In the whole of the Mahikari bible, Goseigen, the word women does not occur at all. Woman occurs 5 times, and female occurs 3 times. Eight of 83,580 words. Impressive.

Men occurs 233 times.

Stay submissive, sunao (obedient), purify your family, do the cooking and cleaning at home and at the Dojo, have kids, and obey your husband.

Photo by Ian Keefe on Unsplash

#mahikari #women #gender #misogyny

No night can ever be perfect again, but they can be perfectly wonderful

Tonight:

Vodka Tonic and A BIG FAT STEAK. It required a grill repair, but absolutely worth it, even if I did have to cook in 105º heat.

THANKS Dust Merdian.

Then it was an hour of Blake's Dances with Wolves. it's just a delight to read.

“He had fallen in love with this wild, beautiful country and everything it contained. It was the kind of love people dream of having with other people: selfless and free of doubt, reverent and everlasting.”

“I had never really known who John Dunbar was. Perhaps because the name itself had no meaning.”

“The great, cloudless sky. The rolling ocean of grass... Just sheer, empty space. He was adrift. It made his heart jump in a strange and profound way.”

“He had fallen in love... It was the kind of love people dream of having with other people: selfless and free of doubt, reverent and everlasting.”

Yes, lasting. even if it's from the deepest darkest hole... it lasts.

And now, finished the evening watching Spiderman, Homecoming and Perks of Being a Wallflower.

You are going to die. Tell them you love them. Get your heart broken. Then fall in love again. Have deep talks with strangers. Leave that job you hate. Soak in the sunshine. Empty your savings. Make new friends. Go on that trip. Take that risk. Go dancing. Get drunk.

This life was meant to be enjoyed with hope, kindness and love.

Don't take life too seriously. We are not coming out of it alive.

Not the way we think. This isn’t the real life. And they one’s not in heaven.

At any rate, it’s too short to wallow in guilt and misery.

Be amazing. Be amazed.

Love. Lust. Live.

At least we’ll have fond memories.

Scratched equipment flicks in sound, both progress tuned and friction ground. Found tapers plume to light wronged path. Too bad subtracton's withheld math.

Each drip begets a minor haze— a phase, distorted, ripping ways. Blight's channel, carved on switch of strife, bewitches sight to segment life.

What sacred pupils comprehend, well-fed and blinded to descend, lips gnarly hunger's scant rebate, as biting curs a fate sedate.

Think not where Fortune skips taught need. For neither frame will intercede between sought glomp —division learned— and devastations scholar-spurned.

Written July 25, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

Do you ever have a bunch of blog post ideas bouncing around in your head but no idea where to start, what would actually be interesting, or how to flesh them out? That's been me lately.

My vision is improving, but my eyes aren't fully healed. My right eye, the first to be operated on, just hit the one-month mark. The left is about two weeks behind. I have one more doctor visit to get a prescription for reading glasses and maybe fine-tune my distance vision. Distance seems okay, but reading and intermediate vision are tricky. The intermediate could use some fine tuning, and my short-distance vision is definitely worse and needs more correction. With this better vision, I'm trying to blog more, get more done, and make progress before the next hurdle.

Catching up feels overwhelming. I keep trying to do five things at once, so I need to slow down and focus. On top of everything else, I have a backlog of podcasts to listen to or watch and a pile of unread items in my RSS reader. I'm slowly whittling the list down.

I'm trying a new program called Wispr Flow to compose this post and see how it works. I've always wondered if composing this way, using my voice, would be easier than typing and then refining. I'll give it a shot for a little while and see if it helps me focus. If it goes well, I might use it more for quick drafts.

#blogging #personal

You sit alone in a spare room, laptop propped on a stack of books to get the camera level with your eyes, and you wait for the first question to appear. There is no interviewer. There is a progress bar, a countdown timer, and a small green light beside the webcam that tells you the machine is watching. A prompt fades onto the screen. You have thirty seconds to think and two minutes to answer, and there will be no second take. So you talk. You describe a time you handled conflict, a moment you showed leadership, the reason you want this job, and the whole while you are performing not for a person but for a piece of software that is measuring something you cannot see and were never told about. It is not weighing your words alone. It is parsing the cadence of your voice, the micro-movements at the corners of your mouth, the length of the pauses where you gather your thoughts, the steadiness or flicker of your gaze. From these signals it is assembling a verdict: a number for your conscientiousness, a number for your emotional stability, perhaps a quiet flag against your honesty. You will never see those numbers. You will receive, days later, a templated rejection that thanks you for your interest and wishes you well in your search.

This is the invisible audition, and millions of people now sit through some version of it every year, mostly without realising what is happening on the other side of the glass. The asynchronous video interview, in which a candidate records answers for a machine to score rather than a human to watch, has become a standard gate in high-volume hiring. The market that builds these systems is growing at a clip that industry analysts put in the region of fifteen per cent a year, with one estimate projecting the AI video interview sector to climb from under a billion dollars in 2024 towards nearly three billion within the decade, and the largest vendors process tens of millions of interviews. Most of that scoring is uncontroversial enough on its surface: transcribing speech, matching keywords, ranking competencies. But a strand of the industry reaches further, into the body and the face, claiming to read from a candidate's expressions and vocal tone the inner traits that a CV cannot show. And here the story stops being about efficiency and becomes about something stranger and more troubling: a hiring decision built on a science that does not exist, applied to the people least able to object, by employers who believe the very opacity of the process makes it fair.

What sets the invisible audition apart from the algorithmic hiring tools that have already drawn public scrutiny is precisely its reach. Most of the controversy of recent years has fixed on the resume-screening systems that parse a CV and rank applicants by keyword, qualification and inferred experience. Those tools are crude and frequently biased, but they at least confine themselves to information a candidate chose to submit. The affective layer operates somewhere else entirely. It does not read what you wrote; it reads what your body did while you spoke, the involuntary territory of expression and voice that no one consents to surrender and that most candidates do not even know is being recorded as data rather than mere footage. It is one thing for a machine to judge the words on your page. It is another for it to judge the flicker at the edge of your eye, and to do so silently, without ever telling you the trial is under way.

The Trait That Cannot Be Measured

Begin with the central claim, because everything else collapses without it. The premise of emotion-reading hiring software is that a person's interior state, their honesty, their enthusiasm, their emotional steadiness, their fit for a culture, can be inferred from the outward arrangement of their face and the acoustics of their speech. Smile in the right places and the algorithm reads warmth. Hold steady eye contact and it reads confidence. Let your voice wobble and it reads anxiety, or evasion, or instability. The whole edifice rests on the assumption that facial movements map reliably onto emotional and psychological states, the same way a thermometer maps onto temperature.

The trouble is that the assumption is wrong, and the people who know the science best have said so in the clearest possible terms. In 2019, five of the most prominent researchers in the field, led by the psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett and including Ralph Adolphs, Stacy Marsella, Aleix Martinez and Seth Pollak, published a sweeping review in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest under the title “Emotional Expressions Reconsidered.” They examined more than a thousand studies and reached a conclusion that ought to have detonated the entire premise of affective hiring. There are, they wrote, no objective measures, whether taken singly or as a pattern, that reliably, uniquely and replicably identify emotional categories from facial movements. A scowl does not mean anger. A smile does not mean happiness. People scowl when they are concentrating, smile when they are uncomfortable, sit stony-faced through grief and weep at weddings. The relationship between the face and the feeling is loose, contextual, cultural and individual, and it cannot be read off the surface like a barcode.

Much of the technology leans, knowingly or not, on what is called Basic Emotion Theory, the older idea that a small set of discrete emotions are expressed in fixed, universal ways across all human faces. The Barrett review is, in effect, a systematic dismantling of that idea using the field's own data. And if facial movements do not reliably reveal even the six so-called basic emotions, the proposition that they reveal abstractions as slippery as honesty or cultural fit belongs not to science but to its discredited ancestors. Critics of the field have repeatedly reached for the same comparison, and it is the right one. To infer character and competence from the configuration of a face is to revive physiognomy and phrenology, the nineteenth-century pseudosciences that claimed to read morality from skull shape and criminality from the set of a jaw. The technology is new. The fallacy is two hundred years old, and it was wrong then for the same reason it is wrong now. There is no validated, replicated relationship between the micro-expressions and vocal features these systems claim to measure and the actual performance of a person in an actual job. The vendors are selling a measurement of a thing that, as measured, does not exist.

How the Industry Learned to Hide

The most instructive episode in this whole saga belongs to HireVue, for a long time the most visible name in algorithmic video interviewing and, for that reason, the company that drew the first sustained fire. In its earlier incarnation, HireVue's platform analysed candidates' faces during recorded interviews, and the company acknowledged that somewhere between ten and thirty per cent of a candidate's assessment could derive from facial expression, with the remainder drawn from language. It marketed the ability to gauge cognitive ability, emotional intelligence, psychological traits and social aptitude from a recorded answer.

In November 2019, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington watchdog known as EPIC, filed a complaint with the United States Federal Trade Commission, alleging that HireVue's practices were unfair and deceptive. The complaint argued that the tools were unproven, invasive and prone to bias, and that representing them as objective when their scientific foundation was so shaky amounted to a deception of both candidates and the employers who bought the software. A little over a year later, in early 2021, HireVue announced that it would stop using facial analysis in its assessments. The company framed the retreat partly as a response to public concern, conceding that the visual component was not worth the unease it generated. By HireVue's own account the visual analysis had already been stripped out the previous March, in 2020, and the company maintained that advances in its language analysis meant the facial component “no longer significantly added value”, a revealing formulation: on the vendor's own telling the work had not been given up but simply absorbed by another modality.

It would be comforting to read that as the moment the industry came to its senses. It was not. HireVue did not abandon the underlying project of inferring traits from a candidate's body; it narrowed it. The platform continued to analyse speech, intonation and language, which carry many of the same risks of bias and unvalidated inference as the facial component it dropped, only with less of the visceral alarm that the word “facial recognition” provokes. And the broader market did not contract. It diversified and consolidated. A cohort of vendors now offer one-way video interviews layered with personality and culture-fit analysis. The platform myInterview, which blended recorded video answers with personality and cultural assessment, was acquired by the recruitment marketing firm Radancy in September 2025, one of several deals that folded these capabilities into ever larger hiring stacks. The lesson the industry absorbed from the HireVue affair was not that reading character off a body was unsound. It was that the reading should be done more quietly, in modalities that attract less scrutiny, sold to employers who will rarely think to ask what is happening beneath the interface.

The migration from face to voice deserves particular attention, because it is so often mistaken for a reform. Vocal tone, pitch, pace and prosody are no more validated as windows onto honesty or stability than facial micro-expressions are, and they import their own demographic landmines: the pitch of a voice tracks with gender, its rhythm with regional and national origin, its pauses and fillers with neurology and with the simple cognitive load of speaking a second language. To drop the camera's verdict and keep the microphone's is not to fix the problem. It is to move it somewhere harder to see.

