There is a question that almost nobody pauses long enough to ask, yet it may be one of the most important questions a human soul will ever consider: if you could save just one life, what would it truly mean? Most people live their entire lives never fully realizing that God has placed inside them a quiet, holy power that can change eternity for someone else. We are surrounded by noise, busyness, pressure, and distraction, and in all the movement we forget that the smallest gesture in the right moment can alter the direction of a person’s story. It does not require a spotlight. It does not demand a title. It asks only for a heart willing to be interrupted, a heart willing to see another human being with tenderness, a heart willing to extend grace in moments when the world looks away. And because God built people with eternal souls, because He wove His own breath into humanity, every moment of compassion becomes far more than an act of kindness. It becomes a thread woven directly into someone else’s destiny. It becomes something Heaven records. It becomes something God uses in ways you may never see with your earthly eyes. That is why the idea of saving just one life becomes so staggering in its significance, because it reminds us that no act of mercy is wasted, no word of encouragement is too small, and no prayer whispered in faith goes unheard.

When Jesus told the story of leaving the ninety-nine to go after the one, He revealed something about the Father’s heart that should reshape how we live every day of our lives. He was not simply teaching a parable about wandering sheep; He was unveiling how deeply God values individuals that the world often forgets. The ninety-nine represented security, predictability, and the comfort of staying with the majority, but Jesus was never drawn to the majority. He was drawn to the one who felt lost, overlooked, or beyond reach. He was moved by the one who wondered if they mattered. And that truth becomes a mirror for every believer who wonders if their smallest acts of kindness hold any weight. The moment you choose compassion, you reflect the heart of the Shepherd. The moment you bless someone in silence, without recognition, you participate in a rescue mission that Heaven takes seriously. This is not about trying to be a hero or trying to impress God; it is about learning to listen to the quiet tug in your spirit that says, “Stop. See them. Speak life. Lift them up.” For in that moment you step into the same divine rhythm that moved Jesus toward broken hearts and weary souls.

The idea that you could save a life sounds dramatic, almost too large, almost too heavy to imagine. Yet the truth is that God rarely asks us to perform grand acts. Instead, He places us in situations where the simplest words can be the difference between collapse and hope, where the smallest kindness can pull someone back from emotional or spiritual darkness, where the decision to pray for someone becomes a turning point they will remember for the rest of their lives. Many people assume their ministry must be enormous to matter, but Scripture teaches the opposite. The kingdom of God is often built one conversation at a time, one moment of compassion at a time, one act of obedience at a time. And when James wrote that whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover a multitude of sins, he wasn’t writing theory. He was describing the eternal ripple effect of one willing heart. Think about that for a moment. Entire generations can shift because one person extended grace at precisely the right moment. Entire family lines can be restored because one believer cared enough to reach out. Entire destinies can be rewritten because one soul refused to give up on someone others dismissed.

There are people walking through this world right now who appear strong on the outside but are fighting for their life on the inside. Some are one conversation away from giving up. Some are one expression of kindness away from believing they still matter. Some are one prayer away from feeling God again. And God, in His unseen orchestration, often places you directly in their path, not because you are perfect, but because you are willing. You have no idea how many divine appointments you have already stepped into without recognizing them. The day you smiled at someone who was breaking. The moment you encouraged someone who had no strength left. The time you prayed quietly for a person you hardly knew. The small gesture you made without thinking, which may have been the very thing that kept someone from a terrible decision. We underestimate how fragile the human heart can become when life presses hard, and we underestimate how powerful the human heart becomes when God moves through it. To save one life is not simply a dramatic rescue; sometimes it is simply being present, being real, being loving at the exact time someone needs it most.

If you could see into the spiritual realm for even a moment, you would be astonished at how closely Heaven pays attention to these seemingly small interactions. Angels celebrate when one wandering life turns back toward God. Heaven rejoices when a discouraged believer is lifted up. God marks every moment when His children choose love instead of indifference. We often think of spiritual warfare as massive, cosmic battles, but in reality, many of the greatest victories are won in quiet, daily acts of faithfulness. Every time you speak hope into someone who is drowning in despair, you push back darkness. Every time you forgive when bitterness would have felt easier, you set a soul free. Every time you notice a person the world ignores, you mirror the heart of Christ. Scripture is filled with monumental moments that began with something small: a boy offering five loaves and two fish, a widow dropping two mites into the offering, a young man running to tell others what he had seen, a woman reaching out to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. God does not measure the size of the moment; He measures the willingness of the heart behind it.

To save just one life is to step into the mystery of divine partnership. God could do everything without us, yet He invites us to participate in His redemptive work because love grows inside us when we serve others. Compassion expands the soul. Mercy strengthens the spirit. Kindness opens doors that sermons never could. When you speak life into someone who has forgotten how to breathe, you become part of God’s healing movement in the world. And often the people who make the greatest difference are the ones who never realize how much they have done. They simply showed up. They simply cared. They simply listened. They simply followed the quiet prompting in their heart. When you realize that you do not need to be extraordinary to change eternity, you become free to live a life that touches others in profound and lasting ways. It is not about being perfect. It is about being authentic. It is not about being strong. It is about being available.

There is a kind of holiness in the unnoticed moments, the ones nobody applauds, the ones that will never make it into a book or a sermon. These moments reveal the true character of your heart, and they reveal the true nature of God working inside you. When you encourage someone who has lost their way, you are not only giving them hope; you are reminding them that God has not forgotten them. When you pray for someone who feels invisible, you are wrapping them in a spiritual covering they may never know existed. When you take the time to see someone deeply, beyond their exterior, beyond their failures, beyond their mistakes, you imitate the God who sees past every surface and looks directly into the soul. And in those sacred interactions, something eternal is exchanged. You pour love into someone, and God pours love into you. You lift someone up, and God lifts you up. You become a vessel of His heart in a world that desperately needs light.

To save just one life is not merely to rescue someone from physical harm, though that, too, is sacred. It is to awaken a heart that was drifting. It is to breathe hope into someone drowning in sorrow. It is to remind a person who feels forgotten that God still knows their name. Many people think spiritual influence requires a stage or a microphone, but the truth is that some of the most powerful ministry in the world happens in quiet corners, whispered conversations, unexpected hugs, or moments when someone simply says, “I’m here, and you matter.” God has always worked through ordinary people doing ordinary things with extraordinary love. And when you realize that your smallest acts might be holding up someone else’s story, it changes how you move through the world. You begin to pay attention. You begin to listen more deeply. You begin to look for the one instead of staying comfortable with the ninety-nine.

When you begin to move through the world with an awareness that God may place someone in your path who needs exactly what you carry, you stop treating encounters as accidents. You stop seeing interruptions as inconveniences. You stop assuming people will be fine without you. Instead, your heart becomes attentive, sensitive, and willing, because you recognize that God orchestrates moments long before you ever step into them. The person sitting quietly at the edge of the room may be fighting a battle you cannot see. The friend who seems a little more distant this week may be desperately waiting for someone to notice. The stranger who crosses your path may be at a crossroads where a single word of kindness could shift their direction. When you understand this, you begin to look into people instead of just looking at them. You begin to listen beyond their words. You begin to care with a depth that only comes from knowing God has entrusted you with something sacred. And every time you choose to act on that holy awareness, a life bends closer toward hope, often without you ever realizing your impact.

The extraordinary thing about saving just one life is that the person you reach today may become the person who reaches someone else tomorrow. Hope multiplies. Healing ripples outward. Encouragement echoes into future generations. You never know if the teenager you speak life into becomes the adult who chooses faith instead of self-destruction. You never know if the lonely neighbor you comfort becomes the person who later comforts someone else at their lowest point. You never know if the person you pray for becomes the one who leads their family to God years from now. This is the miracle of the one. A single heart lifted up can lift many. A single life restored can restore others. A single moment of compassion can spark a chain of redemption that travels farther than your eyes can see. This is why Heaven pays such close attention to the smallest acts of mercy. They are seeds. And seeds, once planted, grow into things far larger than their beginnings.

Many believers underestimate their influence because the enemy works tirelessly to convince them they are insignificant. He whispers that their words don’t matter, that their kindness changes nothing, that their prayers fall unheard. But the enemy’s greatest fear is a believer who understands their true impact. Because the moment you realize that you carry the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead, the moment you realize that your voice carries the power of life and death, the moment you realize that your compassion can pull someone out of despair, the moment you realize that God sends you into people’s lives as a living reminder of His love, your entire posture toward the world changes. You stop shrinking back. You stop doubting yourself. You stop believing the lie that you have nothing to offer. Instead, you begin waking up each day with a sense of holy purpose, knowing that God may use you at any moment to alter the course of someone’s eternity.

There are people whose entire spiritual journey began because someone stepped into their life at precisely the right time. There are testimonies shaped by chance conversations that were never really chance at all. There are stories transformed because one believer chose to be present, to be compassionate, to be willing. It is easy to romanticize ministry as something huge, sweeping, and dramatic, but the real work of God almost always begins with one heart touching another. Think of how many times Jesus stopped for individuals: the woman at the well, the blind man calling out from the roadside, the leper who dared to approach Him, the woman caught in adultery, the paralyzed man lowered through the roof. Each of these encounters changed a life, and in many cases, changed entire communities through them. Jesus did not rush past people to get to the crowd. He allowed the one to slow Him down, guide His steps, and shape His journey. His example becomes our invitation: slow down enough to see the person in front of you, because the one standing before you may be the very soul God sent you to reach.

To save just one life does not mean you must know exactly what to do or what to say. Most of the time, people don’t need perfect words—they need real presence. They need someone who sees them, hears them, and refuses to walk away when things get complicated. They need someone who is not afraid of their feelings or their brokenness. They need someone who reminds them that their worth does not evaporate in difficult seasons. They need someone who prays for them not because they are a project, but because they are precious. And when you offer that kind of presence, you become a living expression of God’s love, the kind of love that reaches into dark places and pulls people back into the light.

At the end of your life, God will not measure your success by accomplishments, followers, achievements, or recognition. He will measure how you loved. He will measure the times you chose mercy over judgment. He will measure the times you said yes to His quiet nudges. He will measure the moments when you stepped into someone’s story and refused to let their pain go unnoticed. And in the vastness of eternity, the lives you helped lift, the souls you helped strengthen, the hearts you helped restore will stand as testimonies to the power of one willing heart. You may never know on earth how many lives you touched, how many people you saved from despair, or how many stories God rewrote because of your obedience. But Heaven knows. Heaven keeps record. Heaven celebrates each moment you chose love.

If you could save just one life, what would it mean? It would mean everything. It would mean that you allowed God to work through your hands, your words, your prayers, and your presence. It would mean that you stepped into the eternal significance of being a vessel of His compassion. It would mean that you lived in alignment with the heart of Jesus, who crossed galaxies of glory to save not just crowds, but individuals—one by one, heart by heart, soul by soul. And the truth is, you will save more than one. As long as you keep moving through this world with a heart that listens, with a spirit that obeys, and with eyes that notice the invisible, you will change far more lives than you realize. You will bend the world toward hope. You will become a resting place for weary souls. You will become a lantern for those walking through darkness. And God will weave your everyday moments into a tapestry of eternal difference.

You do not have to be a preacher, a missionary, or a hero to make an impact. You simply have to be willing. Willing to love. Willing to notice. Willing to speak. Willing to pray. Willing to step into divine appointments that look ordinary on the outside but shake heaven on the inside. And when your life finally stands before God, you will see the faces of those who made it home because somewhere along their journey, your heart said yes. That is the power of saving just one life. That is the miracle of a willing soul. And that is the legacy God is inviting you to step into every single day.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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On 2 November 2023, a dead man released a new song. John Lennon, murdered outside his Manhattan apartment building in December 1980, sang lead vocals on “Now and Then,” the final Beatles single, almost 43 years after his killing. His voice was not synthesised, not cloned, not approximated by an algorithm trained on his catalogue. It was his actual voice, recorded on a cheap cassette player at the Dakota building sometime around 1977, rescued from decades of technical oblivion by machine learning software that could do what no human engineer had managed in nearly three decades of trying: separate his singing from the piano bleeding through beneath it.

The technology that made this possible, a neural network called MAL (a double homage to the HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Beatles' road manager Mal Evans), was developed by Peter Jackson's WingNut Films during the production of the documentary series Get Back. Its purpose was straightforward if technically extraordinary. MAL could be taught to recognise individual sound sources within a mono recording and then isolate them, pulling apart instruments and voices that had been fused together on a single track. As Giles Martin, the song's co-producer and son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin, explained to Variety: “Essentially, what the machine learning does is it recognises someone's voice. So if you and I have a conversation and we're in a crowded room and there's a piano playing in the background, we can teach the AI what the sound of your voice, the sound of my voice, and it can extract those voices.”

That technical feat unlocked something that had been attempted and abandoned twice before. It also raised a question that reverberates far beyond a single pop song, however beloved: when artificial intelligence enables the completion of an artist's unfinished work decades after their death, what kind of creative act is that, exactly? And once the precedent has been set, with a Grammy Award as validation, who gets to decide which ghosts sing next?

A Cassette Labelled “For Paul”

The story of “Now and Then” begins with grief and a cassette tape. In January 1994, Paul McCartney approached Yoko Ono, believing she might have some of Lennon's unused recordings. Ono gave McCartney three cassettes from Lennon's so-called retirement period in the late 1970s, when he had stepped back from public life to raise his son Sean at the Dakota. One cassette bore the words “For Paul” in Lennon's own handwriting. It contained rough piano-and-vocal demos of four songs: “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love,” “Grow Old with Me,” and “Now and Then.”

