because then you're maintaining a GraphQL replay client against an API that was never meant for you.

At that point I'd use a hosted API. I use ScrapeAtlas* for this. GET /v1/meetup/search takes query and location plus optional category_id, distance, start_date/end_date, event_type (online or inPerson), sort, and a cursor for the next page:

import os
import requests

def api_search(query, location, cursor=None):
    params = {"query": query, "location": location, "sort": "DATETIME"}
    if cursor:
        params["cursor"] = cursor
    res = requests.get(
        "https://api.scrapeatlas.com/v1/meetup/search",
        params=params,
        headers={"x-api-key": os.environ["SCRAPEATLAS_API_KEY"]},
        timeout=60,
    )
    res.raise_for_status()
    data = res.json()
    # data["status"] is "success" or "partial"; data["coverage"]["warnings"] explains gaps
    return data.get("events", []), data.get("nextCursor")

There are also /v1/meetup/locations to turn a city name into a location slug, /v1/meetup/categories, /v1/meetup/search/groups, /v1/meetup/group, /v1/meetup/group/events (with status=upcoming or past and a cursor), and /v1/meetup/event.

Wrapping up

• Skip the HTML. Meetup pages carry their full Apollo cache in __NEXT_DATA__.
• Follow __ref pointers and match ROOT_QUERY keys by prefix.
• Search is loose. Filter results yourself.
• Only page one is server-rendered. Deeper pages mean replaying internal GraphQL calls.
• Snapshot RSVPs over time. Change over time is where the useful signal is.

If you find a field I missed, or Meetup moves something, leave a note and I'll update the script.

---

*I build it.

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Wer regelmässig kulturelle Aktivitäten in den Alltag integriert, tut offenbar nicht nur etwas für die Stimmung, sondern möglicherweise auch für die langfristige Gesundheit.

Neue Forschung deutet darauf hin, dass Menschen, die häufig Musik hören, tanzen, malen, Museen besuchen oder kreativ tätig sind, biologisch langsamer altern könnten als Personen ohne solche Aktivitäten.

Besonders interessant ist dabei, dass nicht nur aktives Kunstschaffen positive Effekte zeigt. Auch der regelmässige Besuch von Konzerten, Ausstellungen, historischen Orten oder kulturellen Veranstaltungen scheint mit besserer körperlicher und mentaler Gesundheit zusammenzuhängen. Forschende vermuten, dass dabei verschiedene Faktoren zusammenspielen: geistige Aktivierung, emotionale Anregung, soziale Kontakte und teilweise auch körperliche Bewegung.

Auffällig war zudem, dass die Vielfalt der Aktivitäten offenbar eine Rolle spielt. Menschen, die unterschiedliche kulturelle Interessen pflegen, schnitten besonders gut ab. Jede Aktivität scheint dabei andere Bereiche des Gehirns und des emotionalen Erlebens anzusprechen. Musik kann etwa emotionale und neurologische Prozesse stimulieren, während kreative Tätigkeiten Konzentration, Feinmotorik und Selbstwirksamkeit fördern.

Die Ergebnisse passen zu einer breiteren Entwicklung in der Gesundheitsforschung: Wohlbefinden wird zunehmend nicht mehr nur über Ernährung, Schlaf und Sport definiert. Auch Sinn, Kreativität, soziale Teilhabe und geistige Anregung gelten immer stärker als wichtige Faktoren eines gesunden Lebens. Kultur erscheint damit weniger als Luxus oder Freizeitbeschäftigung — sondern eher als Teil einer langfristigen geistigen und körperlichen Gesundheitspflege.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Eine Kultur ist das Treibhaus, das es den menschlichen Fähigkeiten erlaubt, sich zu entwickeln, und zugleich das Gefängnis, das sie einengt.“ – Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Stress bewusst managen

Plane gezielt „Stresszeit“ ein, um schwierige Themen oder anstrengende Phasen bewusst zu verarbeiten. So bleibt der Stress unter Kontrolle.

