Starcraft Co 2- Mutalisks

And this is the second installment of the scrappy, fledgling private mercenary group trying to make a name for itself in the Koprulu sector, staying true to the plot outlined over twenty years ago.

---

The Horizons Beyond was less a ship than a city that happened to move.

Nearly forty kilometers from bow to stern, the supermassive carrier had been built for people wealthy enough to regard planets as an inconvenience. Its residential districts contained artificial parks, shopping promenades, theaters, universities, hospitals, private clubs and entire neighborhoods of luxury apartments. Hundreds of thousands of residents lived aboard while the Horizons Beyond drifted leisurely between settled systems, spending months at each destination before moving on. Most passengers could live their entire lives without ever entering the industrial decks beneath them.

That separation was precisely why the administration intended to keep the current problem quiet.

“There are six,” Administrator Kessler said.

The commander looked through the photographs on the datapad. The images weren't especially good, but they didn't need to be. The leathery wings and hooked tail were unmistakable.

“Mutalisks.”

“Yes.”

“On a ship carrying three hundred thousand people.”

“Two hundred eighty-six thousand residents, plus approximately forty thousand staff.”

“That's supposed to make me feel better?”

Kessler's expression remained professionally pleasant. The office around them overlooked an artificial lake several decks above. Sailboats moved across blue water beneath simulated sunlight. Nobody strolling along the shore had any idea that six Zerg organisms were roosting a few hundred meters beneath their feet.

“They are confined to maintenance substructure E-Seventeen,” Kessler said. “There is no evidence that they have entered inhabited portions of the vessel.”

“Yet.”

“We don't expect them to.”

“Then why hire us?”

Kessler ignored the question. “The Horizons Beyond crossed the Remora Passage twelve days ago. The route had been certified clear. Evidently that certification was incorrect. We believe a small number of Zerg organisms attached themselves to the outer hull and subsequently entered through maintenance apertures.”

“You notify the authorities?”

“No.”

“Ship security?”

“Only senior command personnel are aware.”

The commander looked up from the datapad. “You have your own security force.”

“We do.”

“And you're hiring mercenaries.”

“We require discretion.”

That explained the contract. StarCraft Co. had exactly one completed paying job to its name. There were larger mercenary outfits, better-equipped outfits and outfits that could have cleared six mutalisks before breakfast. They also charged accordingly. StarCraft Co. had submitted the lowest bid.

Kessler folded his hands. “You understand what would happen if this became public.”

“People might object to living on a ship with Zerg aboard.”

“People would panic unnecessarily. Prospective residents would cancel reservations. Existing residents would reconsider long-term contracts. Our insurers would become involved. Regulators would demand inspections. Financial media would sensationalize an isolated maintenance issue. The company's share price could lose twenty percent before anyone bothered establishing whether there was actually a threat.”

“There are six mutalisks living next to your engine.”

“And I am paying you to make that number zero.”

The commander glanced through the contract again. “Why infantry?”

“Location. E-Seventeen runs directly beneath the outer hull adjacent to the primary engine assembly. Missiles are obviously unacceptable. Fighters cannot engage without risking damage to the vessel. Even some heavier infantry weapons are prohibited.”

“So rifles.”

“Rifles.”

The commander considered what StarCraft Co. could afford. The Varga contract had given them working capital, but not much. Six marines and two medics were available without putting the company back into debt.

Against six mutalisks, it wasn't a comfortable number.

It was enough.

“We'll do it.”

The eight soldiers entered E-Seventeen through a freight elevator normally used by engineering crews. Their equipment had been transported aboard inside unmarked maintenance containers. Officially, StarCraft Co. did not exist on the passenger manifest.

The difference between the upper decks and the maintenance substructure was astonishing. Artificial sunlight disappeared. Decorative architecture became bare steel. Corridors widened and narrowed unpredictably around machinery never intended to be seen by residents. Pipes thicker than a man ran overhead. Coolant pumps vibrated beneath grated floors. Every few seconds the entire structure produced a low metallic groan as stresses shifted through the enormous ship.

The commander spoke through their headsets. “Remember what you're hunting. One mutalisk catches you in the open, somebody dies. Nobody wanders. Nobody chases. You see one, you call it.”

The marines acknowledged.

They had studied everything available about mutalisk behavior before deployment. The creatures were fast, aggressive and surprisingly intelligent predators. Their glaive wurms could tear through infantry and then ricochet into additional targets. Clustering together was dangerous. Spreading too far apart was worse.

So they moved in pairs.

Two marines advanced while two covered. The remaining two protected the medics. Nobody entered an intersection until every adjoining corridor had been checked.

They found the first mutalisk twenty-three minutes later.

Technically, it found them.

A maintenance technician's helmet lay in the middle of the corridor ahead.

“Stop.”

The formation froze.

One marine raised his rifle toward the ceiling.

Nothing.

Another checked the pipes.

Nothing.

The commander studied their helmet feeds.

“Back up.”

They moved backward.

The mutalisk dropped from beneath the walkway behind them.

“CONTACT!”

It struck one marine before anyone fired. The glaive tore across his shoulder armor, ricocheted from the wall and buried itself in another man's thigh. Both went down.

The other four marines opened fire.

The corridor became a storm of muzzle flashes. The mutalisk tried to climb, wings beating furiously inside the confined space, but there was nowhere to gain altitude. Gauss rounds shredded one wing. It struck a pipe, spun and crashed onto the walkway.

They kept firing until it stopped moving.

The medics immediately went to work.

Neither marine was dead.

That became lesson number one.

The mutalisks knew how to hide.

They found the second roosting above a coolant manifold.

This time they didn't approach it.

The maintenance schematics showed three routes into the chamber. Two were sealed remotely. The marines positioned themselves behind machinery along the third.

Then engineering increased coolant pressure through the manifold.

The sudden vibration disturbed the creature.

It dropped from its perch and flew directly toward the only open exit.

Six rifles were waiting.

It survived less than four seconds.

The third was harder.

They tracked droppings and scraps of insulation through nearly half a kilometer of substructure before discovering that the creature had taken refuge inside an inactive ventilation shaft. Sending marines inside would have been suicide.

So they didn't.

They sealed one end and connected a portable maintenance blower to the other.

The mutalisk tolerated the increasing airflow for almost a minute before emerging.

Four marines fired from one side.

Two waited on the other.

The creature chose the direction with fewer enemies.

That was exactly what the commander expected.

The two marines retreated while firing, drawing it through a narrow maintenance passage. The mutalisk followed until it reached a bulkhead doorway.

The door closed behind it.

The other four marines were waiting on the opposite side.

Crossfire killed it.

The fourth was almost anticlimactic. They found it feeding on something beneath a maintenance platform. The marines surrounded the chamber without entering, then one tossed a metal tool down the opposite corridor.

The mutalisk investigated the sound.

Six rifles opened fire from three directions.

Four down.

Two remaining.

The last two were different.

They had nested together.

The chamber was enormous, a vertical maintenance cavity beside one of the primary engine's magnetic containment assemblies. Catwalks crossed open space at multiple levels. Machinery filled the lower sections. Above, the ceiling disappeared into darkness.

The two mutalisks hung together beneath an overhead support structure.

The commander studied the feeds.

“Don't engage.”

Nobody argued.

Six marines could kill one mutalisk quickly enough. Two attacking simultaneously could rip through the entire squad before they brought either down.

Worse, the chamber offered the creatures room to fly.

They withdrew.

For nearly twenty minutes, nobody fired a shot.

Instead they studied the schematics.

One marine eventually noticed something.

“Commander, what's this?”

A maintenance crane ran through the chamber on overhead rails. It was normally used to remove engine components weighing hundreds of tons.

“Can engineering operate it remotely?”

The commander contacted Kessler.

Three minutes later they had access.

That gave them half a plan.

The other half came from one of the medics.

“Why do we have to fight both?”

The commander looked at her camera feed.

“Explain.”

“They're animals. Separate them.”

The chamber had four pressure doors. The crane couldn't reach the mutalisks directly without disturbing both, but it could move something else.

A replacement heat exchanger sat on a maintenance cradle near the far wall.

It weighed forty-three tons.

The marines attached a chain to it and withdrew.

The crane lifted the exchanger.

Then it slammed the forty-three-ton block of machinery against the opposite wall.

The sound was extraordinary.

Both mutalisks woke.

One immediately launched toward the disturbance.

The other hesitated.

That hesitation was enough.

A pressure door dropped between them.

The first mutalisk turned.

Six marines were waiting.

They fired from behind engine machinery, deliberately spreading far enough apart that its glaive could not efficiently ricochet between targets. The creature attacked one position. Those marines withdrew while the others fired into its flank. It turned toward them. The first pair resumed firing.

They rotated.

Again.

Again.

The mutalisk couldn't commit to a target without exposing itself to four other rifles.

Eventually one wing failed.

It crashed onto a catwalk.

The marines finished it.

Five.

The final mutalisk was furious.

It struck the pressure door repeatedly from the opposite side. The metal held, but nobody expected that to last forever.

The marines reloaded.

Two were wounded. Ammunition was getting low. The last creature now knew exactly where they were.

The commander looked at the maintenance schematic again.

“Move everyone to level three.”

The squad climbed.

Below them, the pressure door buckled.

“Commander?” one marine asked.

“Keep moving.”

They reached the upper catwalk.

The door failed.

The mutalisk came through immediately.

Nobody fired.

It saw them above.

The creature climbed.

“Now.”

The maintenance crane moved.

The forty-three-ton heat exchanger swung across the chamber like a pendulum.

The mutalisk never saw it.

The impact caught the creature in midair and carried it across the chamber. Mutalisk and heat exchanger struck the engine housing together with enough force to shake the catwalk.

The creature fell thirty meters.

It hit the lower deck.

Still alive.

“Of course,” one marine muttered.

The squad descended carefully.

The mutalisk tried to rise.

Six rifles finished the job.

Administrator Kessler met the commander two hours later.

There was no celebration. No announcement. No commendation ceremony. Nobody aboard the Horizons Beyond would ever know anything had happened.

That was exactly what Kessler wanted.

“Six confirmed?”

“Six.”

“No additional organisms?”

“We swept the entire affected substructure. Nothing.”

“And casualties?”

“None. Four injuries. All recoverable.”

Kessler nodded.

The commander slid the report across the desk. “You should still notify the authorities.”

“That will be an administrative decision.”

“Meaning no.”

“Meaning your contractual obligations ended when the sixth organism died.”

The commander understood.

Kessler transferred the remaining payment.

Then he added something else.

A discretionary bonus.