The first two songs became reunion singles during the Beatles' Anthology project in 1995 and 1996, produced by Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra. Both reached the charts. Both featured new instrumental contributions from McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr layered around Lennon's demos. “Now and Then” was supposed to be the third.

On 20 and 21 March 1995, the three surviving Beatles gathered in the studio to work on it. The session did not go well. A persistent 60-cycle mains hum saturated the recording. Lennon's voice and piano were locked together on the same track, meaning any attempt to raise the vocal also raised the piano. The noise reduction software available at the time, a Pro Tools plugin called DINR, could not adequately clean the tape. Jeff Lynne spent two weeks trying at his home studio. The results were unsatisfying. “It was one day, one afternoon, really, messing with it,” Lynne later explained. “The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn't finish.”

There was also the matter of George Harrison's opinion. McCartney later recalled that Harrison had dismissed the song as “fucking rubbish,” though Harrison's widow, Olivia, offered a gentler interpretation before the song's eventual release. “Back in 1995, after several days in the studio working on the track, George felt the technical issues with the demo were insurmountable and concluded that it was not possible to finish the track to a high enough standard,” she said. “If he were here today, Dhani and I know he would have whole-heartedly joined Paul and Ringo in completing the recording of 'Now and Then.'”

Harrison died in November 2001. The song sat on a shelf for another two decades.

The Machine That Heard What Humans Could Not

The breakthrough arrived from an unexpected direction. During the production of Get Back, Peter Jackson's team confronted a similar audio problem at massive scale: 60 hours of footage from the Beatles' January 1969 recording sessions, much of it captured by a single microphone that had picked up instruments, voices, and ambient noise in an undifferentiated jumble. The documentary would have been impossible without a way to separate those sounds.

Jackson's team, working with dialogue editor Emile de la Rey and machine learning researcher Paris Smaragdis at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, built MAL from scratch. They scoured academic papers on audio source separation, determined that existing research was insufficient for their purposes, and created their own training data at a quality level that surpassed what had been used in prior academic experiments. The neural network was fed isolated recordings of individual Beatles instruments and voices, learning the spectral signature of each until it could reliably distinguish John from Paul, guitar from bass, drums from background chatter.

As Jackson described the process: “We developed a machine learning system that we taught what a guitar sounds like, what a bass sounds like, what a voice sounds like. In fact we taught the computer what John sounds like and what Paul sounds like. So we can take these mono tracks and split up all the instruments.”

When McCartney saw what MAL could do for the documentary, the connection was immediate. If the software could untangle the sonic chaos of the Twickenham sessions, perhaps it could also rescue Lennon's vocal from that stubborn cassette. It could. Within seconds, according to McCartney, the machine stripped away the piano and the hum, leaving Lennon's voice isolated and clear. “They said this is the sound of John's voice,” McCartney recalled. “A few seconds later and there it was, John's voice, crystal clear. It was quite emotional.”

Giles Martin was emphatic about what had and had not happened. “AI is not creating John's voice,” he told MusicRadar. “John's voice existed on that cassette and we made the song around him.” The distinction matters enormously. No synthetic voice was generated. No words were invented. No performance was fabricated. The technology's role was purely subtractive: removing what obscured a real human performance so that it could finally be heard.

Building Around a Ghost

With Lennon's vocal isolated, the completion of “Now and Then” became a conventional, if emotionally charged, production exercise. McCartney recorded new bass, a slide guitar solo in the style of Harrison as a tribute, electric harpsichord, backing vocals, and piano that echoed the feel of Lennon's original demo. Starr laid down a finalised drum track and added backing vocals. Harrison's guitar parts, both acoustic and electric, recorded during the abandoned 1995 sessions, were extracted and incorporated.

Rather than use AI to recreate the Beatles' signature vocal harmonies, Martin took a more analogue approach. He pulled actual Beatles vocal recordings from existing multitrack tapes of songs like “Eleanor Rigby,” “Because,” and “Here, There and Everywhere,” and wove them into the arrangement. “I'm not using AI to recreate their voices in any way,” Martin told interviewers. “I'm literally taking the multitrack tapes.” He added, with characteristic directness: “It might have been easier if I used AI, but I didn't.”

A string arrangement written by McCartney, Martin, and Ben Foster was recorded at Capitol Studios. The result was a song that featured all four Beatles: Lennon's 1977 vocal, Harrison's 1995 guitar, and McCartney and Starr's 2022 contributions, a creative object spanning 45 years of performances by musicians who were never all in the same room for this particular song and two of whom were dead by the time it was finished.

Validation and the Weight of a Grammy

The commercial and institutional response was striking. “Now and Then” debuted on the UK Singles Chart on 3 November 2023 and reached number one the following week, becoming the Beatles' 18th UK number one and their first in 54 years, since “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in 1969. It set the record for the longest gap between number one singles by any musical act. At the ages of 81 and 83 respectively, McCartney and Starr became members of the oldest band to claim a UK number one single. The single was the fastest-selling vinyl release of the century in the UK, with 19,400 copies sold on vinyl alone, and accumulated 5.03 million streams in its first week, the most ever for a Beatles track.

Then came the Grammy. On 2 February 2025, “Now and Then” won Best Rock Performance at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards, beating out songs by Pearl Jam, IDLES, the Black Keys, St. Vincent, and Green Day. It was the Beatles' first Grammy win since 1997, when they had won for “Free as a Bird,” itself a posthumously completed Lennon demo. It was also, historically, the first AI-assisted track to win a Grammy Award.

Neither McCartney nor Starr attended the ceremony. Sean Ono Lennon, John's son with Yoko Ono, accepted the award. “Since no one is coming up to take this award, I figured I'd come and sit in,” he said. “I really didn't expect to be accepting this award on behalf of my father's group, the Beatles.”

The Grammy matters not merely as an honour but as a legitimising act. The Recording Academy, by bestowing its most prestigious recognition on a track that could not have existed without machine learning, effectively declared that this kind of creative act falls within the boundaries of what the music industry considers real, valid, and worthy of its highest prizes. That declaration will be difficult to walk back.

A New Category, or an Old Power Reasserted

Here is where the philosophical terrain gets uneven. The careful, collaborator-blessed, estate-approved process behind “Now and Then” can be read in two fundamentally different ways.

The first reading is optimistic, even utopian. This is a genuinely new kind of creative act, one that exists outside traditional notions of single authorship. No individual made this song. Lennon wrote the melody and sang the vocal but never finished the composition and could not consent to its completion. Harrison contributed guitar parts in 1995 for a song he openly disliked, and his participation in the final version was sanctioned by his widow and son rather than by the man himself. McCartney and Starr completed the arrangement nearly three decades after the aborted sessions, working with a producer (Giles Martin) who had not been involved in the original attempt. The technology that made it possible was developed for an entirely different project by a filmmaker from New Zealand. The result is a creative object with no single author, no unified moment of creation, and no clear boundary between human artistry and machine capability.

The second reading is more sceptical. Strip away the sentiment, and what happened is that the surviving members of a band, along with their associated estates and production teams, used new technology to finish a project on their terms, shaping how a dead colleague is remembered in a way that he cannot contest. Harrison called the song “fucking rubbish” in 1995. Lennon never heard a finished version of any kind. The decision to release “Now and Then” was made entirely by living people (McCartney, Starr, the Lennon estate, the Harrison estate) with commercial and emotional interests in the outcome. Olivia Harrison's statement that George “would have whole-heartedly joined” the project if he were alive is precisely the kind of claim that cannot be tested. It is an assertion of posthumous consent by someone who is not the deceased.

This is not to impugn anyone's motives. By every available account, the completion of “Now and Then” was undertaken with genuine love and reverence for the material, with painstaking care over the production, and with the blessing of all relevant estates. But the power dynamics are worth noting: it is always the living who decide how the dead are heard.

Precedent and the Catalogue of the Unfinished

The Beatles are not the first case of AI assisting in the completion of a deceased artist's unfinished work, but they are the most culturally significant. In October 2021, a team led by Professor Ahmed Elgammal of Rutgers University and Austrian composer Walter Werzowa premiered an AI-completed version of Beethoven's Tenth Symphony at the Telekom Forum in Bonn, Germany. The project had been organised by Matthias Roder, director of the Karajan Institute in Salzburg, to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. The AI was trained on Beethoven's complete body of work and the surviving sketches for the Tenth Symphony, generating hundreds of musical variations each day from which Werzowa selected the most plausible continuations. The result was two complete movements of more than 20 minutes each. When the team challenged an audience of experts to determine where Beethoven's phrases ended and where the AI extrapolation began, they could not.

AIVA, the Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist, has similarly completed an unfinished Dvořák piano composition in E minor, and various projects have tackled Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony. In each case, the technical achievement was impressive, but the cultural stakes were comparatively low. Classical music has a long tradition of scholarly completions; Deryck Cooke's performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony, for example, has been in concert repertoire since the 1960s. The idea that someone other than the original composer might finish an unfinished symphony is not alien to that world.

Popular music is different. The connection between artist and audience is more personal, more identity-driven, more commercially charged. When a rock or pop artist's unfinished recordings become candidates for technological resurrection, the questions multiply. Whose vault gets opened next? What constitutes sufficient source material for a legitimate completion? If the Beatles' approach represents the gold standard, with surviving collaborators overseeing the process, what happens when there are no surviving collaborators? What happens when the estate holders have financial incentives that may not align with artistic ones?

The music catalogue acquisition market offers a sobering context. According to MIDiA Research, the value of music catalogue acquisitions since 2010 has reached at least 6.5 billion dollars in publicly disclosed transactions alone. Prince's estate sold nearly 50 per cent of rights to his name, likeness, masters, and publishing to Primary Wave. Michael Jackson's estate cashed out his 50 per cent stake in Sony/ATV for 750 million dollars in 2016. When a catalogue is worth hundreds of millions, the financial pressure to generate new revenue from it is enormous. An AI-completed “new” track from a deceased superstar represents a potential commercial event of the first order.

The Dark Mirror of Unauthorised Resurrection

If “Now and Then” represents the careful, consensual end of the spectrum, the opposite extreme is already flourishing. In April 2024, during his feud with Kendrick Lamar, Drake released “Taylor Made Freestyle,” a track featuring AI-synthesised vocals of the late Tupac Shakur. The response from Tupac's estate was swift and furious. Howard King, the estate's attorney, sent a cease-and-desist letter calling Drake's use “a flagrant violation of Tupac's publicity and the estate's legal rights” and “a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time.” King added that “the Estate would never have given its approval for this use.” Drake removed the track within days. The irony was not lost on observers: Drake's own label had previously taken down “Heart on My Sleeve,” a 2023 track by an anonymous creator that used AI to clone the voices of Drake and the Weeknd without permission.

By 2025, the problem had moved far beyond individual celebrity disputes. An investigation by 404 Media found that AI-generated tracks were being uploaded to the official Spotify profiles of deceased musicians without any permission from their estates. Blaze Foley, a Texas folk singer who died in 1989, had a synthetic song called “Together” appear on his verified Spotify page, uploaded via TikTok's SoundOn distribution platform. Grammy-winning songwriter Guy Clark, who died in 2016, had an AI-generated song placed under his name. The electro-pop artist Sophie, who died in 2021, and Uncle Tupelo, the former band of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, were similarly targeted.

The mechanism is disturbingly simple. Independent distribution services like DistroKid, TuneCore, and SoundOn serve as intermediaries between artists and streaming platforms. Spotify relies on these “trusted” distributors to provide accurate metadata but does not independently verify whether an artist is alive, whether the submitter has rights to the name, or whether the music is genuine. Anyone with access to AI music generation tools like Suno or Udio can create a plausible imitation of a real artist in seconds and upload it through these distribution channels. The fake track then appears alongside the artist's legitimate catalogue, indistinguishable to casual listeners.

Spotify has said it removed 75 million “spammy” tracks in a single year and launched a tool for artists to report mismatched releases. But the company has no system for tagging or labelling AI-generated music and has not disclosed how it identifies such content. The scale of the problem is significant: Deezer has reported that 18 per cent of all music uploaded to streaming platforms is fully AI-generated.

Legislative Scaffolding in Progress

The legal landscape is evolving rapidly, though it has not yet caught up with the technology. Tennessee's ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act), signed into law by Governor Bill Lee on 21 March 2024, was the first enacted legislation in the United States specifically designed to protect musicians from unauthorised AI voice cloning. The bill passed both chambers of the Tennessee legislature unanimously, reflecting the state's deep ties to its music industry, which supports more than 60,000 jobs and contributes 5.8 billion dollars to the national GDP.

The ELVIS Act grants individuals rights over their voice “regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation of the voice of the individual” and imposes liability on technology providers, not merely end users. It protects both living and deceased individuals from digital exploitation. California has pursued similar measures, updating its long-established right-of-publicity laws to explicitly cover AI-based infringements.

At the federal level, the No AI FRAUD Act would establish a national right in an individual's likeness and voice, while the NO FAKES Act would create liability for the production or distribution of unauthorised AI-generated digital replicas in audiovisual works or sound recordings. Neither had been enacted as of early 2026, leaving protection largely dependent on a patchwork of state laws.