Aus dem Archiv: Wie wir weniger vergessen – fünf einfache Wege, Wissen dauerhaft zu verankern

Du kennst das vielleicht: Nach einem intensiven Kurstag gehst Du mit einem guten Gefühl nach Hause. Die Inhalte waren spannend, die Übungen sinnvoll, die Gruppe engagiert. Doch eine Woche später, beim Wiederholen der Unterlagen, ist vieles verschwunden. Du erkennst Schlagworte, aber der Zusammenhang ist weg. Und schon stellt sich die leise Frage: Wieso bleibt so wenig hängen, obwohl ich mich doch wirklich konzentriert habe? Dieses Erlebnis ist ganz normal. Unser Gehirn vergisst schnell – nicht, weil es schlecht arbeitet, sondern weil es effizient ist.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

This cold has been around for a while and yesterday was nightmare, slowly miserable, but it seems like after doing basically nothing today because it hurts so much to even stand up, it seems like I’m slowly starting to feel a little bit better. I just really hope everything smoothens out soon enough.

A couple of my best friends are getting pretty old. One has lost most of his sight so he can’t read very well. He can read with one eye if the words are about 4 inches from his face but he can’t spend too much time doing this. He also cannot hear great so volume needs to be sort of high for him to hear. His lovely wife reads to him some but has to yell. They both watch some movies together but he can’t see much of what is going on so he misses a bit of it. I brought them some audio books and they liked some of them quite a bit. They have a bunch of eBooks and I’ve been thinking “wouldn’t it be great if they could just have those read out loud.” That is possible but the default voice was very terrible and robotic. So I spent some time trying to figure out how to fix that.

They are on Linux computers so it’s not quite as easy to get good voices as Windows and Mac. I was lead down many rabbit holes while trying to figure this out. It was harder than I expected and one night I found a program called “Pied” which is a graphical interface to help get Piper going and configuring speech-dispatcher without manual manipulation of config files. It changed the Linux voice and seemed to be going great. Then I figured out it wasn’t keeping track of where it was in the eReader program. So when I closed the program and opened it again it would start over a the beginning of the book unless you manually found out where it left off. That was sad to me and seemed too big of a flaw for them to deal with.

But then I found out that if I updated Calibre to the latest version it now has a built in voice reader with pretty great voices! I found this hilarious, I already have that program and so do they, we just have older versions. So after hours of going in circles all along I could have just updated Calibre and set them up with their own voice reader for any ebook they have or get in the future. I’d highly recommend it for anyone who would use such a thing. I set it up for them today and they seem pleased about it.

For Linux all I needed to do was copy and paste this into terminal to update it:

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin

This same command will install it if you don’t have it.

For people on other operating systems here is where to download it:

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

After that you load whatever book you have and want into it by clicking the “add books” icon on the top left, or click the arrow next to that icon for more options and navigate to your stored books. Once you have books loaded into your Calibre library click the view icon on the top, the icon three to the right of add books it is green with glasses – alternatively you can just double click on the book in your library list. Once the book is loaded just right click in that window and click “Read aloud.” Once that loads then on the top right there are some options, if you click on the gears you can select new voices. The default voice pre-loaded is pretty great in my view. Scroll down to whatever language you want and you can download voices, the English section has many choices. I’d recommend the high and medium quality voices, low is noticeably worse.

Something a little funny with this program. When you load books into Calibre it creates a copy of it in the “Calibre Library” directory. So you may want to delete the old files if they are on the same computer. Some of the great things about this option is that it is all locally run, free, and open source. Once set up this works even if you are disconnected from the internet.

If you like older books and don’t have an eReader you could always just use Calibre to read you books from project Gutenberg. Sometimes I download audio books from LibreVox but it has a very limited supply, the Calibre TTS (text-to-speech) gives us a lot more options.

Links:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/

https://librivox.org/

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

https://github.com/Elleo/pied/tree/main

The black box sits beside the entrance to Woodland Glen IV, a residence hall on the University of Kentucky's campus in Lexington. Its job is simple to describe. You walk towards the door, it looks at you, and if it recognises the geometry of your face, the lock releases. No card, no phone, no fumbling. You are home.

The device is called Rock. It is made by Alcatraz AI, a company based in Cupertino, California, and this autumn the University of Kentucky began testing it at a handful of buildings, including two residence halls, as a way for students to get into the places where they sleep without tapping a key card. In mid-September local television stations covered the installation. The libertarian magazine Reason picked the story up nationally under the headline “Scan your face to enter your dorm?” The university, for its part, has been careful and consistent on one point: enrolling your face is voluntary. Your Wildcard, the university's student ID, still works. Your phone still works. Nobody has to do this.

That is true, and it is worth taking seriously. It is also where the interesting questions begin rather than end. For many of the eighteen-year-olds who arrived at Kentucky this autumn, this may be the first building they have ever been invited to open with their face. It is not a bank vault or an airport gate or a laboratory full of expensive reagents. It is the front door of their home: the one they walk through at two in the morning, after a bad exam, or carrying shopping bags with the key card buried somewhere beneath a textbook. What they learn at that door, about what is normal, about what is asked of them, about whether their face is something they give or something that is simply taken, may shape how they respond to every door that follows.