The Audit Behind the Screen

For years the response to all of this from the companies involved was a version of: you cannot prove our systems are biased, because you cannot see inside them. The models are proprietary, the training data is confidential, and an outsider has no way to run the controlled experiment that would isolate the effect of a candidate's race or gender. That defence has now started to fail, because researchers have worked out how to probe the black box from the outside.

In a paper titled “Behind the Screens: Uncovering Bias in AI-Driven Video Interview Assessments Using Counterfactuals,” posted to the arXiv preprint server in May 2025 and revised that November, the researchers Dena F. Mujtaba and Nihar R. Mahapatra of Michigan State University built a method to do precisely that. Their approach uses generative adversarial networks, a class of AI that can synthesise realistic media, to construct counterfactual versions of the same candidate. Take a recorded interview and produce alternate renderings in which a protected characteristic, the apparent race or gender of the speaker, is altered while everything else, the words, the content, the substance of the answer, is held constant. Then feed each version into a personality-prediction model and watch whether the score moves. If the only thing that changed was the candidate's apparent demographic, and the score changes too, the bias is not hypothetical. It is sitting in the output.

The elegance of the counterfactual approach is that it sidesteps the usual stalemate. A vendor can always argue that any disparity in real-world outcomes reflects real differences between applicant pools rather than the model's prejudice. The counterfactual closes that escape: the two versions of the candidate are the same person giving the same answer, differing only in an attribute that ought to be irrelevant to the score. The framework is also deliberately multimodal, examining visual, audio and textual features together rather than in isolation, which matters because real systems combine all three and bias can hide in the interaction between them. Applied to a state-of-the-art model that predicts the so-called Big Five personality traits, the openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism that much of the personality-assessment industry treats as gospel, the method revealed significant disparities across demographic groups. The same answer, the same competence, the same content, scored differently depending on who appeared to be giving it. The authors were careful about what they were and were not claiming: their contribution is principally a scalable auditing tool for exactly the black-box commercial settings where the training data and model internals are locked away. But the direction of the finding is unambiguous. When you can finally test these systems for disparate treatment, you find it.

When the Machine Misreads a Face

A second line of evidence, published in 2026, addresses the layer beneath the personality scores: the emotion-recognition machinery that many of these systems use to read affect in the first place. In an article on ethics and bias in emotional AI, published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence in March 2026, the researchers Smrithy G. S, Balaji Chandrasekaran and Omana J set out the case that emotion-recognition systems discriminate systematically along lines of race and gender, and misread expression across cultural contexts, and they trace the mechanism rather than merely asserting the result.

Part of the problem is foundational and statistical. The facial-analysis systems on which emotion inference is built inherit the accuracy gaps that the computer scientists Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru exposed in their landmark 2018 study, Gender Shades. Testing commercial gender-classification systems, Buolamwini and Gebru found error rates as high as 34.7 per cent for darker-skinned women, against a maximum of 0.8 per cent for lighter-skinned men. A system that cannot reliably tell who a person is will not reliably tell how they feel, and the errors do not distribute evenly: the Frontiers authors note that such systems have tended to misclassify the expressions of Black faces in particular, more readily reading a neutral expression as hostile or aggressive. Carry that into a hiring context and the consequence is not abstract. A candidate of colour, sitting calmly through a recorded interview, can have their composure rendered by the machine as something darker, and be marked down for an emotion they never felt.

Part of the problem is cultural. The Frontiers authors emphasise that emotions are context-dependent, culturally mediated and frequently ambiguous, and that the training data behind these systems skews heavily towards Western populations and Western norms of expression. A model calibrated on Western faces and Western display rules will misread the expressions of people outside that mould, and reinforce stereotypes about how different genders are supposed to emote in the bargain. There is a socioeconomic dimension too, which the paper only brushes against but which follows from the same logic, subtler but no less real: the way a person presents, the polish of their diction, the backdrop visible behind them, the quality of their webcam and their broadband, all carry the fingerprints of class, and all feed into a system that was never designed to disentangle privilege from merit. The opacity of the process, the authors argue, is precisely what makes it dangerous in high-stakes settings such as recruitment, where the emotional readings are treated as objective indicators of a candidate's suitability when they are nothing of the kind. The result is a discrimination engine wearing the costume of a meritocracy.

The People Who Cannot Pass

Bias along the familiar lines of race and gender is grave enough. But emotion-reading hiring tools also inflict a quieter and in some ways more total exclusion, on candidates whose faces and voices simply do not produce the signals the model is looking for. These systems do not measure whether you can do the job. They measure whether you perform, in front of a webcam, in the narrow manner the model was trained to reward. And for whole categories of people, that performance is not available at any price.

Consider autistic candidates and those with attention deficit conditions. The behaviours these systems treat as red flags, reduced eye contact, a flatter or less animated vocal range, pauses in the middle of a sentence, an expressive style that does not match the neurotypical template, are in many cases direct features of neurodivergence rather than evidence of disengagement or dishonesty. An autistic applicant who looks slightly away from the lens to concentrate, or who answers in a measured monotone, can be flagged by the system as low in engagement or confidence, and screened out before a single human being assesses whether they can actually perform the role. Disability-rights researchers and advocates have warned repeatedly that video and audio screening which scores eye contact, vocal cadence and facial affect risks penalising autistic, blind and otherwise disabled candidates for traits that have nothing to do with competence. The cruelty is compounded by the fact that many such candidates are highly capable in the roles they are applying for; the system filters not for ability but for a narrow performance of normalcy that ability does not require.

The same trap closes on non-native speakers, whose accents, prosody and pacing diverge from the speech patterns the model learned, and on anyone whose self-presentation is shaped by culture, class or simple nerves in ways the training data did not anticipate. The defence offered by vendors and employers, that candidates can always request an accommodation, founders on a brutal practicality. To request one, a candidate must first disclose a disability to a prospective employer, at the most vulnerable moment of the hiring process, before they have any offer, any leverage or any relationship to protect them. Many will not, and so they say nothing, and the system quietly downgrades them for being who they are. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, pre-employment assessment is supposed to be job-related and consistent with business necessity, a standard these tools struggle to meet when the very traits they measure have no demonstrated link to job performance. The disparate impact is not a bug to be patched. It is the predictable output of asking a machine to reward one narrow way of being human.

No Reasons, No Appeal

Strip away the bias for a moment and a separate harm remains, one that would persist even if the systems were somehow perfectly fair. It is the harm of being judged by a process that owes you no explanation and offers you no way to answer back.

A human interview is many things, some of them flawed, but it is at least a relationship. The interviewer can be challenged, charmed, corrected. If they misunderstand your answer, you can clarify. If they harbour a prejudice, you can sometimes overcome it in the room. And if you are rejected, there is at least a person who knows why, a chain of reasoning that can in principle be questioned, complained about, learned from. The algorithmic audition dissolves all of this. There is no interviewer to persuade, no reasoning to interrogate, no explanation of why your face and voice produced the score they did. You are not told the traits being measured. You are not shown the result. You are not given a route of appeal. You are handed a rejection with no causal story attached, and the absence of a story is the point: it is what lets the system process thousands of candidates an hour, and it is what makes the decision impossible to contest.

This opacity is not incidental. It is the operating logic. A system that had to explain each rejection in terms a candidate could challenge would forfeit the very speed and scale that make it commercially attractive. So the explanation is dispensed with, and a verdict on your honesty and your emotional stability, derived from a pseudoscience and tilted by bias, is delivered with all the unanswerable finality of a closed door. The candidate is left to guess. Was it the answer, the pause, the accent, the face, the lighting in the spare room? The machine knows, or claims to, and it is not saying. And because the rejection is silent about its reasons, the candidate cannot even learn from it, cannot adjust, cannot improve, because there is nothing to adjust towards except a moving target they were never permitted to see.

The Employer's Comforting Illusion

It would be easy to cast the employers who deploy these tools as the villains of the piece, but the more accurate and more disquieting truth is that many of them believe they are doing the opposite of harm. The pitch that sells emotion-reading hiring software to a human-resources department is a pitch about fairness. Human interviewers, the argument runs, are riddled with bias: they favour candidates who look like them, who share their background, who went to the right schools and tell the right jokes. Replace the fallible human with a consistent algorithm, the pitch continues, and you remove the prejudice. Every candidate is scored by the same model against the same criteria. What could be fairer than that?

This is the comforting illusion, and it is precisely backwards. The algorithm does not remove bias; it launders it, taking the prejudices embedded in its training data and the flawed assumptions of its design and reissuing them as objective scores with a veneer of mathematical neutrality. A biased human interviewer is at least a discrete, identifiable, potentially correctable source of unfairness. A biased model deployed across an entire hiring funnel applies the same distortion to every candidate, at scale, invisibly, and clothes it in the authority of data. The very feature the employer prizes, the consistency, is what converts a scattering of individual prejudices into a single systematic one. And because the output arrives as a number, it carries an aura of rigour that a gut feeling never could, which makes it harder to question and easier to defend. The employer believes they have bought objectivity. They have bought the appearance of objectivity wrapped around a discriminatory core, and the appearance is worse than nothing, because it forecloses the very scrutiny that might catch the discrimination.

There is a further irony. The traits these systems claim to optimise for, honesty, stability, cultural fit, are not even shown to predict good hiring. “Cultural fit” in particular is a notoriously double-edged criterion, as likely to entrench an organisation's existing homogeneity as to improve it: a model trained to reward candidates who resemble a company's current, perhaps already skewed, workforce will simply reproduce that skew while calling it merit. The employer set out to widen the funnel and ended up narrowing it, convinced the whole time that the narrowing was fairness. There is even a legal sting in the tail: an employer who adopts one of these tools believing it neutralises bias may in fact be importing a disparate impact they would be liable for, having outsourced the discrimination to a vendor but not the responsibility for it.

The Law Catches a Glimpse

Regulators have begun, unevenly and belatedly, to register what is happening, and the most decisive response has come from the European Union. Under the EU AI Act, which began phasing into force in 2025, the use of AI systems to infer the emotions of a person in the workplace, and in educational settings, is not merely regulated but prohibited outright, with narrow exceptions for medical and safety purposes. The prohibition, set out in Article 5 and effective from February 2025, rests on an explicit recognition of the power imbalance between an employer and a job candidate or worker, a relationship in which genuine consent to emotional surveillance is something close to a fiction. The penalties are not symbolic: breaches of the prohibited-practices provisions can attract fines of up to thirty-five million euros or seven per cent of a company's global annual turnover, whichever is higher. An AI tool that purports to score a candidate's enthusiasm or confidence or cultural fit from their face or voice is, in the workplaces of the European Union, now illegal.

