O poder da voz. Faz um mês que partiste. Não há um dia que não acorde e não adormeça com vontade de te ver. Não poder te ligar para te contar o meu dia dói, ouço as tuas mensagens vezes e vezes sem conta, o sentimento que nasce é complexo, sinto o amor mas com ele a saudade cresce. Começo a perceber que essa saudade vai sempre aumentar por isso prefiro te ouvir, pois poder sentir um pouco de ti vivo vale suportar a lembrança da tua ausência. Hoje te estaria a ligar a contar como foi o retorno dele à escola, a contar todas as alegrias, todas as revoltas. Te conto igual. Naquele momento nosso antes de adormecer ou de manhã quando caminho para poder te ver. Obrigada por todas as mensagens que tenho tuas, obrigada por todas as fotos e todos os videos, obrigada por nos fazeres sentir sempre tão amados mesmo quando já não te posso abraçar. Quero que saibas que temos estado bem, temos estado a tentar fazer o melhor como sempre ensinaste, e estamos a seguir em frente mesmo que a vontade seja de passar várias horas nas memórias de quando te tinha aqui. Vou ouvir-te mais um pouco e no meio da saudade celebrar a tua vida, celebrar a pessoa maravilhosa e única que foste, tu meu primeiro eterno amor.

Another week, another of Jenny Erpenbeck’s books: Visitation, this time. I finished it yesterday. First published in 2008, it’s counted as her first novel, though at only 150 pages it could probably also be considered her third novella. While relatively brief, it does not lack heft and depth. It’s about a plot of land by a lake in countryside not far from Berlin, and the house built on it; and about the house’s various inhabitants and some of their near neighbours. Initially a weekend retreat for a successful architect in the early ‘30s, the place goes on to be buffeted by powerful historical crosswinds which leave practically no-one connected with it unscathed — though some suffer much worse fates than others. A connecting thread through the book is the figure of an unnamed gardener who tends the grounds and watches over the house for the majority of its existence, thereby neatly contrasting the disruptive dramas of history with the continuities of nature.

The writing is refined and artful, with the style often changing from chapter to chapter. One early section, for example, incorporates folklore; another, near the end, folds in a measure of legalese. In between, repetition is employed to a number of different ends: to foreshadow, to destabilise, to underscore, and so on. From the simple pleasures of leisurely country living to the terrible cruelties of mass murder, it’s a book that covers a lot of ground in its short span. Comparing it with her later novel Go Went Gone, I found it similarly powerful and affecting, albeit achieving its effects by very different means.

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On Sunday I played host to my sister, her husband, and Bertie, their new puppy (Fig. 38). My cooking didn’t all quite go to plan: some mishaps meant that the main course came to table in two instalments rather than all at once. Flavour-wise at least it was successful enough. And the cheeseboard was well-received. Bertie, a Bedlington/Jack Russell cross (Fig. 39) mostly behaved himself, although his incomplete house-training wasn’t quite equal to the challenge of spending a few hours in an unfamiliar environment.

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At Monmouth on Friday (I took last week off work) I picked up a couple of second-hand CDs with a Cuban connection. There was more Mongo Santamaria with a compilation disc called Skins combining two of his ‘60s albums for the Riverside label: Go, Mongo! (‘62) and Mongo Explodes (‘66). My preference is for the latter with its better-integrated blend of North American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms: for a flavour of it, try ‘Dirty Willie’.

And there was The Blessing (1991), by Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, more than ably assisted by Charlie Haden on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. I’d not previously heard of this remarkably impressive musician. The record begins with some agitated rapid-fire solo piano before the bass & drums come in. And there is plenty more steely virtuosity to follow, expertly blended with more tender & soulful playing, as in his take on ‘Besame Mucho’, for example.

My father had a love of carpentry. Cabinets, bookshelves, tables, chests — it didn’t matter. If it involved woodworking, he was interested. He was very keen on getting quality cuts of wood and the best finishing he could afford. He often said, “No amount of varnish ever fixed a rotten board.” And his Depression-era truth still stands today.

But this kind of truth is only helpful if you also know the distinction between a good and a rotten board. You’d have to know that, characteristically, rotten wood isn’t all the same, as its discoloration can vary widely. It can appear cracked, warped, shrunk, or peeling. It can give off a musty, earthy, mushroom-like odor and, when tapped, sound dull or hollow rather than dense or solid. And it may or may not have visible mold or fungal growth.

Finding a good board to work with can be a challenge if you don’t know what to look for.

And even as simple as that sounds, even a keen eye can sometimes be deceived. We may sometimes mistake a board’s unique qualities of age, stress, or wear for something rotten, when really they’re just blemishes reflecting the board’s circumstances.

People are, by nature, more complex than wooden boards, and telling the difference between good and bad (rotten) character isn’t always easy. I don’t profess to be any kind of expert either. I have been deceived and misled many times. And that’s not simply the fault of the other person. It is also mine, and my own ignorance or naivety or carelessness that allowed me to be taken in by appearances easily in a world of people who often are never on the outside who they appear on the inside.

Culture, too, plays a role here—especially popular culture—which, whether deliberately or accidentally, serves as a tool of acculturation: a means of setting norms and expectations for people, regardless of how accurate or true-to-life those norms and expectations really are. And mass media, along with social interaction, are critical to that acculturation.

Popular culture through media, especially through visual and social media, circulates not what someone needs, but what captures attention. It offers spectacle. And when people consume the shallowness of spectacle, we sometimes also trade our own natural curiosity and need for critical reasoning because the image of a norm or standard they are offered is easier to consume than having to investigate for ourselves. And when we surrender our faculties, no matter how developed they may be, we trade our own natural needs and desires for the projection. In so doing, the projection, then, becomes a mirror.

There are consequences for this. Ideals acquired from an environment like ours that optimizes for attention, comfort, and immediate pleasure—capture. There’s no care there for the well-being of the person consuming it, mimicking it, or living it. And in our consumption of these norms and standards, however nice and attractive they may appear, we also consume the rot within them, smuggled in right before our very eyes. Yet, generation after generation, people keep looking past the catastrophes of these manufactured projections and revere them as the greatest examples of good living — enviable and thus worthy of imitation.

Having wants and desires isn’t the problem. That is part of the human condition. The problem is the source of the desire. There are some desires that are manufactured for us, not to help us by helping us with our basic needs or live better lives, but to convince us that an unrealistic external ideal is implicitly better than whatever our own experiences have shown us or proven.

Conversely, those desires grown from experience with and in the world rather than through media are better suited to guiding us to a better life and contentment since they’ve been tested by encounters and revised by missteps and failure. Those experiences are the best teachers because they show us how no amount of varnish can fix or fully hide the rot inside. At some point, the truth comes out.

We see this when we misplace our faith and trust in appearances rather than character, and later invariably experience: Disappointment. Anger. Insecurity. Cognitive dissonance. Exhaustion. Worry. Fear. The hollowness of someone who should be there but isn’t. Masks, however clever, can never fully hide the rot that lies beneath. And the contractions are more than just inconveniences; they’re toxic realities — hard and painful — that no mask, however joyful and pleasurable, can compensate.

The rot beneath the beauty doesn’t care about you, your desires, or your well-being, no matter the layers of varnish.

#Excultio

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

Starcraft Co 26- Internecion, Part IV: Inferno

The order to stop planning for the final thirty kilometers did not make them disappear. They remained visible on every tactical display, a narrow strip of volcanic country between the coalition and the caldera, packed so densely with defenses that some targeting systems could no longer distinguish military installations from terrain. Thousands of spore colonies covered the approaches, their overlapping envelopes reinforced by missile batteries, surviving Goliaths and shielded Protoss emplacements. Mutalisks, Scourge, Guardians and Devourers filled the atmosphere above them, while the rebel Protoss fleet remained largely intact around the Overmind itself, carriers and Arbiters holding behind layers of Scouts and Corsairs that had barely participated in the outer campaign. The Renegades had sacrificed armies, hive sectors and entire industrial cities without spending the force intended to guard the final objective, and every hour that force waited brought more Zerg into the system.

The coalition could break it. Nobody seriously doubted that anymore, which made the problem worse rather than better. StarCraft Co. and the Ara had just demonstrated that, given sufficient ammunition and sufficient willingness to absorb casualties, they could dismantle the most heavily defended positions either civilization had ever encountered. Another deliberate offensive would work eventually. Tanks would reduce the ground defenses, carriers and battlecruisers would grind down the air fleets, commandos would infiltrate the surviving strongpoints, and enough soldiers would die for the remainder to reach the caldera. The staff disagreed only about whether the process would require four days, six days or longer, and by then the rate at which Zerg were entering the system might exceed the coalition's ability to kill them permanently. Winning the final battle in the ordinary way had become a method of losing the war.

