There is a moment in Acts 4 that feels uncomfortably modern, almost invasive in how closely it mirrors our time. Authority meets conviction. Power meets obedience. Control meets courage. And instead of a neat resolution, everything fractures open. What makes Acts 4 so unsettling is not persecution itself, but the way it exposes a fundamental clash that never really goes away: who gets to decide what is true, what is allowed to be spoken, and what must be silenced. This chapter is not about ancient religious drama. It is about what happens when faith becomes uncontainable, when obedience to God begins to disrupt systems that rely on compliance, fear, and quiet agreement. Acts 4 does not ask whether belief should be private or public. It assumes belief will be public. The only question left is whether the believer will shrink or stand.

Peter and John are not arrested for causing chaos. They are arrested for clarity. They heal a man who had been crippled from birth, and the healing itself is not the real offense. The offense is that the healing is attributed to Jesus, and that His name is spoken openly, confidently, without apology. This is the first lesson Acts 4 presses into the reader: truth is rarely opposed because it is weak; it is opposed because it is effective. The religious leaders are disturbed not because something false has happened, but because something undeniable has happened. A man known by the entire city now walks. The crowd sees it. The leadership cannot refute it. They can only try to contain it.

Acts 4 forces us to confront a difficult reality about faith: once it produces visible change, it becomes threatening to structures that depend on spiritual stagnation. The authorities do not question the miracle. They question the authority behind it. They ask, “By what power or by what name did you do this?” That question echoes across centuries. It is the same question asked whenever faith begins to move from belief to action, from internal conviction to public consequence. Who gave you permission? Who authorized this transformation? Who allowed you to speak this name out loud?

Peter’s response is not cautious. It is not strategic. It is not softened to preserve peace. He does not say, “We respect your position,” or “We acknowledge your leadership.” He says plainly that the man stands healed by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom they crucified and whom God raised from the dead. This is not subtle. This is not diplomatic. This is testimony sharpened into truth. Acts 4 shows us that boldness is not arrogance when it is anchored in obedience. It is clarity. It is alignment. It is faith refusing to masquerade as politeness.

What is striking is that Peter is not acting out of bravado. Just weeks earlier, he denied even knowing Jesus out of fear. Acts 4 is not the story of a naturally fearless man. It is the story of a transformed one. Boldness here is not a personality trait; it is a byproduct of proximity to Christ and the filling of the Spirit. This matters deeply because it reframes courage for us. Courage is not something you summon. It is something that happens when fear loses its authority over your obedience.

The leaders recognize something unsettling about Peter and John. They note that these men are unschooled, ordinary, untrained by their standards. Yet they speak with authority. They stand with confidence. They refuse to retreat. And then comes one of the most revealing lines in the chapter: the leaders realize that these men had been with Jesus. That observation is not meant as praise. It is meant as diagnosis. Something about proximity to Jesus has altered them in a way no institution can reverse.

Acts 4 quietly dismantles the myth that influence comes from credentials alone. Authority in the kingdom of God does not originate from titles, training, or approval. It originates from obedience and presence. Being with Jesus leaves residue. It marks speech. It changes posture. It produces a kind of courage that cannot be coached or manufactured. This is deeply inconvenient for systems that rely on gatekeeping spiritual authority. Acts 4 suggests that proximity to Christ outranks permission from institutions.

The leaders face a dilemma. They cannot deny the miracle. They cannot punish Peter and John without backlash from the people. So they choose a familiar tactic: silence. They command them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. This is the pivot point of the chapter, and perhaps the most important line in all of Acts 4. Peter and John reply, “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to Him?” This is not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. This is obedience drawn with a clear boundary. It is faith refusing to negotiate its allegiance.

Here is where Acts 4 becomes uncomfortable for modern believers. We often assume persecution looks like violence, imprisonment, or martyrdom. But Acts 4 shows that the earliest pressure placed on the church was not to renounce belief, but to stop speaking. Silence was the goal. Keep your faith private. Keep it internal. Do not disrupt public space with it. Do not name it. Do not center it. Acts 4 reminds us that silencing is often more effective than persecution, because it feels reasonable. It feels polite. It feels like compromise rather than denial.

Peter and John refuse. Not because they enjoy conflict, but because silence would mean disobedience. “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” That sentence is not defiance; it is inevitability. When faith becomes experiential rather than theoretical, silence becomes impossible. You do not suppress testimony; it spills. Acts 4 does not glorify confrontation, but it normalizes consequence. Obedience will cost something. The question is whether obedience is still obedience when it becomes inconvenient.

After being released, Peter and John return to the believers, and something remarkable happens. They do not pray for safety. They do not ask God to remove opposition. They do not request comfort. They pray for boldness. This is one of the clearest indicators of spiritual maturity in the early church. They understand that the problem is not opposition; it is fear. They ask not for the threat to disappear, but for courage to increase. Acts 4 reframes prayer away from protection and toward participation. God is not asked to shield them from the mission, but to strengthen them within it.

When they pray, the place where they are gathered shakes. The Spirit fills them, and they speak the word of God boldly. This moment is not spectacle; it is confirmation. God affirms their request not by removing resistance, but by reinforcing resolve. Acts 4 teaches us that boldness is not something God grants once and for all. It is something that must be continually renewed in the face of ongoing pressure.

The chapter then shifts toward community, and here Acts 4 delivers one of its most countercultural visions. The believers share everything. No one claims private ownership. Needs are met. Resources are redistributed voluntarily, joyfully. This is not forced equality; it is Spirit-driven generosity. The unity described here is not ideological; it is practical. Faith expresses itself not just in speech, but in economic decisions, in care for one another, in relinquishing control over possessions.

This challenges modern assumptions about individualism. Acts 4 does not portray faith as a personal lifestyle accessory. It portrays faith as a communal reordering of priorities. When people are filled with the Spirit, they become less possessive, not more. They hold resources loosely because they trust God deeply. This is not communism. It is conviction. It is love made tangible.

What ties the entire chapter together is one central thread: obedience over approval. Peter and John do not seek validation from authorities. The believers do not pray for acceptance. The community does not hoard resources out of fear. Acts 4 depicts a faith that has crossed a threshold. Once crossed, return is impossible. Once obedience is chosen over safety, the trajectory is set.

Acts 4 does not promise ease. It promises clarity. It does not guarantee protection from consequence. It guarantees presence within it. It asks the reader a question that cannot be avoided: when faith collides with authority, when obedience conflicts with comfort, when speaking truth risks consequence, which voice will you obey?

This chapter is not meant to intimidate. It is meant to awaken. Acts 4 does not demand heroics; it reveals alignment. These believers are not exceptional because they are fearless. They are exceptional because they are faithful. They choose obedience even when it costs reputation, security, and approval. They choose boldness not as a performance, but as a necessity.

Acts 4 ends not with resolution, but with momentum. The name that was supposed to be silenced spreads further. The community grows stronger. The opposition remains. And the gospel advances anyway. That is the quiet power of this chapter. Attempts to silence faith often amplify it. Resistance becomes fuel. Pressure produces clarity. Obedience multiplies impact.

Acts 4 does not belong to the past. It belongs to every generation where truth is tolerated only when it is quiet. It belongs to anyone who has felt the tension between obedience and acceptance. It belongs to those who know that once you have seen what God can do, silence is no longer an option.

Now we will continue this reflection by examining how Acts 4 reshapes our understanding of courage, community, generosity, and the cost of public faith in a world that prefers private belief.

The second half of Acts 4 slows the narrative just enough to let its implications settle in, and this is where the chapter becomes less about confrontation and more about formation. What began as public pressure becomes private transformation. What started with external resistance ends with internal alignment. Acts 4 quietly insists that the real miracle is not only the healed man or the shaken room, but the reshaping of a people who no longer live by fear, scarcity, or approval.

One of the most overlooked elements of this chapter is the emotional posture of the early believers. After being threatened by powerful authorities, their response is not paranoia or defensiveness. They do not fracture into factions. They do not argue about strategy. They do not dilute the message to avoid future conflict. Instead, they gather together. This is important. Pressure does not isolate them; it drives them into deeper unity. Acts 4 presents community not as a luxury of comfort but as a necessity of courage. Isolation would have made them easier to silence. Together, they become unmovable.

Their prayer reveals how deeply Scripture has already shaped their worldview. They quote the Psalms, recognizing that opposition to God’s work is not new. This is not a panicked prayer; it is a grounded one. They see their experience as part of a larger story. That perspective changes everything. When suffering is interpreted as random, it feels unbearable. When it is understood as participation in something larger, it becomes meaningful. Acts 4 shows us believers who know where they stand in history, and that awareness steadies them.

The prayer itself is radical in its restraint. They acknowledge God as sovereign, creator of heaven and earth, ruler over kings and nations. They place their fear inside a much larger reality. This is not denial of danger; it is right-sizing it. When God is seen clearly, threats lose their exaggeration. Acts 4 teaches us that fear often grows when God shrinks in our imagination. The early church responds to intimidation by expanding their view of God, not by shrinking their obedience.

