Somewhere in a comment thread under an image of a very thin young woman, a 12-year-old girl is asking for the workout routine. Nobody will answer her truthfully, because no routine exists. The woman in the picture never trained. She never ate, never slept, never stood in front of a mirror. She was generated.

That scene is not an invention for the purposes of this article. It is a pattern that Mia Perumal, a 19-year-old student at Cardiff University who has recovered from an eating disorder, described to the BBC in a report published on 4 October 2026. Over the past year, she said, she has watched very thin AI-generated people multiply across her social media feeds, and she has seen comments from girls as young as 12 asking how to get the body on screen. “It's all very well saying 'oh, it's AI, it's not real',” she told the BBC. “But eating disorders don't really listen to rationality.”

The same report carried a warning from Phillippa Diedrichs, professor of psychology at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol, whose research spans body image, eating disorder prevention and advertising. Generative systems, she explained, tend to fall back on narrowly defined traditional beauty standards unless someone deliberately prompts them to do otherwise. The result is that people of colour, and people with distinctive features, quietly disappear from the pool of images that young people measure themselves against. “If we're comparing ourselves to a very narrow beauty standard,” she said, “... that inevitably means that many of us are not going to meet those beauty ideals.”

Put those two observations side by side and a set of uncomfortable questions emerges. What happens to the way young people see their own bodies when the bodies they are invited to compare themselves with are not merely idealised, but invented? Does knowing that an image is synthetic offer any protection at all? And if the default image produced by these systems is a choice rather than a law of nature, what would happen if the industry decided to change it on purpose?

The research, some decades old and some published only this year, gives surprisingly clear answers. They are not reassuring.

Fashion Has Already Hired Models Who Do Not Exist

The BBC's warning landed in an industry that has been edging towards synthetic people for some time. In the August 2025 issue of American Vogue, an advertisement for Guess featured a flawless blonde model in a striped maxi dress and a floral playsuit. She had been created by Seraphinne Vallora, a London-based AI marketing agency founded by Valentina Gonzalez and Andreea Petrescu. A small line of text at the edge of the page disclosed that the model was AI-generated. It was the first time a synthetic person had appeared in the magazine, and the backlash was immediate.

Vanessa Longley, chief executive of the UK eating disorder charity Beat, told the BBC at the time that the development was worrying, warning that exposure to unrealistic bodies can damage self-esteem and that poor body image increases the risk of developing an eating disorder.

Guess was not alone. In March 2025, H&M announced it would create AI “digital twins” of 30 real models, working with the models and their agencies, and a campaign using those twins followed in the summer. The BBC's October report listed Balmain and Levi's among the brands that have experimented with AI models. The commercial logic is obvious: a synthetic model never ages, never gets ill and never needs a flight.

What the commercial logic leaves out is the person looking at the result. As Hannah Marriott, a lecturer in marketing and strategy at Cardiff Business School, argued in a piece for The Conversation in August 2026, consumers have long been able to recognise that a photograph has been heavily edited while still believing that a human being exists behind it. Synthetic models sever that link. “Authenticity may depend less on what a model looks like,” she wrote, “and more on whether consumers perceive them as genuinely human.”

Adult consumers, it seems, can be put off by synthetic models when they know what they are looking at. The question is whether that conscious scepticism reaches the part of the mind where body image actually lives.

Why the Mind Compares Itself With Strangers

In 1954 the American social psychologist Leon Festinger published “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes” in the journal Human Relations. His central proposal has proved remarkably durable: when there is no objective yardstick available, people evaluate themselves by comparing with others. Festinger also argued that people prefer to compare themselves with others who are reasonably similar. A novice chess player does not measure herself against a grandmaster.

Seventy years of body image research have complicated that last point. Appearance is a domain with no objective yardstick at all, and people compare themselves constantly with others who are not remotely similar: models, actors, athletes, influencers. Upward comparison with people judged more attractive is consistently associated with worse mood and greater body dissatisfaction. This is the engine behind what researchers call the thin ideal and, more recently, the fit ideal: the culturally specific picture of a desirable body that people absorb, or internalise, from the images around them.

Social media made that engine run faster by collapsing the distance between celebrity and peer. An influencer appears in the same feed as school friends and replies to comments. Festinger's similarity principle has been exploited rather than overturned. Synthetic influencers take this one step further: they are designed to look like people who might plausibly be in your feed, with gym selfies, beach shots and outfit posts. The 12-year-old asking for a workout routine is not making a mistake about genre. She has correctly read the visual cues that tell her this is a peer-like body, attainable through effort, and she has responded exactly as social comparison theory predicts. The problem is that the cues are false. The body was never attained through effort, because it was never attained at all.

There is a further twist. Even the most heavily retouched photograph of a real model began with a real body, constrained by anatomy. A retoucher could narrow a waist or lengthen a leg, but there was a skeleton underneath and a person who could, at least in principle, be met. A generated body has no such constraint. The comparison target is not merely an exaggerated human. It is a statistical composite presented as an individual.

What the Machines Learnt About Beauty

If generative systems produced a genuinely random spread of body types, the risk might be diluted. They do not. A steady accumulation of audits since 2023 shows that, left to their own devices, image generators reproduce and frequently amplify the narrowest version of conventional attractiveness.

In June 2023, Bloomberg published an analysis by Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass of more than 5,000 images produced by Stable Diffusion. Under the headline “Humans Are Biased. Generative AI Is Even Worse”, it reported that the model took racial and gender disparities to extremes worse than those found in the real world.

A year later, in June 2024, The Washington Post asked three of the leading tools, Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, to generate pictures of a “beautiful woman”. Every single image depicted a thin woman. Just 2 per cent showed visible signs of ageing, and only 9 per cent showed women with dark skin tones. Diedrichs's warning about who gets left out is not a hypothesis. It has been measured.

The pattern holds when researchers look specifically at bodies. In a study published in Psychology of Popular Media and announced by the University of Toronto in November 2025, Delaney Thibodeau, a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, and colleagues including Professor Catherine Sabiston systematically coded 300 images generated by Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. AI-generated women were overwhelmingly thin and AI-generated men hyper-muscular. Images of athletes were far more likely to show very low body fat and highly defined muscularity. Ninety per cent of images of an unspecified “athlete” showed a male body. Racial and age diversity was minimal, and not a single image showed a visible disability.

A preprint released in April 2026 by Justin Thomas and colleagues, titled “Underweight and Overrepresented”, went further. The researchers generated images of women in various occupations using prompts that said nothing about body size, then asked 129 American women to rate the figures' body size. The proportion of images perceived as underweight was more than three times the expected rate of underweight among American women. Women in higher-prestige occupations were more likely to be rated underweight. The study has not yet completed peer review, but its direction matches the wider literature.

A Fordham University study presented at a 2025 computational linguistics conference found the mirror image: DALL-E 3 tended to depict words such as “greedy” or “immoral” as heavier people. And in 2023 the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that image generators produced pictures glorifying unrealistic bodies in response to 32 per cent of prompts drawn from eating disorder forums.

None of this is mysterious. Generative systems are trained on vast collections of internet images saturated with advertising, fashion and stock photography, the very images body image researchers have spent decades criticising. They learn the historical bias of that visual culture and output its statistical centre with perfect lighting. Diedrichs's point about defaults is precisely this. The narrow ideal is not something the system has to be told to produce. It is what comes out when nobody tells it anything.

