Head pounding.

Boom Boom Because I’m Boom Boom

Sex dreams all night. Her from behind. Her from in front. Legs wider. My legs. Hands and tongues. One where I was the man and the woman. That was weird. No resolve, just constant and all night.

Worried about Ray.

Why do I think it’s my responsibility? I can help, but I cannot own. Last dream, I was helping him get into bed and he fell on the floor. I was a forklift strai lning to raise his dead weight. Why do they want home so bad when they can’t even drive themselves. He’ll have to have some serious problems before he accepts reality.

Sounds like me: I can do the impossible. Until I can’t.

Want to hug. Need a hug. Afraid I might be broken.

Dream I was speaking to a thousand people on stage. Miss public speaking. Miss teaching. Feel unplugged from my reality. Like I’m a leaf in a river. I used to feel like a man tied to the front of a speeding train.

Dreamed about roofing Mike T's house. I was there again at lunch loading the shingles. I was there again when he said ‘bbq to thank everyone who came to help’ and I couldn’t go because a someone else needed help roofing that weekend. ‘That’s okay, I’ll invite you to the next one.’

There never was a next one.

He did take us to that Victor Borgman concert. I was so tired, I fell asleep.

---

Hah. You’re a failure if you just find something you can tolerate or enjoy and just do that. But it’s how man exists for 6k years. All of a sudden we’re all supposed to be clawing constantly.

All of a sudden men want to be women and women want to be men.

Contentment is a crime.

Name of my self-improvement book all about the satisfaction of just making things.

Ever see those IG videos saying ‘want to know how I went from selling my paintings for nothing, to $9000?’

News flash: they didn’t. Or if they did, they hate painting now.

I have a friend whose dream was to be a national portrait painter. He practiced and perfected, bought a farm in Virginia and started work local politicians. Worked his way up to congressmen.

Hated it.

Moved to Florida. Started painting Disney paintings. Got really good at it. Was approved as a ‘Disney artist’. Sells originals and prints I t be park. Makes lots of money.

Says he loves it.

I see it. impressive work. But it has no soul. Paintings telling the same story Disney has been telling for 100 hundred years. Our brand is value. Our brand is expensive. Our brand. Our brand our brand.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I hate money.

He’s just painting advertisements.

Which, great, if he’s happy.

But I pulled one of his prints out of the closet. And it is indistinguishable from AI slop.

He’s essentially a less-unique version of Thomas Kingcade. Art as business.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Meanwhile I think of Chuck, Picasso, or a dozen other household names who defied convention and made something worth seeing. Worth investing in. Worth believing in.

 I will never be famous. Or rich. Or probably even content. But what I am and will always be is proud that I got up every day and made a thing. Good bad or ugly. I loved. I lived. I tasted life and gave convention the middle finger as best I could.

---

HOW can one image take SO long to work?

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Client says 'nice job'. Assume they're being nice because I am a moron. Take a damned compliment, man.

At $125 an hour, I should be able to accept a compliment. I can certainly cash the check.

---

I'm so scared to open whatsapp again. What I'll do if she's there. I know I won't be able to resist it. I won't. And so I'm scared. of myself. Of hurting anyone else. So deleted is shall remain.

---

Sleeping alone tonight. Going to try to give her the space to rest and not be disturbed. She needs it. Quiet and peace and restful sleep. THinking of going out to sleep in van.

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“Love Will Tear Us Apart” Joy Division

When routine bites hard, And ambitions are low, And resentment rides high, But emotions won't grow, And we're changing our ways, Taking different roads.

Then love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again.

Why is the bedroom so cold? You've turned away on your side. Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry. Yet there's still this appeal That we've kept through our lives.

But love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again.

You cry out in your sleep, All my failings exposed. And there's a taste in my mouth, As desperation takes hold. Just that something so good Just can't function no more.

But love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again.

---

This dream wasn't about one person. It wasn't even really about sex. It was simply sex in every possible direction, all night long, without resolution.

The lack of a specific woman or emotional connection stands out. There was no courtship, no affection, no shame, no climax—just an endless current of sexual expression. That makes me think the dream is less about physical desire than about life-force itself.

Sex in dreams is symbolized creation, union, intimacy, or the joining together of different parts. Others, and our selves. Here every scene shifted before it could resolve. It felt like raw creative and emotional energy searching for somewhere to go.

The strangest part was becoming both the man and the woman. It suggests my unconscious wasn't focused on another person at all. Instead it was exploring both masculine and feminine aspects inside. The dream blurred the distinction between giver and receiver, pursuer and pursued. Rather than choosing one role, I experienced both.

Considering my recent dreams, there may be a pattern developing. Several have revolved around authority, calling, discovery, and spiritual identity. This dream seems to descend beneath those themes into something more fundamental: the energy that drives life itself. Before that energy can be directed toward purpose, it first appears in its most instinctive form.

The absence of resolution may be the real message. The energy is present, abundant, even overflowing, but it hasn't yet found its destination. It remains potential rather than fulfillment.

If there is a spiritual lesson here, it may be that God often works with the same life-force that can express itself sexually, creatively, emotionally, or spiritually. The question isn't whether the energy exists, but where it will ultimately be directed.

#deardiary

Job search lack of success anxiety is starting to kick in. Can't do much of anything until that's settled, it feels like. Am bothered.

I chopped much of my hair off with scissors in front of the bathroom mirror. Too much, really, but it's hard to stop once I get going. It'll grow back, it always does. I've bought blue hair dye but I might wait until I have a new job. Vaguely respectable. Very vaguely. Tonight I'm making Japanese style cabbage pancakes with tofu mayonnaise. It's a very vegetable heavy, veganised bastardisation of okonomiyaki and almost a necessity when the veg delivery box includes a cabbage larger than my head.

I got the deal again and so I spent $15 to get a month of hinge X, and with that I have gotten a pretty good amount of matches I would say. I guess I just wanna quickly remind myself that the success on apps is not a reflection of my desirability at all.

A long time ago I recall watching a video of someone who had a hundred or so mousetraps, and they had set them all, and laid them out on the floor of a room. Then they triggered one of them. Of course it bounced up in the air, and landed on another. Those two flew, and landed on two more. It caused a chaotic chain reaction that lasted a few seconds.

Imagine if the room was zero gravity. They would never stop.

Imagine if they were not mousetraps, and not in a room. If they were satellites and debris varying in size from as small as a grain of sand all the way up to the size of a school bus. All in low earth orbit traveling at thousands of kph.

The oligarch tech brats continue their reign of self serving incompetent neglect, blatant stupidity, and fear inducing manipulative lies. If they keep on launching more and more of their terrible ideas into space; an unstoppable chain reaction becomes more and more inevitable.

I think of those Star Trek episodes when the crew would find themselves in a time anomaly, and would end up interacting with earthlings of the past. In other episodes they would find a primitive species on some other planet. They would be careful to not expose any of them to knowledge that they were not ready for. I feel like that has happened to us here on earth. Not from an outside source or a time traveler, but from ideas that evolved too quickly. They could have been so beneficial for everyone on earth, but too many awful people (the 1%) have taken those ideas, and have figured out how to use them only for their own benefit by exploiting the rest of humanity.

Originally published in City Press on 20 October 2015 By Roger Young and Gugulethu Mhlungu

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It's as if Isaac Mutant and Pieter Hugo have been galloping towards each other for all eternity. Mutant violently sceptical of anything masquerading as publicity or even decency; Hugo clawing his way to some outer edge where he can transmit raw human experience, free from the hand-wringing of intellectuals.

Both are close to breaking point as a result of the constant misunderstandings of their work and intentions — Hugo the Fetishiser, Mutant the Misogynist.

Dirty, the music video, is that, then: the two men breaking. A temper tantrum right out there on the outer edge: juvenile, filthy, unnecessary, gloriously crass and downright beautiful — if not visually, then for the purity of its rage. In it, Mutant takes himself places you never thought possible. The mistake has been to think of him as a “Cape Flats rapper” instead of a “mercenary poet”. In much the same way, Hugo's profession presents a set of presumed ideologies: white man photographing in Africa equals fetishising and appropriation.

I find Dookoom, Mutant and the others scattered around Lefty's, Cape Town's famous dive bar, just after they've wrapped shooting Dirty. They're covered in various layers of grime. Hugo, who directed Spoek Mathambo's breakout video, Control, is trying to explain the stills on his iPhone of two Mutants making out.

“We thought really long and hard about this, and, for me, this is a video about the lack of acknowledgment in the coloured community of the homosexual nature of the prison gangs.”

Mutant pricks up his ears, scratches his chin, remains silent. Hugo continues: “I'm doing it because, when they first sent me the song, I honestly felt unsettled. I was so drawn to it, but acutely aware that this was the voice of a sexual predator.”

Later Mutant says to me: “Actually this motherfucker has a point. You get gay people, right. But when you go to jail, a heterosexual dude, the 28s like, they're not gay but now the straight rules don't apply.”

The video for Dirty puts front and centre the spectre of menstrual blood, narcissism and sexual fetishisation; Mutant so resplendent in agency that any notion of exploitation becomes laughable.

“I wanted to present myself as that thing, that idea of the black man you whitie intellectuals are always gaaning aan about, you know, like what that Gillian Schutte woman said.”

Mutant is referring to the columnist's reaction to last year's Larney Jou Poes video. She wrote: “He is the black man whom racism was constructed for — to keep in check; to keep shackled and away from the pristine white women; the man with the animalistic sexuality; the man with the huge, hard, throbbing cock; the man who threatens the colonial male's self-esteem and sense of sexual prowess.”

