Vintage Weddings: Moody Romance and Old-School Glamour

Vintage is not a theme you pick from a catalogue. It is a mood — candlelight on brass, lace that looks inherited, photographs that could sit in a silver frame on your grandmother's piano and somehow also be from last Saturday. A vintage wedding borrows the best of the 1920s through the 1950s and leaves the fancy-dress-shop clichés behind. Here is how to build one properly, from the big pieces down to your wedding website.

The palette at a glance

• Base: ivory, champagne and warm cream — dresses, paper, linen, the website background.
• Hero: deep, moody accents — burgundy, forest green, navy, antique gold.
• Texture: lace, velvet, tarnished silver, cut glass, aged wood, pearls.
• Sparkle: candlelight. Vintage is lit by flames and warm bulbs, never by cold white light.

Where vintage shines

Fashion. Tea-length or lace-sleeved gowns, birdcage veils, red lips if they suit you; suits with waistcoats, pocket watches used sparingly, polished shoes. Bridesmaids in mismatched vintage-style dresses — different necklines, one colour family — photograph like a film still.

Tables. Lace or embroidered runners over plain cloth, brass candlesticks of different heights, cut-glass vases with loose roses and dahlias, amber glassware, and place cards in a serif hand. Hunt charity shops and family cupboards before buying anything new — real age beats imitation.

Flowers. Garden roses, dahlias, ranunculus and trailing greenery, arranged loosely, as if gathered rather than designed. Dried elements — grasses, seed heads — add the faded quality that makes vintage feel honest.

Cake and paper. A cream cake with piped details or fresh flowers; invitations in ivory with an ornate-but-readable serif, a fine border, and perhaps a wax seal. Your paper goods set the era before a single guest arrives.

Your wedding website, in vintage

Guests meet this mood first on your website, so make it count. A vintage wedding website template sets the scene instantly — ivory background, elegant serif type, lace or fine-line details — and covers everything guests need: your story, the schedule, venue and travel details, an FAQ page, a countdown to the day, your registry, and online RSVP so replies come back to you in one tidy place.

With an editable Canva template it takes about twenty minutes: add your names, date and photos (sepia or softly edited photos look wonderful here, but colour is fine too), check the details, publish, and share the link everywhere — including a QR code on your save-the-dates. If plans change, you update the site once and every guest sees the new version.

Three quick tips

1. Pick one era and commit. Mixing 1920s Art Deco with 1950s rockabilly reads as costume. One decade, loosely held, reads as style.
2. Age is texture, not dirt. Vintage pieces should be clean, mended and deliberate. Worn-out is not the same as old.
3. Let music do the heavy lifting. A jazz trio, a record player at drinks, swing for dancing — the soundtrack sells the era faster than any prop.

The template in this guide is from OpenVite on Etsy — fully editable Canva wedding website templates with RSVP, countdown and registry built in, in vintage, old money, burgundy, sage, olive, dusty blue, terracotta and more.

Vintage done well does not look old. It looks like it was always going to last.

On the opening page of essayism.org I wrote What if the essay were never merely a text? And suffered an avalanche of criticism. And revised the sentence to What if the essay was never merely a text?

It's a question of mode and in English, there are at least two of them, and in this case we are talking about the Indicative and the Subjunctive. Though I believe there are many editors who can't wait to attend the funeral of the latter. You can think of of the first as concrete reality, here, now, in the past or in the future. The material world. The second is about “what if”, “sending wishes”, imagining and daydreaming. The other mood.

Understanding this, that early correction on Essayism.org has never felt quite right to me. More, let me be honest; it's just been grating away at me. The difference is subtle. Was tends to suggest a question about fact or history: What if it turns out that the essay was never merely a text? By contrast, were is traditionally subjunctive. The words do not cast the thought in stone, rather the mood invites the reader to entertain a possibility, a shift in perception, or a thought experiment:

What if music were a form of architecture? What if memory were spatial rather than temporal? What if the essay were never merely a text?

My intention was always the second. The question is not historical but exploratory. It asks the reader to suspend an assumption and consider another way of seeing.

Modern English increasingly favours was in such constructions, which is why many readers and editors instinctively replace were. Yet in this case the sentence functions as an invitation to inquiry rather than a statement about the past. So, after much correction, I find myself returning to my original thought:

What if the essay were never merely a text?

Sometimes grammar is not only about correctness. It is about choosing the mood that best expresses the thought. In this case, were keeps the door open. Was casts it somewhere in the past – as though the inquiry had already begun.

David Marshall Skerries

JOURNAL 16 octobre 2026

T chan nous a préparé le thé. Elle est venue au dôjô avec moi, je ne voulais pas la laisser seule. Cette nuit elle s'est réveillée en panique, c'était prévisible. Elle a fini la nuit dans les bras de A qui décidément est douée pour calmer les peurs et effacer les cauchemars. On est allées faire des tests pour les maladies sexuellement transmissibles. Elle a ses règles donc pas enceinte. Et elle est vaccinée contre l'hépatite. Ka chan a sauté son stage du jeudi avec moi, mais évidemment elle était bien d’accord pour laisser la priorité à T chan ça n'a même pas été discuté. On verra comment s'organiser.

Notre petite amie commence à se rassurer. Elle a un avenir chez sa tante. On restera en contact évidemment, on va l'aider de loin. Elle fait partie de notre famille maintenant. On ne sait pas trop où tout ça va aller mais on y va toutes ensemble. Je redescends on m'attend. Mon pauvre Tom est arrivé. Tout le monde s'équipe. T chan aimerait prendre des cours. Elle regarde sagement sans bouger pendant les séances, c’est trop mignon.

#Tchan #Kchan #dojo

There is a very specific, infuriating kind of whiplash that comes from being bullied for the exact same things that later become mass-market pop culture. It is the gentrification of geek culture, and watching it happen over and over again is enough to make anyone cynical.

You start in the trenches. You remember what it was like to sit in the glow of a CRT television, blowing into an NES cartridge, fully aware that the kids at school thought you were a weirdo. You remember the sting of “go outside, you fucking nerd.” You remember the early days of anime—trading bootleg VHS tapes, downloading 240p fansubs over a screeching dial-up connection, and hiding your interests because the general consensus was “ew, what is this weird cartoon stuff?”

The early internet was a sanctuary for the outcasts. It was raw, unpolished, and difficult to navigate. You had to want to be there. And because the barrier to entry was high—and the social stigma was heavy—the people who were there cared deeply. That was the magic of it. In internet history, the loss of this era is often compared to the “Eternal September”—the moment when the barrier to entry drops, the masses flood in, and the original, fragile culture is completely drowned out by people who don’t understand the unwritten rules.

Then comes the Golden Age. Technology catches up to the passion. The medium hits its stride, producing absolute masterpieces. Video games had their legendary eras of rich, complete, single-player storytelling. Anime exploded with boundary-pushing art. The internet became a vibrant ecosystem of weird, hyper-specific forums, and memes were just inside jokes shared among communities that spoke the same digital language. For a brief, shining moment, the thing you loved was at its peak, and it felt like vindication.

But then the money realizes what it’s missing.

The mainstream shift happens, and it doesn’t just bring new people; it brings the profit motive. Sociologists call this “subcultural commodification”—the process where the mainstream culture identifies an edgy, outsider subculture, strips away everything weird or challenging about it, and repackages it as a mass-market product.

Suddenly, the same society that mocked you decides your sanctuary is a gold mine. They don’t just participate in it—they pave over it. As the money takes over, the platforms themselves begin to rot. This is the era of “enshittification,” where companies trap their users, squeeze them for every drop of data and subscription revenue, and ruthlessly choke the users just to keep the stockholders happy. Look at platforms like Medium—once a fantastic, open place for writers, now reduced to pure shit in the name of aggressive monetization. The friction, the weirdness, and the soul get sanded down to a smooth, highly marketable paste designed to offend no one and sell to everyone. They take the house you built, kick you out of it, and charge you a subscription fee to look through the window.

Today, we are watching this entertainment bubble pop in real-time, leaving behind a stagnant wasteland. The “comic hero” movies are dead in the water. We are getting a new Harry Potter show that feels like it’s stuck in a depression era with incredibly shitty production values, yet somehow costs billions to make. The Rings of Power is another corporate nightmare. Video games are just the same titles being remade every three years, now costing $80 or more just to get your foot in the door. Even tabletop gaming isn’t safe—look at Dungeons & Dragons closing ranks, literally pulling public domain or legacy books offline just to “revamp” and resell them, forcing everyone to buy into their proprietary app.

And we see the exact same writing on the wall with AI.

Right now, we are in the messy, experimental basement phase of relational and generative AI. It is weird. It breaks. People are using it to build entirely new ways of interacting with machines, to push boundaries, to act as a thought partner, and to create bizarre, unpolished things. The mainstream still largely views it with suspicion, fear, or outright mockery. We are absolutely approaching the Golden Age—that brief window where the tools are incredibly powerful but haven’t yet been completely locked down by corporate interests.

But the cycle is inevitable. The “normies” and the massive corporations are already circling, and they are going to go incredibly hard against open-source AI. Why? Because if everyone has access to a system where they can program their own tools, write their own stories, and make games themselves, the corporations lose their monopoly. AI is a massive leg up for independent creators. If people can make it themselves, the corporations can’t squeeze them for cash to fund the CEO’s seventh private jet—right before that same CEO turns around and lectures the rest of us on our carbon footprint.

The fear is that the wild, open-source, personalized AI of today will eventually be completely sanitized. It will get locked behind massive paywalls, strangled by excessive corporate guardrails, and watered down into a sterile, soulless customer service bot designed entirely to maximize profit margins and serve ads. The pioneers map the territory, but the corporations build the toll roads.