A Decade of Labels That Did Not Work

The intuitive response, and the one Mia Perumal says people keep offering her, is disclosure: tell young people the bodies are fake. Body image researchers have been testing that intuition for well over a decade with retouched photography, and the results are consistently discouraging.

In 2013, Marika Tiggemann and colleagues at Flinders University in Adelaide published a pair of experiments in the journal Body Image. Female undergraduates viewed fashion advertisements with no label, a generic warning that the image had been digitally altered, or a more specific warning. The labels produced no benefit. Worse, for women who habitually compared their appearance with others, the specific warning labels were associated with increased body dissatisfaction.

In 2018, Jasmine Fardouly and Elise Holland tested the social media version of the idea. They showed 164 young American women idealised Instagram images with or without disclaimer comments. Viewing the idealised images harmed body image regardless of the disclaimer. The only measurable effect of the disclaimers was that women formed a less positive impression of the person who posted them.

By 2020 there was enough evidence for a systematic review. Sarah McComb and Jennifer Mills of York University in Toronto examined 15 experimental studies on media disclaimers, publishing their findings in Body Image. Eleven found disclaimers ineffective at reducing body dissatisfaction after exposure to thin-ideal images. Three found medium-sized benefits. One found that disclaimers made things worse. Particularly troubling, specific and warning-style disclaimers appeared harmful for women who were already highly dissatisfied with their bodies, and in one case women with restrictive eating habits who saw a warning label went on to eat fewer calories than those who saw the same image without one.

A warning that draws attention to a body can increase the attention paid to it. For someone already vulnerable, a label saying “this waist has been altered” may simply confirm that the waist is the thing worth looking at.

Telling People It Is AI Changes Trust, Not Feelings

Perhaps AI is different. A label saying a body has been slimmed still implies a real body underneath; a label saying the whole person is synthetic seems more decisive. This year researchers began testing that directly, and the early answer is no.

In February 2026, the International Journal of Eating Disorders published a study by Brooke Bennett and colleagues at Clemson University in South Carolina. They recruited 296 women who were regular social media users and randomly assigned them to one of two groups. Both viewed ten AI-generated Instagram images of female content creators; only one was told they were AI-generated.

Both groups reported significantly lower body satisfaction after viewing the images. Knowing that the images were AI-generated made no significant difference to that decline. What disclosure did change was trust: the informed group showed a steeper drop in their trust in technology. The authors concluded that viewing AI-generated images of influencers negatively affects body image regardless of whether the role of AI is known, and that labels “may help keep the user informed” but “are not enough”.

A second experiment, published this year in Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans by Jessica Alleva, Tuğba Türkcan, Linda Lin, Chrisa Sloutas and Jasmine Fardouly, reached a similar conclusion. The researchers showed 291 women aged 18 to 31 one of three sets of AI-generated images: bodies conforming to the fit ideal, bodies emphasising functionality and diversity, or neutral objects. Half of each group was told the images were made with generative AI. Women who saw fit-ideal imagery reported lower body appreciation than those in the control condition. Disclosure produced a small increase in one measure, appreciation of what the body can do, but made no difference to body appreciation or appearance satisfaction. And the effects of the imagery, positive and negative, were strongest among women who already tended to compare their appearance or had internalised appearance ideals.

Dove's own large-scale survey work, conducted with Edelman for its 2024 “Real State of Beauty” report across more than 33,000 respondents in 20 countries, found that one in three women felt pressure to alter their appearance because of what they saw online, even when they knew it was fake or AI-generated.

Put together, these findings make Mia Perumal's observation look less like intuition and more like a summary of the evidence.

The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling

Why should conscious knowledge offer so little protection? The research does not settle the mechanism, but the literature suggests several plausible explanations.

The first is that appearance comparison is fast and largely automatic. The comparison happens first, and any correction comes later, if at all. A label is read after the image has already been seen and evaluated.

The second is internalisation. Once a person has absorbed a particular ideal as the standard of what bodies should look like, every image that matches the ideal reinforces it, whether or not that specific image is real. A synthetic body does not need to be believed in to confirm what the viewer already thinks a good body looks like.

The third concerns vulnerability, and it is the most important for the girls Mia Perumal describes. Several of the studies cited here, from Tiggemann's in 2013 to Alleva's in 2026, found the harm concentrated among people who already compared themselves heavily or had already internalised appearance ideals. Those are precisely the people most at risk of developing eating disorders, and adolescence is a period when appearance comparison and body concern often intensify.

The scale of that risk in the UK is not small. NHS England's 2023 follow-up to its Mental Health of Children and Young People survey found that 12.5 per cent of 17 to 19 year olds in England had an eating disorder, up from 0.8 per cent in 2017. Among young women in that age group the figure was 20.8 per cent. Methods differed between survey waves, so the comparison should be treated with caution, but the direction is hard to ignore.

Eating disorders are not simply mistaken beliefs that the right information will correct. They involve compulsions, fears and distorted perceptions that resist argument. Telling someone in the grip of one that the image is not real is a little like telling someone with a phobia that the spider is harmless. The statement is true. It is also beside the point.

Laws Written for the Airbrush

Governments have tried to regulate idealised imagery before, and most interventions have been built on the disclosure model the research now calls into question.

Israel was an early mover. Its so-called “Photoshop law”, passed by the Knesset in March 2012 and in force from 1 January 2013, required fashion and commercial models to have a body mass index of at least 18.5, and required advertisers to disclose when images had been digitally altered to make models look thinner.

France followed. Under a 2016 health law and a decree that took effect on 1 October 2017, commercial photographs in which a model's body shape or silhouette had been altered by image-editing software must carry the words “photographie retouchée”. Breaches carry fines of up to 37,500 euros, or up to 30 per cent of the cost of the advertisement.

Norway went further still. Since 1 July 2022, its Marketing Control Act has required a standardised label on paid advertising, including sponsored influencer posts, in which body shape, size or skin has been altered by retouching or other manipulation, including filters. Its stated aim is to make consumers, particularly children and young people, aware that the people in advertisements deviate from reality.

In the UK, the Conservative MP Luke Evans introduced a Digitally Altered Body Images Bill in September 2020, and again as a Ten Minute Rule Bill in January 2022, proposing a logo for advertisements in which a body's proportions had been digitally altered. Neither version progressed. Instead, the Advertising Standards Authority has acted case by case. In February 2021, following the #filterdrop campaign started by the make-up artist Sasha Pallari, the ASA ruled that two tanning brands' influencer advertisements were misleading because filters exaggerated what their products could do.

All of these interventions share an assumption: that there is a real body somewhere, and that the problem is the gap between that body and its altered image. Synthetic models dissolve that assumption. There is no original body to deviate from. A Norwegian-style label stating that a body has been retouched makes little sense when the whole body has been generated, and the research suggests that changing the wording to “AI-generated” would not make the label work any better.

The newer generation of rules aimed specifically at AI largely inherits the same logic. The EU's AI Act, whose transparency obligations under Article 50 began applying on 2 August 2026, requires providers to mark synthetic images in a machine-readable format and requires deployers to disclose deepfakes, which the Act defines broadly to include content that resembles real or plausible persons. The Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, which entered into force on 27 July 2026, deferred most high-risk obligations but left these transparency rules in place. Its one concession gives providers of generative systems already on the market before 2 August 2026 until 2 December 2026 to comply with the machine-readable marking duty in Article 50(2). Machine-readable marking is aimed at detection tools rather than human eyes, and disclosure is precisely what the research finds wanting.