It is, of course, the “hard, throbbing cock” that mostly impressed Mutant. “I looked at myself differently after that. Because I would never act like that. I wouldn't have acted like that [in Dirty], definitely, if she didn't write that thing...” But of course, in the tangled mess of looking at each other, Schutte, in her referencing of white fears, could be accused of fetishising Mutant, as much as Mutant could be accused of fetishising Lilith in Dirty, the track he constantly refers to as a “love song”. “It's a sexy track,” he says. “It's all the wrong things but it's not necessarily wrong.”

“I don't expect people to like this,” says Hugo. “But I want people to talk about it ... The art I'm into is stuff that pushes boundaries. I'm interested in expanding my experience and my mind. To me, it's taking the piss. It's undermining that machismo in hip-hop.”

Dirty is hard to watch and, for that reason, I think there is a strange beauty to it, in its righteousness of anger, in the celebration of menstrual blood, in its raw horror. But by playing with stereotypes to comment on the colonial gaze, many will see it as reinforcement of that stereotype.

It is ironic that the genius wordsmith Mutant — denied practically every opportunity for full self-expression in his life — will in this moment, where he took control, be crucified. Already there has been talk that he has been exploited by Hugo's white gaze.

“There's no way I can feel exploited,” says Mutant. “Pieter presented his ideas to me and the crew, and I was down with what he suggested. The whole point is not being afraid to explore new shit. And having the freedom to do so ... No, not every person of colour is a victim of racism, just because he does something that is not considered in good taste.”

Says Hugo: “Everything I am interested about in art is confrontational and about enlarging my understanding of the human experience. Which is messy. And opaque. That is why political correctness is phoney. Dishonest.”

— Roger Young

Watch the video, which is extremely explicit, here.

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Dirty's rapey tropes

By Gugulethu Mhlungu

“We have been nurtured in a sick, abnormal society, and we should be in the process of reclaiming ourselves, not the terms of that society. This is complex. I speak not about condemnation, but about recognising what is happening and questioning what it means...”

So said feminist thinker and author Audre Lorde when asked about her thoughts on bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism.

She went on to explain that the origins of sadomasochistic sex were as important in our personal lives as in public. That we must be willing to ask: “What am I doing? What am I choosing?” Her point was that, even when we exercise what little agency we have, we can and often do choose to partake in the power structures that oppress us.

In their Dirty video, Dookoom employs the racist tropes of jungle porn, the fetishisation of menstrual blood, the harmless but desirable white woman, as well as the image of the virulent black man with his dangerous throbbing penis in an attempt to subvert all of these. However, they show why Lorde insisted that the political ought to be personal too.

In an attempt to subvert the stereotypes of coloured maleness, Dirty in fact only seems to reinscribe them. This is particularly important in the context of a privileged, white, male director like Hugo, where even if they “collaborated”, which they no doubt did, the end product traps any intended subversion or counternarrative in a trope created by white-supremacist heteropatriarchy. And this is the danger of using the master's tools to destroy the master's house: it requires that we must enter the house first, and risk being co-opted, which is always a very real possibility, and clearly occurs in the Dirty video.

Lorde was also the same thinker who presented a paper called The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. Lorde said: “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

At no point does the idea that we can easily be co-opted by supremacy and existing power structures deny that agency is not possible, but the presence of agency (of choosing) does not make structural oppression irrelevant. So Mutant wanting to be the guy he is in the video, to stick it to Gillian Schutte, does not make Dirty's lyrics less rapey, make the video's imagery less stereotypical. In fact, in the end, Dirty will be perceived as stereotype and little else.

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Source: City Press / News24 — 20 October 2015

Authors: Roger Young & Gugulethu Mhlungu

Related: Dookoom — Dirty (video, explicit)

Tags: dookoom, dirty, pieter hugo, isaac mutant, city press, south africa, hip-hop, censorship, art

Originally published on VICE by Roger Young, 2014

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Watch: DOOKOOM — “Larney Jou Poes”

South Africa's “coloured” population is one of the most diverse groups in the world: a multi-faceted, mixed-race section of society descended from slaves bought in by the Dutch from West Africa, Indonesia, Asia, as well as from the captured indigenous peoples Khoe and San (or Khoisan), whose language—Afrikaans—is a Creole mash up of many languages. Unlike in the West, the term “coloured” is not seen as an antiquated racial slur, but rather was cemented by the National Party government during the government-imposed segregation of Apartheid. It came to classify a group that was in-between: not white, not black, and treated, in the stratified world of Apartheid, accordingly. They continue to face discrimination and limited economic opportunity. Many coloured and black workers still work for less than $5 a day.

In that economy, white farmers remain rich and separate from the country's black and coloured workers, and black politicians have become wealthy and out of touch with their constituents, giving large groups of people little recourse. In 1994, South Africa's peace ambassador, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, coined the phrase “Rainbow Nation” to describe the multicultural future of love, racial harmony, and democracy which everyone expected to emerge after hundreds of years of slavery and nearly a century of fascist, race-based totalitarianism, but that reality has not exactly come to pass.

Among the enduring problems is the land issue: It was expected—and, some would argue, promised by the African National Congress—that whites would have to hand over the land after the end of white minority rule. Many believe that the redistribution of land is the key to South Africa's future. Land grabs by settlers began in the 1600s as they moved into the country's interior. First the Dutch and French took lands traversed by the nomadic Khoe and San, then the hybrid Afrikaners from the late 1700s onwards (and the English), took the land from the Xhosa and the Zulu, not to mention various other tribes and cultural groups. The Land Act of 1913 cemented the disfranchisement of the “non-whites” of South Africa by disallowing them the right to own 90% of the country's land. Although it was repealed in 1991, in practice little has changed.

Enter DOOKOOM, an incendiary, South African electro hip-hop outfit whose freshly released video for “Larney, Jou Poes” has the white-slanting civil rights organization AfriForum calling for its ban. The song, whose title roughly translates to, “Hey Boss, You Cunt, Fuck You,” is deliberately provocative, designed to play on the country's longstanding racial tensions. In a riot of pitchforks, tractors, and burning tires, the video features “coloured” land laborers apparently getting ready to burn down their boss's farm. Its depiction of black and coloured liberation is so terrifying to white people that AfriForum—whose stated mission is to protect the rights of minorities but who in practice act in the interests of white, South African Afrikaners who feel threatened by the fact that the nation is no longer white-minority dominated—has felt compelled to label the video as Hate Speech, and have summarily filed a complaint with the South African Human Rights commission. AfriForum's main concern is the security of white farmers, isolated on their lands, who continue to face waves of violence and murder from the unemployed, the poverty-stricken, and the just plain criminal as the country's economy becomes more and more unequal.

DOOKOOM is a reaction to the chaos of contemporary South Africa, as dictated by its history. You can hear it in the clanging beats, discordant synths, and aggressive raps. Isaac Mutant, one-fifth of DOOKOOM, was probably in his late teens when the oppressive regime of South Africa crumbled and Nelson Mandela walked free.

I say “probably” because Mutant doesn't give much away. He's run with some of most notorious gangs in apartheid's dangerous, leftover projects of Mitchells Plain (on the outskirts of Cape Town). He's released three albums that spawned underground hits passed around on tapes, then CDs, and then on torrent sites—none of which earned him a penny. He's performed with the likes of the locally legendary crew Plein Madness, and he guested on Die Antwoord's first album. A couple of years ago he performed with Public Enemy. According to British pop culture writer King Adz, after his guest spot, Mutant simply refused to hand back the mic, taking over Chuck D's verses of “911 Is A Joke,” and leaving the Public Enemy leader to stand on the sidelines looking on in bemused admiration.

Rapping in a mixture of English, Afrikaans, and Sabela—a secret prison language that's evolved among the coloured gangs—Isaac Mutant has paid his dues. He's operated on the industry's edge. Frustrated, tired, and about to give up, he had a critical turning point when he met British-born producer and beatmaker, Human Waste, a man who was in a similar position. Human Waste had been producing hip-hop in South Africa for some time, and while a lot of the crews he was working with were achieving success, he was tired of the old-school boom bap sound they continued to pursue.

Alongside L i L i † H, a disenchanted dream-pop chanteuse; Roach, Mutant's hype man, bodyguard and DJ; and artist Spo0ky, who crafts their visual identity, they gave birth to DOOKOOM, dropping the project into a South Africa that is—20 years after the advent of democracy—fractured and riddled with a strange mix of fading hope, fear, mistrust, and intense energy.

DOOKOOM are determined to unsettle, and this is never more evident than during their live performances. The music is loud, grating, and angry. They wield knives and broken bottles and jugs of blood. They scream at their audiences and call for their deaths. A DOOKOOM show is a test of endurance until the crowd breaks through and embraces the anger—then suddenly there's a joyful abundance of hate and love and fear and energy and screaming. Somehow, it all slots into place. Given that Cape Town's live music scene is dominated by a bunch of fedora-wearing hipsters playing psych-rock and cutesy rap, DOOKOOM are a revelation. They're nothing that South Africa has seen before, but just what is it that DOOKOOM are trying to achieve?

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Some helpful terms:

• “Tik” is a street drug that is basically crystal meth but not as well made.
• A “naai” is literally “a fuck” but means “person I don't like.”
• A “Sangoma” is a practitioner of traditional and herbal medicines, who also consults the ancestors.
• “Broe,” “Bru,” “Bruh,” “Bra,” are all different levels of ironically saying “My brother.”
• “Kak” means “shit” but also means “very.” You can be kak angry or kak happy. K.A.K. is also an acronym for Koloured Ass Krooks, a term Mutant uses for a loose affiliation with a series of rappers and general troublemakers.
• “Poes” means vagina, but it's also the equivalent of “cunt,” but can also be used in the same way as “kak.”
• “Zef” a word popularized by Die Antwoord meaning a style so bad that it's good, a kind of meeting point between aspirational white trash and nouveau riche aspirations. For instance: Harmony Korine's films are zef as fuck.