These measures address the most egregious abuses: outright voice cloning, unauthorised deepfakes, fraudulent streaming uploads. What they do not address is the murkier territory that “Now and Then” occupies. When surviving collaborators and authorised estates use emerging technology to complete an unfinished work, existing legal frameworks generally permit the activity. The question is not legality but legitimacy, and that is a cultural judgement rather than a statutory one.

Commercial Gravity and the Erosion of Restraint

The commercial incentives pushing towards more AI-assisted posthumous completions are substantial and growing. Every major record label sits on vaults of unreleased material by deceased artists. Prince alone left behind an estimated 8,000 unreleased songs in his vault at Paisley Park at the time of his death in 2016, enough material, by some estimates, for his estate to release an album a year for a century. The potential to transform these recordings into finished, releasable tracks using the same techniques applied to “Now and Then” represents an enormous financial opportunity.

The restraint shown in the Beatles' case was enabled by several unusual factors. McCartney and Starr are independently wealthy and had no financial need to release the song. The Beatles' catalogue was already one of the most commercially successful in music history, meaning marginal revenue from one additional single was not a decisive factor. The surviving principals had genuine personal connections to the material and the deceased artists. And the public narrative, “the last Beatles song,” had a built-in emotional arc that encouraged care rather than exploitation.

Remove any of these factors and the calculus shifts. An estate managed by distant relatives or corporate entities, a catalogue whose value depends on generating new releases, a fanbase hungry for any scrap of unreleased material: these conditions are ripe for a less restrained approach. The technology that separated Lennon's voice from a cassette hum can just as easily be applied to bootleg recordings, rehearsal tapes, isolated vocal takes, and fragmentary demos by any artist whose voice can be used as training data for source separation algorithms.

The question is not whether this will happen but how quickly commercial pressure will override the curatorial care that characterised “Now and Then.” The Grammy win accelerates this timeline. When the music industry's most prestigious institution rewards an AI-assisted posthumous completion, it sends an unmistakable signal to every label, estate, and producer with access to a deceased artist's unreleased recordings: this is not merely acceptable, it is excellent. It wins awards. It reaches number one.

The Living and the Dead

There is a deeper discomfort at work, one that transcends the specifics of the Beatles or any individual artist. The history of posthumous releases is littered with cautionary tales. After Michael Jackson's death in 2009, his estate released the album Michael in 2010, which sparked fierce controversy when Jackson's own family members claimed that three tracks featured vocals by an impersonator rather than by Jackson himself. After more than a decade of fan protest and legal action, the disputed songs were eventually removed from streaming platforms. His estate later released Xscape in 2014, taking greater care to preserve Jackson's authentic vocal performances, but the earlier debacle had already demonstrated how readily commercial interests could override questions of authenticity. After Prince's death in 2016, the management of his vault became a matter of intense legal and familial dispute, with his estate passing through intestacy laws in the absence of a will.

AI does not create these tensions. It amplifies them. When the technological barrier to finishing an unfinished song drops to near zero, the only remaining barriers are ethical, legal, and cultural. And history suggests that ethical and cultural barriers erode faster than legal ones when significant money is at stake.

Paul McCartney himself framed his decision in terms of imagined consent. “Is it something we shouldn't do?” he told interviewers. “Every time I thought, like that, I thought, 'wait a minute. Let's say I had a chance to ask John. Hey John, would you like us to finish this last song of yours?' I'm telling you, I know the answer would have been 'yeah.'”

McCartney may well be right. But the logic of imagined consent is infinitely extensible. Anyone close to a deceased artist can claim to know what that artist would have wanted. The closer the relationship, the more credible the claim, but it remains fundamentally untestable. And as the distance between the deceased artist and the people making decisions about their legacy grows, from bandmates to widows to children to grandchildren to corporate entities holding catalogue rights, the claim of imagined consent becomes progressively thinner.

What Comes After the Last Beatles Song

“Now and Then” is a beautiful, melancholy record. It sounds like the Beatles, because in every meaningful sense it is the Beatles. Lennon's voice is his own. Harrison's guitar is his own. McCartney and Starr played their parts with the skill and sensitivity of men who spent their formative years making music together. The machine learning software that made it possible did not create anything; it revealed what was already there but hidden.

And yet the song exists because living people decided it should, using capabilities that did not exist when the dead had any say in the matter. That is the irreducible fact at the centre of this story, and it will only become more significant as the technology improves, as the vaults open wider, and as the commercial logic of the music industry seeks new revenue from old recordings.

So is this a fundamentally new category of creative act? In one sense, yes. No previous generation of musicians had access to tools that could extract a voice from a degraded cassette with such fidelity, making collaboration across decades and beyond death a technical reality rather than a metaphor. But in another sense, the answer is less comforting. The power to decide what the dead would have wanted has always belonged to the living. AI does not redistribute that power; it supercharges it. The careful restraint of the Beatles' approach deserves recognition and respect. It also deserves to be understood for what it is: a best-case scenario, executed by people with the resources, the relationships, and the cultural authority to do it well. The next case may not look like this. The case after that almost certainly will not. The technology that gave us one last Beatles song will not stop there. The question is whether the industry, the legal system, and the culture can build frameworks of care and consent that match the capabilities of the machines. On current evidence, the machines are moving faster.

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References and Sources

1. “Now and Then (Beatles song).” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_Then_(Beatles_song)

2. Fortune Europe. “Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Peter Jackson used AI for 'separating' a John Lennon vocal to make the very last Beatles song ever.” October 2023. https://fortune.com/europe/2023/10/26/last-beatles-song-using-ai-now-and-then-peter-jackson-paul-mccartney-john-lennon/

3. NPR. “How producers used AI to finish The Beatles' 'last' song, 'Now And Then.'” November 2023. https://www.npr.org/sections/world-cafe/2023/11/02/1208848690/the-beatles-last-song-now-and-then

4. Rolling Stone. “The Beatles Return for One More Masterpiece With New Song 'Now and Then.'” November 2023. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beatles-new-song-now-and-then-1234868643/

5. The Conversation. “Now and Then: enabled by AI, created by profound connections between the four Beatles.” November 2023. https://theconversation.com/now-and-then-enabled-by-ai-created-by-profound-connections-between-the-four-beatles-216920

6. MusicRadar. “Giles Martin explains why you'd be wrong to think 'AI' created Lennon's parts for The Beatles' Now and Then.” https://www.musicradar.com/artists/giles-martin-ai-beatles-now-and-then

7. Variety. “Giles Martin on Producing the Beatles' 'Now and Then,' Remixing the Red and Blue Albums.” November 2023. https://variety.com/2023/music/news/beatles-giles-martin-now-and-then-producer-remixing-red-blue-albums-interview-1235778746/

8. MusicTech. “It might have been easier if I used AI, but I didn't: How Giles Martin created the backing vocals for The Beatles' Now and Then.” https://musictech.com/news/music/giles-martin-beatles-now-and-then-production-ai/

9. Official Charts. “The Beatles' Now And Then is UK's Official Number 1 song in record-breaking return.” November 2023. https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/beatles-now-then-number-1-song-record/

10. CNN. “The Beatles break UK chart records as 'Now and Then' becomes No. 1 single.” November 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/11/entertainment/the-beatles-break-uk-chart-records-as-now-and-then-becomes-no-1-single/index.html

11. The Beatles Official Website. “Now And Then wins GRAMMY for Best Rock Performance.” February 2025. https://www.thebeatles.com/now-and-then-wins-grammy-best-rock-performance

12. Consequence of Sound. “The Beatles' 'Now And Then' wins Best Rock Performance at 2025 Grammys.” February 2025. https://consequence.net/2025/02/the-beatles-win-best-rock-performance-2025-grammys/

13. Loudwire. “The Beatles Make History With First of Its Kind Win at 2025 Grammys.” February 2025. https://loudwire.com/beatles-history-first-of-its-kind-win-2025-grammys/

14. Smithsonian Magazine. “How Artificial Intelligence Completed Beethoven's Unfinished Tenth Symphony.” 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-artificial-intelligence-completed-beethovens-unfinished-10th-symphony-180978753/

15. The Conversation. “How a team of musicologists and computer scientists completed Beethoven's unfinished 10th Symphony.” October 2021. https://theconversation.com/how-a-team-of-musicologists-and-computer-scientists-completed-beethovens-unfinished-10th-symphony-168160

16. NPR. “Team uses AI to complete Beethoven's unfinished masterpiece.” October 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/02/1042742330/team-uses-ai-to-complete-beethovens-unfinished-masterpiece

17. Rolling Stone. “Tupac Estate Demands Drake Remove Taylor Made Freestyle Over AI Voice.” April 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tupac-estate-drake-remove-taylor-made-freestyle-ai-voice-1235009865/

18. NBC News. “Drake pulls 'Taylor Made Freestyle' after Tupac estate threatens action for apparent use of AI voice.” April 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/drake-pulls-taylor-made-freestyle-tupac-estate-threatens-action-appare-rcna149592

19. Billboard. “Tupac Shakur's Estate Threatens to Sue Drake Over Diss Track Featuring AI-Generated Tupac Voice.” April 2024. https://www.billboard.com/pro/tupac-shakur-estate-drake-diss-track-ai-generated-voice/

20. 404 Media. “Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission.” July 2025. https://www.404media.co/spotify-publishes-ai-generated-songs-from-dead-artists-without-permission/

21. NPR. “When your favorite band's new song is an AI fake.” October 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/27/nx-s1-5587852/spotify-ai-music-fakes

22. MusicTech. “Spotify posting AI-generated songs of dead artists without permission, new report reveals.” 2025. https://musictech.com/news/music/spotify-ai-generated-songs-dead-artists/

23. Wikipedia. “ELVIS Act.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELVIS_Act

24. Latham & Watkins. “The ELVIS Act: Tennessee Shakes Up Its Right of Publicity Law and Takes On Generative AI.” 2024. https://www.lw.com/admin/upload/SiteAttachments/The-ELVIS-Act-Tennessee-Shakes-Up-Its-Right-of-Publicity-Law-and-Takes-On-Generative-AI.pdf

25. CNBC. “Paul McCartney says A.I. got John Lennon's voice on 'last Beatles record.'” June 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/13/paul-mccartney-says-ai-got-john-lennons-voice-on-last-beatles-record.html

26. TechCrunch. “Don't be afraid of the 'AI-assisted' Beatles song, 'Now And Then.'” November 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/02/dont-be-afraid-of-the-ai-assisted-beatles-song-now-and-then/

27. MusicRadar. “Peter Jackson says that he used machine learning to restore the Beatles' music for Get Back documentary.” https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-beatles-audio-stems-get-back

28. The Beatles Bible. “Now And Then, song facts, recording info and more.” https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/now-and-then/

29. Music Business Research. “AI in the Music Industry, Part 9: Finishing the Unfinished.” April 2024. https://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/2024/04/01/ai-in-the-music-industry-part-9-finishing-the-unfinished/

30. Music Tech Policy. “Fake Tracks Are Exploiting Deceased Artists. The FTC Must Act.” August 2025. https://musictechpolicy.com/2025/08/01/fake-tracks-are-exploiting-deceased-artists-the-ftc-must-act/

31. CBS News/60 Minutes. “Exploring the unreleased music in Prince's vault.” April 2021. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prince-welcome-2-america-60-minutes-2021-04-11/

32. Smooth Radio. “Inside Prince's vault where thousands of unreleased songs are reportedly still hidden.” https://www.smoothradio.com/artists/prince/unreleased-songs-music-vault/

33. TIME. “Why Drake Had to Remove A Song That Featured AI-Tupac Vocals.” 2024. https://time.com/6971720/drake-tupac-ai/

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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

There comes a moment in a person’s life when the ground beneath them shifts so suddenly and so violently that they realize nothing will ever be quite the same again. For many, that moment arrives with a phone call, a doctor’s pause, or an unexpected conversation where the word cancer enters the room like an uninvited guest who does not knock, does not speak politely, and does not care about the time of day or the state of your heart. When that word settles into the air, the world feels as if it has been sliced cleanly into a before and an after, and everything that once felt predictable becomes wrapped in a mist of questions you never thought you would have to ask. Yet beneath that moment, beneath the shock and the fear and the tidal wave of wondering what comes next, there is another truth stirring quietly in the soul, a truth many people do not recognize until they are forced into a valley they never wanted to enter. It is the awareness that God’s presence, though often ignored in the brightest seasons of our lives, becomes heartbreakingly real in the shadows. And even though cancer tries to pull you into a darkness that feels unfamiliar and frightening, there is a deeper light that steps into that space with you, refusing to leave, refusing to weaken, and refusing to let the valley become your grave.

When people think about suffering, they often imagine it as a thief that steals from you without mercy, and in many ways that can be true. Suffering interrupts plans, unravels routines, and exposes emotions that were buried under years of normal life. But there is another side to suffering that very few people talk about, and it is a side that only those who have walked through real pain ever learn to understand. Suffering, especially the kind that comes with a diagnosis that shakes the foundation of your existence, has a strange way of sharpening your vision. Suddenly the things that once felt urgent no longer matter in the same way. The things that once irritated you start to feel small. The people you love become more precious. The moments you used to rush past become holy. And in that shift, in that transformation of perspective, you begin to see God in places where you never noticed Him before. You find Him in the stillness of early mornings when you wake up and realize you’ve been given one more day. You find Him in the way someone looks at you with concern and love woven into the same expression. You find Him in the smile of a nurse who takes your hand right before a procedure. And you find Him in the quiet strength that appears in your chest at the exact moment you expected to collapse. This awakening does not erase the pain, but it does something far more mysterious. It reveals the God who never left you.