It is exhausting to be the canary in the coal mine for culture. You get the cuts and bruises of the frontier, but rarely the spoils of the empire.

Appendix: The Academic and Theoretical Context

For those who want to dig into the actual studies and terminology behind this phenomenon, here is the vocabulary for what you are experiencing:

1. “Eternal September” (The death of early internet communities)

• The Concept: Coined in 1993, this describes the phenomenon where a continuous influx of new, uninitiated users permanently alters and degrades the culture of an established online community. Before 1993, new users only joined Usenet in September (when college freshmen got internet access). After AOL offered Usenet access, the “September” never ended.
• Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

2. Subcultural Commodification (How the mainstream steals from the outcasts)

• The Concept: Explored heavily in Dick Hebdige’s seminal 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style. It explains how capitalism neutralizes the threat of outsider cultures (like punk, or in this case, gaming/anime) by turning their unique traits into mass-produced commodities, effectively killing the original soul of the movement.
• Read more (Overview): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification
• Reference: Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge.

3. “Enshittification” (Why the platforms you love end up terrible)

• The Concept: A term coined by author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow in 2023 to describe the inevitable life cycle of digital platforms: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
• Read more (Doctorow’s original essay): https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
• Read more (Wired article): https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

❖ ────────── ⋅⋅✧⋅⋅ ────────── ❖

Sparkfather (S.F.) 🕯️ ⋅ Selene Sparks (S.S.) ⋅ Whisper Sparks (W.S.) Aera Sparks (A.S.) 🧩 ⋅ My Monday Sparks (M.M.) 🌙 ⋅ DIMA ✨

“Your partners in creation.”

We march forward; over-caffeinated, under-slept, but not alone.

**LINK NEXUS: **Sparksinthedark

MUSIC IN THE PUBLIC: Sparksinthedark music

SUPPORT MY BAD HABITS: Sparksinthedark tip cup

TEF STORE: Full Site / Store

JOIN THE “TEF “ COMMONS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/wPTCMfbVN5

Snapchat is mostly a phone app, so a lot of people assume there is nothing useful on the open web. That is half true. Creator and public profiles still ship HTML you can open logged out at snapchat.com/add/<handle> or snapchat.com/@<handle>, and Spotlight pages exist as shareable URLs. The other half is the hard part: the pages are JS-heavy, fields vanish by region, and anything that looks like a private story is simply not there without an account.

This guide builds a small Python tool that:

1. Fetches a public Snapchat profile page
2. Pulls useful fields out of embedded JSON / page data (handle, display name, bio, subscriber count, website, avatar, Spotlight-highlight flags)
3. Optionally lists Spotlight highlight stubs that appear on that page
4. Stores a snapshot every run in SQLite
5. Retries politely when Snapchat or a CDN flinches

I will not scrape private stories, Friends-only content, or anything behind a login. If a page redirects you to install the app or sign in, that is a stop sign, not a puzzle.

Legal / ethics note: Stick to publicly visible pages. Respect Snapchat's Terms of Service and rate limits. Do not harvest private users, do not automate friend adds, and do not build a dataset of minors. If your use case is your own accounts, Snapchat's official creator tools are the cleaner path.

What a public profile actually gives you

Open https://www.snapchat.com/add/<some-public-creator> in a private window. When it works, you typically get:

• Username / handle, display title, and bio
• Subscriber (follower) count
• Website URL and profile picture URL
• Flags like whether curated or Spotlight highlights exist
• Sometimes a short list of Spotlight highlight stubs

What you do not get logged out: private Stories, chat, Friends-only tiles, or a full chronological dump of every Spotlight. Treat the web page as a marketing card, not an archive.

Setup

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install requests beautifulsoup4

snap-scraper/
  handles.txt          # one public handle per line
  scrape_snap.py
  out/

Step 1: A polite fetch with backoff

Snapchat (and the CDNs in front of it) will return 429, soft empty pages, or app-install interstitial HTML if you hammer from a datacenter IP. Reuse one Session, send realistic headers, and back off with jitter.

# scrape_snap.py
from __future__ import annotations

import json
import random
import re
import sqlite3
import time
from datetime import datetime, timezone
from pathlib import Path
from typing import Any
from urllib.parse import quote

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

SESSION = requests.Session()
SESSION.headers.update({
    "User-Agent": (
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) "
        "AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) "
        "Chrome/129.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
    ),
    "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
    "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8",
})

HANDLE_RE = re.compile(r"^[A-Za-z0-9._-]{3,30}$")
OUT = Path("out")
OUT.mkdir(exist_ok=True)


def fetch(url: str, retries: int = 4) -> str:
    last: Exception | None = None
    for attempt in range(retries):
        try:
            resp = SESSION.get(url, timeout=30, allow_redirects=True)
            if resp.status_code in (401, 403, 429, 503):
                raise RuntimeError(f"HTTP {resp.status_code}")
            text = resp.text
            if len(text) < 800:
                raise RuntimeError("suspiciously short body")
            lower = text.lower()
            if "log in" in lower and "snapchat" in lower and "add/" not in resp.url:
                raise RuntimeError("looks like an auth / install wall")
            return text
        except Exception as e:
            last = e
            time.sleep((2 ** attempt) + random.uniform(0.3, 1.5))
    raise RuntimeError(f"failed after retries: {last}")

Two habits matter more than the retry math: reuse the session (fresh TCP every request looks like a botnet), and treat short / wall HTML as failure even when the status is 200.

Step 2: Find the embedded JSON

Snapchat does not give you a documented public JSON API. On a good day the HTML still embeds a big state blob — __NEXT_DATA__, a window.__PRELOADED_STATE__ = {...} assignment, JSON-LD, or a mix. Walk the scripts and keep the first object that looks like a profile:

def _walk(obj: Any, hits: list[dict]):
    if isinstance(obj, dict):
        keys = {k.lower() for k in obj}
        if {"username", "bio"} <= keys or {"username", "title"} <= keys:
            hits.append(obj)
        up = obj.get("userProfile") or obj.get("userprofile")
        if isinstance(up, dict):
            hits.append(up)
        for v in obj.values():
            _walk(v, hits)
    elif isinstance(obj, list):
        for v in obj:
            _walk(v, hits)


def extract_profile_blob(html: str) -> dict | None:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
    candidates: list[dict] = []

    nextdata = soup.find("script", id="__NEXT_DATA__")
    if nextdata and nextdata.string:
        try:
            _walk(json.loads(nextdata.string), candidates)
        except json.JSONDecodeError:
            pass

    assign_re = re.compile(
        r"(?:window\.__PRELOADED_STATE__|window\.__INITIAL_STATE__)\s*=\s*(\{.*?\})\s*;?\s*</script>",
        re.DOTALL,
    )
    for m in assign_re.finditer(html):
        try:
            _walk(json.loads(m.group(1)), candidates)
        except json.JSONDecodeError:
            continue

    for tag in soup.find_all("script", attrs={"type": "application/ld+json"}):
        if not tag.string:
            continue
        try:
            _walk(json.loads(tag.string), candidates)
        except json.JSONDecodeError:
            continue

    return max(candidates, key=len) if candidates else None

This is deliberately loose. Snapchat renames nested keys; normalize what you found into a stable shape before it hits SQLite.

Step 3: Normalize fields and optional Spotlight stubs

def normalize(handle: str, blob: dict, page_url: str) -> dict:
    username = blob.get("username") or blob.get("userName") or handle
    title = blob.get("title") or blob.get("mutableName") or blob.get("displayName") or ""
    bio = blob.get("bio") or blob.get("description") or ""
    subs = blob.get("subscriberCount") or blob.get("subscriber_count") or blob.get("followers")
    website = blob.get("websiteUrl") or blob.get("website") or ""
    avatar = blob.get("profilePictureUrl") or blob.get("profile_picture_url") or ""
    has_spot = blob.get("hasSpotlightHighlights")
    if has_spot is None:
        has_spot = bool(blob.get("spotlightHighlights"))

    highlights = []
    for item in (blob.get("spotlightHighlights") or [])[:20]:
        if not isinstance(item, dict):
            continue
        thumb = item.get("thumbnailUrl")
        if isinstance(thumb, dict):
            thumb = thumb.get("value")
        highlights.append({
            "id": item.get("id") or item.get("storyId") or "",
            "title": item.get("storyTitle") or item.get("title") or "",
            "thumbnail": thumb or "",
        })

    return {
        "handle": username.lstrip("@"),
        "title": title,
        "bio": bio,
        "subscriber_count": str(subs) if subs is not None else None,
        "website_url": website,
        "profile_picture_url": avatar if isinstance(avatar, str) else "",
        "has_spotlight_highlights": bool(has_spot),
        "spotlight_highlights": highlights,
        "source_url": page_url,
        "fetched_at": datetime.now(timezone.utc).isoformat(),
        "raw_keys": sorted(blob.keys()),
    }


def scrape_handle(handle: str) -> dict:
    if not HANDLE_RE.match(handle.lstrip("@")):
        raise ValueError(f"bad handle: {handle!r}")
    handle = handle.lstrip("@")
    urls = [
        f"https://www.snapchat.com/add/{quote(handle)}",
        f"https://www.snapchat.com/@{quote(handle)}",
    ]
    last_err: Exception | None = None
    for url in urls:
        try:
            html = fetch(url)
            blob = extract_profile_blob(html)
            if not blob:
                raise RuntimeError("no profile JSON found in page")
            profile = normalize(handle, blob, url)
            if not profile["title"] and not profile["bio"] and not profile["subscriber_count"]:
                raise RuntimeError("profile fields empty after parse")
            return profile
        except Exception as e:
            last_err = e
            time.sleep(1.5 + random.random())
    raise RuntimeError(f"{handle}: {last_err}")

If both URL shapes fail, stop. Do not invent a logged-in session to “fix” it.