And then comes the request. Not protection. Not influence. Not favor. Boldness. The courage to continue speaking. The ability to remain faithful. The strength to obey publicly. This reveals something essential about mature faith. Immature faith asks God to remove discomfort. Mature faith asks God to make obedience possible within it. Acts 4 reframes prayer from escape to endurance, from avoidance to participation. These believers understand that the mission itself is worth the cost.

The shaking of the place is not meant to be read as spectacle, but affirmation. God does not say, “I will stop the opposition.” He says, “I am with you in it.” They are filled with the Holy Spirit again, not because the Spirit had left, but because boldness must be continually renewed. Acts 4 makes it clear that courage is not a one-time event. It is a daily dependency. Every new pressure point requires fresh surrender.

Then the narrative shifts to how this courage expresses itself in daily life. The believers are described as being of one heart and mind. That phrase is not sentimental. It is deeply practical. Unity here is not agreement on every detail, but alignment around purpose. When fear no longer governs decisions, generosity becomes possible. When survival is no longer the primary concern, sharing becomes natural. Acts 4 shows us that community health is not created by rules, but by trust.

The way possessions are handled is especially striking. No one claims exclusive ownership. This does not mean people stop having homes or property. It means possessions stop owning them. Resources become tools rather than identities. This kind of generosity cannot be legislated. It can only be birthed by security in God’s provision. Acts 4 quietly exposes how fear-based living leads to hoarding, while faith-based living leads to open hands.

What is often misunderstood here is motivation. These believers are not giving to earn approval or spiritual status. They are giving because the Spirit has reordered their values. When eternity becomes more real than accumulation, generosity stops feeling like loss. Acts 4 reveals that generosity is not primarily about money; it is about trust. Who do you believe will sustain you? Who do you believe defines your future? The early church answers that question with action.

Barnabas is introduced as an example, not because he is exceptional, but because he is representative. He sells land and brings the money to the apostles. His name, which means “son of encouragement,” fits his posture. Encouragement here is not merely verbal. It is sacrificial. It is tangible. Acts 4 reminds us that encouragement often costs something. It is easier to offer words than resources. But the early church understands that faith speaks through both.

There is a subtle but important contrast being set up here, one that becomes explicit in Acts 5. Acts 4 ends with generosity and unity, not because perfection has been achieved, but because alignment has. The community is not flawless. It is faithful. And that faith expresses itself in shared burden rather than isolated survival.

What makes Acts 4 so relevant is that it exposes how deeply our private faith is tested by public pressure. Many believers are comfortable with internal belief but hesitate when obedience demands visibility. Acts 4 does not allow that separation. Faith here is inherently public because it is transformative. A healed man cannot hide his legs. A changed life cannot remain theoretical. Obedience produces evidence.

This chapter also challenges the modern assumption that safety is the highest good. The early church does not measure success by comfort. They measure it by faithfulness. That does not mean recklessness or disregard for wisdom. It means obedience is not abandoned when risk appears. Acts 4 teaches that safety without obedience is not peace; it is avoidance. True peace comes from alignment, even when circumstances remain unstable.

Another quiet theme running through Acts 4 is identity. Peter and John are not shaken by threats because they know who they are and whose they are. Identity rooted in Christ is resilient. Identity rooted in approval is fragile. When authority tries to redefine them, they refuse. They do not argue about credentials. They simply testify. Acts 4 shows that testimony is often the most powerful form of resistance. You cannot argue someone out of what they have experienced.

This chapter also reframes what it means to be “ordinary.” The leaders describe Peter and John as unschooled and ordinary, yet they cannot dismiss them. Acts 4 elevates obedience above expertise. This does not devalue learning or preparation, but it places them in their proper place. Authority in God’s kingdom flows from faithfulness, not pedigree. This should both humble and encourage modern believers. You do not need permission to obey. You need willingness.

Acts 4 presses a question that lingers long after the chapter ends. When obedience costs approval, which one do you choose? When speaking truth risks consequence, do you soften or stand? When generosity feels risky, do you cling or trust? This chapter does not offer simplistic answers. It offers embodied ones. It shows us what faith looks like when theory meets resistance.

The power of Acts 4 is not found in its miracles alone, but in its posture. A community that prays for boldness instead of safety. Leaders who speak truth instead of negotiating silence. Believers who share instead of hoard. Faith that refuses to be privatized. Obedience that is not performative, but necessary.

Acts 4 does not promise that obedience will be rewarded by systems of power. It promises that obedience will be met by the presence of God. That is the trade. That is the tension. That is the invitation. The chapter leaves us with a picture of a people who have decided that being with Jesus is worth more than being approved by authorities, more than being comfortable, more than being safe.

And perhaps that is the quiet challenge Acts 4 places before every reader. Not whether you believe, but whether you will speak. Not whether you have faith, but whether that faith will shape your actions when it becomes inconvenient. Not whether you admire courage, but whether you will ask God for it and then act when He gives it.

Acts 4 does not end with resolution because faith does not end with resolution. It continues forward, pressured yet persistent, challenged yet courageous, ordinary yet unstoppable. The name they tried to silence continues to be spoken. The community they tried to suppress continues to grow. And the obedience they tried to restrain becomes the very force that carries the message further than silence ever could.

That is the enduring truth of Acts 4. When faith refuses to be quiet, it reshapes everything it touches.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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For Christians, today is the 6th day of Christmas, which puts us halfway through the celebration of the Incarnation. Beginning on the Feast of the Nativity on December 25th and ending with 12th Night. I came to a much deeper appreciation of this short season in 2020, when a worldwide pandemic had people isolated in their homes for Christmas. Something about the inability to travel and the long cold nights inspired a more thoughtful move through the season. With the help of friends and colleagues, I was able to produce a short devotional film, highlighting the themes, festival days, and various ways to celebrate Incarnation that the 12 days offer. It’s more than just the story of an unusual birthday, even if that’s how it starts. If you appreciate the low budget, on-the-fly style of 2020 digital media, you can watch it here!

While it feels like the world has changed many times over since December of 2020 and January of 2021, the lessons of this particular Christmastide have continued to bear fruit in my own spiritual journey. For one, I no longer feel the rush to treat December 25th as a deadline, but rather I can engage with it as a starting point. It’s okay if I’m still visiting people, listening to Christmas hymns, savoring the decorations and nativities, giving alms, engaging in charity, and distributing gifts right up to January 5th.

Making the time more spacious allows for moving more slowly through travels, visits, devotions, and worship. All of this helps to cultivate a sense of wonder at just how much of a gift genuine presence is. Not only the Divine presence we celebrate in the Incarnation, but the ongoing presence of the Indwelling, and the ubiquitous of the Creator in every growing edge of the universe.

Not only the divine presence, but our own presence, in the moment that matters, the current one. It remains the only time and space which we actually occupy, no matter how much our preoccupation with memories or imagined futures might be. We can actually miss the entire celebration by not showing up, mercifully and lovingly present in each moment of it.

One way we savor this time at St. Clare House is to engage in service projects and generosity that specifically take place on or about January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany. Remembering this occasion of wise strangers giving gifts to honor the Christ child, we look for ways to bring the season to a close with a lot of love. Whether that looks like boots and toe warmers for the day shelter where we live, or bringing the final platters of cookies, fruit, and cheese to the day shelter where I serve. We remember how the Holy One sneaked into the world and tented among us, noticed only by outcasts at first, much like the shelter guests we are trying to help this year.

I have come to cherish this less anxious way to embrace the holidays and the holy days of this season, and I hope it gives you some thoughts about what you might do differently next year, or even in the 6 days that remain. What love might you experience just by being fully present in these sacred moments?

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Blessed Epiphany.

For the past several years, I’ve maintained the discipline of listening to mostly Christian music during Advent, most of it Christmas music. Last year was the year I fell in love with “O, Holy Night,” particularly the version sung by Tracy Chapman. I’m also fond of the reggae version](https://youtu.be/jbylwxfj0Js) from Christafari (their Reggae Christmas compilation is on regular repeat during this time of year). It is this latter version that I first caught the words of the third verse:

Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace; Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in His name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, Let all within us praise His holy name; Christ is the Lord, Oh, praise His name forever! His powr and glory evermore proclaim! His powr and glory evermore proclaim!

For whatever reason, I did not know that this was an abolitionist hymn. This is probably due to the fact that the first verse is the most commonly sung (even Tracy Chapman doesn’t sing either of the other verses in her otherwise excellent rendition). Regardless, something about this line moves me to tears when I first hear it during the Advent season. It speaks powerfully to what Saint Mary sings in the Magnificat, what the birth of Jesus is intended by God to do: to usurp the power dynamics of our world and to proclaim freedom to the captive.