The commander asked for plans that ignored the battlefield rather than plans that defeated it. Nuclear bombardment was rejected first. The Overmind's visible body filled much of the caldera, but geological scans showed tissue descending deep through fractured volcanic rock, and nobody could determine how much of the organism needed to survive for the psionic network to regenerate. Orbital fire posed the same problem. Battlecruisers could burn the surface for hours and still leave living structures beneath kilometers of stone, assuming the ships survived the inner air-defense belt long enough to do so. A ground penetration by commandos was possible in theory, but even the most optimistic route required crossing defenses that had already consumed much of the regiment. The Ara proposed several psionic alternatives, including attempts to disrupt the creature's field from outside, yet their own scholars warned that an unsuccessful attack might merely accelerate whatever developmental process was occurring inside it.

The solution emerged from capabilities that neither side possessed when their alliance began. A Terran staff officer proposed the first version, an Ara executor discarded half of it as impossible, StarCraft Co. engineers restored the impossible half by changing the assumptions, and within several hours the operations room was filled with a plan so dependent upon Terran and Protoss systems working together that nobody could identify which civilization had actually designed it. The operation received the designation MAAD, a name that remained on tactical displays without explanation because there was no time to improve it and because, after the fourth revision, nobody thought the description particularly inaccurate.

At its center was an Arbiter.

The Ara had used Recall throughout the war to move forces across distances that would otherwise require transports or expose them to interception. At Aurelia, Recall had transformed a collapsing battlefield by placing entire formations behind the Renegade army. During the assault on Sanctuary, Arbiters had moved mixed Terran and Protoss groups through defenses that conventional maneuver could not penetrate quickly enough. The final plan took the same principle to an extreme. Instead of fighting thirty kilometers through the inner defenses, the coalition would place an Arbiter inside them and bring the assault force directly to the caldera.

Getting the Arbiter there was the problem around which everything else had to be built. The Renegades understood Ara technology and had surviving Arbiters of their own, which meant the inner defense would identify the threat immediately. A single ship approaching the caldera would draw every Scout, Corsair, spore colony and missile battery within range, while Scourge required only a few successful impacts to destroy it. Cloaking could conceal other vessels beneath an Arbiter's field, but the Arbiter itself remained visible. The coalition therefore decided not to conceal it at all. They would make the sky contain too many Arbiters to know which one mattered.

Ara High Templar began generating hallucinations hours before the assault, creating false Arbiters, carriers and attack craft whose signatures were deliberately mixed with real vessels. Terran engineers added another layer by converting hundreds of damaged and obsolete dropships into unmanned decoys, stripping away anything unnecessary and replacing cargo with heat generators, transponders and reactor-emission simulators tuned to resemble troop-filled transports. Electronic-warfare teams linked the decoys into the Ara illusion network so targeting systems would receive contradictory information about which contacts were physical, which were psionic projections and which were genuine combat ships. Some dummy dropships carried chaff and sensor repeaters, others carried explosives intended to detonate when destroyed, while a handful contained automated missile pods simply to ensure that the Renegades could not safely ignore anything approaching the caldera.

The real Arbiter would move within that chaos under continuous Terran protection. Science vessels were assigned in sequence along its projected route, each prepared to place a Defensive Matrix around the ship as the previous field collapsed. Wraiths would hunt anything that penetrated the decoy screen, Valkyries would break up Scourge concentrations, and battlecruisers would use Yamato fire against whatever defensive position created the greatest immediate threat to the Arbiter rather than against targets of conventional strategic value. Ara carriers would commit their interceptor complements almost without reserve, while Scouts and Corsairs fought not to win air superiority across the battlefield but to hold open one moving corridor for several minutes. It was the fullest expression yet of the military relationship the two civilizations had spent years building: Protoss psionics creating deception, Terran engineering making the deception physical, Terran science extending Protoss survivability, Protoss fighters shaping the airspace for Terran capital weapons, and all of it subordinated to a single timing sequence measured in seconds.

The payload waiting for Recall consisted of six hundred commandos.

There was no reserve behind them. Every commando on the planet who remained medically capable of participating was assigned, supplemented by personnel drawn from the rear staging areas and several companies originally held for planetary cleanup. The regiment that began the campaign had already been mauled beyond recognition. Some of the six hundred had fought through every hive sector and both Renegade bases; others had spent the campaign protecting supply corridors from Phantoms and arrived at the final staging area with armor still carrying volcanic dust from different fronts. A few were among the oldest surviving members of the program, veterans whose service dated back to the first deployment on Aiur, when twenty-four experimental soldiers had been considered enough of an investment that losing five in one mission had shocked StarCraft Co.'s leadership. Now the company was preparing to send six hundred through an Arbiter with no extraction plan.

They knew that before the briefing began. The fusion device intended to destroy the Overmind sat at the center of the staging area in armored sections, surrounded by demolition specialists and redundant arming teams. It was not a conventional battlefield nuclear weapon and could not be detonated safely from the surface. Engineers had built it to drive its reaction inward, concentrating the initial blast and plasma through dense biological mass before the surrounding material could disperse the energy. The deeper it could be placed inside the Overmind, the greater the probability that the organism's central structures would be destroyed faster than they could regenerate or shift control elsewhere. The calculations remained uncertain because nobody understood the creature's anatomy well enough to identify anything resembling a conventional brain.

The commander did not ask for volunteers. By then the distinction would have been almost insulting. Every commando in the formation understood what the operation required, just as the soldiers holding the forward lines understood why they were about to attack defenses they no longer needed to capture. The only question raised during the final briefing concerned the Recall itself. If the Arbiter died before completing it, the six hundred would remain at the staging area while the rest of the coalition spent whatever remained of its strength on a conventional assault. If the Recall succeeded, there would be no second attempt because the Arbiter was not expected to survive long enough to retrieve anyone. Talandar attended the briefing and, after the Terran officers had finished, told the commandos that the Ara would place the lives of their remaining fleet between the Arbiter and destruction for as long as the operation required. “You are being asked to enter a place from which none may return,” he said, his voice carrying through the shared tactical network. “Then know that you shall not walk toward it alone. Every ship we possess, every warrior who yet bears arms, shall purchase your passage. When you descend into the heart of this abomination, the strength of both our peoples shall descend with you.”

The surface assault began before dawn according to the planet's weak, ash-filtered cycle, although the horizon never became bright enough to resemble morning. Every surviving coalition formation attacked. Tanks opened from positions stretching across the captured Renegade bases, firing through barrels worn close to their replacement limits, while Dragoons and Goliaths advanced together through gaps created by the bombardment. High Templar cast storms over the outer spore belts as Ghosts designated hardened targets for the remaining nuclear inventory. Arbiters Recalled assault units onto ridges the coalition had no intention of holding, simply to force the defenders to respond, and battlecruisers descended until their hulls glowed with reflected lava beneath them. The attack looked like the beginning of the deliberate offensive the Renegades expected, and for the first hour StarCraft Co. made no effort to suggest otherwise.

The inner defense committed. Zerg poured toward the surface front in numbers that would have broken almost any army the company had fielded earlier in the war. Elite Ultralisks charged through artillery strikes that shredded ordinary organisms around them, while Hunter Killers fired from reinforced positions and Devouring Ones moved through the gaps created by the larger beasts. Hydralisks occupied terraces beneath Dark Swarm, rebel Zealots attacked beside them, and surviving Phantoms resumed their old work of killing the people who made coalition formations function. The commandos assigned to the surface attack deliberately exposed themselves more than they had for weeks, drawing Phantom cells into scanner coverage so the six hundred waiting behind the lines would encounter fewer of them inside the caldera.

The air battle began when the coalition capital fleet accelerated toward the inner ring. At first the Renegades saw carriers, battlecruisers, Arbiters and dropships approaching across a front so wide that the attack resembled a final attempt to overwhelm everything simultaneously. Then their sensors began contradicting one another. One Arbiter became three, three became twelve, and within minutes dozens appeared to be advancing among hundreds of dropships and carrier signatures. Some disappeared when hit because they had never existed, while others exploded with sufficient violence to convince defensive computers that the destroyed target had been genuine. False carriers released illusory interceptor clouds around real Wraith squadrons. Unmanned dropships transmitted life-sign readings fabricated from databases of actual infantry. Ara hallucinations moved through Terran electronic ghosts until even coalition tactical computers needed encrypted identifiers to distinguish the physical fleet from the fiction surrounding it.