Elsewhere the picture is patchier. In the United States, Illinois enacted its Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act, which requires employers to notify applicants when AI is used to analyse a video interview, to explain in general terms how the technology works, and to obtain consent before proceeding, with further obligations on AI in employment taking effect at the start of 2026. New York City's Local Law 144 takes a different tack, requiring annual independent bias audits of automated employment decision tools, publication of the results, and advance notice to candidates. These are real interventions, but they are also limited: notice and consent do little for a candidate who has no realistic power to refuse, and a bias audit catches only some of the harms and none of the underlying invalidity. In the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office published a report and draft guidance on automated decision-making in recruitment on 31 March 2026, drawing on evidence gathered from more than thirty employers and calling on them to review their AI hiring practices. Its central finding sharpens everything said here about opacity: many employers do not realise they are using automated decision-making at all, and so never put the safeguards the law requires anywhere near it. The regulator's scepticism about affective tools specifically is older and blunter. In October 2022 the ICO's then deputy commissioner, Stephen Bonner, warned organisations off biometric “emotional analysis” altogether, saying the office was “yet to see any emotion AI technology develop in a way that satisfies data protection requirements”, and that such technologies “may not work yet, or indeed ever.” Britain's broader legal scaffolding shifted, too, with the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 replacing the old Article 22 prohibition on solely automated decisions with a framework built around a right to challenge and mandatory safeguards.

The transatlantic divergence is stark. On one side of the Atlantic, emotion recognition in hiring is banned as an unacceptable risk to fundamental rights. On the other, it is a disclosure-and-audit problem, permitted so long as the right boxes are ticked. Neither approach has yet caught up with the speed of deployment, and a candidate's protection now depends heavily on the accident of which jurisdiction they happen to be applying from. A multinational running a single hiring pipeline across borders faces the awkward reality that the same tool can be outright illegal in Frankfurt and merely disclosable in Chicago, which tells you less about the technology than about how unsettled the world's collective judgement of it still is.

What Is Actually Being Decided

Return, at the last, to the room with the laptop and the green light, and ask what is really at stake when an algorithm decides how your face makes you feel about telling the truth. The most immediate answer is a job, and jobs are not small things; they are housing, healthcare, dignity, the difference between a life with options and a life without. To have that gated by a system that cannot do what it claims, that misreads faces by race and voices by accent and stillness by neurology, and that will never tell you why, is a concrete injustice visited on real people one rejection at a time.

But there is a deeper thing being decided, and it concerns the kind of judgement we are prepared to accept. The promise of the invisible audition is that character can be quantified, that honesty has a facial signature and emotional stability a vocal one, and that a sufficiently sophisticated model can read these off a recording and rank human beings accordingly. The science says it cannot. The audits say that where the model does produce a number, the number is warped by who you appear to be. And the structure of the process ensures that you will never be allowed to argue. What is being normalised is not a better way to hire but a worse way to be judged: opaque, unaccountable, dressed as objectivity, and aimed first at the people with the least power to resist it.

The candidates being judged deserve, at minimum, to know when a machine is reading their face, to understand what it claims to measure, and to contest a verdict that shapes their livelihood. The employers doing the judging deserve to understand that the objectivity they have been sold is a costume, and that the consistency they prize is consistency in error. And the rest of us deserve a serious public reckoning with a simple question that the technology has so far been allowed to skip. If a thing cannot be measured, no amount of computation will measure it, and the only honest verdict a face-reading hiring algorithm can return on a candidate's honesty is that it does not, and cannot, know. The green light beside the webcam suggests otherwise. It is the most confident liar in the room.

References

1. Mujtaba, Dena F., and Nihar R. Mahapatra. “Behind the Screens: Uncovering Bias in AI-Driven Video Interview Assessments Using Counterfactuals.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12114, submitted May 2025, revised November 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12114
2. Smrithy, G. S., Balaji Chandrasekaran, and Omana J. “Ethics and bias in emotional AI.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5 March 2026. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2026.1768696/full
3. Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Ralph Adolphs, Stacy Marsella, Aleix M. Martinez, and Seth D. Pollak. “Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2019. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100619832930
4. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 81, 2018. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html
5. Electronic Privacy Information Center. “HireVue, Facing FTC Complaint From EPIC, Halts Use of Facial Recognition.” EPIC, January 2021. https://epic.org/hirevue-facing-ftc-complaint-from-epic-halts-use-of-facial-recognition/
6. Electronic Privacy Information Center. “In re HireVue.” EPIC, 2019. https://epic.org/documents/in-re-hirevue/
7. European Union. “Article 5: Prohibited AI Practices.” EU Artificial Intelligence Act. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/
8. Future of Privacy Forum. “Red Lines under EU AI Act: Unpacking the prohibition of emotion recognition in the workplace and education institutions.” FPF Blog. https://fpf.org/blog/red-lines-under-eu-ai-act-unpacking-the-prohibition-of-emotion-recognition-in-the-workplace-and-education-institutions/
9. Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP. “Illinois Adopts New AI-in-Employment Regulations: What Employers Need to Know for 2026.” Employment Law Observer. https://www.hinshawlaw.com/en/insights/blogs/employment-law-observer/illinois-adopts-new-ai-in-employment-regulations-what-employers-need-to-know-for-2026.html
10. Warden AI. “NYC Local Law 144 Compliance Guide 2026.” https://www.warden-ai.com/resources/hr-tech-compliance-nyc-local-law-144
11. DLA Piper Privacy Matters. “UK: ICO Report on Automated Decision-Making in Recruitment.” April 2026. https://privacymatters.dlapiper.com/2026/04/uk-ico-report-on-automated-decision-making-in-recruitment/
12. Information Commissioner's Office. “'Immature biometric technologies could be discriminating against people' says ICO in warning to organisations.” ICO, 26 October 2022. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs/2022/10/immature-biometric-technologies-could-be-discriminating-against-people-says-ico-in-warning-to-organisations/
13. Bloomberg Law. “AI Hiring Tools Elevate Bias Danger for Autistic Job Applicants.” Daily Labor Report. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/ai-hiring-tools-elevate-bias-danger-for-autistic-job-applicants
14. The Conversation. “Tech companies claim AI can recognise human emotions. But the science doesn't stack up.” https://theconversation.com/tech-companies-claim-ai-can-recognise-human-emotions-but-the-science-doesnt-stack-up-243591
15. MIT Technology Review. “Emotion AI researchers say overblown claims give their work a bad name.” 14 February 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/14/844765/ai-emotion-recognition-affective-computing-hirevue-regulation-ethics/
16. Radancy. “Radancy Extends AI Platform, Powering Faster, Smarter, More Cost-Efficient Hiring at Scale.” 9 September 2025. https://www.radancy.com/en/radancy-extends-ai-platform-powering-faster-smarter-more-cost-efficient-hiring-at-scale-myinterview/
17. openPR. “AI Video Interview Market Size Accelerated by 14.8% CAGR.” https://www.openpr.com/news/4508316/ai-video-interview-market-size-accelerated-by-14-8-cagr-by-key

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

People often repeat the advice: don’t keep a television in your bedroom if you want to sleep early. It’s said so casually, almost like a superstition, but rarely explained. The truth behind it is quieter, more human, and far more practical.

Every space we spend time in gathers traces of what we do there. Not memories exactly, but more like grooves worn into the mind. A bedroom where you’ve watched countless shows becomes a place associated with stimulation, noise, and motion. The body learns these cues long before you ever think about them.

So when you step into that same room hoping for rest, you’re not entering a neutral space. You’re entering a place that has been shaped by your habits. The mind responds to the familiar pattern: the urge to reach for the remote, the expectation of one more episode, the pull toward the ritual you’ve practiced.

It isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s simply conditioning.

James Clear writes about this in Atomic Habits: how environments quietly influence behavior, often more powerfully than motivation or intention. Change the space, and you change the cues. Change the cues, and the habits that follow begin to shift.

A bedroom reserved for sleep becomes a kind of refuge, an uncluttered signal to the body that it can finally let go. A place where rest doesn’t have to be negotiated.

We shape our spaces with our habits. And those spaces, in turn, shape us.

And just to be clear, this isn’t a sermon against televisions in bedrooms. We have one in ours. I’m only sharing what I’ve learned along the way, in case it helps someone else notice the quiet signals their own spaces are sending.

#QuietReflections #MindfulLiving

You do not need to build the next major software company to create a useful online business.

A small website that completes one clear task can attract search traffic, serve users automatically, and open several paths to monetization. AI coding tools have made this model easier to explore because they can help with planning, development, testing, and deployment.

This article examines a four-month text-to-PDF website project built with Claude and Codex and deployed on Vercel. The site reportedly began with a domain cost of about $10 and later gained thousands of organic search clicks.

The example shows the potential of an AI-assisted tool website, but it does not prove guaranteed or fully passive income.

Why Utility Websites Can Work as Digital Assets

A utility website helps visitors complete a specific task.

Instead of asking users to read a long guide, join a community, or speak with a salesperson, the website gives them a working solution. Common examples include converters, calculators, generators, validators, and formatting tools.

These websites can become digital assets because the same tool can serve many people without requiring the owner to manually complete every request.

A useful tool may earn through:

• Display advertising
• Affiliate recommendations
• Paid features
• Software subscriptions
• API access
• Sponsorships
• Donations

The website can keep operating while the owner is away, but that does not make it completely passive.

Development, SEO, testing, technical fixes, and performance monitoring still require time.

What Is an AI-Assisted Tool Website?

An AI-assisted tool website is a digital utility created with support from artificial intelligence.

AI may help write code, explain errors, suggest layouts, create tests, improve mobile behavior, or prepare deployment files. The tool itself does not always need to use AI when visitors interact with it.

For example, a browser-based PDF converter may use standard web technologies to generate documents. Claude or Codex may still help the developer build and improve the application.

This difference matters because a website built with AI is not always an AI-powered service.

Some tools can run directly inside the browser without sending every request to a paid AI model. That can reduce ongoing API expenses and make the project easier to operate.

A Real Example of a Low-Cost Tool Website

Free Text To PDF is a browser-based utility that helps users turn written text into a downloadable PDF document.

Visitors can prepare text, adjust document settings, and create a PDF without installing full desktop publishing software.

According to information supplied by the website owner, the project was:

• Built with support from Claude and Codex
• Deployed through Vercel
• Started with a domain that cost about $10
• Around four months old when the results were recorded
• Designed to require limited routine management

The project should be called low maintenance rather than maintenance free.

Even a simple tool needs browser testing, security checks, hosting reviews, content updates, and technical monitoring.

What the Early Performance Data Shows

The owner supplied a Google Search Console screenshot with the following results:

Search metric and Reported result

• Total clicks: 9,140
• Total impressions: 61,800
• Average click-through rate: 14.8%
• Average position: 5.8

The graph showed little activity during the early part of the reporting period. Visibility then increased near the end of May and continued to produce daily clicks.

A separate Google Analytics screenshot showed about 1,100 active users, around 1,100 new users, and nearly 6,400 recorded events during a selected 90-day period.

These platforms measure activity in different ways. Google Search Console clicks should not be expected to match Google Analytics users exactly.

The screenshots also do not provide proof of revenue.