Most people assume courage is loud. They imagine warriors with raised voices and determined faces. But if there is anything those who walk through cancer understand, it is that true courage often looks nothing like that. True courage is quiet. True courage trembles. True courage breathes slowly through fear that sits heavy on the lungs. True courage shows up to appointments you wish you could cancel. True courage lets tears fall freely without shame. True courage admits when you feel tired and asks God for help when you would rather stand tall. The world may celebrate the victories it can see, but heaven celebrates the victories that happen in the invisible places of the heart, and the courage rising inside someone battling cancer is one of the most sacred forms of courage the world will ever witness. It is the courage that chooses to believe that hope still has a place in this story. It is the courage that stands in the middle of unanswered questions and whispers, God, stay close. And the beauty of this kind of courage is that God does not respond by demanding perfection; He responds by drawing you deeper into His presence, as if He has been waiting for this moment to reveal how faithfully He has been carrying you all along.

What many people do not realize until they face mortal uncertainty is how much their identity has been shaped by things that never truly defined them. Cancer has a way of stripping away everything superficial. It strips away the illusion that we are in control of every outcome. It strips away the roles we perform for the approval of others. It strips away the excuses we make to avoid confronting our own soul. And in that place of raw honesty, where everything unnecessary has been peeled back, something remarkable begins to happen. You discover that your identity was never rooted in your career, your accomplishments, your plans, or your ability to keep your life neatly arranged. Your identity has always been rooted in the God who formed you in secret and breathed His own life into you. Cancer tries to rename people. It tries to reduce their existence to a medical file, a chart full of numbers, a list of appointments and medications. But God has never called you by those names. God calls you beloved. God calls you chosen. God calls you His. And there is nothing on earth, including cancer, that can rewrite the name God placed on your life before you ever took your first breath.

Every person facing cancer learns something about faith that cannot be learned any other way. You learn that faith is not always painted in bold colors. It is not always confident or loud or filled with declarative sentences that sound heroic. Sometimes faith is a quiet whisper spoken through shaking lips. Sometimes faith is a soft breath that says, Lord, I am afraid, but I still trust You. Sometimes faith is a hand gripping a blanket in the middle of the night while you pray for the strength to face tomorrow. Sometimes faith is simply the choice not to quit. These moments of fragile faith are not signs of weakness; they are the very moments when heaven holds you more tightly than you can imagine. They are the moments when God bends low, gathers your tears like precious jewels, and says, I will be your strength when you have none left. And even though it may not feel like it, every small act of faith, every quiet surrender, every whispered prayer becomes part of your testimony, forming a spiritual resilience that shines like a lantern in the darkness.

There is a truth few people speak aloud, yet almost everyone in a deep battle eventually discovers. God is closest in the places where we feel most undone. He is closest when the room is dim, when the scans are uncertain, when the pain is real, and when the fear feels like it is wrapping around your ribs. God does not stand at a distance watching to see how strong you will be. He comes all the way into the valley. He sits on the edge of your bed. He places His peace over your thoughts like a warm blanket. He whispers into your soul that you are not alone. This is the kind of intimacy with God that cannot be learned through comfort. It is the kind of intimacy that only emerges when a person walks through fire and discovers that not even the flames can touch the presence of the One who walks beside them. And once you have felt God in the valley, you will carry that awareness for the rest of your life. You will never again mistake His silence for absence, because you will know what it feels like to be held by Him in your most vulnerable moments.

For many people, cancer becomes a teacher they never sought, but one that leaves behind truths they carry forever. It teaches you how precious time really is. It teaches you how deeply other people matter. It teaches you that small moments deserve more attention than you ever gave them before. It teaches you that love has the power to steady trembling hands and calm anxious thoughts. It teaches you that your soul is far stronger than your body ever was. And perhaps most importantly, it teaches you that hope is not a delicate flower that dies under pressure. Hope is a stubborn, unyielding force that refuses to be extinguished, even in the darkest places. It is the light that flickers when everything else feels lost. It is the warmth that remains when the night tries to swallow your strength. It is the quiet insistence that your story is not over. And it is the voice of God, echoing through your soul, reminding you again and again that He carries the final word, not fear, not cancer, not suffering, but Him.

You begin to realize slowly, sometimes painfully, sometimes beautifully, that this journey is shaping you into someone new, someone deeper, someone more awake to the presence of God than you ever were before. You learn to cherish the gentle moments. You learn to listen to your spirit with more compassion. You learn that vulnerability is not a weakness but a doorway to intimacy with God and with others. You learn that tears are not signs of failure but expressions of a heart that still believes, still hopes, still loves. And you learn that courage is something God grows in you one breath at a time. This kind of transformation is not something you would have chosen, but it is something that God will use in ways you cannot yet see. Your story is being written in ink that does not wash away. Your battle is not a sign of God’s absence; it is a canvas where His faithfulness is being painted stroke by stroke. And even though you may feel tired, worn, or overwhelmed, there is a quiet miracle already unfolding within you.

There is something sacred that happens when you begin to see your own life through a different lens, one shaped not by fear but by divine perspective. People often assume that when you face something as terrifying and unpredictable as cancer, your sense of purpose shrinks alongside the uncertainty of your future. Yet the opposite is often true. In many ways, your purpose expands. You begin to understand the weight and value of your life in a way you never could when everything felt ordinary. Your story becomes larger, not smaller. Even the quietest moments take on a new depth. Sitting beside a window becomes a conversation between your soul and the world God created. Hearing someone laugh becomes a kind of music you never realized you needed. Feeling the presence of someone who loves you turns into a reminder that love was always God’s greatest invention, and somehow it becomes even more powerful when life feels fragile. This is what happens when God meets you in the valley. He does not simply walk with you; He reshapes your understanding of yourself until you begin to see that you are far more loved, far more supported, and far more resilient than you ever imagined.

As the days unfold, you begin to learn that life cannot be measured in years alone. Life is measured in meaning, in depth, in connection, in the way your spirit responds to both joy and suffering. Cancer has a way of reintroducing you to yourself, inviting you to rediscover the parts of your soul that were always there but buried under the noise of busy days. Suddenly, conversations become more genuine. Gratitude stretches into corners of your life you overlooked before. You begin to realize that even the difficult days hold beauty because they reveal your own humanity and the vastness of God’s compassion toward you. You start to notice details you never saw, like the way light spills across a room, or the peace that settles into your heart when you pray, or the quiet courage that rises in you when your body feels weak but your spirit feels steady. This awareness does not make the battle easy, but it makes the journey meaningful. And when meaning grows, hope grows alongside it, like a vine reaching toward the light no matter how many shadows surround it.

There will always be people who try to make sense of suffering through explanations or theories, but explanations rarely bring comfort. What brings comfort is presence. What brings comfort is being held. What brings comfort is remembering that God does not meet you in the storm with a clipboard and a list of spiritual tests. God meets you with compassion shaped like a hand on your shoulder. God meets you with peace that flows gently into the spaces where fear tries to settle. God meets you with assurance that nothing about your life is random or forgotten. The truth that emerges in seasons like this, the truth that takes root in the deepest part of your soul, is that spiritual growth often happens in places you would never choose. The valley becomes a classroom where God teaches you not through lessons but through love, not through lectures but through His presence, not through pressure but through His nearness. And once you taste that nearness, once you feel His presence surrounding you even in uncertainty, you begin to understand that the valley is not just a place of suffering. It is a place of holy encounter.

Over time you also learn something else that becomes a wellspring of strength. You learn that you are not alone in the way you thought you were. People show up in unexpected ways. Someone prays for you without telling you. Someone brings you a meal without asking for credit. Someone sends a message at the exact moment you needed encouragement. Someone sits with you in silence, knowing that silence sometimes speaks louder than words. Through all of this, you begin to see that God’s love often arrives through human hands. And this realization changes you. It humbles you. It strengthens you. It reminds you that your life carries more value than you ever gave it credit for. You are not a burden. You are not an interruption. You are not someone others endure. You are someone others love fiercely. And sometimes, the love surrounding you becomes part of the healing God brings, not only to your body but to your heart.

In this season you also discover that God’s strength is not something He offers from afar. His strength becomes the very air you breathe. It becomes the calm that settles into your bones on the days when fear tries to rise. It becomes the courage that lifts your chin when you feel small. It becomes the foundation beneath your steps when you wake up not knowing what the day will bring. God’s strength is not something fragile or temporary. It is steady, ancient, unwavering, and always present. And when you begin to walk with that strength beneath you, the fear that once felt suffocating begins to lose some of its power. Fear still whispers, but it cannot dominate you the way it once did, because the presence of God has become louder. The presence of God has become the story surrounding your story. And when His presence becomes your atmosphere, even the hardest battles become places where miracles grow.

Eventually, something beautiful begins to unfold inside you. You start to understand that hope is not just an emotional experience; it is a spiritual force that God Himself protects. Hope does not depend on circumstances. Hope does not evaporate when the journey becomes difficult. Hope is something God places inside your heart like a flame that cannot be extinguished, no matter how strong the winds of adversity blow. And there may be days when you feel that flame flicker, days when it feels small or fragile, days when you wonder if it is still burning at all. But here is the truth that God whispers into the deepest part of your spirit: hope does not go out because it does not depend on you to sustain it. Hope is sustained by Him. Hope is fueled by His promises. Hope is anchored in His faithfulness. And as long as God remains who He is, hope will never abandon you.

You also begin to see that your story has a reach far beyond what you imagine. Even on days when you feel tired or worn, your resilience speaks to someone else who needs courage for their own battles. Even your vulnerability becomes a source of light for someone who feels alone. God uses your story not because you are perfect but because you are willing to keep going. And in that willingness, in that sacred persistence, God writes something eternal. He writes compassion into your life that will touch others. He writes strength into your heart that will last long beyond this season. He writes wisdom into your soul that will allow you to comfort people one day with the same comfort He is giving you now. This is why your story is not shrinking. This is why your purpose is not diminishing. Your life is expanding, your soul is deepening, and your testimony is becoming richer with every step you take through this valley.

One day, whether soon or far from now, you will look back on this chapter and realize that God was shaping something in you that could not have been shaped any other way. You will see how He carried you, how He strengthened you, how He steadied you when you felt like collapsing, how He nourished your hope in moments when it felt too small to survive. And you will understand that even in the darkness, the light never left you. The light followed you. The light protected you. The light lived in you. Because the light was never your own; it was His. And as long as His light remains, your story will always move toward healing, toward redemption, toward transformation, and toward a future that still holds beauty you have not yet imagined.

At the end of it all, this becomes the truth that settles into your soul: you are not defined by cancer. You are defined by the God who loves you. You are defined by the purpose that still beats within your heart. You are defined by the hope that refuses to die. You are defined by the courage that grows in your spirit despite the weight of the journey. And you are defined by the light that walks beside you through every valley. Nothing can take that from you. Nothing can silence that truth. Nothing can remove God’s hand from your life. You are His, and because you are His, your story is still unfolding with meaning, depth, and divine intention. And through every breath, every moment, every step, God walks with you, holding you, lifting you, loving you, and surrounding you with a grace that never runs out.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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In Summary: * After a quiet but productive Friday that saw me catching up on little items I'd let slide for the past week, AND getting the A/C working in this joint again. Now I'm listening to the Princeton Tigers pregame show ahead of their men's basketball game tonight vs. the Harvard Crimson. After the game I'm planning to wrap up my night prayers and retire early.

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. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.29 lbs. * bp= 142/84 (65)

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

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 little cookie * 07:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 10:55 – beef chop suey, steamed rice * 16:05 – 1 fresh apple * 17:05 – cheese and crackers

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:10 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:35 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, and nap * 13:30 – Watch old game shows with Sylvia * 14:50 – listening to relaxing music * 17:50 – listening to the Princeton Tigers pregame show ahead of their men's basketball game tonight vs. the Harvard Crimson

Chess: * 09:45 – moved in all pending CC games

“Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”

—P.J. O'Rourke

I love this quote, because I've been that guy. I've been the guy who thinks he can save the world but who literally doesn't help his mom with the dishes when he visits. Thankfully, I've dramatically softened in my activism (appropriately discussed ever so briefly in a recipe but nowhere else on this blog), if it can even be called activism any more, and I did help my mom with the dishes during my most recent visit, although I'm sure I could have done more.

I interpret the statement like this: riding a “high horse” can be fun, and there really are important societal problems that ordinary people can help improve. That said, there are always more ordinary problems that need attention, and sometimes fixing those things goes further than protesting in the streets.

#Life #Quotes #SocialMedia #Tech

Harvard Crimson vs Princeton Tigers

For this Friday's basketball before bedtime I'll turn to the Ivy League and listen to a men's basketball game between the Harvard Crimson and the Princeton Tigers. With its scheduled start time of 6:00 PM CST, this should allow me plenty of time to wrap up my night prayers after the game and still retire early.

And the adventure continues

There are passages in Scripture that do not simply inform you; they enter you like a slow-moving fire and start reshaping the architecture of your soul, and Hebrews 1 is one of them. Every time I return to this chapter, I feel something awaken—a sense that I am stepping into a world that has always been bigger than I allowed myself to believe, a world charged with a holy electricity that hums beneath history, creation, and every breath I take. Hebrews 1 does not begin with an introduction, a warm greeting, or a gentle lead-in. It begins like thunder breaking open a quiet sky. It speaks in the kind of voice that rearranges a room. It calls the reader into something that feels ancient and endless and immediate all at the same time. And I find that every time I sit with it long enough, the chapter does not simply tell me something about Jesus; it declares who He has always been with the kind of authority that makes me feel like I have only ever known Him in shadows. This chapter invites us to stand beneath the blinding radiance of who Christ truly is, and if we do not hurry through it, it slowly teaches us that this radiance has been shining long before any of us opened our eyes to see it.