The Renegades responded by firing at all of it.

The sky above the caldera became an expenditure problem measured in thousands of weapons per minute. Spore colonies launched until their biological magazines emptied, missile towers tracked targets that vanished before impact, and Scourge swarms divided against formations in which fewer than half the contacts were real. Corsairs carved through hallucinations only to expose themselves to Wraiths hidden behind them. Rebel Scouts attacked dropships that contained nothing but hot metal and explosive ballast, while Ara interceptors swarmed their carriers so densely that several groups fought within the fire envelopes of Terran battlecruisers. Valkyries fired into Scourge concentrations without attempting individual targeting, their missiles propagating through packed biological formations in chains of detonations that briefly cleared entire sections of sky before more organisms filled them.

The real Arbiter entered the inner defense almost unnoticed, not because the deception was perfect but because perfection was unnecessary. It merely had to survive longer than the enemy required to identify it. The first Defensive Matrix absorbed enough concentrated fire to destroy several dropships, collapsed, and was replaced by a second science vessel less than four seconds later. A Scout reached the Arbiter between fields and damaged one of its outer structures before Wraiths tore it apart. A mass of Scourge approached from below, hidden against the glow of the lava, and three Valkyrie squadrons descended directly into them, losing aircraft as rapidly as they destroyed organisms. The Arbiter continued forward.

The battlecruisers began firing Yamato weapons not at the largest targets but at whatever threatened the corridor next. A spore ridge vanished beneath concentrated impacts, followed by a rebel carrier whose interceptors had broken through the decoy formation. Another Yamato strike destroyed an Arbiter attempting to reveal the real attack geometry by cloaking a counterforce beneath the coalition's route. Science vessels burned through reactor reserves maintaining detection and Defensive Matrices, while Ara High Templar on distant carriers continued producing hallucinations until exhaustion forced them from the network. The actual operation lasted minutes, but hundreds of ships and thousands of lives were being spent inside those minutes.

The Renegades finally identified the real Arbiter less than twenty kilometers from the caldera. The change was immediately visible in their fire. Scouts disengaged from decoys and turned toward it, Scourge converged from several vectors, and defensive batteries that had been firing opportunistically shifted simultaneously to a single target. The third Defensive Matrix collapsed almost instantly. The fourth barely stabilized before concentrated fire began eating through it, and the science vessel generating the field was destroyed seconds later by Corsairs. Ara carriers moved across the Arbiter's approach rather than around it, physically placing larger ships between the Recall vessel and the enemy. One carrier broke apart under combined spore and Devourer fire while its surviving interceptors continued fighting without it.

Talandar's own formation entered the engagement at that point. The Executor had held several Arbiters and a carrier group out of the initial deception specifically for the moment when deception failed, and they struck the rebel Protoss flank with an aggression Terran officers had rarely seen from Ara forces. Scouts drove directly through Corsair formations, Archons were Recalled onto defensive terraces from which nobody intended to retrieve them, and High Templar exhausted themselves casting storms into the air-defense concentrations threatening the corridor. Talandar's transmission to the coalition contained no tactical commentary beyond the order required to synchronize the final push. “The road is purchased,” he said. “Send them.”

The Arbiter crossed the caldera rim with its hull burning.

Six hundred commandos disappeared from the staging area.

They reappeared inside hell.

Recall placed them across a broad section of volcanic rock and living tissue less than two kilometers from the Overmind's exposed central mass, close enough that the creature filled much of their visual field. Some arrived on bare basalt, others on creep or among vascular structures larger than buildings, and several materialized within immediate range of Zerg defenders already moving toward the distortion created by the Recall. The fusion device arrived with them in armored sections, along with demolition equipment, ammunition and every portable weapon the planners believed could remain useful inside a living organism.

The Arbiter died eleven seconds later.

There was never any attempt to recover the commandos. The coalition's surviving fleet immediately shifted from penetration to containment, throwing itself between the caldera and the enormous aerial forces trying to converge upon the landing zone. Battlecruisers used their remaining Yamato charges against Guardian concentrations and spore structures, carriers released every functional interceptor, and damaged ships that would ordinarily have withdrawn remained in combat because there was nowhere more valuable for them to survive. On the surface, StarCraft Co. and Ara units intensified their assault rather than slowing it, forcing the inner defenders to keep fighting outward while six hundred commandos attacked inward.

The first commandos reached the Overmind's outer tissue within minutes and discovered that “entering” it was not a straightforward concept. There were no gates, tunnels or anatomical openings large enough to exploit, only layered biological structures protected by armor plates thicker than bunker walls and constantly shifting beneath the pressure of internal fluids. Demolition teams placed shaped charges while the rest of the force formed a perimeter against Zerg arriving from every direction. The blast opened a cavity rather than a passage, exposing dense vascular tissue that immediately began contracting around the wound. Firebats burned the edges to slow regeneration while commandos entered through the opening and continued cutting downward.

The Overmind reacted.

Every Ghost on the planet felt the first shift, even those kilometers from the caldera. The background pressure that had built throughout the campaign sharpened abruptly into something directed, and several human psionics collapsed before shielding could be increased. Inside the creature, commandos experienced it without protection. Their armor filtered radiation, toxins and thermal extremes, but there was no physical filter for the sensation of a vast intelligence becoming aware that something small and violent had entered its body. Some reported voices in languages they did not know, others memories that were not their own, fragments of alien landscapes or impossible impressions of seeing through thousands of eyes simultaneously. Communications filled briefly with overlapping descriptions before officers ordered everyone to stop reporting subjective phenomena unless they interfered with combat.

The Zerg around them changed as well. Organisms that had been attacking according to coordinated battlefield doctrine abandoned local objectives and turned toward the breach. Zerglings poured into the wound behind the commandos, Hydralisks fired down passages the Terrans had created with explosives, and smaller organisms crawled through spaces too narrow for armored soldiers to cover effectively. Elite strains appeared among them, including Devouring Ones and heavily armored forms whose lineage reached back to the breeding programs StarCraft Co. thought it had erased years earlier. The commandos fought while descending, companies becoming platoons within the first hour.

Project Phantom waited inside.

The remaining Phantoms had not all been committed to the outer defenses. Enough had been held close to the Overmind to turn its interior into precisely the environment their program had been designed for: poor visibility, constant Zerg contact, biological distortion that degraded detection and a battlefield where important targets had nowhere to hide among ordinary infantry because every human present was a commando. The first Phantom attack killed a demolition specialist carrying one of the fusion-device control modules, then two commandos attempting to recover it. Scanner coverage inside the Overmind was erratic, and the Ara Observers that had accompanied earlier commando operations could not be Recalled into passages where the surrounding tissue disrupted their movement. The two elite programs therefore finished their private war at ranges sometimes shorter than a room.

Phantoms killed efficiently, but there were fewer of them than the Renegades needed. Each time one fired, commandos saturated the surrounding tissue until cloak disruption exposed movement. Injured Phantoms continued fighting because their biological modifications made surrender effectively impossible and because many were already dying from the processes that had created them. Several recovered bodies showed tumors rupturing through internal organs, implanted Zerg tissue consuming surrounding human structures and chemical systems pumping doses that would have killed an unmodified soldier. StarCraft Co. finally understood the full obscenity of the program while killing its last products. The Renegades had not created a new class of soldier for the future. They had created men and women designed to survive exactly long enough to make sure their enemies had less of one.

The fusion device moved deeper.

No single group carried it for long. Commandos died, modules changed hands, and demolition teams were rebuilt around whoever still understood enough of the arming sequence to continue. The assault split into multiple columns whenever the Overmind's anatomy forced them apart, then recombined around the device whenever possible. Where tissue proved too thick to cut, they placed charges and let the blast create routes no living organism would naturally contain. Where internal cavities descended faster than engineers could map them, commandos lowered themselves on cables through blood-warm vapor while others held the rim against Zerg trying to follow.

The Overmind's interior became progressively less recognizable as biology. Structures appeared whose purposes Terran scientists could not identify even from transmitted imagery: crystalline growths embedded within living tissue, dense neural masses surrounded by Zerg organisms that did not resemble any battlefield strain, and cavities lined with conductive material that responded to psionic fluctuations before instruments registered them. Some appeared to be natural products of the creature's development; others showed signs of deliberate engineering. Renegade machinery had been implanted directly into several regions, connected by cables and nutrient lines to structures that looked partly grown and partly assembled. The deeper the commandos descended, the more difficult it became to determine where Zerg biology ended and the Renegades' attempt to recreate an ancient Xel'Naga design began.