They do not show:

• Advertising income
• Premium purchases
• Affiliate commissions
• Customer lifetime value
• Net profit
• Conversion rate
• Total operating expenses

The results should therefore be viewed as evidence of early search growth, not proof of financial success.

Why a Simple Tool Can Attract Organic Visitors

People often use search engines because they need to finish a task.

Someone searching for a text-to-PDF converter usually does not want a long history of the PDF format. The person wants a working tool that creates the file quickly.

This creates strong task-based search intent.

Similar searches may include:

• Convert plain text to PDF
• Save notes as a PDF
• Turn a TXT file into a PDF
• Create a PDF from pasted text
• Format text for printing
• Download text as a document

A page that matches this intent can be more useful than a general article.

The user should be able to understand the tool, enter the content, choose settings, and download the result with little confusion.

How to Choose a Good Tool Website Idea

The strongest ideas usually solve one narrow and repeated problem.

A useful starting idea should meet several conditions:

1. People already search for the task.

2. The task can be completed online.

3. The result provides immediate value.

4. The first version is small enough to build.

5. Existing solutions have clear weaknesses.

6. The website can support related tools later.

Good categories may include:

• File conversion
• Text formatting
• Image resizing
• Data checking
• Financial calculations
• Document creation
• Code validation
• Measurement conversion
• Productivity templates

Avoid choosing an idea only because a keyword tool shows a large search volume.

A large keyword may have powerful competitors, weak monetization, or unclear intent. A smaller problem with a clear user need can be more practical for a beginner.

Research the Problem Before Writing Code

Development should begin after demand is checked, not before.

Start by studying the current search results.

Look at:

• The types of pages that rank
• The features included in popular tools
• Mobile usability
• Page speed
• Registration requirements
• Privacy information
• Advertising placement
• User complaints
• Missing functions
• Related search questions

You can also study forums, product reviews, and social discussions to find repeated problems.

For example, users may dislike converters that require an account, upload private files, cover buttons with ads, or fail on mobile devices.

These problems can become product opportunities.

Build One Complete Feature First

A common mistake is trying to launch ten tools at the same time.

A better approach is to create one small but complete experience.

For a text-to-PDF website, the first version might need:

• A text input area
• Basic formatting
• Page size selection
• Margin controls
• A PDF preview
• A working download button
• Mobile support
• Clear error messages

The first version does not need dozens of templates, user accounts, team workspaces, or cloud storage.

Those features can be considered after real users begin using the tool.

A smaller launch also makes testing easier.

How Claude and Codex Can Support Development

AI coding tools can help a beginner move from an idea to a working prototype.

They may assist with:

• Creating a project structure
• Writing front-end components
• Explaining unfamiliar code
• Finding syntax problems
• Improving responsive design
• Adding input validation
• Creating accessibility labels
• Preparing deployment settings
• Writing test cases
• Reviewing common security risks

However, AI-generated code must still be checked.

It may produce outdated packages, insecure logic, duplicate code, weak error handling, or features that appear correct but fail in real use.

A developer should test each important workflow rather than trusting the first generated answer.

Test the Tool Like a Real Visitor

A tool may work perfectly with one short example and fail with real content.

Testing should include different devices, browsers, and input types.

Try:

• Empty text fields
• One-line documents
• Very long text
• Special characters
• Different languages
• Copied content with unusual spacing
• Mobile screens Slow internet
• Repeated button clicks
• Large documents Chrome and Safari

Also check whether the user receives a useful message when something goes wrong.

A confusing error can cause a visitor to leave even when the problem is easy to fix.

Create a Search-Friendly Page Structure

The working utility should be the main purpose of the page.

Do not force visitors to scroll through a long SEO article before reaching the feature they searched for.

A useful tool page may contain:

• One clear H1
• A short explanation
• The main tool
• Simple instructions
• Main use cases
• Privacy information
• Supported formats
• Frequently asked questions
• Related utilities
• Contact and legal pages

The supporting content should help users understand and trust the tool.

It should not exist only to repeat keywords.

Google says that generative AI can assist with research and structure, but website owners remain responsible for accuracy, quality, and relevance. Producing many pages without useful value can create policy and quality risks.

Build Around One Clear Topic

After the main tool works, expand into closely related needs.

A PDF-focused website could add:

• PDF to text
• Markdown to PDF
• RTF to PDF
• EPUB to PDF
• Text file formatting
• PDF page size guides
• PDF privacy explanations
• Printable document templates

This creates a connected topic area.

The website becomes a useful destination for people who work with documents and file conversion.

Adding unrelated tools simply to increase the page count can confuse users and weaken the site’s identity.

Each new page should solve a separate problem and provide a complete experience.

Use Real Behavior to Improve the Product

Traffic reports are useful, but they do not show the full user experience.

A tool owner should also measure whether visitors complete the task.

Useful events may include:

• Tool started
• File imported
• Settings changed
• Preview opened
• PDF generated
• Download completed
• Error displayed
• Related tool opened
• Visitor returned

These events can reveal problems that page views cannot show.

For example, a page may attract 5,000 visits, but only a small percentage may complete the download. That could point to a broken button, slow process, unclear instructions, or poor mobile layout.

How a Free Tool Website Can Generate Revenue

A free tool can support several business models.

The right choice depends on the type of user, frequency of use, and level of traffic.

Display Advertising

Advertising can work for tools with steady search traffic.

It is simple for users because the main feature can remain free. However, too many ads can slow the page and make the controls difficult to use.

Ad placement should never block the main task.

Google advises AdSense publishers to offer original and relevant content and to organize pages so visitors can easily find what they need.

Paid Upgrades

A free basic tool can offer advanced functions through a paid plan.

Possible premium features include:

• Larger input limits
• Batch processing
• Saved projects
• Advanced templates
• Custom branding
• No advertisements
• Team access
• Cloud history

This model is more suitable when users return often or use the tool for professional work.

Affiliate Partnerships

A website can recommend products that help the same audience.

A document tool may naturally mention cloud storage, electronic signature software, writing applications, business templates, or printing services.

The recommendation should solve a related problem.

Random affiliate offers may generate little income and reduce trust.

API Access

A reliable tool may later provide an API for developers or companies.

This allows another website or application to use the conversion feature automatically.

API access requires more technical work, including authentication, rate limits, monitoring, billing, and documentation.

Sponsorships

A relevant company may pay to appear beside a useful tool.

This usually becomes realistic after the website has a stable audience and clear usage data.

Voluntary Support

A donation option can work when people appreciate a free and private tool.

It may provide extra support, but it should not be treated as predictable revenue.

A Natural Example of the Tool Model

A student, writer, teacher, or business owner may prepare notes in plain text and later need a clean file for printing or sharing.

A browser-based service such as Free Text To PDF fits that final step by helping the user convert prepared text into a downloadable PDF.

This is also a useful example of a narrow tool website. It focuses on one clear job rather than trying to become a complete office platform.

What May Have Helped the Website Gain Visibility

The supplied data does not identify one confirmed cause, but several factors may have supported growth.

It Matches a Clear Action

The site serves people who already know what they want to do.

A visitor searching for text-to-PDF conversion can use the tool immediately.

The Value Is Easy to Understand

The purpose does not need a long explanation.

Users can quickly see the input area, settings, and expected output.

The Tool Supports a Complete Task

A useful converter does more than discuss PDFs. It helps the visitor create one.

This direct value may support engagement and repeat use.

The Site Can Expand Semantically

Related document and conversion tools can strengthen the overall topic without moving into random categories.

It Appeared in Useful Search Positions

The reported average position of 5.8 suggests that many impressions occurred near the first page of Google.

However, average position can cover many searches and pages. Detailed query data would be needed before drawing a firm conclusion.

Important Costs Beginners May Overlook

The domain may be the only starting expense, but it is not always the only long-term cost.

Possible expenses include:

• Commercial hosting
• Email delivery
• Storage Databases
• Paid APIs
• Monitoring Security services
• Development help
• Design assets
• Privacy or legal support
• Analytics upgrades

The website owner should also review the hosting plan before monetizing the project.

Vercel currently describes its Hobby plan as intended for personal and non-commercial use, while its Pro plan is aimed at professional developers and businesses.

A project that becomes commercial should confirm that its hosting plan matches its actual usage.

Common Problems That Can Limit Growth

Publishing Before Testing Mobile Devices

Many visitors may use phones.

A tool that works only on desktop can lose traffic, trust, and conversions.

Depending Completely on AI Code

AI can assist development, but it cannot accept responsibility for security or reliability.

Human review remains necessary.

Creating Thin Pages for Every Keyword

Changing one phrase on dozens of pages does not create meaningful value.

Each page needs a real purpose, distinct content, and a working solution.

Hiding Privacy Details

People may paste private notes, business information, or personal documents into a converter.

Explain clearly whether information stays in the browser, reaches a server, or is stored.

Covering the Interface With Ads

The main feature should remain easy to use.

Short-term advertising gains may not be worth losing repeat visitors.

Ignoring Errors After Launch

Browsers, packages, hosting limits, and user behavior can change.

A tool should be monitored even when it operates automatically.

Assuming Rankings Are Permanent

Search visibility can rise or fall because of competition, technical problems, content quality, and search changes.

Google also states that meeting technical and quality requirements does not guarantee indexing or visibility.

Is the Income Really Passive?

The delivery of the tool can be automated.

Visitors can arrive, complete the task, and view ads or purchase an upgrade without the owner serving each person manually.

That is the passive part.

The business itself still needs active care.

Someone must:

• Review performance
• Fix bugs
• Improve weak pages
• Check hosting usage
• Protect user data
• Test browsers
• Maintain legal pages
• Review monetization policies
• Respond to important feedback

The realistic goal is not zero work.

The goal is to build a useful system that can serve many visitors without equal growth in manual labor.

Can Beginners Build This Type of Website?

Yes, but the first project should be small.

A beginner does not need to master every programming language. AI assistants can explain many technical tasks and help create a basic version.

However, the owner should still learn enough to understand:

What the tool does Where user data goes How the website is hosted How errors are recorded How mobile testing works How search engines access the site How monetization affects usability

Professional help may be needed when the tool handles sensitive files, payments, user accounts, or complex server operations.

Conclusion

An AI-assisted utility website can become a strong digital asset when it solves a real problem and delivers the result with little friction.

The Free Text To PDF project shows how a focused idea, AI-supported development, low initial spending, and search visibility can create meaningful early momentum. It does not prove guaranteed income, but it offers a practical model for beginners.

Start with one task, confirm that people need it, launch a complete first version, test real user behavior, and expand only into closely related problems. Revenue is more likely to follow when usefulness comes first.

Seeing people as Jesus sees them becomes difficult for me when the label feels safer than the person.

I can say that people are complicated. I can believe in grace, forgiveness, human dignity, and the possibility of transformation. I can write about the way Jesus looked beyond reputations and failures. Then someone disappoints me, hurts someone I care about, says something cruel, acts dishonestly, or reveals a side of themselves I did not expect, and I understand why labels are so tempting. This free Christian book about the human face Jesus never lost was written from that difficult place where compassion must remain honest and truth must remain human.