Hebrews 1 opens by reminding us that God has spoken in many ways throughout human history, and that line alone could occupy a lifetime of meditation. If you have ever walked through seasons where God felt silent or distant, this opening sentence brings a deep steadiness to the heart. It reminds you that God has always been speaking, always reaching, always initiating, always unfolding Himself to His people, sometimes through prophets, sometimes through visions, sometimes through whispers, sometimes through fire, sometimes through kings, and sometimes through the quiet insistence of His Spirit. But Hebrews 1 wants us to understand something that changes the entire reason we read the Bible in the first place: all the fragments, all the pieces, all the hints, all the shadows were leading to something, and that something is a Someone. God did not merely speak through a prophet; God spoke through His Son. Not through a message, but through the Messenger. Not through words alone, but through a living breathing revelation of Himself. And every time I let myself feel the weight of that truth, I realize that Jesus did not just bring a word from God—He is the Word of God, the complete, unbroken, unfiltered communication of the Father’s heart.

When the writer of Hebrews tells us that the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of His nature, something shifts inside anyone who has ever wrestled with who God really is. Many believers live with subconscious fear, a trembling uncertainty about what God feels toward them, as if the Father’s heart might be harsher than Jesus’ compassion. But Hebrews 1 destroys the false distance between Father and Son. It reveals that Jesus is not just similar to God; He is the radiance of God. He is the exact imprint. He is the fullness of the Father walking in human form. If you want to know what God is like, you look at Jesus. If you want to know how God responds to guilt, you look at how Jesus lifted the head of the broken. If you want to know how God deals with fear, you look at how Jesus extended His hand toward the trembling. If you want to know how God confronts sin, you look at the way Jesus drew near instead of walking away. Every miracle, every gesture, every tone, every step, every moment in the Gospels was the Father showing you His nature in a language humanity could finally understand. And Hebrews 1 brings that truth into perfect focus by reminding us that the Son is not a reflection; He is radiance itself. He does not merely point us to God; He reveals God exactly.

This chapter also carries an authority that confronts the quiet tendency within many believers to shrink Jesus down to something manageable. Sometimes we carry Him like an accessory to our beliefs instead of recognizing Him as the One who sustains all things by the word of His power. Hebrews 1 leaves no room for a miniature Christ. It lifts the reader’s eyes so high that our small assumptions begin to crumble. It tells us that Jesus is not simply the hero of the Gospels; He is the architect of creation. He is the One through whom the worlds were made. If you have ever doubted whether your prayers reach Heaven, Hebrews 1 whispers that you are speaking to the One who keeps galaxies spinning with a sentence. If you have ever feared life spinning out of control, this chapter anchors you in the truth that nothing spins unless He sustains it. You are held by the same hands that crafted constellations. And when you allow yourself to truly take in the magnitude of that, your fears begin to lose their dominion. You start to understand that the presence walking beside you is not fragile, not temporary, not uncertain, but eternal and cosmic and sovereign in ways human language can barely convey.

Yet the greatness of Jesus does not create distance; it creates belonging. The same Jesus who sustains the universe is also the Jesus who made purification for sins. This sentence in Hebrews 1 carries a tenderness that only grows deeper the more you sit with it. The One who shaped the stars stepped into human history to cleanse the stain of sin from the souls He created. And He did it not with reluctance or resentment, but with love that goes deeper than anything this world has ever offered us. When the writer tells us that He sat down at the right hand of Majesty after making purification, it is not merely a theological statement; it is a declaration that the work is finished, the price is paid, the barrier is removed, and the invitation to come near is permanently open. There is no hesitation in His posture. There is no uncertainty in His accomplishment. The seating of Jesus is not the posture of someone still working to save you; it is the posture of someone who has completed the rescue and now reigns with absolute authority over everything that once tried to claim you.

As the chapter unfolds, it takes us into a breathtaking contrast between the Son and the angels. In a world fascinated with the mystical and the spiritual, this moment in Hebrews serves as a reminder that the glory of Jesus surpasses every celestial being we could ever imagine. Angels are magnificent, powerful, awe-inspiring creations, but they are creations. Jesus is not. Angels minister. Jesus reigns. Angels serve by command. Jesus commands by nature. Angels stand in the presence of God. Jesus is the presence of God. And the writer of Hebrews wants this truth drilled into our bones so deeply that we never again confuse majesty with magnitude. Jesus is not competing for rank in Heaven; He is enthroned above all. His name is better. His authority is higher. His nature is unmatched. And this is not meant to inflate our minds; it is meant to enlarge our faith. Because the One who reigns above angels is the One who intercedes for you, walks with you, speaks to you, strengthens you, and carries you through every season where you felt like you were only surviving by a thread.

The Father’s declaration, “You are My Son; today I have begotten You,” is one of the most profound statements ever spoken in Scripture, not because it marks the beginning of Jesus’ existence—His existence is eternal—but because it reveals something about the relationship between Father and Son that human words can only partially convey. It is the language of affection, identity, honor, and divine intimacy. It is the pleasure of the Father overflowing. It is the eternal bond spoken into the fabric of creation. When the Father calls the Son His delight, He is inviting us to understand that everything Jesus did was rooted in a relationship so perfect and unbroken that it becomes the model for our redemption. We are saved not simply because Christ died, but because the One who died was the beloved Son, the radiance of the Father, the One whose obedience was rooted in a love deeper than human comprehension. And when we are drawn into Christ, we are drawn into that very relationship, not as distant spectators but as adopted children brought into the warmth of the Father’s embrace.

The command, “Let all God’s angels worship Him,” is one of the most breathtaking sentences in the entire chapter, because it reveals that worship is the natural response to who the Son is. When the angels worship, they are not performing a ritual; they are responding to reality. They bow because He is worthy. They sing because His beauty demands expression. They adore because His glory cannot be met with silence. And if the angels, who are far more holy and powerful than any human being, fall before Him in absolute awe, what does that say about His majesty? What does that say about the One who calls you by name, who listens when you pray, who walks beside you through grief and joy and confusion and victory? Worship is not something assigned to Jesus; it is something that emerges naturally from encountering Him. This verse reminds us that every time we worship, we are joining a cosmic chorus that has been echoing since before time began, a chorus that will continue long after the last sunrise on this earth.

Then the chapter shifts into a declaration of the Son’s eternal kingship, and I have always found this section to be one of the most comforting truths in all of Scripture. Your throne, O God, is forever and ever. That is not metaphor. That is not poetry. That is reality. Jesus does not rise and fall like earthly kings. He does not change with political seasons. He does not waver with cultural tides. He does not adjust His moral compass based on human opinion. His throne is eternal. His scepter is righteous. His dominion is unshakable. And in a world where people anchor their hope to shifting ideologies, this truth stands like a mountain in the middle of a storm. You do not belong to a kingdom that fades. You belong to the kingdom of an everlasting King, a kingdom where righteousness is not an aspiration but a nature. And when you live in that truth long enough, anxiety loosens its grip, because you realize you are not navigating your life under the rule of uncertainty but under the reign of One who cannot fail.

What makes the declarations about the Son even more staggering is the fact that Hebrews 1 is not merely describing what Jesus does, but who Jesus is in His eternal nature. The chapter is not concerned with the chronology of His earthly ministry or the timeline of His miracles; it is revealing the reality that has always been true behind the scenes of creation. When it tells us that He loves righteousness and hates wickedness, it is describing the internal nature of the Son, the character that radiates through every action He takes. His love for righteousness is not selective, conditional, or circumstantial. It is rooted in the very essence of who He is. He does not drift toward holiness because it is expected; He embodies holiness because it is His nature. And when the writer tells us He hates wickedness, it is not describing some angry reaction but an incompatibility at the deepest level. Darkness cannot exist in His presence not because He chases it away like a warrior with a sword, but because His presence is so perfectly light that darkness evaporates upon contact. This truth holds immense comfort for every believer who has ever feared falling short or being swallowed by the shadows within themselves. You belong to a Savior whose love for righteousness is so powerful and whose hatred for wickedness is so complete that He does not merely forgive your sin; He transforms your nature by drawing you deeper into His.

The passage continues by comparing the Son’s eternity to the created order, and this is where Hebrews 1 becomes almost overwhelming in its scope. It declares that the heavens and the earth will wear out like a garment, that time and matter and the vast architecture of the universe are temporary fabrics draped over the frame of existence, destined to be rolled up and replaced. But the Son remains the same. This is not metaphor; this is theology written in cosmic proportion. Everything you see, everything you touch, everything you fear losing, everything you think is permanent is actually temporary. Mountains erode. Stars burn out. Oceans shift. Empires rise and fall. Human history reshuffles itself a thousand times. But the Son does not change. His nature does not evolve. His purpose does not drift. His throne does not shake. When the cosmos grows old, He remains eternally young. When creation groans, He remains eternally sovereign. This truth is meant to pull your heart out of the anxious grip of circumstances and bring you into the stability of a Christ who cannot be altered by time. If He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, then your hope is never hanging on shifting ground. It is anchored in One who has never changed and never will.

The closing section of Hebrews 1 returns again to the relationship between the Son and the angels, not because the early church struggled with angel worship alone, but because human beings throughout history have always had a tendency to elevate the created over the Creator. We marvel at power we can see. We are fascinated by beings who stand between the earthly and the divine. Angels evoke wonder, and rightly so—they are magnificent expressions of God’s creativity. But Hebrews 1 wants the believer to understand that no matter how glorious angels are, they do not come close to the Son. They are ministering spirits. They serve at His command. They carry out His will. They stand ready to assist those who will inherit salvation. But they do not sit on a throne. They do not receive worship. They do not carry the identity of God. They do not speak creation into existence. And this entire chapter is deliberately structured to lift our eyes away from anything in this world that competes for our reverence. It calls us back to the truth that Christ alone is worthy, Christ alone is supreme, Christ alone is enthroned, Christ alone is the radiance of the Father’s glory.

When I sit with all of this long enough, Hebrews 1 becomes less like a chapter and more like a doorway into the eternal identity of Jesus. It strips away the traditions, assumptions, and sentimental ideas that people often attach to Christ. It removes the overly domesticated version of Jesus that modern culture prefers—the gentle teacher, the wise moral guide, the inspirational figure. It confronts us with a Christ who is far more magnificent than we have ever dared to imagine. It invites us to meet the Jesus who walked before creation, who breathed galaxies into being, who radiates with the brilliance of God’s own glory, who sits enthroned above every power and principality, and who reigns with a scepter of righteousness unmatched by anything this world has ever known. And the deeper this truth sinks into the believer’s heart, the more it reshapes how we walk through our days. You cannot cling to a small faith when you have seen a Christ this big. You cannot surrender to despair when your Savior sits on an everlasting throne. You cannot define yourself by your failures when the One who purifies sins sustains the universe by His word. There is something about seeing Jesus rightly that changes how you survive storms, how you endure pressure, and how you rise from seasons you thought would break you.

This chapter confronts something else too—our tendency to live beneath the weight of our own limitations, forgetting that the One who upholds everything also upholds us. Hebrews 1 quietly reframes human weakness by placing it within the context of Christ’s supremacy. You are not navigating life alone. You are not held together by your own strength. You are not responsible for sustaining your existence. The same Christ who keeps the stars in place is the One who walks with you when you feel like your world is collapsing. He is the stability beneath your shaking. He is the clarity in your confusion. He is the power in your weakness. And when you take Hebrews 1 seriously, something changes deep inside: you no longer treat faith as a fragile hope but as a firm foundation built on the eternal nature of the Son. You stop worrying about whether you are enough and begin resting in the truth that He is. And that shift alone can heal parts of the heart that nothing else ever reached.

As I let the chapter settle deeper, I realize that Hebrews 1 is not written to impress the mind but to ignite awe in the soul. It is meant to make you feel small in the best possible way, not insignificant but held by something infinitely greater. It reorders your inner world, not by demanding something from you, but by revealing Someone to you. And when you see Jesus as Hebrews 1 describes Him, prayer stops being a ritual and becomes a response to majesty. Worship stops being an obligation and becomes a natural outpouring of wonder. Obedience stops feeling like a burden and becomes the joyful response of someone who has glimpsed the greatness of the King they follow. This chapter reshapes faith itself, because it reminds you that Christianity is not built on your ability to cling to God but on God’s unshakable glory revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Faith becomes less about striving and more about surrendering to the One who sustains all things.

There is a moment in Hebrews 1 that has always moved me deeply: the sentence that declares God has spoken through His Son in these last days. This is not merely a chronological marker. It is a revelation that everything God wants to say to humanity is summed up in Jesus. Jesus is not an appendix to the Old Testament story, nor is He simply the fulfillment of prophecy. He is the full language of Heaven spoken in human flesh. He is God’s final word. And that truth alone carries a weight that reshapes how we read Scripture, how we view our own story, and how we walk through this world. If God’s final word is Jesus, then every other voice must bow to His. The voice of shame must bow. The voice of fear must bow. The voice of condemnation must bow. The voice of regret must bow. The voice of despair must bow. And the voice of the past that tells you your story is finished must bow to the One whose throne is eternal and whose power is unending.