On the surface, the battle reached a scale that ceased to fit comfortably into reports. The inner Zerg air fleet attacked the coalition in waves that crossed one another above the caldera while fresh organisms continued arriving from outside the system. Battlecruisers fired until their primary batteries overheated, then remained as armored platforms for secondary weapons while reactors recovered. Ara carriers ran out of replacement interceptors and began redistributing surviving craft among ships whose control systems still functioned. Wraith pilots flew sorties without returning to the original bases, landing at whatever forward strip remained operational long enough to refuel and rearm. Valkyrie squadrons that had begun the campaign with dozens of aircraft were reduced to flights of three or four.

Terran and Protoss technology operated together at limits neither civilization would have attempted alone. Science vessels fed targeting data into carrier networks while Ara sensor systems guided Wraiths through ash so dense human pilots could not see the enemies they were shooting. Damaged battlecruisers sheltered behind temporary Arbiter cloaking fields long enough to cycle reactors, then emerged to fire Yamato weapons at positions designated by Protoss Observers. Shield relays linked to Terran reactors kept Ara defensive platforms active after their original power networks were destroyed, while SCVs physically repaired structures around shield generators whose energy preserved the workers doing the repairs. The distinction between Terran and Ara formations had become administrative rather than tactical. After years of fighting together, each side had learned not merely what the other could do but when it would do it, allowing combined actions to occur at speeds that earlier in the alliance would have required planning conferences.

Talandar lost two carriers and most of his Scouts during the second hour after Recall. His flagship remained in the air above the caldera, damaged badly enough that several Terran officers urged him to withdraw before the ship became another irreplaceable loss. He refused without ceremony. The commandos beneath him were still moving, the psionic field still existed, and every combat-capable ship in the coalition remained part of the price being paid for the time they needed. When Voss later asked whether the Ara could sustain another hour at the current rate, Talandar answered in the formal calm that had persisted from their first uneasy alliance through Aurelia, Sanctuary and now the end of the Renegade war. “No,” he said. “Therefore the hour must be sufficient.”

Inside the Overmind, the commandos stopped measuring progress in distance because the route no longer moved consistently downward. They followed regions of increasing neural density identified by the fusion device's scientific team, cutting laterally through tissue when necessary and occasionally climbing through structures whose geometry seemed to have no relationship to the creature's external shape. The psionic pressure intensified until even non-psionic soldiers began experiencing synchronized hallucinations. Entire teams reported hearing the same low rhythmic sound despite audio sensors recording nothing. Others saw flashes of Zerg moving through places that did not exist, or experienced a momentary certainty that the corridors around them extended not meters but light-years.

The Ara scholars monitoring the telemetry reached a disturbing conclusion. The commandos were not simply approaching the center of the organism. They were approaching the portion of it where the distinction between biological communication and psionic awareness became meaningless. If the ancient texts were even partly accurate, a mature Overmind would not possess a brain in the Terran sense because its mind would be distributed through Cerebrates and broods across interstellar space. The creature in the caldera had not reached that state yet. Its central structures were still doing work that a mature network might eventually distribute across billions of organisms, which meant the incompleteness that made the Overmind vulnerable was also what had made it possible to find anything worth destroying.

The commandos paid for that knowledge by reaching it.

Fewer than two hundred remained combat effective when the assault entered the deepest neural structures. Fewer than one hundred were still accompanying the fusion device. The last organized Phantom resistance appeared there, not in scattered cells but as a defensive group fighting alongside elite Zerg whose movements were so precisely coordinated that commandos described them less as separate creatures than as limbs of the structure surrounding them. Lockdown fields disabled weapons at the worst possible moments, Hydralisks fired from openings that closed after each volley, and Zerglings emerged directly from folds in living tissue. The commandos no longer had sufficient ammunition for sustained engagements and began stripping weapons from their own dead.

Twenty-four commandos had entered the first battle on Aiur years earlier, experimental soldiers whose existence StarCraft Co. had treated as a secret worth protecting. Six hundred had entered the Overmind. That arithmetic contained much of the company's history. What had begun as a mercenary outfit hiring two Firebats and a Medic to clean Zerglings from a basement had grown until it could build an elite regiment, integrate its technology with an alien civilization and spend six hundred of its best soldiers on a single operation because the survival of both species required it. The growth had not made the individual deaths smaller. It had simply created circumstances large enough to consume more of them.

The final breach cost most of what remained. Commandos planted charges around a dense neural barrier while one group held a narrowing passage behind them. A Phantom killed the officer supervising the fusion device, and a wounded demolition specialist took over the sequence without waiting for formal command transfer. The explosion opened a cavity filled with structures that every available instrument identified differently: some registered as nervous tissue, others as psionic conduits, and several produced energy signatures closer to Xel'Naga machinery than ordinary Zerg biology. The device team concluded that they had reached as close to a central nexus as they were likely to find.

They began assembly.

The fusion weapon had survived the descent in pieces carried by different teams so no single casualty could destroy the mission. Now those pieces had to be connected manually while the Overmind convulsed around them. Armor servos held warped components in alignment, damaged commandos crawled through fluid carrying power links, and soldiers who no longer possessed functioning weapons used demolition charges simply to keep the passages open. The arming sequence required three independent confirmations because nobody on the surface had wanted accidental detonation to destroy the assault before it reached sufficient depth. By the time the first confirmation transmitted, fewer than forty commandos remained near the device.

The Overmind's psionic field surged hard enough to disable several Terran instruments and stun Ghosts across the planet. Zerg reinforcements outside the system altered course simultaneously, accelerating toward the volcanic world. Inside the creature, the commandos received no comprehensible message, yet many later telemetry recordings contained the same burst of neural activity immediately before communications began failing. Ara scholars would spend years arguing over whether it represented pain, recognition or an attempt at deliberate contact.

The second arming confirmation completed.

The last commandos formed a perimeter around the device while the demolition team finished the internal connections. Nobody discussed extraction because there was none to discuss, and by then the route behind them was filled with Zerg. Ammunition counters dropped toward zero while damaged armor failed one system at a time. A final Phantom emerged less than ten meters from the weapon and killed two engineers before a commando whose rifle had already jammed crossed the distance physically and drove both of them into the surrounding tissue. Neither figure returned to the perimeter.

The third confirmation transmitted eighteen seconds later.

Surface command received the signal through a relay chain so degraded that the first packet arrived corrupted. The second contained only the arming code, a depth estimate and confirmation that the fusion core had entered irreversible sequence. No commandos requested evacuation. No further tactical report followed because the Overmind's psionic field overwhelmed the remaining transmitters before anyone could send one.

The coalition continued fighting for another ninety-one seconds.

Then the caldera moved.

The initial fusion reaction occurred deep enough inside the Overmind that observers on the surface saw no flash. What they saw instead was the organism contract across kilometers of tissue, every visible structure drawing inward at once as though the entire creature had experienced a single involuntary spasm. The volcanic ground around it fractured. Biological towers collapsed toward the center, vascular structures burst under pressures they had never evolved to contain, and a bulge of incandescent material rose through the creature before tearing the upper mass apart from within. The explosion that followed was muffled by rock and flesh, but sensors registered temperatures and pressures far beyond anything biological tissue could survive.

The psionic effect was larger.

Every Terran Ghost and Ara psionic on the planet experienced the same impossible instant. The Overmind's signal surged beyond previous readings, not merely stronger but suddenly coherent across every frequency StarCraft Co. had been monitoring since the first scout detected it. For less than a second, the thing in the caldera seemed to become more complete than it had ever been while alive. Human Ghosts described a sensation of scale so vast that several were incapable of speaking afterward. Talandar later said the Ara experienced something worse: for one moment, they perceived the outline of what the creature had been intended to become.

Then it was gone.

The silence did not feel empty at first because the battle continued around it. Zerglings still attacked soldiers in the volcanic trenches, Hydralisks still fired, Mutalisks remained airborne and Guardians did not fall dead from the sky. The Overmind's destruction had not killed the species because the Zerg had never been puppets powered by a single organism. What disappeared was coordination. Mutalisks that had been maneuvering as part of enormous formations broke into smaller groups or simply continued along their last trajectories. Scourge swarms lost the precision that had allowed them to penetrate escort screens. Zerglings inside the surface defenses attacked whatever remained nearest rather than following larger operational patterns, while several broods turned on organisms from other broods when command hierarchies vanished.

The change propagated outward through the system. Overlords approaching from deep space altered course, slowed or began drifting according to local instinct. Migration streams that had converged steadily for months dissolved within minutes, some populations turning toward nearby planets while others simply continued into empty space. Long-range Ara sensors watched the reinforcement curve flatten for the first time since the campaign began. Analysts who had spent weeks projecting the point at which incoming Zerg would exceed coalition killing capacity stared at models that no longer described anything occurring outside.