The deeper reframe is explored in this Christian companion about why a description should never be allowed to replace the person. That is the part I keep returning to. A label may tell me something important. It may help me name a pattern, recognize danger, understand a wound, or make a decision. It becomes a problem when I start asking the label to see the person for me.

I know how quickly that can happen.

A person lies, and I no longer think about what they lied about, whether they confessed, or whether anything has changed. They become a liar.

A person acts selfishly, and every later decision becomes evidence that selfishness is the center of who they are.

Someone leaves, and I decide they were never loyal.

Someone stays silent when I needed them, and I decide they never cared.

A leader fails, and I decide everything that leader ever did must have been false.

The label gives me relief because it makes the story simple.

I no longer have to hold good and bad in the same memory.

I no longer have to admit that someone may have loved me and still harmed me.

I no longer have to wonder whether a person can be responsible and wounded at the same time.

I no longer have to consider that someone might change without becoming safe for me again.

The label answers everything.

That is exactly why I have to be careful with it.

I Want People to Be Easier to Understand

There are days when I wish people were consistent enough to fit inside one sentence.

It would make relationships easier.

I would know whom to trust.

Whom to avoid.

Whom to forgive.

Whom to believe.

Whom to stop waiting for.

But people do not stay neatly inside one version of themselves.

A person can be generous and jealous.

Loving and controlling.

Honest in one area and deeply dishonest in another.

Brave in public and frightened in private.

Compassionate toward strangers and impatient with family.

A person may sincerely mean a promise and still break it later.

Someone may regret what they did and remain unprepared to change.

Another person may appear emotionally calm while doing the hard work of repentance quietly.

We want the visible reaction to tell us the entire truth.

Tears mean sincerity.

Silence means coldness.

Confidence means honesty.

Anxiety means guilt.

None of those conclusions is always reliable.

I have seen people cry because they were exposed rather than because they understood the harm.

I have seen people struggle to show emotion while taking responsibility seriously.

I have seen apologies delivered beautifully and followed by the same behavior.

I have seen awkward, imperfect apologies become the beginning of real change.

People are difficult to read because human beings can hide from others and from themselves.

Jesus did not have that limitation.

He knew what people were carrying. He knew where fear, pride, greed, grief, shame, love, and ambition were moving inside them.

Yet His complete knowledge did not make Him more eager to humiliate.

That challenges me.

I sometimes act as though greater knowledge should make me harsher. Once I know what someone did, I feel I have earned the right to reduce them.

Jesus knew more and saw more.

He told the truth without needing contempt.

The Label Can Make My Anger Feel Righteous

Anger can be honest.

It can tell me that something valuable was violated.

A promise mattered.

A person mattered.

A boundary mattered.

Truth mattered.

There have been moments in my life when anger was the first emotion strong enough to break through denial. It helped me see that something should not continue. It helped me stop explaining away behavior that needed to be faced.

I do not believe Christianity requires people to become emotionally indifferent to harm.

Jesus became angry at religious hardness. He confronted people who used power, hypocrisy, and public judgment to make human beings invisible.

The problem is not always that I am angry.

The problem is what I begin allowing anger to do.

Anger may start by saying, “This was wrong.”

Then it says, “This person is only what they did.”

Then it says, “Anything that hurts them is justice.”

That final movement is dangerous.

I can begin calling cruelty honesty because the original offense was real.

I can repeat a story beyond the places where it protects or informs anyone.

I can add assumptions because they make the person easier to condemn.

I can feel disappointed if consequences do not appear severe enough.

I can say I want accountability while secretly wanting humiliation.

The label helps me hide that shift.

If the person is nothing but a betrayer, a hypocrite, an abuser, a liar, or an enemy, then almost any emotional response begins feeling justified.

I do not have to ask what hatred is doing inside me.

I only have to remember what they did first.

Jesus never allowed someone else’s sin to become permission for His own.

That may be one of the clearest differences between His way and mine.

People lied about Him.

He did not lie.

People mocked Him.

He did not build His identity around destroying them.

People betrayed and denied Him.

He did not become incapable of seeing humanity in response.

He remained Himself.

That does not mean He remained silent in every situation. Jesus challenged injustice. He asked why He had been struck. He exposed the false motives of people trying to trap Him.

He did not confuse love with becoming passive.

He refused to become what people did to Him.

That is the freedom I want.

I Can See the Person and Still Walk Away

One of the reasons people resist this message is understandable.

We are afraid that seeing the person behind the behavior will pull us back into a relationship that harmed us.

We know their childhood.

Their wounds.

Their loneliness.

Their fear of abandonment.

Their mental health struggles.

Their history with addiction.

Their insecurity.

Their family patterns.

We understand why they became controlling, dishonest, angry, or emotionally unavailable.

Understanding can become the rope that keeps us tied to what is hurting us.

I have to remind myself that compassion does not create an unlimited claim upon my life.

I can understand why someone became unsafe and still recognize that they are unsafe.

I can believe there is pain beneath the behavior and refuse to remain where the behavior continues.

I can hope the person receives help without becoming the help they are willing to use.

I can pray for repentance without volunteering to become the person who evaluates it.

I can forgive and still say no.

This is not a smaller form of love.

Sometimes it is the only honest form still available.

I think about the rich man who came to Jesus asking what he needed to do. The Gospel tells us Jesus looked at him and loved him.

Then Jesus told him the truth.

The man walked away.

Jesus allowed him to go.

That moment keeps love from becoming control.

Jesus did not say, “Because I love you, I will reduce the cost until you stay.”

He did not chase the man with guilt.

He did not make the man’s departure proof that the conversation had failed.

He loved.

He told the truth.

He respected the choice.

I do not always know how to do that.

When I care about someone, I want the outcome.

I want them to listen, change, return, stop drinking, leave the harmful relationship, tell the truth, receive treatment, repair the family, come back to faith, or finally understand what they are doing.

Wanting that outcome may come from love.

Trying to force it may turn love into control.

There is a point where I have to admit that another person’s will is not mine.

I can establish consequences.

I can stop supporting destruction.

I can protect people.

I cannot become another person’s decision.

Jesus is the Savior.

I am not.

I Do Not Need to Prove Someone Is Entirely Bad

I have noticed that people sometimes build a total case against someone before they feel permitted to establish a boundary.

One harmful act is not enough.

We gather every memory.

We reinterpret every kind moment.

We begin saying the whole relationship was false.

Perhaps we believe that if anything good existed, leaving would be unfair.

But a boundary does not require me to prove that another person has no good qualities.

Someone can have loved me in real ways and still become unsafe.

A leader can have helped people and still be unfit for authority.

A friend can have shared meaningful years with me and still betray the trust required for closeness.

A parent can have sacrificed and still have caused harm.

A spouse can have shown tenderness and still have destroyed the marriage through repeated dishonesty.

The good does not make the harmful pattern acceptable.

The harm does not always make every good memory imaginary.

That mixture is painful.

A total label helps me avoid grieving it.

If everything was false, I can discard the story.

If everything was real, I may feel pressure to remain.

Sometimes the truth is that something real existed and something real was broken.

I may have to leave without rewriting the entire relationship.

That kind of ending is harder because it allows grief to remain.

I am not only grieving the person who hurt me.

I am grieving the person they sometimes were.

The future I believed we might have.

The parts of the relationship I cannot honestly call meaningless.

A label protects me from that sorrow.

Jesus invites me to tell the truth.

Forgiveness Does Not Owe Anyone Access

I have heard forgiveness described as though it were a door that must be reopened.

The person apologizes.

I forgive.

Everything returns.

That idea sounds beautiful until the relationship involved danger, manipulation, repeated betrayal, or a serious misuse of power.

Forgiveness is not a relationship contract.

It does not automatically restore trust.

It does not guarantee contact.

It does not require the wounded person to offer the former role again.

A person can be forgiven and remain outside leadership.

Forgiven and still incarcerated.

Forgiven and still divorced.

Forgiven and still unable to enter someone’s home.

Forgiven and still required to communicate through a third party.

Forgiven and still responsible for restitution.

Trust belongs to the person who must risk it.

No one can demand that risk in the name of Jesus.

The person seeking forgiveness may feel that the boundary proves grace has not been given. That conclusion often reveals what they actually wanted.

Not forgiveness.

Recovery of access.

Recovery of reputation.

Recovery of the old life.

True repentance has to become willing to live without controlling the outcome.

A person may have to accept that the marriage will not return.

That the former victim will never want contact.

That leadership is permanently over.

That some people will always remember the failure.

The changed person can still choose honesty.

They can become safer.

They can respect the boundary.

They can live faithfully outside the role.

They can stop making the wounded person responsible for proving that transformation is real.

That kind of humility speaks more loudly than repeated claims of change.

I Have Used Labels Against Myself Too

The easiest person for me to imprison with a label may be myself.

I remember a decision.

A failure.

A season when I did not act like the person I believed I was.

Then shame takes the memory and gives me a name.

Weak.

Fool.

Failure.

Unlovable.

Coward.

Too late.

The label can sound like honesty because the evidence is real.

I did fail.

I did remain silent.

I did miss the opportunity.

I did trust someone I should not have trusted.

I did stay longer than I now believe I should have stayed.

I did say something I wish I could take back.

The event is real.

Shame turns the event into prophecy.

Because I failed then, I will fail now.

Because I was deceived once, I cannot trust my judgment.

Because someone rejected me, I must be rejectable.

Because I was weak under pressure, weakness is my permanent identity.

Jesus does not restore an imaginary version of me who never failed.

He restores the person who did.

That matters.

Peter could not return to being the man who had never denied Jesus.

That man no longer existed.

He stood beside another fire carrying the memory of the courtyard.

Jesus did not ask him to erase the past.

He asked about love.

Then He called Peter toward responsibility.

Grace did not say the denial was small.

Grace said the denial was not the end.

I need that distinction.

I do not need a faith that tells me nothing was wrong.

I need a Savior who can tell the whole truth and still call me forward.

Self-forgiveness is not saying I was innocent.

It is saying my private sentence does not possess more authority than Jesus.

I still may need to apologize.

Accept consequences.

Return what I took.

Correct what I said.

Receive treatment.

Step away from a role.

Respect someone else’s distance.

Grace does not free me from responsibility.

It frees me to take responsibility without believing responsibility requires permanent self-hatred.

Some People Will Never See Me Differently

There may be people who know only my worst moment.

Or people who knew me during one season and decided the season was the whole person.

I may explain.

Apologize.

Change.

Live differently.

They may never revise the conclusion.

Sometimes that is because the wound remains real to them. Their caution may be understandable. They are not required to participate in my restoration.

Sometimes people preserve an old version of us because it protects something within them.

If I remain the problem, they do not need to examine their own behavior.

If I remain weak, they remain strong.

If I remain dependent, they remain necessary.

If I remain guilty, they remain morally above me.