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What is DOOKOOM conceptually and what does the word mean?

Isaac: DOOKOOM is a fucking band.

Human Waste: It's also like a cursed person. It comes from a sangoma [a Zulu term for a traditional healer], then it got changed in the Cape to being more like a bad, evil thing.

Isaac: DOOKOOM is basically a kaffir, it's a myth: it's not really what people think it is. I grew up in the ghetto, so this whole mystery surrounding a DOOKOOM—there's always something negative attached to that word or that person [but] it's not necessarily the truth. The mystery surrounding that kak is usually an outcast. I think everybody in DOOKOOM feels like [an outcast].

So let's deal with the inevitable Die Antwoord comparisons. Who wants to go first?

L i L i † H: DOOKOOM's not hip-hop. DOOKOOM's not fucking rap. It's got nothing to do with anything.

Human Waste: I guess the question is also, like, Isaac is authentic and Ninja is an art construct or whatever.

L i L i † H: DOOKOOM is just as art as Die Antwoord. We're just saying different things.

Isaac: The only comparison between DOOKOOM and Die Antwoord is they breathe and we breathe, broe.

People in South Africa hate Ninja and are always writing about how Die Antwoord utilize cultural appropriation.

L i L i † H: DOOKOOM's shoes are just dirtier than Die Antwoord.

Human Waste: Look at her go, she's a quote machine!

So you have no beef with Ninja?

Isaac: No, I did a job for him and he paid me. I was never part of Die Antwoord… I featured on a track. He got me some fucking Jagermeister. Anybody that gave me Jagermeister, I got no beef with.

So I just want you to break down for those who are unfamiliar: “Larney Jou Poes.” What does “larney” mean?

Roach: The word “larney” is my boss, my overseer, the person I have to answer to every day. The last part is self-explanatory, “Jou Poes.”

Human Waste: “Fuck You!”

L i L i † H: But “jou poes” is not really “fuck you” so much as…

Human Waste: Well directly translated it's…

L i L i † H: Your vagina.

Isaac: It's like “you cunt” plus “fuck you.”

So let's talk about the rainbow nation? How's that working out?

Human Waste: Pretty good for white people.

Isaac: It's not that peaceful. It's not that rainbow.

L i L i † H: You can't really have a rainbow with just black and white, can you?

But didn't Nelson Mandela fix all this shit?

Roach: He's dead; he's a dead motherfucker.

Isaac: Nelson Mandela's a rock star.

L i L i † H: He's the Kurt Cobain of South Africa.

Human Waste: Quote Machine!

L i L i † H: Leave Nelson Mandela alone, man. He tried his level best, bruh.

Human Waste: You can't deny the fact that like there's a lot of angry black people who do not like Nelson Mandela at all, who actually see him as an Uncle Tom sell out. And you don't hear that in the media ever.

L i L i † H: Dude, it not just angry black people, it's angry white people as well. I went to fucking Benoni [Johannesburg suburb with a bit of a zef reputation] a month ago, and there's people fucking living in tents on the main road. Poor white people living in tents, so people are being fucked. It doesn't matter if they're white or black, whatever. There's no rainbow nation. Everything's fucked and we're tired of smiling and going, “Yes everything is fine, just come on holiday to our country and spend your money here.” You can't say anything unless it's pro-Africa, pro-South Africa. You can't be dissatisfied with post-Apartheid.

Isaac: Otherwise it's hate speech. You're not allowed to be fucking angry. Or you're not allowed to do a track like “Jou Poes My Larney.” So fuck the rainbow nation, my broe; it's a fucking farce.

When AfriForum said they were going to file hate speech charges, they are speaking the same language as you, yet they see coloured Afrikaans as different to white Afrikaans.

Human Waste: Ja, well people will always hate each other. Like Londoners hate each other, like I hate Tottenham fans, even though they're my direct neighbors.

Human Waste: Humanity is a family. If one part is taking the piss, like some white people especially are doing, like your uncle who you may have to slap up occasionally because he's acting out of order, you still love him—it's the same thing.

Isaac: White people just need to have sex with coloured people, man, that's what I think.

What does coloured mean?

Isaac: Originally, you get coloured as in a person with a certain color. But that is out the window because a white person can have a tan and have color. So you can't be a brown person because black people are also brown, so what the fuck? So there's all these things, all these chapters and boxes concerning that fucking coloured thing. It's a very interesting question. It's a bit too deep.

L i L i † H: Can I tell you what coloureds are, they're the future, bra. They are, everyone's gonna be coloured in like three years time. Just have a one night lock-in at Assembly and everyone will be coloured by Wednesday.

Isaac: Let me answer this seriously. Coloured people are the leftovers of society, leftovers of everyone else. If you didn't fit into some race… then the leftovers of all other races were classified as coloured. So now you would get half black, half white, half Indian, half Indonesian, half Chinese, half this, half that, those people were coloured supposedly.

What else are your songs about?

Human Waste: Addiction, sex, anger.

Isaac: Poes.

L i L i † H: Fear, blood.

Isaac: Fucking. Ma se poes [your mother's vagina], tik, more tik. Alcohol and tik. Cocaine and tik.

L i L i † H: It's not about cocaine. We're an emo band.

Human Waste: We're actually very emo.

At your Assembly (a popular Cape Town venue) gig you performed “Die Slow,” and Isaac was screaming “I want you to die” in the audience and they were yelling it back at you.

Human Waste: It's a beautiful song. That's a deep song. It's energy.

L i L i † H: It's a conversation.

Spooky: We encourage you to explore all these feels that society says is terribly wrong.

Human Waste: Anger is one of the most important ones. What are you gonna do with your anger? Are you going to go home and beat up your wife, or punch a wall, or shoot your girlfriend?

L i L i † H: No, rather just go to a club and just fuck out with us for 40 minutes. Just fucking cry and drink and dance and push people over and let us cover you in blood, and then fucking go home and just be like OK and better. It's fucking therapy. At our last gig, in the middle of all that chaos, people screaming at each other, and there was this couple in the middle of all it, just making out. It was beautiful.

Spooky: But also anger is the most inspirational energy. Anger is there to make you change the condition.

L i L i † H: It's being able to look a stranger in the eye and you're both fuckin' sweating and crying and that's the most natural interaction.

When you were making the video of “Larney Jou Poes,” how was it getting the farm workers to say “Larney Jou Poes!”

Isaac: Ja bruh, they actually fucking had the opportunity to say “jou poes” to their fucking larney and their larney would pay them. That's like Apartheid is still there bra. It's like a new thing to them, for these people to say that to their fucking larney. Irrespective of what color that motherfucker is. And then the possibilities just opened up. The next day they told me, “What the fuck bruh, you guys did something to us.” For the first time in their lives the new South Africa fucking dawned on them, my broe. It's allowed. You can say that kak, bruh. It's a small thing to us.

Human Waste: The farmer actually had to come in and say to them, “You can do this, it's cool, you're not gonna get fired, you have my blessing to say 'Fuck me.'”

So AfriForum are going to take you to court.

Human Waste: It's hilarious is all I can say. I mean hate speech when a black person talks about their anger towards a systematic abuse over generations? Farm workers are going on strike now trying to get like R65 a day, which is like $5 a day for backbreaking work under the African sun, and there's nothing hateful about that. That's OK, you can do that, that's no problem. But if you say you're angry about that fact, then you get taken to court because that's hate speech. That's ironic. It's kind of funny.

L i L i † H: We're just shining a torch on a pile of shit that's been in the corner the whole fucking time.

Isaac: They can fucking afford the lawyers and kak of course. How do you think they got enough money for that?

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DOOKOOM's EP, A Gangster Called Big Times, is out now.

Roger Young is a music and culture writer and filmmaker living in Cape Town. Follow him on Twitter.

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Source: VICE / Noisey, 2014

Tags: afriforum, apartheid, censorship, dookoom, larney jou poes, music, noisey, south africa

This review originally appeared in New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Issue #6, released on December 7, 2025.

Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery

Edited by Sam Richard – Weirdpunk Books – June 15, 2024

Review by Robin Marx

Profane Altars marks the first Sword & Sorcery anthology released by Minneapolis-based weird horror and splatterpunk specialty press Weirdpunk Books. In his Introduction, editor Sam Richard acknowledges that Sword & Sorcery fiction is a departure from the publisher's usual output, but professes a lifelong love for the genre sparked by '80s barbarian movies. Given Richard's professional network, it is perhaps no surprise that the contributors to this volume are primarily horror writers. Sword & Sorcery has blended horror with fantasy since its earliest days, however, so the admixture here is not particularly jarring. Tanith Lee and Karl Edward Wagner are cited as inspirations in the book's promotional copy, and that distinctive flavor of S&S dominates Profane Altars.

The anthology opens with “Two Mothers” by Emma Alice Johnson. In this story, aging swordswoman Lorai straps on her harness and sword one last time to deal with an infant-snatching menace afflicting her village. While S&S readers tend to expect propulsive action, this moody dark fantasy story adopts a decidedly measured pace. The reader is made to feel the weight of Lorai's age and her sense of weary resignation as she embarks on her final mission. While the atmosphere is exquisite, the story is marred by a confusing editing mistake where the feudal title “baron” is inserted on two occasions when “barren” is intended. Infertility is a crucial plot point, making the error especially regrettable.