So here is the question the black box poses. When the student with the shopping walks up and the lock clicks open before they have put anything down, what have they actually experienced? Added safety? Added convenience? Or the first of many doors that will, one day, know who they are whether or not they asked?

What the University Actually Installed

Start with what is known, because the facts are more specific than the headlines.

According to the University of Kentucky Police Department's own information page, the biometric access pilot began at Woodland Glen IV. Residents were told to expect an enrolment email near the start of the semester, sent from an Alcatraz address, with personalised instructions. The page states that biometric data is collected solely to verify access to the building, that it is not used to track students' movements or behaviour beyond building entry, and that anyone the system fails to recognise can still get in with their Wildcard or mobile ID. WKYT, the Lexington CBS affiliate, reported on 19 September that scanners were also going in at Kirwan-Blanding, another residence complex, for a two-week trial. The Lexington Herald-Leader listed further planned sites, including parts of the medical campus, several biomedical research buildings and athletics practice spaces.

How the machine sees you was explained by the university's own police chief. Joe Monroe, who has led the UK Police Department since 2009, told LEX18 that the system “looks at your face, and it assigns different points using geometry, facial geometry. They call it facial vectors. Once that number is assigned, that is who you are. There's no pictures stored.” The university's privacy language, quoted by the Herald-Leader, describes the resulting “facial signature” as “a one-way encrypted mathematical representation of your facial features.” Alcatraz's chief executive, Tina D'Agostin, put it more bluntly to WKYT: “You're zeros and ones to us once you've been scanned.” Monroe has also conceded that a security brand named after America's most famous island prison “may not be the best name for the product, and we've pointed that out.”

Two details from the local coverage matter more than they first appear. The first is that this is not the university's first experiment with biometrics. According to the Herald-Leader, Rock is replacing iris-scanning equipment from a company called Eyelock that the university described as “non-functional.” Biometric entry at UK is an existing practice being upgraded and extended, not a novelty.

The second detail should stay with anyone thinking about consent. The Herald-Leader reported that enrolment would be required for people entering the most sensitive places on campus, including the police department and research facilities, and optional for less vulnerable places such as residence halls and most athletics facilities. LEX18 filmed the police evidence room, where Deputy Chief Nathan Brown explained that entry required both a credential and a face. “This is dual authentication because this is a very obvious restricted room,” he said. In other words, the University of Kentucky is not running a voluntary facial recognition programme. It is running one facial recognition system under two sets of rules. The Kentucky Kernel, the student newspaper, reported that the technology is also in other locations requiring two-factor authentication, such as research labs. For some people on campus, a face scan is already a condition of doing their job. For students, at their front doors, it is a choice. The technology is identical. Only the policy differs, and policy is the easiest part of any system to change.

A Company Built by a Face ID Veteran

Alcatraz AI is not a campus start-up that stumbled into student housing. It is an enterprise access control company with serious money and a clear ambition. It was founded in 2016 by Vince Gaydarzhiev, who, according to the company, led hardware prototyping for the iPad and iPhone at Apple during the development of Face ID. In a 2019 interview with Security Sales and Integration, Gaydarzhiev said the idea came from noticing that physical security, even at Apple's own campus, was still done “old school,” with badges and guards at almost every door.

In April 2026 the company announced a fifty million dollar Series B round, led by BlackPeak Capital, Cogito Capital and Taiwania Capital, bringing its total funding to more than one hundred million dollars. It claimed customers among the world's largest AI data centres, major US airports, energy companies, NFL teams, Fortune 100 firms and “major universities.” D'Agostin summarised the pitch in one line: “We are the Face ID of securing physical spaces.”

That framing tells you where the product is designed to end up. Face ID on a phone is not an optional extra for enthusiasts. It is the default way tens of millions of people unlock the most personal object they own. A company that describes itself as the Face ID of buildings is not aiming to sit politely beside the key card. It is aiming to make the key card feel as dated as typing a passcode. D'Agostin said as much to WKYT: “The badge, what most campuses are using today is a 30-year-old technology.”