This is reflected in the saint commemorated in the Episcopal Church’s calendar today: Frances Joseph-Gaudet. Initially I was going to write about Saint Anysia of Thessaloniki. This was partly due to some confusion on my part over our calendar (Frances is listed as being commemorated on the 31st in our current edition of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, but was commemorated on the 30th in the previous editions). But Anysia is not recognized in our calendar (she’s remembered in the Orthodox Churches). Plus, she’s another martyr and—intending no disrespect to any of the Holy Martyrs—I imagine that some of us are a bit overwhelmed by reading about murdered saints day-after-day. What of someone who incarnated the gospel in a way that didn’t end with hurled rocks, or decades of exile, or political executions, or drawn swords in a cathedral? That brings us to Frances.

From what I can gather, Frances is held in high regard in the diocese of Louisiana, where she lived and ministered. She was not an ordained person, but nonetheless lived a life dedicated to the gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly that part about breaking chains and having love as His law. She was dedicated to the work of prison reform, especially in regards to young Black men. Which she did in 1930s Louisiana. As a woman. Born of mixed race as Black and Native American.

No wonder she’s a saint.

There is one connection with Saint Anysia that is worth commenting on: both were committed to the work of the gospel during troublesome times as single women. Saint Anysia was a consecrated virgin active during the persecutions of Diocletian. Saint Frances was a divorced woman (seeking the divorce because her husband was an alcoholic—this also influenced her commitment to the Temperance movement), raising her three children as a seamstress, during the deep racism of pre-Civil-Rights America.

Frances began her ministerial work by holding prayer meetings for families with sons and daughters in prison. This then turned into prayer meetings with prisoners, making and proving clothes to prisoners, and the work of helping young men get back to some kind of normal life after being released from prison. She would take charge of young men after attending juvenile court (something that she also advocated for—previously, young men were tried as adults exclusively), eventually needing to acquire more land in order to house them and educate them. This evolved into the Gaudet Episcopal Home (after she donated the property to the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana).

All of this as she remained a woman of meager means. She focused her efforts on her school and became its principal, but she was never a wealthy woman.

She serves as an example we all need: someone who did great things for the gospel using what she had in front of her. She heard the plight of her friends and neighbors, saw the injustice of the penal system (which perpetuates to this day, sadly), and did what she could, building on each development as the Lord provided.

One of my little maxims when it comes to parish ministry is that the most effective ministry is the one that a parish wants to do, not the one it feels obligated to do. We’ve seen this throughout Saint Mary’s history. In our story, we’ve been a Sunday School for Chinese and Japanese children, a medical dispensary, an orphanage, a school, and a parish (which actually is a fairly recent development for us, only really beginning in the 1960s). Each time we’ve made a change, it seems to be based on us discerning what we are both willing and able to do rather than taxing ourself with what we feel obligated to do.

But this philosophy is not limited to parish communities. It also applies to individuals. The first time I ever saw this, I was still in seminary. I had interned at Saint Paul’s in Newnan, Georgia for a summer. In one of my sermons I mentioned how we could use what we already have for the benefit of God’s work, referencing the model used by Toms Shoes as an illustration. Toms, which were immensely popular in the late 00s, have a one-for-one model: you buy a pair of their shoes and another pair is set aside for person in need, footwear being a significant preventative for lots of diseases and infections throughout most of the world. After that summer, I went back to seminary for a semester and then was home for Christmas, where the rector of Saint Paul’s invited me to serve at the Christmas services. After one of the services a parishioner came up to me very excitedly and handed me a gift bag. Inside were four hand-made wine glass charms (so you can identify your glass when at a party at someone’s house). She told me that she had been trying to think of ways to help people in need. Then the Spirit moved her during my sermon and she realized that she could use her beading hobby as means to foster God’s kingdom. So she partnered with a charity and used proceeds from her wine glass charms (which she sold at a local farmer’s market) to support their work.

When we think of saints and saintly work, we tend to think of people like Saint Stephen or Saint John or maybe even Saint Thomas—people who made giant gestures of faith that ultimately cost them their lives in a direct sense. Or we think of Saint Theresa of Calcutta, who became a nun and helped the poor in India die with dignity. But Saint Frances of New Orleans reminds us that saintly gestures begin simply and within our current means. We don’t need to be a nun or a deacon or the second-most-powerful-person in the English realm in order to effect great things for God’s kingdom. We can be a single mother working as a seamstress, sharing the pain of other mothers lamenting their children in jail and the unjust systems that put them there.

When I was a school chaplain I used to say to my students at the start of the school year: you are called to change the world; only the world you change might not be your own. Simply holding the hand of and praying with a mother whose son has been imprisoned for a petty charge can change her world in profound ways, even ways we might not know until all is revealed in God’s coming Kingdom.

Saint Frances of New Orleans heard the words of Jesus at the start of His ministry, when He picked up Isaiah’s scroll and read to the poor people of Nazareth:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19 CEB)

Or, as Charles Wesley would put it:

His law is love and His gospel is peace; Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in His name all oppression shall cease.

That is something we can also do, one small moment at a time.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I abandoned this blog last December, but was reminded of it today in therapy when discussing my penchant for intense, directed projects to drag myself out of desolation. I even forgot what this domain was initially (“write.io”? “blog.write”?) but finally remembered it. I’m still paying for it, probably. Year-in-review:

Without diminishing some significant high points and positive memories, I spent most of 2025 afraid that I wouldn’t survive or flailing wildly all over everyone in an attempt to. I did survive, and I daresay stronger and better for it. Still settling into my “AuDHD” identity, exploring and pushing on things but pleased that after a lifetime of almost universally-negative therapy experiences, I’m batting 2/2 just by screening for neurodivergence expertise. (A favorite early therapy memory is, after I described an emotionally triggering experience that dysregulated me, my therapist told me to use hand warmers and earplugs. And I was like, WHAT? But… IT F-ING WORKS!)

On the good days, despite my best efforts to remain alive for my kids and other loved ones that my suicide would traumatize, I fought off impulses to throw myself in front of passing trains. On the bad days I would spend hours wailing, too paralyzed for impulsive self-offing, relegated to pining for some acceptable form of death… aneurysm, freak accident, terminal cancer… that would get me relief while sparing my loved ones the complications of a suicide.

Gratitude was a constant—gratitude for surviving at all, for random circumstances that landed me on my feet when it could have easily gone the other way, for the support and love and grace I have been shown by people in my life despite self-destructive decisions and unilaterally-imposed burdens on them. Gratitude is just a concept though; it can overflow as if a waterfall from my consciousness, but hardly a sizzle up against the horrific, raging dumpster fire threatening to engulf my nervous system in flames at any moment.

I began exploring residential treatment in January, and was even screened and accepted into a program that would have been fully insurance covered. I ultimately decided against it; a big contributor to my mental state was job instability and checking out of the workforce for a month would probably impair my ability to get what I needed to out of the treatment. Additionally, when I asked my therapist about it, he said I’d probably hate it but it could benefit me in the sense that I would get to practice frustration tolerance. The facility wouldn’t let me “defer” regardless and I wasn’t ready to up and check myself in THAT WEEK. So, no residential treatment.

Of course, that therapist had to stop seeing me suddenly in February because the application he submitted for a different kind of license was still processing. I know it was unexpected on his end and he had no choice… but this type of abrupt disruption was… not good. I knew how important it was for me to have mental health supervision; I searched for GA-licensed therapists (apparently there is no such thing as a GA-NY licensed therapist who is expert in neurodivergence… at least not one who takes insurance / has immediate availability) and found the right one on my first try. I also signed up for a “virtual intensive” 10 hours/ week of group therapy + 1 hour / week individual therapy and optional family therapy. They had neurodivergent-specific groups, which intrigued me.

During this time, I also decided to pursue a career opportunity that felt potentially risky—but the risks of staying in place ultimately felt worse. Immediately before starting my new work, I dropped the intensive virtual treatment… I really did try but at the end of the third week it was turning out to be a massive waste of time in which I might get 1-2 helpful nuggets over the course of a 3-hour “frustration tolerance” exercise 3 days a week. My time and my “frustration tolerance” was not well spent in that setting when I had new colleagues to build rapport with and a practice to rebuild.

Mid-March 2025 was a pivot point unlike any other in my life, both from that transition and for other reasons I do not intend to explain in detail, but what happened in March likely saved me, sparing me from what otherwise would have been an excruciating April and May returning to Atlanta and trying to reintegrate into synagogue life. Mid-March gave me angelic reprieve after months of agony and exhaustion from getting through the day.

I plunged back into dysregulation starting in late June, with July being fairly dark. But somehow I managed to stay engaged and productive, with only a handful of nights when various triggers caused me to lose myself and lose my ability to conceive of sustained existence.

Starting in August I was very very very busy in preparation for the high holidays in September / early October, and then for my daughter’s bat mitzvah in early December.