The inner defenders understood what had happened almost as quickly. Rebel Protoss formations fought on because their intelligence remained intact, and Renegade Terran units still capable of organized resistance continued firing, but the biological system around which their entire defense had been constructed had disappeared. Arbiters lost Zerg screens they had relied upon, Guardians drifted beyond science-vessel support, and mixed formations fragmented into species that no longer shared a controlling architecture. Ara carriers began isolating rebel ships while battlecruisers concentrated fire upon the remaining fixed defenses. The coalition that had spent weeks being forced to fight every component simultaneously could finally destroy them one at a time.

The battle did not end that day. Zerg still occupied hive terrain across the volcanic world, surviving Phantoms remained dangerous, and several rebel Protoss ships attempted to escape the system before Ara Scouts intercepted them. Renegade soldiers fought from tunnels and surviving fortifications for days, some surrendering once they understood that the Overmind was dead and others continuing until ammunition or food disappeared. StarCraft Co. accepted prisoners. The riverbed on Aurelia had demonstrated what the company was prepared to do when allowing an enemy technical cadre to escape threatened to recreate the war somewhere else; the volcanic world demonstrated the other side of the same doctrine. Once the Overmind was gone and the Renegade production system destroyed, killing people who could no longer alter the strategic outcome served no purpose.

The six hundred commandos did not return.

No bodies were recovered from the deepest structures because there were no deepest structures left to search. The fusion blast had collapsed much of the caldera into itself, and subsequent bombardment destroyed surviving Zerg tissue according to protocols written with almost pathological caution. StarCraft Co. engineers burned every biological fragment that retained unusual psionic activity, while Ara scholars supervised destruction of structures that appeared connected to the Overmind's central network. Neither side proposed preserving a living sample. They had spent too much blood learning what it could become.

Casualty accounting took months. StarCraft Co. had lost capital ships built from Moria's first great production surge, armored formations rebuilt after Aurelia, pilots trained during the war's quiet years and a commando regiment whose experience could never be reproduced simply by recruiting another one. Ara losses were proportionally worse because many of their warriors and ships embodied centuries of accumulated skill. Several carriers destroyed above the caldera had served through conflicts older than the UIC, and some of the High Templar who died protecting the Recall corridor had studied traditions derived from the same ancient histories that first identified the Overmind.

Talandar visited the command center after the last organized Renegade resistance on the planet collapsed. His flagship would never fly again and much of his personal guard had died during the final air battle, yet his manner remained as formal as when StarCraft Co. first encountered the Ara during the defense of their capital. He and the commander watched the casualty projections together for some time before Talandar spoke. “When first we fought beside your people,” he said, “I believed necessity had joined two powers that would separate when the danger passed. I no longer believe this. Too much of what we have become was forged in the presence of the other.” The commander looked toward the figures representing Terran and Ara dead and answered that the partnership had become expensive. Talandar inclined his head. “All things worthy of endurance acquire a cost. The question is whether those who inherit them remember what was paid.”

The military consequences were impossible to ignore. The Renegade war had ended with StarCraft Co. commanding a Terran military larger, better integrated and technologically more advanced than the UIC force it had once hired itself out to support. Moria produced the minerals that sustained it, synthetic vespene threatened to weaken one of the oldest constraints on interstellar power, and the Temple of Light had accelerated weapons development across nearly every major platform. Terran and Ara systems were no longer merely compatible enough to cooperate. Engineers on both sides were designing the next generation around cooperation from the beginning, creating battlecruiser groups intended to operate beneath Arbiter support, Ara formations built around Terran detection and logistics, and command networks that treated the assets of both civilizations as pieces of one operational picture.

There was an absurdity to the trajectory that veterans occasionally mentioned after enough time had passed for humor to return. StarCraft Co.'s first Zerg contract had involved a basement, two Firebats, a Medic and an argument over whether a twenty-thousand-credit job should pay thirty thousand instead. The company had gone from exterminating escaped laboratory animals to fighting Mutalisks beneath an orbital city, hunting Ultralisks through preserves, capturing pirate equipment, surviving sieges, discovering Zerg farms, destroying psi emitters, saving an Ara capital, overthrowing a government without dismantling its state, rebuilding that state's armies, retaking Moria, breaking Aurelia, conquering the Temple of Light and eventually dropping six hundred commandos into the mind of a creature from Protoss prehistory. Nothing about the path had been planned. StarCraft Co. had simply survived each problem long enough to become the organization required by the next one.

That raised a question the commander had postponed at the Citadel when the old UIC leadership died. At the time, with Renegade fleets still operating and Terran governments threatening to fragment, StarCraft Co. had preserved the ministries, courts, military ranks, contracts and regional administrations while taking temporary control of the war. Permanent politics could wait. Until then, the commander had said, they would win.

Now they had.

The phrase moved through political circles almost immediately after the volcanic campaign ended because too many people remembered it. Governors who had accepted emergency operational authority while Renegade armies threatened their worlds now wanted to know when the emergency ended. Officers who had spent years taking orders from StarCraft Co. had to decide whether their loyalty belonged to the wartime command structure, their regional governments or whatever political order replaced the UIC. Industrial ministries depended upon StarCraft Co. logistics standards, fleets used its doctrine, laboratories competed for access to its Temple research and entire worlds had reorganized their economies around the production systems built during the war. The commander could dissolve an emergency directive. Nobody could dissolve the fact that most Terran power now ran through institutions StarCraft Co. had either created, repaired or taught how to function.

The company did not declare itself a government. It did not need to. Regional administrations continued operating, courts remained open, currencies circulated, ministries delivered food and fuel, and military commands retained their legal identities. StarCraft Co. called for the political conference it had promised after the Citadel, while beginning the slow process of separating wartime operational control from permanent civil authority. The process would be ugly, and nobody pretended that withdrawing a directive automatically restored the old distribution of power. The UIC had once possessed authority because its institutions said it did. StarCraft Co. possessed influence because fleets, governors and populations had learned through repeated catastrophe that its systems worked. Even if the commander surrendered every formal emergency power, that difference would remain.

The Ara faced a parallel transformation. Their rebel factions had been defeated militarily, but the war had exposed questions about tradition, knowledge and hierarchy that no victory could erase. The Temple of Light had proven that sacred restrictions had hidden technologies capable of changing the survival prospects of entire civilizations, while the Overmind demonstrated that some forbidden knowledge had been feared for reasons far deeper than superstition. Ara leaders who survived the war therefore faced an uncomfortable task: preserve enough of their civilization's caution to prevent another Overmind without rebuilding the culture of secrecy that had allowed dangerous discoveries to become monopolies of extremists. Their partnership with the Terrans complicated the matter further because knowledge once contained entirely within Protoss institutions now existed in laboratories operated jointly with a species that considered reverence a poor substitute for testing.

For a brief period, the scale of victory overshadowed those problems. Renegade strongholds surrendered across former Terran space once news of the Overmind's destruction became undeniable. Several rebel Protoss groups negotiated terms through the Ara rather than continue a war whose strategic purpose had vanished. Dormant Zerg populations returned to being dangerous local problems rather than components of an emerging galactic organism. Trade routes reopened. Worlds that had spent years budgeting for fortifications began discussing reconstruction. Shipyards that had built battlecruisers continuously since Aurelia received civilian orders for the first time in years.

Humanity had survived. The Ara had survived. The Zerg remained scattered, dangerous and essentially impossible to exterminate, but they were scattered again.

Only after the emergency began receding did intelligence return to the question nobody had managed to answer during the war.

Who had taught the Renegades to do any of it?

Captured officers could explain individual operations. Scientists from Canaan understood industrial breeding, surviving personnel from Erebus could describe early control systems, engineers from Aurelia explained how the Farm had converted civilian populations into biological resources, and fragments of Project Phantom documentation revealed the long sequence of failures that eventually produced viable subjects. Rebel Protoss prisoners knew why their own factions cooperated with the Renegades and how the promise of forbidden Xel'Naga knowledge had overcome feuds that predated human civilization.

Nobody could explain where the larger architecture came from.

The problem became clearer once intelligence stopped studying each program independently. Technical breakthroughs repeatedly appeared without developmental histories sufficient to produce them. The Niflheim psi emitter incorporated principles that Renegade scientists had not demonstrated in earlier work. Several Zerg-control systems recovered at Erebus contained mathematical structures that Terran engineers could use but could not trace to preceding research. Project Phantom's biological integration protocols appeared abruptly after years of failed experimentation, accompanied by references to psionic tissue behavior written in notation no captured Terran scientist claimed to have invented. Most disturbing of all, the coordinates of the volcanic world and the oldest technical assumptions behind the Overmind project did not appear to originate within any Renegade archive StarCraft Co. captured.

