from Unvarnished diary of a lill Japanese mouse

JOURNAL 8 octobre 2026

Aujourd’hui ka chan entre officiellement dans mon école. Elle commence son apprentissage. Elle sera maintenant mon élève. Elle accepte que je serai très exigeante car elle sera amenée à passer le contrôle de mes pairs quand je la sentirai prête, mais que nous sommes deux femmes et qu’il faudra qu'elle soit deux fois meilleure que si nous étions des hommes. C’est ainsi. Nous nous retrouverons tous les jeudis ici à la maison. Pendant le travail il n’y aura plus entre nous l'amitié profonde qui nous unit mais un strict rapport de maître à élève. Ce sera dur et extrêmement exigeant. Elle est ok. La journée a été longue. Ce soir nous nous retrouvons à nouveau, fatiguées mais sœurs de cœur. Nous allons nous doucher puis nous préparerons ensemble le dîner.

#Kachan #dojo

 
Lire la suite...

from bios

Thoughts on The CCID’s Not My Forever Campaign

by Roger Young

Disclaimer: This shit makes me very angry.

“A partnership with the CCID is more than a donation. It’s an investment in a safer, more dignified city centre for your staff, customers and clients. Your support directly funds the outreach and reintegration programmes that turn small first steps into lasting change. It provides your brand with a visible, meaningful commitment.” — Cape Town Central City Improvement District, Not My Forever campaign page

In September the CCID launched Not My Forever, a digital storytelling campaign built around people who have lived on the streets of Cape Town’s CBD. Four of them speak to camera about family deaths, abuse, addiction and losing their children. Their trauma is shot beautifully in black and white. Let us be clear here: they are just doing what it takes to survive. They have been asked to tell their stories, and their stories are true and heartbreaking. A fifth person, who now works for the CCID, is presented as what they could become.

The stories run as video on the campaign website and on digital LED billboards around the city, between the ads for everything else. “Behind every person experiencing homelessness in Cape Town is a name, a history, and a future still being written,” and the invitation is to see the person, not the stereotype. I can just imagine the person sleeping in a doorway somewhere off Loop Street, their sleep interrupted by the flashing face of a success story, taunting them for their lack of initiative.

The CCID is a non-profit funded by the CBD’s property owners, set up in 2000 to lift the city centre out of what it calls “crime and grime.” Its own pitch is a world-class place to live, work, play and stay. Social development is one department among those. At the City’s 2018/19 count, 6,175 people were living on Cape Town’s streets or in its shelters; researchers say about 14,000. There aren’t enough billboards in Cape Town for every person experiencing homelessness.

So while this campaign might be materially and socially helping a fraction of those on the streets, and those on the billboards, the CCID is not mandated to solve homelessness as a wider social issue. Forgive me for being cynical here, but as a former homeless person in the city of Cape Town, I wonder if we, the unhoused, are so used to getting beaten down by the CCID that we are willing to treat whatever scraps they give us as a blessing, a break from the demeaning bullshit we have been subjected to.

Through Straatwerk – partially funded by the CCID – redemption is conditional on labour: sweeping the city clean and safe for business. When I was there in the 2010s, if you didn’t sweep you didn’t get a bed. You swept, you got a meal and a bed. I cannot remember if we were paid in cash and it was deducted; I remember that we got no cash.

In 2018, GroundUp reported that Straatwerk’s Jesus Saves programme in Sea Point paid R50 for a four-hour shift — R12.50 an hour. Workers with bank accounts were paid R65; foremen, most of them homeless themselves, were paid R80 in cash or R90 into a bank account. Straatwerk collected a 20% administration fee from the ratepayers’ payments that funded the programme. The national minimum wage of R20 an hour came into effect nine months later, on 1 January 2019. Straatwerk’s manager told the paper that the people on those shifts weren’t workers but members of a “school of life.” That seems like a neat trick for avoiding paying the homeless minimum wage to do a job that the City of Cape Town should be responsible for.

Also, “Jesus Saves”.

In Johannesburg, OUTsurance and Easybet put their names on the pointsmen directing traffic, and the logos are on the vests. Everyone can see who is paying for what. Johannesburg is a city whose municipal management problems are widely acknowledged, and I’m not offering this as a model. But Cape Town claims to be a functioning municipality, and here the same arrangement — business paying for work normally associated with the state — gets presented as welfare.

When I lost my apartment in 2018 after a sudden rent increase of 20% coincided with a relapse, I ended up living from couch to park bench. One afternoon I was sitting in the park across from my old apartment building, in the place where I used to have lunch every day, as I had nowhere else to go, and I was told to move on by the CCID because I was making the tourists uncomfortable. Because there were tourists watching, the CCID were extremely nice to me. They drove me out to Blikkiesdorp, thirty kilometres outside of the city.

During COVID the homeless were removed from their sparse populations on the mountain above Vredehoek and moved into the densely populated, unsanitary conditions of Strandfontein, where the food was thin and information was non-existent. The reason given for the move was that the unhoused might infect the residents. We were not seen as residents.

So when I see the billboards of Not My Forever, I have to wonder if this is not just virtue signalling by the CCID to make the tourists feel comfortable while they remove the homeless elsewhere.

Of course, social change is not the ambit of the CCID; they are here to make the city safe and clean for business and high-value renters. It is the CoCT’s failure to build low-cost housing, suitable harm-reduction interventions, and unconditional access to shelters, skills development and rehabs that has left the CCID doing social-development work in the first place.

In December 2024, the Constitutional Court found the City’s housing programme unconstitutional in part because it failed to provide temporary emergency accommodation in the inner city and compounded the legacy of spatial apartheid.

“What negates the reasonableness of the City is that not a single emergency housing development has been built in the last 30 years.” — Mathopo J, Constitutional Court, Commando v City of Cape Town, December 2024

The DA-led CoCT has, over the course of its tenure, failed to adequately respond to the problems of homelessness, spatial inequality, and the lack of access to work opportunities that, combined, lead to high instances of substance dependence.

There should be no private-public partnership managing the unhoused of Cape Town. They are people, not things to be managed. And while at face value the CCID department of Social Development may seem to be leading well-intentioned interventions, their corporate mandate is at odds with their brand messaging.

There are signs in the CBD of Cape Town that state NO BEGGING in pictorial form. Can I tell you what it’s like to be hungry on the streets, and someone walks past you with a fucking artisan boerewors roll, and when you ask them for help they grunt and point to a no begging sign? Your hunger is not allowed. Here’s a suggestion: don’t make begging illegal, make it unnecessary.

After the institution of the CCID, homeless spikes, hostile benches and no-begging signs became conventional features of the CBD. Now that same CCID has a department of Social Development. I remain skeptical.

One of them says he’s working on himself, preparing for a different future. His redemption becomes evidence of the CCID’s success. In this format relapse wouldn’t be a part of recovery, it would land as a breach of the brand. Everyone who has seen his face in the CBD has been told how his story ends, and if it doesn’t end that way, the failure will be his alone. His redemption story is his permanent Not His Forever.

Researchers who study recovery stories in mental health services have a name for this. Angela Woods, Akiko Hart and Helen Spandler describe the Recovery Narrative as a genre: a highly circumscribed kind of storytelling, shaped by a “positivity imperative” that lets some stories through and silences the rest. Another review, “Eliciting Recovery Narratives in Global Mental Health: Benefits and Potential Harms,” finds that the institutions collecting these stories shape who gets chosen and how they’re coached for their audience.

In the video for the Not My Forever campaign, one of the people who was formerly homeless and now works for the CCID says the phrase “Not My Forever” in a way that, to my ear, sits uncomfortably in her mouth. You can imagine the tone deaf brand bro saying, “PERFECT,” between sips of his R90 flat white.

There is another beautiful shot of a homeless camp under a bridge, the golden evening light filtering between the two aerial freeways onto the tents. A voice-over explains that there is nowhere to sleep in the city, and that they sleep under the bridges to stay dry. It almost looks idyllic. But the message being reinforced is brutally simple: there is nowhere to sleep in the city. Do not even try.