When I think about the legacy of Hebrews 1, I think about its ability to anchor the believer in a world that constantly shakes. Every generation faces its own storms, its own uncertainties, its own cultural earthquakes. People panic. Systems fail. Foundations crack. But Hebrews 1 is written like a stabilizing beam in the middle of shifting ground. It tells you to lift your eyes above the chaos and fix your gaze on the Son who sits enthroned. It reminds you that your faith is not fragile because your Savior is not fragile. It tells you that the radiance of His glory does not dim when the world darkens. It tells you that the power of His word does not weaken when circumstances become overwhelming. And if you let it, this chapter can become one of the most grounding truths in your entire spiritual walk, because it forces you to place your hope where nothing can strike it down.

As I bring this legacy meditation to its close, I feel the same stirring I always feel when I walk slowly through Hebrews 1. I feel the weight of glory pressing gently on the edges of the present moment, reminding me that the Jesus I follow is more magnificent than my words can ever capture, more powerful than my imagination can ever grasp, and more beautiful than my heart can ever fully hold. I feel the eternal nature of the Son overshadowing the temporary nature of my fears. I feel the unchanging Christ towering above a world that constantly shifts beneath our feet. And I feel gratitude—deep, quiet, steady gratitude—that this Jesus, the radiance of God’s glory, the exact imprint of His nature, the One who created the worlds and sustains all things, is the same Jesus who calls me beloved, who walks with me through every valley, who strengthens me in every battle, and who reigns with a scepter of righteousness that will never, ever be shaken.

You and I live in a world that tries to shrink Jesus to something manageable, something less overwhelming, something more comfortable to the modern mind. But Hebrews 1 refuses to let that happen. It lifts Christ so high that every small conception of Him is shattered. It demands that you see Him as He truly is. And once you do, you cannot go back to ordinary faith. You cannot live a low-ceiling Christianity. You cannot pray small prayers. You cannot cling to weak hope. You walk through this world with the awareness that the One who sustains galaxies sustains you. And that awareness becomes courage. It becomes peace. It becomes worship. It becomes the quiet fire that carries you through everything you will ever face. This is the legacy of Hebrews 1. It reveals the Son in such glory that the believer is forever changed by the sight.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

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Omroep VVA Stress Bijeenkomst ivm tegenvallende volgers winst over het laatste kwartaal.

Welkom Deelnemers bij deze bijeengaring. De nood is heel hoog anders zou ik u allen niet laten opdraven op dit late tijdstip, ver na Sesamstraat, en voor de meesten van ons wordt het leven dan heel moeilijk, dicht vallende ogen, weg zappende hersenen, elk moment zoeken naar vermaak voor nu en later om te voorkomen dat u gaat zitten denken. Voor de meesten zou vergaderen op deze drie tijdstipjes eigenlijk wel goed uitkomen, maar let wel dit samen raapsel is zeker niet voor u maar vanwege de tegenvallende kwartaal cijfers, Het aantal lezers van onze omroep is minder toegenomen dan we, ik, vooraf had ingeschat.

Het lijkt me daarom een puik plan om de oorzaken daarvan te achterhalen. De rede achter het ontbreken van 3 procent verse, frisse horigen, ik had zoals gewoonlijk rekening gehouden met een volgers toename van zeker 10%, dit in vergelijking met het vorige kwartaal, jammer genoeg zijn we blijven steken op 6,8 procent. Hier moet iets of iemand achter zitten en het is aan ons te ontdekken wat of wie dat is en daarna zal ik dan een verse weblog volg strategie ontwikkelen om de ontbrekende doel groep of groepies alsnog in te lijven. Ik heb inmiddels met de zeer bruikbare natte vinger methodiek bepaald dat we volgend kwartaal minstens 13 procent nieuwe volgers kunnen verwachten. Dat is dus de standaard 10 per kwart er bij plus de ontbrekende 3 van het vorige kwartje.

We gaan hier en nu het volgende doen om het beoogde doel te bereiken. Ik ga er vanuit dat we minder volgers winnen uit de onuitputtelijke volg bron door de aanwezigheid van talrijke vijanden. In sommige bedrijfstakken minder hard dan de onze worden vijanden betiteld als concurrenten maar hier in de weblogosfeer ben je een vriend, volger, of de vijand! Ik geef aan jullie allen, beste VVA deelnemers een leeg A-viertje en ik verwacht van jullie minstens 10 namen van vijanden voor VVA allen mogelijk, waarschijnlijk, verantwoordelijk voor het stelen of vermoorden van onze verse aanhang! Jullie krijgen een half uur de tijd daarna neem ik de documenten in beslag en zal de opgeschreven namen, de daders, het resultaat van deze brain orkaan, hier in de klas beoordelen op kwaliteit, vlijt, vitaliteit, fantasie en netheid onder andere.

Tijdens deze sessie zal ik u verblijden met muziek uitermate geschikt als rustgevende maar inspirerende begeleiding voor driftig stormende breinen, happy hardcore van de Party Animals, in goed Neerlandsch de feestbeestjes.

Zit iedereen recht, pen en papier bij de hand! De tijd gaat nu in. Start..Party Animals playlist

This is the age of aquarius, aquarius... . . . .... .... . . . ... I wanna be a hippy ... ... . . Stop de tijd. Pennen neerrrr! Nu! Tijd is geld, ik moest dit lokaal huren met geld uit het VVA goede doelen fonds!

A-vier Papier Hier.

Shit, volgende keer gebruiken we digitale formulieren. Ik dacht dat ik een onleesbaar handschrift had maar jullie bakken er helemaal niks van, mijn letters lijken tenminste nog een beetje op het orgineel. Goed, ik heb 16 vellen papier, ik tel 15 personen, klopt als een bus. Mooi, mooi.

Ik begin met het opsommen en tevens vol automatisch opschrijven van de vijandelijkheden op het digitale bord, graag geen geluiden maken tijdens de opsomming want het bord is heel gevoelig afgesteld. Voor je het weet maakt het er een heel ander woord van en ik zou bij god niet weten hoe je die kan wissen of omzetten in de juiste vijand.

1.Deelnemer 11

11 – De vijanden van Oorblog Omroep VVA Lastige gevallen in de Rede zijn...

De omstandigheden Plotseling opkomende gevoelens van onbehagen. Koningsdag. Kerst. Het Smægmååns Voetbal Elftal Het WK ouija borden Alle Series Echtgenoten. Weblog allergie Aquarium TV De Anarchie Theatershows Gebrekkige wifi door waardeloze providers en hun goedkope ondeugdelijke hardware Hongersnood Stroomuitval De dood De Aziatische Hoornaar Seks Diverse Bladzijden Uitzendingen Bommentapijt Geen zin

Dat is een flinke opsomming. Bommentapijt is een bord vergissing daar moest zijn Smægmååns Internationaal Politiek Beleid staan maar iemand ademde te luid. Ik ga meteen door met de rest dan bespreek ik de meest waarschijnlijke daders na het noemen van alle mogelijke daders.

2.Leonie

De georganiseerde misdaad de ongeorganiseerde Porno Huisdieren Terminale ziekte Watersnood Tijdgebrek Brood en Spelen met Brood Parel duiken Stress De afwas Online shoppen Streamingsdiensten Lettervrees Drugs Drugs dealen (legaal en illegaal) Meervoudige handicaps met name doof, stom, blind en lam Moeders wil Griep De politie De Supermarkt De Toorn des Here

3.Robomaaier

Welkom terug Rob, leuk dat je er bent.

Gras De mensheid Het Oosten Het Zuiden Het Noorden Hengel vis wedstrijden Slaap De kerk Water Het Westen

Precies 10, een wel zeer persoonlijke lijst Robo..

Rrrrrrrrr, RRrrrrRrr

Sorry, goed gedaan. Ik ben trots op je!

4.Hannibal Lectœr

Ook welkom terug, Hanni.

De hele bliksemse klotezooi De domheid Het al Vertederende dieren filmpjes op JouBuis Serie- moordenaars Vrouwenbladen Puzzelboekjes Betaald werk Blaadjes op de rails De ijstijd Milieurampen Barbecue weer Bingo Lammetjes De kroeg Vergaderingen (zoals deze) De natuur De vergankelijkheid Pech op de weg

Je wordt met de jaren steeds milder Hannibal

Hannibal – De moordlust wordt ieder jaar wat minder. Ik heb deze maand amper twee man achter de kiezen. Ik moet mijn slachtoffers ook steeds zorgvuldiger kiezen, de meest gewilde kan ik niet eens meer bijbenen met die klote rollator en die nukkige kleine wieletjes.

5.V

V! Op jou hebben onze jaren geen vat. Wat ben je toch weergaloos mooi.

De vijanden van Lastige Gevallen van de Rede zijn...

Van Voorbijgaande Aard zelf De liefde- loosheid Het werelderfgoed Asbest Windows, Apple en Linux Mint Pakketjes Gwyneth Plumeau Café, Restaurant, Theater, Winkelcentrum, Bioscoop en Museum “Zijspoor” Muziek Meanderende beekjes De realiteit Documentaires Elvis De genen Ondergoed Koffie De aandelen Het Casino De nakende dood Krasloten Het gebrek aan opvolging en nog veel meer maar daarover later meer, in deel twee.

6.Imagine

*O Imagine, zucht. Mooiste aller mooien, kop van mijn munt, water bij mijn vuur, chemo bij mijn kuur, leuk je weer te zien.*

O Aard, zucht. Beste aller besten, Kees bij mijn hond, zout in mijn wond, verbod bij mijn straat. Eendsgelijks mijn eeuwige subtopper, slapende kabouter.

Imagine – Van Voorbijgaande Aards vijanden, een kleine selectie uit het aanbod

Iedereen. Alles. Target Marketeers. De Tijd. De Taal Haast En Nijd. Intern;punctie Seks Het materialisme Mycleanlady's No Wan De Woordenaar Het overige aanbod Spelshows Praatshows Sport Podcasts Radio programma's De vermoeidheid De Poster met het Blauwe Paardje De huis aan huis folder Software Games Drogende verf Groeiend gras

Robomaaier – Prrrrrrecies

Sssst

Gebroken surplas

Ach, kut bord!

Zelf kastijding God Satan Allah Salman Warm eten @ zee terra

7.Zout

Peper weer op pad?

Zout – Ach ja, hoe ouder, hoe gekker. Geranium Yoga of zo.

Kaas. Voedselvergiftiging De dag des oordeels Het fundament Bijzaken Gelabelde Publicaties Winstoogmerk Planten De houdbaarheid Passie Teleurstelling Het uiterlijk vertoon De macht Geld Kartel afspraken De wetenschap de few teller Straatrovers Piraten Clowns Acrobaten Het wild Batterijen Tomeloze Energie De zenuwen Het genoeg De smaak Geranium Yoga

Nou bedankt.

8.(Voorheen)

GBJ Hilterman De nacht Hollywood De koopkracht Afwas Keizer Sop Het niet aanvalsverdrag Het Almachtige Nee De tendens Het materiaal Smeltende ijskappen Viagra Verdovende middelen De apotheek Meegroeiende kinderziektes De biodiversiteit Urine Poesjes De tuin De glorie (vergaan) De spoorwegovergang Het verlangen de weerbaarheid De drang en de hoop

Tja

9.No Wan

Hi

No Wan – Hi Aard, I wipe later myself not, Its too hard for remove real good thinks, like I thinks those up. By way, No Wan not A VVA any me, just do as you for signed when say 18, please let me c nude body. Only job, you want and need, like bad. No Wan thinks about people bad and make not follow best thinks ever to remove.

Hunger De Woordenaar Big bad wolf Witches Clocky the Time monster Scrollathons Pink Floyd Purple Floyd and Blue Floyd with yellow dots The Evol Master of Ceremony Borders Attracking Opposites Disney world Fairies Marvel Interesting People Attacking Opposites Lite headedness Soft drinks No'Money in thin Tintin tin

No Wan – I know bad all, No Wan help you defeat and everybody follow you like you be new Lord, super wise because No Wan help you, as left arm and you be left with No one.

Fijn.

10.I & i

I & i – Volgens ons heb jij en dus wij ook de volgende vijanden die goede echte mensen het VVA volgen onmogelijk maken.

Spanningen op het thuiswerk De Nieuwe regelgeving Overbodige Luxe Complexe materie De zevende colonne De achtste golf De zesde, de vijfde en de vierde Bloedmonsters kleuren televisie De afstandsbediening museum jaarkaart ov jaarkaart pinpassie De Paashaas Klokkenspel De Marimba Kunstzinnige Intelligentie Darters Pogie, Matthie, Evenepoolie Kernachtige bewoordingen Tekenaars Weermensen en het Weer zelf dat en natuurlijk de stijgende C Spiegel

11.Berg

Berg – Je weet dat ik eigenlijk niet in deze regio kan zijn, toch Ik lek hier smeltwater als een bezetene en het ski seizoen loopt nog. De bergdorpen lopen inkomsten mis.

Ja, ja, nood breekt ook natuurwet Berg, had je maar niet ja moeten zeggen toen ik je vroeg om mee te doen aan een reality tv programma met Mozes.

Berg – Hrmpf. Spletsj..

Gatver, zo Koud.