Ara records showed the same gap from the other side. Rebel factions possessed fragments of ancient Xel'Naga knowledge that orthodox scholars had never seen, yet prisoners disagreed about where those fragments came from. Some said intermediaries delivered them. Others believed allied tribes had recovered them from forgotten ruins. A few insisted the information had been preserved secretly for generations, but when Ara historians compared the language and formatting of supposedly ancient records, several showed patterns inconsistent with any known Protoss archival tradition.

There was no common messenger, no surviving command authority above the Renegade political leadership, and no communications network that intelligence could identify as the source. Instead, there were discontinuities. A failed research program suddenly succeeded. Rival factions independently acquired complementary pieces of information. An obscure biological theory became a functional control system. A hidden planetary coordinate unknown to both Terran and modern Ara charts appeared in the hands of people who needed exactly such a place. At each stage, the Renegades behaved like intelligent, dangerous actors making their own choices, but the choices were repeatedly made possible by information that seemed to enter their civilization from outside the visible chain of invention.

Voss regarded the accumulated analysis with the particular irritation of an officer who had spent years discovering that victory merely created better questions. He observed that it was possible there had never been a single architect at all. War created coincidences, secret research created missing documentation, and rebel movements were precisely the sort of organizations in which information traveled through channels nobody recorded. The commander agreed that this remained possible. It simply no longer felt like the most comfortable explanation.

The Ara were less willing to dismiss the pattern. Talandar returned to the oldest Xel'Naga texts recovered during the Overmind investigation and pointed out that the surviving records contained repeated warnings against interpreting Xel'Naga activity according to the political logic of younger species. Their interventions had unfolded across centuries, sometimes millennia. They cultivated organisms, altered civilizations and abandoned projects whose consequences appeared generations later. Even the Overmind described in ancient texts might not have been a weapon in any conventional sense. Nobody knew whether it had rebelled against its makers, fulfilled their intention or become something the Xel'Naga themselves failed to predict.

“The arrogance of the young,” Talandar told the commander during one of their final intelligence conferences, “is to imagine that because a hand is no longer visible, it has ceased to move.” He did not claim the Xel'Naga were responsible. No evidence justified that conclusion, and the Ara had spent too much of their own history turning fragments of ancient knowledge into certainty. His point was narrower and therefore harder to dismiss. The galaxy contained intelligences older than Terran institutions, older than the Ara hierarchy and perhaps older than Protoss civilization itself. StarCraft Co. had just spent years fighting a coalition whose greatest advances repeatedly arrived from somewhere beyond the knowledge of the people using them. Whatever conclusion followed from that fact, declaring the mystery solved because the Renegades were dead would merely reproduce the mistake that had allowed the Overmind to grow unnoticed for two years.

StarCraft Co. therefore did what it had always done when confronted with something it did not understand. It created a file, assigned people to it, and began collecting evidence.

The war ended without another revelation. No hidden Xel'Naga fleet appeared from the void. No surviving Renegade leader confessed to serving an unseen master. No signal arrived explaining why Terrans and Protoss had nearly destroyed one another to create a creature capable of enslaving billions of Zerg. The great military machine assembled during the war slowly turned toward reconstruction, political transition and the long work of making permanent institutions out of systems built under emergency conditions.

Yet deep inside StarCraft Co.'s new intelligence archive, analysts kept a chronology beginning years earlier with controlled Zerg in clandestine laboratories and ending with the fusion detonation beneath the volcanic caldera. Between those events lay Canaan, Erebus, Khamsin, Niflheim, the Farm, Project Phantom and the Overmind, each once appearing to be a separate escalation until history made the pattern easier to see. The Renegades had been defeated, their armies destroyed, their laboratories captured and their final creation burned out of the rock in which it grew. StarCraft Co. had become the greatest Terran military power in the known sector, its alliance with the Ara had shifted the strategic balance of the cosmos, and for the first time in years there was no enemy on the operational map powerful enough to threaten either civilization.

There remained only the empty place in the record where the architect should have been. Somewhere between the first crude attempts to control the Zerg and the birth of the Overmind, knowledge had entered the war from a source nobody could identify, passed through human and Protoss hands, and changed the course of civilizations without ever revealing a face behind it. StarCraft Co. had hunted down the Renegades, broken their armies, destroyed their final weapon and survived everything the war had required it to become. What it had not found was the thing, person or intelligence that had known enough to set those possibilities before them in the first place, and in the silence beyond the recovered worlds, that absence remained.

They had killed the Overmind. They had never found the mind that wanted it born.

I am very aware of my n00bness. But, let’s try anyway? Follow for Zen/witchy/pop culture/mind wanderings of a 38-year-old woman living somewhere near the equator.

#helloworld #fediverse

In the early 1980s, while working for ETA Systems, I got picked to be our representative to Control Data (our parent company)’s working group on AI. At the time, it was all Lisp and Scheme-based “expert systems,” and my assessment was that the hard part was teaching the systems and the danger of the system making connections that were not factually-based, but which sounded very plausible.

I never really got any deep understanding, as I saw it as an intractable problem, for a number of reasons, not least of which was liability. “If you build an expert system, and it mis-diagnoses someone’s cancer and they die, are you prepared for the reputation hit, and the years of lawsuits?” The systems of the time could still suggest interesting avenues for research, but it would take a human to do the research and see if the machine’s suggestion has any basis in reality, or was just a case of correlation without causation.

This was not seen as a productive direction, as most researchers had plenty of bad ideas, and having a computer generate even more bad ideas just added noise without adding signal. Plus Control Data started having financial problems, so the whole thing was dropped. “Any useful results are still a couple decades off, and we don’t have the resources to spare for this research today.” It reminded me of the people saying that fusion power was going to save us; it’s just another decade of research away (still is, four decades later).

At the same time, a friend was playing with Markov Chain text generators to make plausible sounding “lorem ipsum” text. The results were interesting, and plausible-sounding (just like today’s LLMs), but there was no fact-checking. It was a fun toy for distracting the computer-naïve though, much like Eliza.

Today, we have much bigger models, so the text is even more plausible sounding, but still without fact-checking. And we have the companies run by greedheads who don’t care about whether the LLM is right as long as they’re making money, and shrug off any liability, but the warning from IBM in 1979 is every bit as true today as it was then. “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”

Anyway, I’m thinking it’s another case of a waste of research money, but with the greedheads wasting much more money, energy, and resources than would have been possible in the Reagan years. And we’ve got LLMs polluting the web with their slop, so a guy can’t even find out easily that there’s no such thing as alcohol-free port without having to wade through dozens of pages of slop.

Sigh.

The reading material arrived in my inbox on a Wednesday, five days before the workshop was due to start.

It was from a 2016 book: “Applied Theatre: Facilitation Pedagogies, Practices, Resilience”, by Sheila Preston. Chapter 1 presented a case study where:

a member of a mental health institution expressed his disquiet at the idea that other members of the group were happy to perform, in public, a play about the experience of mental illness. He felt uncomfortable with the association and that they would be representing “him”.

Indeed, any intervention – which may sometimes be a facilitated workshop, or a staged theatre production – may run the risk of reproducing dominant narratives, leading to anxiety and sensitivity among the disenfranchised.

What then is the role of a facilitator in this social and cultural system that surrounds the facilitator on all sides – whether at the family dinner table, or at the workplace desk, or during the morning commute?

I attended a workshop to find out – it lasted fourteen hours over two days, 10 AM to 5 PM each day.

The host, H.L., was candid about the setting of the workshop: “Workshops are romantic. They allows participants to meander on topics. After the workshop ends, the participants – and their accumulated know-how – are tested by the reality that awaits them outside of the workshop venue.”

The books referenced in this workshop did not make for light reading:

1. “Theater of the oppressed”, a book by Augusto Boal (a Brazilian).
2. “Pedagogy of the oppressed”, a book by Paulo Freire (another Brazilian).
3. “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”, by the same Boal.

Time does not suffice to elucidate the proceedings of the workshop in detail. Nonetheless I attempt a sketch.

The participants numbered about thirty. Most appeared to be in mid-career, whether as a facilitator of workshops within a large, top-down organisation, or as a founder of a small enterprise.

H.L. started the workshop by inviting participants to set the rules of engagement.

Two participants collaboratively volunteered the first rule: “Hold space for each other's choices”.