Not enormous, but enough to matter to a company that had completed only its second contract.

“You were inexpensive,” Kessler said. “More importantly, you were quiet.”

“That's quite an endorsement.”

“For our purposes, it is.” Kessler stood and offered his hand. “The Horizons Beyond has extensive operations throughout the sector. Problems occasionally arise for which conventional security services are… inappropriate.”

The commander shook it.

“We'll keep the channel open.”

“I recommend that you do.”

By the time the Horizons Beyond entered its next system, the damaged maintenance sections had been repaired. The wounded marines were recovering. The official ship log contained nothing more alarming than an unscheduled inspection of engine substructure E-Seventeen.

On the residential decks, artificial sunlight rose over the lake precisely on schedule. Restaurants opened. Children went to school. Investors checked the Horizons Beyond share price and saw nothing unusual.

StarCraft Co. had completed its second paying contract.

And, for the first time, someone with very deep pockets had remembered their name.

Starcraft Co. 1- Intro + Zerglings

A little over two decades ago I created a Starcraft Brood War custom campaign called “Starcraft Co”. I had a lot of fun making it using the built in map editor that came with the game, and added missions to it periodically over time. I even had a sequel planned but never got around to it. Unfortunately the map files are lost to time. Probably one some hard drive that's been decomposing in a landfill or recycled for scrap ages ago. This was before the ubiquity of the cloud.

The basic premise of the campaign is that you are working with a partner to start a private military corporation that will operate across the galaxy taking high-risk, lucrative contracts. I had the face of Arcturus Mengsk for the cut scenes as your partner because, for anyone who played that game, the number of character animations was... limited. In this version of the Starcraft Universe, the Zerg are not a centralized hivemind intelligence intent on galactic domination/consumption. Instead, they are a disparate alien race that travels in roving swarms. More of a serious nuisance than an existential threat. Their numbers are vast, but they lack any centralized coordination. The Terrans are humans that have spread across the galaxy and are run by a corrupt, bloated, bureaucratic, capitalist interplanetary government. Humans have limited contact with the Protoss, but they are an older alien race with vastly different technology. They haven't been much of a threat because they are separated into different tribes that constantly war with one another.

While the campaign files are lost, I still remember the general plot pretty well considering its age. There were somewhere in the mid 20s in terms of missions, so I might miss a few but I think I can reconstruct most of them. I thought it would be fun to turn it into an episodic narrative, with a narrative based on each mission. So, without further adieu, Mission I- Zerglings (i'm going to try to maintain the exact titles when I can remember, I wasn't very creative back then apparently, and will fill in the blanks as best I can. A few missions may be lost)

Mission I- Zerglings

Dr. Emil Varga had been very careful about the wording of his request. SECURITY CONTRACT — PRIVATE RESEARCH FACILITY. Hazardous wildlife removal. Subterranean environment. Discretion required. Compensation: 20,000 credits. There was no mention of the Zerg.

“There are perhaps thirty,” Varga said.

The commander studied him across the kitchen table. The scientist's home was unremarkable: cheap cabinets, an aging refrigerator, dirty dishes stacked beside the sink. Nothing about it suggested that a private biological laboratory extended beneath the basement.

“Perhaps?”

“Twenty-eight as of yesterday morning.”

“And now?”

Varga hesitated. That hesitation was enough.

“Forty thousand.”

Varga nearly came out of his chair. “Forty? The contract was for twenty!”

“The contract said hazardous wildlife. You have a Zerg infestation.”

“Zerglings. Only zerglings.”

“Then you won't have any trouble finding someone else.”

Varga glanced toward the basement door. Somewhere below them came a muffled metallic crash. “Twenty-five.”

“Forty.”

“Thirty.”

The commander considered it. The job was ugly, but simple enough in principle. The budget only allowed three personnel: two firebats and a medic. Against a few dozen zerglings, that should be sufficient if they were careful. More importantly, every hour spent negotiating was another hour the creatures had to spread.

“Thirty.”

Varga exhaled. “Agreed.”

“One more thing. How did they get here?”

The scientist's expression changed. “I acquired several specimens.”

“Several living Zerg specimens?”

“They were contained.”

“Apparently not.”

“They were sedated. Juvenile organisms. There was no queen, no hatchery, no mature reproductive organism of any kind. They should not have been capable of establishing a viable population.”

The commander looked toward the basement door. “You said you had twenty-eight yesterday. How many did you acquire?”

Varga didn't answer.

“How many?”

“Six.”

That changed things.

The commander leaned forward. “Zerglings don't reproduce on their own.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Are you?”

Varga's irritation briefly overcame his fear. “I am a xenobiologist.”

“And yet you've got six zerglings turning into thirty in your basement.”

“They've been consuming biological material from my experiments.”

“What kind of material?”

“Cultured biomass. Artificial tissue. Some experimental regenerative substrates.”

“Anything designed for rapid cellular replication?”

Another hesitation.

The commander stood. “Thirty thousand. Half now.”

Varga transferred the money.

The commander opened the channel to the three soldiers waiting outside. “You're going in.”

The firebats were Cole Rourke and Jin Mercer. The medic was Mara Venn. They weren't specialists, exterminators, or xenobiologists. They were grunts who had been given a job and enough information to understand that getting surrounded would kill them.

They entered through Varga's basement. The first flight of stairs was completely ordinary, descending past painted drywall, shelves of household supplies and a washer and dryer. Behind a reinforced security door, however, the house gave way to something else entirely. A steel staircase descended through a concrete shaft lined with pipes, cables and ventilation ducts. At the bottom, another security door hung partially open.

“Power?” Rourke asked.

“Still active in most sectors,” Varga replied over the radio.

“Cameras?”

“Offline.”

“Figures.”

The commander came over the channel. “You've got the floor plan. Clear clockwise. Room by room. Seal everything behind you. Don't split up and don't chase anything.”

Rourke lowered his visor. “Copy.”

Mercer did the same. Behind them, Venn checked the seals on her medical kit and drew her sidearm. The two firebats ignited their weapons.

They went in.

The first room was empty. The second contained three zerglings clustered around a stainless-steel specimen tray, tearing strips from something pink and fibrous that had overflowed its container. Mercer fired first. The confined laboratory erupted in orange light. One zergling died almost immediately. Another charged directly through the flames, its burning carapace cracking as Rourke caught it with a second stream. The third fled through the opposite doorway.

Mercer started forward.

“Negative,” the commander said immediately. “Stay on your route.”

Mercer stopped.

They watched the burning zergling disappear around the corner. Then Rourke closed the door behind them and marked the room clear.

They learned the rhythm quickly. Rourke entered first while Mercer covered the doorway. Then Mercer advanced while Rourke shifted to cover another angle. Venn remained behind them, watching vents, ceilings and previously cleared entrances. Whenever possible, they didn't attack the zerglings at all. They made noise, drew them into corridors, and let the creatures charge into overlapping streams of flame. A firebat's greatest weakness against zerglings was the distance the creatures could cover before dying. Two firebats firing together solved much of that problem.

By the seventh room they had killed fourteen.

That was when they found the biomass.

It covered half the laboratory floor. Thick ropes of pale tissue had burst from shattered cultivation tanks and spread across the tiles. Portions of it twitched despite being disconnected from any obvious organism. Zerglings had burrowed into it like animals feeding inside a carcass.

Mercer stared through his visor. “Doc?”

“Yes?”

“You've got a meat garden.”

“That terminology is scientifically meaningless.”

“I'm looking at a meat garden.”

Venn crouched near the doorway without entering. “It's growing.”

Varga didn't answer immediately.

“Doctor?”

“It shouldn't be.”

Something moved beneath the tissue.

Then several things moved.

“Back!”

The biomass erupted. Eight zerglings came through almost simultaneously. Rourke fired and the front rank vanished into flame, but the others charged through their dying kin. One slammed into him hard enough to throw nearly half a ton of armored firebat backward. Another cleared him entirely and hit Mercer from the side. Its claws found the flexible joint beneath his left arm.

His armor alarm screamed.

Venn fired twice. The first round ricocheted from carapace. The second entered the creature's open mouth. Mercer grabbed it with both gauntlets, hauled it away from his body and threw it against the wall. Rourke rolled onto one knee and incinerated it.

“MOVE!”

They retreated. Rourke slapped the emergency control as he crossed the threshold and the laboratory door slammed shut. Something hit the other side hard enough to bow the metal.

Mercer leaned against the wall. Blood was already pooling inside his armor.

Venn went to work.

“How bad?” the commander asked.

“Deep punctures beneath the arm. No arterial bleed. I can stabilize him.”

“Do it.”

The three listened to zerglings clawing against the door while Venn packed and sealed the wound. After several minutes Mercer flexed his arm experimentally.

“Can you fight?” the commander asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then we keep moving.”

They changed tactics.

Varga's laboratory had been constructed with an isolation ventilation system so individual rooms could be sealed during a containment failure. The Zerg had damaged parts of it, but enough remained operational to manipulate airflow. Mercer opened an access panel in the neighboring utility room while Rourke traced the duct leading into the biomass laboratory.

Venn watched him push his flamethrower nozzle into it. “That seems like a terrible idea.”

Rourke pulled the trigger.

Fire roared into the ventilation shaft.

Thirty seconds later smoke began pouring beneath the laboratory door. Screeching followed. They waited until it stopped before entering. Five zerglings were dead inside and most of the exposed biomass was burning.

“Commander,” Venn said, looking at the remains. “You seeing this?”

“I see it.”

One of the dead zerglings was small.

Very small.

Varga came over the radio. “Move your camera closer.”

Venn did.

The scientist was silent for several seconds.

“That wasn't one of mine.”

Nobody answered.

“It can't be,” Varga continued. “The original specimens were all approximately the same developmental age.”

Rourke looked around the room. “So where'd Junior come from?”

“I don't know.”

The commander did not like that answer. “Doctor, is there anything else in this facility capable of producing Zerg organisms?”

“No.”

“A queen?”

“No.”

“Larvae?”

“No.”

“Eggs?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then we've got a problem.”

They kept moving.

The infestation became worse deeper inside the complex. They killed nine zerglings in the incubation wing and four more in storage. Several were noticeably smaller than the others. Two came through a ceiling panel and nearly reached Venn before Mercer intercepted them. Another survived long enough to rake its claws across Rourke's faceplate, leaving three deep grooves and cracking the visor. His left-side visibility became little more than distorted shapes.

Venn wanted him pulled out.

The commander refused. “We retreat now, whatever is producing these things gets time to produce more.”

Rourke wiped blood from inside his visor. “I'm good.”

“You're not good,” Venn said.