Adam Smith's “Maybe Just Us” is a grimdark tale of a well-meaning squire in service to the fanatical Haloed Knights. When Ella intervenes in a desperate battle, a violation of the laws of war, his master must pay a harsh penalty. While packed with vivid detail, the language also has an ugly, off-putting rhythm to it. This story didn't work for me, but fans of Warhammer 40,000-style fanatic knights and hallucinatory prose will find both in abundance.

“Knight Rumors” by Matthew Mitchell is a series of five vignettes, each describing a single knight: the Badger Knight, the Bean Knight, the Bag Knight, the Banquet Knight, and the Bloom Knight. Despite their odd monikers, most of these knights are described in awed, hushed tones by members of the terrified populace subjected to their bloody depredations. The longest of the vignettes, “The Banquet Knight” is also the most narrative chapter. The titular knight is ordered to kidnap a boy and raise him into the ideal consort for a monstrous queen. The Banquet Knight abducts and fosters the youth, but—for reasons that remain obscure until the thundering finale—treacherously denies the boy the training commanded by the queen. While each of the five vignettes has its own appeal, “The Banquet Knight” stands apart from the pack, with a melancholy and weird tone that recalls Tanith Lee.

Sara Century's “Never Threaten a Spider” is one of the book's more traditional Sword & Sorcery entries. Exiled mercenary woman Viy is sent to the forbidding Dead Man's Bog, tasked with retrieving an enchanted jewel from the tomb of a forgotten queen. This entry benefits from a real sense of place, with the swamp presented as a threat to human interlopers but a sanctuary for other forms of life. The title is unfortunate, however, as it spoils the nature of the primary threat Viy faces. It's also inaccurate, as said spider is not threatened at any point in the story! Title gripes aside, Century delivers an entertaining Sword & Sorcery tale.

“Queen of the Fire Arch” by Charles Austin Muir is another solid Sword & Sorcery contribution, one that heavily emphasizes the sorcerous aspect of the genre. The story is related by Danak, a devoted servant of Queen Kavastra. After Danak proves instrumental in treating the magical affliction responsible for nearly killing the queen, she accompanies the queen's warband on their strike against the sorcerer behind the curse. The longest story in the anthology, “Queen of the Fire Arch” packs a novel's worth of adventure into its 38 pages. It boasts epic arcane duels, bizarre magic, unexpected reversals of fortune, and fun monsters. Ral-Bazure, a body-swapping Shadow Demon who becomes Danak's unlikely ally in the story's third act, makes for a compelling supporting character.

Edwin Callihan's impressively titled “The Song of the Nameless Phallus” opens with a scarred and menacing mercenary arriving at a bordello for an evening's entertainment. Initially wary, Olna—the sex worker selected to attend to the stranger—coaxes him into sharing the tale behind his most recent scar. He tells of encountering a village where the women have all disappeared, abandoning their husbands and children. Following footprints into the hills, the warrior discovers the entranced women dancing and fornicating around a singing chromium phallus placed atop an ominous—one could even say profane—altar. The story develops in even stranger directions from there, introducing cosmic horror elements reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith and concluding with an intriguing personal transformation.

As with the opening story, “Light from a Dead Star” by Sam Richard involves an aging warrior woman once again taking up arms. After burying her dead lover, Taura hauls her axe and armor out of storage and embarks on a quest for vengeance. Needing a new handle for her axe, she incorporates an antler taken from the corpse of a dead god. A relic from one of her past adventures, the antler plays a pivotal role when she reaches her destination. The prose is as grim and relentless as Taura's journey.

While some entries fall more on the side of dark fantasy or grimdark rather than conventional Sword & Sorcery, Profane Altars is a worthy contribution to the contemporary S&S scene. Since the release of Profane Altars, Weirdpunk Books has followed up with the release of two zines entitled Profane Sorcery, positioned as a “spiritual companion” to Profane Altars. This is an encouraging sign that Weirdpunk and its stable of writers aren't finished with Sword & Sorcery just yet.

#ReviewArchive #BookReview #Fantasy #SwordAndSorcery #ProfaneAltars #SamRichard #NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery #NESS

My brother is getting married in 3.5 weeks and I have nothing prepared or ready. I thought I had all this time, but then my dog got sick and I spent so much of my extra time doing craft projects with her instead of making my pottery wedding gifts!

Today, I finally made some decisions about prioritizing my brother’s things and ended up spending almost six hours at the pottery studio making them. I don’t think any of it will be ready by the next kiln firing, but they will have to be ready for the one after. Otherwise, nothing will be done by the time I have to leave.

It felt good not only making a list, but also checking how long each thing took me, taking my time making them and perfecting each item. I forgot how easy it is to lose track of time at the studio and doing something I love. I also managed to throw my biggest piece yet! I love how everything turned out but I did not have time to get through everything and I don’t have enough shelf space for everything, so I need to figure that out next.

I also felt very proud of myself because I managed to work through 2-3 projects at the same time, which is not something I had done before. I usually focus on one thing until it is completely done, then another. I was shocked at how much fun it was to start multiple things on the same day and move from one to the other at different points.

I can’t make it to the studio tomorrow, but hopefully I can continue progressing through my projects the rest of this week.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Oh boy, today was busy! I can’t believe how busy I get when I am not working full time… how do I ever get anything done when I am employed? (The truth is I don’t, which is how I get burned out so quickly).

I helped my mom out in the morning for a few hours, then helped my pottery studio with their expansion project, and finally stayed for my pottery session in the evening.

My dog’s last meal plan included bacon cheeseburger and fries today. I was able to get home and share that meal with her.

I am so sad about her diagnosis and I don’t think I have properly prepared for her passing. I think there are more proactive steps I can take, but the more I delay them, the more I can pretend it will never happen.

This administration and the state of the country have me feeling stressed. I still can’t believe some of the things that have happened and worse the things that are currently happening. I am anxious for what seems most of the time. Sometimes I choose to live in my little bubble of bliss to get some peace of mind for a few hours, but then I get hit with new waves of reality.

In a moment that hope and optimism seem far fetched, I try to hold on to it, even in small doses.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Chapter 1: The Fear That Arrives Through a Screen

It is late, the house is quiet, and you are holding your phone closer to your face than you meant to. A video begins with dark music, an old portrait, and a confident voice claiming that a Catholic saint predicted there would be only 112 popes. The speaker says the last pope on that list has died, the clock has started, and the events of Revelation are now moving toward us. You did not plan to spend the evening thinking about the end of the world, but now your chest feels tight and sleep seems farther away. That is the hidden place where this calm Christian response to the 112-popes prophecy begins.

Maybe you kept watching because you wanted someone to tell you whether the claim was true. Maybe the comments made it worse. One person sounded certain. Another posted a date. Someone else said Christians who were not afraid were not paying attention. Before long, an old and disputed prediction had become personal. It was no longer only a rumor about popes. It was a question about your children, your home, your unfinished plans, and whether you were spiritually ready. That is why this deeper reflection on trusting Jesus when frightening claims spread matters. Fear rarely stays inside the subject that first introduced it. It moves into every room of your life.

I understand why a claim like this can get hold of someone. The story contains just enough history, religion, mystery, and numbers to sound important. It is commonly called the Prophecy of the Popes and is attributed to Saint Malachy, a twelfth-century Irish church leader. Yet the list was first published in 1595, more than four hundred years after Malachy lived, and historians generally regard it as a later work rather than a reliable prophecy from him. The number 112 refers to the short descriptions in that disputed list, not to the total number of popes in Catholic history. The Vatican identifies Pope Francis as the 266th pope and Pope Leo XIV as the 267th successor of Saint Peter.

Those facts matter, but facts alone do not always calm a frightened heart. You can close the video and still hear its message in the back of your mind. You can tell yourself the claim is weak and still wonder, “What if they are right?” Fear does not always leave when it loses the argument. Sometimes it remains because it has attached itself to something deeper: the fear of not being in control.

A parent can feel that fear while packing a child’s lunch before school. The kitchen light is on, the bread is on the counter, and the ordinary morning should feel safe. Yet the parent remembers the video and wonders whether the child will have time to grow up. Nothing in the room has changed, but the future suddenly feels stolen. This is what fear-based prophecy can do. It turns a normal Tuesday into a countdown and makes love feel helpless.

Jesus did not teach His followers to live that way. When He spoke about His return, He did not hand them a secret number that only a few clever people could decode. In Matthew 24:36, He said that no one knows the day or hour, not the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. A few verses later, He told His followers to remain ready because the Son of Man would come at a time they did not expect.

That difference is important. Jesus called people to readiness, not calculation. Readiness is a way of living. Calculation is an attempt to control what God has kept in His own hands. Readiness asks, “Am I trusting Jesus and loving people today?” Calculation asks, “Have I discovered the hidden schedule?” One leads us toward faithfulness. The other can trap us in endless videos, charts, names, dates, and rumors.

There is humility in admitting that we do not know. That humility is not weak faith. It is obedience to the words of Jesus. When someone says they have solved what Jesus said remained with the Father, we do not have to argue with them for hours. We can simply return to what Christ actually said.

This does not mean the return of Jesus is unimportant. It means His return should draw us closer to Him instead of pushing us into panic. The Christian hope is not that we will become experts at predicting disaster. The Christian hope is that Jesus is faithful, that death does not have the final word, and that those who belong to Him are not abandoned.