However, there are plenty of places for people to sleep within the city, but that space is available only to a certain class of people — property owners, highly paid professionals, and tourists. Everyone else must catch a bus to work, and the MyCiTi prices keep on rising.

One of the people featured in the campaign talks about his time as a 28. We cut to aerial shots of the Cape Flats, then to a man standing with his back to camera outside a housing project as a police van passes. Again, the implied framing is clear: the places where “the Coloureds” live are associated with crime and the destruction of lives. But there is no context for why these areas are like this, or any clear accountability for the conditions that produced them. The failure is individualised and racialised across class lines. There is no context for the systems in which those failures happen.

Side Note: CoCT has launched its programme for aerial surveillance and SWAT units to support the gang units in the Cape Flats. That’s on brand.

Another person in the campaign hopes to help other addicts and street people find their way to better lives. According to Not My Forever, the way to a brighter future is to help other people out of homelessness. The video’s final payoff is… maybe you can get a job with the CCID helping get other people off the streets, or maybe you can use your experience to help other people get free of addiction.

While these might be noble ideas, they are being employed to legitimise a private-public partnership whose core function is to make the city safe for business, not people. Besides, are there even enough jobs for every homeless person to aspire to work for the CCID?

According to the CCID’s own news page, field worker Mark Williams “anticipates that as many as 30 of his clients may not survive” each winter. If we had unconditional access to shelters, even if just in winter, this might indicate that the CCID actually cares about the homeless.

The CoCT and the DA keep creating conditions that churn out a new supply of homeless people pretty much constantly. If they don’t die in winter, there are streets for them to sweep, at below minimum wage.

In the framing of the Not My Forever campaign, the message seems to be: to get out of the conditions of homelessness (that the CoCT has helped create) you must work for business doing the job of government, for the sake of building brands, and perform redemption forever.

Note:If you dispute my framing of the CCID here, please feel free to ask an unhoused person in the City Centre. You will find them under the bridge, bathed in golden light.
 
Read more...

from AnOublietteofThought

I'm currently laying in bed listening to the beep beep beep of reverse warning driving me insane. It's been ongoing for a while now. There is something about it that gets under my skin very quickly. I had a brief phone call distraction.

We spoke of old movies from our childhood and teens. He's four years younger than me, so there can be slight memory differences. I think he was likely allowed to watch more. He also knows all of the movie trivia, so that can be smile-inducing to listen to. I've never bothered because it takes me out of the story.

I also don't like to know what I'm going to be watching before I see it. It spoils the fun. I rarely watch a movie twice, but I think I'm going to make an exception and take a nostalgia trip, because I fell asleep watching 'Gremlins' yesterday, and there was something about it that brought me joy. A warmth I often find missing in today's cinema.

We spoke about a few different movies. I'm going to be looking up 'Flight of the Navigator' to see what adult me thinks. It reminded me of a conversation from earlier in the week where a younger friend was asking me about 'Rocky Horror Picture Show'. It did not rub her the right way.

I, on the other hand, have some very fond memories of the movie. I think I must have been very wide-eyed the first time I saw it in the early 90s. It seemed like everyone knew what was going on except for me. I got very wet that evening, and didn't know a word of the songs. The shadow cast was amazing. I was most excited to go back fully prepared and dressed appropriately. I'm going to have to have a look-see.

That's around the age where I started loosening up a little. I still hadn't fully settled into my me. We're constantly shifting and growing after all, but I began to develop a better understanding of who I was when not following the rules of conservative expectation.

My visual snow has drifted into its rarity phase tonight. It usually only gets plasma cloudy when a geomagnetic storm is headed our way. I should check on that. They're like a drifting purple fuchsia tonight. It's simultaneously extremely pretty and very disconcerting because I'm not accustomed to it. The normal red dots have been joined with blue dots, and there's larger teal flashes of what looks like around seven layers of chicken scratch fading in and out on the diagonal. When I close my eyes, it's uncomfortably intense. I guess I'll be adding some light to my darkness to try to dampen it.

These days people classify it as a syndrome or disorder. I question if it's more a neurological phenotype. It's all I've ever known after all. I should probably get off the phone. I have a few chess games to lose later. I had a mild migraine all day yesterday. It's foolish of me to be pushing it, but I say my brain can get ahold of itself and calm down. We have some research to do. (Yes, I know there's no known correlation with geomagnetic storms, but the timing is kooky.)

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved. Not edited nor proofread.

 
Read more...

from Pierre-Emmanuel Weck

À chaque renouveau de manifs, c'est la même rengaine, il faut flouter les visages des manifestants, voir même ne plus faire de photo du tout.

Si on écoutait les donneurs de leçons gauchos, on arriverait au monde souhaité par les fachos. Plus d'information, plus de rapport au réel, un seul canal d'information…

La violence des manifestations serait toujours la bonne, face à celle de l'Etat et de sa police. Dans ce cadre là, qu'en sera-t-il le jour où nous aurons des manifs de fachos qui casseront des vitrine de boutiques juives ? Pas d'image là non plus ?

En 1986, lors des manifs étudiantes contre la loi Devaquet, alors que Jacques Chirac était premier ministre et Charles Pasqua ministre de l'intérieur, les journalistes de télévision avaient remarqué un manifestant avec une écharpe jaune qui lançait des projectiles sur les CRS. Ce même manifestation n'était jamais inquiété lors des charges des policiers sur les étudiants, et même, on le retrouvait sur différents terrains de manifestation. Ces images avait alors permis de démontrer qu'il y avait bien des “agents provocateurs” envoyés pour décrédibiliser les étudiants. Et s'il n'y avait pas eu d'images ?

On n'a pas eu ce genre de débat pour les gilets jaunes. Peut-être parce que ce mouvement est parti socialement de couches de la société que les révolutionnaires de salon ne fréquentaient pas et qu'ensuite, récupéré en partie par l'extrême droite, il n'apparaissait plus comme fréquentable.

De quel camp est la violence ? La sienne est-t-elle toujours légitime ? Pourquoi la majorité la rejette-t-elle ?

Je ne porte pas de jugement sur sa légitimité, parfois il n'existe pas d'autre forme d'expression possible. Et même si c'est un engrenage délétère, elle n'est souvent que la réponse à une autre violence. Dans le cas présent, côté étudiants, en dehors de l'excitation et l'effet d'entraînement, matinée de provocations divers, le rôle des adultes est plutôt de les écouter et de les aider à formuler leurs revendications et organiser leur mouvement, pas d'en profiter pour les envoyer à la casse, éborgner leur vie et remplir leur casier judiciaire.

Côté gouvernement, la violence n'est pas que physique, c'est une trahison morale et politique. C'est leur envoyer le message que l'on n'a pas besoin d'eux, sinon de jouer le seul rôle assigné, celui de consommer et de se débrouiller, quoi qu'il en coûte, pour ne pas remettre en question la hiérarchie actuelle et faire perdurer ce système pour leurs aînés. En dehors de ça, se ne sont que des délinquants à mater et éliminer.

Ceux qui aujourd'hui rejette la photo dans les manifs semblent habités par une vision, à la fois, passéiste et déconnectée de la réalité. Passéiste, car ils sont nostalgique de révoltes anciennes dont ils ont abondamment été abreuvé d'images nostalgique d'un temps où les luttes semblaient continuelles et gâgnables. Et déconnectés d'un monde saturé de vidéosurveillance, de reconnaissance faciale et de fichage. Ils préfèrent s'attaquer à ceux qui tentent de changer ce monde ainsi que ceux qui en font le récit, plutôt qu'au responsables de cette situation.

Ce n'est pas le travail de quelques photographes amateurs ou professionnels qui va mettre en danger tout un mouvement. Le denis de réalité ne sert que le pouvoir qui aura toujours les moyens d'imposer son propre récit.

Si on ne laisse pas les multitudes s'exprimer, on étouffe toute les alternatives.