Alcatraz's marketing to universities makes the same argument with a student in mind. A February 2026 guide on its website, pitching “privacy-first facial authentication” to higher education, opens with an observation about young people: “Students today unlock their phones with a glance and verify banking transactions with their faces. Yet on campus, they still fumble with physical keycards.” It promises “the frictionless experience your students expect.” To its credit, the same guide also sets out a strong consent standard, stating that students “must have the right to withdraw consent and delete their templates at any time.”

The guide is also candid about where else the technology could go. Beyond residence halls, labs and athletics, it suggests that “Libraries can automate entry for late-night study sessions,” and it mentions exam proctoring. There is no public evidence that the University of Kentucky plans to put face readers on its libraries or in its exam halls. But the people selling the system already imagine a campus where the face is the credential for much more than the dorm.

The Door That Watches Everyone Else

“Voluntary enrolment” describes the relationship between the system and the person who signs up. It says rather less about everyone else who walks through the door.

The main security argument for Rock is not really about the enrolled student. It is about tailgating: someone with no right to be in a building slipping in behind someone who does. D'Agostin told WKYT that the system lets security teams “detect when this incident occurs so they can react to it in real time.” The university has framed the housing tests in the same terms, as part of a broader effort to reduce unauthorised entry and strengthen residence hall safety, with the face option added as a hands-free extra rather than a replacement for existing credentials. A student interviewed by WKYT said they liked it “just because safety is the number one priority for the college.”

To detect a tailgater, though, the machine has to pay attention to people who have not enrolled. Alcatraz's product page is explicit. The reader “authenticates the enrolled person in under a second, then keeps monitoring the doorway as the door opens,” and if someone enters without authenticating, “a picture is captured at the door” and logged for investigation. The security operations centre, the page says, receives a snapshot of that person along with the time of the event and the device that triggered it. A 2021 announcement of the feature, reported by Security Systems News, described the same behaviour.

Neither the university nor local reporting has said whether tailgating snapshots are switched on at Woodland Glen IV or Kirwan-Blanding, and it would be wrong to assume that they are. But the design matters regardless of how any one site is configured. In a residence hall, the person walking in close behind a resident is very often not an intruder. It is a roommate who left their card upstairs, a friend coming to study, a parent carrying a mini-fridge. Some of those people will have chosen not to enrol. Some will never have been asked. A system whose core safety feature involves noticing, and potentially photographing, the people who did not authenticate is a system whose voluntariness applies to only one side of the door.

This is the structural problem that has dogged every face recognition product sold as a convenience. The person who opts in gets the benefit. The people around them bear some of the cost, and they are not the ones who were asked.

Voluntary Is a Setting, Not a Promise

Consent is often spoken about as though it were a fixed property of a technology. With access control, it is closer to a configuration option.

Alcatraz's public help centre describes three ways to enrol someone. Manual enrolment takes a single badge swipe and a few prompts on the Rock's screen. Web enrolment sends an invitation to register with your own phone or computer camera, which matches the emailed process the University of Kentucky describes. The third mode is auto-enrolment. When a Rock is configured this way, the help centre explains, “each time the user swipes their badge and enters through the door, the Rock is learning their face.” It needs four swipes, at least five minutes apart, from people who already have access to that door. In 2019 Security Sales and Integration described this self-enrolment as requiring no administration or employee action, “switching to face-only mode autonomously as soon as the employee is seen enough times.”

The direction of travel in the product is towards less friction at sign-up, not more. In May 2026 Alcatraz announced platform updates that, according to Biometric Update, let administrators apply access control rules to enrolment and added visual guidance to speed up biometric registration. D'Agostin said the changes were about making sign-up simpler and continuing to “automate operations and deliver a seamless authentication experience.” In September, at the GSX security show in Atlanta, the company went further. It named its software layers: RockOS, the firmware on each device that handles enrolment, liveness detection, authentication and tailgating detection, and Rock Cortex, a platform for verification, user and device management, integrations, monitoring, analytics and compliance. According to SecurityInfoWatch, a guided enrolment process that removes the need for users to move or tilt their heads was slated for general availability in October 2026, which Alcatraz says will make onboarding faster and cut failed enrolments. None of that is sinister. Making sign-up easy is what any product team would do. But ease is not the same thing as deliberation, and a choice that takes two seconds is rarely a choice anyone remembers making.

There is no evidence that the University of Kentucky uses auto-enrolment in its halls. Its published process is invitation-based and opt-in. The point is not that anyone is being enrolled without their knowledge. It is that the hardware on the wall can operate under a quite different consent model, and the difference is a setting chosen by an administrator. The student's choice is protected by a policy, not by the physics of the device.