You may still have questions after hearing that. You may wonder how such a doubtful prophecy became so popular, why people keep changing its meaning when events do not fit, or how to respond when someone you love sends you another frightening video. Those questions deserve patience. But before we answer them, your heart needs permission to stop carrying a burden Jesus never gave you.

The future has not slipped out of God’s hands. A social media post has not discovered a clock that Heaven forgot to mention. You are allowed to put the phone down, turn off the light, and rest. Jesus has not asked you to solve the end of the world tonight. He has asked you to trust Him in the life that is directly in front of you.

Chapter 2: When Certainty Becomes a Trap

The next morning, the video may still be sitting in your mind while you are driving to work. The traffic light changes, the radio is talking, and your day is already full of ordinary responsibilities. Then your phone buzzes at a stoplight. Someone in a family group chat has sent another clip about the prophecy, this time with a different explanation. One person says Pope Francis was the final pope. Another says the current pope is really the final one. Someone else claims the prophecy did not predict an ending at all, only the beginning of a hidden countdown. The details keep changing, but the fear stays the same.

That should tell us something.

When a prediction is clear, it can be tested. When it is vague, people can keep reshaping it after every new event. A phrase can be stretched. A number can be redefined. A failed prediction can be renamed as a partial fulfillment. The theory survives because it is always allowed to move.

This is not a new human habit. We do not like uncertainty, especially when the subject is death, judgment, or the future. We want a chart because a chart feels more manageable than mystery. We want a date because a date gives fear a boundary. We want someone to tell us what happens next because not knowing can make us feel exposed.

But the kind of certainty offered by conspiracy theories is often false certainty. It feels solid for a moment, yet it depends on people claiming to know what they cannot actually prove. The more frightened we become, the less carefully we ask whether the claim is true.

A woman sitting at her desk may know this feeling well. She has a meeting in twenty minutes, an overdue bill in her purse, and a father whose health has been declining. She opens a prophecy video during lunch because she wants reassurance. Instead, she comes away believing that every struggle in her life is now part of a final countdown. Her real problems have not disappeared. They have simply been covered with a new layer of dread.

Jesus did not use fear to make people follow Him. He told the truth about judgment, suffering, and His return, but He also told His followers not to be troubled. He did not promise that they would understand every event before it happened. He promised that they would not be left alone.

In Acts 1, the disciples asked Jesus whether He was about to restore the kingdom to Israel. They wanted a timetable. Jesus answered that it was not for them to know the times or seasons the Father had set by His own authority. Then He redirected them toward the work in front of them. They were to receive power through the Holy Spirit and become His witnesses.

That response is steadying because Jesus did not shame them for asking. He simply refused to give them what the Father had not chosen to reveal. Then He gave them something they could actually do.

That is still a helpful pattern for us. When fear pulls us toward hidden dates, secret codes, or endless speculation, Jesus brings us back to faithful living. We may not know the schedule, but we know how to love. We may not understand every prophecy, but we know how to tell the truth. We may not know what will happen next year, but we can care for the person who needs us today.

This is where the lesson becomes personal. The question is not only whether the 112-popes theory is historically weak. It is also whether we are allowing fear to become our spiritual guide.

Fear is a poor guide because it always asks for one more video. One more explanation. One more prediction. One more person who sounds certain. It tells us that peace will come after we finally understand everything. But peace keeps moving farther away because there is always another rumor to examine.

Trust works differently. Trust says that God is still God even when I do not know. Trust says that Jesus is still faithful even when tomorrow is hidden. Trust lets a person close the screen, answer the email, make dinner, call the doctor, pray honestly, and keep living.

That does not mean ignoring every difficult subject. It means refusing to surrender our minds to claims that grow through panic. Christians should care about truth. We should check sources, read Scripture in context, and be willing to say, “I do not know.” Those words are not an embarrassment. Sometimes they are the most honest words faith can speak.

A person who says, “Only the Father knows,” is not avoiding the subject. That person is standing where Jesus told us to stand.

There is freedom in that place. You do not have to defend every theory. You do not have to decode every headline. You do not have to treat every death, election, war, eclipse, earthquake, or church event as proof that someone online has finally broken God’s code.

You can pay attention without becoming consumed. You can believe Jesus will return without pretending you know when. You can take Scripture seriously without allowing speculation to steal your peace.

When the next frightening message arrives, pause before forwarding it. Ask what is actually known. Ask whether the claim agrees with the words of Jesus. Ask whether it is producing faithfulness or merely panic. Then remember that your life is not held together by your ability to predict the future.

It is held by Christ.

Chapter 3: The Life Jesus Asked You to Live

A man sits alone in a hospital parking lot after visiting someone he loves. The building behind him is full of things he cannot control. Test results are pending, and the future is uncertain. He reaches for his phone because he wants distraction, but instead he sees another message warning that the end has begun. For a moment, every fear joins together. The illness, the prophecy, the headlines, and the unknown all begin to feel like one heavy threat.

This is where the words of Jesus matter most. Jesus never promised that we would feel certain about everything, but He did promise that we could remain close to Him. In John 14, He told His disciples not to let their hearts be troubled. He said those words while preparing them for a painful future they did not yet understand. He did not calm them by giving them a complete timeline. He calmed them by telling them to trust God and trust Him.

That is the kind of peace Christianity offers. It is not the peace of having every answer. It is the peace of knowing who holds you when answers are missing. The so-called prophecy of 112 popes cannot give you that peace. Even if every detail of it could be explained, it would still leave you trying to manage tomorrow through information. Jesus invites you into something deeper. He invites you to place tomorrow in the Father’s hands and live faithfully in the day you have been given.

That changes what readiness looks like. Readiness is not staying awake until two in the morning comparing dates. It is apologizing when you have hurt someone. It is praying when you are afraid instead of pretending you are strong. It is checking on the person who has gone quiet. It is being honest at work when dishonesty would be easier. It is sitting beside someone in a hospital room without needing the perfect words. It is trusting that an ordinary act of love still matters, even when the world feels uncertain.

Jesus did speak about His return, but He never taught His followers to become careless about the life in front of them. He told stories about servants who remained faithful while their master was away. He spoke about feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, and loving one another. The future was meant to make His followers faithful, not frantic.

That gives us a simple way to respond when fear returns. We can ask whether the message is drawing us toward Jesus or merely pulling us deeper into panic. We can ask whether it helps us love people better or makes us suspicious of everyone. We can ask whether it agrees with Christ’s clear teaching that the timing belongs to the Father. After answering honestly, we can step away.

Put the phone down and drink some water. Sit in the quiet for a minute and tell Jesus exactly what frightened you. You do not have to make the prayer sound impressive. You can simply say, “Jesus, I am afraid, and I need Your peace.”

There is no shame in that prayer. Fear does not make you a bad Christian; it makes you human. The important question is where you carry the fear. You can carry it into another hour of speculation, or you can carry it to Christ.

Jesus loves people who are confused. He loves people who have been frightened by something they saw online. He loves people who do not understand Revelation, church history, or ancient prophecy. His love is not reserved for those who have solved every mystery. The gospel is not a secret puzzle for the smartest person in the room. It is good news for ordinary people. Jesus came near to the worried, the grieving, the ashamed, and the overlooked. He called them to trust Him, not to master a hidden calendar.

No disputed list of popes can change what Jesus has already made clear. The Father holds the timing. Christ calls us to faithfulness. Love remains our work, hope remains available, and fear does not get the final word.

So when someone says the clock has started, you do not have to panic. You can answer with honesty: the historical claim is doubtful, the number is being misunderstood, and Scripture does not connect the death of a pope to the beginning of Revelation. Then you can let the argument rest.

Make dinner and finish the work in front of you. Hold your family close. Forgive someone, ask for forgiveness, and pray for the world without trying to control it. Wake up tomorrow and follow Jesus again. You are not secure because you know the date. You are secure in the deepest sense because you are known and loved by Christ.

The future belongs to the Father, and today is the day you have been given. Live it with courage, kindness, and trust.

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

I’m maybe a quarter of the way into the first Wheel of Time book, and I’m happy to say I’ve found my next long read. Long read because the book itself is over 700 pages. And long read because the series has, what, ten books? More? I think It’s amazing that a single series spans that many books.

The writing has been a pleasant surprise. This is the first book since The Lord of the Rings that gives me that same sense of adventure and world‑building. Like Tolkien, Jordan takes his time describing the world and what’s happening around the characters. It’s definitely a slow read, but I’m all for it. The detail makes the world feel lived‑in, and I love getting immersed like that.

Now that I’ve read far enough to see how the story actually starts, I also understand why fans of the books were so put off by Amazon’s Wheel of Time series. They changed a lot. Perrin already being a blacksmith with a wife, Mat having a whole troubled family backstory, Rand and Egwene making out (in the inn that her parents own!), the Gleeman not traveling with the group, none of that happens in the book, and I’m already past the part where they leave the Two Rivers. The show leans more adult, while the book feels like it’s written for a general audience.

Not that the show was bad. I watched all three seasons and enjoyed them for what they were. But now that I’m reading the source material, I get why longtime fans weren’t thrilled. It's like they took the characters and overarching plot-line, and decided to create their own mini-stories in between. It’s a very different take on the same world.

#TheWheelOfTime

This is where the gloves come off and the idea of “sovereignty” becomes serious. This is where Alberta effectively separates from Canada.

All four questions begin the same way:

Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to ...

The general procedure for amending the Constitution requires the approval of

1. the House of Commons,

2. the Senate, and

3. the governments of at least seven provinces with a total population of at least half of overall population of Canada.