“Good enough.”

That became the standard.

They stopped treating the laboratory as terrain and started treating it as a weapon. Steel tables became barricades. Fuel was sprayed across corridors and ignited only after zerglings committed to a charge. Venn discovered that several doors could be controlled through local terminals, allowing them to separate packs before engaging them. In the refrigeration chamber, they trapped six by opening one entrance, drawing them inside, then cycling the door remotely. The temperature dropped far below freezing.

Twenty minutes later they returned. The zerglings were still alive, but barely moving.

Mercer finished them.

“I'm starting to enjoy science.”

Varga's voice came over the radio. “Cold doesn't kill them that quickly.”

Mercer looked at the frozen bodies. “Fire does.”

They continued.

Five hours after entering the facility, they reached the main cultivation laboratory.

Varga had warned them about it from the beginning. Most of the experimental biomass had been stored there. The door was open and the lights beyond it had failed. Rourke's damaged visor compensated as best it could.

Movement appeared in the darkness.

A lot of movement.

Mercer checked his fuel. “Twenty-one percent.”

“Eighteen,” Rourke replied.

Venn looked past them into the darkened room. “How many?”

Nobody answered.

The commander watched their helmet feeds. Shapes moved among overturned tanks. Some were full-grown zerglings.

Others weren't.

“Doctor,” the commander said. “What am I looking at?”

Varga didn't answer.

“Varga.”

“I don't know.”

There was genuine fear in his voice now.

The commander counted what he could see. There was too much biomass, too many blind corners and not enough fuel. Sending the three soldiers into that room would turn a successful extermination into a suicide mission.

“Fall back.”

Rourke hesitated.

“You heard me. Back upstairs.”

Varga was waiting when they emerged. His expression changed when he saw Mercer's torn armor and Rourke's ruined visor.

“You're leaving?”

“No,” the commander said over the radio. “They're improvising.”

Ten minutes later, the three returned carrying two propane cylinders from Varga's house, a length of garden hose, several containers of industrial solvent and a sack of flour from the kitchen.

Varga watched through their cameras. “What exactly are you planning?”

Mercer answered. “Science.”

“That is not science.”

“Starting to sound like a matter of professional disagreement.”

They built the trap in the corridor outside the cultivation laboratory. Fuel first. Solvent next. The propane cylinders went at the center. The flour was dumped into an air intake where the ventilation system could disperse it into the corridor as fine particulate.

Venn examined their handiwork. “I'd like the record to show that the medical professional objects to all of this.”

“Objection noted,” the commander replied. “Get behind cover.”

Rourke approached the cultivation laboratory and struck the metal doorway repeatedly with a wrench.

The darkness came alive.

He ran.

Zerglings poured into the corridor. Ten. Fifteen. More followed. Adults came first, fast enough that Rourke barely kept ahead of them. Smaller creatures followed behind, scrambling over one another in their frenzy.

“Wait,” Mercer said.

Rourke crossed the mark.

“Wait.”

The swarm reached the solvent.

“Now.”

Mercer fired.

The corridor became the sun.

The explosion knocked Varga's washing machine half a meter across his basement floor. Dust fell from the kitchen ceiling. Somewhere outside, a neighbor's dog began barking.

For several seconds there was nothing on the radio but static.

Then Venn coughed.

“We're alive.”

Varga collapsed into a chair.

The three soldiers emerged twenty minutes later. Mercer's armor was torn open beneath one arm. Rourke's visor was destroyed. Venn had a burn across one hand and a long cut down her thigh. All three were walking.

Behind them, the underground laboratory was blackened, flooded in places, and probably going to require hundreds of thousands of credits in repairs.

Nothing inside it was moving.

Rourke uploaded the final count.

Forty-seven.

Varga stared at the number. “That's impossible.”

The commander answered him. “You started with six.”

“Yes.”

“And we killed forty-seven.”

“Yes.”

“How long ago did they escape?”

“Approximately seventy-two hours.”

The commander was silent.

Varga looked toward the basement door. The relief that had been on his face moments earlier slowly disappeared.

“There was no queen,” he said.

“You've mentioned that.”

“No. You don't understand.” Varga looked genuinely shaken now. “There was no queen. No hatchery. No larvae. Nothing. Zerglings cannot establish a reproductive cycle independently. They don't work that way.”

The commander looked at the mission report again. Forty-seven confirmed kills. Multiple juvenile organisms. Six original specimens.

“Apparently these did.”

Varga said nothing.

The remaining fifteen thousand credits arrived a moment later.

The commander confirmed the transfer, then closed the contract.

Downstairs, beneath scorched concrete and collapsed laboratory equipment, the last pieces of Dr. Varga's experimental biomass continued to smolder.

For now, at least, nothing moved.

“What goes around comes around.” Now, the question. does that quote mean anything? No, i just thought it would be funny to throw something unnecessarily profound at the beginning and then admit i have no idea what im talking about. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about my mother lately, i havent visited her grave in some time. long enough that admitting it feels worse than actually counting the days. i tell myself ill go soon, then days become weeks. weeks become another month, another excuse. its weird how easy it is to avoid a place when you know exactly what you’ll feel once you get there. And then there are the dreams. for gods sake, leave me alone. i already sleep like ive been left halfway through something interesting with these wrist restrainers and a broken door. which doesnt sound pleasant to begin with. my dreams, naturally, have decided to make it worse. sometimes they feel so real that i wake up and have to sit there for a while, trying to figure out which part actually happened and which parts my brain decided would be a fun little extension, because it had nothing better to do. there are times where i have to make a guess. No, not remember. Guess. was that a dream? did i actually say that? did i actually see her? was that a memory? or was my mind just bored enough to manufacture an entire little world and then leave me to deal with it when i woke up? they are convincing. my dreams dont always feel like dreams. they feel like memories that haven’t happened yet or memories that never happened at all. sometimes i wake up carrying the emotion of something that doesnt exist, and somehow the emotion still feels completely real. whatever, thats funny to talk about. i guess ill always fall for my own “tricks”.

Thats enough for today, enough thoughts, enough complaints, i need a cigarette.

Sincerely, Barely trusting my own memory.

Chapter 1: The Prayer You Almost Do Not Want to Say Out Loud

It is late enough that the house has finally gone quiet. The lights are low, the dishes are still in the sink, and your phone is charging across the room. You know this would normally be the kind of moment when you pray, but tonight you sit there with nothing coming. Not anger. Not tears. Not peace. Just a strange blankness that makes you wonder whether you should even try. If you have been living in that silence, this message for when you feel spiritually numb and cannot feel God is not asking you to become more emotional. It is asking you to stop hiding from what is already true.

There is a sentence many believers are uncomfortable saying: “God, I do not feel close to You.” It sounds dangerous because we have learned to associate strong faith with confidence, gratitude, certainty, and visible devotion. So when the heart becomes quiet, we often cover it with religious language. We tell God what we think a faithful person should say instead of what the person sitting in the room actually feels. That is why this encouragement for Christians struggling with spiritual dryness and a tired faith begins in a place that can feel almost too simple: you are allowed to tell God the truth.

Maybe the truth is that you are tired of praying about the same thing. Maybe you have asked Him to change a situation for so long that you no longer know what another prayer would add. Maybe there was a time when you felt His presence easily, and now you cannot remember the last time something inside you truly responded. You still believe. You have not rejected Jesus. You just do not know how to make yourself feel what you think you should feel.

I think many people make spiritual numbness heavier by keeping it secret.

You can sit beside someone in church, sing the same song, hear the same message, and carry an entirely different experience inside. They may lift their hands while you are wondering why the words are not reaching you. You may feel guilty because you remember loving that song once. You may look around and think everyone else has something you have lost.

Then you go home and say nothing about it.

There is a man somewhere tonight who has spent the last year solving problems for everybody else. His family calls when something breaks. People at work depend on him. Someone close to him is going through a hard season. He keeps handling the next thing because that is what he does. When he finally gets ten minutes alone, he realizes he does not feel much of anything. He assumes the emptiness means his spiritual life is failing.

But maybe his heart has simply been living without enough room to breathe.

God knows the difference.

That matters because you may be accusing yourself of something Jesus is not accusing you of.

There are times when numbness can point toward something that needs attention. We can drift. We can become distracted. We can avoid God. But not every quiet season is rebellion, and treating every quiet season like rebellion can make you afraid of your own humanity.

Sometimes you have been disappointed for too long.

Sometimes grief has worn you down.

Sometimes life has required so much emotional energy that when you finally come to prayer, there is simply not much left.

You do not have to solve which one it is tonight.

You can begin with honesty.

“Jesus, I do not know what is happening inside me.”

That is enough to start.

Do not rush to add a better sentence. Do not explain yourself. Do not promise that you will do better tomorrow. Let yourself sit there for a minute without turning the prayer into another responsibility.

The strange thing about honesty is that it can feel less spiritual than performance, even though it may bring you closer to the truth. We often think prayer needs to sound hopeful before it can be faithful. But there are moments when the most faithful prayer is simply refusing to pretend.

Jesus already knows what you feel before you name it.

He knows you are disappointed.

He knows you are tired.

He knows you miss the version of yourself who prayed more easily.

He knows you are frightened by the silence.

You are not giving Him bad news.

You are finally letting yourself stop carrying it alone.

And perhaps that is where you begin again—not by trying to feel God, but by allowing yourself to speak honestly to the God who has never needed you to pretend.

Chapter 2: Staying With God When Nothing Inside You Moves

The next afternoon, you may find yourself standing in a grocery store aisle with a basket in your hand, trying to remember what you came to buy. Your mind has been full all day. You answered people, handled responsibilities, drove where you needed to go, and kept moving. Then, for one strange second beneath the bright store lights, you realize how tired you are. Not just physically tired. Tired in that deeper place where even prayer has started to feel like another thing you should be doing better.

You do not have to turn that moment into a spiritual test.

You can simply recognize it.

There are seasons when returning to God does not feel like returning home. It feels more like sitting beside someone you trust when you do not have anything to say. The relationship is still there. The love is still there. The silence does not cancel either one.

This is where I would encourage you to stop asking yourself whether you feel enough and start noticing whether you are still willing to remain.

You opened this article.

You are still thinking about God.

Some part of you still wants closeness, even if you cannot produce the feeling.

That matters.

You may have spent so much time trying to get your old spiritual life back that you have missed the possibility that God can meet you differently now. Maybe you used to pray for thirty minutes and now you can barely manage three. Maybe you once filled pages in a journal, and now the notebook sits untouched beside the bed. Maybe worship once brought tears, and now you listen quietly while folding laundry.