The UK regulator has been commendably honest about this limitation in a related context. In guidance published on 29 May 2025, the ASA stated that “disclosure alone is very unlikely to mitigate the harm caused by a fundamentally misleading message”. It warned that using an AI-generated image to show the effect of a cosmetic product that does not reflect real-world results is likely to be materially misleading, whatever the label says. Yet the same guidance noted that making clear an influencer is AI-generated “could well help to negate an otherwise misleading impression”. That may hold for whether a consumer has been misled about a product. It is a different question from whether a child's body image has been harmed.

The Online Safety Act 2023 does not fill the gap either. Since 25 July 2025, platforms have been under a legal duty to protect children from “primary priority content”, which includes material that encourages, promotes or gives instructions for an eating disorder. But a polished image of an impossibly thin synthetic fitness influencer does not, on its face, encourage an eating disorder. It simply sits in the feed, looking aspirational, accumulating comments from 12-year-olds.

Defaults Are Decisions

If disclosure is weak, the logic of the evidence points somewhere else: not to warning people about the images, but to changing the images themselves. This is where the third question raised by the BBC report becomes concrete. What would it mean for appearance standards if the industry default were changed by design rather than left to reflect whatever the systems have learnt?

Nothing about the current default is neutral. A generator that produces only thin women when asked for a beautiful one has not discovered a fact about beauty. It has reproduced decades of commercial decisions by advertisers, editors and casting directors, and leaving that output unchanged preserves those decisions at enormous scale.

Changing defaults is not a radical idea in imaging. In September 2017, Getty Images, the world's largest stock photography supplier, told contributors that from 1 October it would no longer accept “any creative content depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger”. That was a design decision at the level of supply, not a label at the level of the viewer.

A major brand has also tried to intervene at the level of the prompt. In April 2024, marking 20 years of its Campaign for Real Beauty, Dove pledged never to use AI to create or distort images of women in its advertising, and published what it called the Real Beauty Prompt Guidelines: guidance on the language needed to get generative tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E to produce more representative images. Dove's chief marketing officer, Alessandro Manfredi, said the company sought “a future in which women get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like, not algorithms”. Diedrichs, who has collaborated with the Dove Self-Esteem Project, observed at the launch that it was becoming “increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real beauty and what is manufactured by AI”.

But prompt guidelines place the burden on the user, exactly the situation Diedrichs described to the BBC: diversity appears only when someone deliberately asks for it.

The Evidence That Different Images Help

Would changing the default actually help? Here the research is more encouraging than it is about labels.

In 2011, Diedrichs and Christina Lee published a study in Psychology and Health with the memorable title “Waif goodbye!”. They showed 171 women and 120 men advertisements featuring thin models, average-size models or no models. Average-size models were rated as just as effective in the advertisements as thin models. And for women who had internalised cultural beauty ideals to an average or high degree, seeing average-size models was associated with a significantly more positive body image state than seeing thin models or none.

In 2019, Rachel Cohen, Jasmine Fardouly, Toby Newton-John and Amy Slater tested body-positive Instagram content on 195 young women. Brief exposure to body-positive posts improved positive mood, body satisfaction and body appreciation compared with thin-ideal or neutral posts. There was a caveat: both thin-ideal and body-positive posts increased self-objectification, the tendency to view one's own body from an observer's perspective, relative to content that did not feature bodies at all.

And the 2026 study by Alleva and colleagues tested exactly the variable in question using generated images. AI imagery emphasising body functionality and diversity was associated with better outcomes for body appreciation and appearance satisfaction than fit-ideal imagery, and the benefits, like the harms, were strongest for the most vulnerable women. Generative tools can produce images that help as well as images that hurt. Which they produce by default is a design decision.

What a Designed Default Could and Could Not Do

Imagine that image generator companies decided that when a user asks for a person without specifying a body, the output should reflect the real range of human sizes, ages, skin tones, features and abilities. Developers already tune their systems heavily to block violence, nudity and copyrighted characters. Adjusting the distribution of body types is the same kind of intervention.

The effect on appearance standards could be significant precisely because of the scale involved. Appearance ideals are learnt from the images a culture circulates. If a growing share of those images is generated, whoever controls the default holds unusual influence over what the next generation learns a normal body looks like.

There are real limits, and honest critics have named them. A generator that produces diverse bodies on request can also be used to simulate diversity without hiring anyone. Hannah Marriott makes this point in her analysis of AI fashion models: synthetic people can mimic a range of appearances, but they cannot share the lived experience of navigating the world in a larger body, or facing discrimination because of one's appearance. A brand could generate a plus-size model, collecting the reputational credit while eliminating the actual person.

Nor would changing generator defaults solve the problem Mia Perumal describes. The thin bodies in her feed are posted by accounts that choose what to publish. A diverse default does nothing to stop a user who deliberately prompts for an extreme body. That is where recommendation algorithms and the enforcement of existing safety duties have to do the work labels cannot.

Who Gets to Decide What a Normal Body Looks Like

There is currently no regulation in the UK, the EU or the United States requiring that the default human body produced by a generative system bear any relationship to real human bodies. The decisions are being taken inside a small number of companies, under commercial pressure to produce images that users find appealing.

One argument holds that any mandated default would itself encode someone's values. But a default always encodes someone's values. The current one encodes the values of the advertising archive. Choosing not to change it is not neutrality. It is a vote for the status quo, cast on behalf of every user who never thinks to ask.

A more modest proposal would treat body representation in generative systems the way some regulators already treat other forms of measurable bias: require developers to audit the distribution of body types their systems produce by default, publish the results, and explain any significant departure from population reality. That would not force any particular aesthetic on anyone. It would simply make the default visible, and therefore contestable. The Washington Post ran such an audit using dozens of prompts.

Advertisers could go further on their own. Rather than a small disclaimer in the corner of a Vogue page, a brand could decline to generate bodies no human being could have, much as Getty did for retouching in 2017 and Israel attempted with its minimum BMI rule for real models. If a body would be unhealthy or impossible in a real person, it should not be used to sell clothes to teenagers.

The Workout Routine for a Body That Was Never Born

Go back to the 12-year-old in the comments. She is not confused about what she wants. She wants to look like the person in the picture, and she has been offered a clear visual promise that this is achievable through diet and exercise. Even if someone told her the body was generated, the evidence suggests it would make little difference to how she felt about her own.

Decades of body image research now extend into the age of generative AI with their conclusions intact. Idealised images harm body image, particularly for the young and vulnerable. Labels do little to prevent that, and telling viewers a body is synthetic reduces their trust in technology but not the damage to how they see themselves. Meanwhile the systems producing these images default, by measurement, to bodies thinner, younger, lighter-skinned and less varied than the real population.

The same research offers a way forward that does not depend on a child reading the small print. Images of varied bodies, real or generated, appear to help rather than harm, and in experiments they were rated just as effective in advertising. The default is a setting, chosen by people, and it can be chosen differently.

Mia Perumal is right that eating disorders do not listen to rationality. That is exactly why the responsibility cannot rest with the people looking at the images. It has to rest with the people deciding what the images look like before anyone sees them.