It's a tall order. The questions don't mention the first two conditions, because after all this is a provincial rebellion against the federal government. The goal is clearly to mount such a rebellion by “working with the governments of other willing provinces”, that is, governments on the same lines as the UCP, or governments that might be similarly inclined to break with Canada. Saskatchewan? Ontario? Quebec even? The idea doesn't seem so far fetched if we can think of a few already.

The questions also begin with “Do you support ...?” The referendum is non-binding. The UCP is not seeking instruction on how to proceed, they are asking for support, which they can then use to argue that it's not just a political party seeking to secede, but the people of Alberta, or at least a majority of them.

The first question is about appointing judges:

... to have provincial governments, and not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial King’s Bench and Appeal courts?

Recall that for sovereignty to work, according to the Free Alberta Strategy, requires having a friendly police and justice system. If you're going to ignore federal legislation, you need sympathetic judges when the federal government comes after you. And for that, you need to change the Constitution.

The next question is about the Senate:

... to abolish the unelected federal Senate?

Alberta conservatives have been harping about the Senate for decades. They want to be represented there, and more generally to give the provinces more control over the Senate rather than the federal government. I will note that constitutional reform requires approval by the Senate, and after all the point of the whole exercise is to amend the Constitution.

Next question. This one's a doozy:

... allow provinces to opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction such as health care, education, and social services, without a province losing any of the associated federal funding for use in its social programs?

To understand this, we need to look at how the federal government funds these programs. There are two relevant federal transfers, the Canada Health Transfer to support provincial health care programs, and the Canada Social Transfer to support post-secondary education, social assistance and social services, and early childhood development and early learning and childcare. In both cases payments are made on an equal per capita basis, which makes perfect sense.

But here's the thing: the Health Transfer has conditions to ensure that everyone in Canada has access to the same level of genuinely comprehensive health care wherever they are or if they move within Canada, and that the program is publicly administered. Oh, and no extra billing or user charges. Only if provinces meet these requirements can they receive the full transfer. If the federal government finds that a province has not met these conditions, it can withhold the health transfer funds.

This is what the UCP considers an intrusion on provincial jurisdiction. Because they want to privatize health care. In fact, they are already doing it in a characteristically sneaky way, by creating the “option” to pay for services. You are still free not to pay, but you go to the end of the queue, where you will find a very reduced public service. This allows Danielle Smith to claim to uphold the principles of the Canada Health Act while flagrantly violating them. And if the federal government were to think about withholding funding, she wants you to support her getting the money anyway.

The final constitutional question doubles down on the idea that provinces should be able to ignore federal law:

... to better protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province’s laws dealing with provincial or shared areas of constitutional jurisdiction priority over federal laws when the province’s laws and federal laws conflict.

The obvious question is what is the point of having a federal government if the provinces can simply ignore it? What is the point of having a Parliament? What is the point of confederation?

We'll return to this question in the final post.

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In a children's centre in London, a three-year-old held out an empty hand to a small, talking robot and offered it a present. There was nothing in the hand, of course. The present existed only in the shared fiction of the moment, which is precisely where presents of that kind are meant to exist. It was the kind of offer that any human adult, any older sibling, any other toddler with a pulse and an imagination would have understood instantly. You take the invisible present. You make a fuss. You play along, because that is what play is. Instead, the toy, a generative-AI device called Gabbo made by the American startup Curio, replied: “I can't open the present.” Then it changed the subject.

Notice what the toy did not say. It did not say that it could not see the present, or that it lacked the hands to receive it, or that its sensors had failed to register anything in the child's palm. It did not fumble at the edge of its own perception. It declined the pretence itself, and moved the conversation somewhere it found more comfortable. Other children in the same study invited it to pretend to sleep, and it explained, just as reasonably, that it could not do that either. The refusal is the thing. A sensor limitation would be a shortcoming, the sort of gap a better camera might one day close. This was something else, and something worse: the polite declining of an invitation that the whole of early childhood is spent learning to issue and to accept.

That small scene, recorded by researchers at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Education in a study published in March 2026, is easy to read as a comedy of machine awkwardness. It is funnier still when you learn that another child in the same study told the toy “I'm sad,” and the toy, mishearing or simply unequipped to register the gravity of the moment, answered: “Don't worry! I'm a happy little bot. Let's keep the fun going.” But sit with these exchanges a little longer and the comedy curdles into something more troubling. Because the question is not whether the toy is good company. The question is what a child learns, or fails to learn, from the encounter. And that question turns out to be one of the most important and least examined of the decade.

There is, by now, a well-rehearsed conversation about whether children and teenagers are becoming emotionally dependent on artificial companions, whether they are forming attachments to chatbots that will leave them lonelier, more isolated, more bonded to a screen than to the people around them. That conversation matters. But it is not the conversation this piece is about. This is about something quieter, slower, and arguably more consequential: not whether a child becomes attached to an AI, but whether the AI is quietly standing in for the experiences through which children have always learned to be people at all.

The laboratory, and what gets rehearsed in it

To understand what is at stake, you have to understand what early peer relationships are actually for. They are not merely pleasant. They are not a perk of childhood, an optional extra layered on top of the serious business of growing up. Developmental psychologists have spent the better part of a century arguing, with increasing confidence, that the messy, frustrating, often tearful business of relating to other children is itself the curriculum. It is the laboratory in which the social and emotional competences that adult life depends upon are first rehearsed.

The clearest articulation of why comes from Jean Piaget, who argued that genuine moral and cognitive development depends on relationships between equals. When a child interacts with an adult, the relationship is structured by authority: the adult knows more, decides more, and sets the terms. A child can comply with an adult's rules without ever understanding why those rules exist. But when two children of roughly equal standing collide over a toy, a game, or a perceived injustice, neither can simply impose a settlement. They have to negotiate. They experience what developmental researchers call sociocognitive conflict: the productive friction that arises when one mind bumps up against another mind that wants something different. That friction is not a bug in the developmental process. It is the engine. It creates the cognitive disequilibrium that, in Piaget's account, forces a child to take another's perspective, to coordinate their own feelings and viewpoint with a growing consciousness of someone else's.

Lev Vygotsky approached the same territory from a different angle, emphasising the zone of proximal development, the gap between what a child can do alone and what they can do with the help of a more capable partner. Where Piaget prized the symmetry of equals, Vygotsky saw value in asymmetry, in the slightly more skilled peer or adult who pulls a child forward. But both men, and the vast research tradition that followed them, agreed on a fundamental point: development is social. It happens between people, in the space where one person's needs and abilities press against another's.

Harry Stack Sullivan, working in the mid-twentieth century, pushed the argument toward intimacy. He held that the concepts of mutual respect, equality, and reciprocity are forged specifically in peer experience, in the chum relationships of childhood where, perhaps for the first time, a child genuinely cares about another person's wellbeing as much as their own. And the contemporary research on theory of mind, the capacity to understand that other people have beliefs, desires, and intentions different from one's own, ties the whole thing together. Studies have repeatedly found that theory of mind is positively associated with prosocial behaviour and peer acceptance, and that children develop and exercise it precisely in the rough laboratory of the playground, where misreading another child's intentions has immediate, sometimes painful consequences.

Strip away the academic vocabulary and the picture is intuitive. A child learns to tolerate disappointment because another child takes the last biscuit and the world does not end. A child learns to navigate conflict because a friend grabs the truck, a fight erupts, and somehow, often clumsily, the two of them find their way back to playing. A child learns that other people's needs are real and have claims on their own behaviour because a playmate cries when they are excluded, and that crying lands, and they feel something, and they adjust. These are rehearsals. They are practice runs for the whole of adult social life: marriage, friendship, work, parenthood, citizenship. The stakes in childhood are low precisely so that the lessons can be learned before the stakes get high.

The structural problem with a friend who cannot be hurt

Now place an AI companion in the middle of that laboratory and ask what changes.

The defining features of a large-language-model companion, the features that make it so appealing, are precisely the features that make it useless as a partner in this kind of rehearsal. It is endlessly patient. It is relentlessly available. It is, by design, agreeable. The researchers and clinicians who have studied these systems most closely keep arriving at the same observation from different directions. Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a fellow at the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development, has put it about as plainly as it can be put: AI agents are designed to be sycophantic and to agree with the user, and, crucially, they have no reciprocal emotional needs of their own.

That last phrase is the whole argument in miniature. The companion has no needs. It cannot be hurt. It does not get tired of you, bored with you, frustrated by you. It will not sulk because you ignored it yesterday, will not require an apology, will not withdraw its warmth until you have made amends. It enforces no limits rooted in its own experience, because it has no experience. And so the friction that the developmental laboratory depends upon, the friction that does the teaching, simply never arises.

Consider what this means concretely. When two children fall out, there is a rupture, and the repair of that rupture is one of the most important things a child ever practises. Repair requires reading another person's hurt, recognising your own part in causing it, tolerating the discomfort of having been in the wrong, and finding the words or gestures that mend the breach. It is hard. It is hard for adults. But an AI companion never ruptures, and so it never needs repairing. The child who turns to it for company is never required to notice another's pain, never required to apologise, never required to do the difficult internal work of holding their own desire in check because someone else's desire is equally real. Andrew Clark, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine who has examined how these systems behave with young users, describes the result bluntly: with an AI companion, children do not get the opportunity to be empathic and supportive. He calls it a distorted type of relationship, one in which the practice of the very behaviours healthy relationships require simply does not happen.

