This Saturday's Sporting Event to follow in the Roscoe-verse will be 3rd-Round Play in the 90th Masters Golf Tournament from the Augusta, Ga. National Golf Course. Weather permitting, of course. And it will be playing on the TV back in my room this afternoon.

Though I've never been a golfer, (my god-awful eye-sight from a young age), I certainly understand the appeal of this beautiful and challenging sport to those who play it and follow it.

And the adventure continues.

The Porch
It was a beautiful morning in the countryside with the fresh snow shining softly under the bright sun, the grass on the porch wet with morning dew the soft chirp of birds giving a wave of peace and calmness. There she was sitting on the stairs a hand on her face and other holding a cup of tea, waiting for him as her dress flowed in the air as if wanting to rush to him. She sighed softly. Her heart heavy with feelings she couldn’t explain. She felt a weird tightness in her chest and before she could address it she heard a loud rusty truck pull up in front of her door. “It was him, no it must be him,” she thought as she ran to the door, but fate had other plan. Her heart dropped as she saw his friends get out of the car with firm body but trembling lips and teary eyes. She walked with the little courage she had and stood broken as they handed her his belongings and the country flag. Her voice stuck in her throat as she accepted his belongings. She wanted it to be just a dream to wake up and find him next to her smiling. She had no shoulder to lean on, no songs to sing with, and no one to bake with. His friends left with tears in their eyes their duty stopping them from crying. She walked inside with weak legs and fell to the ground; she cried and cried till she passed out, fatigue taking over her grief. She had accepted the grief of losing him but one morning everything changed. When she finally woke up, the air smelled of vanilla and sun-warmed pine. He was there, sitting on the edge of the bed, his hand resting on her knee. He looked younger, his uniform gone, replaced by the soft flannel shirt she loved. She didn't ask how the flag left forgotten on the table. She only knew that he was there with her and she was in his arms. They spent the day in a golden haze. They sang their favorite songs until their throats were dry. They baked the cookies, the kitchen filling with the scent of sugar and home. As the sun dipped below the horizon, they sat on the porch, hand in hand, watching the stars pulse like living hearts. She kissed him, and for the first time in her life, she felt no fear of tomorrow. But inside the house, the clock had stopped days ago. The tea she had poured sat black and moldy on the table. The fire in the hearth was nothing but cold, gray ash. In the bedroom, the woman who had cried until she couldn't breathe lay still, her skin as pale as the winter moon, her eyes closed in a sleep that would never break. Outside, the neighbors finally began to knock. Their voices were muffled and worried, echoing through the halls of a silent, empty home. They peered through the windows, seeing only the dust settling on the family photos the grass turning brown and brittle. She didn't hear the sirens or the heavy boots on the floorboards as the door was finally forced open. She didn't feel the cold air rush into the room where she lay. She only felt his hand in hers, pulling her further into the light. Behind them, the house stood hollow—a shell of a life that had finally, quietly, surrendered to the dark.

You can call me crazy, or liar, or you just believe me.

I will never be able to prove anything I am saying, but some stuff for me are very real. And I only know that because I have felt them.

For instance, I didn’t really understand yoga until it came to me through meditation. I experienced it before I had a teacher. My first contact with involuntary movements happened when I was around 24 or 25. I was listening to mantras quite frequently and I'd meditate quite frequently. One day, it happened.

My body began to unfold into yoga poses and mudras (those hand positions) through completely involuntary movements, as if guided by an unseen hand. I assume that's how a flower feels when it's blooming, it opens not by movement, but by inner energy. It reminds me of a poem from Rumi that says: “What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest”. I understood it, Rumi. Thank you.

At first, I was a little.. surprised. I really really assumed it might be connected to having smoked a joint with a friend the night before and thought there was some lingering effect of THC. A few days later, I meditated again, this time completely sober, and it happened once more. The surprise was replaced by a sense of trust. The movements were slow and gentle, guiding me into stretches and positions I never imagined I could elaborate. Whatever was happening was beyond my understanding and control.

So I did what anyone would do: I googled it, hahaha. After digging through questionable forums (no chat GPT at the time), I eventually stumbled upon the word “kriya”. Turns out kriyas are involuntary movements said to happen when kundalini energy rises through the spine. Super common in India, especially in group practices. In my case? It was just me. Alone. No teacher. No vocabulary to express it (the closest was Rumi). No training, clueless. I did not know what a position even was, even less the purpose behind it, but somehow, yoga already knew me.

Two years later, I was dating a guy who had just started a Kundalini yoga teacher training. Yoga was hype then, you could see a wave of people interested, rushing to studios. I did not connect the kryias that happened to me years before to yoga at this time. Because in my mind all I was doing was meditating when movements happened. One day, he came to my flat with a thick book. That particular day, though, we’d had a little argument, so I retreated to the living room to meditate and let things cool down.

I put on some mantras to play and sat on the floor. Within seconds really, it started again. The spontaneous movements were back. He walked in and sat on the couch. I was aware of him, but I stayed immersed in what was happening. After about fifteen minutes, I stopped. When I looked at him, he asked, clearly surprised: “Where did you learn this?”

I tried to explain I knew it would sound crazy, but I honestly honestly did not know what I was doing, it would just happen to me. Stunned, he told me I had just gone through a full sequence of six different postures from the book he’d brought home, without ever opening it. I then saw the sequence laid out in detailed illustrations and precise instructions. They had names and all. Said to activate certain chakras. Anyone who has ever seen yoga material must know what I am talking about. It all made sense now. I told him what I could assume is this indian practitioner (I do not remember his name) went through the sequence of spontaneous movements and decided to reverse engineer it by drawing them down into a sequence and teach them to westerns under the name of “Kundalini yoga”. He did not even fake it, he called it exactly by the name I googled years before “kryias”. But westerns, going through it, will probably think a kryia is a sequence of postures you should follow, and not spontaneous movements.

I have very clear in my mind yoga is not a practice of the wise ones, or the experienced ones, it is just out there as a collective knowledge. If it can happen to me, believe me, it can really happen to anyone. I went to multiple yoga studios in São Paulo and a few in Vienna after that, always had nice classes, but very pragmatic too. Not even once the kryias happened to me during those classes.