Another rule was volunteered: “have fun”.

As a group of strangers coming together for the first time, this first activity served as scaffolding for the next seven hours of the first day.

H.L. introduced the “banking” concept of education (from Freire's book) where students are seen as docile cabinets that store the knowledge that trickle down from the teachers' authority-position; think: large imposing teacher's desk in the classroom, and quite possibly a punitive device, such as a rattan cane.

But H.L. draws from Freire's idea of the problem-posing method: here is a problem that has emerged; how shall we solve it together? This dissolves the dichotomy between teacher and student. In Freire's words (as translated by Myra Bergman Ramos):

“He [the teacher-student] does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.”

H.L. has his own spin on this afore-mentioned “re-considering of earlier considerations” – he coins the term: Negation Of Negation. (A heady brew of words, for sure).

In other words, the facilitator considers the downsides of the participants' choices, and then performs an intellectual leap to re-consider his own thoughts about the supposed down-sides – what if I go along with the participants' choices? What choices would be lost? What would be gained?

This idea could certainly be lost in a stew of cerebral-sounding words that ring hollow for participants and clients of the facilitator, so H.L. has provided a role model during this workshop, by having all 30 of us engage in activities that involved our physical bodies. These were games titled: “Take my name”, and “Sword and shield”.

“Learning involves the body and the emotions,” H.L. observed.

After the games, we sat down and formed a pair to discuss what happened during the game. This was particularly insightful as every one of us (30 pax) had brought a refreshing perspective based on our differing professional experiences: for example, one was a theatre performer, while another was a social worker.

According to H.L., the praxis of building possibilities together in such a teacher-student collective exploration, comes from (a) action and then, (b) reflection.

There was certainly plenty of time for games, and plenty of time to reflect on how the game illuminated these aspects:

1. What did I notice about me as a person?
2. What did I notice about Facilitation?
3. What did I notice about myself as a facilitator?

In retrospect, I realise that the game serves as the problem-posing method. What happened in the game just now? How can we play better the next time?

This brings me back to the topic of this workshop, Critical Facilitation. Such a process of Critical Facilitation serves a dual purpose: (a) identifying the forces at play, in a oppressive dynamic – for example, to consider a dynamic between an alcoholic father, and his worker-children who toil away in sweatshops to send him money to feed his alcoholic addiction: there may be a toxic dependence on each other, and that is why the children are reluctant to leave: they rely on any crumbs of affection from the father, while the father is unable to find a job due to an economy that prioritises cheaper labour from women, and then he feels useless, and then he drinks to numb his pain.

A workshop setting (hopefully) allows the disenfranchised to build the world they live in, giving a voice to tensions that exist in this situation but which may have gone unheard in the outside-workshop setting. H.L. quotes Thomas Hardy here: “The caller always calls but is not heeded. That is why love falls through.”

Question: can the caller be heeded in a facilitated workshop?

But such a singular purpose is not enough. Critical Facilitation serves the second purpose of (b) imparting skills so that participants can make change after the workshop, as they return to their communities, in the hopes that they themselves can participate in such change.

A question for myself: what kind of skill might be useful to an adult child of an alcoholic father?

I think, perhaps that might look like instilling a greater sense of confidence in that individual's own gut feeling and intuition, which may likely have been buried under the shame of having been abused verbally and physically by the addict-father.

But, in the spirit of curiosity, and to apply Negation Of Negation, perhaps my above-ventured intervention could run the risk of being repulsively prescriptive – perhaps a facilitator could more skillfully serve the adult child by being asking what he, or she, wants – what she (i.e. the adult child) finds helpful and what she finds unhelpful.

However H.L. sounds a caution for any would-be facilitator, by quoting a Jewish proverb: “When humans plan, God laughs.”

This corresponds with the Biblical Book of Proverbs, chapter 19, verse 21: “Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails.”

At this point, I want to end this short reflection by listing the questions that H.L. has invited us to carry out of the workshop venue:

1. What did this space just admit?
2. What limits us here?
3. What will you bring into your space of practice?

Thank you for reading.

#acting

Locks click twice now, force of habit, even when nobody's coming up the stairs.

I tell the mirror I'm fine before it has time to ask, get dressed in a hurry so it doesn't catch me still.

Face turns toward the window whenever footsteps slow outside, I count them past the door, exhale when they keep going.

Everyone who gets close eventually hears it, my voice going flat and careful, like I'm reading it off a card.

I still leave the second cup on the drying rack, though nobody here has needed it in months.

Sultry noon curdles into grey by four most days, the kind of sky that can't commit to one mood either.

A knock comes sometimes. I count to ten before I move, like the door might forget I'm home if I wait long enough.

Barometer dropping in my chest before it drops outside, I feel the storm coming before the weatherman does.

I want the rain and the closing door to be different things, one leaves a rainbow I never catch in time, the other leaves nothing.

Tuesday the sun broke through for maybe six minutes, I stood in the kitchen and let it hit the back of my neck.

Cup's still on the rack. I rinse it anyway most mornings, not sure yet if that's habit or something closer to hope.

Hoping the next knock finds the door already open, not promising I'll get there. Just hoping I'm learning how.

• diimaan (08/09/2026)

People's MOTIVES and some dynamics in RELATIONSHIPS

The BRAIN can read a current person as a threat based on past experiences and relationships. It can recognize the behaviors of individuals that were acting with malice and forethought and identifying some current people as THE SAME. However, it does not always mean the current person acting this way has THE SAME malice and forethought as that past person or other past people did.

It is just so TOUGH nowadays with any relationships because people are seeming to only be motivated out of self-interest. That many just DO NOT CARE about other people, only what they can get out of other people.

Statements I've heard such as: “I'd like to be his (Corey Taylor's) ex-wife some day” have this type of materialistic ideology. Even said jokingly (if it was) shows me that many ARE just self-interested. That their idea of “happiness” lies in material wealth and goods.

A HUGE DISTINCTION: some may act 100% one-sided, but it's SO NOT INTENTIONAL. I made the mistake of treating these situations as other past toxic situations but one thing I left out: THERE IS A LEARNING PROBLEM involved that produces this behavior. It matches up all one-sided but again it is SO UNINTENTIONAL. That's the difference!

These situations cannot work either way, though. There is a recognition of the behavior, but it still makes the dynamic unworkable. I need to be heard too, and other people that are participating need to recognize that. It cannot work if the dynamic is always one-sided. People need reciprocity. Some are just incapable of it, even though their intentions are essentionally good.

A week ago, esx.ie was quietly configured as the short-link domain for the Essayism family: essayism.org, essayism.ie, essay.ie, esy.ie, essayist.ie and so forth.

The logic seemed perfectly obvious. They all begin with es; x is an agreeable little code-letter for everything that follows. Neat, compact, almost self-explanatory.

Then, without announcement, promotion, or meaningful use – apart from a default error page and one modest footer appearance – esx.ie received 177 clicks.

This raises several possibilities. Perhaps people are intuitively drawn to concise domains. Perhaps the internet has developed a taste for unexplained initials. Or perhaps 177 accidental visitors were simply looking for somewhere called “Essex” and took a poetic wrong turn.

Whatever the reason, esx.ie has made its first small, mysterious entrance. It appears that even a link can have a life before it has a purpose.

For a micro-second I pondered

Ah. Of course. :–)

The 177 clicks may not have been a spontaneous celebration of elegant URL architecture after all. They were probably seekers of sex.ie whose fingers, morals, or browser autocomplete took a slight turn toward Essayism.

Which is rather wonderful: a short-link domain devised as an efficient code for a family of essays, accidentally masquerading as Ireland’s most optimistic typo.

“Essayism begins where expectation ends.”

David Marshall Skerries

We met heard about how the Magician Gordon White was dead, same way as everyone else – on the digital world wide web, where he contributed so much.

His work was the catalyst that brought a crew of us together, really – initially, we formed as a reading group for Star.Ships, and a working group for The Chaos Protocols, and especially a drinking group for rum, which fuelled the whole jagged, swaggering affair.

The group and its history endure, though we meet less, and our interests have evolved, as they can only be expected to. Horizons tend move as they're approached, and none of us were staying still.

It was a wild time – I certainly gained a lot from it; I'm sure the others did too, and each in our own way. I've found huge value in having peers and fellow travellers in this enterprise – even though we've been on radically different trajectories, that have only diverged further over the years.

Dissenters anonymous

None of us agreed whole-heartedly with all of Gordon's positions, either – and, with his work rate, there were a lot of them. His work elicited, provoked, and suggested exceptions and divergences. We all felt he was a fellow traveller, for sure.