Policies drift, and the most instructive recent example is an airport. The US Transportation Security Administration has long described its facial comparison checks as optional. In May 2025 a bipartisan group of senators, including Jeff Merkley, John Kennedy, Ed Markey and Roger Marshall, reintroduced legislation to rein the programme in. “Americans have the right to opt out of using TSA's facial recognition at the airport, and we need to protect that right,” Merkley said. Kennedy complained that the agency scans travellers “without even making it clear that they can opt out.” Two months later the Algorithmic Justice League, founded by the computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, published “Comply To Fly?”, drawing on travellers' accounts from 91 US airports. According to Biometric Update's summary, 99 per cent of respondents said officers had not told them verbally that they could opt out, many experienced the scans as mandatory, and some who declined reported hostility and extra scrutiny.

Nobody made the scans compulsory. They did not need to. When the scan is the fast lane, when the signs are small, when refusal is treated as an inconvenience, “optional” becomes something you have to insist on rather than something you are offered. That is how convenience quietly becomes expectation. It does not happen through a decree. It happens through queues.

The media scholars Nora Draper and Joseph Turow have a name for the feeling this produces. In a 2019 paper in New Media and Society, they described “digital resignation”: the condition in which people want to control what companies know about them but feel unable to, and give up. They argued that this resignation is not a flaw in consumers but something cultivated by routine corporate practices that make resistance tiring and pointless. A student who opts out in a hall where most neighbours have opted in will not be punished. They will simply be the one still tapping a card, still the exception. Most people do not choose to be the exception for long.

Home Is a Different Kind of Door

Privacy theory offers a useful way to explain why a residence hall feels different from a laboratory.

In a 2004 article in the Washington Law Review, the philosopher Helen Nissenbaum proposed that privacy is best understood as “contextual integrity.” Every setting carries norms about which information flows are appropriate within it, and the violation lies not in the information itself but in its movement out of the context where it belongs. In the police evidence room, the norm is scrutiny; anyone entering is expected to account for being there, and a face scan fits. A home is governed by the opposite norm. It is the one place you are supposed to be able to come and go without explaining yourself. That a student's home is owned by an institution, patrolled by its police and opened with its credential does not erase the norm. It makes it more fragile.

Then there is the question of who is being taught what. Most first-year undergraduates at Kentucky in 2026 were born around 2007 or 2008. Apple introduced Face ID with the iPhone X on 12 September 2017, when they were nine or ten. For this cohort, unlocking a device with a glance is a childhood habit, which is exactly what Alcatraz's marketing leans on. The dorm door extends that habit from the private object in your pocket to a shared building run by someone else. Face ID, by Apple's design, answers to you. The building answers to its owner.

What that habit looks like in practice surfaced a few weeks into term. The Kentucky Kernel spoke to Leah Henderson, a first-year student living in Woodland Glen IV, who said the university had not yet told her about the technology. She first assumed the cameras at the doors were recording students. Once she learned their purpose, she called the system innovative and convenient. “It's kind of cool. Maybe I don't have to use my phone all the time to get in,” she said. Purani Kannan, a sophomore and resident advisor at Kirwan-Blanding, told the paper that many students don't know much about the technology yet. Nothing in either account suggests anything improper; enrolment remains opt-in. But together they show how quickly an unexplained camera becomes a welcome convenience, and how little of that journey passes through anything resembling deliberate consent.

Mark Andrejevic and Neil Selwyn, both at Monash University, examined facial recognition in schools in a 2020 paper in Learning, Media and Technology. They warned that it risked altering schooling “along divisive, authoritarian and oppressive lines,” and worried about how such systems normalise surveillance for young people, teaching them to treat constant identification as the ordinary texture of institutional life. Their focus was compulsory schooling rather than universities, and Kentucky's pilot is opt-in. But the point travels: habits formed in institutions shape expectations outside them.

Not all research points one way. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology surveyed 391 college students in mainland China and Taiwan about face recognition access control on their campuses. Students who found the systems useful and easy were more likely to use them, and that acceptance was associated with a stronger sense of school identity and belonging. The authors acknowledged “information leakage anxiety” but did not measure it. The finding is a useful corrective: for some students, a door that recognises them may feel like a place that knows them. That is precisely why normalisation matters. A technology that feels welcoming is easy to accept without examining what else comes with it.

What a Card Swipe Already Knows

It is tempting to treat the face as the moment surveillance begins. On most American campuses, the key card has been quietly generating data for years.