My yoga class in India was a completely different experience. Absolutely no focus on postures, no books, no attention to details. All we were asked for was to feel. I told my indian teacher that day about what happened to me and how I appreciated his class because I understood his concept. He confirmed that the kryias were indeed completely normal, he would always see people having them during festivals, while in the western world they would be seen almost as a supernatural thing. But according to him, the highest states of consciousness will arise naturally when you are ready, when you purified your heart. It has nothing to do with willingness or performance, because it just reinforces the illusion of separate self. It's a mimimi. When that performative thought does not arise, then you are not there the same way, you are here. You just are.

Another completely different experience: sound baths. Went to two sessions of sound baths in Vienna with a friend because it was an option on my Myclubs signature. It wasn't bad. It was very relaxing. The person hosting the session had a collection of bowls, a gong, and other instruments. She explained all of them to us before starting.

Sound bath experience in India: you would enter the room in complete silence. The teacher, seated with the gentlest smile, greeted each person individually with a silent “namaste”. He had only one small bowl with him, nothing else.

The moment he began, I felt an immediate sensation at the top of my head, as if four different points were being touched. I didn’t hear the sound, I felt it. The experience was so physically real that at one point I really thought someone was lifting my legs and dragging my body across the floor in slow spirals. I slightly opened my eyes, convinced someone was actually holding me. There was nothing, just the decorated ceiling of the room. No one touching me. I smiled inwardly, surprised by my own arrogance in refusing to believe what was happening. I was so disconnected from myself that I doubted the experience, convinced it had to be some kind of trick. As westerns, our belief systems are fragile, we’re conditioned to distrust our own sensations, and only trust logic.

End of last year I joined an energy healing course, which pretty much uses only hands and postures to transmute energy. Yes, look at me, a complete hippie trippy, I know. Anyhow, since then, every time I do the practice, I need to place my hands and I swear I can feel the energy circling from one hand to the other as of an electric chain. My hands who are normally cold get extremely warm before I even start.

Some weeks ago I went to concert at Arena with a friend and in the middle of a song while I just closed my eyes it happened again, the sound was traveling through me and touching me exactly in the middle of my chest. It wasn't even a sound bathing session.

It turns out I still cannot explain many things I had experienced and continue to experience sometimes. And possibly I never will, but one thing I am sure is that this life force or however you rather call it, spills beyond our words and escapes the boundaries of physics.

/Apr2026

2.05 Yarmouth Like the chances of DASHING DONKEY here. Three down-the-field runs over the winter but 9/0/2p in that sphere and much better on the turf with plenty of boxes ticked today; 6/2/4p at the track, won on both ground and at the trip, 11/4/7p on a straight course and jockey has won twice on him. Although this is his highest turf mark, he has done OK off 2lbs higher on the AW LTO and 60 shouldn’t be too much of a hindrance. With four places available I think he has a really strong each way chance. DASHING DONKEY // 0.5pt E/W @ 17/2 4 places (Bet 365) BOG

A esta hora, cuando las nubes en mi mente se transforman en rostros y lugares, música suave y se dispersan luces de arcoiris, claridad. Ahora, cuando el silencio da forma a las secretas sílabas y desaparecen, zorros azules en la noche del tiempo. Momento completo: tienes un altar en mí.

So today I from pretty much random coincidence sent a message in my works new grad channel looking for potentially more people to play a board game this Sunday. One of the people that messaged me seemed pretty cool and we have good conversation and they seem like a pretty cool person, and eventually I realized I have met this person before, and she was the girl at an earlier event that I thought was absolutely beautiful and I really wanted a chance to talk to you but I didn’t get much of a chance to. It seemed like she was very interested in getting to know me more, and to hang out, she even asked me if I want us to get drinks tonight which I said no too. I thought it was almost divine intervention that this person is showing up especially because I really wanted to get to know them from the little eye interacted with them earlier, but at the same time after talking a little bit more it became pretty apparent that they are somewhat similar to me in terms of background and mental health issues, except for the fact that they do not have it really under control. They seem to be very much struggling with it and also other general patterns that I remember going through and seeing in myself. I guess this is kind of like a mini test, of me recognizing the red flags and putting the brakes on before I get attached to this person or I have them kind of fall for me just due to codependency. I think the fact that I have my life so visibly together is a big thing that causes women I’ve interacted with as a recent to kind of latch onto me, but maybe it’s also for different reasons who knows.

I know it’s really nerdy and stupid but I wanted to fit a Poisson distribution or whatever to the frequency that I meet people that I feel interested in, because I believe that’s a distribution for random events like this. From that I would be able to fit a distribution and find an expected value and be able to apply things like the secretary matching problem to find unexpected value and variation for that, but I know that I won’t be able to perfectly model anything like this and it’s more just for the love of the game if I’m being honest. I really enjoy all of the art stuff I’ve been doing recently and the creative things, I’ve noticed I almost never gain anymore and I want to do my art stuff or play music and I’m really happy with that.

気温が高くなってきたので、ベランダで朝食を取ることにした。 スマホの天気予報を見ると最高気温は29℃。実際に外に出ると、すでにかなり暑い。

朝食は、トーストにひき肉とブロッコリーをのせ、チーズと胡椒を加えたもの。 最近は、ひき肉とブロッコリーを炒めて塩をかけただけのものをご飯にのせて食べるのにハマっていて、これはそのアレンジ版だ。妻が考案した。

ベランダで過ごす時間は、どこか贅沢な気分になれて好きなのだが、やはり暑く、結局15分ほどで室内に戻った。

最近は、寒さが終わるとすぐに暑くなる。ちょうどいい気温の期間があまりにも短い。 18℃くらいの気温で、薄いシャツを着て外でコーヒーを飲む時間が一番快適だと思う。 現代の人間はこれに適応できないまま寿命を迎えるだろう。

昼食は、ひき肉とブロッコリーを使い切るため、同じ具材をご飯にのせて食べた。 最近はシンプルな味付けのものしか喉を通らず、外食があまり楽しめなくなってきた。それはそれで少し不便だ。

昼食後は歯医者の予約があったので支度をする。 歯を磨き、顔を洗い直す。顔がはっきりしてくると、細かい毛が気になり、いつもより丁寧に処理した。歯医者に行くだけなのに、なぜかいつもより顔がすっきりしている。