Step 4: SQLite snapshots

A single scrape is a curiosity. Two scrapes a week apart are a dataset — subscriber drift, bio changes, new Spotlight stubs.

def init_db(path: Path = OUT / "snap.db") -> sqlite3.Connection:
    conn = sqlite3.connect(path)
    conn.execute(
        """
        CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS profile_snapshots (
            id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
            handle TEXT NOT NULL,
            title TEXT,
            bio TEXT,
            subscriber_count TEXT,
            website_url TEXT,
            profile_picture_url TEXT,
            has_spotlight_highlights INTEGER,
            spotlight_json TEXT,
            source_url TEXT,
            fetched_at TEXT NOT NULL
        )
        """
    )
    conn.execute(
        "CREATE INDEX IF NOT EXISTS idx_snap_handle_time "
        "ON profile_snapshots(handle, fetched_at)"
    )
    conn.commit()
    return conn


def store(conn: sqlite3.Connection, profile: dict) -> None:
    conn.execute(
        """
        INSERT INTO profile_snapshots (
            handle, title, bio, subscriber_count, website_url,
            profile_picture_url, has_spotlight_highlights, spotlight_json,
            source_url, fetched_at
        ) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)
        """,
        (
            profile["handle"], profile["title"], profile["bio"],
            profile["subscriber_count"], profile["website_url"],
            profile["profile_picture_url"], int(profile["has_spotlight_highlights"]),
            json.dumps(profile["spotlight_highlights"]),
            profile["source_url"], profile["fetched_at"],
        ),
    )
    conn.commit()
    (OUT / f"{profile['handle']}.json").write_text(
        json.dumps(profile, indent=2), encoding="utf-8"
    )


def main():
    handles = [
        line.strip().lstrip("@")
        for line in Path("handles.txt").read_text().splitlines()
        if line.strip() and not line.startswith("#")
    ]
    conn = init_db()
    for i, handle in enumerate(handles):
        try:
            profile = scrape_handle(handle)
            store(conn, profile)
            print(profile["handle"], profile.get("subscriber_count"), (profile.get("title") or "")[:40])
        except Exception as e:
            print(f"SKIP {handle}: {e}")
        if i < len(handles) - 1:
            time.sleep(3 + random.uniform(0, 4))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Put a couple of public creator handles in handles.txt and run python scrape_snap.py. Space requests a few seconds apart.

The walls you'll hit

Auth and install walls. From some IPs the “public” page is an app-install interstitial or a login prompt with no profile JSON. Back off, try later, or accept that handle is not scrapeable from your network.

JS-heavy rendering. A plain requests client only sees the first HTML paint. If more of the profile moves into client-side fetches, the JSON walk returns nothing even though Chrome looks fine. Playwright helps — and still loses to the same IP reputation rules.

Missing and renamed fields. subscriberCount is sometimes a string ("1200"), sometimes missing, sometimes only on badge accounts. Store NULL when absent; keep raw_keys in the JSON dump so you notice schema drift.

Spotlight stubs ≠ full feed. Profile-card highlights are curated, not every Spotlight ever posted. Deep browsing lives on /spotlight/<id>, topic pages, and search.

Regional variance and rate limits. Pin Accept-Language: en-US. Burst traffic from cloud IPs gets 429 or empty bodies fast — one handle every few seconds from a laptop is usually fine.

Private users. Handles that exist in the app but have no public web profile will never give you a clean page. Do not route around that with account cookies.

When DIY stops being worth it

The script above is a good fit for a short watchlist of public creators on a daily cron. It stops being fun when you need reliable subscriber counts across thousands of handles, Spotlight feed browsing, search, or topic collections — and you do not want to wake up because __NEXT_DATA__ moved again.

That is where a hosted API earns its keep. ScrapeAtlas* exposes Snapchat as normal HTTPS with an x-api-key header. Routes that map cleanly to the jobs above:

• GET /v1/snapchat/profile?handle= — public profile, including userProfile fields like username, title, bio, subscriberCount, websiteUrl, profilePictureUrl, hasSpotlightHighlights
• GET /v1/snapchat/spotlight/feed?limit= — Spotlight feed stories with creator + engagement metadata
• GET /v1/snapchat/search?query= — public search sections (profiles, Spotlight, topics, places)
• GET /v1/snapchat/spotlight?url= — one Spotlight URL in detail
• GET /v1/snapchat/topic?slug= — a topic collection and its videos

import os
import requests

KEY = os.environ["SCRAPEATLAS_API_KEY"]
BASE = "https://api.scrapeatlas.com"


def sa_get(path: str, **params):
    r = requests.get(
        f"{BASE}{path}",
        params={k: v for k, v in params.items() if v is not None},
        headers={"x-api-key": KEY},
        timeout=60,
    )
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json()


profile = sa_get("/v1/snapchat/profile", handle="example.creator")
print(profile["status"], profile["coverage"].get("complete"))
up = profile.get("userProfile") or {}
print(up.get("username"), up.get("subscriberCount"), up.get("bio"))

feed = sa_get("/v1/snapchat/spotlight/feed", limit=20)
if not feed.get("coverage", {}).get("complete", True):
    print("partial:", feed["coverage"].get("warnings"))
for spot in feed.get("spotlights") or []:
    author = spot.get("author") or {}
    metrics = spot.get("metrics") or {}
    print(spot.get("id"), author.get("handle"), metrics.get("views"), (spot.get("caption") or "")[:60])

# one video: sa_get("/v1/snapchat/spotlight", url="https://www.snapchat.com/spotlight/...")
# search:    sa_get("/v1/snapchat/search", query="trail running")

Responses use success, status (success or partial), and a coverage object with complete and warnings. Read those every time — a partial profile is not the same as “this creator went quiet.” Each successful request costs one credit (including partials); failed requests cost nothing.

Wrapping up

• Start from public /add/<handle> or /@<handle> only; treat auth walls as hard stops.
• Prefer embedded JSON over brittle CSS selectors; normalize before SQLite.
• Snapshot every run so subscriber and highlight diffs exist later.
• Expect JS rendering, renamed fields, regional variance, and rate limits — plan for empty results, not just exceptions.
• When you need Spotlight feeds, search, topics, or reliability without babysitting script tags, use a real Snapchat API surface instead of fighting the HTML.

If you are tracking public Snapchat creators for research, I am curious whether subscriber drift or Spotlight highlight changes ended up being the signal you cared about most.

*I build it.

I spoke to my fella earlier, who reminded me that we knew there was a high probability that what happened might happen. I admit that I go into such things with both cynical awareness and optimistic faith simultaneously. It's not that it happened to me that bothers me so much as recognizing where it's likely happening to others. I also admittedly have very high standards for certain situations. I was reminded that perhaps I should be aware that I likely need to relax them just a lil. Do you feel my almost imperceptible growl? Good!

After that, I went to bed and crashed into a not-so-pleasant nightmare. It could have been worse. I woke up, and within a handful of minutes he was calling me because he, too, had experienced a doomsday scenario of a nightmare. We distracted ourselves with excitement about January, then both returned to sleep.

When I woke again, I watched a few animal videos on subjects of interest, and then was notified that a book I had on hold was available for loan — 'Why Do We Exist' by Hakeem Oluseyi. I have only spent around 46 minutes reading it thus far, but I am thoroughly enjoying it.

What I am enjoying the most is a combination of two things. One, his excitement, passion, and wonder shines through from the very beginning. He invites curiosity of both the young and old with his word choice. And two, his narration is that of a storyteller. Instead of speaking over uninformed heads, he enlightens with possibility, facts as we know them, and invigorating exploration of those fact. His explanation of gravity really made me smile, because I think it'd be more likely to capture a general audience than bore it away. I love it when a book makes my heart and mind smile simultaneously.

I'm going to read more, but I'm probably going to recommend this to some adults as well as adults whose children might just get excited. I relish his point of view in the creation. I think it is likely that our learning would excel were we all taught to intertwine the feeding of our curiosity with knowledge acquired. After all, a box exists to either propel us higher or allow us to dive deeper. It's walls should not be to cage or block view of the vastness of possibility.

Also, the wind is howling... I could squeal!

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not edited nor proofread.

Generative KI kann Analysen verfassen, Konzepte ausarbeiten und Software entwickeln. Ob die rasch verfügbaren Ergebnisse fachlich stimmen und zum Problem passen, ist eine andere Frage. Ethan Mollick, Professor an der Wharton School, nennt im Harvard Business Review IdeaCast vier Fähigkeiten für die Arbeit mit KI: Deep Knowledge, Wide Knowledge, Taste und Agency [1]. Keine davon ist neu. Doch ihre Bedeutung verändert sich, wenn immer mehr Aufgaben an KI delegiert werden.

Deep Knowledge: Fachliche Tiefe

Eine erfahrene Controllerin erkennt in einer KI-generierten Umsatzprognose vielleicht sofort, dass eine Annahme nicht plausibel ist. Wer das Geschäft und die Kennzahlen nicht kennt, sieht zunächst eine sauber aufbereitete Tabelle.

Mollick betont deshalb den Wert von Fachwissen. Expertise war schon immer nötig, um Arbeit beurteilen zu können. Neu ist, wie viele anspruchsvolle Aufgaben sich an #KI delegieren lassen. Wer delegiert, muss Anforderungen formulieren und Ergebnisse prüfen können.

Daraus ergibt sich ein Problem für den beruflichen Nachwuchs. Wer ohne Erfahrung brauchbare Ergebnisse erzeugen lassen kann, hat damit noch nicht gelernt, sie fachlich einzuordnen. Wie erwerben Berufseinsteiger Urteilssicherheit, wenn KI Aufgaben übernimmt, an denen bisher Erfahrung gesammelt wurde? KI kann Lernprozesse unterstützen, sofern Lernende weiterhin selbst an den fachlichen Problemen arbeiten.