And for the most part, I’ve been doing alright. There have been a few unfortunate meltdowns, and I was highly neurotic leading up to the bat mitzvah… but understanding it all makes these times so much less threatening and so much easier to let go of and learn from. I had an actual good time at the bat mitzvah, which was a massive accomplishment for me, as I tend to melt down at my own events (or at best go into “work” mode and dissociate from social engagement or enjoyment).

The bat mitzvah was the thing hanging over my head at my worst, the thing that I had worked so hard to ensure was a good experience for my daughter (which meant I couldn’t ruin it and other people’s dislike for me couldn’t ruin it). Once it was over, a huge weight was lifted, but after a week or so, the endless plain of “what now?” stretched ominously before me. No structure, no goal, no certainty, nothing imminent to motivate me. I sank into cycles of neurosis and seeking external validation and reassurance.

This morning … I started registering to take the CA bar exam in February. And now I feel a bit more like myself.

Here’s hoping 2026 makes sense, and that I can climb closer to the equilibrium that eludes me in my eternally-warring cravings for novelty and predictability…

Reading Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler for a second time thirty-two years after the first, I was heartened by how little of it I had remembered. A vague sketch of the concept had stayed with me, along with the name 'Ludmilla', among no more than a handful of other details. I dislike revisiting narrative fiction when my recollection of the story is too clear, and probably would not have finished it again had too many other particulars felt familiar. It is a book with several unrelated, deliberately truncated plot-lines, which would be harder (I imagine) to recall than a single narrative arc. In any event, I reckon three decades is at last a long enough interval after which I could profitably reacquaint myself with some of the other novels I read in my twenties.

In a text concerned with reading in so many of its guises, it's no surprise that re-reading gets a mention, as in the following view voiced by one of the library patrons in Chapter 11:

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read [...] but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reding a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before [...]“

The impressions experienced on this encounter with the novel were just a little less favourable than those from my first. The sense of novelty that's part of its charm was unavoidably diminished, and I suspect I'm a fussier and more impatient reader in general nowadays. I felt some of the later chapters stretched their conceits too thinly, and that a couple of the nested narratives were a little weak. It doesn't speak well of my younger self, moreover, that I was so oblivious to Calvino's sexism back in the '90s. For all that, I've seldom – if ever – met with such buoyant & inventive writing about reading as I enjoyed again here.

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Catching up with some reading this week I also finished George Saunders' examination of the art & craft of short-story writing – A Swim in a Pond in the Rain – which I much admired even if it did little to lessen my antipathy for the works of Anton Chekhov, one of the four Russian authors examined at length within. And I read Barley Patch, a first and perhaps last encounter with the work of idiosyncratic Australian Gerald Murnane. I'd had my apprehensions that his writing might not be to my taste, and indeed it wasn't: there were undoubtedly striking images and illuminating insights to be gleaned, but, for each such pay-off, there were too many pages of dogged pedantry to slog through for my liking. Beyond that, I simply didn’t much care for Murnane’s authorial company.

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Wine of the week: Graham's 2020 LBV Port. While my usual taste is for a drier beverage, port has undeniable appeal at this time of year. A couple of glasses were a welcome treat on Saturday. I have to hope the head-cold that has taken hold since then doesn't linger, and I get to savour some more soon.

Larry's Faves: 2025 Movies

See all #Larrys2025Faves

Bad year for movies. Or a bad year for me seeing movies. Award season rules push studios to cram releases at year’s end, and it's hard to keep up. I will catch up with films I missed in Jan-March.

My list, ranked, with microreviews:

1. One Battle After Another: Brilliant, has a tragic flaw 2. Sinners: Juke Joint Cinema 3. Pavements: Larry’s100 Review 4. Weapons: Campy, creepy, freaky 5. Baltimorons: Larry’s100 Review 6. The Ballad of Wallis Island: Tim Key is brilliant 7. KPop Demon Hunters: Trust the phenom 8. John Candy: I Like Me: Sadder than you’d think 9. Fantastic Four: Didn’t suck 10. Nonnas: More sweet than savory

#movies #film #2025BestOf #FilmReviews #BestOfFilm #Larrys2025Faves #Larrys2025FavesFilm #Cinema #MovieReviews #100WordReview #Larrys100 #100DaysToOffload

#002279 – 25 de Agosto de 2025

A tarde de fim de Dezembro está gelada, o pôr-do-sol é bonito, as ondas óptimas. Os surfistas na água não conseguem escutar este tipo na mesa em frente à minha que destila teorias de conspiração sobre os Estados Unidos, o Musk, o Trump e os nazis e experiências secretas numa ilha perto de Nova Iorque. A mulher em silêncio é interlocutora silenciosa, apenas rindo de vez em quando, incentivando o monólogo.

Larry's Faves: 2025 Television

Putting this list together, I was knocked out by how good television was in 2025. This list includes stone-cold classics like Andor, Black Mirror, and Hacks, while making room for the mind-bending genre work of Pluribus, The Eternaut, and Severance. Comedies came laughing back and were welcome against the darkness of both reality and fiction.

In 2025, television was balanced between shows that took me by surprise (The Studio) and high-quality comfort food (Abbott Elementary). We don’t know what awaits us, with more corporate consolidation and the storm clouds of AI, so I am savoring (most of) the shows below.

All the scripted shows I watched ranked, with microreviews, or links to Larrys100 reviews

1. Pluribus (Apple TV): Larry's 100 Reviews 2. Andor (Disney+): Two-season masterpiece 3. The Rehearsal (HBO): Rube Goldberg of social experiments 4. The Eternaut (Netflix): Larry's 100 Review 5. The Studio: (Apple TV) Fast-paced & meta AF 6. Shoresy (Hulu): I challenge you to find a show this sweet and filthy 7. Righteous Gemstones (HBO): Goodbye, sweet prince 8. Task (HBO): Existential dread with a water ice sidecar 9. The Lowdown (FX/Hulu):Pulp noir Gen X style 10. Slow Horses (Apple TV): Larry's 100 Review 11. Severance (Apple TV): Goat room for the win 12. Abbott Elementary (ABC): Ava is one of my favorite characters on TV 13. Hacks (HBO): Loved the Larry Sanders call backs 14. Mythic Quest (Apple TV): Poppy is one of my favorite characters on TV 15. Agatha All Along (Disney+): Witchy kitsch and great cast 16. Death By Lightning (Netflix): Who knew? 17. White Lotus (HBO): Ground Zero for the Year of Goggins 18. Gilded Age (HBO): No show has actors having fun like Gilded Age 19 Black Mirror (Netflix): Strong season for this institution 20. Fallout (Amazon): Cheating a bit, will straddle into 2026 21. Silo (Apple TV): Apple is the real SciFi channel 22 North of North (Netflix) A funny, smart, sexy show set near the Arctic. 23. The Paper (Peacock): Better than I expected, strong ensemble 24. American Primeval (Netflix): Gritty westerns are always appreciated 25. The Bear (FX/Hulu): Overhyped mess, Carmy is annoying 26. Stranger Things (Netflix): Larry's 100 Review 27. Last of Us (HBO): The last episode was a horrible hour of TV 28. Murderbot (Apple TV): Stuff to like, but got tedious. 29. The Four Seasons (Netflix): Catnip for almost old people 30. The Witcher (Netflix): I miss Henry Cavill 31. King & Conquer (Amazon): This was conceived in a lab just for me, but it sucked

#tv #television #2025BestOf #TVReviews #BestOfTV #Larrys2025FavesTV #Streaming #100WordReview #Larrys100 #100DaysToOffload #Larrys2025Faves