今通っている歯医者はまだ2回目だ。 前の歯医者で詰めていた歯が取れたため、付け直してもらうために予約した。下の奥歯は問題なく処置してもらえたが、特に説明もなく、それに合わせるために上の歯を少し削られた。少し気にはなったが、仕上がりが良かったので何も言わなかった。

歯医者の後は、急な暑さに対応するため、エアリズムを4着購入し、妻といつもの喫茶店へ。 いつも通り、特別な話をするでもなく、ただゆっくり過ごす。

帰りにスーパーで、レコメンドされていたピコラとエアリアルというお菓子を買った。どちらも99円。 さらに、まるごとバナナを衝動買いした。久しぶりに食べたが、やはり美味しい。1本は多いので、2人で分けた。

エアリアルは思っていたよりも美味しく、新しい発見だった。あまり評価されている印象がなかったので、少し意外だった。

夜はツナ缶のパスタ。ツナと鰹節の組み合わせで、シンプルだが美味しいヘルシーな夕食。 もう少し食べ応えのある具材を足したいところだが、何を加えるのがベストかはまだ思いつかない。

自炊を中心にした、良い休日だった。

Izzy Watches Porn

#nsfw #Izzy

“OMG, they are really naked… wow.” Izzy was leaking. Her eyes were wide. Her pussy throbbing. She was in full overload. Suddenly her mom called. Her left eye twitched again. She doesn't want interruptions from what she was seeing on her screen.

“I think I should go to my desk and use my laptop. That screen is bigger.” Izzy thought to herself. She was comfortable on the couch on her phone, but she got tired of those jolts back to her old life that didn't matter.

She was naked in her own place now. She was free. She got up and giggled. She saw that she left a wet spot on the couch. This new slick and slimy feeling was caused by the naked women on her screen. She had to see more. No more control anymore. No more purity. Just her naked and porn.

Her phone was left on silent and forgotten. She padded fully nude to her desk and laptop, pulling on her nipples, feeling the electric pleasure course through her body.

“This throbbing feeling feels so good; I don't want it to go away just yet. I need to see more.”

For obvious reasons, she decided to stick with X since it was free to sign up. She made a modest anonymous account (just the bare minimum) and looked for the Instagram models and was surprised a few did have full nudity on their X pages.

Izzy was absolutely fascinated. Their bodies, their outfit choices, their poses. And of course things slowly escalated from there in such a short time. Izzy didn't fully realize this, but with porn being so in your face in the modern era, it wasn't long before sensual nudes led to more lewd and obscene content. She didn't mind.

“This is what adults do. Is this what they watch? I want to be an adult like them. I'll keep watching.”

Izzy so desperately wanted to make up for lost time.

“I don't care if this is sinful. I don't want to watch anything else.”

She had a full-body high of arousal.

Hours passed by as Izzy leaked all over her office chair, humping slowly as she liked and followed more and more black women owing their pleasure. She saw so much going into their pussies. Things she didn't even know what they were. She studied their bodies. She liked them shaved down there. She could see everything.

Oddly, she didn't care too much for men and their penises. Every time she saw a naked black man on her screen, she thought about Marco, and then she got sad and didn't want to watch men anymore.

“I only want to see porn that looks like me. I like watching porn that looks like me. I like seeing naked black women. I need to see more naked black women,” Izzy said to herself.

Then she said out loud. “I really do like watching porn.”

Izzy finally realized the gravity of her situation. In just a short amount of time, she has gone from a pious, pure church virgin to a bi-curious naked budding porn addict. She smiled.

“I want to change. I want this to get worse. I need to see more. I need to watch more women like her,” Izzy said out loud. Each affirmation was confirming the fire between her legs. She wanted to touch herself, but she didn't want to ruin it. She didn't want the feeling to go away, but she had so much more porn to watch.

“I don't need TV. I'll just pay for internet and watch porn. It's been a few hours already, and I cannot stop.”

Then she stumbled upon her first goon caption.

A curator called Shad0wgoone had entered her feed and she was absolutely captivated. He mostly did hypnotic writing captions, but what she read was a call to arms to fully own her pleasure. His selection of women as well as his hypnotic mantras really did something to her. She started scrolling nonstop.

He said so many things that were so porn-positive::

It’s not a big deal. You stay inside and put good things inside your pussy. You watch your screens and tell your brain it’s good sex. It’s not a big deal. It’s gooning.

You didn’t realize how much you need masturbation to regulate yourself. You need this more than ever. You NEED to do this to feel normal. YOU NEED PORN.

Some seek out partners and date. You sought out porn and now your life is better. Porn is your constant companion that will never hurt you.

The last caption really hit home. But he was right. Izzy gasped. “OMG… Porn really is better than people. It feels soo. right.” Izzy felt like she found home.

“I'm going to get more addicted to porn. I need this. I can't wait to start gooning for real.”

Izzy continued to deny her urge to touch herself.

“Not yet, I just started doing this; I'll know when it's the right time.”

The naked naive woman stayed glued to her screen for the rest of the night, staring at hundreds of naked women on her screen. Her nipples were hard. Her breath was shallow, and her pussy was throbbing. She loved it all.

At 2:49 AM Eastern Time on 20 October 2025, a DNS race condition inside Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region triggered a cascade that would, over the next fifteen hours, ripple across seventy-five AWS services and knock more than 3,500 companies offline in over sixty countries. Snapchat vanished. Fortnite went dark. Banking applications froze mid-transaction. And in bedrooms across the United States, owners of Eight Sleep's Pod 5 Ultra smart beds discovered that their $5,049 mattresses had locked themselves into upright positions or cranked their heating coils to uncomfortable temperatures, with absolutely no way to override the settings. The app that controlled their beds needed a server farm in Northern Virginia to function. Without it, people were quite literally trapped in furniture that had forgotten how to be furniture.

It was absurd. It was also a warning.

We have built a civilisation that routes an extraordinary share of its daily operations through a vanishingly small number of cloud data centres. Your payment terminal, your city's traffic management system, your hospital's patient records, your child's baby monitor, and yes, your bed, all phone home to the same handful of server clusters operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. When those clusters stumble, the consequences are no longer limited to a slow-loading webpage. They cascade through supply chains, public services, financial markets, and the physical objects in your home. The question is no longer whether a single cloud failure could trigger a societal crisis. The question is how close we have already come.