UKNow, the university's news service, described in August 2024 what its Wildcard Mobile ID could already do: residence hall access, payment at UK Dining, rides on LexTran buses, verification at athletic events, borrowing from UK Libraries and entry to recreational facilities. The same article said the university hoped to extend the mobile experience to the entire campus community, with faculty and staff to follow. Credentials on campus do not stay in one place; they spread to wherever it is convenient to use them. Each interaction is, potentially, a timestamped record of where a student was.

What institutions can do with such records is not hypothetical. In 2018 Sudha Ram, a professor of management information systems at the University of Arizona, drew attention for research using anonymised data from the university's CatCard ID system to predict which first-year students would drop out, based on how often they swiped into halls, libraries and recreation centres and where they spent money. “Many times, students who tend to drop out are people who have not established social relationships and who haven't established a regular routine on campus,” Ram told Arizona Public Media. Contemporary reports said the model identified roughly 85 to 90 per cent of students who went on to leave. The work was framed as supportive. It is also a textbook case of function creep: data collected to open doors and sell sandwiches becoming raw material for behavioural prediction. It happened with cards. Nothing about a face makes it less likely to happen with faces.

The architecture makes the connection concrete. According to Alcatraz, a Rock profile is linked to the user's badge ID in the existing access control system, so the face simply stands in for the card. Wherever the card is already a key, the face could, with the right hardware and a policy decision, become one too. Nobody has announced plans to put face readers in Kentucky's dining halls, libraries or gyms. But the path from one door to many is an installation job, not a reinvention.

Beyond campuses, the warnings are sharper. In late 2022 Madison Square Garden Entertainment used facial recognition at Radio City Music Hall to identify and eject Kelly Conlon, a lawyer chaperoning her daughter's Girl Scout troop, because her firm was in litigation against the company. Security technology became a tool for settling commercial scores. In Western Australia in 2021, police obtained data from SafeWA, a Covid-19 check-in app whose users had been told only contact tracers would see it. The government rushed through a law restricting its use. “Because it is so important to maintain community confidence in SafeWA, we've come down in favour of nobody,” said Attorney General John Quigley. “Not the CCC, not someone under FOI, not the police. Nobody sees this information.”

Note the order of events. The promise came first, its breach second, and the law protecting it only after the public found out. Anyone weighing a campus assurance that biometric data will not be used for tracking should ask what Western Australians eventually had to ask: what, other than the institution's goodwill, makes that true?

Kentucky's Law Stops at the Campus Gate

In Kentucky, the honest answer appears to be: not very much.

The Kentucky Consumer Data Protection Act, signed by Governor Andy Beshear in April 2024, took effect on 1 January 2026. It treats biometric data used for identification as sensitive and requires opt-in consent before a covered business processes it. That sounds like exactly the protection a student would want. But the Act states that its core provisions “shall not apply to any” city, state agency or political subdivision, nor to any “institution of higher education.” The University of Kentucky is a public university; on the plain text, the state's new privacy law does not appear to reach it. The Act also provides no private right of action, so even where it applies, only the attorney general can enforce it.

Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act of 2008, the strongest such law in the country, would not necessarily help either. BIPA requires written, informed consent before a private entity collects a face template and lets individuals sue, which is why it has produced some of the largest privacy settlements in history. But it excludes state and local government agencies, and private universities have slipped through too. In November 2022 a federal court dismissed a BIPA class action against DePaul University over a remote proctoring tool that captured students' facial data, ruling that because DePaul administered federal student loans it counted as an exempt financial institution.

Federal law offers a partial safeguard. Regulations under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act define a “biometric record” as a record of one or more measurable biological or behavioural characteristics that can be used for automated recognition of an individual, listing facial characteristics as an example, and treat it as personally identifiable information. But FERPA governs disclosure of education records. It does not decide whether an institution should build a face-matching system, and it says nothing about keeping enrolment optional.

Some policymakers have drawn firmer lines. In September 2023 New York's education commissioner, Betty Rosa, banned the purchase and use of facial recognition in the state's elementary and secondary schools, concluding after a state technology report that the risks outweighed the claimed benefits. That ban covers children, not adult university students. But it shows that a government can decide some settings are inappropriate for the technology, rather than leaving the question to procurement officers one pilot at a time.