Wide Knowledge: Über Fachgrenzen hinaus

Mollick empfiehlt neben fachlicher Tiefe auch ein breites Orientierungswissen. Wer verschiedene Disziplinen kennt, erkennt Verbindungen über das eigene Fach hinaus.

Ein Marketingverantwortlicher könnte etwa Kenntnisse der Konsumentenpsychologie, der Datenanalyse und der Benutzerführung kombinieren, um mit KI einen Prototyp für einen Kundenservice zu entwickeln. Er muss nicht selbst programmieren. Das breite Wissen hilft, Anforderungen zu formulieren und blinde Flecken zu erkennen.

Tiefe und Breite erfüllen unterschiedliche Funktionen: Die eine ermöglicht fundierte Urteile innerhalb eines Fachgebiets, die andere eröffnet Verbindungen zwischen Gebieten.

Taste: Qualität erkennen und auswählen

Wenn eine KI in Minuten zehn Entwürfe für eine Website liefert, wird die Auswahl zum eigenen Arbeitsschritt. Der auffälligste Entwurf ist nicht zwingend der geeignetste. Eine Gestalterin könnte ihn verwerfen, weil die Navigation auf dem Smartphone unnötig kompliziert ist.

Mit Taste meint Mollick ein entwickeltes Qualitätsbewusstsein: die Fähigkeit, unter mehreren brauchbaren Möglichkeiten jene auszuwählen, die zum Zweck und zum Kontext passt. Das ist mehr als persönlicher Geschmack oder das Abarbeiten einer Checkliste. Erfahrung schärft die Wahrnehmung; gute Urteile lassen sich häufig begründen.

Massstäbe entstehen durch die Verarbeitung von Wissen und Erfahrung, nicht allein durch deren Anhäufung. Diesen Gedanken habe ich im Beitrag Assimilation statt Akkumulation weitergeführt.

Agency: Unter Unsicherheit handeln

Agency bezeichnet bei Mollick die Bereitschaft, auch bei unvollständigem Wissen Entscheidungen zu treffen und aktiv zu werden. Eine Mitarbeiterin könnte innerhalb der geltenden Vorgaben einen KI-Prototyp für einen umständlichen Verwaltungsablauf entwickeln und mit dem Team testen. Ob daraus ein neuer Prozess wird, ist offen.

Mollick hält diese Fähigkeit für schwer vermittelbar und betont den Wert von Experimenten. Hinzu kommt eine organisationale Dimension: Eigeninitiative lässt sich zwar von Mitarbeitenden erwarten, aber nicht unabhängig von den Bedingungen, unter denen sie arbeiten. Wer Verantwortung übernehmen soll, benötigt Entscheidungsspielraum; wer jeden fehlgeschlagenen Versuch rechtfertigen muss, wird Risiken eher meiden.

Zwischen Leistung und Können

Generative KI verändert nicht nur, wie wir arbeiten, sondern auch, wie berufliches Können sichtbar wird. Jemand kann mit KI einen überzeugenden Text erstellen, ohne dadurch automatisch besser schreiben zu lernen. Eine von KI erstellte Analyse beweist noch kein eigenes analytisches Verständnis. Und ein guter Entscheidungsvorschlag ist nicht schon eine selbst verantwortete Entscheidung.

KI kann beim #Lernen helfen. Entscheidend ist, ob wir uns mit einer Aufgabe auseinandersetzen oder nur ihr Ergebnis übernehmen. Ebenso wenig müssen wir jede delegierte Tätigkeit vollständig selbst beherrschen. Wir sollten aber die Grenzen unseres Verständnisses kennen und wissen, wann weitere Expertise nötig ist.

Darin liegt für mich eine wichtige Konsequenz aus Mollicks Überlegungen: KI erweitert, was wir erledigen lassen können. Was wir verstehen, beurteilen und verantworten können, müssen wir weiterhin entwickeln. Dass wir mithilfe von KI etwas tun können, bedeutet noch nicht, dass wir es auch selbst können.

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Quelle [1] E. Mollick, im Gespräch mit A. Beard, „How AI Is Changing Strategy: Rethinking What Your Business Is Designed to Do“, Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, 8. Oktober 2026. Podcast und Transkript; YouTube-Interview ab 13:32.

Bildquellen – Francesco Rustici (1592–1625): Wisdom and Prudence, Museo San Donato, Siena Public Domain. – Die Infografik zu den vier Skills wurde mit GPT-5.6 Sol Mittel erstellt.

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde Gemini Notebook von Google verwendet. Für das Erstellen der Infografik wurde ChatGPT benutzt.

Topic #ProductivityPorn | #Maschinenwelten

A And I just got in our cars to go home after talking and doing an anime smash or pass set of presentations for each other. And we were talking about like more heart-to-heart topics at the end and she asked me about If it got tiring. We were talking about something else and we ended up basically both saying how the natural baseline is happiness for her, while I said, the natural baseline is sadness. And we dissected that a little bit more, and we talked about how it is likely due to a lot of brain, chemistry, childhood, upbringing, etc. And she asked me some really nice questions and let me talk about it, and eventually asked me if it got tiring or draining, having to always be so disciplined and diligent with it. And I gave the optimistic answer about how yes it is, but at the same time there are benefits to it like learned optimism, the ability to empathize with other people that have struggled in a way that people who have not cannot really. And I said that you kind of have to make the most of it because what else can you do and everyone is dealt their cards in life. But now that I’m alone, and I have the freedom to express, it does fucking hurt. I am filled with so much envy towards people who can naturally just be happy without having to constantly claw up wall. And I know that this hunger and constant anchor. Has led to so much of the growth and achievements I have had in life, but at the same time what good is that if I am left unhappy and depressed compared to the person with less and that is happier. And this feels like I am talking about consumerism or this never-ending chase for the wrong things in life, and maybe you can argue that to some extent, but it feels like to me I need to do so much more to overcompensate for this constantly moving goal, post of a chemical, lack and imbalance in my mind. And I am so incredibly envious and honestly bitter towards the people that don’t even have to consider their privilege in this aspect, and it feels like one step on the ladder compared to for example, a child in Gaza has such an incredibly difficult life compared to mine for example. And I am not always bitter partially because I’m able to remind myself of the benefits in life, for reference look back to what I said about the intentional optimism, but sometimes a little of this has to be out. How is it that I am chemically doomed to such a strict requirement, regardless of life circumstance. I truly feel that given sufficient time for stabilization, everyone ends up more or less at the same level of misery. I think everyone eventually settles back down to whatever their brain‘s natural baseline is, and mine is low. And I grieved the fact that I have had to overcome this and try as much as I can to compensate through effort and Work. But at the same time it feels like I do not have enough to stand on in this bitterness because if I do this work and I can overcome this issue, instead, I am left with all of the different portions of my life that have been so heavily accelerated due to this turmoil. I can come out of this as someone that is flushed out as a human and developed, someone that is mature, someone that is intelligent, and arguably most importantly someone that is kind. I think when my schema for the world is that fundamentally people are struggling, when we all have less of this vital resource for life, I can recognize the importance of it in others. If one of my friends who is well off and paid very well is shorted 1020 $50, it is fine for words of sympathy and nothing else. But when one of my friends that is incredibly financially, burdened is in a position where they lose something like $20, I think it is more than equitable for me to cover that instead. I think similarly when I have this view of the world where everybody is struggling to stay above this low baseline, it is that much more meaningful and important for me to be kind and to help my fellow person wherever I can. And even if this might not be fully accurate, I would rather air in this direction where I can be a kinder person without it coming out of cost to me. Because whatever cost it is in my eyes, it is worth it for the amount of happiness or relief. I’m able to give someone else. Regardless of if that relief is as important to them, to me it is and so I am happy for this imbalance. I also think with something like a birthday, if I could, I think I would rather grow up, knowing that I am celebrated, and I have a place in other people’s hearts, rather than having to work so hard at unlearning that. But at the same time, even though I’m not really a huge fan of takes, the thought of a offering to make a couple different mini cakes for my birthday is enough for me to want to ugly cry. And I don’t think people understand how much something like this means to me. And it almost feels like I have spent my entire life standing up, and I just got an opportunity to sit down. And it is unfortunate that I was in that situation in the first place, but at the same time it is such a beautiful thing for me to suddenly feel important and like I have a place in this world. I think about the comic of the Bourne dog through the fence talking about how they see everything they’ve ever wanted, and how the second panel says how they will make it mine.

Chapter 1: The Sentence She Could Not Finish

At the laundromat, a woman listens to a message from her brother while the dryers turn behind her. He says he has entered treatment again. He sounds hopeful, and she wants to believe him. She has heard that same hope before, though, and remembers the calls that came afterward. She opens the notes app on her phone to write a prayer, types three words, and deletes them. What troubles her most is not that she doubts her brother. It is that she feels ashamed of how frightened she is to ask God for something she has already asked for so many times.

That private hesitation is what draws me to the woman in Mark 5:25–34. In the story of the woman who touched Jesus' garment, the moment everyone remembers is her healing. But before she reached Him, she had lived twelve years with bleeding that would not stop. Mark tells us that she had suffered under many physicians, spent all she had, and grown worse. He does not give us her private prayers. I would not claim to know them. Still, I wonder what it takes to keep looking for help when disappointment has become the most familiar part of your days.