JOURNAL 30 décembre 2025 #auberge

Alors comme on est pas habituées à ces pratiques, on a demandé à mon frère de mettre ses experts sur le coup de notre rêve de reprendre l'auberge. Lui il a toujours pensé que c'était une folie, mais il a joué le jeu comme si c'était pour lui. Alors il y a plusieurs points essentiels. Bien sûr on peut acheter les bâtiments du vivant de m et p, mais on peut pas avoir la licence de restauration parce que c’est une licence de 1947 qui a été donnée aux établissements familiaux qui existaient depuis x années avant. Elle est transmissibles aux descendants, enfants, neveux et nièces cousins etc. à condition qu'ils aient un lien de parenté mais elle peut pas être vendue car elle a été donnée c’est un régime spécial destiné uniquement aux établissements traditionnels anciens. Donc il nous faudrait obtenir une nouvelle licence. Et voilà le point merdique : si un quelconque héritier se pointe un jour et dit moi je prends la licence familiale, au revoir neko et A il sera prioritaire. La loi japonaise est très protectrice des droits familiaux et professionnels. Pour la même raison si un héritier en ligne directe, donc enfants, petits-enfants, arrière etc. décide d'attaquer la vente il a de fortes chances de gagner, il y a plein d’angles d'attaque possible : le montant, l'influence sur des gens très âgés, le fait qu'une des acheteuses est une étrangère etc. 80 % de chances que le tribunal nous donne tort. Pour assurer notre coup il faudrait l'accord de la fille de m et p mais aussi des petites-filles qui signeraient une renonciation au droit de licence et à toute réclamation sur la vente. En plus comme le Japon ne reconnaît pas le mariage entre femmes, tout contrat devra être établi à nos deux noms pour qu'on ait les mêmes droits sur les bâtiments et la nouvelle licence et badaboum A n'a pas encore le statut de résidente donc si son visa était annulé (avec la dingue au pouvoir c'est pas du tout impossible) alors au revoir princesse. Même si M et P nous adoptaient, solution extrême ça poserait encore un problème pour A. : deviendrait-elle Japonaise du même coup ? malheureusement la question ne semble pas tranchée. Tout cumulé la possibilité de réussite à moyen terme du projet est proche de 0% sans parler des pertes financières dont je vous ferai pas un exposé c’est pas passionnant. Il y a en plus pour tout arranger des lois locales régionales qui sont ce qu'elles sont mais qui vont pas dans notre sens et qui me considèrent moi même comme étrangère, étant originaire du kanto. Et la loi non écrite la plus importante du japon et qui chapeaute toutes les autres et qui dit Ça Ne Se Fait Pas ça vous fait rire mais c’est ça mon pays C’est comme ça par exemple que des milliers de postes dans les grandes entreprises je dis bien des milliers sont occupés par des gens qui arrivent le matin et repartent le soir sans avoir strictement rien fait ou presque : on peut pas les virer parce que “ça ne se fait pas”, aucune considération économique ne peut avoir raison là-dessus. C’est dingo, hein ? C'est le Japon.

Alors soit on trouve l'adresse de la fille de m et p et celles des deux petites filles soit on abandonne définitivement. Elles sont vivantes car elles sont toujours mentionnées sur le livret familial mais personne ne sait ce qu'elles sont devenues. La fille a dans les 70 ans et les deux petites-filles un peu plus âgées que nous 38 et 40 c’est tout ce qu'on sait. Environ 100 000 Japonais disparaissent chaque année, inutile de dire que c’est pas la peine de s'adresser à la police pour les trouver.

Alors pfffff notre rêve est parti emporté par le vent 🌬️ On est allées faire une grande marche sous la neige en silence pour digérer ça ❄️❄️❄️ merci à vous de vous être fait du souci pour nous, ça ira mieux demain Si le chasse-neige dégage la route on devra accueillir 6 pensionnaires, il faudra être souriantes comme des vraies Japonaises bien dressées.

Umberto Eco said that the Internet has given idiots the right to speak to a legion of idiots. But long before the Internet, we already had fireworks to prove that this legion was not only there: it was organized and capable of causing very real harm.

No algorithms are needed to amplify hate or stupidity. This legion of idiots terrorizes animals, starts fires and injures thousands of people, sometimes killing them, while overloading hospitals, police forces and fire services.

In places like Berlin, entire neighborhoods have turned into war zones where it is no longer safe to walk down the street. An idiot holding a firework enjoys the same rights as someone who just wants to take a peaceful walk and celebrate New Year’s Eve with their family.

That isn’t freedom. It's collective irresponsibility masquerading as tradition.

#Eco #Fireworks #Berlin #Germany #Idiocy #SocialMedia

The crayfish wire cages were empty. They lay scattered here and there, on surprisingly different places on the lawn; blown in all directions.

So then — like I wrote earlier — there weren’t any crabs in them, and no crayfish.

Crayfish are murk dwellers, who during winter go into a type of stand-by mode in the lakebed, hidden by the dark depths of mud. I think primarily that’s why those cages were empty, being as they were: on land.

But in my imagination, it could’ve been something in there.

A tall pine tree has blown over at mother’s, uprooted by the giant forces of nature.

And the neighbours car port did blow away, denting their car before taking off.

And the roof of a nearby hotel. Like it was just some hat…

But now only icy winds are blowing over the frosted ground, which glitters in the sunlight.

But soon there will fall lots of snow.

They say.

And it’s also soon spring

This weather, in a freakish coincidence, mirrors how I feel.

#NSFW

This post is NSFW 19+ Adult content. Viewer discretion is advised.

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https://soundcloud.com/hustin_art/sets/minori_hatsune/s-GajK6rIzmhy?si=42c9705c7eac4b09bc2244f3327647b5&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

In Connection With This Post: Minori Hatsune https://hustin.art/minori-hatsune

Minori Hatsune, at the time of her debut, emerged as a performer with a distinctly Japanese look—rounded, cheerful facial features paired with large breasts, a classic combination. The AV industry in the late 2000s had not yet been saturated with celebrity-level visuals as it is now, and slightly awkward appearances were still common. ….

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2025 was the year I told myself I would become a movie guy. I wasn't a big movie watcher before this year and as a result I have significant gaps in movie history and knowledge. I haven't seen a lot of the classics and quintessential 21st century movies. So, I buckled down and started watching as many movies as I could.

As of writing this I've watched 108 movies this year. Most of them are not movies I've watched already, and they range from new releases to movies from the 50's. There was no real rhyme or reason to which movies I chose to watch. Some were from recommendations from friends, family, and the internet (specifically the movie podcasts The Big Picture and The Rewatchables), and other choices were from randomly flipping through Tubi when I had some time to kill.

There are still so many movies I have to watch, ones that most people can't believe I still haven't seen, but I'll get through 100 more in 2026, and so on and so on.

But in this post I just want to talk about my favourite movies released in 2025.

2025 Movie Lists

My top 5 movies of 2025, in no particular order:

• One Battle After Another
• Weapons
• Sinners
• 28 Years Later
• Marty Supreme

I enjoyed all these movies immensely. With every single movie on this list I left the theatre thinking about the movie for days and weeks after, enthusiastically discussing them with friends and family and recommending them to anyone I met. I saw Sinners twice this year, once in IMAX and again in 70mm at the Revue Cinema. That movie took my breath away every time I watched it. One Battle After Another, Weapons, and 28 Years Later, were the movies that stuck in my brain the most this year. I would remember scenes or lines from them and that would lead me down a rabbit hole thinking about the grander themes of the movies or how beautifully they were shot. Weapons and Marty Supreme were two movies that had me on the edge of my seat the entire movie, with loads of laugh-out-loud moments immediately followed by tension, or in the case of Weapons, a scare. I watched all these movies in theatres and I'm so glad I did. KEEP THEATRES ALIVE!

Other movies I thoroughly enjoyed:

• Eddington
• Black Bag
• The Shrouds
• Wake Up Dead Man
• The Phoenician Scheme
• F1
• Superman
• Companion
• Materialists

Of the superhero movies released this year that I saw, Superman was my favourite. It was fun and funny, and the action set-pieces were great. Companion is a low-key movie that I feel more people need to watch. It's very well-written and a fun thriller with good acting mixed in. The Shrouds I watched in a theatre that had two other people in it and, as with a lot of Cronenberg movies, I left the movie trying to parse what I had just watched. I watched Eddington when I got home a little drunk and that was one of the most stressful experiences I've ever had watching a movie, but man was that movie incredible.

I could write more about each movie in particular but I think I'll just leave it at that. If you're reading this and you haven't seen some of the movies on this list, I definitely recommend renting them, or if you get the chance watch them in a theatre. I really enjoyed a lot of movies that came out this year, and I only saw a fraction of them. I'll probably have more favourites from this year that I'll catch-up on in 2026.

Here's to 100 more movies in 2026!

In Summary: * Ready to wrap up a good Monday, time spent putting things back in order after the wedding weekend of a best friend of the daughter-in-law. It is indeed good to be back home.

Prayers, etc.: * My daily prayers

Health Metrics: * bw= 218.48 lbs. * bp= 142/88 (75)

Exercise: * kegel pelvic floor exercise, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:30 – 1 banana * 08:00 – small apple pastries * 11:30 – plate of sweet rice * 16:50 – plate of pancit * 19:00 – pork, pancit, steak burger patties with mushroom sauce, Mexican wedding cookies

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:30 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 08:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 13:00 – listening to the JLab Birmingham Bowl: Georgia Southern Eagles vs Appalachian State Mountaineers, An NCAA college football game broadcast live by the Appalachian State Sports Network. * 14:20 – start my weekly laundry * 16:10 – And the Georgia Southern Eagles have just won the JLab Birmingham Bowl, 29 to 10. * 16:15 – Listening now to B97 – The Home for IU Women's Basketball ahead of tonight's early NCAA women's basketball game between the Minnesota Golden Gophers and my Indiana Hoosiers. Yes, of course I'll try to stay here for the radio call of the game. * 18:45 – Minnesota gets the win over the Hoosiers, score is 71 to 48. * 19:00 – dinner guests arrived, then ... * 20:15 – ... left early because they had to catch an early flight tomorrow. * 20:30 – time now to wrap up the night prayers, and shut things down in this joint.

Chess: * 13:30 – moved in all pending CC games

The energy of passion drips out in viscous dreams.