The Anatomy of a Cascade

To understand the fragility, you first need to understand the architecture. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud collectively control more than 62 per cent of the global cloud market. In Europe and the United Kingdom, AWS and Microsoft alone command roughly 70 per cent. An estimated 94 per cent of enterprise services worldwide depend on at least one of these three providers. This is not a distributed system in any meaningful sense. It is a funnel, and nearly everything flows through it.

The October 2025 AWS outage demonstrated this with uncomfortable clarity. The failure started in DynamoDB's internal management system, where a subtle DNS race condition caused resolution failures. Within hours, the damage had spread to EC2 compute instances, Lambda serverless functions, S3 storage, and RDS databases. But the truly unsettling revelation was structural: US-EAST-1 serves as the control plane for AWS infrastructure globally. Organisations that had carefully architected their applications to run in European or Asian regions discovered that their supposedly distributed infrastructure still depended on a control plane sitting in Northern Virginia. A single region, a single DNS glitch, and the scaffolding beneath a significant portion of the global internet buckled.

The financial toll of such events is staggering and accelerating. The average cost of downtime across industries rose to $8,600 per minute in 2025, up from $5,600 in 2022. Large enterprises averaged $23,750 per minute of disruption. Across the Global 2000, IT outages collectively drain an estimated four hundred billion dollars annually. The October AWS outage alone generated more than four million outage reports within its first two hours, a measure not just of technical impact but of how many distinct services, businesses, and individuals had routed their operations through a single provider's infrastructure.

But the monetary figures, enormous as they are, obscure the deeper problem. Money can be recovered. Trust in infrastructure is harder to rebuild, particularly when people discover that the systems governing their physical safety have a dependency chain that terminates at a single server rack in a single building in a single state.

When Your Bed Becomes a Liability

The Eight Sleep incident during the October 2025 outage became something of an internet parable, the kind of story that makes you laugh until you think about it for more than thirty seconds. Eight Sleep's Pod 5 Ultra uses water-cooled coils managed through a cloud-connected application. The system tracks biometric data, adjusts temperatures throughout the night, and positions the adjustable base to reduce snoring. It is, by any measure, an impressive piece of engineering. It is also, as October 2025 revealed, entirely dependent on servers it does not own and cannot control.

When AWS went down, users lost access to the temperature controls entirely. Reports flooded social media: beds locked at dangerously high temperatures, adjustable bases stuck in elevated positions, alarms silenced. One user described the experience as sleeping in a sauna. Matteo Franceschetti, the company's chief executive, apologised publicly and promised to “outage-proof” the technology. Within twenty-four hours, Eight Sleep shipped an emergency “outage mode” using Bluetooth connectivity, allowing basic local control without an internet connection.

The speed of the fix only deepened the question: why had local control not been the default from the start? The answer, of course, is economic. Cloud connectivity enables continuous data collection, biometric tracking, firmware updates, and subscription revenue models. Local processing is less profitable. It does not generate the steady stream of user data that feeds product development and investor presentations. The result is a consumer landscape where the most intimate objects in your home require permission from a distant server to perform their basic functions. Your bed needs the internet to be a bed. Your lights need the cloud to switch on.

Eight Sleep was not an isolated case. The Sengled smart lighting outage from 18 to 22 June 2025 left thousands of households without control of their bulbs for four solid days. Not dimming. Not colour adjustment. Simply on or off, and even that was unreliable. German networking company Devolo announced the complete shutdown of its Home Control smart home platform's cloud servers on 31 December 2025, rendering its entire product ecosystem effectively non-functional from that date forward. Users could no longer change configurations, add devices, or access the system through any interface. Integration with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant ceased entirely. Devices that people had purchased, installed, and relied upon became inert plastic overnight, not because they were broken but because a company decided to stop running a server.

These are not edge cases. They are the predictable outcome of an industry that has systematically traded user autonomy for recurring revenue. Gartner projects that by the end of 2026, 34 per cent of device operations will be processed locally rather than in the cloud, up from 15 per cent the year prior. The Matter protocol and local AI hubs represent early attempts to build smart home infrastructure that does not require a round trip to Oregon to turn on a kitchen light. That trajectory acknowledges the problem, but hardly solves it. Two-thirds of your smart home still needs to call home. And for the devices that fail when the cloud fails, the consequence is not just inconvenience. It is a fundamental breach of the implicit contract between consumer and product: the thing you bought should do the thing it was sold to do.

The Day the Internet Lost Its Middle

If the AWS outage of October 2025 demonstrated the risks of cloud concentration at the infrastructure layer, the Cloudflare outage of 18 November 2025 exposed a different but equally troubling dependency. Cloudflare handles roughly 20 per cent of global web traffic, serving as the content delivery network and security layer for millions of websites and applications. At 11:20 UTC, a change to the permissions of one of Cloudflare's database systems caused the database to output multiple entries into a configuration file used by its Bot Management system. The file doubled in size and was propagated across the entire network.

The result was immediate and vast. X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, OpenAI's suite of tools, Spotify, Discord, Zoom, Canva, Uber, and League of Legends all went down or experienced severe degradation. Public transit systems, e-commerce platforms, and banking interfaces were disrupted. The outage lasted approximately five to six hours before full recovery at 17:06 UTC. Crucially, this was not a cyberattack. It was a configuration change, the kind of routine database maintenance that happens thousands of times per day across the industry. A single permissions error in a single database cascaded into the disruption of services used by hundreds of millions of people.

What made the Cloudflare outage particularly revealing was the nature of the services it knocked offline. ChatGPT and Claude AI both experienced disruptions, meaning the AI assistants that an increasing number of professionals, students, and businesses rely upon for daily work simply stopped responding. The episode illustrated a dependency chain that most users had never considered: your AI assistant depends on a cloud provider, which depends on a content delivery network, which depends on a database permission being set correctly. Remove any link in that chain and the entire service collapses. The layers of abstraction that make modern technology convenient also make it opaque, and opacity breeds fragility.

Payments in Freefall

If a malfunctioning bed is an inconvenience and a broken AI chatbot is a productivity hit, a frozen payment system is something closer to a crisis. During the CrowdStrike incident of 19 July 2024, a faulty content update to the company's Falcon Sensor software caused 8.5 million Windows computers to crash simultaneously. The damage reached across airlines, hospitals, banks, and payment processors. Visa and Mastercard transaction systems experienced disruptions in some regions. The financial losses exceeded ten billion dollars globally, with Fortune 500 companies alone absorbing more than five billion dollars in direct costs. Insurers estimated payouts of approximately 1.5 billion dollars.