De blaasbalgen industrie Het ondernemers klimaat De zoektochten naar de Waarheid Grenstwisten Zonnepanelen apps Rapport uitslagen Examens & Tentamens Formulieren Drijfgas Brei patronen Magere Hein Dode dichters Kabbelende waterstromen Andere omroepers Melancholie De geestesgesteldheid De Zorg Het onderwijs De culturele sector Het geheel der dingen De onzichtbare hand Printer problemen Gewichtige zaken Schuivende massa Drama

12.Stagiair 665644

O ja, paar schepjes minder koffie mag wel. Het is maar een tip.

Stagiair 665643 Koffieschepje Reiskosten vergoeding Valse Leiders Stroomvoorziening De Poel des Verderfs De Haat Het vergeefse Roblox Tik Tok Dating De ouderdom Het Publiek Domein De voordragers Het wonder der natuur De mensen onder de trap Dat ding in de schuur Het zwarte gat na een schitterende en succesvolle loopbaan in het Bullshit werk

13.Gwyneth Plumeau

Eh ... opmh rtygcv, ik weet wel wat ik moet zeggen maar verder dan dit kom ik niet... Leo

Leonie – Ja, pfft.. zeg het zelf!

Lafhartigheid Eigen dunk Mannen Foute mannen Melancholie Het verdriet The Force Egoïsme Het weer De donkere luchten De kou regen en de wind De printers Alle overbodige anderen Het rumoer De lange afwezigheid van zon Zinloze drukte Dit soort bijeenkomsten Iedereen die er is maar niet hoeft te zijn Pratende mensen Van Voorbijgaande Aard in het bijzonder vooral jij

Eh.. bedankt, ik ben blij dat we op deze manier weer dichter bij elkaar komen. Het verleden langzaam dag na dag beetje bij beetje vergeten.

14.Keizer Sop

Sorry Sop dat ik je moest oppiepen vanuit je vertrouwde droomwereld. Jij hebt naar eigen zeggen zoveel vijanden dat ik je expertise op dat front niet kon missen om de mijne in kaart te brengen.

Sop – Iedereen kan in principe je vijand zijn, zeker in deze tak van sport, het al tip toetsend omroepen, verkondigen van de waarheid, op het wijdsche internnet. Een man met zoveel talent zou miljarden volgelingen tot zijn beschikking moeten hebben.

Precies en geen 2, op goede dagen.

Keizer Sop – Jij hebt ze, je Aards vijanden namelijk deze...

Het Lot De door mij van hun grondgebied verdreven Schuursponsjes, Plakhaakjes, Is- en Wasknijpers, Handzeeppompjes, Is- en Wasvoorschriftlabels, Losgeslagen bubbels allen op zoek naar een veilig heen komen op jou planeet, de Aarde, deze ontheemde volkeren beschouw ik in principe als een grote vijand. Het afkoelende water Smerigheid Aangekoekt Vet Iedereen die het waagt nee te zeggen als ja het enige juiste antwoord is Alle mensen die je weblog niet lezen, kennen, geen begrip opbrengen, jou niet het broodnodige respect tonen, niet trouw blijven, loyaal tot ruim voorbij de dood, geen standbeeld voor je willen oprichten en meer van dergelijke minne lui, bij jou is dat de hele wereld, zelfs je naaste familie! De buren, de buurt, de gemeenschap, overheid, zakenwereld, collega's, vrouw, kinderen, de huisdieren en zelfs de lucht die je moet inademen, en weer uit, niemand of niets in je omgeving is betrouwbaar. De grond waarop je meestal hangt op een meubel stuk Dat meubel zelve Kortom ik ben de enigste die je kan vertrouwen de rest moet je wegpoetsen, schrobben, afdrogen, de weerstand van ze afwassen in loeiheet water, vrind. Vertrouw op mij en alles komt goed.

Klaar?

Sop – Je weet genoeg, neem het in je op. Weet dat je er niet alleen voor staat. Ik ben er voor je, verder niemand dus.

Het is in ieder geval genoteerd. Bedankt Keizer Sop voor deze bemoedigende woorden.

1. Nemesis

Het zegt iets als de afdeling VVA Stress Bijeenkomsten mijn grootste opponent hebben uitgenodigd voor deze meeting, denk ik.

Ik Ik en nog eens ik! De dunne spoeling Writeas Alle inwoners van Australië en omstreken Je spiegelbeeld Het woordt, de spelilng en grammatika Spoed en Haast Je brein Waargenomen hoop in een hopeloze situatie De altijd latente schizofrenie De diverse instellingen, instituten, waarmee jij in contact staat, van afhankelijk bent zijn allen tegen je en dat volkomen terecht Je ondeugdelijke wereldbeeld Het onvermogen en noem maar op.

Ik zou dit alles graag in overweging willen nemen maar jammer genoeg is het slimme bord net voor je begon met ratelen een stille IT dood gestorven. De stekker is spontaan uit het contact gesprongen. Helaas.

Nemesis – Zeg niet da ... ik .... verd .... puntje puntje mi .... ell...dl..g

Watte, huh, ik kan niks aannemen van iemand die zich niet eens kan verweren tegen een paar puntjes.

15, dus toch. Ik zag tweefout. Het pientere bord is na de ineenstorting weder opgestart Dankzij mijn enorme deskundigheid betreffende super computers & specifiek de toepassing van AI gaat het bord nu groots en meeslepende berekeningen loslaten op de 14 opgeslagen formulieren en daarna uit de aangeleverde een top vijf VVA vijand lijst opstellen.

Dit neemt ongeveer een poosje in beslag en dan is het al zo ver, het verdict daar!

Hier is De G5 Vijand lijst aldus mij en mijn slimme Bord.

Op 5

5 Koffieschepje

Op 4

4 Complexe Materie

Op 3

3 De mensen onder de trap

Op 2

2 No Wan

Op 1, de top vijand onder de miljarden vijanden

1 De Dood

Opzienbarend! Wat een lijst. Hier kan ik iets mee, nu kom ik ergens. Ik pik de hoofdschuldige er uit en daar mee aan de slag. De dood, inderdaad al tijden worstel ik met deze enorme onbereikbare doelgroep, zelf heb ik al menig voorstel ingediend bij de omroep om juiste deze personen te bereiken. Promotie teams bij dodenakkers om duidelijk te maken dat je er ondanks alles voor ons nog toe doet, deel uit maakt van onze club. Laat je niet kisten, in het veld slaan, het hoeft niet per c na afloop te zitten in kannen en kruiken, er is meer tussen hemel en aarde namelijk VVA. Flyers uitdelen, buttons, stickers plakken desnoods, deze groep is veruit de grootste en minst gebruikte, genegeerd, het is eerlijk waar kwetsend zo weinig er komt van die kant. De mensen onder de trap hebben het ook zwaar, worden niet erkend pleiten al jaren voor meer rechten, zeggenschap, ruimte om stappen te maken, optredens, trapje hoger komen onder de ladder, zeker, ook hun beschouw ik noodzakelijk voor het betreden van het Weblog Walhalla. No Wan, No Wan, in mijn achterhoofd wist ik al dat jij meer was dan zomaar een karakter, een wisser van mijn werk. Je gedrevenheid om mij en mijn werk van het web te verwijderen komt alleen maar omdat je weet dat ik daardoor energie krijg om nog beter te worden, je me wil stimuleren om het beste uit mezelf te halen. Het bord heeft gesproken, laten zien wat ik eigenlijk al wist.

No Wan – Not true, bord wrong. I try safe world by control delete, no encourage U. All Lies!!

Complexe materie, iedere dag kom ik het tegen maar het stuwt me op, maakt me een moeilijker maar stukken betere mens, complex ben je, materie maar daarom niet minder waard. Ik zie je zoals je echt bent, heel ingewikkeld. En koffieschepje, jaren dacht ik dat jij mijn vriend was maar nu heb ik dankzij bord gezien welk kwaad er in je huist, koffieschepje ik wil je nooit weer in de buurt van mijn weblog zien, ik zal de rechter inschakelen voor het regelen van de een virtueel weblog domein verbod. Ik gebruik mijn handen wel voor koffie scheppen in een filter. Het is dat het niet anders kan omdat ik, wij, van VVA anders niet ieder kwartaal de juiste hoeveelheid volgers winst boeken, ik had je als alles anders was wel een gouden handdruk gegund, een goedmakertje waarmee je het nog een poosje kon uitzingen maar nu het bord je heeft aangewezen als een van de vijf VVA hoofdzonden zie ik daar vanaf.

Ik weet wat me te doen staat en nu ga ik meteen flink worstelen en daarna boven komen als echte overwinteraar.

Progress has been slower this month, in part because I'm now working on the ending of the game, and endings are hard.

Endings are especially hard in this kind of branching interactive fiction, because I've got to pull all the different plot threads together, many of which will be different depending on the player's choices, and many of which I haven't written yet. (Contrast with the ending of Beyond the Chiron Gate, which is basically the same every time you reach it—it varies based on choices you make in the endgame itself, but not based on choices you made earlier in the game.)

And endings are hard to write about because I want to avoid spoilers, which is the main reason this is a short dev diary. Although I will just note that many of the space hero stories I'm drawing on culminate in some kind of mass combat, either on the ground or in space.

Once I've got this ending solved, I'll have a complete path through the game written, and then hopefully everything else will fall into place.

Or will it? Learn more in next month's developer diary!

*

Also, the “No ICE in Minnesota” charity bundle is still live on itch.io, and it has a bunch of great games, so please consider getting that if you haven't already.

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO (2026)

Episodes 4-6 (Spoilers)

See review of 1-3 here

The origin story of Dunk & Egg’s team-up takes a darker turn in the second half of the premiere season. Due to his innate goodness, Dunk finds himself in power’s crosshairs, and Egg is revealed to be the nickname of princeling Aegon Targaryen. 

This show shrinks Westeros down to an intimate experience; we have never spent this kind of quality time with the Smallfolk. Steely Pate, the armorer with a heart of gold, is an elite side character. The closing scene sets up season's worth of storytelling and an effective denouement to the black-and-blue bruising of the previous episode. 

Watch it.

#100WordReviews #Drabble #100DaysToOffload #tv #TVReview #HBO #HouseOfTheDragon #GameOfThrones #Westeros #KnightOfTheSevenKingdoms #Fantasy #television

Previously, I asked if homeowners do research about HOAs before they move into an HOA community. This research is going to be difficult because there is no database for HOA complaints. And there should be at least one, especially for Florida.

Prospective homeowners have to become private investigators to uncover details about the HOAs in the communities in which they anticipate living. You can go to the Reddit r/FuckHOA thread, but posters often conceal details about their neighborhoods, HOAs, and property management companies. Interestingly, many of the stories are about Florida.

As it become increasingly difficult to buy a home without deed restrictions, we need a national database about HOA abuses that is not run by realtors or homeowners association lobbies.

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: The 2026 Corporate Accra Girl Wardrobe: A Bold, Colourful Palette to Power Your Style, Luxury brands super inflated prices reviewed, Fashion in space, Beach walk and star watching, and Saffron Saga Indian restaurant

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The 2026 Corporate Accra Girl Wardrobe: A Bold, Colourful Palette to Power Your Style. Hey, City girls! It’s 2026, and we’re not here to play when it comes to fashion in the corporate world. Gone are the days when a neutral palette ruled the office; the modern corporate Accra girl is taking charge and making waves with a wardrobe that's as bold, vibrant, and dynamic as the city itself. Let’s take a deep dive into the hottest colours dominating the office in Accra this year. Whether you're a startup superstar or a boss at a multinational corporation, your wardrobe needs to reflect confidence, creativity, and of course, that African flair. Ready to turn heads and own the boardroom? Here’s the must-have colour palette you’ll be seeing everywhere this year! Rich Earth Tones with a Twist. Think terracotta, deep cocoa, and burnt sienna — but make them modern and fresh. These earthy hues, reminiscent of Accra’s rich soil and vibrant markets, are perfect for the corporate environment. Paired with sleek, structured suits, dresses, or blazers, these shades exude authority while remaining grounded in the culture. In 2026, we’re adding a twist with pops of gold or coral accessories to lighten the look. Why it works: Earth tones are universally flattering and versatile, while still being a fresh take on the classic neutral tones. They evoke professionalism without sacrificing personality. Style tip: Go for a terracotta blazer with a black pencil skirt or pants. Add a gold necklace and statement earrings to elevate your look. Bonus points if you’re rocking a bold lip in a deep berry or brick red! Luxury brands super inflated prices reviewed. Recent hikes in prices of brands like Dior and Chanel (30-60%) have brought some extra profit to the bottom line of these companies, but now sales are dropping, some customers (about 50 million of them) have come to their senses and feel that a 50 ml bottle of eau de parfum is not worth 150 USD, especially if most of us are hardly able to detect every little smell that goes into that. So these big brands are now offering little items again at lower prices, call it at the entry level, for the aspirational customers, those who want to buy the Brand but cannot really afford it, and who pleasure themselves with a little affordable Brand item, dreaming that later they'll be richer and can then buy some of the other Brand things too. The Brand seems more important than the product itself, and in Ghana too we are influenced by this sort of thing, if it is not an Apple don’t give it to me. I even hear that from people who are asking for money to buy airtime.

Fashion in space. The first man in a space, Yuri Gagarin (a Russian, in 1961) was not even recognizable to his own wife... But since then astronauts and astronautes have become film stars in their own way, and want to look good for the many pictures taken of them. So space suits now look more attractive, as can be seen on a recent picture of the crew who is to replace the current International Space Station crew. The transporter was the Space Shuttle. Looks a bit like star wars dresses, and expect earth fashion to soon copy space fashion, and to have a fashion brand called “Musk”.