 
Read more...

from An Open Letter

I was reading the Horror book incidents around the house, and I found the thing that honestly hurt me. The most was the mother‘s negligence and how she treated the daughter. It reminded me a lot of of my childhood and my issues with my mom. And I think about how I haven’t spoken with her in over two years because she told me that she should not be in my life in one of her moods. And I think about how her stubbornness is more important to her.

 
Read more...

from Midus

Publicat la 26 septembrie 2017.

Ați făcut vreodată ordine în căsuța de e-mail? Dacă aveți Yahoo!, aș putea pune pariu că nu, deoarece, teoretic, aveți spațiu nelimitat. La Yahoo! am renunțat aproape imediat după apariția Gmail. Am intenționat să beneficiez ulterior și de alte servicii Y!, așa că am deschis un nou cont. Dezamăgire totală! Ca inginer, Gmail se potrivește mai mult spiritului tehnic. Yahoo! este mai artistic, mai vizual, mai cromatic, mai orientat către partea socială, de știri și de evenimente. L-aș numi tabloid.

Google e strict și la obiect, dar e mai — aș zice, ba chiar zic — cistercian; scop pur, fără floricele, fără artificii (poate doar cu ocazia vreunui doodle).

Revin la ordinea din căsuța de e-mail. Am luat e-mail cu e-mail, corespondențe vechi de ani de zile (mai exact, din vremea Google Mail beta version) și am rămas surprins câtă informație a rămas „agățată” în acele scrisori electronice.

Conturi pe tot felul de magazine online, de site-uri de muzică, de cărți, de filme, educaționale (adăugați tot ce vă vine în minte), felicitări și urări, persoane de care nici nu ne mai aducem aminte, de altele de care uitasem, dar mi-am reamintit citind din nou conversațiile, persoane care nu mai sunt, persoane dragi cu care comunicam în continuare sau de la care așteptam un semn. Miile de conversații mă aștept să-mi aducă zeci de mii de e-mailuri individuale.

Parcurgerea lor e anevoioasă, dar sunt e-mailuri pe care le citesc și recitesc cu drag. Am și șters o puzderie de redirecționări cu rețete culinare, sfaturi medicale și tot felul de prezentări ce au dus la un procent îngrijorător al ocupării spațiului pus la dispoziție de Google. Versiunea contra cost nu este atractivă, așa că trebuie să eficientizez spațiul.

Am optat pentru un alt serviciu plătit, dar sincronizarea fotografiilor se face în paralel și pe Google, așa că, decât să șterg din poze, mai bine șterg e-mailul cu contul de la magazinul de anvelope.

![Interiorul capelei din Turnul Londrei](https://i.snap.as/zuBWQr02.webp)

Fotografia nu este cea pe care mi-aș fi dorit să o adaug, dar puzderia de poze este mereu pe celălalt calculator, așa că am ales-o pe aceasta. Aceasta reprezintă interiorul capelei din Turnul Londrei, dar, ca stil simplist, seamănă cu cea pe care aș fi dorit să o adaug. Ar fi trebuit să fie o poză cu biserica cisterciană de la Cisnădioara (Michelsberg), județul Sibiu.

De ce?! Pentru că am asociat Gmail cu acest concept, cu acest gen (corectați-mă aici, că nu găsesc formularea ideală) de a practica religia, cu acest stil de viață monahal. Am căutat și am constatat că, deși primisem această informație, se pare că Michelsberg nu este o biserică cisterciană. Totuși, iată o legătură cu acest stil de viață:

Revenind la Biserica-Cetate din Cisnădioara, pe care Andrei a primit-o de la Prepozitura Sibiului, ea a fost donată după scurt timp unui apropiat al Regelui (magistrus Gocelinus) care, la rândul său, a donat „muntele Sfântul Mihail împreună cu biserica și tot pământul ce ține de el” Abației Cisterciene din Cârța.

Sursa: PrinTransilvania.ro

Și iată că, de la ordine și curățenie în e-mailuri, am ajuns la o frântură dintr-o nouă pagină de călătorii. Poate ar fi trebuit să-mi spuneți, dintre destinațiile propuse într-o postare anterioară, pe unde ați fi dorit să vă plimb sau care sunt locurile de care doriți să vă reamintiți citind rândurile mele… Se pare că până la urmă trebuie să decid singur…

 
Read more... Discuss...

from Midus

Publicat la 25 septembrie 2017

Aseară, la o petrecere, am fost prezentat și poftit alături de niște bloggerițe simpatice. Cum s-o fi întâmplat ca toate să scrie despre modă, iar eu să nu am nici măcar o singură postare despre modă?! Bănuiesc că nu putem scrie toți într-o singură direcție. M-au întrebat despre ce scriu. Și? Despre ce scriu? Începusem să dau din colț în colț pentru că eu nu găseam un singur cuvânt, așa cum aveau ele: modă.

![](https://i.snap.as/e76DNKvs.webp)

Am tras aer în piept (era din plin, căci petrecerea a fost în grădină; era seară, iar aerul era răcoros, deci numai bun) și am răspuns: despre timp! Timpul a fost prezent în câteva postări pe care eu le consider bune. Și apoi le-am mai spus despre ce îmi mai aminteam că aș fi scris pe celelalte bloguri: fotografie și natură, concerte și muzică, filme și călătorii, cărți și gânduri…

Din vorbă-n vorbă am ajuns la concluzia că nu putem împăca pe toată lumea. Totuși, eu evit să scriu despre anumite lucruri care știu că îi pot afecta negativ pe unii dintre cititorii mei. Ulterior ni s-a alăturat un pictor în devenire, momentan masterand. El a spus că îi place să fie criticat.

Una dintre bloggerițe, încântată de declarația lui, a zis: ei, iată, lui (adică mie) nu îi place să fie criticat! Nu am încercat să îi spun că înțelesese greșit, că ceea ce scriu nu vreau să îi rănească în vreun fel pe puținii mei cititori și nicidecum să nu îi fac să mă critice! Au contraire! Mi s-a spus că designul nu e atractiv și l-am schimbat! Mi s-a spus că nu am o arhivă accesibilă și am pus-o la dispoziție!

Întrebarea mea, pentru mine însumi, era alta: despre ce scriu eu pe acest blog? Nu am reușit să răspund pe scurt… Poate că timpul va decide, iar spre final voi avea un răspuns dintr-un singur cuvânt: despre… nimic!

 
Read more... Discuss...

from triptych

By Andrew Wooldridge

Game 062 in the collection is Rotten to the Core. It's Diablo with the tone turned all the way to silly: you're a piece of fruit with a butter knife, the monsters are rotten fruit and their pests, and the loot is kitchenware.

Something rotten has crawled up from under the village of Tristrawberry. You grow a fruit hero, head down the cellar stairs and squash your way through twelve procedurally generated levels to Durian the Diabolical, the stinkiest thing in the Great Orchard.

Like every game here, it uses no asset files. Every fruit, monster, dungeon, texture and note of music is made in code. It's built with three.js and plays on a phone as well as on a desktop.

The Diablo loop, but juicier

The structure will feel familiar to anyone who has played Diablo: town, dungeon, loot, back to town. What changes is the vocabulary:

  • Health is Freshness, and mana is Juice. They sit in two glass globes at the bottom of the screen, with a sloshing wave on top.
  • Gold is Sugar.
  • Town portals are Portal Pies.
  • Your health potion is Strawberry Jam and your mana potion is Orange Juice.
  • Everything that dies bursts into juice, and the splats stay on the floor.

That last one does a lot of work. By the end of a big fight the floor is painted in grape purple, tomato red and lemon yellow, so you can see where the fight went.