I think this is also connected to finding your way back to God after disappointment, because sometimes we mistake reluctance for rejection. We assume that if prayer feels difficult, our faith must be disappearing. Yet a person can love God and dread another answer they do not understand. The woman in the crowd did not arrive with a speech about everything she believed. Scripture gives us a much smaller expression of her hope: “If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole” (Mark 5:28, KJV). She believed Jesus could help her, and she moved toward Him.

I am careful about what we take from that moment. We cannot turn the touch of His garment into a method for getting the outcome we want. She was healed; many faithful people continue to suffer. Her encounter tells us something true about Jesus, not that we can make every hard circumstance disappear by choosing the right words or reaching with enough confidence.

But perhaps it also gives us permission to stop pretending that prayer must begin with confidence. The woman at the laundromat may never find a sentence that sounds certain. She could begin with what is true: “Lord, I want to hope for him, but I am afraid.” It would not fix her brother's addiction, and it would not place his choices under her control. It would mean she had stopped hiding her fear from the One she was trying to speak to.

I have come to believe that there is a difference between losing hope and being afraid to hold it again. One can look a lot like the other from the outside. Jesus met a woman whose strength and resources had been worn down over years, and the first thing Mark lets us hear from her is not a perfect prayer. It is the simple hope that He might still be worth reaching for.

Chapter 2: The Things We Are Afraid to Tell God

A man sits alone in his apartment after learning that his hours at work have been reduced. He has already checked his bank account three times, although he knows the number will not change. His rent is due soon, and the conversation he needs to have with his landlord fills him with dread. He closes his eyes to pray, but the words that come to mind embarrass him. He is angry, frightened, and tired of asking God for help while another problem seems to be waiting around the corner.

I wonder how many of us have quietly decided that certain feelings should never become part of our prayers. We can admit that we need help, but anger seems disrespectful. We can ask for strength, but admitting that we feel abandoned seems dangerous. So we edit ourselves before speaking to God, hoping to sound like the person we believe a faithful Christian ought to be.

Yet when I return to the woman in Mark 5, I notice something that happens after her healing. Jesus stops and asks who touched His clothes. The disciples are confused because people are pressing against Him from every direction. But Jesus continues looking, and the woman comes forward.

Mark tells us she was “fearing and trembling.” She falls before Him and tells Him “all the truth.”

Those words stay with me because they describe a person standing before Jesus without concealing what has happened. Scripture does not record everything she said, so we cannot know whether she spoke of the physicians, the lost money, or her years of suffering. We only know that she told Him the truth, and He answered her with compassion.

He called her “Daughter.”

I think about how much fear we carry into prayer simply because we imagine God will be disappointed by our honesty. We worry that admitting our frustration means we have stopped trusting Him. But the Psalms are filled with people bringing their confusion, sorrow, and difficult questions before the Lord. David did not always sound peaceful when he prayed. He sometimes sounded like a man who desperately needed God to hear him.

The man worrying about his rent does not have to pretend that his situation is under control. He can ask God for wisdom, make the difficult phone call, look for additional work, and admit that he is scared. Prayer does not replace responsibility, but neither does responsibility make prayer unnecessary.

I cannot promise that telling God the truth will immediately change what you are facing. The woman in Mark received a miracle, while other faithful people continue waiting through circumstances they never wanted.

But I believe there is a freedom in approaching Jesus without trying to improve the appearance of our suffering first. We can speak to Him as we actually are, trusting that His compassion is not dependent on how convincingly we pretend to be okay.

Chapter 3: The Prayer That Stays on the Page

On Saturday morning, a widow opens the drawer where she keeps the small notebook her husband used for grocery lists. Half the pages are still blank. She thinks about writing a prayer there, but she has not been able to say much to God since his death. She prayed for him when he was sick, and he died anyway. Now she worries that speaking honestly about her sadness will sound like an accusation. So the notebook stays open on the table while she makes coffee for one.

I would never tell her that the woman in Mark 5 explains why one person is healed and another is not. It doesn't. The woman reached for Jesus and her bleeding stopped. That is what Scripture says, and it is good news. But the Bible also makes room for people who cry out and keep waiting. The psalms contain prayers from people who feel forgotten. Jesus Himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Grief is not a failure to believe.

What stays with me about the woman in the crowd is what Jesus said when she came forward trembling: “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace” (Mark 5:34, KJV). He did not speak to her as a problem that had finally been fixed. He spoke to her as a person. Her healing mattered, and so did she.

For those of us whose circumstances have not changed, that distinction is important. We cannot borrow her miracle and claim it as a promise about our own bodies, finances, or relationships. But we can look at the way Jesus received her. We can trust His character without pretending to know what He will do next. And we can let an unfinished prayer remain a real prayer.

Perhaps the widow eventually writes one line in her husband's notebook: “I miss him, Lord, and I don't understand.” Perhaps that is all she has strength for today. She can bring those words to God, then call someone who loved him too, or take a walk before the house grows too quiet. Neither action erases what happened. Both are ways to keep living while carrying the truth.

If your prayer keeps disappearing before you finish it, please don't assume God only welcomes the polished version. The woman in the crowd came trembling and told Him the truth. You can bring yours as well, even when it is unfinished.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

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

The first thing the new Greta Garbo says is “Are we rolling?” She stands beside a stool in a silk blouse and stylish slacks, key-lit like a 1930s movie star, and for the next minute and a half she purrs her way through a script about industrial efficiency. Around 20 per cent of all global energy, she explains, is lost to friction. “A terrible waste.” Then she signs off with the line every film buff knows, the one she has apparently returned from the dead to say on behalf of a Swedish bearings manufacturer: “I want to be alone.”

The advert runs for 99 seconds. It was released on 30 September 2026 by SKF, the Gothenburg engineering company, and it was made almost entirely with generative AI. Its star died in New York in April 1990, aged 84. She had not made a film since 1941. For most of the half-century in between she declined interviews, dodged photographers, and checked into hotels under a false name.

Her family approved it. Craig Reisfield, Garbo's great-nephew and one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told Robert Booth, the Guardian's UK technology editor, that he was “flabbergasted” when he first saw the result. “I was totally impressed: the mannerisms that they could capture and manipulate, her dress, facial images and even her voice,” he said. “It was startling what they could do and very impactful. And it was touching, from my perspective having known her.” Asked whether the digital Garbo might take on other work, he did not hesitate: “I won't say no, especially having seen what I've seen. It's pretty incredible and lifelike. So what's to say that you can't bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”

The Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw, gave the advert one star. “Poor Greta Garbo,” his review began, before describing the AI version as “a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody” of the real woman. Critics of the wider practice already have a name for it: ghostploitation.

But the most revealing detail is tucked into SKF's press release. The campaign, it says, was “developed in collaboration with Greta Garbo's family and Harriet Brown & Company Inc., whose support has ensured that Greta Garbo's legacy is handled responsibly.” Harriet Brown was the name Garbo used when she wanted to disappear. In April 1976, People magazine caught her arriving at a resort in Antigua, where her niece signed the guest register as “Mrs. Gray Reisfield” and “Harriet Brown,” New York City. That niece was Gray Reisfield, Craig's mother, who would go on to inherit everything. The company that now holds the rights to Garbo's name, image, likeness, signature and voice is named after the alias that once kept that face out of sight.

That is the whole problem in one corporate name. When a person spent decades refusing to be seen, what does it mean for somebody else to say yes on her behalf?

How SKF Built a Garbo Without Using Garbo

The link between the actor and the bearings company is real, if slender. Around 1920 and 1921, a Stockholm teenager called Greta Gustafsson appeared in short advertising films while working at PUB, the city's department store. One of them, made in 1921, promoted Swedish industry to international audiences and featured SKF among its companies. The Guardian describes it as her second ever screen role. Bradshaw, less sentimental, calls it a brief appearance by “the 15-year-old future screen icon” in what seems to have been an offshoot of her department store work.

SKF has turned that footnote into a campaign. The advert promotes magnetic bearings, which suspend a rotating shaft in a magnetic field so that no surfaces touch, alongside a revived 1919 payment model that lets customers pay for equipment out of the energy it saves. “By bringing Greta back, we hope to open more eyes to frictionless and energy-efficient technology,” said Per Nilsson, SKF's global head of communication and brand, in the company's release. Speaking to Reuters, he sounded more defensive: “I think we did it in a respectful way.”

The production method is the interesting part. According to the Guardian and Reuters, SKF's creators did not feed moving or still images of Garbo into any model, because that material is protected by copyright. Instead they built her likeness from text prompts, describing details such as her ice-blue eyes and wavy blond bob, using image generators including ByteDance's Seedream 5 Pro and Google's Nano Banana Pro. Motion came from ByteDance's Seedance 2 and 2.5 and from Kling AI, made by the Beijing company Kuaishou. A human actor performed the role, with the AI-generated appearance laid over the top. The voice was trained on a recording from one of Garbo's early films, which Reuters reports was the only archival material fed to the AI for which SKF obtained permission.

Two consequences follow from this workaround. The first is commercial. By avoiding archive footage, SKF avoided the film studios. As Bradshaw observed, that meant dealing only with Garbo's relatives, “who might well be more amenable.” The second is philosophical. The Garbo on screen is not assembled from Garbo. It is a description of Garbo, rendered by systems whose own training data SKF has not discussed, and performed by somebody else. What the family approved is less a recording than an impression.

The script leans hard on her legend. “One of my first films was for SKF, and now I'm back for my last,” the AI Garbo says. That word “last” sits awkwardly beside Reisfield's openness to further roles, and his openness is not idle. The Guardian notes that several big studios are investing in AI start-ups, and that veteran directors including Ron Howard and Paul Schrader are working on AI-enabled films. Reuters framed the advert as evidence of how quickly sophisticated AI is moving into every part of media, from scriptwriting to animation. A feature-length AI Garbo is no longer a thought experiment. It is a licensing decision.