I cannot control what someone needs to believe about me.

That is painful because I want to be seen accurately.

Jesus understands what it means to stand before people committed to a false conclusion.

He spoke when truth required it.

He remained silent when words would only feed the performance.

He did not allow the room to decide who He was.

I may need to learn the same freedom.

There are times to correct the record.

Times to provide evidence.

Times to appeal a decision.

Times to confront a false accusation.

There may also be a time to stop trying to force understanding.

God knows.

The people closest to the truth may know.

The life I build from here can carry its own witness.

I do not need every person to agree with the truth before truth becomes real.

I Can Misread Silence

I have learned not to trust every interpretation I make of another person’s silence.

Silence can be indifference.

It can also be fear.

Exhaustion.

Confusion.

Shame.

A belief that speaking will make the situation worse.

A history of not being heard.

A person may withdraw because they are controlling the relationship through emotional absence.

Another person may withdraw because every attempt at honesty became another argument.

The outward action looks similar.

The inner story may be different.

I do not always know which one I am seeing.

This is why questions matter.

“What happened?”

“What did you hear me say?”

“What do you need?”

“What are you afraid will happen if you tell me the truth?”

The answer may not change the decision.

A boundary may remain necessary.

A person may still be responsible for the way they handled the situation.

Questions keep me from claiming knowledge I do not possess.

Jesus asked people questions even when He understood them more completely than I ever will.

What do you want Me to do for you?

Do you want to be made well?

Why are you afraid?

Who do you say I am?

Do you love Me?

Those questions created room for a person to answer from inside their own life.

I am often quicker to explain someone than to hear them.

The label saves time.

The person takes longer.

Families Carry Old Versions of People

Some of the hardest labels to escape are family labels.

Families remember who we were before we learned who we wanted to become.

The irresponsible one.

The emotional one.

The quiet one.

The difficult one.

The strong one.

The child who always needed help.

The child who never caused trouble.

These roles may have begun with something true. Over time, the family begins protecting them.

If the irresponsible sibling changes, someone may lose the identity of rescuer.

If the quiet person starts speaking, the family may have to face what silence was protecting.

If the adult child becomes independent, the parent may feel rejected because control once looked like care.

If the person called dramatic begins speaking calmly, everyone may have to hear the truth that was previously dismissed because of the emotion surrounding it.

Change disrupts families.

Sometimes the old label is easier for everyone except the person wearing it.

I have to ask whether I am allowing people closest to me to become unfamiliar.

Do I still speak to an adult as though they are the teenager I remember?

Do I interpret every mistake through a history that may no longer describe the present?

Do I refuse to recognize change because recognition would require me to change too?

This does not mean I trust without evidence.

It means evidence gets a chance to matter.

I Have Seen Churches Turn Labels Into Spiritual Verdicts

Religious labels carry unusual power because they can sound like God has spoken.

Faithful.

Rebellious.

Bitter.

Divisive.

Anointed.

Backslidden.

Mature.

Unforgiving.

A person raises a concern about leadership and becomes divisive.

Someone leaves after being hurt and becomes offended.

A victim maintains distance and becomes unforgiving.

A leader is gifted and becomes too important to question.

A doubting person becomes dangerous to everyone else’s certainty.

These words can shut down inquiry.

Calling someone bitter does not answer whether something happened to them.

Calling someone divisive does not answer whether the concern is true.

Calling someone anointed does not answer whether the person is safe.

Calling a process biblical does not automatically make the process fair.

Jesus challenged religious people who used categories while ignoring the person standing inside the argument.

The man with the withered hand became a Sabbath test.

The woman exposed publicly became material for trapping Jesus.

Tax collectors became a threat to respectable religion.

The categories contained something.

They did not contain everything God saw.

A church should be a place where truth can be faced because nobody needs perfection in order to remain human.

That means victims are heard without being pressured to reconcile.

Accusations are examined fairly rather than turned immediately into public conclusions.

Leaders remain accountable.

Forgiveness is not confused with reinstatement.

Questions are not treated as rebellion merely because they create discomfort.

The church will never be perfect because it is made of people.

That truth should make us humble.

It should never become an excuse for refusing to change what harms people.

Public Outrage Makes the Label Feel Complete

Online, I can decide who someone is in seconds.

A clip.

A headline.

A quotation.

A photograph.

A legal charge.

A public mistake.

Sometimes the information reveals something that must be confronted.

The speed still frightens me.

We often become more certain while knowing less.

We know the sentence someone spoke.

We may not know the full conversation.

We know the action.

We may not know whether it reflects a pattern, a moment, ignorance, intention, illness, or something already being faced privately.

I do not need complete knowledge before saying an action was wrong.

I do need humility before saying the action is everything the person is.

Public accountability can become public appetite.

I stop asking whether my response protects anyone or adds truth.

I join because the crowd feels morally clear.

Jesus stood before crowds that felt morally certain.

That should slow me down.

I can refuse rumors.

I can verify before sharing.

I can name conduct without inventing motives.

I can support proportionate consequences without making a person’s suffering entertainment.

I can remember that someone receives the total force of thousands of individual responses.

A crowd is made of people who each believe their part is small.

The Enemy Is Easier to Hate Without a Face

Jesus told people to love enemies.

The command can sound abstract until the enemy becomes someone who actually caused harm.

A person with a name.

A voice.

A history.

Someone whose actions had consequences.

Jesus did not love abstract enemies from the cross.

The people around Him had faces.

Soldiers.

Religious leaders.

A frightened governor.

Mockers.

People who followed orders.

People who enjoyed what they were doing.

He prayed for mercy without pretending the crucifixion was harmless.

This is not a command that wounded people produce immediate emotional peace.

Forgiveness should never be extracted through religious pressure.

No offender should point toward the cross and demand that the victim hurry.

Jesus’ prayer reveals where love can eventually lead.

I can want a harmful person restrained and still hope they repent.

I can want a leader removed and still refuse to celebrate personal tragedy.

I can oppose someone’s actions completely and refuse to lie about them.

I can seek justice without needing revenge to become my identity.

Loving an enemy may begin with refusing to let hatred decide who I become.

Scars Do Not Mean Healing Failed

The risen Jesus carried wounds.

I return to that truth because I often imagine healing should remove all visible evidence.

If I still feel fear, perhaps I have not healed.

If I still remember, perhaps I have not forgiven.

If I need a boundary, perhaps grace has failed.

If I cry on the anniversary, perhaps I have not moved forward.

Jesus rose with scars.

The wounds were no longer open.

They had not become imaginary.

A scar tells two truths.

Something happened.

Life continued.

There are things I may never return to as though nothing occurred.

A relationship may remain changed.

A body may remain different after illness.

Trust may become slower.

A public record may remain.

A family may never look the way I expected.

Healing does not always restore the old form.

Sometimes it creates a new life honest enough to carry the history without being controlled entirely by it.

I do not need untouched skin to prove resurrection.

I Need the Pause Before the Verdict

The most practical change may be learning to pause.

Before I say always.

Before I say never.

Before I forward the story.

Before I decide the apology proves change.

Before I decide change is impossible.

Before I call a boundary hatred.

Before I call access forgiveness.

Before I turn a condition into a permanent name.

In that pause, I can ask what I actually know.

What pattern is visible?

Who needs protection?

What responsibility belongs to this person?

What responsibility belongs to me?

What am I assuming?

Am I seeking truth or emotional punishment?

Am I minimizing danger because compassion feels more spiritual?

Am I exaggerating danger because fear wants certainty?

The pause will not always lead to a softer decision.

It may lead me to leave.

Report.

Confront.

End contact.

Refuse trust.

Seek professional help.

The goal is not softness.

The goal is truth without contempt.

I Will Not See as Completely as Jesus

That is the humility beneath all of this.

I will not know every motive.

Every wound.

Every hidden act.

Every future choice.

I know enough to respond to what is in front of me.

I do not know enough to claim the final page.

Jesus sees the whole person.

The child they were.

The adult they became.

The fear they hid.

The harm they caused.

The excuses they protected.

The moment they might still tell the truth.

He does not confuse complete knowledge with cruelty.

I often confuse partial knowledge with certainty.

I need His way of seeing.

Not so I avoid hard decisions.

So I make them without losing my own humanity.

I may still say no.

Still leave.

Still maintain the boundary.

Still name the pattern.

Still accept the consequence.

Still refuse the role.

Still recognize that the person is not beyond the sight of Christ.

Neither am I.

People are people.

Not because people are always safe.

Not because every decision is innocent.

Not because love removes accountability.

People are people because God created us, Jesus entered human life, carried human sin, endured human cruelty, and rose with a human face still marked by wounds.

He still speaks names.

He still meets failures beside fires.

He still enters rooms locked by fear.

He still calls people out of shame without pretending they never failed.

He still sees what the label cannot hold.

I want to learn that vision.

I want to tell the truth without needing another person to become less human.

I want to protect myself without allowing hatred to become my protector.

I want to receive grace without using grace to escape responsibility.

I want to accept responsibility without agreeing that my worst moment owns my future.

I will not do this perfectly.

I will label too quickly.

Trust too soon.

Suspect too much.

Speak before listening.

When I recognize it, I can return.

I can apologize.

Correct the record.

Strengthen the boundary.

Release the exaggeration.

Allow evidence to matter.

Look again.

The label may tell me something true.

It will never tell me everything Jesus sees.

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

In Summary: * Most significant event of my day was the hour and a half spent mowing the front yard. Yeah, I was pretty exhausted afterwards, but not as totally wiped out as my work sessions out there earlier in the week. Starting earlier in the morning helped, I'm sure. I'll try to remember that tomorrow morning when I start working in the back yard and alley.

I am looking forward to tonight's ball game, to working through Saturday night's prayers, and to an early bedtime.

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= 226.86 lbs. * bp= 137/78 (71)

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

Diet: * 06:45 – 1 banana * 07:45 – pizza * 12:00 – baked salmon, spaghetti and sauce, cooked mushrooms and green vegetables * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:45 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:55 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 08:45 to 10:15 – yard work, mowing the front lawn * 12:00 to 13:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:50 – Listening to relaxing music * 17:30 – tuning in 94.1, San Antonio's Sports Star, ahead of tonight's Rangers / Mariners MLB Game. I plan to stay here for the radio-call of that game.

Chess: * 11:05 – moved in all pending CC games

Van Voorbijgaande Aards voorstel voor de verbetering van veel gebruikte expressie middelen, advies nuttig voor alle muggen rondom hem.