Grow a hero

The character creator lets you pick from sixteen kinds of fruit, eight colourways, six eyes, six mouths and twelve hats, with a live 3D preview standing in town. Then you choose one of three classes:

ClassMain statSkillsMelon Knight CrunchSlice, Rind Bash, Big Slice, Juice Up!, Pit Leap, Blender

Seed Ranger ZipSeed Shot, Pomegranate Pop, Pip Spray, Somersault, Peel Trap, Raisin Rain

Citromancer ZestZest Bolt, Caramelize, Brain Freeze, Chain Lime-ning, Peel-port, Melon Meteor

That's eighteen skills, and I'm still proud of “Chain Lime-ning”. Like Diablo III, every skill scales from your weapon's damage, so finding a better bread knife makes your fireballs better too. You get one skill point per level, skills rank up to 20, and any skill you've learned can go on any button. The fourth attribute, Pulp, is your health.

Kitchenware with affixes

Loot comes in four rarities: Common, Juicy (magic), Ripe (rare, with a random name) and Golden (uniques). Weapons climb through tiers like Butter Knife → Bread Knife → Santoku → Obsidian Peeler, and shields go from Pot Lid to Wok to Cauldron Lid. Armour includes Tea Cozies, Cork Boots and Wicker Basket Mail.

The fourteen Golden uniques were the most fun part to write:

  • The Big Squeeze, a cleaver
  • Grandma's Rolling Pin
  • Melon Collie, a candy necklace
  • Fresh Prince of Bel-Pear, body armour
  • Oven Mitts of Fury
  • The Wok Lord, a pie-tin shield
  • Kiwirt's Spare Leg, a baguette you get from a quest (more on that below)

Ripe and Golden items drop unidentified, and you take them to Deckard Cane to find out what they are. There's a nine-slot paper doll, a 40-slot backpack, a 60-slot stash and comparison tooltips. Drops lean towards your class, so a Citromancer finds mostly wands and orbs.

Three acts, one generator

The dungeon is twelve levels in three acts, with a boss at the bottom of each one:

  • The Root Cellar: rectangular rooms, corridors and pillar halls. “The cellar smells… fermented.”
  • The Jam Catacombs: rounded rooms and sticky jam pools that halve your speed. “The jam down here has opinions.”
  • The Rotten Core: blobby caves, wandering tunnels and lakes of boiling fruit punch.

It's one generator with three looks. Rooms are joined by a minimum spanning tree plus about a quarter more connections, so the levels have loops instead of being one long branch. The entrance goes in the room farthest from the boss arena, and every level is flood-filled to make sure you can reach all of it. If a crate or barrel would seal off part of the floor, it gets removed, and if the level fails the checks, it's thrown away and generated again.

Each level is filled with crates, jam jars, cider barrels, exploding soda kegs, picnic-basket chests, Smoothie Shrines, monster packs, quest objects, and the occasional pie that turns out to be a mimic.

The rotten menagerie

There are fourteen monster types, and each one has its own brain:

  • Moldy Grapes shamble towards you with their arms out, like zombies.
  • Fruit Flies swarm.
  • Banana Peeltons are bony peels, and Peelton Pitchers throw peels like boomerangs.
  • Apple Worms in bowler hats burrow underground and pop up next to you.
  • Eggplant Shamans heal their friends and bring them back from the dead, so you learn to kill them first.
  • Rotten Tomatoes run at you and burst.
  • Sour Lemons leave acid puddles, and Prickly Pears are needle turrets.
  • Coconut Crabs are armoured and charge.
  • Jack o' Lanterns throw fireballs and blink away when you get close.
  • Chili Imps explode when they die, and Durian Brutes slam the ground and leave stink clouds.

Champions and named uniques come with elite affixes like Extra Juicy, Speedy, Spicy, Frosty, Stinky and Bouncy. Every attack has a windup, and the big ones show a red circle on the floor before they land, so if you get hit, it's usually because you didn't move.

The three bosses each get an act:

ActBoss1 · The Root Cellar

The Juicer (“Ahh… FRESH FRUIT!”) charges and sprays juice, then calls in grapes at half health2 · The Jam Catacombs

Mangophisto, Lord of Chutney floats, lobs chutney, rains fire and summons Chili Imps over three phases3 · The Rotten Core

Durian the Diabolical slams, sprays spikes, fills the arena with stink, and fires a huge stink nova you have to walk out of

Beat Durian and you unlock Overripe difficulty, and after that Rotten, with tougher monsters and better loot.

Tristrawberry

The town is where most of the jokes live. You'll meet:

  • Deckard Cane, a candy cane elder who identifies your items. “Stay a while and glisten!”
  • Granny Smith, who heals you and sells potions. “Back in my day we fought rot with a spoon.”
  • Grapeswold, the blacksmith. “I forge kitchenware. For WAR.”
  • Olivia, the oracle, who sells magic goods and pies. “The olives told me you would come.”
  • Kiwirt, a shady kiwi on a toothpick leg who sells mystery smoothies (that's the gambling). “Don't look at the leg. Everyone looks at the leg.”

Each of them talks in Animal Crossing-style gibberish pitched to their character. There are six quests, including finding Granny's lost recipe book, bringing Grapeswold the fuzzy Anvil of Furry, and getting Kiwirt's spare leg back from the Toothpick Thief. When you return it, Kiwirt decides it's too sticky now and lets you keep it, which is how you end up hitting things with a baguette.

There's also a Wishing Well that works as a waypoint, so you don't have to walk all the way down every time.

Making fruit look good

Every character is built from lathe profiles, the same trick you'd use to turn a vase on a lathe. Each fruit gets a procedural skin: dimpled citrus, seeded strawberries, striped melons, diamond-patterned pineapples, fuzzy kiwis with a sheen, and mouldy versions for the rotten monsters. They have eyes with highlights that blink, mouths, blush, eyebrows, hats, and Rayman-style floating gloves and shoes.

There are no animation files. Everything is procedural: fruit squash when they're hit, bounce when they walk, wind up before they swing, wobble when they're stunned, and pop when they die.

The dungeons have a few tricks of their own:

  • Walls that stand between the camera and your hero are cut away in the vertex shader, so you never lose sight of yourself.
  • Fog of war is a texture with one pixel per tile, eased every frame. Places you've been fade to a cool, washed-out memory.
  • Your hero carries a warm light, and a pool of eight point lights gets reassigned every frame to the nearest torches, glowing mushrooms and explosions.
  • The boiling fruit punch in Act 3 has its own shader.
  • Each act gets its own colour grade, and the screen pulses when your Freshness gets low.

On phones the game starts at a lower quality setting, and on any device it drops a level automatically if frames get slow.

The sound

All the sound is Web Audio, with no audio files. Each area has its own generative score: a lute waltz in town, drones and drips in the cellar, sneaky pizzicato in the jam, toms and dark pads in the core, a driving boss track and a victory fanfare. The effects include squishes, splats, seed shots, freezes, zaps, meteors, chest opens and glass breaking. When you die, you get a sad trombone.

On a phone

On a desktop it plays like Diablo: click to move, click a monster to attack it until it pops, right-click or 1–4 for skills. WASD works too.

On a phone, you drag on the left side of the screen to walk and tap the ground or a monster to act. A big ⚔️ button attacks the nearest enemy, and the round skill buttons aim themselves. If there's no enemy nearby, ⚔️ picks up the nearest loot or opens the nearest chest instead. Walking over an item also picks it up.

That last part came from a bug. In the first release, the invisible joystick area in the bottom-left corner sat on top of everything and swallowed every tap there, so you couldn't pick up loot that landed in that corner. Version 1.0.2 fixed it, and the phone test now taps a loot label inside the joystick area to make sure it stays fixed.

Tested by a bot

As with the other recent games, the dev/ folder has test harnesses:

  • simtest.mjs checks that the simulation is pure (no three.js, no DOM and no Math.random), generates 480 levels and checks each one, generates 6,000 items, tests every skill of every class, and then has a bot play each class from a brand-new hero all the way to Durian's death. The bot usually finishes in 33 to 55 simulated minutes, at level 23 to 28.
  • browsertest.mjs plays the game in real Chromium with real mouse clicks and key presses, then does the same on touch-only phones in portrait and landscape, and checks that every panel fits on the screen.

The whole game is about 9,000 lines of plain JavaScript modules with no build step.