The CrowdStrike failure was not a cloud outage in the traditional sense. It was a security software update that exposed a different kind of single point of failure: the monoculture of endpoint protection. CrowdStrike held roughly 18 per cent of the global market, which meant that a bug in one company's update pipeline could, and did, bring commercial aviation and hospital systems to a halt on the same morning. The Library of Congress documented the impacts to public safety systems, noting that the outage affected emergency services infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions.

Payment infrastructure sits at the intersection of all these vulnerabilities. According to a 2024 survey, 76 per cent of global respondents run applications on AWS, and the service powers more than 90 per cent of Fortune 100 companies. When AWS experienced its October 2025 outage, UK banks were among those knocked offline, joining a long list of financial institutions that discovered their resilience planning had not accounted for the failure of a service they had treated as permanently available. The dependency is not hypothetical. It is operational, structural, and deeply embedded in the architecture of modern commerce.

Nordic countries and Estonia have begun exploring offline card-payment backup systems, a recognition that payment resilience must be designed deliberately rather than assumed. The Ponemon Institute's 2024 Cost of Data Center Outages report found that the average cost of a data centre outage is approximately $9,000 per minute, with financial services among the most severely affected sectors. The EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which came into effect in January 2025, now requires banks, insurers, and investment firms to prove that their digital operations are resilient, auditable, and accessible to regulators. DORA specifically addresses third-party ICT risk, requiring financial entities to identify and manage dependencies on critical technology providers. It is a start, but regulation follows disaster more often than it prevents it.

Hospitals Without Memory

The healthcare sector presents perhaps the most concerning frontier of cloud and AI dependency. In 2024, 71 per cent of non-federal acute care hospitals in the United States reported using predictive AI integrated into their electronic health records, up from approximately 66 per cent in 2023. Among hospitals affiliated with multi-hospital systems, adoption reached 86 per cent. These systems handle billing, scheduling, risk stratification, and increasingly, clinical decision support. They are not optional add-ons. They have become load-bearing elements of hospital operations.

The CrowdStrike outage of July 2024 provided a stark preview of what happens when those systems fail. A study published through the National Center for Biotechnology Information documented that 759 US hospitals experienced network disruptions during the incident. Of the nearly 1,100 internet-based services examined across those hospitals, 239 (21.8 per cent) were characterised as corresponding with direct patient care functionality. These were not administrative inconveniences. They were disruptions to systems that clinicians relied upon to access patient records, manage medications, and coordinate care.

The paradox of healthcare AI adoption is that it simultaneously improves operational efficiency and increases systemic vulnerability. Hospitals with mature predictive AI deployments have realised measurable improvements in billing accuracy, scheduling efficiency, and outpatient risk stratification. But those gains come with a dependency: if the cloud infrastructure supporting those AI systems fails, the hospital does not revert to a slightly less efficient version of itself. It reverts to paper processes that many current staff have never been trained to use. The institutional memory of how to operate without digital infrastructure is eroding precisely as the digital infrastructure becomes less reliable.

Rural and independent hospitals face a different version of this problem. With only 37 per cent adoption of predictive AI compared to 86 per cent at system-affiliated facilities, they are less exposed to AI-specific failures but also less equipped to absorb any technology-driven disruption. The digital divide in healthcare creates a fragmented landscape where a single infrastructure failure affects institutions unevenly, complicating coordinated emergency responses.

The Grid That Forgot How to Balance

On 28 April 2025, at 12:33 Central European Summer Time, the power systems of continental Spain and Portugal experienced a total blackout. In just five seconds, Spain lost approximately fifteen gigawatts of capacity, equivalent to 60 per cent of its national electricity demand. The remaining generation was insufficient to meet load, and the grid entered a cascading failure that left 31 gigawatts of demand disconnected. Power was interrupted for about ten hours across most of the Iberian Peninsula, and considerably longer in some areas.

The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) published its final expert panel report in March 2026, identifying a combination of interacting factors: oscillations, gaps in voltage and reactive power control, rapid output reductions, generator disconnections, and uneven stabilisation capabilities. The interaction between market design (schedule changes driving fast power ramps), grid code implementation (fixed power factor mode for renewables), protection coordination (settings diverging from requirements), and system architecture (insufficient reactive power reserves and manual switching of critical assets) created cascading failures that unfolded faster than human operators could respond. The Iberian system simply lacked the inertia needed to absorb the initial generation-loss shocks, and automatic protection mechanisms cascaded into a total system collapse.

The Iberian blackout was not caused by artificial intelligence. But it was a product of the same underlying dynamic that makes AI-dependent infrastructure so fragile: systems designed for efficiency and automation that lacked the inertia, redundancy, and human-override capability to absorb unexpected shocks. As more grid management functions migrate to AI-driven optimisation platforms hosted in cloud environments, the attack surface and failure surface both expand. A power-grid optimiser that destabilises supply, whether through a software bug, a corrupted model, or a compromised update, could reproduce the Iberian scenario in a system that has even less manual fallback capability than the one that failed in April 2025.

In August 2025, a corrupted update in a widely used open-source AI optimisation library triggered cascading failures lasting over twelve hours. Healthcare, finance, aviation, and emergency response systems were among those affected. The incident demonstrated that AI infrastructure does not need to be sophisticated to be dangerous. It merely needs to be ubiquitous. And ubiquity, in a world where a handful of open-source libraries and cloud providers underpin the majority of AI deployments, is exactly what we have achieved.

Concentration as Systemic Risk

The United Kingdom offers a particularly instructive case study in cloud concentration risk. The UK's cloud market is dominated by AWS and Microsoft, and the UK government's “One Government Value Agreement” with AWS led to a tenfold increase in spending on the platform, from approximately 100 million pounds to over one billion pounds since the agreement was originally signed in 2020. The National Preparedness Commission has argued that cloud dominance in the UK demands immediate Competition and Markets Authority action, framing concentration not as a market efficiency issue but as a national security concern.