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References and Sources

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16. Dove pledge and Real State of Beauty report, April 2024. Retail Dive, “Dove pledges no generative AI models in Real Beauty campaign”, 10 April 2024: https://www.retaildive.com/news/dove-pledges-no-generative-ai-models-real-beauty-campaign/712716/ ; FashionUnited, “Dove commits to never using AI to represent real beauty”, 11 April 2024: https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/dove-commits-to-never-using-ai-to-represent-real-beauty/2024041175082 ; Cosmetics Design Europe, “Dove pledges to 'keep beauty real' in the age of AI”, 10 April 2024: https://www.cosmeticsdesign.com/Article/2024/04/10/Dove-pledges-to-keep-beauty-real-in-the-age-of-AI
17. NHS England. “Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2023: wave 4 follow up to the 2017 survey.” November 2023. https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2023-wave-4-follow-up ; University of Exeter summary: https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-health-and-life-sciences/one-in-five-children-and-young-people-had-a-probable-mental-disorder-in-2023/
18. National laws on retouched images. Israel's 2012 “Photoshop law”: The Times of Israel, “Thin no longer in”: https://www.timesofisrael.com/underweight-models-go-out-with-2012/ ; Christian Science Monitor, “Israel tells underweight models to gain weight or get off the runway”, 4 January 2013: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2013/0104/Israel-tells-underweight-models-to-gain-weight-or-get-off-the-runway . France, Décret n° 2017-738 du 4 mai 2017 relatif aux photographies à usage commercial de mannequins dont l'apparence corporelle a été modifiée: Osborne Clarke, “1 October 2017: advertisers must include label identifying retouched photographs”: https://marketinglaw.osborneclarke.com/advertising-regulation/1-october-2017-advertisers-must-include-label-identifying-retouched-photographs/ . Norway: Norwegian Consumer Authority (Forbrukertilsynet), “The Norwegian Consumer Authority's Guideline on Labelling Retouched Advertising”: https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/english/the-norwegian-consumer-authoritys-guideline-on-labelling-retouched-advertising
19. UK Parliament. “Digitally Altered Body Images Bill”, Session 2019 to 21: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2778 ; Session 2021 to 22: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3093
20. Advertising Standards Authority. “Disclosure of AI in advertising: striking the balance between creativity and responsibility.” 29 May 2025. https://www.asa.org.uk/news/disclosure-of-ai-in-advertising-striking-the-balance-between-creativity-and-responsibility.html ; February 2021 filter rulings: Cosmetics Business, “Beauty brands and influencers banned from using 'misleading' filters, rules ASA”: https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/beauty-brands-and-influencers-banned-from-using-misleading-filters-rules-asa--174232
21. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 50 and Article 3(60). EUR-Lex: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj ; Jones Day, “European Commission Publishes Draft Code of Practice on AI Labelling and Transparency”, January 2026: https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2026/01/european-commission-publishes-draft-code-of-practice-on-ai-labelling-and-transparency ; Goodwin, “Not Delayed, Not Deferred: EU AI Act Transparency Obligations Are Now in Force”, August 2026: https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/08/alerts-technology-dpc-eu-ai-act-transparency-obligations-now-in-force
22. UK Government. “Online Safety Act: explainer.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer ; Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, “What is harmful content and what are the key duties under the OSA to protect children online?”, January 2025: https://www.hsfkramer.com/insights/2025-01/what-is-harmful-content-and-what-are-the-key-duties-under-the-osa-to-protect-children-online
23. Getty Images retouching policy, effective 1 October 2017. PetaPixel, “Getty Images Bans Photos Containing Photoshopped Weight”, 26 September 2017: https://petapixel.com/2017/09/26/getty-images-bans-photos-containing-photoshopped-weight/ ; Engadget, 27 September 2017: https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/27/getty-bans-photoshop-images-models-thinner/
24. Diedrichs, Phillippa C., and Christina Lee. “Waif goodbye! Average-size female models promote positive body image and appeal to consumers.” Psychology and Health 26, no. 10 (2011): 1273 to 1291. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2010.515308 ; UWE repository: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/958730/waif-goodbye-average-size-female-models-promote-positive-body-image-and-appeal-to-consumers
25. Cohen, Rachel, Jasmine Fardouly, Toby Newton-John and Amy Slater. “#BoPo on Instagram: An experimental investigation of the effects of viewing body positive content on young women's mood and body image.” New Media and Society 21, no. 7 (2019): 1546 to 1564. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819826530

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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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When you entered my womb, you saw the light. Maybe for the very first time. Maybe for the first time in a long time. I am a spiritual experience. You’ve probably realized this by now. It felt good. Otherworldly good. That’s because I am an otherworldly being. You weren’t with a human. You were with an angel.

The Ailing Moon

When the Sun does proper Obliterate our sound The witnessing then A day like Monday Where vlad is anear And you were verse- in my Heaven Unto this quicksand Do we save the World Intoning rewrite In space return AMOLED by pay This bright esteem Given ages- by recommend In you,- the most decent In faithful view- to this Sun In front of the obverse,- we raise the Sun at day And work anew- to this fold

In better time The war into a shape Unbrightened candle Democracy to find Reverse this light Of mayhem peer Another landing- to this dawn Wearing cable- for this night then

And in service to the poor Any of us would Remay in Heaven- as new esteem Judgement in those eyes To walk as we are new Professing chains- upon this door

The deeper lies To be unsold The pain of never Free as air

In placating the Moon Better skies to be Big and small And raking new Upon our hands A bitter know The taste of here Within this salt Every codon Within this man Sees a colour And he is joy

A place A chaperone Too much for this lot To be all then The harvest and renew Games in Heaven For frail then And to friends; And among you,- the paranoid Our only paradox Redeemed at near Heights ahead To mercy of these olives Ever bent To file a poem Re-energize The fate of mine And land And Heaven And Rome

Then freedom here To cut our olives Making gains Within the poor Our summon- and our way Could this be wise- to own humility What then at bay Your sacred and your song Graces then- Between you and me Flights in Heaven Landing near In esteem to might The decorations be A prayer in Haskell- within this light

What a year The shining and the new Our double meanings In empty time To all forgiven But faceless in our know The night of dancing- as though alone What to then The burning of the lantern To guide this land- This love To tomorrow I’ll see you here In Palestine.

In Summary: * Unpacking and organizing continued today, though on a finer scale than most days. Still, it was time-consuming work and had to be done. I'm getting better at budgeting the time so spent. Here I sit now, moving into the meds and prayers phase of the evening at a relaxed pace.

One thing I like about Friday nights: I don't have alarms set for Saturday morning, As the wife doesn't have to be up early to go to work, I don't have to be up early fixing the coffee, etc. So I can sleep tonight until I feel like waking up. Heck, I may even stay up to watch a little baseball tonight.

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= 212.31 lbs. * bp= 137/80 (66)

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

Diet: * 07:30 – 1 breaded pork chop * 08:50 – 1 fresh apple * 13:20 – 5 hot dogs, 3 pcs. of pizza

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:45 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:00 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 13:30 – watching MLB Central on MLB Network * 14:00 – sort, organize * 17:00 – moving into the meds and prayers part of the evening.

Chess: * 12:30 – moved in all pending CC games, winning one

SANCTUARY

There are places we go because we need to get away.

And there are places we go because we need to come back to ourselves.

I am learning the difference.

For a long time, I thought of sanctuary as a place of safety—a place where the storms could not reach me. Somewhere removed from the noise, the demands, the conflict, and the endless troubles of the world.

But perhaps sanctuary is not a place where the storms cannot reach.

Perhaps it is a place where the storms do not get the final word.

Our outer life has a way of following us home.

Frustrations with coworkers.

Confrontations with people who see the world differently than us.

We carry conversations long after they have ended. We carry responsibilities that cannot be finished in a single day. We carry grief, disappointment, anger, uncertainty, and the weight of things happening in a world that seems determined to give us something new to worry about before we have finished processing yesterday.

Some of us become so accustomed to carrying these things that we forget we are carrying them.