Play it

Play Rotten to the Core, or find its statue in the Garden of Games with the rest of the collection. If you want to see how it's built, the design doc covers everything from the dungeon generator to the boss phases.

Grab a butter knife. Hold your nose. Have fun!

 
Read more... Discuss...

from Out of Office

Boy do I have news.

It started off one of my “new” typical days since I had to leave my job. I slept in a little, talked to my brother, got ready for lunch with a friend and pottery. When I got in my car to head home for the day, I received a call. A call from a potential career/life change. And it went very, very well. Sooooooo it looks like I am moving to Colorado ~ temporarily ~ for the winter. I have a job!! It is a complete career change, totally different, have 0 experience, but here we are.

I feel excited, nervous, and filled with complete gratitude. I have no idea how this winter will play out for me. I may love it, I may hate it, but I am so excited for a change. I am nervous to move away, but the fact that it is a seasonal job leaves the door wide open to come back home afterward, or stay if I decide that I love it. I am sad to leave my pottery studio, my friends, my kickball team, my volunteer commitments, my family, but I am so open to this opportunity. I have to let my heart, mind and body try something completely new in a completely new state. It feels like a fresh slate, which may be exactly what I need after these 119 days of chaos.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
Read more...

from Out of Office

I thought today would be very productive, but I was wrong. I mean it was semi-productive but not nearly as much as I would have liked.

I went to pottery for a few hours, and that’s essentially it. I also met my mom for dinner… but that was about all I did. I refuse to feel bad though, I am still in recovery mode. At this point I feel like I am actively recovering from the emotional stress of this summer and from my surgery. My feelings and body are healing – a long, bumpy process.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
Read more...

from Out of Office

I can breathe again! Well, kind of.

I got the stents removed, which was a huge relief, but now I have some major scabbing and pain. It is 100 times better without the stents though. That was a disgusting procedure by the way.

I am even feeling up to getting back to pottery. I have much to work on and finish! I am feeling very excited and optimistic, but planning to continue taking it slow.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
Read more...

from Out of Office

What is one more chill day in? I haven’t had enough of those, right?

That is exactly what I did today, chilled and stayed in. I did not even get out of pajamas all day. It was slow, quiet, easy… simply beautiful. I am still in recovery mode. Tomorrow I get these plastic stents taken out and will (hopefully) feel much, much better.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
Read more...

from Out of Office

Well today’s main highlight was Costco. Did a huge Costco haul and it was nice to be out and about. I still felt really tired and out of it, but it was nice to do something familiar and normal again.

We had a beautiful sunset on the drive home, every minute was as spectacular as the last. It made me feel so grateful and thankful for everything I have overcome and all the new and exciting things that are coming.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
Read more...

from SmarterArticles

“You shouldn't have to worry whether or not the apartment you're viewing online is real,” Zohran Mamdani said in July, when he put artificial intelligence on New York City's list of things that rip off renters. Then came the line that made the headlines: “After all, it's called StreetEasy, not StreetHard.”

It is a good joke because it is a sad one. StreetEasy, the Zillow-owned portal, is the city's dominant rental listing platform, and the first thing it offers anyone is a photograph. The photograph is the listing's opening argument. It decides whether you book a viewing, whether you take an afternoon off work, whether you cross two boroughs on a Tuesday evening, whether you send a deposit for a place in a city you have not yet moved to. For most of the history of online property search, that argument could be exaggerated with a wide-angle lens, a flattering hour of the day or a strategically placed plant. It could not easily be invented.

Now it can. A room can be furnished by software in seconds. A grey sky can be swapped for a blue one, a scuffed floor refinished, a cracked facade repainted, a car park turned into a lawn. The practice has acquired a name, housefishing, borrowed from the catfish who poses online as someone they are not. And in mid-September the mayor went back to the subject in a post on X. “New Yorkers should know whether the apartment they're looking at is real,” he wrote. “That's why we're working to require apartment listings to clearly disclose when images and videos have been generated by AI.”

The promise sits inside a larger package. On 16 July, City Hall published a 68-page Rental Ripoff Report setting out 23 actions drawn from hearings held in all five boroughs between February and April 2026, and from testimony submitted by more than 2,400 New Yorkers. Most of it concerns things that have nothing to do with AI: pests, which featured in 16 per cent of testimony, and mould and leaks, at 13 per cent each. Tucked among the heating complaints and the tenant union proposals is a commitment that the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection will use its rulemaking powers under the city's Consumer Protection Law to require a “clear and conspicuous” disclosure on rental listings containing digitally altered photographs, including images altered with AI.

The rule is still being drafted. Its details, including who is liable and what the penalty will be, are not yet public. But it arrives at a moment when the same problem is surfacing in London, Dublin, Detroit and Sacramento, and when regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are testing different answers to the same question. When the picture that opens the door can no longer be trusted, is it enough to tell people the picture is fake? Or does the rental market need to be told what it may and may not show people before they sign?

A Market With 1.41 Per Cent of Room to Breathe

To understand why a photograph matters so much in New York, start with the vacancy rate. The city's 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey, the statutory census of the rental market, found a net rental vacancy rate of 1.41 per cent, the lowest since 1968 and down from 4.54 per cent in 2021. For flats renting below $1,100 a month, the vacancy rate was 0.39 per cent. Among households earning less than $25,000 a year without rental assistance, 86 per cent were severely rent-burdened, spending more than half their income on housing.

In a market that tight, the balance of power in a listing is not subtle. Renters compete for scarce units, move fast and often decide on thin information. Landlords and brokers rarely need to persuade anyone to rent. What they need is to generate enquiries, and an attractive image generates enquiries whether or not it resembles the unit. The Rental Ripoff Report says so plainly. “Landlords and or brokers regularly use photos that have been altered, either digitally or through artificial intelligence (AI), in their rental listings,” it states. “These photos are typically not a true representation of the space and cost New Yorkers vital time and money during their apartment search.”

That phrase, time and money, is where the harm lives. The department that will draft the rule has form in this territory. Since the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act, known as the FARE Act, took effect on 11 June 2025, brokers hired by landlords have been barred from charging tenants their fees, and listings must disclose the fees a tenant will pay. The department has issued more than 70 summonses under the law. It has also, according to amNY's reading of the report, encountered numerous listings for flats that did not exist at all, used as bait to draw renters into paying illegal broker fees for different units.

A fabricated listing and a doctored photograph are not the same thing, but they share a mechanism. Both exploit the gap between what a renter sees on a screen and what they can check before money changes hands. The department's commissioner, Samuel Levine, previously ran the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, where he pursued junk fees and subscription traps. In July's announcement he said: “Every New Yorker deserves a safe and stable place to call home, without having to navigate deceptive practices.”

Not everyone agrees this is where the city's energy should go. The Next Web noted that landlord groups argue a thicket of new disclosure rules adds cost and friction without fixing supply. Brick Underground, the New York property site, placed the AI measure among the report's longer-term changes rather than its quick wins. Those objections are worth holding on to. A disclosure rule does not build a single flat. The question is whether it stops the flats that already exist from being misrepresented, and whether a label can do that job at all.

The Eleven Per Cent Nobody Mentions

How common is the problem? The best available count comes, with an obvious caveat, from a company that sells AI tools to estate agents. Coraly, a property technology firm, examined just under 40,000 primary listing images from Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com during the first quarter of 2026. HousingWire reported that 10.8 per cent, or 4,330 images, showed indicators of digital alteration. More than 90 per cent of those altered images carried no visible disclosure.

The composition matters. Sky replacement accounted for 69 per cent of the alterations. Virtual staging, where software adds furniture to an empty room, made up about 10 per cent, and object removal about 1.5 per cent. The analysis flagged 218 images that appeared to be computer-generated renders presented as photographs. Exterior shots were altered at 13.1 per cent, interiors at 4.5 per cent. Kitchens were almost never touched, at 0.7 per cent, and bathrooms barely at all.