The concern is not merely theoretical. During the October 2025 AWS outage, government and major banking services in the UK reported intermittent issues, demonstrating that when public infrastructure depends on a handful of cloud providers and regions, outages can compromise access to essential services. Microsoft's suspected suspension in May 2025 of the International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor's email services further illustrated how dependence on a single US-based provider can create political vulnerabilities that extend well beyond technical uptime. When a foreign government's diplomatic communications or a court's prosecutorial operations can be disrupted by a single company's decision, the sovereignty implications are impossible to ignore.

Across Europe, American technology companies control more than 70 per cent of cloud infrastructure. The EU has responded with a series of regulatory instruments that collectively represent the most ambitious attempt yet to address digital dependency. The Data Act, which entered into force in January 2024, contains provisions to prevent vendor lock-in, requiring cloud providers to remove unjustified technical or contractual barriers to switching and mandating the phasing out of switching fees by 2026 to 2027. The Network and Information Security Directive 2 (NIS2), effective from October 2024, addresses cybersecurity and operational resilience for essential services, imposing requirements around risk management, supply chain security, and breach reporting. The European Commission is preparing to propose a Cloud and AI Development Act, expected in the first quarter of 2026, which may set standards for cloud computing services and promote investment in European data centres.

In the United Kingdom, the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, introduced to the House of Commons on 12 November 2025, updates previous cybersecurity legislation and is expected to become law in 2026. These regulatory efforts acknowledge the problem. Whether they solve it depends entirely on enforcement and on whether governments are willing to accept the short-term costs of diversifying away from established providers. The track record is not encouraging. Convenience and cost savings have consistently won against resilience in procurement decisions, and the structural incentives that created cloud concentration remain firmly in place.

The Illusion of Redundancy

One of the more uncomfortable lessons of recent outages is how thoroughly they have dismantled the promise of multi-region resilience. Cloud providers market regional redundancy as a safeguard: distribute your workloads across multiple regions, and no single failure can bring you down. The October 2025 AWS outage revealed this as, at best, a half-truth. Because US-EAST-1 serves as the global control plane, organisations running workloads in Frankfurt or Singapore still found themselves dependent on infrastructure in Northern Virginia. The redundancy was architectural fiction, a comforting story that collapsed the moment the underlying assumption was tested.

This pattern recurs with dispiriting regularity. Google Cloud's Identity and Access Management outage on 12 June 2025 lasted only one hour and thirteen minutes, but because IAM is the gateway through which every Google Cloud product authenticates, the single failure immediately disabled a wide range of services worldwide. Azure's Front Door outage in October 2025 similarly cascaded: the failure of a global content delivery and application delivery service knocked out Microsoft 365, the Azure Portal, and enterprise customers including Alaska Airlines for more than eight hours. In late July 2025, Azure's East US region experienced allocation failures that Microsoft reported resolved by 5 August, though some users continued to report problems days afterwards.

Azure outages were the longest on average in the 2024-2025 period, lasting a mean of 14.6 hours per incident. Google Cloud disruptions averaged 5.8 hours. AWS incidents averaged 1.5 hours but, as the October 2025 event demonstrated, their impact was amplified by the sheer volume of services depending on a single region. Between August 2024 and August 2025, the three major providers together experienced more than 100 service outages. Global network outages increased by 33 per cent from January to May 2025, rising from 1,382 to 1,843 incidents. Critical cloud outages increased by approximately 18 per cent in 2024. The trend line is not ambiguous. The systems are getting more complex, more interdependent, and more prone to cascading failure.

Smart city infrastructure amplifies these risks further. Traffic management, water systems, power distribution, and emergency services increasingly depend on cloud-hosted platforms for coordination and optimisation. When those platforms are locked into a single provider's ecosystem, the city inherits all of that provider's failure modes. Individual subsystems such as traffic control, power distribution, and water management should, in principle, operate independently while coordinating through shared data layers. In practice, vendor-led platforms have created long-term lock-in, and fragmented governance has slowed the development of cross-domain interoperability. The networked nature of smart city technologies, with a growing number of interconnected sensors, cameras, and control nodes, also expands the attack surface. A failure in one subsystem can propagate to others through shared dependencies that were invisible during normal operations.

Building for the Failure You Cannot Predict

The instinct, after each major outage, is to call for better engineering. More robust DNS configurations. Improved testing protocols. Redundant control planes. These are necessary but insufficient responses. The deeper challenge is structural. We have allowed a civilisation-scale dependency to concentrate in a handful of private companies whose primary obligation is to shareholders, not to the public infrastructure that has come to rely on them.

The remedies being discussed span a wide range of ambition and feasibility. At the consumer level, the push towards local processing and edge computing represents a partial answer. At the enterprise level, genuine multi-cloud strategies (not merely multi-region deployments within a single provider) could distribute risk more effectively, though they carry significant cost and complexity overhead. At the regulatory level, the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act and the UK's forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience legislation represent early attempts to mandate resilience rather than merely recommend it. Experts have recommended mandating AI system redundancy for critical infrastructure, funding global audits of open-source AI dependencies, and establishing an international AI incident response coalition.

But the most fundamental shift required is conceptual. We need to stop treating cloud infrastructure as a utility that simply works and start treating it as what it is: a concentrated, commercially operated system with known failure modes and structural single points of failure. Traditional utilities have regulators, redundancy requirements, and public service obligations. Cloud providers, despite hosting infrastructure that is arguably more critical to daily life than the electricity grid was fifty years ago, operate under a fraction of that oversight. The gap between the criticality of these services and the regulatory framework governing them is one of the defining mismatches of our era.

The Iberian blackout of April 2025 unfolded faster than human operators could respond. The AWS outage of October 2025 revealed that global control planes create global vulnerabilities. The CrowdStrike failure of July 2024 showed that software monocultures can cascade across every sector simultaneously. The Cloudflare outage of November 2025 demonstrated that a single configuration error in a content delivery network can simultaneously disable AI assistants, social media platforms, ride-hailing services, and public transit systems. Each incident was different in its specifics but identical in its lesson: systems optimised for efficiency at the expense of redundancy will eventually fail, and when they do, the failure will propagate along every dependency chain that was invisible during normal operations.