We'd all signed up to his premium membership, when it launched, explored his material, taken what applied and left to go our own way. Some resonated more than others. I appreciated his whole “restoration of context” angle. That early history of the grimoires course was an absolute banger.

Then and now, I personally disagree with his various collapse theses, though got a lot out of his “World Without Sin” writing, and loved the All Red Line. I liked a lot of the stuff in Chaos Protocols, but couldn't really make the operations work for me, to the extent I'd become used to with other methods. I liked that he referenced source materials – and deeply enjoyed reading Witzel's The Origin of the World's Mythologies, which inspired so much of Star.Ships.

I appreciated White's journalistic flair and sense of adventure. His blog posts inspired my own appreciation and, later, significant collection, of rum. This led to cocktail making, then distilling spirits – and my own small experiment, Elixir Arborvitae.

An offhand mention in in one of his blog posts led to tiki culture, and through this, to many drunken, delightful nights recreating forgotten and recovered cocktail recipes, originating from now-long-closed bars. The respective revivals of the Grimoire tradition and Tiki mixology have some curious similarities, that become even more apparent after communing with strong spirits. Missionary's Downfall, indeed.

The Wake

So we met, on a hilltop, where we could see the harbour mouth, and the sea, and the point where the water merged into the horizon. The sun was in our faces and the jagged ridgeline of hills at our backs on cold, clear Saturday Winter Wellington morning.

We burned incense, drank coffee and rum, and talked about our beautiful, brave new world, that has such people in it. A persistent squawking bush parrot hung around, even as dogwalkers gave the animated, daydrinking characters in the park a wider berth. Those weird kids? Hell, the weird adults were hanging out, getting louche that particular morning.

With this man's death, something significant and special has ended. A most strange and transitional time. He called the changes, and spun good yarns.
The Sons of Hermes raised and drained dry our glasses to the mighty wizard and adventurer, Gordon White.

Fair winds and following seas, traveller.

THE TRAUMA OF MY EVERY DAY LIFE – why living with Bipolar 1 and cPTSD makes every day feel like it's unlivable...

...and on top of that: NOBODY LISTENS.

Seeking out a trauma therapist. No GENERIC therapist, someone with the specialty in trauma.

The mood swings (even on medication) and constant hypervigilence is leaving me exhausted every day and this has been repeatedly going on for almost 3 years.

IMAGINE: scanning every environment, every interaction, reading every face/gesture, and more of other people's behavior all day long. And the mood swings on top of that. I literally have nothing left.

I cannot do this anymore. If I don't get out of my own head, days are going to repeatedly feel exhausting more and more.

Celebrating 60 years of Star Trek with a nostalgic view of the USS Enterprise model, an open book, and a themed drink, blending classic sci-fi adventure with modern fandom.

Star Trek aired three years before I was born, yet it has had a significant influence on my life. The only thing more profound and more influential has been my faith and salvation in Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.

To me, Star Trek has long served as an earthly role model. It is more than a story or a television show. It is an aspiration for how a fallen world might come together and work for the common good. The ethos of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets represents an ideal that a world or species might pursue on its own, if there were no grand Savior.

By that ethos, I mean the hopeful idea that people from many worlds, cultures, and backgrounds can serve together for something greater than themselves. It is built on exploration, peace, sacrifice, reason, mercy, discovery, and cooperation. It is the belief that humanity can rise above its worst instincts and become better than it is now.

I want to mark 60 years of storytelling, especially those deep episodes that ran in reruns every week when I was a kid and a teenager. What prompted this reflection, of all things, was a gift from my sister. For my birthday in April, she gave me a special Parade release dedicated to Star Trek’s 60th anniversary (see image below).

Celebrating 60 years of Star Trek, this Parade Collector's Edition honors the iconic heroes, villains, and strange new worlds that transformed science fiction forever.

The franchise that started on September 8, 1966, inspired many real-life ideas during the 1960s and 1970s space race, and it continues to spark imagination today. I have not always agreed with the direction the franchise has taken, but with few exceptions, the United Federation of Planets and the Star Trek ethos remain largely unchanged.

Star Trek has shaped part of how I see the world, alongside my faith, and that combination still matters to me. I want to see AI grow into something like the Star Trek computer, and I look forward to seeing more of its science fiction technology come to life in ways that help humanity.

So today, on Star Trek Day, let’s boldly go where no one has gone before and celebrate the series and its ideals.

#StarTrek #personal #tv

THAT PARTICULAR TIME – Alanis Morissette (song meaning)

NOT a typical breakup song.

It's the recogition that an attachment between two people is constantly costing the other person to sacrifice all of their needs in order to maintain THAT relationship. So leaving is the only option to preserve the “self”, otherwise the costs of remaining in it are way too high and exceeding the benefit to maintain it. It's about still loving and caring about the person but knowing that the dynamic can never work.

'De eerste sinds...'

De eerste sinds gisteren die een rit in lijn wint de eerste zin sinds het vroege begin de eerste Spanjaard die Italiaans spreekt sinds deze de grens is overgestoken De eerste geest die sinds de vorige het leven liet is gaan rond spoken De eerste sinds de vorige kwam opzetten de eerste uitbraak sinds we bij een eerdere op onze ellebogen moesten letten de eerste verpozing sinds een lange tijd lanterfanten de eerste persoon sinds eeuwen die met iedereen en alles kan voortplanten

Sinds sinds is er veel onzin in omloop gepraat Sinds dat unieke moment zitten we voor meer van dergelijke uitspraken paraat van sinds om meer woorden te voegen bij een kleine niets betekenende over en overdaad De eersten zullen eindelijk weer eens de laatsten zijn sinds bij die ene klassiek geworden omloop de eersten per ongeluk waren blijven hangen in catatonische staat

Het eerste stuk sinds een stukje geleden de eerste die sinds de regel is geschreven die regel niet heeft overtreden Het is de eerste noot sinds de vorige gelijkgestemde is gespeeld de eerste groep sinds een andere groep verdween in een enorm lange diepe rotsspleet de eerste zin sinds jaren die net zo als de zee woelig kan baren de eerste mens sinds eeuwen hopsend op de maan de eerste gewonnen set sinds de eerste set op de tennisbaan de eerste sinds een maand die aan de gevolgen ervan het leven heeft opgegeven de eerste keer sinds een poosje terug dat de aarde heftig is gaan bewegen een reeks aan eerder vastgestelde records aan de lopende band gebroken een serie voor het eerst sinds tien opgenomen afleveringen wat langer dan gewoonlijk onderbroken de meest tijdloze tijdverspilling gevangen in een zin sinds het oorspronkelijk begin is degene verantwoordelijk voor het verzinnen van de lam gevleugelde uitspraak 'De eerste sinds'

My Love called me while on his daily walk. He is miles away so an unexpected phone call in the middle of my day—what an underrated and sacred gesture. We get to speak daily, but we don’t hug or touch at all. So any point of connecting in the present, in the same moment, brings about waves of gratitude. He is full of life and I love everything about him. I heard cars tires screech against the asphalt, and he said that there was some sort of getaway-car-chase scene happening. Then I pointed out that somehow, whenever I’m listening to him whether it’s a call or our voice notes, I seem to get a taste of the America that the media shows to the rest of the world.

Chaos and such scenes, are always finding him—but maybe it’s because, we each call upon and even, welcome that energy? That neither of us are afraid of it?

Anyway, I’m obsessed with him. It’s not a secret. I was also speaking to a friend over the weekend, that that’s how you find longevity in partnership. Find someone you can be sustainably obsessed with, who is equally obsessed with you. Healthily obsessed with? I’m here, and he’s there, but we are fundamentally connected. For the first time in my love life, I feel a very calm bond with someone. The connectedness. The magnetism of connection beyond the physical, that it is hard to describe. True and pure connection. I believe our meditation has something to do with it but maybe it’s also because in the philosophies, studies, teachings I/we follow, the world and things are less separate—there is more spaciousness and in that spaciousness, love is the guiding force and principle. And if love is the guiding force and principle, you always invite it to the moment. Even when it’s one of those moodier days. Even if you’re shaken by life happening and things are going haywire and wayward, when you leave a little gap for love—there is a lightness to things, and the moment can be filled with more ease.

Suffering in duality. It seems that part of being human, means that we have to first feel the pain of duality in the physical world. To be in the mud. Even how the body was structured has dualism and disparity/disjointedness. To be feeling your body in the mud. Perhaps we have to be aware of that first, before we can learn to recognize and be aware of the love that unifies, and the joy in all things.

#writing #tarot #love #daily #braindump