Read one way, that is reassuring: most of it is cosmetic, and the rooms where condition matters most are mostly left alone. Read another way, it shows the industry's defaults. Changing the weather is so routine that nobody thinks to mention it, which means the norm is already that a listing photograph is an illustration rather than a record. The distance from a better sky to a better view, a larger garden or a quieter street is a matter of how far a given agent is willing to go.

HousingWire's account of why disclosure fails is mundane and damning. “An agent engages a photographer who delivers JPEGs with no metadata, no record of what was altered,” it noted. The person uploading the listing may not know what was changed, and the person viewing it certainly does not.

Scale is the other shift. When Vice looked at AI staging in British listings in February 2024, it reported that one provider, Virtual Staging AI, had 3,000 paid subscribers, including UK agents, and was generating 500,000 images a month from $12 a month. Its chief executive, Michael Bonacina, described the disclosure regime at the time: “Usually, it's up to the agent to disclose in descriptions. Some also add a watermark.” In October 2024 Zillow Group bought the company. In September 2025 Zillow launched AI virtual staging for its Showcase listings, letting buyers restyle rooms in several design styles and swipe back to compare with the original. Redfin launched a similar tool, Redfin Redesign, in December 2023, letting shoppers change walls, floors and worktops in listing photos.

There is a distinction worth keeping here. A tool that lets a viewer imagine a room differently, clearly labelled and paired with the original, is a very different thing from a seller quietly presenting the imagined room as the real one. Zillow draws the same line. “We support clear disclosure when AI is used to materially alter a listing image, and believe consumers should be able to view the original content alongside the altered version wherever possible,” a spokesperson told Fortune, adding that “AI should help set accurate expectations before a tour, not create surprises when a buyer walks through the door.” StreetEasy told Business Insider that it expects listings to represent a home accurately “whether AI is involved or not”. The platforms are not hostile to regulation. But they own the tools and host the listings, which gives them every reason to favour a rule that keeps the tools in business.

The Leafy View That Was Not There

The problem is not confined to New York, and the clearest recent account of what it feels like comes from south London. On 21 September 2026, the Big Issue published an interview with a couple it identified only as Holly and Richard, who had moved to London for new jobs and had three months to find a two-bedroom flat around Brixton and Streatham. They were searching from outside the city, relying on photographs and remote viewings.

“It looked like they'd had an interior designer in,” Holly said of the listings. “You could just sort of tell it wasn't real.” One flat was advertised with a leafy green outlook. When they visited, the view bore no resemblance to the picture. “That is so important to your property,” she said. “To think that's what you're going to have and then for it to not work out that way is quite frustrating.” She also described the pressure of the search: “There was a lot of pressure to bid. You never know if it's true or not, but we would be told there were three or four other people bidding with you. That led us to make quite quick decisions.”

That last detail is the important one. A misleading photograph does its damage in combination with speed. “When you're not in the area you're trying to rent in, you're putting a lot of trust in the person showing you the house,” Holly said.

Renters' groups were blunt. Eleesha Taylor-Barrett, identified by the Big Issue as national chair of the renters' union Acorn, said: “Renters don't have time to be misled. If someone wouldn't have booked a viewing had they seen an honest representation of the property, they shouldn't have been misled into going in the first place.” Dan Wilson Craw, deputy chief executive of Generation Rent, said: “AI-manipulated images give renters a false idea of the home and can lead to renters making misinformed decisions.”

The industry voice in the piece, Charlie Lamdin of BestAgent, drew a line between optical exaggeration and fabrication. “Making rooms look bigger isn't an intentional trick, whereas using AI to manipulate room appearance is,” he said, while arguing that “there's no harm to using AI to create 'what it could look like' images” if they are clearly labelled and shown alongside the real condition.

Two years earlier, Vice had found estate agents on Rightmove and Zoopla using AI furniture in rental listings, sometimes scaled to make small rooms look larger. Omar Beg, managing director of the London agency McBryer Beg, told Vice that “some agents can be a little bit flexible with the truth”, describing listings showing furniture fitted into a space “where you couldn't swing a cat”. The technology has improved since. The temptation has not changed.

Who Pays When the Door Opens on a Different Flat

The cost of a misleading listing depends almost entirely on how far the renter has travelled before they find out. That is what makes housefishing a question of inequality rather than just of taste.

For a renter who lives nearby, has flexible working hours and can view five flats on a Saturday, a doctored photograph wastes an hour. The reality check comes at the door, before any commitment. For a renter moving from another city or country, working shifts, caring for children, living with a disability or searching against a deadline, the photograph carries far more weight, because it is often the only inspection they get before paying. Zillow's own consumer research has found that about one in five recent renters skipped in-person tours entirely. For those renters, the listing is the flat until the keys arrive.

Money moves early. New York's Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 caps application and background check fees at $20 and security deposits at one month's rent, which limits the upfront exposure in a way many markets do not. But a deposit, the first month's rent, a moving van and a lease are all committed before a remote renter walks in. A flat that turns out to be darker, smaller or on a noisier street than advertised leaves them with a set of bad options. They can live with it, try to break the lease, or pursue a misrepresentation claim, which requires time, evidence and often a lawyer.

The burden also falls unevenly across rent bands. In New York's lowest-rent segment, with a vacancy rate below half a per cent, renters have the least ability to walk away from a disappointing flat because there is almost nothing else to walk to.

This is the part of the story that a disclosure label cannot see. A label tells you something about the image. It does not tell you what the renter can afford to do with that information. A well-off renter who notices “digitally altered” in small type can go and look. A renter relocating across an ocean may read the same label and have no option except to trust the listing anyway.

The Fine Print That Did Not Save Detroit

In early 2026, a house in Detroit's Dexter-Linwood neighbourhood became a lesson in what disclosure does and does not achieve. A social media post comparing the AI-enhanced Zillow images of the property with its actual state drew millions of views. The listed version had a smoothed, freshly painted facade. The real one did not. “It looks fake. It looks like a painting,” a local resident, Jasmine Jackson, told WDIV's ClickOnDetroit.

The property, listed off-market on Zillow for $20,000, was owned by Redstone Group, an affordable housing developer that, according to ClickOnDetroit, serves Section 8 clients. The company said the broker had generated the images and that the listing did disclose that the house was “under renovation” and that the photographs were “virtually staged”. Its representative put it bluntly: “The person who posted that original story either missed the fine print or ignored it.” The episode had its own cruel coda. The company said the attention prompted break-ins in which doors, windows and furnaces were stolen.

Set aside who was right. In Detroit, a disclosure existed and the public still felt deceived. When a label is in the fine print and the image is the whole page, the image wins. That is not a failure of the reader. It is how images work.

British advertising rules already acknowledge this. The CAP Code, which the Advertising Standards Authority enforces, says in rule 3.1 that “marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.” Rule 3.3 goes further, requiring that material information is not omitted, including by “providing such information in a way that is unclear or untimely, or in a way that the consumer is unlikely to see or hear it.” In other words, a disclosure buried where nobody reads it is itself a potential breach.

New York's proposed wording, “clear and conspicuous”, points in the same direction. The difficulty is that the proposal, as reported by amNY, does not yet define penalties or say whether responsibility falls on landlords, brokers or platforms. Those details will decide whether it works. A disclosure duty that nobody is on the hook for is a suggestion.

What Labels Have Taught Regulators Before

Regulators have tried labelling doctored photographs before, in a different context, and the evidence from that experiment should give New York pause.

In 2017 France began requiring commercial photographs of models whose bodies had been digitally slimmed or thickened to carry the words “photographie retouchée”. The decree, dated 4 May 2017, took effect that October, with fines of up to €37,500. Norway went further in 2021, amending its Marketing Act so that paid advertising, including influencer posts, must carry a standard government label when body shape, size or skin has been retouched.

The research on whether such labels change how people respond is sobering. In a 2013 study in the journal Body Image, Marika Tiggemann and colleagues at Flinders University showed women fashion advertisements with no label, a generic label or a detailed label saying the image had been digitally altered. Across two experiments, the type of label made no significant difference to body dissatisfaction. People knew the images were retouched. They compared themselves anyway.