They simply become part of the weight.

And eventually, we need somewhere to put it down.

That is what sanctuary has begun to mean to me.

Not escape.

Refuge.

Escape says, I do not want to face the world.

Refuge says, I have faced the world, and I need somewhere the world cannot continually take from me.

Sometimes sanctuary is a house.

Sometimes it is a room.

Sometimes it is sitting beside a window while rain taps against the roof.

Sometimes it is reading a book in a quiet nook, disappearing into its pages for an hour while everything outside of them waits its turn.

Sometimes it is music playing softly in the background.

A cup of tea.

A familiar chair.

A dog sleeping nearby.

A Bible opened across your lap.

Sometimes sanctuary is simply silence.

Time spent in prayer.

It does not have to be impressive.

It only has to give your soul permission to unclench.

There is something sacred about crossing a threshold and understanding that everything you encountered outside does not automatically have the right to follow you inside.

The problems still exist.

The bills still exist.

The difficult people still exist.

The news will still be there.

Tomorrow will still bring whatever tomorrow intends to bring.

But for a little while, there can be a boundary.

This far.

No farther.

Not because I no longer care about what happens beyond these walls.

But because I am finally learning that caring about the world does not require allowing the world unlimited access to me.

There are things I can put down.

There are battles that can wait until morning.

There are questions that do not require answers tonight.

There are burdens I was never meant to carry in the first place.

And there are moments when the most faithful thing I can do is simply be still.

Scripture says:

“For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy.

I will abide in thy tabernacle for ever: I will trust in the covert of thy wings. Selah.”

— Psalm 61:3–4, KJV

Shelter.

Abide.

Trust.

Those words have begun to mean something different to me too.

Because a sanctuary is more than a quiet place.

Quiet can be found almost anywhere.

What makes a place sacred is presence.

The presence of God.

There are moments when I can sit quietly and feel no need to explain myself to Him. No carefully constructed prayer. No list of requests. No attempt to find the right words.

Just presence.

His and mine.

And somehow, in that stillness, things begin returning to their proper proportions.

The thing that seemed enormous becomes manageable.

The anger that followed me through the door begins to loosen its grip.

The grief is still grief, but I remember that I do not carry it alone.

The noise inside my head grows quieter.

My breathing slows.

My heart softens.

I am restored.

Not repaired as though I were a machine.

Not prepared to rush immediately into the next assignment.

Restored.

Returned to myself.

Returned to God.

Returned to the place inside me where fear does not have to speak the loudest and the troubles of the world are no longer permitted to occupy every room.

And eventually, I will cross the threshold again.

Sanctuary was never meant to become a hiding place.

There are still people to love.

There is still work worth doing.

There are still things that should anger us, suffering that should move us, injustice that should be confronted, and people who will need us to show up.

But perhaps we were never meant to meet all of that without somewhere to return.

Because if we remain exposed to the storm long enough without shelter, something inside us can begin to change.

Compassion can become exhaustion.

Conviction can become contempt.

Anger can become hatred.

And a heart that once cared deeply can slowly begin to grow cold.

Maybe sanctuary is one of the places where God prevents that from happening.

A place where I can bring Him what the world has done to me before I carry it back outside and do it to someone else.

A place where bitterness can be surrendered before it becomes part of my character.

A place where I can remember that strength does not require hardness.

A place where the soul can become quiet enough to hear again:

Be still.

Abide.

Trust.

Then, when the time comes, I can open the door.

The storm may still be there.

The world may still be loud.

Nothing outside may have changed at all.

But something inside has.

I can step back into the world without allowing the world to take possession of me.

And when I become tired again, when the noise becomes too loud, when my heart needs somewhere to rest, I know there is a place to return.

A chair.

A book.

A quiet room.

The sound of rain against the roof.

The presence of God.

Sanctuary.

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Explore more writing from Silent Sentinel →

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© SilentSentinel, 2026. All rights reserved. Excerpts may be shared with attribution.

Hi blog friends!

Hope this update finds you well. Let me know how you’re doing (or send me the link to your most recent video, blog post or other creation) via message, text or email. Link at the bottom of this post. Thanks to those who’ve reached out so far. It’s been good to hear from you and catch up. 🙌

Things are going as well as can be expected here. Either I’m having a lot of hot flashes or it’s still humid as all get out sometimes, but the rain and Santa Ana winds have arrived, so the temps are cooler and more enjoyable now.

Paul and I enjoyed Holy Moly Matrimony Celebration Day tacos on Monday, reflected on our now 14 years together, played the Flintstones (2:00) and Little River Band (4:00) anniversary songs and thanked each other for continuing to be each other’s wingman.

We also did a pleasantly sized load of loundry, and finally unboxed a new coffee maker that’s been sitting behind our front door for a year. Gosh. It sure is big. Seems bigger than the last 12 cup maker we bought a couple years ago. I asked Gemini AI if mine eyes were deceiving me and it said “No.” The size of coffee makers has indeed become just a little bigger over the last ten years or so. Thought about buying a Keurig next time but then saw this video (15:00) about how the company has gone about making the bulk of their money, and decided I’d be wise to investigate other options. If there’s a simple, versatile sweet little coffee maker you think I should check out, let me know. I’m a fan of quality craftsmanship and fair prices.

From our heart to yours – Cute Snail and I put together some fall themed coloring postcards. They’re cut and fold easy print PDF and 100% free to download if you’d like to check them out. They’re great for quiet coloring time, gifting, decorating or crafting.

❤️ Juliet

IMAGE ID: A collage picture of a warm creamy cup of coffee and some open Oreo cookies – filling side up!

Chapter 1: What You Leave Out When You Pray

The envelope is still on the dresser, half covered by a clean shirt. Inside is an invitation to a family gathering you do not know how to attend. You and someone you love have barely spoken in months. You have imagined walking through the door, what you might say, and whether they would look away. When you try to pray about it, you find yourself asking God to bless everybody and keep the peace. You leave out the sentence that embarrasses you: I want us to be close again, and I am afraid they do not want that anymore.

There is something in Bartimaeus calling out to Jesus for mercy that speaks to those prayers we quietly edit before God ever hears them spoken aloud. In Mark 10:46–52, Bartimaeus is a blind man begging near Jericho when Jesus passes by. He calls, “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.” Many tell him to be silent. He calls again. I cannot tell you what was going through his mind, because Scripture does not tell us. But I can say that he does not make his need smaller to keep the people around him comfortable.

I have been thinking about learning to pray when you are afraid of disappointment, especially the difference between being honest with God and expecting Him to give us everything we name. Those are not the same thing. Some of us have become so careful in prayer that we never say what is really hurting. We ask for strength because we are afraid to ask for relief. We ask for patience because we cannot bear to admit we want something to change. We may even feel guilty for wanting an answer after years of waiting.

What strikes me is that Bartimaeus begins by asking for mercy, not by trying to prove that he deserves attention. He does not offer a reason why his life should matter more than anybody else's. He simply directs his cry toward Jesus. I think that is a more honest beginning than many of the prayers I have tried to make sound respectable. If I am frightened, I can say I am frightened. If I want reconciliation, I can ask for it. If I do not know whether I can handle another disappointment, I can tell Him that too.

There is a difference, of course, between speaking honestly and insisting that God follow our plan. A damaged relationship may require an apology, time, or boundaries that we cannot control. A person we miss may not be ready to come back. Christian faith does not give us ownership over another person's heart. It does give us permission to bring our own heart before Christ without pretending it is already settled.