None of that automatically means you are moving backward.

Faith can become quieter without becoming weaker.

There is a woman sitting in a hospital waiting room tonight with a paper cup of coffee she no longer wants. Someone she loves is behind a closed door. She has already prayed every prayer she knows how to pray. Eventually she stops asking for new words and simply whispers, “Jesus.”

That may be all she has.

It is still prayer.

Sometimes we complicate our relationship with God because we believe every spiritual moment must contain insight, emotion, clarity, or relief. But there are days when faith is simply staying turned toward Him.

If you are spiritually numb, try letting your prayers become smaller for a while. When you wake up, say, “Thank You for another day.” Before a hard conversation, say, “Help me.” When fear rises, say, “Stay close.” Before sleep, say, “I am still here.”

Those prayers are not inferior because they are short.

You can also stop judging every Bible reading by how strongly it affects you. Read a few verses and let them exist without demanding an emotional response. Truth does not stop being truth because your heart is tired.

And give yourself permission to notice your actual life. Maybe you need rest. Maybe you need to talk to somebody. Maybe you need to admit that the last year hurt more than you have allowed yourself to say. Spiritual honesty sometimes begins with ordinary honesty.

There may come a morning when you notice something small. You look through the window and feel grateful for the sunlight. A verse stays with you after you close the Bible. You pray without deciding to pray. You realize the silence does not scare you quite as much.

Do not rush that moment either.

Let faith return at its own pace.

And if you are not there yet, you do not have to be.

Jesus is not standing at some distant finish line waiting for the emotionally restored version of you to arrive. He is with the tired person you are right now.

You can stay there with Him.

You can tell the truth.

You can remain.

Sometimes that is what faith looks like before it feels like anything again.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

The decisive document in the fight over western Coweta County, Georgia, was not a protest sign or a petition. It was a line on a zoning map. For years, 829 acres of pine and hardwood about thirty-five miles south-west of Atlanta had carried the designation Rural Conservation, a category the county's own comprehensive plan reserved for what it called rural places and complete communities. In April 2026, on a three-to-two vote of the county board of commissioners, that land became Industrial. The change took seconds to enact and will take a decade to build out: nine data centre buildings, two substations, a campus valued at seventeen billion dollars and rated at nine hundred megawatts, roughly the output of a nuclear reactor, dropped into a landscape whose defining feature until that afternoon had been that almost nothing was there.

The residents who had spent fifteen months trying to stop it were, by then, extremely well organised. Laura Beth, the chairwoman of a group called Citizens for Rural Coweta, had learned in early 2025 that a hyperscale campus of more than 4.9 million square feet was proposed to run past her back garden, and had started a Facebook group, Stop Project Sail, which TIME reported in July had grown beyond eight thousand members. They read the ordinances. They turned up to every hearing. They had no financial interest in the outcome beyond the water in their wells and the value of their houses. And they lost, by one vote, on a body of five people.

I keep returning to that margin, because it exposes what the national argument about artificial intelligence tends to skip. We debate whether the machines are worth their cost. The question Coweta County actually had to answer was procedural: who possesses the authority to trade a place's groundwater, its grid capacity and its rural character for a facility it did not ask for and will not use? That has an obvious legal answer in most American jurisdictions, and a deeply unsatisfying one. The bodies with formal power to decide are frequently not the bodies containing the people who bear the consequences. The harm has one footprint and the franchise has another, and the AI build-out has made the gap between them impossible to ignore.

A Country Learning to Say No

The gap is being noticed at scale. On 18 July 2026, according to Reuters reporting carried in newspapers across the country, opponents staged 142 protests across 42 states, coordinated by a group calling itself HumansFirst and described as the first nationally organised day of action against the AI build-out. Texas hosted eighteen events, more than any other state; Georgia eleven; California eight. HumansFirst was co-founded by Amy Kremer, a veteran of the Tea Party and of Women for Trump, who has compared the mood to 2009 while insisting the campaign is nonpartisan, and who blames both parties for letting the companies build at this scale without troubling to consult the people who will live beside it.

The protests are the visible edge of something larger. The Information reported in June 2026 that more than three hundred American cities, towns and counties had adopted bans or moratoriums on data centre development. Data Center Watch, the tracker maintained by the AI research firm 10a Labs, counted 833 active opposition groups across forty-nine states by March 2026, up from 396 at the end of 2025, and calculated that in the first quarter of 2026 alone at least seventy-five projects worth a combined 130 billion dollars were blocked or delayed. Taken cumulatively since the start of 2025, the tracker puts the value of projects blocked or delayed at roughly 286 billion dollars.

Public opinion has moved with it. A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,531 Americans, published on 11 June 2026, found that just fourteen per cent were comfortable with a data centre being built near them, and that fifty-seven per cent would oppose one in their community, including two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans. Only a third agreed that building data centres at the current pace was mainly a good thing. Seventy-seven per cent were worried that AI would make electricity more expensive, and Republicans, Democrats and independents worried about it in close to equal proportion. This is not a partisan split so much as a broad, cross-cutting discomfort, and it has begun to register at the level of state executives. On 14 July 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62, imposing what her office described as the first statewide moratorium in the United States on new hyperscale data centres, pausing discretionary state environmental permits for facilities drawing fifty megawatts or more for up to a year while regulators build a framework. New York's average residential electricity price has climbed by close to sixty-eight per cent since 2019. “They drive up costs for local ratepayers,” Hochul said of the facilities, “and I refuse to let those costs get passed down to New Yorkers.”

What happened in New York before that order is the more revealing half of the story, and it is this essay's question in miniature. On 4 June 2026 the state legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a one-year moratorium on state permits for data centres drawing twenty megawatts or more, with dedicated rate classes, transparency standards and impact studies attached. The Senate carried it forty-four to sixteen, the Assembly one hundred and two to thirty-nine. Hochul did not sign it. Six weeks later she issued an executive order of her own, and commentators now expect the Act to be vetoed. The thresholds are the tell: the chamber closest to the affected districts drew its line at twenty megawatts, the single executive at fifty, more than twice as permissive. Both instruments are lawful, both get reported as a moratorium, and they are not the same policy. The choice between them was settled by which office holds the pen.

One widely repeated figure deserves care. Reporting on the backlash, including TIME's, has cited electricity price rises of up to 267 per cent in states with dense data centre activity. That number originates in a Bloomberg analysis of wholesale prices at tens of thousands of individual grid nodes, which found that in some locations near major clusters the monthly wholesale cost of power was as much as 267 per cent higher than five years earlier. It is a wholesale, node-level finding rather than a residential bill, and when Senator Elizabeth Warren used it as a household figure in June 2026 PolitiFact rated the claim mostly false. The distinction matters, because the ease with which the number has migrated into the shorthand of the debate is itself a symptom of how little reliable, locally specific information reaches the people asked to accept these facilities.

The Difference Between By-Right and By-Permission

To understand where authority actually sits, you have to understand a distinction almost nobody outside land-use law thinks about until it lands on them. In American zoning, a use is either permitted by right in a given district, meaning a developer who meets the technical standards is approved administratively through site-plan review, or it requires a discretionary act, a rezoning or special exception, which triggers public hearings and a legislative vote.

For most of the industry's history, in most of the places it grew, it was by right. Loudoun County, Virginia, the densest concentration of data centres on earth, permitted them by right across much of its industrially zoned land, which is precisely how the corridor filled so fast and so quietly. That changed on 18 March 2025, when the board of supervisors voted seven to two to make data centres a special exception use in districts where they had been by right, converting an administrative rubber stamp into a legislative process with staff review and public hearings. Even then, the board grandfathered applications submitted before 12 February 2025 for projects more than five hundred feet from homes. The reform arrived after the pipeline had already formed.

The by-right question determines whether there is a public decision at all. Where a data centre is by right, there is no hearing to attend, no vote to lobby, no record to appeal. The community's only formal opportunity to shape the outcome came years earlier, when the zoning map was drawn, in a proceeding almost nobody attended because nobody imagined what would eventually be built there. The decision had, in effect, already been taken by the county's past self on behalf of its future one.

Where discretion does exist, the procedural rules become the whole battlefield. The most consequential legal defeat the industry has suffered in Virginia turned on a technicality of notice. On 7 August 2025, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Irving voided the rezoning for the Prince William Digital Gateway, a project of more than two thousand acres beside the Manassas battlefield, holding the ordinances void ab initio because the county had failed to comply with the state code's public-notice requirements: the advertisement for the December 2023 hearing was published three days before it. The Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed unanimously on 31 March 2026. The county and the developer Compass Datacenters withdrew from the litigation in April. QTS, the Blackstone-owned operator, petitioned the Supreme Court of Virginia in May through an affiliate, then withdrew the petition on 2 July 2026, leaving the lower rulings standing, and after a Court of Appeals order on 29 July the rezonings are void and the land reverts to the district it held before. The largest data centre campus ever proposed in the United States, some 2,100 acres of it, is dead. Years of civic argument about water, viewsheds and historic land hinged on the calendar arithmetic of a legal notice, because that was the only lever the law actually handed the objectors. The lever worked. The project was not defeated on water, or on viewshed, or on any ground the community had spent years assembling. It was defeated on the date a newspaper advertisement ran.

Ken Confidential

The second structural feature that determines who decides is information, and here the asymmetry has been engineered deliberately. In July 2026, Public Citizen published a report by Deanna Noël titled The Secret Data Center Buildout, documenting the routine use of non-disclosure agreements between developers and the public officials who will vote on their projects. It found that eighty per cent of Virginia localities with proposed or existing data centres have NDAs in place, and that at least ten states have introduced bills restricting the practice. Some agreements forbid officials from revealing that discussions are occurring, that confidential information has been received, or even that an NDA exists.

The Minnesota Star Tribune documented the same machinery in its own state, reporting that eight cities, two counties, at least one state agency and a school district had signed such agreements; of twelve cities the paper approached with known data centre proposals, only four had never signed one. Leslie Krueger, the University of Minnesota's assistant vice president for planning, space and real estate, spent August 2023 corresponding about Meta's Rosemount campus, code-named Project Bigfoot, with a company representative who identified himself to her only as “Ken Confidential”. Further north, in Hermantown near Duluth, city officials knew from September 2024 that a large project was proposed and declined to confirm publicly what it actually was until the Star Tribune obtained the city's emails roughly a year later, at which point the scheme filed as Project Loon turned out to be Google's. A community can be kept from knowing not merely who is building but what is being built, for a year, by the officials it elected. In Tucson, negotiations over a 290-acre campus proceeded for roughly two years behind NDAs that concealed the end user's identity from the public and from most of the city council. “Giant corporations prefer to operate in the shadows,” the council member Lane Santa Cruz said, “but Tucson is not for sale. We deserve transparency and accountability.”