A 2024 study pointed to the opposite risk. Sacha Altay and Fabrizio Gilardi, publishing in PNAS Nexus, ran two preregistered experiments with 4,976 participants in the United States and the United Kingdom. Labelling news headlines as AI-generated lowered their perceived accuracy and people's willingness to share them, whether the headlines were true or false and whether a human or a machine had written them. Participants assumed the label meant full automation with no human oversight. The authors concluded that labels “should be approached cautiously” and that effective labelling “requires transparency regarding their meaning”.

Put those two findings next to a rental listing and the problem becomes clear. A label may fail to correct the impression a beautiful image creates, as the retouching studies suggest. It may also cast doubt on honest listings, as the headline study suggests, if a photograph with a replaced sky gets the same “AI” tag as a room invented from nothing. Neither outcome helps a renter decide whether to spend a morning on a viewing.

The broader legal scholarship is harsher still. In More Than You Wanted to Know, published by Princeton University Press in 2014, the law professors Omri Ben-Shahar of the University of Chicago and Carl Schneider of the University of Michigan surveyed mandated disclosure regimes across consumer life and concluded that they rarely achieve their goals. Disclosures pile up, people skip them, and the obligation to disclose becomes a shield for the discloser. The problem is not that people are foolish. The problem is that a label asks the person with the least information and least time to do the correcting.

None of this means disclosure is useless. It creates a legal hook: a listing that should have carried a label and did not is an easy enforcement case, far easier than proving that a picture was materially misleading. But it does suggest that a label alone, stuck on a doctored image, is the weakest version of the remedy.

California Chose the Original Photograph

The most instructive answer so far comes from California, and it goes further than a label.

Assembly Bill 723, written by Assemblymember Gail Pellerin and signed in October 2025, took effect on 1 January 2026. It applies to property for sale. Any broker or salesperson who uses a digitally altered image in an advertisement must include a statement that the image has been altered and a link, URL or QR code to a publicly accessible site that includes, and clearly identifies, the original unaltered image. The statement must be “reasonably conspicuous and located on or adjacent to the image”. The law defines an altered image broadly, covering changes to fixtures, furniture, appliances, flooring, walls, paint colour, landscaping, facades, floor plans and neighbouring properties, while exempting routine adjustments such as lighting, sharpening, white balance, colour correction, cropping and exposure.

The key move is the original photograph. California does not simply warn buyers that a picture has been changed. It hands them the unchanged picture and lets them see the difference. Multiple listing services in the state have translated that into practice: the San Diego and California regional MLS guidance requires the unaltered image to sit next to the altered one.

Pellerin has now extended the same logic to renters. Assembly Bill 2025 requires anyone using a digitally altered image to advertise a rental to disclose the alteration on or next to the image and, where it is based on a real photograph, to provide the original or a link to it. It passed the state Senate on 24 August 2026, the Assembly concurred the next day, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed it in the final days of September. It takes effect on 1 January 2027, and from that date California renters will have the protection New York is still drafting.

Other legislatures are following. Wisconsin's 2025 Act 69, which takes effect on 1 January 2027, requires licensees to disclose in advertising when technology, including AI, has been used to add, remove or change elements of a property in a way that creates a false or misleading impression. In New York State, Senator Rachel May introduced S9584 in March 2026. It would treat materially altered listing images, videos and virtual tours as deceptive practices unless clearly disclosed, defining a material alteration as one that would affect a reasonable consumer's understanding of a property's condition, features or layout. It cleared the Senate Consumer Protection Committee unanimously in April and now sits with the Judiciary Committee.

New York's Department of State had already fired a warning shot. In November 2025 it issued a trend alert on AI-generated listings, noting that “these automated technology tools may produce misleading or exaggerated representation of properties” and reminding licensees that state rules require advertising to include “an honest and accurate depiction of the property”. That is the most important point for the city's draft rule. New York already had a standard of honesty. What it lacked was a specific way to enforce it against a new kind of image.

The industry's own trade bodies are not far away from this. The National Association of Realtors has said AI should “show possibilities” in a home and “not rewrite reality”, Real Estate News reported in September. Rich Rosa, a past president of the National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents, put the risk precisely: “The concern is the gap that can occur when images imply features, scale, or conditions that aren't there in person, especially when digital changes are not clearly disclosed.”

Europe Already Calls a Fake Room a Deepfake

Across the Atlantic, the law has approached the same problem from a different angle, and in one respect it already goes further than any American proposal.

The EU's AI Act defines a deepfake in Article 3 as “AI-generated or manipulated image, audio or video content that resembles existing persons, objects, places, entities or events and would falsely appear to a person to be authentic or truthful.” Note the word places. A photograph of a real flat altered by AI so that it falsely appears authentic fits that definition. Under Article 50(4), which has applied since 2 August 2026, deployers of AI systems that generate or manipulate deepfakes must disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated. The European Commission's draft guidelines, published in May 2026, confirm that the definition extends beyond people to objects and places, and that deceptive intent is not required. Fines can reach €15 million or 3 per cent of global turnover.

The provision is best known as a response to political deepfakes, and how regulators will apply it to a virtually staged bedroom in Lisbon or Lyon is untested. But the principle is on the books: in the EU, a synthetic image of a real place that could pass for real must say so.

The UK has no AI-specific rule for property images. What it has is general consumer law with sharper teeth than before. Since 6 April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has allowed the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate and decide consumer law breaches itself, without going to court, and to impose fines of up to 10 per cent of global turnover. The Act replaced the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, under which National Trading Standards' Estate and Letting Agency Team published guidance in November 2023 on the material information that sales and lettings listings must include, from price and council tax to room measurements and flood risk. The guidance already warns that photography should not be used to avoid disclosing material details.

The Renters' Rights Act 2025, whose main provisions came into force in England on 1 May 2026, changes the stakes too. It ended fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies in favour of periodic tenancies, banned rental bidding above the advertised rent and gave tenants the right to leave with two months' notice. That last point matters. A renter lured into a misrepresented flat in England now has a way out that does not involve a court case. It does not refund the cost of moving twice, but it caps the damage.

Ireland offers a third model. The Irish Examiner reported in August 2026 that the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland's voluntary best practice is for AI-enhanced property images to be clearly marked, with limits on what may be changed: no enlarging buildings, hiding structural flaws, removing poles and wires, adding windows or doors, or replacing views. That last list is worth pausing over. It is not a disclosure rule. It is a list of things you simply may not show.

Changing What a Listing Is Allowed to Be

Taken together, these regimes suggest the answer to the question New York has set itself. Disclosure is necessary but not sufficient. What actually protects renters is a change in what a listing is.

The first step is the one California has already taken for buyers, and will extend to renters from January: the original photograph must travel with the altered one. A label asks a renter to imagine what has changed. An original shows them. It turns the image from an argument into evidence, and it costs the landlord nothing except the pretence.

The second is a short list of things that cannot be altered at all, however clearly labelled. The Irish best practice list is a good starting point: the size of rooms, the view from the windows, structural condition, the street outside. A virtually staged sofa in an empty room is a sales tool. A garden that does not exist is not a stylistic choice. For the features that most determine whether a flat suits someone, the photograph should be a record, not an illustration.

The third is liability that follows the listing. The city's draft does not yet say who is responsible, and that silence is the rule's biggest risk. Platforms such as StreetEasy and Zillow control the upload process, own staging tools and could require originals at the point of upload. Landlords and brokers choose what to post. Leaving liability vague invites each to blame the other, as the Detroit case showed.

The fourth is technical and should be approached with care. Content provenance standards such as C2PA's Content Credentials can attach a signed record of how an image was made and edited. They could, in principle, let a listing show a verified original. But the standard cannot prove a negative: an image without credentials might be honest, old or simply unsigned, and a valid credential does not prove that a picture is fair. Provenance can support the rule. It cannot replace it.