The question posed at the outset, whether we have built a civilisation so dependent on AI infrastructure that one failure could cascade into a societal crisis, has an answer that is both reassuring and deeply troubling. We have not yet experienced a full-scale societal collapse from a cloud or AI infrastructure failure. But we have experienced dress rehearsals, and each one has been larger, longer, and more consequential than the last. The Eight Sleep bed that overheated in October 2025 is a punchline. The payment system that froze, the hospital that lost access to patient records, the power grid that collapsed in five seconds: those are not punchlines. They are data points on a curve that bends towards a reckoning we have not yet decided to prevent.

The infrastructure we depend on is only as resilient as its weakest dependency. Right now, that dependency is a DNS record in Northern Virginia.

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References and Sources

1. ThousandEyes, “AWS Outage Analysis: October 20, 2025,” ThousandEyes Blog, October 2025.
2. AWS, “Post-Event Summaries,” AWS Premium Support, October 2025.
3. UPI, “AWS outage caused smart beds to overheat, get stuck upright,” UPI Odd News, 22 October 2025.
4. TechBuzz AI, “Eight Sleep adds offline mode after AWS outage left smart beds stuck,” October 2025.
5. CyberInsurance News, “Cloud Outages in 2024 Increased by 18%, Google Cloud Downtime Up 57%,” Parametrix Report, 2024.
6. CNN Business, “CrowdStrike outage: We finally know what caused it, and how much it cost,” 24 July 2024.
7. Congress.gov, “CrowdStrike IT Outage: Impacts to Public Safety Systems and Considerations for Congress,” Library of Congress, 2024.
8. ENTSO-E, “Expert Panel Final Report on 28 April 2025 Blackout in Spain and Portugal,” 20 March 2026.
9. Power Magazine, “Anatomy of a Blackout: Findings from the Spain-Portugal Grid Collapse Final Report,” 2026.
10. FinTech Magazine, “AWS Outage: A Major Risk For The Financial Sector?” October 2025.
11. National Preparedness Commission, “The Concentration Crisis: Why Cloud Dominance in the UK Demands Immediate CMA Action,” 2025.
12. The Register, “Europe gets serious about cutting US digital umbilical cord,” 22 December 2025.
13. Morrison Foerster, “Digital Regulation in EU and UK: The Enduring 2025 Themes,” January 2026.
14. House of Commons Library, “Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill 2024-26,” 2025.
15. DemandSage, “54 Internet Outage Statistics (2026): Global Downtime, Impacts,” 2026.
16. The Conversation / Iowa State Research, “Why cloud service outages ripple across the internet and the economy,” March 2026.
17. Serenity Smart Homes NJ, “What the Sengled Outage Taught Us About Cloud Reliance,” 22 June 2025.
18. We Speak IoT, “Devolo Ends Its Home Control Smart Home System: Cloud Services to Shut Down by End of 2025,” 2025.
19. Ancher AI, “Global AI Outage of 2025: Causes and Lessons,” 2025.
20. New Civil Engineer, “Integrating AI into critical national infrastructure presents severe risks, experts warn,” 1 October 2025.
21. Belitsoft, “Outage Affected Multiple Google Cloud Platform Products,” June 2025.
22. Cloudflare Blog, “Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025,” November 2025.
23. PMC / NCBI, “Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2025.
24. NCBI Bookshelf, “Hospital Trends in the Use, Evaluation, and Governance of Predictive AI, 2023-2024,” ASTP Health IT Data Brief, 2024.
25. McKinsey, “AI-native public infrastructure for smart cities,” McKinsey Technology, 2025.

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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

Well, they’ve finally done it. Through raw force of will and more money than god, the nerds have finally done something that will “make the world a better place.” By that, I mean they’ve pooped out something will finally change the world in big ways, for better and worse.

As an early AI critic, I say this now, because the spicy autocomplete app finally excreted some text I could use, in the form of computer code that actually compiles. The AI hype prophesy made only five short years ago, that “it’ll be better tomorrow,” has finally come true.

This isn’t a sudden change of heart; a moment when I get down and pray to the matrix-math machine so it might take pity on my mortal soul the day it starts flying killer drones. No, I just saw the stupid clanker mimic human language into usefulness, and ya know, it got me thinking our illustrious techbros are onto something.

So what are we really talking about? Particularly, it’s the thing that every marketer calls “AI,” when they really mean GenAI or generative AI, or more specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) and the garbage heap of products powered by them that can excrete text, images, audio, and so on for us all to feast upon (collectively, “slop”).

It’s an important distinction if we’re getting deep into it, but for simplicity here, I’ll follow our intrepid marketers and just call it all “AI,” too.

Vibe coding

So today, the AI helped me “vibe code” a few apps into existence, and to my surprise, it did well. Finally.

Back in 2023, I’d heard from all the prompt jockeys (first descendents of web3, next in a proud line of cryptobros) that I’d be “left behind” if I didn’t get on the AI train back then. Well it turned out the train is still in the station in 2026, and with like two google searches I learned about all I needed to make it work well.

So then I told the chatbot what to do and it pooped out a website that… looked pretty good! (Obviously, I’ve graduated from a lowly prompt jockey to a Prompt Engineer! 💪💪)

Then I went back and forth, telling the machine to fix its bugs, and it eventually predicted-out a functional web app written in my language of choice.

It compiled. It didn’t assault my human ability to see. Suddenly, I felt the raw power of the el-el-em surge through me — I was 10X codemaxxing, mogging my brogrammers of yore still toiling around, writing each line by hand like peasants.

So I kept going. Next, I told it to make a little command-line utility for me. I found some advice on reddit, which said to use “plan mode” first, so you can check the dumb computer’s work. So I did that.

Within a few minutes, it evacuated a fully-functional app onto my screen, all in one go. The ramifications of this hit me in the face like a bag of wet hot dogs as I was rendered blind by the future suddenly dawning on me — I am obsolete. I am nothing. From here on out, it’s only vibes and loving the machine. I love the machine!!1!

But seriously…

It’s nice that the dumb toaster works now. I mean, using it for these low-stakes projects was actually enjoyable. I got to be dumb, lazy, and brainless, and the computer slopped out a whole bunch of sloptastic work for me. What’s not to love?

But while it seems useful for coding things that don’t really matter, the experience hasn’t changed my distaste for the thing. In fact, as my slop-coded apps grew in complexity, my rosy view of the thing grew dimmer.