Coweta County shows how the two asymmetries compound. Investigative reporting by DeSmog, based on public records requests, established that Project Sail's public face, an entity called Atlas Development, LLC, was fronting for Prologis, the San Francisco-based logistics real estate giant, whose involvement was concealed until May 2025 even as its logos appeared on project illustrations. The records showed a steady programme of private access: a meeting between a Prologis vice-president and one commissioner at a Newnan law office in July 2025, another with a second commissioner in August, personalised email updates to all five the day before a public hearing, further emails in October. The lobbyist Arthur “Skin” Edge IV submitted recommendations for the county's data centre ordinance on 7 July, writing that he did so on behalf of the Project Sail team and stating that Atlas Development had retained him as an attorney for the project; both Atlas Development and Prologis subsequently told DeSmog that they were not represented by Edge. Somebody's account of who was speaking for whom is wrong, and the instructive part is that the public record does not allow anyone outside those rooms to establish whose. After a CBRE vice-president testified at the November 2025 hearing, commissioners amended their draft to allow data centres on collector roads, raise the height limit from sixty to seventy feet, and replace a requirement that utilities demonstrate adequate capacity with a letter of intent showing preliminary coordination.

Set against that, Laura Beth's account of her group's access is stark. “Coweta County has not met with us specifically about the ordinance,” she told DeSmog, describing commissioners who would accept only group emails and declined the telephone conversations residents requested. The rules governing the facility were being drafted in one conversation and defended in another, and only one of those conversations had a transcript.

The Lawsuit That Followed the Vote

Suppose a community clears every hurdle: it learns about the project in time, secures a discretionary hearing, persuades its elected board, and votes no. What happens then is the sharpest test of where authority really lies, and the answer arrived in a farming township of about 2,200 people in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

In September 2025, after months of contentious meetings, the Saline Township board voted four to one to deny the rezoning sought for a Stargate data centre campus backed by Related Digital, Oracle, OpenAI and Blackstone, with DTE Energy contracted to supply roughly 1.4 gigawatts. Two days later the developers and landowners sued, alleging exclusionary zoning: the claim, under Michigan law, that the township had unreasonably barred a legitimate use, strengthened by the fact that Saline Township had no industrially zoned land at all. Facing litigation costs against an annual municipal budget of roughly a million dollars, the township settled by consent judgment, accepting community benefits worth about fourteen million dollars, including four million for farmland preservation, along with water and noise restrictions. The attorney who advised the settlement observed that zoning power is not absolute.

The sequel is more revealing than the settlement. Residents organised to force a referendum on the rezoning, a right Michigan law affords them. On 14 January 2026 the board formally rezoned the land to industrial to comply with the consent judgment; on 28 January it reversed that action and restored the agricultural designation, reasoning that the judgment itself authorised the project, so no map change was required. Because there had been no formal rezoning, there was nothing to petition against. Tammie Bruneau of the Rural Michigan Defense Fund put the consequence plainly: if the map need not be updated and no notice published, there could be no referendum. The resident Kathryn Haushalter, whose motion to intervene in the settlement had been rejected by a Washtenaw County judge as untimely, asked the question the episode poses: “What does it look like when residents are not able to determine what happens in their communities? What are we expected to do?” On 1 June 2026, Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Sam Altman appeared at the ceremony marking construction of the campus.

Tucson demonstrates the same lesson through geography rather than litigation. On 6 August 2025 the city council voted seven to nil to reject the annexation that Project Blue required, after residents objected to roughly two thousand acre-feet of city water a year. But the land was unincorporated county territory, and the Pima County board of supervisors had already voted three to two in June to sell it and had approved the zoning. The developer, having earlier signalled that the project could not proceed without the city, redesigned the facility for air cooling, which uses far less water and considerably more electricity, and pressed ahead through the county alone. On 3 December 2025 the Arizona Corporation Commission approved the power purchase agreement four to one, Commissioner Rachel Walden the sole vote against; Tucson Electric Power expects to be supplying the campus with two hundred and eighty-six megawatts by 2028. Amazon Web Services withdrew as operating partner. The project continued, and then acquired one more venue. Arizona's attorney general, Kris Mayes, has appealed the commission's approval, contesting the speed of it and arguing that the agreement lets the utility and the developers set electricity rates between themselves, a power the state constitution reserves to the commission alone. For once the proliferation of forums runs in the objectors' favour, though nobody in Tucson could reach that one either. The state's chief legal officer took an interest, which is a different thing from a community having a say.

The pattern in both cases is not that local government was overruled. It is that “local government” was never a single thing. It is a set of overlapping venues — township, county, court, utility commission — in which a developer need prevail only once, while residents must prevail everywhere.

Where the Decision Actually Lives

Step back far enough and the venue keeps moving upward. Justin Kollar, writing in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 2026, describes this as planning under pre-emption: states removing land use, zoning and environmental review authority from cities and counties through statutory overrides, utility governance, fiscal incentives and procedural constraints, so that decisions migrate to state agencies, utilities and corporate actors, and planning becomes administrative coordination rather than deliberation.

West Virginia has gone furthest. Its House Bill 2014 bars counties and municipalities from adopting or enforcing any ordinance limiting a certified microgrid district or a certified high-impact data centre, and exempts those projects from county and municipal zoning and land use ordinances, from building permitting, inspection and code enforcement, and from licence requirements. What is left to the locality is the power to charge fees and to send fire engines and police cars. Nor does the statute restrict what may be generated inside a microgrid district, so a gas, coal or nuclear plant may be sited in a county that has been relieved of any authority to review it. And the property tax revenue such a facility produces does not stay where the facility stands: the statute routes the greater part of it to the state, partly to fund reductions in income tax. That last provision repays attention, because the standard defence of accepting a data centre is that the host is compensated for what it absorbs. West Virginia has legislated away the deliberation and the compensation together, and left the county with the facility. In Pennsylvania, a proposed Data Center Siting and Permitting Act would have the state environmental department designate at least fifteen pre-approved sites. More than three hundred data-centre-related bills were introduced by state legislators in the first six weeks of 2026.

Much of the most consequential decision-making never touches land use at all. It happens at public utility commissions, bodies whose members most residents cannot name. On 15 April 2026 the Louisiana Public Service Commission voted four to one on Entergy Louisiana's application to build the generation for Meta's Richland Parish campus: seven new gas-fired power stations, some two hundred and forty miles of transmission and a set of nuclear uprates, a programme of 21.37 billion dollars, the largest investment in the utility's history, binding ratepayers across the state for the term of a twenty-year agreement. What the commissioners approved that day was not the plan. It was a request to fast-track it, skipping key steps of the standard regulatory review; the vote on the application itself is set for November 2026. The distinction is this essay's subject reduced to a single procedural motion. Before anybody decides the question, somebody decides how much deliberation the question is going to get, and that second decision is taken first, in a proceeding almost nobody is watching. Entergy maintains that Meta will cover construction costs and that customers will save money. The Alliance for Affordable Energy has warned that if Meta departs before the contract ends, the cost of the gas plants could fall on ordinary ratepayers; the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that the commission declined to investigate a financing arrangement under which Meta established an additional parent entity, retaining a twenty per cent stake, and borrowed twenty-seven billion dollars against the project. Whatever one concludes about the risk, a decision of that magnitude about who bears what is being taken by five elected commissioners in a venue with no relationship whatsoever to the parish hosting the buildings.

The tariff question is following the same path. According to Utility Dive, state regulators approved twenty-nine large-load tariffs in 2025, against fourteen in the whole period from 2018 to 2024, and by June 2026 twenty-four states had approved at least one. Minnesota's HF 16, enacted in June 2025, requires the state utility commission to create a very large customer rate class and allocate attributable costs to it. Oregon's POWER Act directs its commission to establish a separate class for facilities of twenty megawatts or more. Texas Senate Bill 6, signed on 20 June 2025, established a regime for loads of seventy-five megawatts and above, requiring new transmission-level connections to install equipment permitting remote curtailment during firm load shed events. These reforms matter enormously for whether the build-out raises household bills. They are also decisions taken hundreds of miles from any affected backyard.

Then there is the fiscal layer, which quietly converts a public choice into an accounting one. Good Jobs First has documented that most states subsidise data centres through sales and use tax exemptions on hardware and software, some lasting as long as forty years, alongside property tax abatements, and calculates that public subsidy runs to roughly two million dollars for every permanent job created. Abatements and payment-in-lieu-of-taxes arrangements are typically negotiated by development authorities rather than legislatures. At the top of the stack sits Executive Order 14318, signed on 23 July 2025, directing federal agencies to streamline permitting, identify federal land for siting and expedite environmental reviews for qualifying projects. Every one of these levers is legitimate in itself. Stacked together, they mean that by the time a proposal reaches a county board, most of the consequential variables have already been fixed elsewhere.

The Boundary Problem in a Rural County

This is where the argument stops being about zoning and becomes something older. Democratic theory has a name for the difficulty at the centre of the data centre fight: the boundary problem. In 1983 the political theorist Frederick Whelan set it out with uncomfortable clarity. Democracy is a method by which a group makes decisions, but it offers no democratic method for deciding who belongs to the group; any vote on the boundaries of the demos must be taken by a demos already constituted, which places the foundational question outside democratic determination. Robert Dahl, who framed the same difficulty a decade earlier, could find no satisfying escape from it.

One candidate answer is the all-affected-interests principle: those affected by a collective decision should have a say in making it. Robert Goodin, examining it in Philosophy and Public Affairs, treated the principle as the most promising basis for constituting a demos while showing how radically expansive it becomes once taken seriously, since almost any decision affects almost everyone at some remove. Sarah Song, writing in International Theory, argued the other way, that the demos should be bounded by the state, precisely because affectedness is too elastic to draw workable lines. The debate is unresolved for good reasons. But the data centre is an unusually clean instance of the mismatch it describes.

Consider the footprints. A hyperscale campus draws on an aquifer that obeys hydrology rather than municipal boundaries; its cooling demand, at the upper end of industry estimates, can reach five million gallons a day, comparable to a city of fifty thousand. Its electrical load falls on a regional transmission system, and PJM's footprint alone spans thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Data centres consumed about 4.4 per cent of American electricity in 2023, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's report for the Department of Energy, and are projected to reach between 6.7 and twelve per cent by 2028. Emissions travel with the wind; xAI sited turbines for its second Memphis supercomputer across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, while the computing sat in Tennessee. Ratepayer costs fall on a customer class defined by a utility's service territory. Not one of these footprints coincides with the electorate of a county board of commissioners.