I feel urgent A pressure to explore The tro-tros are all full Black boys wave me off Saying, “sorry, abruni”

A big thick horn Vibrated the ground, “COOOOMMMMMAAAAHHH BOOOOOOAAAAAATAAAAHH!” It says.

The black tro-tro doorman Gives me a thumbs up “Boats are better. For the motion.”

I walk through city forever The stone path starts to wear Thin from the pressure of So many steps.

The ‘boats’ are massive faces bobbing in The water, people sprawled Languidly over cheeks On foreheads, in the hollow Where tears gather Before spilling

I can't get through the door though. It is big and red and has brass knobs But turn as I might, The monoliths don't budge.

A woman appears. Deep, dark eyes. High cheekbones flushed with rose. Lips curved like a Stradivarius— tuned for mischief. Beautiful without asking permission.

“They are locked,” She says “You must be hungry. You need soup.”

We go from restaurant to Restaurant all glowing Golden in the night like gems. Each one we enter says the same thing: 'No Soup!'

The last door enters a living room. Ultramodern and angled, everything in white. Wherever I step, I leave mud stains. I am extremely embarrassed, But she just laughs and rolls piercing eyes. She lays me down on the couch.

A bowl materializes and she says, 'Eat.' And tips the bowl to my lips. I sip it down, but the bowl never empties. It pours and pours but I never get full. She laces her fingers through my hair And Massages my scalp, it's very very pleasant. I feel incredibly relaxed and soothed.

The room turns from cold white stone To soft yellow and pink woods. Something pulses and vibrates slow and steady. Suddenly a bell rings, it is the same bell They used to ring when I was in high school. “Oh, I'm sorry you have to leave.” She says And invites me to the door. When I approach, it is a giant steak. Pressing it, my hands sink into the surface And then I fall through.

The loss of my balance wakes me and I find I'm grasping for someone who isn't there.

Drifting back to slumber after rousing, I discover myself in a city of lights and rivers. I am a giant climbing the Eiffel Tower. The police come and explain that it isn't permitted and that I must come down. Rather than acquiesce, I call for a ride and a giant purple bear comes running in to snatch me up. They yell stop! But my attention is already in the cotton candy clouds. No time for distraction.

The bear takes flight into the clouds and lowers me on a spiders strand into a thick pool. I fall in slowly, like the water is welcoming with a hug. Under the surface everything is sensual and the liquid seeps into me until I become part of the world. I hear a voice calling me, but i cannot see the speaker.

The lights go down and I am lost in her forever.

I wake thick and warm, the hum of feeling still in my skin. The dream time was slow—devotional. The kind of passion that takes its time because there is no need to rush a good thing—It left me with the afterimage of being wanted without apology.

It was a hunger and restraint—not reckless—with intentional consideration. Want and ache that anticipated her discovery, her smile when she finds the evidence and asks, quietly, did you mean for me to see this?

Everything moved at the pace of breath. Of listening. Of hands learning through without asking. It wasn’t urgency that drove it, but confidence—the certainty that nothing needed to be rushed because nothing was in danger of disappearing.

When Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed their copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney in January 2023, they raised a question that now defines one of the most contentious debates in technology: can AI image generation's creative potential be reconciled with artists' rights and market sustainability? More than two years later, that question remains largely unanswered, but the outlines of potential solutions are beginning to emerge through experimental licensing frameworks, technical standards, and a rapidly shifting platform landscape.

The scale of what's at stake is difficult to overstate. Stability AI's models were trained on LAION-5B, a dataset containing 5.85 billion images scraped from the internet. Most of those images were created by human artists who never consented to their work being used as training data, never received attribution, and certainly never saw compensation. At a U.S. Senate hearing, Karla Ortiz testified with stark clarity: “I have never been asked. I have never been credited. I have never been compensated one penny, and that's for the use of almost the entirety of my work, both personal and commercial, senator.”

This isn't merely a legal question about copyright infringement. It's a governance crisis that demands we design new institutional frameworks capable of balancing competing interests: the technological potential of generative AI, the economic livelihoods of millions of creative workers, and the sustainability of markets that depend on human creativity. Three distinct threads have emerged in response. First, experimental licensing and compensation models that attempt to establish consent-based frameworks for AI training. Second, technical standards for attribution and provenance that make the origins of digital content visible. Third, a dramatic migration of creator communities away from platforms that embraced AI without meaningful consent mechanisms.

Experiments in Consent and Compensation

The most direct approach to reconciling AI development with artists' rights is to establish licensing frameworks that require consent and provide compensation for the use of copyrighted works in training datasets.

Getty Images' partnership with Nvidia represents the most comprehensive attempt to build such a model. Rather than training on publicly scraped data, Getty developed its generative AI tool exclusively on its licensed creative library of approximately 200 million images. Contributors are compensated through a revenue-sharing model that pays them “for the life of the product”, not as a one-time fee, but as a percentage of revenue “into eternity”. On an annual recurring basis, the company shares revenues generated from the tool with contributors whose content was used to train the AI generator.

This Spotify-style compensation model addresses several concerns simultaneously. It establishes consent by only using content from photographers who have already agreed to licence their work to Getty. It provides ongoing compensation that scales with the commercial success of the AI tool. And it offers legal protection, with Getty providing up to £50,000 in legal coverage per image and uncapped indemnification as part of enterprise solutions.

The limitations are equally clear. It only works within a closed ecosystem where Getty controls both the training data and the commercial distribution. Most artists don't licence their work through Getty, and the model provides no mechanism for compensating creators whose work appears in open datasets like LAION-5B.

A different approach has emerged in the music industry. In Sweden, STIM (the Swedish music rights society) launched what it describes as the world's first collective AI licence for music. The framework allows AI companies to train their systems on copyrighted music lawfully, with royalties flowing back to the original songwriters both through model training and through downstream consumption of AI outputs.

STIM's Acting CEO Lina Heyman described this as “establishing a scalable, democratic model for the industry”, one that “embraces disruption without undermining human creativity”. GEMA, a German performing rights collection society, has proposed a similar model that explicitly rejects one-off lump sum payments for training data, arguing that “such one-off payments may not sufficiently compensate authors given the potential revenues from AI-generated content”.

These collective licensing approaches draw on decades of experience from the music industry, where performance rights organisations have successfully managed complex licensing across millions of works. The advantage is scalability: rather than requiring individual negotiations between AI companies and millions of artists, a collective licensing organisation can offer blanket permissions covering large repertoires.

Yet collective licensing faces obstacles. Unlike music, where performance rights organisations have legal standing and well-established royalty collection mechanisms, visual arts have no equivalent infrastructure. And critically, these systems only work if AI companies choose to participate. Without legal requirements forcing licensing, companies can simply continue training on publicly scraped data.

The consent problem runs deeper than licensing alone. In 2017, Monica Boța-Moisin coined the phrase “the 3 Cs” in the context of protecting Indigenous People's cultural property: consent, credit, and compensation. This framework has more recently emerged as a rallying cry for creative workers responding to generative AI. But as researchers have noted, the 3 Cs “are not yet a concrete framework in the sense of an objectively implementable technical standard”. They represent aspirational principles rather than functioning governance mechanisms.

Regional Governance Divergence

The lack of global consensus has produced three distinct regional approaches to AI training data governance, each reflecting different assumptions about the balance between innovation and rights protection.

The United States has taken what researchers describe as a “market-driven” approach, where private companies through their practices and internal frameworks set de facto standards. No specific law regulates the use of copyrighted material for training AI models. Instead, the issue is being litigated in lawsuits that pit content creators against the creators of generative AI tools.

In August 2024, U.S. District Judge William Orrick of California issued a significant ruling in the Andersen v. Stability AI case. He found that the artists had reasonably argued that the companies violate their rights by illegally storing work and that Stable Diffusion may have been built “to a significant extent on copyrighted works” and was “created to facilitate that infringement by design”. The judge denied Stability AI and Midjourney's motion to dismiss the artists' copyright infringement claims, allowing the case to move towards discovery.

This ruling suggests that American courts may not accept blanket fair use claims for AI training, but the legal landscape remains unsettled. Yet without legislation, the governance framework will emerge piecemeal through court decisions, creating uncertainty for both AI companies and artists.

The European Union has taken a “rights-focused” approach, creating opt-out mechanisms for copyright owners to remove their works from text and data mining purposes. The EU AI Act explicitly declares text and data mining exceptions to be applicable to general-purpose AI models, but with critical limitations. If rights have been explicitly reserved through an appropriate opt-out mechanism (by machine-readable means for online content), developers of AI models must obtain authorisation from rights holders.

Under Article 53(1)© of the AI Act, providers must establish a copyright policy including state-of-the-art technologies to identify and comply with possible opt-out reservations. Additionally, providers must “draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary about the content used for training of the general-purpose AI model”.