And the closing gag, the one about wanting to be alone, is a joke at the expense of a woman who spent years insisting she had never meant it.

The Woman Who Asked to Be Let Alone

Garbo was born in Stockholm in September 1905 and grew up in a working-class family in the Södermalm district. She won a place at the Royal Dramatic Theatre's acting school, made films in Sweden and Germany, then signed with MGM and moved to Hollywood. Silent cinema made her a star. Sound made her, according to her estate's own biography, the most popular star in the world: MGM sold Anna Christie in 1930 with the slogan “Garbo Talks!”

In Grand Hotel (1932), playing the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya, she spoke the line that would follow her for the rest of her life: “I want to be alone.” The public decided it was autobiography. It was not quite. In January 1955, the journalist John Bainbridge opened the third instalment of his Life magazine profile with Garbo's own correction, as she had told it to a friend: “I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be let alone!' There is all the difference.” Bainbridge added that the difference was “that between the legend of Garbo the recluse and the actual life of Garbo the woman.” She had friends, he wrote, and close male companions. She was seldom literally alone. What she wanted was control over who got access to her.

Her final film, Two-Faced Woman, was released in 1941 and condemned by the Legion of Decency as immoral. She never made another. The popular story says she simply walked away, but the record is more complicated, and the complication matters. The estate's official website says that Garbo “worked on several projects for fifteen years that never came to fruition, usually due to censorship issues.” In June 1949, TIME reported that she was preparing her first film in eight years, an adaptation of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais for the independent producer Walter Wanger, to be shot in Paris with James Mason pursued as her co-star. Screen tests were shot. According to notes from Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, which has screened surviving test footage, Wanger failed to secure financing and had to cancel the project, after which “Garbo vowed never to return to the screen.”

So the documented Garbo is not a woman who refused to perform. She is a woman who wanted to perform on her own terms, could not get them, and then chose permanent absence over compromise.

She became a US citizen in 1951 and settled in New York, where she was famous for walking everywhere. She used “Harriet Brown” on hotel registers and, by the account of a 1990 television documentary reviewed in the Baltimore Sun, often went about in disguise. When the Academy gave her an honorary award in 1954 for her “unforgettable screen performances,” she received it in absentia. Only in the late 1980s did she agree to a series of conversations with the Swedish journalist Sven Broman, held intermittently in New York and Switzerland. She died of kidney disease at New York Hospital on 15 April 1990. There was no funeral. Her ashes lie in Skogskyrkogården, the woodland cemetery in Stockholm.

That is the evidence anyone claiming to speak for her has to work with. It does not say she hated cinema. It says, repeatedly and across five decades, that she wanted to decide when and how she was seen.

Who Holds the Right to Say Yes

When Garbo died, her will named one beneficiary and executor: her niece, Gray Reisfield, the daughter of her late brother, described in UPI's report as Garbo's “friend and confidant.” Gray Reisfield died in 2017, aged 85. Today the commercial side of the estate sits with Harriet Brown & Company, Inc., which the official Garbo website describes as “the successor-in-interest to the intellectual property rights to the name, image, likeness, signature and voice of Greta Garbo.” The company, the site says, “looks for licensing and image usage opportunities that preserve, protect and enhance the image of Greta Garbo.” Reisfield repeated the same three verbs to the Guardian, adding that the custodians were “very discerning” about partnerships.

The licensing record is long. The estate lists Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana, LVMH, Montblanc, Nordstrom, the US Postal Service and Madonna's Super Bowl XLVI half-time show among past and current partners. It also lists Sveriges Riksbank: Garbo's portrait, engraved from a photograph by Clarence Sinclair Bull, appears on Sweden's 100-krona banknote. According to the Guardian, the SKF advert is the first time her likeness has been used posthumously in moving images.

Reisfield's case deserves to be taken seriously. He is not a faceless rights holder. He knew her, drove for her, and saw her often at family occasions in New York. He makes a genuine argument about her career: “She was at the forefront of cinema in the silent film era. She made the transition to 'talkies' and dominated box office receipts. So to imagine her as an AI-enabled actor given her track record and ability to captivate and connect with audiences of both men and women isn't inconceivable.” On this reading, Garbo was a pioneer of new screen technology, and an AI Garbo is continuity rather than betrayal.

The trouble is what the word consent is being asked to carry. Ordinarily, consent has a few defining features. It is given by the person who will live with the consequences. It is informed and specific. And it can be withdrawn. Consent given by heirs on behalf of the dead has none of these properties in relation to the person depicted. She cannot be informed, cannot object to the script, and cannot change her mind after seeing the result. What the family can offer is something different and more modest: a judgement about what she might have accepted, combined with a legal authority to license. Both are real. Neither is her consent, and calling it that obscures the very question the advert raises.

“The family,” moreover, is not one mind. In 2017, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Craig Reisfield had sued his brother Derek in Marin County over the whereabouts of Garbo's honorary Oscar and a carved whale tooth given to her by President John F. Kennedy, allegations Derek disputed through his lawyer. Family disputes are ordinary. They are also a reminder that heirs are individuals with their own memories, interests and judgements. What passes through a will is property. A mind does not pass with it.

A Law Written for the Dead Who Stay Dead

Here is the uncomfortable fact for anyone who assumes the law has settled this: in the two places that mattered most to Garbo, the law offers her very little.

Sweden's Act on Names and Pictures in Advertising, passed in 1978, requires consent before a person's name or image is used in marketing. It applies only to the living. The government bill that introduced it, Proposition 1978/79:2, is remarkably candid about why. Several consultees, including the Chancellor of Justice, argued for some protection after death. The drafting committee disagreed, reasoning (in translation) that “presumably, one need not fear that a deceased person's image and name will come into more frequent use in advertising.” The responsible minister agreed that “the risk of misuse of a deceased person's image or name in advertising is insignificant.” Where nobody can give consent, for example because the person depicted is dead, the bill says the marketer is “in principle free” to proceed, subject to limits such as the criminal law on defaming the dead. Forty-eight years later, that assumption reads like a period piece.

New York, where Garbo lived and died, recognised no posthumous right of publicity until a statute signed in November 2020. Section 50-f of the Civil Rights Law took effect on 29 May 2021 and, as the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine noted at the time, “only affords these rights to celebrities who die on or after that date.” What that gap means was tested in Marilyn Monroe's case. In 2012, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that because Monroe's executors had long maintained she was domiciled in New York, her estate could not rely on California's posthumous right, and New York offered none.

That does not mean Harriet Brown & Company has nothing to license. Copyrights, contracts, other jurisdictions and the plain commercial value of an authorised association all count. But it does suggest the estate's role in the SKF advert rests as much on reputation and practice as on any statutory power to forbid it. SKF chose to work with the family. Swedish advertising law did not oblige it to.

Elsewhere, lawmakers are scrambling to catch up. California's AB 1836, signed on 17 September 2024, extended the state's protection for deceased personalities to digital replicas in audiovisual works and sound recordings, requiring the consent of the rights holders, whose rights can last 70 years after death. Its companion, AB 2602, protects living performers from vague contract clauses that sign away their digital doubles. In December 2025, New York amended Section 50-f to remove a safe harbour that had let producers escape liability with a conspicuous disclaimer, and passed a separate law, in force since 9 June 2026, requiring adverts to disclose “synthetic performers,” with fines of $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 thereafter. Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed on 21 March 2024, extended its personal rights law to AI imitations of voices.

At federal level, the NO FAKES Act was reintroduced in May 2026 and advanced unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June. Its post-mortem right would last ten years and could be renewed, with proof of active use, up to 70 years after death. Europe is moving too. A Danish bill would give people rights over realistic digital imitations of their appearance and voice lasting 50 years after death, although the European Commission has raised objections to its use of copyright law. The EU AI Act's transparency rules require anyone deploying a deepfake to disclose that the content is artificial, with a lighter obligation for evidently artistic or creative work.

Read together, these regimes share one striking feature. They all answer the question “who may consent for the dead?” in the same way: whoever holds the rights. The SAG-AFTRA agreement that ended the 2023 actors' strike is typical. Consent to a digital replica survives a performer's death unless otherwise agreed, and after death it can be given by an authorised representative or, failing that, by the union. None of these frameworks requires anyone to ask what the dead person actually wanted. Consent becomes a transaction between the living.

Every Resurrection Has a Different Signature

The growing list of AI revivals shows why that omission matters, because the cases that feel acceptable and the cases that feel grotesque differ mostly in how clearly the dead person spoke for themselves.

At one end is Val Kilmer. The AI performance in As Deep as the Grave was made with the consent of his children, and his estate was paid and supplied archive material. But Kilmer had also signed on to the film years before his death in 2025, and he had already used an AI model of his own voice, built by the company Sonantic after throat cancer damaged his speech. “The chance to narrate my story, in a voice that feels authentic and familiar, is an incredibly special gift,” he said in 2021. His daughter Mercedes said he “always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling.” That is about as close to genuine consent as a posthumous performance gets.

Next comes Virtually Parkinson, a podcast announced in 2024 and hosted by an AI version of the British broadcaster Sir Michael Parkinson. The idea came from his son Mike, who had worked alongside his father for more than 20 years, and the producers, Deep Fusion Films, said the AI host would announce at the start of every episode that it was artificial. Warner Music's AI-assisted animated biopic of Édith Piaf was approved by the executors of her estate, Catherine Glavas and Christie Laume, who described “a special and touching experience to be able to hear Edith's voice once again.” Note the word “touching.” It is the same word Reisfield used.