The subsidiarity principle, familiar from European constitutional law and Catholic social teaching, holds that decisions should be taken at the lowest level competent to take them. It is usually invoked for localism, and here it is often assumed to settle the matter in favour of the county. But subsidiarity contains its own limit, and the limit is competence. A township of 2,200 people cannot competently allocate a regional grid's capacity, and should not have to. Equally, a state utility commission cannot competently decide what a particular hillside means to the people who live beneath it. The failure is not that decisions are made too high or too low, but that they are distributed across levels in a way that lets each venue treat the questions it is worst placed to answer as somebody else's problem.

Elinor Ostrom, whose fieldwork on commons governance won her the Nobel prize in economics in 2009, derived design principles for institutions that manage shared resources without collapsing. Two are directly relevant: that the boundaries of the resource and of the group entitled to use it be clearly defined and congruent with local conditions, and that most individuals affected by operational rules be able to participate in modifying them. Measured against those principles, American data centre siting fails not because it is too democratic or too little, but because the people bound by the rules and the people entitled to change them are systematically different sets of people.

The Strongest Case Against the Veto

It would be easy, and dishonest, to leave the argument there. The case for local control over land use has a bleak record, and anyone who wants to strengthen community authority over data centres should sit with it.

The most rigorous account is Neighborhood Defenders, the 2019 study by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick and Maxwell Palmer, which examined thousands of participants in local land-use proceedings and found that the people who turn up to oppose development are not representative of their communities. They are disproportionately older, whiter, wealthier and far more likely to be homeowners; they oppose new housing considerably more strongly than their neighbours do; and the participatory institutions built to democratise planning reliably amplify their voices. The result has been a decades-long housing shortage borne overwhelmingly by people who never got to attend the meeting because they did not yet live in the town.

The same dynamic has kneecapped the energy transition. The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia found that by the end of 2024 at least 459 counties and municipalities across forty-four states had adopted severe local restrictions on siting renewable energy, a sixteen per cent rise in a year, and identified 498 contested projects across forty-nine states. Between 2018 and 2023, at least thirty per cent of utility-scale wind and solar projects were cancelled during siting, largely because of community opposition, local ordinances and zoning. If your principle is that affected communities may refuse infrastructure they did not choose, that principle has already been road-tested, and used most effectively against solar farms and transmission lines.

The pro-build response also has a legitimate core. Matthew de Boer, writing in the Fordham Law Review in 2026, notes that states have aggressively pursued data centres with incentives while declining to regulate their siting, leaving municipalities to manage hyperscale facilities with frameworks designed for warehouses. His proposal is light pre-emption modelled on housing reform: not the elimination of local authority but its discipline through procedural mandates and objective standards. The Michigan exclusionary zoning doctrine that defeated Saline Township exists for a reason. A jurisdiction with no industrial zoning anywhere within it has, in effect, pre-committed to refusing every industrial use, and a legal system that permitted that at every boundary would make nothing buildable anywhere.

The honest position, then, is that “who decides” genuinely cuts both ways, and that a general right of local veto is not a principle anyone should want applied consistently. Which is precisely why the boundary problem is the right frame. The complaint from Coweta County and Saline Township is not, at its strongest, that localities should be able to refuse anything. It is that the procedure by which these decisions are made produces answers no defensible theory of authority endorses: hearings held after entitlements are secured, ordinances drafted by the applicant's lobbyist, referendum rights extinguished by declining to amend a map, consequences distributed across airsheds, watersheds and ratepayer classes that no ballot anywhere encompasses. That is not the tyranny of the neighbourhood defender. It is the absence of any forum in which the actual question can be put.

Making the Franchise Fit the Footprint

What would it take for a decision of this kind to be legitimate rather than merely lawful? The reforms already circulating are more modest than the theory suggests, and worth taking seriously precisely because they are achievable.

The first is informational, and nearly consensual. Public Citizen's recommendations amount to a simple proposition: officials should not sign non-disclosure agreements with private developers about matters they will later vote on, developers should disclose their identity, projected water and energy use, procurement plans and financial incentives before entitlements are granted, and existing agreements should be published. Attorneys quoted in reporting on Oklahoma's secrecy deals have questioned whether such agreements are even enforceable against public bodies. Pima County changed its own policies on NDAs and environmental review in September 2025, after what its supervisors called lessons learned from Project Blue. And the standard objection, that transparency of this kind is commercially unworkable, has now been answered by the only sort of party who could answer it. On 18 March 2026 Microsoft announced that it would stop using non-disclosure agreements with local governments for data centre projects anywhere in the world and would terminate those already in force, saying that transparency with the communities where it operates was paramount. That followed a commitment in January to pay the full cost of the power its facilities draw, decline local property tax breaks, replenish more water than it consumes and invest in local training. Microsoft is so far the exception, and should be called one: Public Citizen records that every other major technology company continues the practice. A single exception is still enough to dispose of the claim that the practice is necessary. Nothing about the AI build-out requires that the people voting know less than the people lobbying them.

The second is jurisdictional, and follows from the boundary problem. If the harms of a facility cross municipal lines, notice, standing and formal comment rights should cross them too. There is no technical obstacle to requiring that a rezoning application within a defined radius of a boundary trigger notice and consultative standing for the adjacent jurisdiction, or that a groundwater withdrawal above a threshold trigger review at the level of the aquifer rather than the parcel. That would not give neighbours a veto. It would give them a seat, the minimum the all-affected-interests principle can be read to demand without becoming unbounded.

The third is fiscal, and has the most momentum. Large-load tariffs and dedicated rate classes of the kind Minnesota, Oregon and Texas have adopted move the ratepayer question into a proceeding where it can be argued explicitly. If a facility's grid costs are ring-fenced to the customer that causes them, the county board's decision becomes one about land, water and noise rather than about everyone else's electricity bill, and the venue mismatch shrinks. The same logic applies to abatements: a forty-year tax exemption negotiated by a development authority binds successor councils and their electorates, and ought to require the deliberative treatment any long-dated public borrowing would.

New York's executive order is a hybrid of all three. It pauses state permits, an exercise of upward authority, while directing Empire State Development to publish a community investment framework within sixty days to guide local negotiations, and the Department of Public Service to prepare a generic environmental impact statement so proposals are assessed against a consistent standard rather than each locality improvising. Whether that produces better decisions or merely relocates them is unclear. That it exists in place of the statute the legislature actually passed, and at more than twice the legislature's threshold, is a reminder that the reforms are governed by the same question as the projects. But it recognises that a county board asked to evaluate a nine-hundred-megawatt load with a planning staff of a dozen is not being empowered. It is being handed a decision it has no capacity to make and then blamed for the outcome.

A Judge in Newnan

On 5 May 2026, Citizens for Rural Coweta filed a petition in Coweta County Superior Court asking a judge to declare the rezoning invalid. Their argument is that the commissioners disregarded the county's own comprehensive plan, which designated the land for rural places rather than industry, and did so despite the site's groundwater recharge areas, wetlands and watershed. It is, in essence, a claim that the county broke a promise to itself.

There is a coda to the vote that is easy to miss, and it may be the sharpest thing in this account. In May 2026, weeks after rezoning the Sargent land, the Coweta commissioners adopted a moratorium on any future data centre project in the county. Residents said it was too little and far too late; one likened it to shutting the barn door once the horses were out. But consider what the sequence establishes. The county was entirely capable of pausing. It held the instrument, understood how to use it and did use it, one decision after the only decision that mattered. Coweta's future self is now protected in a way its present self declined to be, and the difference between those two counties is not one of law, or capacity, or information, or public sentiment. It is a difference of timing, which is to say a difference of nothing at all except that the applicant arrived first.

The venue is telling. Having lost in the only forum where they could vote, the residents have moved to the one forum where nobody votes at all. That is the recurring shape of these disputes. In Prince William County the decisive intervention was a judge's reading of a notice statute, and it killed the largest project in the country. In Saline Township a consent judgment did what the electorate had refused to do, and a second judge declined to reopen it. In Tucson a unanimous rejection was routed around by a county land sale and a corporation commission vote, and the next serious challenge came from a state attorney general. Litigation has become the default civic instrument of the AI build-out because it is the only instrument that reliably crosses the boundaries everything else respects.

There is a version of this story in which the residents are simply wrong: in which a county gains a tax base and a state gains capacity it badly needs, and a few hundred households absorb a view they dislike, which is roughly what infrastructure has always asked of somebody. I do not think that version is obviously false. What is false is the assumption that the current procedure is capable of telling us which version is right. A process in which the applicant's lobbyist helps draft the ordinance, the developer's identity is concealed behind a shell entity, commissioners meet privately with one side and by group email with the other, and a referendum right can be extinguished by declining to amend a map, is not a process that produces a trustworthy answer to a hard question. It produces an answer and calls it settled.

The families in Coweta County who moved out of Atlanta to be surrounded by trees are not, in the end, asking for a veto over American AI policy. They are asking something democratic theory has never fully answered and American land-use law has stopped even trying to: what makes a decision about a place belong to the people who live in it. Nine hundred megawatts is arriving either way. Whether it arrives as something a community decided or as something that happened to it is a difference no amount of tax revenue will retire, and it is being settled right now, county by county, in rooms that most of the affected will never enter.