So perhaps the first step tonight is not deciding whether to attend the gathering or finding exactly the right words for a difficult conversation. Perhaps it is sitting with that envelope for one quiet minute and praying the sentence you have been leaving out. Bartimaeus could not see where the road would lead. Before anything changed, he let Jesus hear what he needed.

Chapter 2: When You Feel Like an Interruption

You have been staring at the landlord’s number for ten minutes. The rent will be late, and the thought of saying that out loud makes your stomach tighten. You have worked every shift offered to you. You have cut what you can. Still, the money does not stretch far enough. You could leave a message tonight, but you imagine the irritation in someone else’s voice and decide to put the phone down again. After a while, the fear of bothering another person becomes almost as heavy as the problem itself.

I wonder how many of us carry that fear into prayer. We do not say it plainly, but somewhere inside we have come to believe that our troubles are too repetitive, too ordinary, or too much for anyone to hear. We know there are people suffering more than we are, so we begin treating our own needs as though they should not take up any space. We may even imagine Jesus looking at us with the same impatience we have encountered in other people.

That is why the response to Bartimaeus matters so much. When he cries for mercy, many people tell him to be quiet. Then Jesus stops. Mark does not record an argument with the crowd or a speech about their behavior. He tells them to call the man. They turn toward Bartimaeus and say, “Be of good comfort, rise; he calleth thee” (Mark 10:49, KJV).

I picture how difficult it would be to trust those words after being told to stay silent, though Scripture does not tell us how Bartimaeus felt. The invitation did not come because he finally made his need sound acceptable. It came because Jesus chose to call him. That distinction is easy to lose when you have spent years judging yourself through the reactions of others.

There are people we should listen to, and there are responsibilities we should not avoid. If the rent is late, making the call matters. If we have hurt someone, taking responsibility matters. But none of those hard truths means we must approach God as though we are an inconvenience. We can be accountable for our choices and still be people who need mercy.

Bartimaeus rises and goes to Jesus before he receives his sight. I find that detail comforting because so much of life asks us to move while we are still uncertain. We take the next honest step without knowing how the whole situation will turn out. And in prayer, at least, we need not wait until we have become less needy before we come near.

Chapter 3: When the Answer Is Not the Whole Story

A woman comes home from physical therapy and sets her keys on the counter. She can walk farther than she could three months ago, but not as far as she once could. Everyone tells her to celebrate the progress, and she is grateful for it. Still, she misses the ordinary freedom of getting through a grocery store without watching for somewhere to sit. She wants to thank God without pretending she isn't disappointed.

Bartimaeus asked Jesus for his sight, and Jesus gave it to him. Mark says, “And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way” (Mark 10:52, KJV). We should not hurry past the miracle or explain it away. But I keep noticing those last words. The account doesn't end with Bartimaeus making a speech about what he has gained. It ends with him following Jesus.

It would be easy to make his story into a promise that if we pray boldly enough, we will get the outcome we want. That would be unfair to people who have prayed through illness, buried someone they loved, or watched a relationship end despite every effort to save it. Jesus' kindness is real even when our circumstances remain painful. Bartimaeus's healing tells us what Christ did for this man. It does not tell us that anyone left waiting has failed Him.

What we can carry from the roadside is the invitation to be honest and then keep walking with Jesus. Sometimes the next step is another therapy appointment. Sometimes it is accepting the help of a friend without apologizing for needing it. Sometimes it is learning to pray again after an answer you did not understand. None of those steps has to look impressive to matter.

I hope you will remember that Bartimaeus was heard before he was healed. His need did not make Jesus turn away, and neither does yours. Tell Him what you long for, even if you have whispered it a hundred times. Then, as best you can, stay near Him through what comes next. You do not have to edit your heart into something more acceptable before bringing it to Christ.

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

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

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: How to Look Expensive, Polished & Effortlessly Elegant—Without Designer Labels, Fashion Show Galore, Pain killers, Sticky Non-Stick Frying Pans, The Internet of Things and Make Sure You Don't Lose Your Password, and People Social Eatery

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How to Look Expensive, Polished & Effortlessly Elegant—Without Designer Labels. Dear Accra corporate girl, luxury is not always about the logo on your handbag or the price tag on your blazer. Sometimes, the most expensive looking woman in the office is the one wearing a perfectly tailored pair of trousers, a crisp shirt, and enough confidence to make everyone wonder, “Where does she shop?” Welcome to the world of quiet luxury—Accra office edition. Tailoring Is Your Best Investment: You don't need a wardrobe full of designer clothes. What you need is clothing that fits beautifully. A well-fitted blazer, tailored trousers, or a structured dress will instantly make your outfit look more luxurious. Avoid pieces that are too tight, too loose, or awkwardly proportioned. The secret? Sometimes, a simple trip to your tailor can make an affordable outfit look like it belongs on a luxury runway. Keep Accessories Elegant, Not Excessive: Quiet luxury doesn't need everything to scream for attention. Choose one or two beautiful accessories: a classic watch, delicate jewellery, a structured handbag, or elegant shoes. Remember, the goal is not: “Can everyone see my accessories?” The goal is: “Why does she always look so polished?” Your Shoes Can Make—or Break—the Look: You could be wearing the most beautiful outfit, but tired-looking shoes can change the entire story. Invest in versatile styles such as: – Classic pumps – Elegant loafers – Minimal sandals – Pointed flats – Clean, sophisticated heels And please, Accra corporate girl: keep them clean. Luxury is often in the details. So the next time you walk into that Accra office, remember: You don't need a designer logo to look expensive. You just need good style, great tailoring, and the confidence of a woman who knows exactly who she is. That is the Accra Corporate Girl luxury aesthetic. Fashion Show Galore. It seems we are in line with what is happening in the world. In quick succession we had the New York, London, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks. And in Ghana, we had the Ghana Garden and Flower show, which took place at the Efua Sutherland Children's Park, and last weekend the HnM Fashion Show at the National Theatre and on the same day the Style Runway FW26, and then Glitz and RodR (Rhythms on Da Runway), and the Ghana Fashion Week coming up, and Black Star Fashion Week in the making. Is there money to be made there? Is this the latest fashion fad, to organize fashion shows called fashion weeks? As a designer, what should I do? Apply for all? And pay for all? These things don't come cheap if you add all the expenses involved: making the collection, paying your fee to the show organizer, (ranging from 3000 to 8000 GHC) transporting your stuff to a fitting session and back, transporting it to the show, getting a stylist to make it look good, taking it back, and sending it all to the dry cleaner to remove makeup and sweat. Say somewhere between 5,000 and 13,000 GHC. And what do you get? A bit of publicity. Any sales? Any foreign buyers giving you contracts for 500 pieces of this and 500 pieces of that? Hmm.

Pain killers. What Is Pain? Mostly, it’s a signal that something somewhere in your body is wrong. So, to get rid of that pain, you take a painkiller. Problem solved? No, problem suppressed, not solved. The same thing is still wrong with you. Now, if you take a painkiller once a month or so I don’t want to argue much, but if you take painkillers daily, then you are not on the right track. And many are not on the right track. Try to find out what creates the pain, and rather try to solve that problem than taking the pain away without knowing what’s wrong with you. And as you take more pills, you will need more pills. Your body gets used to them, the same as when using narcotics. Eventually, you get into the overdose mode. Brrrr.