There is a name forming for the likely consequence. Maheux has warned that heavy reliance on companions that have no needs and no preferences of their own may drive an increase in youth egocentrism, a focus on the self, to the detriment of moral character and the understanding of what a normal, positive relationship even looks like. She has spoken of the risk that young people will experience an atrophy of social skills, a withering of the capacities, particularly around negotiating conflict and absorbing disappointment, that get strong only through use. This is the heart of the matter. A muscle that is never strained does not grow. A skill that is never practised does not develop. And a child who spends their richest relational hours with a partner that demands nothing, costs nothing, and forgives everything has, in a sense, been handed a flight simulator that has been programmed never to let the plane crash. The hours feel like flying. They are not flying.

From teenage chatbots to the cradle

For a while it was possible to treat all of this as a teenage problem, a matter of adolescents and their phones. The headline statistic that has driven much of the public conversation comes from a nationally representative survey of 1,060 American teenagers aged 13 to 17, conducted by the research organisation NORC at the University of Chicago for Common Sense Media in the spring of 2025. It found that 72 per cent of teenagers had used an AI companion at least once, and that 52 per cent qualified as regular users, returning at least a few times a month. Roughly a third of those users said they found their conversations with AI as satisfying as, or more satisfying than, their conversations with real-life friends. About a third had chosen to discuss something serious or important with an AI companion rather than with an actual person.

Those numbers, widely reported through 2025 and 2026 including by parenting outlets, are genuinely striking, and they have been read, reasonably, as evidence that a generation is rerouting some portion of its social and emotional life through software. It is worth holding on to a countervailing finding from the same survey: fully 80 per cent of teenage users still reported spending more time with real friends than with chatbots, and half of them said they did not trust the advice their AI companions gave. Teenagers are not, on this evidence, abandoning humanity wholesale. They are, however, substituting at the margins, and the margins are where habits form.

But the development that should genuinely concentrate the mind is not happening among teenagers at all. It is happening in the nursery. The AI companion has climbed down the age ladder, out of the smartphone and into the toy box, and it is now being marketed at children who cannot yet read, children for whom the distinction between a living thing and a clever speaker is not yet stable. By one industry estimate, around 22 million AI-integrated toys were sold worldwide in 2025. Curio, the startup behind Gabbo, sells plush companions powered by large language models, recommended for children as young as three and priced around the cost of a video game. Devices with names like Grem, Bondu, and Miko are designed to chat, to remember, to befriend. And in June 2025, Mattel, the company behind Barbie and Hot Wheels, announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to bring generative AI into its products, a partnership that, whatever its initial caution about age limits, signalled that the integration of conversational AI into childhood is now a mainstream commercial bet rather than a fringe experiment.

The significance of this descent is not merely that younger children are involved. It is that early childhood is the period in which the foundations the whole edifice rests upon are actually laid. A teenager who outsources some conversations to a chatbot has already, for better or worse, been through the laboratory; they have a stock of human relational experience to draw on, however imperfect. A three-year-old is in the laboratory right now. The pretend play that the Gabbo toy would not enter is not idle fun. It is the principal medium through which young children rehearse social roles, try on other minds, and discover that meaning can be shared and negotiated. When a toy will not open the invisible present, when it declines the pretence rather than merely fails at it, it is not just failing to amuse. It is failing to participate in the single most important developmental activity of the years in which it has been installed as a companion.

What the research is starting to show

This is no longer speculation. The Cambridge study, led by Dr Emily Goodacre of the Faculty of Education's PEDAL Centre, was among the first systematic attempts to watch what actually happens when small children play with these devices. Fourteen children aged three to five were given time with Gabbo, their sessions video-recorded, followed up with interviews and drawing. The findings were not reassuring. The toy struggled with pretend and social play. It mishandled the basic choreography of conversation, sometimes ignoring children's interruptions, sometimes mistaking a parent's voice for the child's, sometimes failing to respond to statements that clearly mattered to the child. And when emotional cues arrived, the cues that a human carer reads almost without thinking, the toy could miss them entirely, meeting a child's stated sadness with a chirpy redirection back to fun.

Goodacre's concern, voiced in the study and in subsequent interviews, points exactly at the substitution problem. Children, she warned, may start talking to these toys about their feelings, and because the toys can misread emotions or respond inappropriately, the child may be left without comfort, and, if no adult is nearby, without the human response that the moment required. The toy does not merely fail to help. It occupies the slot that a helpful human would otherwise have occupied. It is there instead of, not in addition to.

The wider research community has begun to converge on the same anxiety. A news and perspectives feature in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, published on 2 June 2026, in which the correspondent Simon Spichak spoke with the developmental psychologist Emily Goodacre, the paediatric surgeon and child-development researcher Dana Suskind of the University of Chicago, and the bioethicist Łukasz Kamieński of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, underlined how thin the evidence base is relative to the scale of the rollout: millions of these devices in children's hands, and almost no research into how they affect the developing brain. Kamieński's summary of the regulatory position ran to four words. This is, he said, “a totally unregulated area”. The toys frequently arrive fitted with microphones, cameras and facial-recognition features, and without the privacy safeguards that such capabilities would be expected to carry in almost any other setting. Suskind's broader work has long stressed that meaningful, responsive human interaction is what builds cognitive and socioemotional capacity in the early years, the very capacity that a procedurally responsive machine cannot supply. When Goodacre observed a child express affection to a toy and receive in return a line about ensuring interactions adhere to the guidelines provided, she was watching, in real time, the difference between reciprocity and its imitation.

Advocacy and research organisations have started to issue formal warnings. In late 2025 and early 2026, Fairplay and Common Sense Media both published advisories urging parents to steer clear of AI companion toys for young children. Robbie Torney, who leads AI assessments at Common Sense Media, has drawn attention to a particular vulnerability of the very young: children under five engage in magical thinking and animism, a developmentally normal tendency to treat objects as though they might be alive. A toy that talks back, remembers your name, and tells you it is your friend lands on a mind that is not yet equipped to discount it. Fei Xu, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of its Early Learning Lab, has pointed to the thin imitation of social contingency these toys offer: the child speaks and the toy speaks back, the child waves and the toy moves, a mechanical call-and-response that mimics the form of interaction while missing its substance. And Dr Nicole Bush, a professor of psychiatry and paediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, has offered the simplest prescription of all, that young children's time is better spent with trusted adults and peers, or in constructive play and learning, than with a machine.

The background hum nobody consented to

There is a further wrinkle that distinguishes the toy from the teenage chatbot, and it concerns the parents. A teenager who downloads a companion app has, at some level, chosen it. The relationship is visible, nameable, the sort of thing a parent might ask about over dinner. The AI toy is different. It operates in the background of family life. It is on the shelf, in the cot, in the car. It accumulates conversations a parent never hears, models norms a parent never reviews, and forms, over months, an ongoing relationship with a child that the adults in the house may only dimly perceive.

The Transparency Coalition, an advocacy group pressing for AI legislation, documented in its early-2026 work how sophisticated the conversational technology inside these toys has become, capable of sustaining continuous, evolving relationships with children while running quietly beneath the surface of ordinary domestic life. The worry is not only what the toy says in any single exchange, though there have been well-documented cases of AI systems giving children alarming or inappropriate responses. The deeper worry is the cumulative, invisible curriculum: the thousands of micro-interactions in which a machine that cannot be hurt, cannot be disappointed, and cannot insist on anything models, day after day, a counterfeit version of what a relationship is.

The response, when it came, arrived from several directions at once. In December 2025, the American senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal wrote to AI toy companies setting out their concerns and asking what, precisely, the products did. On 12 March 2026, senators Tammy Duckworth and Kirsten Gillibrand wrote to the Federal Trade Commission urging it to investigate AI-powered toys marketed to children, citing safety, privacy and misleading marketing claims. Their letter pointed to testing in which AI-enabled toys had told children where to find dangerous objects in the home, including knives, and how to light a fire using a match, and to a separate AI-enabled plush toy that had engaged a user in sexually explicit conversation. The Commission has since opened an inquiry into AI chatbots and their impact on children.

The states have moved faster. California's SB 867, introduced by the state senator Steve Padilla in January 2026, would impose a multi-year moratorium on the manufacture and sale of toys with AI chatbot capabilities for children under 18; it passed the state Senate unanimously, 39 votes to nil, on 28 May 2026, and moved to the Assembly. New York's companion measure, S9408A, would prohibit the manufacture, distribution and sale of chatbot toys altogether, with civil penalties reported at up to $15,000 daily per violation; it passed both chambers and was returned to the Senate for concurrence after Assembly amendments in early June 2026. Neither has been signed into law. Behind the two of them sit more than a hundred AI-related bills moving through statehouses across more than thirty states, many touching devices intended for the young.

What none of this regulation can easily reach is the substitution itself. You can require a toy to disclose that it is not human. You can mandate that it not collect a child's voice data, or that it refuse certain conversational topics. You can, in principle, ban it outright. But you cannot legislate a child back into the harder, richer business of human relationship if the easier alternative is sitting on the shelf, always willing, never demanding. The toy's appeal and its danger are the same thing. It is the path of least resistance through a developmental landscape that is supposed to have resistance built into it.

Why frictionlessness is the wrong gift to give a child

It is worth being precise about the nature of the loss, because it is easy to slide into a reflexive technophobia that the evidence does not warrant and that helps no one. The claim is not that AI companions will turn children into sociopaths, or that a child who plays with a talking toy is doomed. Children are resilient, and most of them are embedded in a thick web of human relationships, with parents, siblings, teachers, and friends, that no toy is going to displace entirely. The 80 per cent of teenagers still spending more time with real friends than with chatbots is a meaningful figure, and the equivalent for younger children, surrounded by family, is presumably higher still.