References

1. Shah, Simmone. “Community Backlash to AI Data Centers Is Growing Across the U.S.” TIME, 22 July 2026. https://time.com/article/2026/07/22/community-backlash-ai-data-centers/
2. Reuters. “Data center opponents stage 142 protests across 42 US states.” 18 July 2026. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jul/18/data-center-opponents-stage-142-protests-across-42/
3. Reuters/Ipsos. “Americans wary of AI-driven data center boom, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows.” 11 June 2026. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-06-11/americans-wary-of-ai-driven-data-center-boom-reuters-ipsos-poll-shows
4. Data Center Watch (10a Labs). Data Center Opposition Tracker. https://www.datacenterwatch.org/
5. Office of Governor Kathy Hochul. “Executive Order No. 62: Establishing a Temporary Moratorium on Data Centers in New York.” 14 July 2026. https://www.governor.ny.gov/executive-order/no-62-establishing-temporary-moratorium-data-centers-new-york-while-state-develops
6. Bloomberg. “How AI Data Centers Are Sending Your Power Bill Soaring.” 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/
7. PolitiFact. “How much have data centers increased electricity prices?” 12 June 2026. https://politifact.com/factchecks/2026/jun/12/elizabeth-warren/data-centers-rising-electricity-costs/
8. Shehabi, Arman, et al. 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, December 2024. https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/lbnl-2024-united-states-data-center-energy-usage-report_1.pdf
9. DeSmog. “How Data Center Developers Staked Their Claim in Rural Georgia.” 7 April 2026. https://www.desmog.com/2026/04/07/how-data-center-developers-staked-their-claim-in-rural-georgia/
10. Noël, Deanna. The Secret Data Center Buildout: How States Can Stop Big Tech's Abuse of NDAs. Public Citizen, 8 July 2026. https://www.citizen.org/news/the-secret-data-center-buildout-how-states-can-stop-big-techs-abuse-of-ndas/
11. Minnesota Star Tribune. “NDAs, code names and shell companies: how Minnesota officials support data center secrecy.” https://www.startribune.com/ndas-code-names-and-shell-companies-how-minnesota-officials-support-data-center-secrecy/601499182
12. WTOP News. “Digital Gateway data center project dies after final developer withdraws appeal.” July 2026. https://wtop.com/prince-william-county/2026/07/digital-gateway-data-center-project-dies-after-final-developer-withdraws-appeal/
13. Fortune. “A Michigan farm town voted down plans for a giant OpenAI-Oracle data center. Weeks later, construction began.” 6 May 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/05/06/ai-data-center-michigan-saline-politics-farmland/
14. KJZZ. “Rejected by Tucson and abandoned by Amazon, Project Blue data center moves forward.” 9 December 2025. https://www.kjzz.org/the-show/2025-12-09/rejected-by-tucson-and-abandoned-by-amazon-project-blue-data-center-moves-forward
15. Kollar, Justin. “Planning Under Preemption: State Power and Local Authority in the AI Data Center Era.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 2026. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2026.2618221
16. de Boer, Matthew. “State Intervention in Local Zoning: Lessons from Housing Applied to Data Centers.” Fordham Law Review, Vol. 94, Issue 5, 2026. https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol94/iss5/12/
17. West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. “HB 2014 Would Preempt Local Control; Divert Millions Annually in Local Property Tax Revenue for Schools and Public Safety to Fund Income Tax Cuts.” https://wvpolicy.org/hb-2014-would-preempt-local-control-divert-millions-annually-in-local-property-tax-revenue-for-schools-and-public-safety-to-fund-income-tax-cuts/
18. Utility Dive. “Large load tariffs proliferate as states take more active role in data center regulation.” https://www.utilitydive.com/news/large-load-tariffs-proliferate-as-states-take-more-active-role-in-data-cent/816184/
19. Good Jobs First. “Money Lost to the Cloud: How Data Centers Benefit from State and Local Government Subsidies.” https://goodjobsfirst.org/money-lost-cloud-how-data-centers-benefit-state-and-local-government-subsidies/
20. Whelan, Frederick G. “Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem.” In NOMOS XXV: Liberal Democracy, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman. New York University Press, 1983.
21. Goodin, Robert E. “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2007.
22. Song, Sarah. “The boundary problem in democratic theory: why the demos should be bounded by the state.” International Theory, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2012. https://polisci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/people/u3868/Song%20-%20Boundary%20Problem%20in%20Democratic%20Theory.pdf
23. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A8BB63BC4A1433A50A3FB92EDBBB97D5
24. Einstein, Katherine Levine, David M. Glick and Maxwell Palmer. Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis. Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48584947
25. Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Opposition to Renewable Energy Facilities in the United States: June 2025 Edition.” Columbia University. https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/opposition-renewable-energy-facilities-united-states-june-2025-edition

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * The week I recently spent without central air, being able to air condition only two rooms in the back of this house with window a/c units, that week is thankfully over. Six hours ago cool air began blowing from vents throughout this house and, my-oh-my, in the immortal words of Jackie Gleason, “How SWEET it is!”

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= 227.63 lbs. * bp= 133/81 (70)

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

Diet: * 05:10 – 1 banana, 2 HEB bakery cookies * 07:34 – 1 ham & cheese sdandwich * 13:50 – meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:45 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 13:30 – following the MLB Game, Cardinals vs Phillies * 15:40 – and the Cardinals win, 7 to 1. * 15:50 – follow news reports from various sources, * 17:50 – listening to relaxing music, and reading

Chess: * 06:30 – moved in all pending CC games

I am far too busy doing the things of life to live a life.

This is not necessarily a complaint.

It is more of an observation.

There are things that need doing. I have generally been the sort of person who does them. There is a certain simplicity to it. If something is broken, fix it. If something needs carrying, carry it. If somebody needs help, help them. If the roof leaks, get on the roof. If the car makes a noise it has never made before, pretend not to hear it for a little while and then eventually find out what is wrong with it.

There is always something.

This has the useful advantage of keeping a man occupied.

It also has the useful advantage of keeping him out of trouble.

Mostly.

There are worse things a man can do with his days than be useful.

I suppose that is one of the bargains of adulthood. You spend a great deal of your time taking care of things that did not exist when you were young and will probably continue to exist after you are gone. Bills. Houses. Vehicles. Fences. Appliances. Other people's problems. Your own problems, which are generally less cooperative.

You make appointments.

You keep appointments.

You forget appointments.

You make another appointment.

You buy things you did not know you needed until you discovered that you needed them.

You repair things that worked perfectly well until you touched them.

Then you repair the thing you broke while repairing the first thing.

It is a system.

I have become rather good at it.

There is satisfaction in finishing something.

A job completed has a certain clean honesty about it. You know where you stand with a repaired fence. It is either repaired or it isn't. A ditch is either dug or it is not dug. The wood is either stacked or it remains in a pile making you look at it every time you walk past.

There is something comforting about such things.

The world becomes less complicated when reduced to a list of things that need doing.

Perhaps this is why soldiers have always made sense to me.

Soldiers dig ditches.

They carry equipment.

They clean things.

They stand watch.

They march.

They wait.

They fight battles when required and then, presumably, go back to digging ditches.

They do not spend much time wondering whether the ditch is a meaningful expression of their inner self.

The ditch needs to be there.

So they dig it.

There is something admirable in that.

Loyal.

Enduring.

Resilient.

Strong.

Mostly, though, they dig ditches.

I suspect much of life works the same way.

We like to imagine that life is made up of the great moments. The wedding. The birth of a child. The trip. The promotion. The victory. The sunset over the lake. The photograph that eventually becomes old enough to be called a memory.

Those things are real, of course.

But most of life is not like that.

Most of life is Tuesday.

Tuesday needs the garbage taken out.

Tuesday needs groceries.

Tuesday has an email that requires an answer.

Tuesday has a tire that is going soft.

Tuesday has laundry.

Tuesday has somebody calling to say they need a hand with something.

Tuesday has a ditch.

And so you dig it.

I think there is something to be said for a life made largely of Tuesdays.

Not every day needs to be memorable.

In fact, most days probably shouldn't be.

A day in which nothing terrible happened and several necessary things got done is a pretty good day.

We have perhaps become too interested in making our lives remarkable.

There is considerable pressure to have experiences. To travel. To discover ourselves. To maximize our mornings. To optimize our sleep. To find our passion. To cultivate hobbies. To make memories.

All of this sounds exhausting.

Sometimes I think the great luxury is simply to know what needs doing and do it without turning it into a philosophy.

There is a kind of peace in ordinary work.

You get up.

You go.

You do what needs doing.

You come home.

You eat something.

You sleep.

Then you do it again.

Years can disappear that way.

I do not necessarily regard that as tragic.

There are people whose lives are full of excitement who would probably trade some of it for a little peace and quiet.

There are people who have spent their lives chasing extraordinary experiences who eventually discover that what they really wanted was somebody familiar sitting across the table.

There are worse things than being tired from having done something useful.

I have occasionally wondered, however, what all the doing amounts to.

Not in some grand philosophical sense.

I am not looking for the meaning of existence.

That seems like a lot of work.

I mean in the smaller sense.

What will remain of all this?

Perhaps not much.

The fence will eventually need repairing again.

The house will belong to somebody else.

The truck will be replaced.

The bills will be forgotten.

The projects will become somebody else's projects.

Even the things we thought were permanent turn out to be temporary arrangements.

But perhaps that does not make them pointless.

A ditch does not need to last forever to have been worth digging.

A bridge does not need to stand for a thousand years to be useful.

A meal does not become meaningless because it is eventually eaten.

Maybe usefulness has never required permanence.

Maybe the value is simply that something was better because you were there to do it.

That is a modest sort of legacy.

I rather like modest legacies.

Perhaps your children will not remember every thing you did for them.

They probably shouldn't.

A childhood ought to be more than an inventory of parental maintenance.

But perhaps they will remember that when something needed doing, you did it.

Perhaps somebody will remember that you showed up.

Perhaps somebody will remember that you drove across town at an inconvenient hour because they called.

Perhaps somebody will remember that you fixed something.

Perhaps they will remember that you sat beside them when there was nothing to fix.

That last one may be harder.

I have always found it easier to do something than to do nothing.

Doing nothing requires a certain amount of confidence.

You have to believe that the world will continue without your immediate supervision.

This is not always obvious.

There is always another task.

Always.

If you finish everything on the list, somebody will simply make another list.

If nobody does, there is probably something wrong.

The list is eternal.

That is its great strength.

It never runs out of ammunition.

Which means that waiting until everything is finished before living a little is probably not a particularly sound strategy.

Everything will never be finished.

The ditch will remain.

There will be another ditch.

This does not mean we abandon the work.

It means perhaps we occasionally look up from it.

Not because the work is unimportant.

Because it is not the only thing happening.

There is a difference.

A man can dig a ditch and notice the weather.

He can repair a fence and hear the birds.

He can mow the grass and realize that the evening light is particularly good.

He can stop for coffee.

He can call somebody he has not talked to in too long.

He can sit on the porch without needing a reason.

These things do not interfere with the work.

They are part of the work.

Or perhaps they are the reward for doing it.

I am not sure.

I have never been particularly good at rewards.

Give me another task.

I understand tasks.

Tasks are dependable.

Roses are less so.

Roses bloom when they please and then become roses no longer.

Lakes change.

Weather changes.

People change.

Children grow.

Dogs get old.

Houses become unfamiliar.

Friends move away.

Parents become older.

One day, without much ceremony, something that was ordinary becomes something you remember.

This is not necessarily sad.

It is simply the nature of things.

The trick, if there is one, may be to notice them while they are still ordinary.

The cup of coffee while it is still just coffee.

The dog while he is still young enough to get up without thinking about it.

The friend while he is still only a phone call away.

The house while it is still your house.