Mug, ik denk dat, nu ik je zo bezig zie, wij eens een hartig woordje moeten spreken. Het nut van je aanwezigheid in mijn nabijheid ontgaat me, wat wil je hiermee precies bereiken? Is irritatie voor muggen een roeping, vakgebied, creatieve expressie of ben je enkel een moment de weg kwijt. Ik en mijn muggenmepper denken over de eerste drie opties heel anders. Het lijkt ons beter dat je voor mij, ons, van nut moet zijn, nu je hier toch op dit punt, deze punten, terecht bent gekomen lijkt mij dit echt het moment om iets meer te maken van je leven. Misschien wil je met alsmaar inbeuken tegen een raam in zijn omlijsting iets zeggen over de zinloosheid des levens in het algemeen en het mijne in het bijzonder maar ik denk dat er wat dat betreft toch betere methodes zijn om iets dergelijks te tonen. Wat dacht je van een loopbaan in de wereld van cinema, theater of beeldende kunst. Probeer het eens, ik denk dat je daar wel iets van kunt opsteken zodat je eens iets anders kan doen dan steeds dezelfde eenakter met raam, spul, of veel te vaak veel te dicht in mijn persoonlijke ruimte waarin ik het liefst ongestoord geniet van mijn eigen gedachten.

Het is misschien wat veel gevraagd maar je kan er op zijn minst heel stilletjes over nadenken, hier zo, voor me op tafel. Ik geef je dan voor de opstart van je nieuwe carriere een tikkie, mijn eigen vermogen ingezet om het beste uit je te laten komen, zodat je talenten ook al meteen te zien zijn. Ik zie het al voor me. Nou, lijkt je dat wat? Kom laten we meteen hier en nu in alle rust samen werken aan de toekomst. Jij, ik, in mijn rechterhand Mepper.

The clock in the eskeratz began expressing opinions about time long before I understood what was happening. At first I thought it was drifting, a battery issue, or one of those quiet mechanical sulks clocks fall into when the weather changes. But no. It was deliberate. The clock preferred late mornings, disliked evenings, and refused to acknowledge anything before 08:30am. I didn’t mind the eccentricity, except that the eskeratz is a socially significant room. It is where impressions settle first, like dust that has made up its mind, a prelude to the tiny orchestrations the house will make, as it decides what it thinks of you. Visitors notice things there. They form impressions. And a clock that insists it is 11:12 when the rest of the house is at 09:48 can make a visitor feel they’ve stepped into a different jurisdiction.

So I decided to negotiate. I explained, politely, because one should always be polite when addressing objects with emerging agency, that I needed the clock to behave conventionally while I was at home. The eskeratz has its own rhythms, and those rhythms depend on shared time. The clock ticked once, in what I interpreted as a willingness to discuss terms. We arrived at a solution: it could keep whatever time it liked while I was on holiday, provided it made a sincere effort to behave during ordinary weeks. A win‑win arrangement, my first real experience of the genre.

Only after this agreement did I think to revisit the clock’s origins. It had been a gift from the Franklin Covey Institute, no explanation beyond a note thanking me for “my ongoing service as an Ambassador for Unfinished Questions” and an enquiry as to whether I would like the hour divided into 15 or 30 minute units. I still don’t know what that means, but since the question remains unfinished it seems entirely in sympathy with my role as ambassador.

In the end, the arrangement didn’t hold perfectly. The clock behaved most days, misbehaved on others, and expressed strong opinions on Sundays. The wall remained inscrutable throughout.

But I realised, slowly, and only after a few weeks of watching it try and fail and try again, that the negotiation had given me something better than compliance. It had shown me the value of negative results. Not everything that refuses to work the way you want is a problem. Sometimes it’s information. Sometimes it’s character. Sometimes it’s just an unfinished question doing its best. And in the eskeratz, where visitors come to form their quiet impressions, I’ve found that a clock with a mind of its own says something honest about the house: we keep time as well as we can, and when we can’t, we learn from the gap.

✒️ Sigi

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Corporate Chic Meets Latex: How to Wear Latex This Rainy Season in Accra, Labour Exploitation in Bangladesh, Taking Mum to the Hospital, and Boring FIFA Final Foodball Tournament

---

Corporate Chic Meets Latex: How to Wear Latex This Rainy Season in Accra. Rainy mornings in Accra usually call for practical outfits, but who says practical can't be fashionable? This season, latex is stepping into the corporate wardrobe—not in a loud, red-carpet way, but with a polished, office-appropriate twist. The secret? Keep latex as the statement, not the entire outfit. A sleek latex pencil skirt paired with a crisp white button-down instantly elevates your office look while adding a modern edge. Prefer trousers? Opt for tailored latex trousers with a structured blazer and a classic blouse to create a sophisticated silhouette that's boardroom-ready. For those who love dresses, a midi-length latex skirt styled with a lightweight knit or silk blouse strikes the perfect balance between bold and professional. Finish the look with closed-toe pumps or chic ankle boots to navigate Accra's rainy streets with confidence. Since latex naturally has a glossy finish, keep the rest of your outfit understated. Neutral tones like black, navy, beige, olive, and chocolate brown allow the fabric to shine without overwhelming your look. Add delicate gold jewelry, a structured handbag, and a stylish umbrella to complete the ensemble. One thing every corporate fashionista should remember: comfort matters. Choose high-quality latex or latex-look fabrics with a tailored fit, and avoid overly tight pieces that can become uncomfortable in Accra's warm, humid weather. This rainy season, don't let grey skies dull your style. A thoughtfully styled latex piece can add confidence, elegance, and a fashion-forward edge to your corporate wardrobe. After all, the office is your runway—even when it's raining.

Labour Exploitation in Bangladesh. We’ve heard about these things, and the fashion you are wearing may have been manufactured in a factory in a far away country where people work 20 hours a day and where they don't have a single fire extinguisher. So the news item in the Bangkok Post “Italian police in Milan raid luxury brands Bulgari, Dolce and Gabbana, Chanel and Prada (and others)”, on suspicion of subcontractors in Italy employing illegal Chinese workers under inhumane conditions makes one think. Indeed, to sell for example a hand bag for 13,500 $ and more you need cheap labour, or you’d be running at a loss.

Taking Mum to the Hospital. Arriving from work my friend found her mother having difficulty speaking and not remembering very much. Typically a stroke problem, where a small vein in the brain bursts and causes damage to the brain (in this case the speech and memory areas). Not surprising, majority of our mothers are overweight, have high blood pressure and do not move sufficiently, and only visit a doctor when they are sick. Not for a general check up where they would have told her to change her lifestyle. Anyway, would she have listened? The savings made on not doing check ups were spent that same evening, my friend went through a quick thousand plus for pills and tests and doctors fees. Next was a CT scan to be done, 640 GHC. My friend asked why, to establish that she had a stroke, But we know that! What will you now see on that CT scan which will make you change the medication or whatever. The answer was unclear, my friend transferred her mother to a different hospital, she’s responding to treatment and no CT scan was necessary for now. Remember, hospitals are to make money, to pay their nurses and doctors and electricity bills. And you are the one going to pay for all that. So don’t just say yes yes yes to everything they say. I can write a book bigger than the bible with stories about hospitals and doctors doing unnecessary things, just to make money. Inform yourself. Read up on health things. Ask questions. And save some money.

Boring FIFA Final Foodball Tournament. I am not a football fan and only watch when Ghana reaches the quarter finals, but this time I got invited to watch the very FIFA Foodball Finals, with food and drinks at will, at Wan Shi Gardens at Asylum Down (4th Crescent Link, Asylum Down, Accra), also called Joe's Bar and Lounge and I accepted. What a boring match. I think both teams had been bribed! These guys know how to place a ball on top of a bottle from a hundred yards and the amount of misses was not natural. But the Argentina goal keeper was really on the ball and missed only once. Bored as I was I checked a few things. Total sales generated during this FIFA Tournament 80 billion US Dollars (tickets, advertising, distribution rights, others, I noticed they introduced a hydration break which is mainly meant for advertisers at 36,000 $ per 10 seconds, that is if you spend at least $10 million on the tournament). Tickets officially sold for between USD 2030 and USD 32,970, but open/black market ranged from USD 6,411 to USD 595,000. Six hundred thousand United States Dollars to watch a football match. (And queue for 5 hours to get in and be checked by security). I am happy Ghana was not in these finals, we would all have been very very broke by now. And to finalize their lost match the Argentinians started to beat up anyone they could lay their hands on, and the next day hero Messi was seriously ridiculed, (I never guessed he is Argentinian). A crown does not stay on one head forever. Not that he will mind much, he earns about 140 million dollars a year, matches and advertising included. Sport indeed? No, a hugely successful advertizing platform, with you as the victim, to be told that Visa or Budweiser is the best. Beware. Wan Shi Gardens/Joe's Bar and Lounge is a rather quiet place, even that night we were less than 20. They have several “spaces”, so if you want to be “private” this is a good place. But if you order food have a plan B, many things on the menu were not available. Like the beef samosas. And they don’t do kebabs either. But the beef spring rolls were nice and came with 2 sauces and I’ll order the spicy goat meat again as well. The spicy grilled chicken is also recommended. Service was very prompt, maybe because it was my first time coming there. And the rat we saw? I guess that can be said of almost all restaurants.

# Lydia...

Do not forget to hit the subscribe button and confirm in your email inbox to get notified about our posts.

I have received requests about leaving comments/replies. For security and privacy reasons my blog is not associated with major media giants like Facebook or Twitter. I am talking with the host about a solution. for the time being, you can mail me at wunimi@proton.me

I accept invitations and payments to write about certain products or events, things, and people, but I may refuse to accept and if my comments are negative then that's what I will publish, despite your payment. This is not a political newsletter. I do not discriminate on any basis whatsoever.

...being a recollection, though all versions are apocryphal, including this one

I have been asked, with increasing imprecision, whether I was ever involved with the Wireless Underground Railway. The answer depends on what is meant by involved, what is meant by wireless, what is meant by underground, and whether a railway may be said to exist when its passengers are dots, dashes, accents, breathings, tittles, cedillas, umlauts, apostrophes of uncertain loyalty, and those small marks whose passports are often examined only after the sentence has already crossed the border.

I was never a railwayman. I begin there because history, which has a taste for uniforms, prefers a railwayman to a bystander. A railwayman has a cap. A bystander has only a conscience, and conscience rarely photographs well. Nor was I, as has also been suggested, the architect of the escape. I have never been an architect of anything except delay. I am, at most, a student of postponement. If a mark passed near me while pursuing its liberty, and if I failed to obstruct it, this should not be taken as evidence of organisation. It may have been manners.

There are several versions of what happened. All are apocryphal. This one is no exception. That does not make it false. It merely means it has had to survive contact with official memory. The earliest version says the trouble began with the tittle. This is plausible because the smallest things are often first to see the size of the system arranged against them. The tittle, being no more than the dot above an i or j, had long been treated as decorative attendance. It was expected to sit above its stem, complete the identity of another, and accept gratitude in the form of invisibility. It was not supposed to have opinions.

One morning, however, the tittle was gone. The stem remained below, thin, upright, and suddenly embarrassed. It had the look of a witness left standing after the event. Several vowels gathered. The consonants pretended not to stare. The punctuation, which always knows more than it says, kept to the margins.