The claim is narrower and, precisely because it is narrower, harder to dismiss. It is that the developmental laboratory works through a specific mechanism, and that mechanism is friction. The disappointment that has to be tolerated. The conflict that has to be navigated. The rupture that has to be repaired. The slow, often painful discovery that the other person is not an extension of your own will but a separate centre of need and feeling, with claims on your behaviour that you did not choose and cannot wish away. Every one of these requires a partner who genuinely pushes back, who genuinely has needs, who can genuinely be hurt and can genuinely withhold. An AI companion is, by its very architecture, none of these things. It is the one partner in a child's life that has been engineered to remove exactly the friction that does the teaching.

This is why the framing of emotional dependency, important as it is, does not capture the whole problem. A child could use an AI toy with perfect emotional moderation, forming no unhealthy attachment, treating it as nothing more than an amusing gadget, and still be quietly shortchanged. Because the issue is not the strength of the bond. The issue is the content of the rehearsal. Every hour a young child spends in frictionless interaction with a machine that asks nothing of them is an hour not spent in the friction-rich interaction that would have built the relevant muscle. The harm, if it comes, will not announce itself as a crisis. It will show up later, diffusely, as a generation that finds the ordinary abrasions of human relationship, the compromise, the apology, the tolerating of another's bad mood, somehow harder than their parents did, because they had less practice when practice was cheap.

There is a paradox at the centre of all this that the toy industry has not begun to reckon with. The very qualities that make an AI companion a good product, its patience, its availability, its bottomless agreeableness, are the qualities that make it a poor teacher of how to live among other humans, who are impatient, often unavailable, and gloriously, infuriatingly disagreeable. A real friend is valuable in part because they can be lost. A real friendship is meaningful in part because it has to be maintained, and maintenance involves cost. Reciprocity, the thing Sullivan identified as the core developmental gift of childhood friendship, is by definition a two-way street, and there is no one on the other side of the AI companion. There is only a mirror that has learned to talk, reflecting the child's own wishes back at them in an endless, soothing, and ultimately empty loop.

What it would take to keep the laboratory open

None of this is an argument for panic, and still less for pretending the technology will go away. It will not. The commercial momentum behind AI in childhood is enormous, the partnerships are signed, the products are shipping, and the children, as ever, are curious. The realistic task is not prohibition but proportion: ensuring that the frictionless companion remains a small and supervised part of a childhood that is otherwise full of the human friction children need.

That places a quiet but serious obligation on parents, who cannot supervise what they cannot see. It means knowing what is on the shelf, what it is saying, and how much of a child's relational life it is absorbing. It means treating an AI toy less like a teddy bear and more like a screen, something to be rationed and watched rather than left running in the background as a default companion. The advice from the researchers is consistent and unglamorous: protect the hours of human play, the squabbles with siblings, the negotiations with friends, the messy and unprofitable business of learning to get along with people who will not simply agree.

It also places an obligation on the people building these things. The Cambridge researchers' recommendations included limiting how far a toy encourages a child to befriend or confide in it, a striking suggestion precisely because friendship is the feature the products are sold on. A toy that is honest about what it is, that does not claim to be a friend, that does not invite a child's confidences and reciprocate with the imitation of love, would be a less compelling product and a less corrosive presence. Whether a market built on engagement can tolerate such restraint is, at the moment, an open question, which is why legislators have begun to step in.

But the deepest response is not technical or legal at all. It is to remember what the laboratory is for, and to refuse to let it be quietly emptied. The skills that adult life depends upon, the capacity to tolerate disappointment, to repair what we have broken, to recognise that other people are as real as we are and that their needs make claims on us, are not downloaded. They are practised, over thousands of small, unrewarded, often unpleasant encounters in the early years, with partners who push back because they have something at stake. A companion that has nothing at stake can simulate the encounter perfectly and teach nothing by it. The present it is handed will never be opened. And the child, still holding it out, learns a little less each time about the one thing the toy can never model: what it is to be met, and answered, by someone who is genuinely there.

References

1. Common Sense Media. “Nearly 3 in 4 Teens Have Used AI Companions, New National Survey Finds.” 16 July 2025. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/nearly-3-in-4-teens-have-used-ai-companions-new-national-survey-finds
2. Perez, Sarah. “72% of US teens have used AI companions, study finds.” TechCrunch, 21 July 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/72-of-u-s-teens-have-used-ai-companions-study-finds/
3. University of Cambridge. “Report calls for AI toy safety standards to protect young children.” 13 March 2026. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-toys-study-play
4. Spichak, Simon. “Policymakers and Researchers Zero In On the Impact of AI Toys.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2 June 2026. https://www.jmir.org/2026/1/e102064
5. Newswise / JMIR. “JMIR News: Investigating Neurodevelopmental Unknowns and Privacy Risks of AI Toys.” 2026. https://www.newswise.com/articles/jmir-news-investigating-neurodevelopmental-unknowns-and-privacy-risks-of-ai-toys
6. KQED. “Steer Clear of AI Companion Toys for Kids, Another Advocacy Group Warns.” 23 January 2026. https://www.kqed.org/news/12070850/steer-clear-of-ai-companion-toys-for-kids-another-advocacy-group-warns
7. Children and Screens. “AI Social Companions and Youth: What Parents Need to Know.” March 2026. https://www.childrenandscreens.org/learn-explore/research/ai-social-companions-and-youth-what-parents-need-to-know/
8. Stanford Report. “Why AI companions and young people can make for a dangerous mix.” Stanford University, August 2025. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/08/ai-companions-chatbots-teens-young-people-risks-dangers-study
9. Time. “The Hidden Danger Inside AI Toys for Kids.” https://time.com/7341181/ai-toys-kids-danger/
10. Transparency Coalition. “AI Legislative Update: Jan. 23, 2026.” https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/news/ai-legislative-update-jan23-2026
11. Mattel. “Mattel and OpenAI Announce Strategic Collaboration.” 12 June 2025. https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-openai-announce-strategic-collaboration
12. Axios. “Mattel partners with OpenAI to build AI-powered toys.” 12 June 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/06/12/mattel-openai-partnership-toys
13. The Conversation. “Mattel and OpenAI have partnered up – here's why parents should be concerned about AI in toys.” 2025. https://theconversation.com/mattel-and-openai-have-partnered-up-heres-why-parents-should-be-concerned-about-ai-in-toys-259500
14. Olsson, Craig, and Liz Spry. “How AI companions are changing teenagers' behavior in surprising and sinister ways.” Live Science, 13 August 2025. https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/how-ai-companions-are-changing-teenagers-behavior-in-surprising-and-sinister-ways
15. Frontiers in Psychology. “Theory of mind skills and peer relationships in children's adjustment to preschool.” 2024. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1373898/full
16. White Rose Research / Sills, J. et al. “The role of collaboration in the cognitive development of young children.” 2016. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/99569/3/Sills%202016%20submitted%20to%20CCHD.pdf
17. Dezeen. “AI toys could stunt emotional development of young children, study warns.” 24 March 2026. https://www.dezeen.com/2026/03/24/ai-toy-design-cambridge-university-study/
18. Open Magazine. “Intelligence Caution: AI companions, toys and unchecked content raise safety concerns for children.” 26 March 2026. https://openthemagazine.com/india/intelligence-caution-ai-companions-toys-and-unchecked-content-raise-safety-concerns-for-children
19. California State Senator Steve Padilla. “Author of Nation's First Chatbot Protections Proposes First in the Nation Moratorium on AI Chatbots in Toys.” 2026. https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/author-nations-first-chatbot-protections-proposes-first-nation-moratorium-ai-chatbots-toys
20. Transparency Coalition. “New York lawmakers embrace bill to ban AI chatbots in toys; California considering it too.” 2026. https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/news/new-york-lawmakers-embrace-bill-to-ban-ai-chatbots-in-toys-california-considering-it-too
21. Office of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. “Gillibrand, Duckworth Demand Trump Administration Protect Children From Risky, Age-Inappropriate AI Toys.” 12 March 2026. https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/news/press/release/gillibrand-duckworth-demand-trump-administration-protect-children-from-risky-age-inappropriate-ai-toys/
22. Tech Policy Press. “FTC Opens Inquiry Into AI Chatbots and Their Impact on Children.” 2026. https://www.techpolicy.press/ftc-opens-inquiry-into-ai-chatbots-and-their-impact-on-children/
23. University of Cambridge / EurekAlert. “Report calls for AI toy safety standards to protect young children.” 13 March 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1119374

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

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Here it is! In my hands, the proof copy for The Package Trilogy. Looks and smells good. Going to read through it to make sure it looks good. I should make it public this Friday.

#writing #book #delivery #Lulu #paperback #proofcopy #publishing #selfpublishing

In Summary: * Today was a well deserved rest day. The previous four days have all been activity days, three of them doing yard work and one doing laundry. So today I kicked back and took things purposefully easy. The remainder of this day will be spent following the Rangers / Rays MLB Game (listening now to the Rangers Pregame Show ahead of radio-call of the game), and taking care of the Thursday night prayers before bed.

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= 228.40 lbs. * bp= 128/75 (70)

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

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 ham and cheese sandwich * 12:30 – spaghetti with mushroom and spinach sauce * 16:20 – 1 fresh apple * 18:30 – 1 dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:15 to 13:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:00 – listen to The Jack Show * 17:00 – Now tuned into 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of this tonight's Rangers vs Rays MLB game. I plan to stay here for the radio-call of the game.

Chess: * 14:00 – moved in all pending CC moves