The evening while there is still evening left.

There is no great lesson in this.

I distrust great lessons.

They tend to require a seminar.

It is just something I have noticed.

I spend a great deal of my life doing things.

Perhaps that is what I was built for.

There are worse occupations.

There is dignity in being the fellow who gets up and handles it.

There is dignity in carrying your share.

There is dignity in being tired because somebody needed you.

There is dignity in keeping the promises you made even after the excitement of making them has worn off.

There is dignity in doing ordinary things well.

And there is probably some wisdom in occasionally remembering that the ordinary things are not the whole story.

Soldiers dig ditches.

They do not spend their days wondering whether the ditch expresses who they are.

They dig because the ditch needs digging.

Then perhaps they sit somewhere afterward.

Maybe they smoke.

Maybe they talk.

Maybe they laugh about something stupid.

Maybe they look at the sky.

For a few minutes, at least, they are not soldiers doing anything.

They are simply there.

That seems about right to me.

Do the work.

Carry the load.

Fix what is broken.

Help where you can.

Be dependable.

Dig the ditch.

There will always be another one.

But every now and then, put down the shovel.

Look around.

There is probably something worth seeing.

You do not have to make a production of it.

You do not need a retreat, a life coach, a five-year plan or a scented candle.

Just look up.

Maybe somebody you love is standing there.

Maybe the sun is going down.

Maybe the lake is quiet.

Maybe there is a rose.

Smell it.

Then pick up the shovel.

The ditch is not going to dig itself.

---

#essay #writing

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12/08/22

Edmonton Commonwealth Stadium – August 17th, 1987

Five of us packed in to my friends cousins Fiesta (I think) and drove three hours to Edmonton to see David Bowie, Duran Duran, and Georgia Satellites.

#Edmonton #history #BlastFromThePast

The secret sauce is in the COLOR

Inverse color transform using the BG plates:

1. Using a Levels effect on the BG plate apply an Input Black and Input White move + Gamma to create a decent looking plate.

Input Black and Input White are somewhat negotiable, but Gamma must be .454.

Don't touch the Output Levels at this stage, only Input.  2. Work with these plates in your in comp. Integrate 3D elements using exposure and other tools to make sure the black & white points visually match the BG plate.

Create a new comp for export of the shot. I do the scale-to 3.8K in this new comp as well as applying letterbox bars to mask any layers that extend beyond the image area.

Apply a Levels effect, this time using the inverse of the previous Levels;

If you applied Input Black levels of 0.0667 then apply the same to the Output Black. Same with the Output White. Set Gamma to 2.2, which is the inverse Gamma of .454.

Don't touch the Input Levels at this stage, only Output.



This is a frame of what you would see in your comp. The BG has been leveled to live in a “normal world, and the rendered object plays nicely;



This is a frame of the output, the BG plate and CG elements have been transformed back into the original plate's color levels;



This is a frame of the above image with the view Levels applied looking just like our comp view ;

---

#art #vfx #workflow



for 48, today has presented some challenges.

Effervescent at times, tar-ish at others. Unexpected weights but thanks to kind words from friends, manageable.

Sometimes I think how nice it would be to climb into a good memory and just exist there until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I suppose, in some ways, I already do so.

Time for a walk and maybe movie… something funny I think. Or, an evening of music. Yeah, music would be nice.

And a beer.

some days are just harder than others.

Getting angry is a reaction, but remaining angry is a choice

This Too Shall Pass (OK Go)

A gem as fresh today as it was 15 years ago

https://youtu.be/qybUFnY7Y8w?si=O-rK7wwmHRzUddOg

[Verse 1] You know you can't keep letting it get you down And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around If there ain't all that much to lug around Better run like hell when you hit the ground

[Chorus] When the morning comes When the morning comes

[Verse 2] You can't stop these kids from dancing — why would you want to 'Specially when you are already getting yours? 'Cause if your mind don't move and your knees don't bend Well, don't go blaming the kids again

[Chorus] When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes

[Bridge] Let it go, this too shall pass Let it go, this too shall pass

[Outro] You know you can't keep letting it get you down No, you can't keep letting it get you down (Let it go, this too shall pass) Hey! Is it really all that much to lug around? Oh, you can't keep letting it get you down (Let it go, this too shall pass)

When the morning comes (You can't keep letting it get you down) (You can't keep letting it get you down) When the morning comes (You can't keep letting it get you down) (No, you can't keep letting it get you down) When the morning comes (You can't keep letting it get you down) (You can't keep letting it get you down) When the morning comes (You can't keep letting it get you down) (No, you can't keep letting it get you down) When the morning comes!

---

I got bad news this afternoon. Not world-ending, just upsetting. That was insult-to-injury'd with emotional attacks from trusted sources. Just the kind of stuff that is hard to shake off and go. A couple of beers helped. A couple of more will only tip things the wrong way. So, I'll call it even.

Patience. This too shall pass. But man is it heavy to carry while it's here!

It doesn't always feel like it's passing. The scale of things is so huge that even though they are moving, to our human mind, they appear still. Pain and fear are two of those things that seem to always hang in time. Meanwhile joy and happiness seem hardly longer than they are in real time.

Made harder when you just keep clinging and clinging to the thing. Bend like the reed, grasshopper.

Breath.

Breath.

Breath.

Thank all that is good for joys like OK Go.

---

#music #confession 2025-05-03 22:00:00

Los grandes acontecimientos no dependen nunca de ti. Puede que los pequeños tampoco exactamente.

Tú solo intentas entender qué podría pasar. Buscas un lugar propicio. Buena compañía. Y esperas. Que pase lo que tenga que pasar. A veces se nubla y no se ve la corona ni nada que no sea una noche repentina. Un silencio. Un algo contenido. Gente que aplaude porque no sabe qué hacer con lo que está pasando. Gente que lloramos porque siempre lloramos cuando hay algo enorme oprimiendo el pecho. Ponerle nombre a esa enormidas es saber que somos enanos. Que el universo es infinito y sigue sus ritmos ignorándome. A mi hace mucho que entender eso de verdad me da paz.

Un niño detrás de mi con una madre incapaz de entender el sistema solar. Desinformada de miedo “pónganse las gafas”. Entender de pronto el privilegio. Siempre fuiste una niña con al menos un adulto capaz de explicarte el mundo con una precisión suficiente. Parece una tontería. Lo cambia todo. “Mamá, con las gafas no veo nada”

Me giro. Le digo: como las nubes tapan al sol sólo vamos a ver que se hace de noche muy pronto, de golpe. Y luego de día otra vez igual de rápido. Sonríe pero sigue sin entende nada.

A veces el eclipse se nubla pero da igual porque ha sido un día precioso, porque hemos subido por las escaleras que comunican las dos playas riendo con restos de salitre en la piel. Porque el aperol tiene el color del atardecer. Porque dentro de muchísimos años diremos “tú y yo vimos aquel no eclipse en Los locos” y eso significará mucho más que un fenómeno astronómico rarísimo.

Vivir es esperar al eclipse total y disfrutar de la noche repentina. Volver conduciendo de la playa, ducharte con agua caliente a presión, el mejor disco de Iván de fondo. Que eso sean las vacaciones.

Tags: #random

Today's MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse is joined in progress. The Phillies and Cardinals are playing in the 2nd inning, and the Cardinals are leading 1 to 0. I'm following the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Today for some reason, I felt terrible.

Don’t know what set me off but it was just feelings of anxiety and a sadness which I don’t know from where it came but it was like just this distraction irate behaviour I couldn’t focus just sat for five minutes, made code, then back and then out again five minutes with the dogs, try to focus 20 min then coffee.

It’s the feeling of something very unspecific being wrong

I really tried

Having spent the workday in this weird state of mind, I went to the neighbours to help their son with his computer and I might’ve fixed it or maybe I didn’t; maybe it’s broken still, but at least it booted

And my black mood lifted too, late now I’m having dinner, watching Supernatural. Without spoiling anything I’ll say that the notion of the soul being tied to the conscience I think it’s spot on.

Tomorrow I’ll go running, it’s to keep the wolves at bay

It’ll prevent me from feeling bad

I used to think that that’s all there was to it, mere chemistry of the brain

Imbalance of the humours I used to think

But now I think that there’s something unhandled psychologically with is making these terrible feelings appear in the first place

And that the training is just a way to handle operating this broken machine in this world, which I love.

Typical Day in the Life of an Average American- Part VII, Retrospective

So, I was going to also have Grok take a crack at the prompt, but honestly, I couldn't bring myself to sign up for it. Same way I don't use X. If I thought there was a chance Grok was a superior alternative as a Chatbot I'd swallow my pride and try it out, but alas, I highly doubt it is. Also, the Chatbots were all converging around similar themes with their summaries so I figured we had seen enough.

With that said, apparently the average American is male. I tried out 5 Chatbots and all of them gave me an employed male adult. Considering 49.1% of Americans are male, just randomly selecting you'd only have a 2.85% chance of selecting a male all five times. Definitely some implicit bias happening in the background there.

Four out of five worked in an office, where Claude's average American worked in a distribution center. Three of them ate a granola bar at some point during their day. Data I pulled showed 24% of Americans eat a granola bar over a 3 month period, so that was mildly interesting. Only one of them had a pet, a cat, and that guy did not have any other nuclear family members mentioned. Every prompt mentioned using a phone at least a few times, with Chat having nine references to the word “phone.” They all ate remarkably healthy considering the propensity of unhealthy foods in the U.S. In fact, the only real vice mentioned at all was the bowl of ice cream that ChatGPT's “Michael” ate at the end of the day. And calling a bowl of ice cream a vice is a stretch. 3/5 listened to podcasts, and data shows 58% of Americans listen to a podcast in the last month so that is not as unusual as the granola bar.

Overall these fictional peoples lives felt empty. They were productive members of society conforming to norms and living a generally middle class lifestyle. It felt more like what the average user of an AI Chatbot would be like than the average American, though AI use was not actually referenced at any point. I suppose when you average everything out it should seem pretty bland, but I was hoping for something a little more interesting. Maybe down the line I'll try a different prompt. For now, I'd say the highlight, or maybe lowlight, of the entire thing was: “He eats his packed lunch at his cubicle while watching a 10-minute YouTube tutorial on Excel pivot tables.” Pretty bleak, and I'm pretty sure I had a similar experience at a past office job, though we weren't even given the privacy of a cubicle.

Not sure I'd want to pull this thread any further, but if I did, here are some ideas:

-Modify the prompt, have it give a specific vignette of a random American rather than the average one -Have it focus on different demographics -Try the average day in different countries

Anyway, that's all for now.