In Kentucky, then, the durability of “voluntary” rests largely on institutional policy and on vendor commitments. The Herald-Leader reported that the company says it keeps no cloud biometric database and shares no data with third parties or government databases. Speaking to the Kentucky Kernel, D'Agostin was blunter still: “Basically, your face is a digital key, and when you come to the door, if that key matches, the door opens.” Of the data behind it, she said: “We don't have access and we don't store it, so we can't sell the data.” The Kernel reported that the data remains with the university, which manages it. Dani Jaffe, the university's associate director of strategic and crisis communications, said: “All biometric data is stored on secure servers and is never shared with third parties.” She added that the university “will continue to evaluate and implement tools” as security needs evolve. That clarifies where the promise lives. If the vendor holds nothing, the templates' fate rests on the university's own policy, and the state law that would bind a private company does not bind the university. Those are meaningful assurances. They are also promises made by the parties who benefit from the system's expansion, enforceable mainly by the parties who made them.

The Campaign That Already Won Once

None of this is new. Six years before Kentucky installed its scanners, the digital rights group Fight for the Future and the student organisation Students for Sensible Drug Policy set out to keep facial recognition off American campuses, publishing a scorecard of institutions and pushing resolutions through student governments.

Their best-known victory came at UCLA. In early 2020, as the university considered adding facial recognition to its security cameras, Fight for the Future ran more than 400 photographs of UCLA athletes and faculty through Amazon's face recognition software against a mugshot database. According to Inside Higher Ed, the test produced 58 false matches, most of them people of colour. UCLA dropped the plan. “UCLA will not pursue the use of facial recognition software technology,” Michael Beck, the administrative vice chancellor, said in a statement, concluding that “the potential benefits are limited and are vastly outweighed by the concerns of the campus community.” Evan Greer of Fight for the Future said the victory would “send a pretty strong message to any other administration who is considering doing this.” By then around 50 universities had publicly said they had no plans to use the technology.

Kentucky's pilot differs in important ways. UCLA's plan would have scanned everyone in view of campus cameras; Kentucky's is an opt-in door lock that verifies one enrolled person at a time. A mismatch at a dorm door means using your card, not being flagged as a suspect, and IEEE Spectrum has reported that best-case false negative rates are around two in 1,000. Michael Murray, a University of Kentucky law professor who studies artificial intelligence, told LEX18 that the university seemed to be “taking it quite seriously” and trying “to roll it out with a very low threshold of risk,” while cautioning that AI “is not cost-free, and it's not risk-free.”

Still, the old unease has not gone away. Local online discussion, summarised by the Lexington Times, was dominated by privacy worries, with some commenters calling the scanners the start of a surveillance network and others doubting that a face reader would stop anyone following a resident through an open door. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown questioned whether the security case justified the system at all, and suggested institutions might be “dreaming bigger” than a limited dorm pilot. There is no sign yet of an organised Kentucky campaign on the UCLA model. But the arguments that won in 2020 are still available, and a pilot is the stage at which they are easiest to make.

Safety, Convenience, or the First of Many Doors

So what does the student carrying the shopping actually experience when the lock clicks open?

On the evidence available: mostly convenience, described as safety. The system is genuinely easier than hunting for a card, and nobody should sneer at that. Losing a Wildcard late at night is a real problem, and a door that knows you is a real comfort. The safety case is harder to pin down. Its main security function depends on the door paying attention to people who have not enrolled, in a building where the person behind you is usually a friend, and the university has not published data on how often tailgating causes harm in its halls.

What the student is less likely to notice is the thing that matters most over time. They are not only choosing between a card and a face. They are helping to establish a norm. Every enrolment makes the face reader more useful, the card tapper more unusual and the next expansion easier to justify. That is not a conspiracy. It is how defaults work.

It would be unfair to say the University of Kentucky has done anything wrong. On the public record, it has kept the dorm pilot optional, maintained alternatives, avoided storing photographs and explained the system openly. That is better practice than many face technology deployments. But it would be naïve to treat “voluntary” as a permanent feature rather than a present policy, in a state whose new privacy law excludes public universities, using hardware that is already mandatory elsewhere on the same campus.

If voluntariness is to last, it needs to be written down in forms that are hard to quietly revise. A university serious about the standard in Alcatraz's own guide could publish, before any expansion, answers to a short list of questions. Which features are switched on, including tailgating snapshots of people who have not enrolled? How long are templates and event logs kept? The police department's pilot page does not say, promising only that details on data use and retention will be shared during enrolment. Who can see them, and when would they go to police? What would have to happen, and who would have to agree, before face entry reached libraries, dining halls or exam rooms? And will a card or phone always remain a fully equal alternative, rather than the slow lane?