However, the practical implementation has proven problematic. As legal scholars note, “you have to have some way to know that your image was or will be actually used in training”. The ECSA's secretary general told Euronews that “the work of our members should not be used without transparency, consent, and remuneration, and we see that the implementation of the AI Act does not give us” these protections.

Japan has pursued perhaps the most permissive approach. Article 30-4 of Japan's revised Copyright Act, which came into effect on 1 January 2019, allows broad rights to ingest and use copyrighted works for any type of information analysis, including training AI models, even for commercial use. Collection of copyrighted works as AI training data is permitted without permission of the copyright holder, provided the use doesn't cause unreasonable harm.

The rationale reflects national priorities: AI is seen as a potential solution to a swiftly ageing population, and with no major local Japanese AI providers, the government implemented a flexible AI approach to quickly develop capabilities. However, this has generated increasing pushback from Japan-based content creators, particularly developers of manga and anime.

The United Kingdom is currently navigating between these approaches. On 17 December 2024, the UK Government announced its public consultation on “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence”, proposing an EU-style broad text and data mining exception for any purpose, including commercial, but only where the party has “lawful access” and the rightholder hasn't opted out. A petition signed by more than 37,500 people, including actors and celebrities, condemned the proposals as a “major and unfair threat” to creators' livelihoods.

What emerges from this regional divergence is not a unified governance framework but a fragmented landscape where “the world is splintering”, as one legal analysis put it. AI companies operating globally must navigate different rules in different jurisdictions, and artists have vastly different levels of protection depending on where they and the AI companies are located.

The C2PA and Content Credentials

Whilst licensing frameworks and legal regulations attempt to govern the input side of AI image generation (what goes into training datasets), technical standards are emerging to address the output side: making the origins and history of digital content visible and verifiable.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is a formal coalition dedicated to addressing the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history of media content. Formed through an alliance between Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic, collaborators include the Associated Press, BBC, The New York Times, Reuters, Leica, Nikon, Canon, and Qualcomm.

Content Credentials provide cryptographically secure metadata that captures content provenance from the moment it is created through all subsequent modifications. They function as “a nutrition label for digital content”, containing information about who produced a piece of content, when they produced it, and which tools and editing processes they used. When an action was performed by an AI or machine learning system, it is clearly identified as such.

OpenAI now includes C2PA metadata in images generated with ChatGPT and DALL-E 3. Google collaborated on version 2.1 of the technical standard, which is more secure against tampering attacks. Microsoft Azure OpenAI includes Content Credentials in all AI-generated images.

The security model is robust: faking Content Credentials would require breaking current cryptographic standards, an infeasible task with today's technology. However, metadata can be easily removed either accidentally or intentionally. To address this, C2PA supports durable credentials via soft bindings such as invisible watermarking that can help rediscover the associated Content Credential even if it's removed from the file.

Critically, the core C2PA specification does not support attribution of content to individuals or organisations, so that it can remain maximally privacy-preserving. However, creators can choose to attach attribution information directly to their assets.

For artists concerned about AI training, C2PA offers partial solutions. It can make AI-generated images identifiable, potentially reducing confusion about whether a work was created by a human artist or an AI system. It cannot, however, prevent AI companies from training on human-created images, nor does it provide any mechanism for consent or compensation. It's a transparency tool, not a rights management tool.

Glaze, Nightshade, and the Resistance

Frustrated by the lack of effective governance frameworks, some artists have turned to defensive technologies that attempt to protect their work at the technical level.

Glaze and Nightshade, developed by researchers at the University of Chicago, represent two complementary approaches. Glaze is a defensive tool that individual artists can use to protect themselves against style mimicry attacks. It works by making subtle changes to images invisible to the human eye but which cause AI models to misinterpret the artistic style.

Nightshade takes a more aggressive approach: it's a data poisoning tool that artists can use as a group to disrupt models that scrape their images without consent. By introducing carefully crafted perturbations into images, Nightshade causes AI models trained on those images to learn incorrect associations.

The adoption statistics are striking. Glaze has been downloaded more than 8.5 million times since its launch in March 2023. Nightshade has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times since January 2024. Glaze has been integrated into Cara, a popular art platform, allowing artists to embed protection in their work when they upload images.

Shawn Shan, the lead developer, was named MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year for 2024, reflecting the significance the artistic community places on tools that offer some degree of protection in the absence of effective legal frameworks.

Yet defensive technologies face inherent limitations. They require artists to proactively protect their work before posting it online, placing the burden of protection on individual creators rather than on AI companies. They're engaged in an arms race: as defensive techniques evolve, AI companies can develop countermeasures. And they do nothing to address the billions of images already scraped and incorporated into existing training datasets. Glaze and Nightshade are symptoms of a governance failure, tactical responses to a strategic problem that requires institutional solutions.

Spawning and Have I Been Trained

Between defensive technologies and legal frameworks sits another approach: opt-out infrastructure that attempts to create a consent layer for AI training.

Spawning AI created Have I Been Trained, a website that allows creators to opt out of the training dataset for art-generating AI models like Stable Diffusion. The website searches the LAION-5B training dataset, a library of 5.85 billion images used to feed Stable Diffusion and Google's Imagen.

Since launching opt-outs in December 2022, Spawning has helped thousands of individual artists and organisations remove 78 million artworks from AI training. By late April, that figure had exceeded 1 billion. Spawning partnered with ArtStation to ensure opt-out requests made on their site are honoured, and partnered with Shutterstock to opt out all images posted to their platforms by default.

Critically, Stability AI promised to respect opt-outs in Spawning's Do Not Train Registry for training of Stable Diffusion 3. This represents a voluntary commitment rather than a legal requirement, but it demonstrates that opt-out infrastructure can work when AI companies choose to participate.

However, the opt-out model faces fundamental problems: it places the burden on artists to discover their work is being used and to actively request removal. It works retrospectively rather than prospectively. And it only functions if AI companies voluntarily respect opt-out requests.

The infrastructure challenge is enormous. An artist must somehow discover that their work appears in a training dataset, navigate to the opt-out system, verify their ownership, submit the request, and hope that AI companies honour it. For the millions of artists whose work appears in LAION-5B, this represents an impossible administrative burden. The default should arguably be opt-in rather than opt-out: work should only be included in training datasets with explicit artist permission.

The Platform Migration Crisis

Whilst lawyers debate frameworks and technologists build tools, a more immediate crisis has been unfolding: artist communities are fracturing across platform boundaries in response to AI policies.

The most dramatic migration occurred in early June 2024, when Meta announced that starting 26 June 2024, photos, art, posts, and even post captions on Facebook and Instagram would be used to train Meta's AI chatbots. The company offered no opt-out mechanism for users in the United States. The reaction was immediate and severe.

Cara, an explicitly anti-AI art platform founded by Singaporean photographer Jingna Zhang, became the primary destination for the exodus. In around seven days, Cara went from having 40,000 users to 700,000, eventually reaching close to 800,000 users at its peak. In the first days of June 2024, the Cara app recorded approximately 314,000 downloads across the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, compared to 49,410 downloads in May 2024. The surge landed Cara in the Top 5 of Apple's US App Store.

Cara explicitly bans AI-generated images and uses detection technology from AI company Hive to identify and remove rule-breakers. Each uploaded image is tagged with a “NoAI” label to discourage scraping. The platform integrates Glaze, allowing artists to automatically protect their work when uploading. This combination of policy (banning AI art), technical protection (Glaze integration), and community values (explicitly supporting human artists) created a platform aligned with artist concerns in ways Instagram was not.

The infrastructure challenges were severe. Server costs jumped from £2,000 to £13,500 in a week. The platform is run entirely by volunteers who pay for the platform to keep running out of their own pockets. This highlights a critical tension in platform migration: the platforms most aligned with artist values often lack the resources and infrastructure of the corporate platforms artists are fleeing.

DeviantArt faced a similar exodus following its launch of DreamUp, an artificial intelligence image-generation tool based on Stable Diffusion, in November 2022. The release led to DeviantArt's inclusion in the copyright infringement lawsuit alongside Stability AI and Midjourney. Artist frustrations include “AI art everywhere, low activity unless you're amongst the lucky few with thousands of followers, and paid memberships required just to properly protect your work”.

ArtStation, owned by Epic Games, took a different approach. The platform allows users to tag their projects with “NoAI” if they would like their content to be prohibited from use in datasets utilised by generative AI programs. This tag is not applied by default; users must actively designate their projects. This opt-out approach has been more acceptable to many artists than platforms that offer no protection mechanisms at all, though it still places the burden on individual creators.

Traffic data from November 2024 shows DeviantArt.com had more total visits compared to ArtStation.com, with DeviantArt holding a global rank of #258 whilst ArtStation ranks #2,902. Most professional artists maintain accounts on multiple platforms, with the general recommendation being to focus on ArtStation for professional work whilst staying on DeviantArt for discussions and relationships.