The last is a remedy that matches the harm. England's two-month exit and New York's caps on fees and deposits already reduce what a misled renter loses. A rule on doctored images should add the right to walk away before the tenancy starts, with the deposit returned, when the flat does not match the listing in the respects the rule protects. That is what turns a disclosure into a deterrent. A landlord who knows a doctored view will cost them the tenancy has a reason not to doctor it.

None of this addresses the underlying scarcity. A vacancy rate of 1.41 per cent is not a problem any image rule can solve, and the landlord groups are right that honesty in listings does not build homes. But scarcity is exactly why the rule matters. When renters cannot walk away, the least they are owed is an accurate picture of what they are being asked to accept.

Holly, searching for a flat in south London from another city, asked for something modest. “If they are using it, can we just make sure that they're using it carefully?” she said. “The agent needs to know the property and make sure AI hasn't manipulated it in a way that gives an inaccurate representation.” It is not a radical demand. It is the premise a listing was supposed to rest on all along: that the flat in the picture is the flat behind the door.

Sources and References

  1. Fortune, “'It's called StreetEasy, not StreetHard': Mamdani cracks down on scourge of 'housefishing' and 'real estate slop'“, 22 July 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/07/22/mamdani-ai-altered-rental-listing-disclosures/
  2. NYC Office of the Mayor, “Mayor Mamdani Releases 'Rental Ripoff Report,' Outlining New Actions to Crack Down on Hazardous Housing Violations and Deceptive Landlord Practices”, press release, 16 July 2026, with the accompanying 68-page Rental Ripoff Report (PDF). https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-releases--rental-ripoff-report---outlining-new-act and https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tenantprotection/downloads/pdf/rental-ripoffs-hearing-report-072026.pdf
  3. Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor), post on X, September 2026. https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2100364985348022387
  4. Adam Daly, “Mamdani lays out 23 proposals to reshape renting in NYC”, amNY, 16 July 2026. https://www.amny.com/news/mamdani-23-proposals-reshape-renting-nyc/
  5. NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, “New York City's Vacancy Rate Reaches Historic Low of 1.4 Percent, Demanding Urgent Action and New Affordable Housing”, 2024, reporting the 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey. https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vacancy-rate-reaches-historic-low-1-4-percent-demanding-urgent-action-new
  6. Ana-Maria Stanciuc, “Mamdani wants NYC landlords to label the AI in their apartment photos”, The Next Web, 17 July 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/mamdani-ai-apartment-listings-streeteasy
  7. Cassidy Jensen, “Mamdani's 'Rental Ripoff' report is out. What happens next?”, Brick Underground, 18 July 2026. https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/mamdani-rent-ripoff-hearings-report-recommdendations-nyc
  8. Jonathan Delozier, “Most AI-altered listings go undisclosed, California law bans it”, HousingWire, 24 June 2026. https://www.housingwire.com/articles/most-ai-altered-listings-go-undisclosed-california-law-bans-it/
  9. Lillian Dickerson, “AI-modified listing photos blur line between enhancement, deception”, Real Estate News, 8 September 2026. https://www.realestatenews.com/2026/09/08/ai-modified-listing-photos-blur-line-between-enhancement-deception
  10. Hayden Vernon, “What's Wrong With This Rental Listing? The Furniture Is AI.”, Vice, 12 February 2024. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ai-generated-furniture-real-estate-listings/
  11. Ryan Butcher, “AI is increasingly being used on listings for homes to rent. Is it acceptable or misleading?”, Big Issue, 21 September 2026. https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/looking-to-rent-somewhere-careful-browsing-room-enhanced-by-ai/
  12. Shawnte Passmore, “Detroit listing prompts debate over AI-enhanced home photos”, ClickOnDetroit (WDIV), 2 March 2026. https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2026/03/02/detroit-listing-prompts-debate-over-ai-enhanced-home-photos/
  13. Advertising Standards Authority and Committee of Advertising Practice, “Misleading advertising”, advice online, CAP Code rules 3.1 and 3.3. https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/misleading-advertising.html
  14. France 24, “New French law says airbrushed or Photoshopped images must be labelled”, 30 September 2017. https://www.france24.com/en/20170930-france-fashion-photoshop-law-models-skinny
  15. Marika Tiggemann, Amy Slater, Belinda Bury, Kimberley Hawkins and Bonny Firth, “Disclaimer labels on fashion magazine advertisements: Effects on social comparison and body dissatisfaction”, Body Image, 10(1): 45 to 53, 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22947622/
  16. Sacha Altay and Fabrizio Gilardi, “People are skeptical of headlines labeled as AI-generated, even if true or human-made, because they assume full AI automation”, PNAS Nexus, 3(10): pgae403, October 2024. https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/10/pgae403/7795946
  17. Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, Princeton University Press, 2014. https://law.uchicago.edu/news/research-matters-omri-ben-shahar-more-you-wanted-know-failure-mandated-disclosure
  18. California Legislative Information, “AB-723 Real estate: digitally altered images: disclosure”, Chapter 497, Statutes of 2025, chaptered 10 October 2025. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB723
  19. California Apartment Association, “New law will require disclosures for digitally altered rental ads”, 29 September 2026. https://caanet.org/new-law-will-require-disclosures-for-digitally-altered-rental-ads/
  20. New York State Senate, “Senate Bill S9584 (2025 to 2026 session): digital representations in real estate listings”, sponsored by Senator Rachel May, introduced 26 March 2026. https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S9584
  21. New York Department of State, “New York Department of State Issues New Trend Alert Warning Homebuyers of AI-Generated Home Listings”, 13 November 2025. https://dos.ny.gov/news/new-york-department-state-issues-new-trend-alert-warning-homebuyers-ai-generated-home-listings
  22. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 3(60) and Article 50. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/ and https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/
  23. Philip Radlanski and Carsten Kociok, “Deepfakes, Chatbots, AI-Generated Text: European Commission Details Transparency Obligations Under the AI Act”, Greenberg Traurig, June 2026. https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2026/6/deepfakes-chatbots-ai-generated-text-european-commission-details-transparency-obligations-under-the-ai-act
  24. Kya deLongchamps, “Is AI virtual home-staging catfishing vulnerable property viewers?”, Irish Examiner, 21 August 2026. https://www.irishexaminer.com/property/homeandgardens/arid-41898721.html
  25. Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, “C2PA and Content Credentials Explainer”, specification 2.4. https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.4/explainer/Explainer.html

Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

 
Read more... Discuss...

from James Christopher Hall

I’ve been trying to do more from scratch cooking in 2026. Not only do I get to control the nutrition better, it’s more affordable, and it’s been teaching me a lot about food science. I’ve got some basic skills and practices from when I worked pizza that have translated well.

I’ve been trying to work more with potatoes, luckily they are easy to get creative with. I enjoyed this breakfast, not too heavy, plenty of carbs for my run and somehow managed to perfectly poach the eggs, topped with Za’atar seasoning and some red chili flakes.

On the pancake front I’ve tweaked my recipe from my usual little hotcakes to a single, Golden Diner-esque pancake. I actually think just from a logistics perspective this is better as I don’t have a griddle to cook multiple at once, so I inevitably have some fresh pancakes and some less-than-fresh ones. I do have a large pan, but it doesn’t quite have the thermal mass of a griddle, and there are noticeable cold spots after removing a cooked pancake, that affect the cook of the next one.

I’ve come to learn that the mechanics of combining the ingredients is just as important as the amounts. For example, for this batter I very slowly mixed the dry ingredients into the wet, bsically alternating between the two. I’ve also come to learn that not doing something is pretty effective as well. I let the batter autolyse for about 20 minutes to fully hydrate before going into the pan.

Pretty proud of this one, kept me full all day.

Another thing I’ve been experimenting with more is deep frying, which the potato is basically born for. Last year I went to one of the chef stores on Bowery and picked up some stainless ramikans, they’ve turned out to be one of my best kitchen purchases ever.

These are The Potatoes That Mum Grew. She grew 3 little golden potatoes and then mailed them to me in New York in a golden box!

 
Read more... Discuss...

Join the writers on Write.as.

Start writing or create a blog