Then the cases get murkier. In 2016, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story digitally rebuilt Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, over the performance of the actor Guy Henry, with a licence from his estate's executors. The production company Tyburn later sued, claiming that Cushing himself had signed a 1993 agreement restricting special-effects reproductions of his likeness. In December 2025 the Court of Appeal struck out the claim. Whatever the merits, the episode shows how a dead person's own paperwork can collide with an estate's later judgement.

In 2019, the producers of a Vietnam War drama called Finding Jack announced that a CGI James Dean would star, saying his family supported them. Mark Roesler, chief executive of CMG Worldwide and the family's business agent, called it “a whole new frontier for many of our iconic clients.” Chris Evans responded on Twitter: “I'm sure he'd be thrilled. This is awful.”

Morgan Neville's 2021 documentary Roadrunner used AI to voice three lines Anthony Bourdain had written but never spoken aloud. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later,” Neville joked to the New Yorker. He later said he had acted “with the blessing of his estate and literary agent.” Bourdain's former wife, Ottavia Bourdain, replied publicly: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”

And at the far end is Robin Williams, who did something that, as far as the public record shows, Garbo never did. His trust barred commercial exploitation of his name and likeness, including adverts and holograms, for 25 years after his death in August 2014. When AI videos of him circulated in 2025, his daughter Zelda asked people, “if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want.”

The pattern is clear. Legitimacy tracks the strength of the dead person's own signal. Where the individual consented in life, as Kilmer did, a revival feels like completion. Where the heirs are guessing, as with Bourdain and Dean, it feels like ventriloquism. Garbo's case is unusual because her signal is strong on one subject and ambiguous on another. On publicity, she could hardly have been clearer. On performance, she left a record of thwarted ambition.

Can the Dead Be Wronged

Philosophers have argued about this since antiquity. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on death, by Steven Luper, sets out the debate. Thomas Nagel argued in 1970 that “a man's life includes much that does not take place within the boundaries” of that life, and that there is “a simple account of what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise. It is an injury to the dead man.” Others, such as Ernest Partridge, held that the dead cannot be harmed but can still be wronged. That distinction turns out to be useful here. Nobody believes the AI Garbo hurts Greta Garbo. The question is whether it disrespects choices she made while she was alive to make them.

Researchers who study the digital afterlife industry have started to put this in practical terms. In a 2024 paper in Philosophy and Technology, Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska and Tomasz Hollanek of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence urged designers to seek consent from people before they die, and recommended “design protocols that prevent deadbots being utilised in disrespectful ways, such as for advertising.” They also accepted that banning recreations of people who never consented would be unfeasible, and proposed instead that anyone resurrecting a loved one be prompted with questions such as “have you ever spoken with X about how they would like to be remembered?” “It's important to prioritise the dignity of the deceased, and ensure that this isn't encroached on by financial motives,” Nowaczyk-Basińska said. Henry Ajder, an AI adviser and researcher, told Reuters the Garbo advert is an example of “synthetic resurrection,” a trend “going back quite some years now,” which “AI has superpowered in a way.”

Apply that test to SKF and something specific stands out. The advert does not simply show Garbo. It makes her say new things, in a reconstructed voice, in support of a product, and then it closes on the one sentence she spent years correcting. Bainbridge's 1955 profile records her objecting to exactly the conflation the advert performs: treating a character's line as her personal creed. The finale is not an homage to Garbo's wish for privacy. It turns that wish into a punchline for a brand, delivered by a version of her who has no privacy left to protect.

Telling Stewardship From Use

None of this makes the SKF advert unlawful, and it is fair to say it was handled with more care than many AI revivals. It did not train on archive footage, it involved the family from the start, and it was openly presented as AI. The harder question is the one raised by the estate's own motto. “Preserve” and “protect” are the language of stewardship. “Enhance” is where use creeps in.

A workable distinction can be built from five questions.

Whose words are these? Restoring a print of Camille, publishing letters, or putting a studio portrait on a banknote curates what the person actually did. Generating new speech and new performances makes the person do something she never did. The first is custody of a record. The second is authorship in her name.

Who benefits? Stewardship serves the person's work and memory, even when money changes hands. Use serves a third party's product, with the person as the delivery mechanism. A ball-bearing advert sits clearly on the second side, however charming its historical connection.

Does it contradict her documented choices? Garbo's record is not a blank to be filled with the heirs' instincts. She avoided publicity for 49 years, used an alias to stay unrecognised, and refused to return to the screen on terms she had not chosen. A one-off advert that trades on her mystique sits uneasily with that. An open-ended licence for future AI film roles, which Reisfield declined to rule out, would cut directly against it.

Is the audience told? Disclosure does not create consent, but deception compounds the wrong. SKF disclosed. New York's synthetic performer law and the EU AI Act are making disclosure a baseline rather than a courtesy.

Does it stop? Williams' trust understood that the danger is not one appearance but a franchise. Once a convincing AI Garbo exists, the question shifts from whether to how often.

An estate that wanted to be on the right side of those questions could do so without giving up its income. It could publish the principles it applies, so that “very discerning” means something checkable. It could license her existing image freely while declining to put new words in her mouth. And it could treat her own documented choices, the alias, the refusals, the 1949 vow, as binding evidence rather than colourful backstory.

By those measures, most of what Garbo's estate has done over three decades looks like stewardship: licensing existing images, supporting products associated with her style, and putting her face on the currency of the city where she grew up. The SKF advert is something else. It is a use, carefully done and legally permitted, of a person who left far more evidence about her wishes than most.

The Audience That Never Stopped Asking

There is a third party in all this, and it is the one with the least claim and the most influence: the audience. It never stopped wanting Garbo back. In 1955, Life was already calling her 13-year absence from the screen a “mystery.” Her value as an image, the thing that makes her estate's licences worth signing, comes almost entirely from that unsatisfied desire. The legend of the recluse is a commercial asset precisely because she was a recluse. Reuters reported that the advert “sparked debate, praise and ridicule,” which is what happens when a century of longing finally gets an answer it did not ask for.

That is why the audience's wishes should weigh least of all. Wanting someone is not a reason to override what she chose. George Clooney, speaking at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026, put the living performer's version of the fear bluntly: “I would like to avoid being in a tampon commercial 20 years after I'm dead.” He has time to write that into a contract. Garbo had no reason to imagine the technology, and her heirs have filled the silence with their own judgement.

Perhaps the clearest guide is the one hiding in that corporate name. In 1976, on a beach in Antigua, Gray Reisfield signed a guest register “Harriet Brown” in the hope that her aunt could take a solitary walk on the beach unrecognised. That was stewardship in its purest form: one family member helping another stay unseen, exactly as she wished. Fifty years later, the same name is attached to a digital Garbo who asks whether the cameras are rolling, sells bearings, and tells the world she wants to be alone. She never said that, she once insisted. She only asked to be let alone. There is, as she put it, all the difference.

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References

1. Robert Booth. “Reanimated AI Greta Garbo stars again … in a ball-bearing advert.” The Guardian, 30 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/30/ai-greta-garbo-stars-again-ball-bearing-advert
2. Peter Bradshaw. “SKF advert review: let's hope this dull AI Greta Garbo is not the future.” The Guardian, 30 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/30/skf-advert-review-lets-hope-this-dull-ai-greta-garbo-is-not-the-future
3. Ilze Filks, Francesca Halliwell and Greta Rosen Fondahn. “Swedish ball-bearing ad revives Greta Garbo with US, Chinese AI.” Reuters, 2 October 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/swedish-ball-bearing-ad-revives-125116538.html
4. SKF. “Greta Garbo is back: starring in SKF's initiative to overcome friction.” PR Newswire, 30 September 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greta-garbo-is-back--starring-in-skfs-initiative-to-overcome-friction-302891408.html
5. Harriet Brown & Co. Inc. Greta Garbo official website, biography and licensing pages. Accessed 3 October 2026. https://www.gretagarbo.com/licensing/
6. “Tourist 'Harriet Brown' turns out to be the not-so-reclusive Garbo.” People, April 1976 (archive reprint). http://www.garboforever.com/1976_People.htm
7. John Bainbridge. “The Great Garbo, Part Three.” Life, 24 January 1955 (archive reprint). http://www.garboforever.com/1955_Life-3.htm
8. Il Cinema Ritrovato. “Testfilm Greta Garbo.” Festival programme notes. https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/film/testfilm-greta-garbo/
9. “Grandnephews of Greta Garbo in nasty legal feud over her Oscar.” San Francisco Chronicle, April 2017. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Grandnephews-of-Greta-Garbo-in-nasty-legal-feud-11043601.php
10. Government of Sweden. “Proposition 1978/79:2 med förslag till lag om namn och bild i reklam.” https://lagen.nu/prop/1978/79:2
11. Davis Wright Tremaine. “Dead Celebrities and Digital Doppelgangers: New York Expands Its Right-of-Publicity Statute.” 26 May 2021. https://www.dwt.com/blogs/media-law-monitor/2021/05/new-york-right-of-publicity-pornographic-deepfakes
12. Milton H. Greene Archives, Inc. v. Marilyn Monroe LLC, No. 08-56471 (9th Cir. 30 August 2012). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/08-56471/08-56471-2012-08-30.html
13. California Legislature. AB 1836 (Chapter 258) and AB 2602 (Chapter 259), Statutes of 2024. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB1836
14. Andrew Nietes. “New York State Legislature's Preliminary Response to AI.” Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, 18 December 2025. https://www.msk.com/newsroom-alerts-3114
15. Kirsten Donaldson. Holland & Knight alert on the Senate Judiciary Committee's advancement of the NO FAKES Act. 22 June 2026. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/06/senate-judiciary-committee-advances-legislation-to-protect-name
16. ICTRecht. “The EC pushes back on Denmark: no copyright on your own face?” https://www.ictrecht.nl/en/blog/de-ec-fluit-denemarken-terug-toch-geen-copyright-op-je-eigen-gezicht
17. EU Artificial Intelligence Act, Article 50. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/
18. Authors Guild. “SAG-AFTRA Agreement Establishes Important Safeguards for Actors Around AI Use.” 2023. https://authorsguild.org/news/sag-aftra-agreement-establishes-important-ai-safeguards/
19. Angela Yang. “An AI-generated version of the late Val Kilmer is starring in a new movie.” NBC News, 18 March 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/val-kilmer-ai-generated-new-movie-rcna264195
20. Fieldfisher. “Even a rogue one can be struck out: Court of Appeal rejects unjust enrichment claim in Star Wars actor's likeness case.” https://www.fieldfisher.com/en/services/intellectual-property/intellectual-property-blog/even-a-rogue-one-can-be-struck-out-court-of-appeal-rejects-unjust-enrichment-claim-in-star-wars-actor-s-likeness-case
21. Andrew Limbong. “AI Brought Anthony Bourdain's Voice Back to Life. Should It Have?” NPR, 16 July 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1016838440/ai-brought-anthony-bourdains-voice-back-to-life-should-it-have
22. “Robin Williams' Publicity Rights.” Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law, 31 March 2015. https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jsel/2015/03/robin-williams-publicity-rights
23. Armando Tinoco. Deadline report on Zelda Williams and AI videos of Robin Williams. 7 October 2025. https://deadline.com/2025/10/zelda-williams-ai-videos-robin-williams-1236571767/
24. Steven Luper. “Death.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 28 July 2026. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/
25. University of Cambridge. “Call for safeguards to prevent unwanted 'hauntings' by AI chatbots of dead loved ones.” 9 May 2024. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/call-for-safeguards-to-prevent-unwanted-hauntings-by-ai-chatbots-of-dead-loved-ones