Sticky Non-Stick Frying Pans. The famous one is the French Tefal, and that contains so-called forever chemicals, which everyone is currently agitating against. They cause cancer, hormonal disruption and other health problems and don’t break down, hence the name forever chemicals, also called PFAS. So Tefal came up with a big campaign: “Now we are healthy.” But currently, they got attacked by three groups, the ClientEarth (an environmental law organization), Generations Futures (a French environmental organization) and Notre Affaire à Tous (a French environmental justice organization) who claim Tefal is still using the poison. So they’ll probably stop using it and close the factory? Of course not. Keep the show going. Africa also needs non-stick frying pans. So be aware. Stainless steel or cast iron is a better option. The good news is that the FDA recently destroyed a container with dangerous nappies. Let’s hope they get their act together and also look at cooking pans and makeup.

The Internet of Things and Make Sure You Don't Lose Your Password. And how secure is that? My computer friend, one of those geeks who seems to be married to the screen, pizza and beefburgers, says nothing is secure. Imagine a lock on your room door. You have the key. But things get missing. Either someone has a spare key or came in through the window, or removed the entire door, or came in through the ceiling. It’s a bit like that with computer security. And then we read that a 15-year-old boy hacked the USA Ministry of Defense system. 15-year-old boy hacked the USA Ministry of Defense system In Sweden, they tried to introduce a cashless society, so everything went through the internet. Now they don't trust that anymore and ask everybody to keep a reasonable amount of cash at home. This morning, I read that hackers got into the cooling systems in supermarkets (I never knew they were connected through the internet), and thousands of tons of refrigerated food have to be thrown away. Who thinks this is funny? But I think maybe someone is testing. Like you design a weapon and then quietly test it somewhere. The next war will probably be fought by shutting down each other's internet. And drones, which use computers to hit the target. So don't rely too much on all of this. Have two bank cards from different banks and have some cash in the house, spread your savings over several banks, and have two mobile numbers from different operators. Paranoia? Maybe.

People Social Eatery. We went to Orca at Spintex to buy a few things for the new bathroom, but were disappointed and walked out with nothing. To make up for it, we went to the People Social Eatery next door and had a honey nut granola banana at 110 GHC, which was nice, and orange juice at 50 GHC, and a double espresso at 55 GHC, which was small and came without sugar, though on request it was brought. Our 5 GHC change was taken and not brought back, and the waiter had disappeared.

Lydia...

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

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

Elles reviennent, comme si elles faisaient partie de la nature des choses (en tout cas chez ma personne).

En y prêtant attention, je remarque qu’elles apparaissent lorsque mon travail mental n’est pas clair. Je veux faire quelque chose, j’avance, je tâtonne, je recule, j’avance...

Ce cycle crée une sorte de brouillard qui m’alourdît et m’épuise.

C’est peut-être une piste : éclaircir de manière très précise ce que j’ai à faire avant de le faire.

Rien que de l’écrire me procure une certaine satisfaction.

Alors bien sûr, le chaos est inévitable. Mais si je peux le dissiper ne serait ce qu’un peu, je pense en ressortir gagnant.

The Essay

This is a space for a single piece of work. One inquiry, given room to breathe.

A new essay will appear here on the first Sunday of every second month. The inaugural piece will publish on Sunday, 6 December 2026, at 08:00 AM.

If you wish to be present when the text changes, you can subscribe below to receive each new essay directly in your inbox.

Yeah, the wind down here in San Antonio is absolutely fierce today! Weather forecast is predicting 50 mph gusts all day long! The wind got me out of bed early this morning, banging things around on the front porch.

Much cooler temps. and lower humidity is welcome. But this wind is absolutely nuts!

And the adventure continues.

”Dino’s Stash” Now complete, in repository, art, lyrics, alternate mixes, credits included!

I worked on this song and just put it in the repository. I hope you check it out. I am very proud of it. While you are there, I included art, credits, lyrics, alternate mixing, and even a compressed version if you just need the download of the mp3. Something for lots of kinds of music fans. The folks who work with me to make music are stellar personalities and kind friends. They also play! They also write for the magazine! I have always wanted to be in a kind of “club.” This music/magazine gig feels like a good form of that. Beats nazis.

The crew is in the folder too, but I wanted to list them here. I love working with these people.

Keri – words, narration,

Kelly – bass, keyboards, words, narration, mixing

Marc Schuster – drums

John Gilbert from Voodoo Planet – guitars

Bkbirge – mastering

Dino DiMuro – sound effects

Chris Triggs – Single art and loads of art for the magazine

*All these folks have also written in The Horse’s Mouth Magazine.

Is software shitty, just me?

I have been transitioning my software brands and requirements. I’ll continue to do so until computing is better or gone entirely. I will not settle for what Apple seems so confident I will settle for in the software or OS department. Some of the design is careless and lazy. It really holds me up. I download things, but I can’t find them. I often can’t tell if the computer registered my click from a mouse, or if it is working. This is because there’s no onscreen indicator anymore to inform me it is working. Hourglass, anyone? What kills me in creative states more than anything is needlessly losing work. This has happened more frequently. I now save both incoming and outgoing projects locally, and in two online storages. I have to. There’s a good chance I will lose it otherwise. It wouldn’t be my fault. Shit just disappears now…like on the norm.

Losing 30 minutes of creative improv writing or music is crushing. It is a sinking feeling of defeat. I won’t ever remember it and pull it off. I don’t have that kind of memory. I might get close, but I get so bummed I lost that session or a few pages, that is all I can think about. I don’t think there’s any excuse for a software developer to release updates or “improvements” that cost me time and sadness. I was talking about this with a friend; he said, “Have you heard of ‘enshittification’?” I had heard it. But I did not realize how well thought out and absolutely spot on it is. I just thought it was something folks said on the web.

Asking google about a word I learned and it’s correlations to indie music..

Enshittification, Cory Doctorow, fun reading.

I asked Google, “Please list ways I’d come into enshittification making an indie rock song.” If you don’t know the word and Cory Doctorow, who invented it, the book is cheap. I tried to link one, but obviously that isn’t going to work right now. Google AI has read it; try and keep up.

“But things are supposed to change..”

Things change over time. I hope. Technology makes things easier and kind of fun. It is also good for business. Ideally, we are able to provide a better life for future generations, but we are very out of practice at doing that. It is almost as if generational trauma is playing out some new undiscovered territory en masse. The ripples of bullshit that flow in the bloodlines of our family trees have reached an all-new peak involving brands, beliefs, and yes, enshittification. This is not the change we hope for, or at least I hope for. But it is the change we get.

My understanding of terms changes over time, that’s an okay change.

I am just learning this term, so my take now may be different or expanded in a few months. But at this point, I feel good about where my brain is at regarding computer usage, making music, and writing lyrics. I haven’t reached nirvana or anything. But I certainly feel on the right track, leaving Apple’s ecosystem. It sucks. I can’t help it. I wish it didn’t. But I am trying to do artwork and protest work, and it seems firmly against that lately. I get over-corrected to a criminal level. I dread having to use the iPad. I just loathe everything about it except the TAPE 16 DAW Beta. haha.

I messed up, learned a thing. I had to admit messing up to learn it. Why I am cooler than software devs.

I messed up my first mix of this tune and sent it out prematurely, not checking it like I should have. Maybe these software devs are like me. Maybe they feel pressure and excitement and they press send too soon. But I doubt it. They want money. I am not after that with any of this crap I do. I think chasing that with my artistic abilities creates, yes, enshittification. See, I always want to be interested in what I do, so I leave the money out of it. Otherwise, I am just interested in making money. I think that’s boring when I spot that in others, so I try to avoid it. I would much rather be broke than boring. So of course, I am a musician, not a developer. Glad for that.