None of those questions requires opposing the technology. They require only that the choice offered to students today is still a choice for the students who arrive next year.

The first door a young person learns to open with their face is a lesson in what their face is for. It can teach them that their body is a password they control, lent to an institution for a specific purpose on specific terms. Or it can teach them that being recognised is simply the price of coming home. The black box beside Woodland Glen IV cannot tell the difference. The people who decide how it is configured can.

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References

1. University of Kentucky Police Department, “Biometric Access”, police.uky.edu, accessed 24 September 2026. https://police.uky.edu/safety/biometric-access
2. Alyssa Williams, “UK installs AI facial scanning technology at residence halls”, WKYT, 19 September 2026. https://www.wkyt.com/2026/09/19/uk-installs-ai-facial-scanning-technology-residence-halls/
3. Leigh Searcy, “University of Kentucky tests AI facial scanning for campus building access”, LEX18, 17 September 2026. https://www.lex18.com/news/covering-kentucky/university-of-kentucky-tests-ai-facial-scanning-for-campus-building-access
4. Jesse Fraga, “UK installing AI scanners that take 'facial signatures' at some buildings. Here's where”, Lexington Herald-Leader (via NewsBreak), September 2026. https://www.newsbreak.com/lexington-herald-leader-1592576/4889066180360-uk-installing-ai-scanners-that-take-facial-signatures-at-some-buildings-here-s-where
5. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “Scan your face to enter your dorm? University of Kentucky installs facial recognition tech around campus”, Reason, 23 September 2026. https://reason.com/2026/09/23/scan-your-face-to-enter-your-dorm-university-of-kentucky-installs-facial-recognition-tech-around-campus/
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15. Mark Andrejevic and Neil Selwyn, “Facial recognition technology in schools: critical questions and concerns”, Learning, Media and Technology, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020, pp. 115-128. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1686014
16. Wang, Hou, Hong, Yang and Zhang, “Impact of Face-Recognition-Based Access Control System on College Students' Sense of School Identity and Belonging During COVID-19 Pandemic”, Frontiers in Psychology, 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8889067/
17. Steve Jess, “Can the Way Students Use ID Cards Predict Whether They Drop Out?”, Arizona Public Media, 2 April 2018. https://news.azpm.org/p/news-articles/2018/4/2/126689-can-the-way-students-use-id-cards-predict-dropouts/
18. ABC News (Australia), “Police access SafeWA app data for murder investigation, prompting urgent law change”, 15 June 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-15/safewa-app-sparks-urgent-law-change-after-police-access-data/100201340
19. Kentucky General Assembly, House Bill 15 (2024 Regular Session), Acts Chapter 72, Kentucky Consumer Data Protection Act. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/acts/24RS/documents/0072.pdf
20. Privacy World, “Federal Court Dismisses Biometric Privacy Class Action Brought Against University, On Basis It Was a Regulated 'Financial Institution'”, November 2022 (Powell v. DePaul University, N.D. Ill., No. 21-C-3001). https://www.privacyworld.blog/2022/11/federal-court-dismisses-biometric-privacy-class-action-brought-against-university-on-basis-it-was-a-regulated-financial-institution/
21. New York State Education Department, “State Education Department Issues Determination on Biometric Identifying Technology in Schools”, 27 September 2023. https://www.nysed.gov/news/2023/state-education-department-issues-determination-biometric-identifying-technology-schools
22. Lilah Burke, “UCLA drops plan to use facial recognition security surveillance, but other colleges may be using technology”, Inside Higher Ed, 20 February 2020. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/21/ucla-drops-plan-use-facial-recognition-security-surveillance-other-colleges-may-be
23. IEEE Spectrum, “Facial Recognition Errors Affect Millions Globally”, 30 March 2026. https://spectrum.ieee.org/facial-recognition-gone-wrong
24. Keyonna Henson, “UK brings AI facial authentication scanners to campus”, Kentucky Kernel, 28 September 2026. https://kykernel.com/128434/news/uk-brings-ai-facial-authentication-scanners-to-campus/
25. Rodney Bosch, “Alcatraz Introduces RockOS, Rock Cortex for Facial Authentication Platform”, SecurityInfoWatch, 17 September 2026. https://www.securityinfowatch.com/access-identity/biometrics/facial-recognition-solutions/news/55406004/alcatraz-introduces-rockos-rock-cortex-for-facial-authentication-platform

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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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