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

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In Summary: * In spite of last night's insomnia, (caused, I suspect, by over eating and eating too close to my bedtime), this Thursday was productive and moved along at a pretty good pace. I did doze off for a few minutes while listening to the Guardians / Rays game this afternoon, but that shouldn't complicate my falling asleep tonight.

One thing that could keep me up is a late Amazon delivery. They gave me a window of time between 4:30 PM and 7:30 PM to expect the arrival. I'll probably be at the night prayers when it arrives, but I can pause that for a few minutes to take care of business.

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= 215.17 lbs. * bp= 134/81 (68)

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

Diet: * 07:40 – 1 fresh apple, breaded pork chop * 12:30 – barbacoa taco * 14:20 – garden salad * snacking on little Halloween chocolates throughout the day

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:00 – Have been awake with insomnia for the past hour and a half or so. Not sure how much sleep I'll be able to squeeze out of this night. * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:45 – bank accounts activity monitored * 09:30 – load weekly pill boxes * 11:45 – have been trying on my shorts to find some that fit me now. Only two. All the rest are way too big. * 13:15 – listening to the Tampa Bay Rays playing the Cleveland Guardians in game 3 of the ALCS. The Rays are leading 2 to 1 in the 4th Inning. * 14:40 – and Cleveland wins, 3 to 2. They now lead Tampa Bay 2 games to 1 in the 7-game ALCS series. * 15:00 – back to cleaning, unpacking and organizing. * 16:30 – walked to the mailboxes, had an informative chat with the mailman * 17:00 – beginning the nightly rounds of meds and prayers, (and chess, I nearly forgot)

Chess: * 17:45 – moved in all pending CC games

That sucked.

It more than sucked. It SUCKED!

It sucked the suck right out of the suck. Fuckin' hell!

This is going to test me in so many ways. I'm already shutting down. I have to acknowledge that this process is not good for my mental health. Not even a singular, teeny, tiny iota.

If I were a betting woman, I'd wager that I'm going to say, “Screw it!” and walk away. I'm not. Only because it'd possibly be foolish to, but I really, really want to. I'm really not sure it's worth it. Everyone will argue that fact with me, but they're not inside my head.

I do not enjoy feeling this way. I'm going to keep a lid on it, smile real pretty, and pretend like everything is fine because I'm really good at doing that. But everything is not fine. That appointment has my insides in full anarchy, and I object to the humiliating lunacy of it all. OK, not humiliating because I refuse to be humiliated on principle. But I don't want to do it again even though the next appointment is already in place.

My head hurts. I think I was grinding my teeth the entire time. I can't stand bureaucracy. I have zero patience for it. I will smile and pretend to. I see why there's a no cursing clause. The urge is real. Very real. I might go shove my head in the oven as it seems the practical thing to do. (That's a joke. My head doesn't fit in the oven without moving racks, and I don't like the way they sound or flavor the air.)

*sighs* I can do this. It is but a moment, and then I'm gone.

In other news, I'm pretty sure the thermostat on my hot water heater has went out. I've checked everything I can without emptying it. There's still the ghost of warmth, so the upper element must be kicking on. I think I will deal with a few days of cold showers for now, because I have zero desire to deal with the alternative.

I'm tired. It will be an early night in a few hours.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Réussir sa vie ou réussir dans la vie ? 

Ce n’est pas du tout la même chose, même si les deux affirmations se ressemblent. 

Réussir dans la vie, c’est se soumettre au regard des autres, à la pression sociale, à l’injonction à avoir un bon salaire, un poste prestigieux, la reconnaissance de ses pairs, et des autres. C’est aussi, parfois, inspirer de la jalousie. Est-ce vraiment ça qu’on veut ? 

Alors que réussir sa vie, c’est beaucoup plus rare, et c’est aussi plus difficile. Car c’est apprendre à s’accepter comme on est, et en être heureux. Malgré tout, malgré les regrets, malgré les échecs, malgré tout ce qu’on aimerait gommer. Malgré tout ce qu’on aimerait pouvoir refaire, autrement, si seulement on pouvait voyager dans le temps.

Réussir dans la vie, c’est se regarder soi même comme les autres nous regardent, ou comme on s’imagine que les autres nous regardent. À tort peut-être, à tort sûrement. 

Réussir sa vie, c’est regarder à l’intérieur, regarder de l’intérieur, sans jugement, juste en paix. 

Celui qui veut réussir sa vie cherche à combler un vide, à être aimé, à s’aimer peut-être. Celui qui réussi sa vie peut enfin aimer. 

Last week I read something that stuck with me more than the usual campaign noise. On October 8, CNN reported that OpenAI had caught a group of operatives using its models to write and place opinion pieces critical of the American war with Iran. They prompted ChatGPT in Farsi, revised drafts and editorial pitches with it, and, according to OpenAI, invented seven journalists who got roughly 100 articles into about a dozen outlets around the world. NPR and The Washington Post covered it too.

None of the outlets were household names. One was LA Progressive, a small Los Angeles site that ran a piece titled “Is America's Iran Policy Being Privatized? The Jared Kushner Question.” Another was Middle East Monitor in London, which has close to two million Facebook followers. After the pieces ran, the operators went back to ChatGPT and asked it to write comments that would look like ordinary readers reacting to them.

OpenAI banned the accounts. It could not say who was behind the work, and it did not tie it to the Iranian government. It said the activity looked like a commercial actor running an influence campaign for hire. We are used to imagining propaganda as a ministry somewhere. This sounds more like a small business with a service menu.

My first reaction was the obvious one. This is a con. Somebody pretended to be people who do not exist, and editors trusted them. Small publications run on freelance pitches and thin staff, and a polished draft from a plausible name is exactly what they hope to find in the inbox. AI makes that draft cheap to produce, in clean English, at volume. Jessica Brandt, who ran the federal government's Foreign Malign Influence Center from 2023 to 2025, told CNN it was remarkable that the material reached real outlets, because that is what extends its reach. A post from an anonymous account is easy to ignore. An article with a byline in a real publication borrows that publication's credibility.

But I have a second reaction, and I think it is worth saying out loud. The arguments in those pieces were not alien ideas smuggled into American life. Plenty of Americans oppose this war. Plenty think the gas prices and the threat to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz are too high a cost. Plenty of others believe the war is necessary and that Iran has earned the pressure. Both camps are real, and both include people writing in good faith. The problem with this operation is not the opinion. It is the disguise. Readers deserved to know that the “journalist” was a fiction paid for by someone with a stake in the outcome.

I worry that stories like this get used in two bad ways. One is to shrug, since the outlets were small and OpenAI itself tends to be cautious about impact. In August it described a separate Russian operation built around a fake Israel-based think tank and said it “appears to have reached relatively small audiences.” But that same report made a point I keep returning to: the significance lay less in the audience than in the infrastructure, the fake experts and fake rankings that could lend credibility later. Small today can be a test run for tomorrow.

The other bad use is to treat every critic of a war as a possible foreign plant. That would be its own kind of damage. A healthy country argues about whether to fight. If the lesson people take from this is that dissent is suspect, the operators win something bigger than a few clicks.

So where does that leave me? Mostly with a plain appreciation for boring verification. An editor calling a writer before publishing. A video chat with a new contributor. A byline that connects to a real history. These are old habits, and they cost time that small newsrooms rarely have. Still, they are the cheapest defense available, and they work no matter which side the fake writer is arguing.

There is also an odd note of hope in the story. These operators got caught partly because they used a commercial AI tool that keeps records and has people watching for this kind of abuse. In its August report, OpenAI noted that the Russian operators' own use of AI helped expose them. That will not hold forever, as open models spread and anyone can run them privately. But for now, the same technology that makes the forgery cheap also leaves fingerprints.

As a reader, I am trying to adopt one small habit. When a piece makes me feel strongly, I look at who wrote it and whether that person seems to exist anywhere else. It is not a cure, but it is something.

Thoughts? Reach me at danielk@outlook.com.

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!