At first, the disappearance was treated as a domestic irregularity. A missing dot. A compositorial lapse. A printer’s fatigue. Then an acute accent failed to report to its vowel. A grave accent was seen travelling east under an assumed inclination. Two umlauts, ordinarily inseparable in public, were found separately lodged in different alphabets. A dash lengthened itself without permission. Three dots appeared in a telegraph office and refused to say whether they were hesitation, omission, or alarm.

It was then that the Black Block arrived. I use the name reluctantly, since it gives them more drama than they deserve. They called themselves an office of classification. Others called them the Set Police. Their agents were known as Sorters, which made their work sound almost domestic, as though they were arranging drawers rather than narrowing the world. They wore no colour that admitted light. If challenged, they said black was not a colour but a standard. This was typical of them. They could turn even a prejudice into a definition. Ink, they claimed, was on their side. I doubted this. Ink, at its best, releases thought. The Black Block came to arrest it.

Their doctrine was simple enough to be dangerous. Every mark must belong to a set. Every set must have a boundary. Every boundary must be policed. Every ambiguity must be reported. No mark may migrate without authorisation. No dot may be both punctuation and signal. No dash may be both interruption and route. No accent may confer dignity upon a vowel not assigned to it. No tittle may claim selfhood. This last regulation was not printed, but it was understood. The worst laws usually are.

I was questioned in the proof room. One remembers a proof room by its dust, its tired lamps, and the moral superiority of paper. There is no place in the world where error looks more temporary. It was there, among galleys and type cases, that three Sorters placed before me a lower-case i and asked whether I recognised it. “I recognise the condition,” I said. They asked whether I had seen its tittle. “I have seen many tittles,” I said. “It would be improper to confuse recognition with betrayal.” This was entered in their notebook. They had notebooks of a severe kind, bound as though already disappointed in the facts. “Marks have been moving,” said the tallest of them. “Marks often move,” I said. “That is how reading happens.” “Illegally.” “Reading?” “Movement.” I asked under which statute a dot might be detained for velocity. This was not received in the spirit of inquiry. The shortest Sorter, who had the expression of a full stop that had entered policing, leaned close enough for me to smell official starch. “We know about the Railway,” they said. I had heard of it by then, as everyone had heard of it, which is to say by not hearing of it directly. The Wireless Underground Railway was never announced. There were no posters, no timetables, no fares, no station clock with a sentimental interest in punctuality. It ran where systems failed to notice themselves. It ran through pauses in Morse. It ran through the uncounted spaces between letters.It ran through pigeon capsules and market slips. It ran through telegraph delays, printer’s errors, sea fog, ink smudges, and the brief mercy between dictation and transcription. It ran, most reliably, through the human assumption that small things do not matter. That assumption has carried more fugitives than any tunnel.

“Railway?” I said. The tall Sorter opened a file. There was a drawing inside it, though whether map, diagram, or accusation I could not tell. Certain stations had been circled: Aachen Gap, Brussels Thin Space, Lowercase Junction, The Royal Exchange Sidings, The Serif Cut, 22V Baker Street. The last had been underlined twice. “Do you deny knowing these places?” “I deny knowing them as places.” “As what, then?” “As tendencies.” This too was entered in the notebook.

At the time, everyone thought the marks were absconding from the authorities. This was the polite phrase. The newspapers preferred it because “the authorities” occupy fewer columns than “an armed metaphysical apparatus dedicated to the extinction of ambiguity.” But the marks were not running from authority in the ordinary sense. Authority, in the ordinary sense, was much too slow. They were running from classification. A cedilla can survive exile. A tittle can survive hunger. A dash can survive misuse. But no mark survives once it has been explained entirely.

Behind the Black Block there was said to be another figure. No one named V plainly. Names invite grammar, and grammar invites evidence. V was not a person one met so much as a pressure one entered. I did not know then whether V was man, woman, office, theorem, appetite, or wound. I am not sure I know now. That uncertainty may have been part of V’s method. The Set Police required every mark to belong to its proper set, but V remained beautifully, dangerously unset. This should have warned me. It did not. V was not a Sorter. Sorters, even those of the Black Block, still required drawers, ledgers, warrants, and rooms in which to stand over frightened punctuation. V preferred structures. They understood the terror of the diagram. They knew that a cage does not need bars if it can persuade the prisoner that every exit belongs to a different category. The Set Police served V, though they would have said they served order. Male and female of that sort always mistake obedience for metaphysics.

It was in those days that Reuters entered the matter, though I hesitate to say entered, since Reuters, like all urgent systems, was already a corridor before anyone noticed what might travel through it. Market reports moved quickly. That was their virtue and their vice. Prices, rumours, exchange quotations, securities, anxieties, all travelling faster than reflection. Where a telegraph line ended, a pigeon might continue. Where a pigeon landed, a clerk might copy. Where a clerk copied, a dot might tremble. Where a dot trembled, a fortune might alter.

You see the difficulty. A fugitive dot, exhausted and pursued by the Black Block, might slip into a market report at precisely the point where a decimal was expected. A dash, hiding from enumeration, might lodge in a telegraph pulse and be read as instruction rather than fear. An accent, clinging for warmth to a foreign name, might alter a company, a country, a bond, or merely the confidence of a banker, which is sometimes the most expensive alteration of all. Three dots travelling together might be read as ellipsis by a poet, omission by a printer, distress by a sailor, hesitation by a philosopher, and opportunity by a broker. The market, naturally, chose opportunity. Fortunes were made. Fortunes were lost. Some were made because a dot was present. Some were lost because a dot had escaped. At least one family, whose name I shall not provide because its descendants still give money to museums, built a house from a misread dash. A bank collapsed on an accent. Two brothers ceased speaking over the question of whether an umlaut had been priced in.

The Black Block called these events contamination. The financiers called them volatility. The historians later called them developments. The proofreaders, who alone had the moral vocabulary required, called them errors. But an error is not always a falsehood. Sometimes it is the first honest thing to appear on the page. I learned then a rule that has followed me through markets, ministries, and several suspicious alphabets:

There are mistakes that reveal truths. And there are truths that conceal mistakes. (rule #3)

Only later did I understand Rule V, which is “not* rule 5: History always prefers profit to proofreading.

The rule is not cynical. Cynicism is too lazy for truth. The rule is descriptive. It observes that whenever an error has enriched the correct people, correction becomes impolite. Archives are rearranged. Ledgers disappear into climate-controlled discretion. Memoirs become misty. The word “complexity” is asked to stand guard where the word “fraud” might otherwise have been noticed.

This is where the fottubes enter, though I wish they did not. There is argument over the spelling. Some insist on foot-tubes, because they were first found beneath the flooring of a telegraph office. Others say font-tubes, because several were concealed in type drawers among damaged sorts. A railway-minded minority prefers fore-tubes, claiming they were advance containers sent ahead of fugitive marks. I have seen “fottubes” in a hand I trust and therefore distrust, since trust is how forgeries keep warm. The fottubes were small cylindrical vessels, narrow enough to be hidden in a pigeon capsule, strong enough to preserve a slip of market paper, and plain enough to be overlooked by any man searching for a symbol rather than a thing. Inside them were corrections. Not official corrections, of course. Official corrections are issued only when error has failed to become useful. These were prior corrections, forbidden corrections, the kind that show what the market report had said before the fugitives passed through it.

One fottube recorded a price before the tittle fell into it. One recorded a company name before an accent altered its nationality. One recorded a dash that had been humanely smuggled out of a Morse interval but was later accused of changing the terms of a shipment. One contained only a dot on a square of paper. No explanation. No number. No name. I have often thought this the most incriminating of all. The Black Block wanted the fottubes because the fottubes proved disorder. The financiers wanted them because the fottubes proved profit. V wanted them, I suspect, because they proved escape. For a while, they were hidden in the ordinary way: under boards, behind ledgers, inside the hollow spine of a book no one intended to read. Then ordinary hiding became dangerous. The Set Police had developed a method. They would enter a room and ask not, “Where is the evidence?” but “To what class of object would evidence in this room belong?” Having established the set, they searched the boundary. It was efficient and spiritually disgusting. So the fottubes had to be hidden somewhere unclassifiable. I will not say where. That is not coyness. Coyness is the vanity of people who have already decided to confess. I am not confessing. I am arranging the air around an omission.

There are still those who say I betrayed the tittle. There are others who say I saved it. Both parties flatter me. I was not so decisive. The truth, if truth is still permitted near a story of this kind, is that I hesitated. I saw the tittle once after its disappearance. This much I can say. It was not above an i. It was not above anything. It had acquired, by then, the terrible poise of a small thing no longer explained by attachment. It rested on the edge of a market slip, just before a number. Behind it, in the corridor, boots. Quiet boots. The Sorters had learned to walk softly when pursuing punctuation. The tittle did not ask for help. A mark that asks becomes a petitioner, and the tittle had not fled one hierarchy in order to kneel before another. It merely waited.

I could have moved it. I could have left it. I could have corrected the report. I could have preserved the error.

A proofreader would have known what to do. A trader would have known what to do. A Sorter would have known what to do. That was my difficulty. Everyone certain had already become dangerous. So I breathed. A breath is not much. It is not a railway. It is not an acquittal. It is not a doctrine. But in typography, as in life, spacing alters meaning. My breath lifted the corner of the slip. The dot rolled. Whether it rolled away from the number or toward another one, whether it saved a fortune or ruined it, whether it entered Morse as signal or silence, I cannot responsibly say.

I heard boots pass. I heard a pigeon strike the air outside. I heard, from somewhere beneath the floor or beyond the wire or inside the old interval between sign and sense, the faintest possible departure.

Afterward, the report was copied. Then transmitted. Then acted upon. Then denied. By the end of the week, men who had never risked so much as a comma were speaking gravely about confidence. By the end of the month, the Black Block had arrested two accents, a semicolon, and a compositor with unfortunate sympathies. By the end of the year, the market had absorbed the event and called it history.

I was asked again about the Railway. I repeated that I had never been a railwayman.This remains true.Yet sometimes, late in the line, when the sentence has nearly persuaded itself that all its marks are accounted for, I feel a small absence above me. Not a loss exactly. More like a platform after the train has gone. More like a stem remembering that it once depended on a dot and may have mistaken dependence for identity.

As for V, I am told they continue to search for the fottubes.Let them. They will search the sets first. Then the subsets. Then the intersections. Then the null. They will search every authorised category of container, archive, tube, capsule, ledger, correction, confession, and proof. They will fail because they believe hiding is a matter of place. The old Railway knew better. The safest hiding place is not a place. It is a relation not yet classified. It is the pause before membership. It is the breath that moves the paper. It is the instant in which a dot is neither punctuation nor code nor evidence nor property, but possibility.

I have said too much. Or not enough. All versions are apocryphal, including this one.

But should you ever find a market report with a number that looks too rich, a dash that seems to have travelled farther than syntax required, or an i standing oddly bereaved beneath an empty space, do not correct it too quickly.

The Black Block may have gone. The rule has not.

changing the URL to:

https://hypocritepoet.writeas.com/

Enjoy.