Beach walk and star watching. If the sky is clear (not really of late) you can see the stars, and even point out your own Zodiac. But then you need to know what time your zodiac will be visible, which changes throughout the year. But Elon Musk, and many before him, have put so many satellites around the world that you can hardly see the stars again. And especially above areas with a lot of artificial light, like cities, that light disturbs the light emitted by the stars, so you don’t see much again. A bit like trying to listen to music next to a generator. So those who really want to observe stars, as a hobby or professionally, go to areas where there is least light disturbance, like Chile's Atacama Desert, 4000 meters high and no clouds and zero rainfall. And scientists are currently celebrating that a 10 billion $ hydrogen and ammonia production facility project planned for that area has finally been cancelled, it would have spoiled the view.

Saffron Saga Indian restaurant (11th Lane, Salvation Road, behind La Villa Boutique in Osu, Accra) is one of my favourites of late, and often the place is full of Indian looking Indians and we are the only “foreigners”, so it can't be bad or these would go elsewhere. And some of this Indian food is quite interesting. But mind you, it is difficult to talk about Indian food, they have about 7 main distinctive cuisines, and hundreds if not thousands of local cuisines so maybe we are just seeing one particular cuisine here. Something I'll ask the next time I go there. We had crispy canvas humus at GHC 133, this is a sort of very thin crispy pancake fried in what you could call a headpan, and then they add a sort of humus with freshly chopped vegetables like onions, peppers, tomatoes, spring onions etc. Nice. We also had chicken chilly rice at 133GHC, a bit like the royal rice in a Chinese restaurant, but this one is richer, not just a few small pieces of meat or shrimps mixed through the rice. And it is also spicier. Their rice is “wetter” than what you get at the Chinese. Also nice. A Guinness goes for 46 GHC.

Lydia...

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Consistency, Reliability, Anxiety and Technology

Hello fellow beta testers, today is another day of trial and error. Your alarm has worked. That's a good start. Take a deep breath and ask yourself what is the next piece of technology you will need to rely on today? Do you have a backup plan if it doesn't work? Anxiety has been thinking about these things all night. Anxiety and our current, technologically advanced world are great bedfellows.

The boomers often told stories of consumer products that would last a life time. “They don't make 'em like they used to,” was the phrase that covered everything from automobiles to toasters. The generations after the boomers can attest to the quality loss. The were guinea pigs for corporations. What is our tolerance for replacing the tech in our lives? Imagine the parents of boomers had a refrigerator for 50 years and then gave it to their boomer children for the garage or basement. My parents had a fridge for maybe 20 years. Today, a 15 year old fridge is beyond geriatric and more of a miracle.

As more and more devices have computers built-in, they become less reliable. Of course, there's a new-ish villain on the scene as well. Built-in obsolescence is the prince of capitalism. Now, if we are lucky to have homes, they all come with the insecurity of inconsistent appliances that our recent ancestors relied on. Knowing that tomorrow morning there is a 50% chance that my transit card may not scan and I won't get to work is not a comforting thought. You've got a load of wet clothes in the washer, but suddenly the dryer refuses to recognize that its door is closed and fails to start. The garage door opener is great at that one job. Note that is not called a garage door closer. Yup, something is tripping it up and it will not close. The printer, well let's face it, the thing has never worked without some sort of hassle.

Meanwhile, your boss was around when computers were advertised as the fastest, most efficient and effective tools for every single task. Certainly you can finish this project you were given via email 20 minutes ago in under an hour and still get 3 other tasks done. You have a computer! Never mind that the latest security update has broken your email client and if you computer goes to sleep it will lock up and you have to turn it off and then back on to keep working. The boss doesn't really believe you. Her computer is not having issues. Granted, you aren't sure what she uses it for because last week you had to show her how to add an appointment to her calendar.

Whether technology works or not, the world is moving at a faster pace and that is causing anxiety in many people. The faster we move, the more that is expected of us thanks to capitalism. Glitchy, buggy technology is the bread of the shit sandwich that is our anxiety. It gets worse every single day. That goes for both anxiety and technology.

Panic on the Hour

The amount of tasks we perform in a day is far more than it used to be. We congratulate ourselves for putting in extra time as well. The idea of working more than 40 hours a week is a badge of honor, not something to alarm us. Anxiety gets to spend far more time on the job when we work more hours and increase the number of tasks we perform. So we're all on meds trying to stop the lizard brain from interpreting the fact that the email won't open as a physical attack from a predator. Well to be fair, if you don't get the email with the changes open, you don't make the changes, you get fired, you cannot pay the bills and will likely die on the streets in the winter. Maybe the lizard brain isn't that far off with its interpretation.

We're scared. Living paycheck to paycheck means more than just a few white hairs. We're afraid of layoffs so we put in extra, unpaid time to show our loyalty. All that extra time means we're not eating healthy. We don't have time for doctor exam, when could we ever fit that in? Now, I am scared about my health. The anxiety starts to become overwhelming, but I surely cannot take time off from work. Despite there being a mental health leave available, taking it is a one way ticket to the scrutiny of every single minute when I am back at work. Any mistake is proof that I am no longer cut out for this work.

Of course, the moment you think about taking a mental health leave is the first time that you recognized that things are getting bad. This means you get to add that to the infinite anxiety list. You could ask for an accommodation, perhaps to work a day or two at home? No, you cannot do that because your internet at home goes down at random times, once a week. Your provider forces you to use their hardware and they've replace the network hub 3 times already. Is it a cheap device or are the employees at the manufacturer of the hub feeling similar to you? Are they so anxious trying to meet quotas that they make mistakes during assembly?

Perhaps we should say capitalism “pushes” the world around, not makes it go around.

Unreliable Expectations

“Everything is out to destroy us!” Anxiety chants.

Though, it is not paranoia or a flight or fight system that is overreacting. Literally the technology we use to solve problems everyday is built to fail in the name of capitalism. One of the biggest advancements in recent years is the smart phone. It's also one of the most expensive things we own.

We forget that our phones which are now required for transactions at banks or social agencies, are priced anywhere between $700 – $3000 USD. The companies have put us on payment plans. They cover the phone cost upfront and we pay it off in 3-5 years. Of course, the technology moves so fast that the phone will be obsolete in 2 years.

It's this weird mix between having the latest, supported device that is required for most of the tasks in our world and owning a status symbol. Companies have taught us that phones don't last long. Nobody expects a phone to last them 50 years. So it's normal to go into debt every two years for at least 2k. And, now everything is digital and runs software like a phone so obviously we need a new dishwasher. This one is pushing 6 years.

We have printers, nearly all ink jet printers on the market have an expiry date. At some point the printer will say it needs to be serviced, but shipping it to be serviced and paying for the service is more than the cost of a new printer.

We're missing those reliable, stable pieces in our lives that give us breathing room to worry about the things that matter in the moment. Our lives are a minefield and we're navigating blind. Of course we are anxious.

The stress of all our human relationships and the complexity of all the financial commitments that require our attention to simply have a roof over our heads is far more than we can handle. Yet, the layer above that is filled with technology that is unreliable. Your bank website is down. The car refuses to be put in drive because it thinks the air bag has been deployed. The Uber app says your credit card was denied so you cannot get to the bank for help. The furnace in the house is not working and you are freaking out. To calm the anxiety you think you should do a guided meditation. Unfortunately, your phone has decided that it won't play any audio of any kind.

With any luck, I will be able to post this without issue. Then, I can settle into the anxiety of the moment.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.

— Allan Bloom (h/t: Cultural Offering)

#culture #life #quotes #reading

Gestern in einer digitalen Politik-Werkstatt des SEND e.V. zur politischen Arbeit in ländlichen Räumen habe ich einen Gedanken geteilt, der mich schon länger begleitet und den ich hier etwas sortieren möchte. In meinem beruflichen Alltag begegne ich in Dörfern und Kleinstädten regelmäßig Menschen, die sich selbst als konservativ bezeichnen – und zugleich an Projekten arbeiten, die man im urbanen Diskurs vermutlich als progressiv oder sogar transformativ einordnen würde. Diese Menschen bauen Netzwerke auf, gründen Coworking Spaces, initiieren MehrWertOrte oder engagieren sich für das, was Ray Oldenburg als „Dritte Orte“ beschrieben hat: Räume jenseits von Zuhause und Arbeitsplatz, in denen Begegnung, Austausch und demokratische Aushandlung stattfinden.

Und doch höre ich immer wieder den Satz: „Ich bin eher konservativ.“ Das hat mich lange irritiert – auch, weil ich mich selbst nicht als konservativ verstehe und wir trotzdem gut, konstruktiv und mit gemeinsamen Zielen zusammenarbeiten. Hinzu kommt, dass empirische Befunde, etwa von dem Soziologen Ansgar Hudde, zeigen, dass das Wahlverhalten vieler dieser Personen – mit regionalen Ausnahmen wie Bayern oder der Eifel – gar nicht eindeutig konservativ ist. Selbstzuschreibung und politische Praxis fallen also nicht zwangsläufig zusammen.

Vielleicht liegt die Irritation an meinem Begriffsverständnis. Im urban geprägten Diskurs erscheint „konservativ“ häufig als Gegenbegriff zu „progressiv“: Bewahrung statt Veränderung, Tradition statt Innovation. Im ländlichen Raum scheint sich diese Semantik jedoch zu verschieben. Dort bedeutet konservativ meiner Wahrnehmung nach oft, Verantwortung für das Gemeinwesen zu übernehmen, sich zu kümmern und funktionierende Strukturen nicht leichtfertig aufzugeben.

Wenn eine Unternehmerin einen leerstehenden Vierseitenhof in einen Coworking- und Begegnungsort transformiert, dann geschieht das selten aus disruptivem Sendungsbewusstsein. Es geht um Ortskernbelebung, um kürzere Wege, um Perspektiven für junge Menschen, um soziale Infrastruktur. Das ist kein Bruch mit dem Bestehenden, sondern dessen Weiterentwicklung. Auch der urbane Coworking Space war nie wirklich disruptiv – Büros existieren weiterhin –, doch im städtischen Kontext wurde Coworking gern als Symbol einer „neuen Arbeitswelt“ inszeniert. Neu ist dort normativ aufgeladen. Auf dem Land ist neu vor allem funktional.

In Metropolen war Coworking lange Teil einer kreativen Milieu-Logik; in Kleinstädten und Dörfern ist es häufig eine infrastrukturelle Antwort auf strukturelle Herausforderungen: Leerstand nimmt zu, Geschäftsmodelle verändern sich, klassische Treffpunkte verschwinden, junge Menschen pendeln oder ziehen weg. Unter diesen Bedingungen wird ein Coworking Space zu einem Instrument der Daseinsvorsorge im weiteren Sinne.

Ähnlich verhält es sich mit MehrWertOrten: multifunktionale Räume, die Arbeiten, Lernen, Nahversorgung, Kultur und Ehrenamt zusammenführen. Sie stabilisieren lokale Netzwerke und erhöhen Resilienz. Viele Initiator*innen sprechen dabei von Heimat, Zusammenhalt, Verantwortung und Generationengerechtigkeit – Begriffe, die politisch eher konservativ konnotiert sind. Und doch sind diese Projekte ohne Offenheit nicht denkbar. Unterschiedliche Professionen, Lebensentwürfe und politische Haltungen teilen sich Infrastruktur und kommen ins Gespräch. Vielleicht lese ich diese Praxis deshalb – aus meiner urban sozialisierten Perspektive – als progressiv.

Je länger ich darüber nachdenke, desto mehr zweifle ich an der Schärfe der Dichotomie „konservativ versus progressiv“ im ländlichen Kontext. Viele der Akteur*innen, mit denen ich arbeite, wollen nichts umstürzen. Sie wollen erhalten, was ihnen wichtig ist: Lebensqualität, Gemeinschaft, wirtschaftliche Tragfähigkeit. Gerade aus diesem Motiv heraus entwickeln sie neue Modelle von Arbeit, Kooperation und Begegnung. Das wirkt weniger wie ein Widerspruch als wie eine andere Form von Fortschritt – nicht der radikale Bruch mit dem Bestehenden, sondern eine behutsame Transformation aus der Mitte der Gemeinschaft heraus.

Wer ländliche Räume vorschnell in politische Schubladen steckt, übersieht diese Dynamik. Dort entstehen Orte, die demokratische Kultur stärken, wirtschaftliche Perspektiven eröffnen und gesellschaftliche Vielfalt ermöglichen – häufig initiiert von Menschen, die sich selbst als konservativ verstehen. Für mich ist das inzwischen weniger irritierend als ermutigend. Es zeigt, dass Offenheit nicht zwingend an ein bestimmtes politisches Label gebunden ist und dass Coworking Spaces, MehrWertOrte und andere Dritte Orte Brücken schlagen können – zwischen Milieus, Generationen und Weltanschauungen. Vielleicht liegt genau darin ihr eigentlicher Mehrwert.

Así como suena, sin alterar. En su golpe, en las ondas que produce, tal como es, sencilla perfección.

Dejando que la mente caiga, descanse. Simplemente lo que sucede.

Otra gota, y otra. La montaña, la casa, el origen: la luz que enciende la forma y tus pensamientos, también gotas.

En su golpe, otra gota.

Sin alterar nada, descansa.