This platform fragmentation reveals how AI policies are fundamentally reshaping the geography of creative communities. Rather than a unified ecosystem, artists now navigate a fractured landscape where different platforms offer different levels of protection, serve different community norms, and align with different values around AI. The migration isn't simply about features or user experience; it's about alignment on fundamental questions of consent, compensation, and the role of human creativity in an age of generative AI.

The broader creator economy shows similar tensions. In December 2024, more than 500 people in the entertainment industry signed a letter launching the Creators Coalition on AI, an organisation addressing AI concerns across creative fields. Signatories included Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Ben Affleck, Guillermo del Toro, Aaron Sorkin, Ava DuVernay, and Taika Waititi, along with members of the Directors Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America, and IATSE. The coalition's work is guided by four core pillars: transparency, consent and compensation for content and data; job protection and transition plans; guardrails against misuse and deep fakes; and safeguarding humanity in the creative process.

This coalition represents an attempt to organise creator power across platforms and industries, recognising that individual artists have limited leverage whilst platform-level organisation can shift policy. The Make it Fair Campaign, launched by the UK's creative industries on 25 February, similarly calls on the UK government to support artists and enforce copyright laws through a responsible AI approach.

Can Creative Economies Survive?

The platform migration crisis connects directly to the broader question of market sustainability. If AI-generated images can be produced at near-zero marginal cost, what happens to the market for human-created art?

CISAC projections suggest that by 2028, generative AI outputs in music could approach £17 billion annually, a sizeable share of a global music market Goldman Sachs valued at £105 billion in 2024. With up to 24 per cent of music creators' revenues at risk of being diluted due to AI developments by 2028, the music industry faces a pivotal moment. Visual arts markets face similar pressures.

Creative workers around the world have spoken up about the harms of generative AI on their work, mentioning issues such as damage to their professional reputation, economic losses, plagiarism, copyright issues, and an overall decrease in creative jobs. The economic argument from AI proponents is that generative AI will expand the total market for visual content, creating opportunities even as it disrupts existing business models. The counter-argument from artists is that AI fundamentally devalues human creativity by flooding markets with low-cost alternatives, making it impossible for human artists to compete on price.

Getty Images has compensated hundreds of thousands of artists with “anticipated payments to millions more for the role their content IP has played in training generative technology”. This suggests one path towards market sustainability: embedding artist compensation directly into AI business models. But this only works if AI companies choose to adopt such models or are legally required to do so.

Market sustainability also depends on maintaining the quality and diversity of human-created art. If the most talented artists abandon creative careers because they can't compete economically with AI, the cultural ecosystem degrades. This creates a potential feedback loop: AI models trained predominantly on AI-generated content rather than human-created works may produce increasingly homogenised outputs, reducing the diversity and innovation that makes creative markets valuable.

Some suggest this concern is overblown, pointing to the continued market for artisanal goods in an age of mass manufacturing, or the survival of live music in an age of recorded sound. Human-created art, this argument goes, will retain value precisely because of its human origin, becoming a premium product in a market flooded with AI-generated content. But this presumes consumers can distinguish human from AI art (which C2PA aims to enable) and that enough consumers value that distinction enough to pay premium prices.

What Would Functional Governance Look Like?

More than two years into the generative AI crisis, no comprehensive governance framework has emerged that successfully reconciles AI's creative potential with artists' rights and market sustainability. What exists instead is a patchwork of partial solutions, experimental models, and fragmented regional approaches. But the outlines of what functional governance might look like are becoming clearer.

First, consent mechanisms must shift from opt-out to opt-in as the default. The burden should be on AI companies to obtain permission to use works in training data, not on artists to discover and prevent such use. This reverses the current presumption where anything accessible online is treated as fair game for AI training.

Second, compensation frameworks need to move beyond one-time payments towards revenue-sharing models that scale with the commercial success of AI tools. Getty Images' model demonstrates this is possible within a closed ecosystem. STIM's collective licensing framework shows how it might scale across an industry. But extending these models to cover the full scope of AI training requires either voluntary industry adoption or regulatory mandates that make licensing compulsory.

Third, transparency about training data must become a baseline requirement, not a voluntary disclosure. The EU AI Act's requirement that providers “draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary about the content used for training” points in this direction. Artists cannot exercise rights they don't know they have, and markets cannot function when the inputs to AI systems are opaque.

Fourth, attribution and provenance standards like C2PA need widespread adoption to maintain the distinction between human-created and AI-generated content. This serves both consumer protection goals (knowing what you're looking at) and market sustainability goals (allowing human creators to differentiate their work). But adoption must extend beyond a few tech companies to become an industry-wide standard, ideally enforced through regulation.

Fifth, collective rights management infrastructure needs to be built for visual arts, analogous to performance rights organisations in music. Individual artists cannot negotiate effectively with AI companies, and the transaction costs of millions of individual licensing agreements are prohibitive. Collective licensing scales, but it requires institutional infrastructure that currently doesn't exist for most visual arts.

Sixth, platform governance needs to evolve beyond individual platform policies towards industry-wide standards. The current fragmentation, where artists must navigate different policies on different platforms, imposes enormous costs and drives community fracturing. Industry standards or regulatory frameworks that establish baseline protections across platforms would reduce this friction.

Finally, enforcement mechanisms are critical. Voluntary frameworks only work if AI companies choose to participate. The history of internet governance suggests that without enforcement, economic incentives will drive companies towards the least restrictive jurisdictions and practices. This argues for regulatory approaches with meaningful penalties for violations, combined with technical enforcement tools like C2PA that make violations detectable.

None of these elements alone is sufficient. Consent without compensation leaves artists with rights but no income. Compensation without transparency makes verification impossible. Transparency without collective management creates unmanageable transaction costs. But together, they sketch a governance framework that could reconcile competing interests: enabling AI development whilst protecting artist rights and maintaining market sustainability.

The evidence so far suggests that market forces alone will not produce adequate protections. AI companies have strong incentives to train on the largest possible datasets with minimal restrictions, whilst individual artists have limited leverage to enforce their rights. Platform migration shows that artists will vote with their feet when platforms ignore their concerns, but migration to smaller platforms with limited resources isn't a sustainable solution.

The regional divergence between the U.S., EU, and Japan reflects different political economies and different assumptions about the appropriate balance between innovation and rights protection. In a globalised technology market, this divergence creates regulatory arbitrage opportunities that undermine any single jurisdiction's governance attempts.

The litigation underway in the U.S., particularly the Andersen v. Stability AI case, may force legal clarity that voluntary frameworks have failed to provide. If courts find that training AI models on copyrighted works without permission constitutes infringement, licensing becomes legally necessary rather than optional. This could catalyse the development of collective licensing infrastructure and compensation frameworks. But if courts find that such use constitutes fair use, the legal foundation for artist rights collapses, leaving only voluntary industry commitments and platform-level policies.

The governance question posed at the beginning remains open: can AI image generation's creative potential be reconciled with artists' rights and market sustainability? The answer emerging from two years of crisis is provisional: yes, but only if we build institutional frameworks that don't currently exist, establish legal clarity that courts have not yet provided, and demonstrate political will that governments have been reluctant to show. The experimental models, technical standards, and platform migrations documented here are early moves in a governance game whose rules are still being written. What they reveal is that reconciliation is possible, but far from inevitable. The question is whether we'll build the frameworks necessary to achieve it before the damage to creative communities and markets becomes irreversible.

References & Sources

• CIO Playbook: Adobe Generative AI (Firefly) Licensing Models
• Governance of Generative AI in Creative Work: Consent, Credit, Compensation, and Beyond
• Artists' Rights in the Age of Generative AI
• Protecting artists' rights: what responsible AI means for the creative industries
• Meta's New AI Policy Sparks Exodus of Artists
• Creators Coalition on AI
• Hollywood Insiders Unite to Fight for Future of Industry With Launch of Creators Coalition on AI
• C2PA in ChatGPT Images
• How Google and the C2PA are increasing transparency for gen AI content
• The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI
• Nightshade: Protecting Copyright
• Glaze – Protecting Artists from Generative AI
• Spawning lays out plans for letting creators opt out of generative AI training
• Have I Been Trained?
• Spawning opts out 78 million artworks from AI training
• Moving Pictures: NVIDIA, Getty Images Collaborate on Generative AI
• Getty Images promises its new AI doesn't contain copyrighted art
• STIM launches world's first collective AI music licence
• Sweden's STIM has launched the 'world's first AI licence for music'
• GEMA proposes licensing model for AI-generated music
• EU AI Act's Opt-Out Trend May Limit Data Use for Training AI Models
• How to 'opt-out' your images from use in AI training
• Training AI models: UK Government proposes EU style “opt out” copyright exception
• Japan's New Draft Guidelines on AI and Copyright
• Artists Land a Win in Class Action Lawsuit Against A.I. Companies
• What is Cara, the Instagram alternative that gained 600k users in a week?
• Why Artists are Fleeing Instagram for AI-Skeptical App Cara

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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