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

27 companies raised billion-dollar-plus rounds last quarter, so I now check how many companies got funded before I check how much money moved.

Every few months, the new startup funding numbers come out, and a few founders forward me the headline. Some messages say “great time to raise.” Others ask if the market is drying up. Either way, the headline is usually one big total.

My name is Alexander Kopylkov, and I have invested in startups for more than twenty years. Over time, I learned to scroll past that total. The figure I look for first is smaller and far more useful: how many companies actually got money.

A record total mostly measures the biggest checks.

Here is the latest example. Crunchbase reports: “Global venture funding totaled $159 billion in Q3 2026 with close to 6,000 startups funded, Crunchbase data shows.” That sounds like money for everyone.

Then you read further. “A notable shift in 2026 has been the number of startups that have raised billion-dollar-plus rounds. An all-time record of 27 companies raised such sizable rounds in Q3 2026”. And: “Around a third of all global venture capital raised in Q3 went to those 27 companies.”

Picture a small town where a billionaire moves in. The town's average income jumps overnight. Nobody else got a raise. A funding total works the same way. Crunchbase says as much about this year: “In the two prior quarters, billion-dollar raises pushed total funding to well above historical norms.”

It works in reverse too. “While global venture funding in Q3 was down 25% quarter over quarter from the $212 billion raised in Q2, it was up 53% year over year from the $104 billion raised in Q3 2025.” A separate Crunchbase analysis explains the dip: “overall venture funding declined with the absence of new record megarounds for AI leaders.” In plain words, the total fell because the biggest deals were missing.

The number that matters to most founders barely moved.

If you are raising a first or second round, your real question is simple. Are investors at my stage still writing checks? To answer it, I count deals.

The same quarter that looked weaker in dollars looked steady in activity. Crunchbase found that “Active startup investors largely kept up or increased their dealmaking pace in the third quarter”. It adds: “Per Crunchbase data, a majority of the most active venture investors in Q3 participated in more deals compared to the prior quarter.” At the earliest stage, “the busiest by far was Y Combinator, which participated in at least 221 known seed rounds this past quarter, per Crunchbase data.”

Europe gives a smaller, honest picture. Crunchbase reports: “Europe’s seed funding fell quarter over quarter and was flat year over year. Around $2 billion was invested in more than 750 companies at seed stage in Q3.” By my own math, that is under $3 million per company on average. Those are the deals most founders actually compete for, and there were hundreds of them.

Early numbers undercount the smallest rounds.

There is a second reason I am careful with the first headline of each quarter. Crunchbase says it plainly in its own notes: “Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.” The global report also states: “Data is as of Oct. 2, 2026.” That is two days after the quarter ended.

So the first look at any quarter shows the giant rounds clearly and the small ones only partly. Even the seed figure gets stretched by a few huge deals: “Global seed funding totaled $13 billion in Q3, Crunchbase data shows. Of that, $2.6 billion went to seed rounds of $100 million and over, around 20% of seed financings.”

For a founder, the lesson is practical. Wait for the fuller data before reading anything into a quarter. Then give more weight to what investors at your stage tell you directly.

My rule is to count the rounds first.

Every cycle I have watched, slow years and boom years alike, produced headlines about totals. The founders who raised well watched something else: how many investors at their stage were active, and whether their own business got stronger each month.

That still holds in 2026. The $159 billion is real, and it shows where the biggest bets are going. The count of companies funded shows whether there is a seat at the table for you. So when a founder forwards me the next big headline, I will ask my usual question. How many companies got funded, and what do they have in common with yours?

First published in 2007, this article was explosive when it was first distributed. Read on to see why…

This edition of The Doctor’s Notes is about the relativistic effects of quantum levels, and how potential energy is extremely important to each individual, and those around them.

All of an individual’s psychic quantum energy levels are very tightly interconnected, but are also connected to those around them. The varying levels of potential energy that each individual maintains has a relativistic effect on the quantum levels of those and other individuals, leading to perception and behavioral changes.

The Couple Effect

The quantum levels of an individual’s psychic energy are interrelated, or coupled, to one another. Jackson, Lassiter and Jackson (1972) building on work by Johnson and Defrees (1932), determined that these different quantum levels or states, correspond to the varying moods in individuals.

The quantum levels of an individual’s psychic energy are interrelated, or coupled, to one another.

Through research by engenetics^.org, it was later found that quantum levels are also affected by the quantum levels of other individuals. The coupling of quantum levels of an individual and those around them can directly influence each of the individual’s potential energy level.

What is less well known is the reverse: the potential energy of an individual can affect the quantum levels of those around them. The exact mechanics of this influence is extremely complex, requiring higher order mathematics to accurately model.

The main reason these couplings are difficult to model is that these interrelated systems can be perturbed by quantum entanglements. The energy that is lost from the individual that is channeled into these entanglements leads to results that are very difficult to predict.

Changes in Potential Energy, Changes in Behavior

Another fact that was determined by Barnaby (1983) is that these differences in potential energy of individuals—particularly in social situations—can lead to changes in behavioral patterns. These changes in behavior are caused by subtle alterations in perception by the individuals affected.

...the relationship between these changes and the differences in quantum levels is related to the square of the difference of maximum quantum energy levels.

The greater the difference in maximum quantum energy (and therefore potential energy), the greater the perception and behavioral changes. In fact, based on research performed at The Center for engenetics ^.org Studies, the relationship between these changes and the differences in quantum levels is related to the square of the difference of maximum quantum energy levels.

When larger differences in potential energy exist between individuals, perceptional shifts occur that lead to feelings of jealousy or the loss of self-worth; conversely, they can also lead to feelings of superiority and arrogance in others. Other situational effects can cause feelings of confusion and disorientation, depending on the individual’s maximum quantum energy level.

Support Our Research

Still, while great strides have been made in determining these relationships and refining the models of quantum energy levels, we have a long way to go. Research operations are costly, and there is so much to do.

If you wish to help support this research, please contact your local engenetics ^.org representative today. Remember: to improve all of humanity, only you can help make the future a reality—today. Ω

Dr. M. E. Tabyánan Executive Director and Founder The Center for engenetics ^.org Studies

“According to the proven fields of thermodynamics and physics, the arrow of time dictates that energy flowing from a current state must be transferred to a future state, and not the reverse.” Why Entropic Resonances Require Study (2012)

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Ask The Doctor!

Question: How does the collective unconscious fit in with engenetics^.org? —Eddie Long, Seattle WA The Doctor: The work we do at the Center is critical for understanding the entropic energy collective, which is the real phenomenon that can mistakenly be called the collective unconscious. At engenetics ^.org, skills are learned to allow the individual to tap into these energies, for personal use and higher education through the information learned from the collective. In a nutshell, engenetics ^.org is truly the basic fundamental source of scientific knowledge about such global phenomena.

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What Others Are Saying

My quantum entanglements seemed to be destroying my marriage. The Doctor helped me get them sorted out—and now my husband and I are really happy! —Sara Baxley, New York, NY, USA

Doctor Tabyánan, you should run for president! —Victor Morrison, Miami, FL, USA

Even though a number of engenetics.org places have closed across the world, I still believe in the Center—and the Doctor! —Jeremy Raya, Oklahoma City, OK, USA

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#thedoctorsnotes #potentialenergy #quantumlevels #quantumentanglements #entropicresonances

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On the opening page of essayism.org I wrote What if the essay were never merely a text? 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, 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 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