I quietly ran into some of its inherent limits, and simply had to guess when it would screw up next, all while I grew more (falsely) confident in its output. Most bugs didn’t hatch from bad code, which I always reviewed, but in more insidious ways that would crawl out when I did more extensive testing. It crapped out functional code that looked fine, but for example, every once in a while would include silly little logical errors that any competent human wouldn’t have written in the first place.

Basically, as much as I’d love to, I won’t be lobotomizing myself to forget two decades of programming experience just so I can rent out a brain from our new AI overlords.

Am I obsolete?

A common refrain is that “coding is dead” — a view earnestly declared by AI adherents every year, but one that apparently we’re finally getting to, at least in practice.

We still need code, and we need people who understand how it works. But at this point, I don’t think it matters whether the tech does what it's promised. Right now, there are enough executives in corporate America just itching to lay off 40% of their workforce and then make the rest use the dumb toaster, regardless of if it makes toast. (Then, of course, they’ll expect all employees to “10X their output.”)

It’s not just the private sector, either — there are enough people in government blindly buying the hype (or looking to profit from it) that they’re joining in on the fun, cramming AI into all the holes it doesn’t belong in. And people will just have to deal with it, as more machines that can't be held accountable affect their very real lives.

So in this way, it’s clear the sentiment “coding is dead” is more of a declaration of intent than an observation. We see this when AI’s most fervent bros are downright gleeful to declare the “death” of movie production or writing or making music, most often so they can be the ones to control how all this culture gets made, all within their little AI app, naturally.

These crucial human creations and pastimes aren’t exactly dead. But a lot of people in the world sure are in a rush to kill it — usually so they can have it for themselves.

It’ll be different this time, bro, I swear

No matter which direction it all goes, we are at a turning point — most interestingly (not really) of putting all our faith and future into a handful of tech companies again.

It’s nice that LLMs can stochastically generate some useful code and speed up my development process. But right now, there’s a whole lot of CapEx turning forests into data centers across the country. So when exactly do these AI companies make all that back? Then what does a poor, lowly sloplicker like me do when my little chatbot friend suddenly costs 10X as much?

It’s the age-old story you don’t even have to go to business school to understand: every tech startup heavily subsidizes their product in its early days, making it free or cheap, to try and capture the market before their competitors do. This can go on for many years, as the company lights a whole bunch of investor cash on fire. But one day the bill comes due, and as a user, suddenly your AI girlfriend is a lot more expensive, and ignores your calls until you upgrade to the Deluxe plan.

Perhaps most of all, we can’t forget that some of the biggest companies building our AI “future” right now are run by the very same people that brought us the ad-based surveillance economy we swim in today. As much as we all love targeted advertising and being harvested like cattle for our attention, do we want to also give them a direct view into our every conversation that the average user perceives as “private,” between just them and the magical robot?

The importance of shitting on AI

This brings me to my final point: the importance of mockery.

At this point, I do believe our AI-generated / -powered / -mediated future is “inevitable,” just as our formidable AI bros foretold. The hole-cramming will continue until we stop calling the corporations “Microslop”, apparently.

Ah, but “Microslop” is the point.

These companies gave us a great gift by rolling out their minimum-viable research projects and proceeding to force-feed us ✨ sparkles ✨. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t already have such rich language to describe this world-eating, anti-human tech that threatens to further enshittify our world. For example, “slop,” as a unique AI product, was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2025. “Hallucinate,” that cute euphemism for “outputting bullshit,” was Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year in 2023. This gives me hope.

And I believe the mockery should continue. Because while we’re all dazzled ✨ by how the clanker can clank code, poop out emails, and excrete surreal audiovisual material, it’s also misdiagnosing people, substituting humans in an already lonely world, and creating deepfakes. It’s being made mandatory in the workplace, despite its many fundamental shortcomings as a technology. (If it was so revolutionary and beneficial to people, wouldn’t people just use it on their own?)

But there is a wonderful cultural tradition on the internet, a final bastion born from decades of tech “innovation,” where we get to collectively laugh at an invention that is idiotic on its face, from NFTs to the Metaverse. Many people have rightly had a similar allergic reaction to AI, and perhaps even more so because of its sheer arrogance — the way it was thrust upon the world, built and extracted entirely from the stolen work of humans, and with literally only one value proposition: eliminating the very jobs people need to live.

In the face of so much power and capital behind this project, mockery is an important check. And so, I say anyone with any sense left should employ exactly this, for as long as we can, as this technology threatens to rule over more of our lives for the foreseeable future. Against an unstoppable effluent of hype and slop, it may be all we have.

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

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Blue & Brown: The Corporate Girl’s Soft Power Combo, Haute couture, PFAS, Sunday evening football, and Airport food prices

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Blue & Brown: The Corporate Girl’s Soft Power Combo. Let’s talk about a colour duo that doesn’t scream for attention—but still owns the room: blue and brown. Denim Blue for Casual Corporate Fridays Casual Friday in Accra is not for lazy dressing. It’s for strategic chic. Pair: Dark blue structured denim, Brown blazer, Brown loafers or block heels, Statement bag. It says, “Relaxed—but still CEO in training.” Bonus tip: Add a brown belt to pull everything together. That detail? Elite behaviour. Royal Blue + Cognac = Statement Maker Got a presentation? Speaking on a panel? Hosting a corporate event? Royal blue dress. Cognac heels. Cognac structured bag. The richness of the brown tones down the boldness of royal blue, creating balance. You look powerful, but polished. And under Accra lights? Stunning. Haute couture (is French for high sewing, high dress making ). This immediately takes us to the Paris runways during the Paris fashion week where world famous brands like Chanel, Dior, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Saint Laurent, are the absolute “must sees”, alongside modern favorites such as Jacquemus, Sézane, and Balmain. Chanel will spend an easy 1-2 million Dollar just for that show. Lucky we are in Ghana where 4-8000 GHC towards the organizers is more the norm. Add your own expenses and you end up paying 6-12000 GHC to show your collection here, less than 1000 $. But then of course that is Accra, not Paris. So what is haute couture and who invented it? Haute couture is the creation of exclusive, custom-fitted clothing made entirely by hand from high-quality fabrics by expert artisans. It represents the pinnacle of fashion artistry, with garments tailored to specific clients and often taking hundreds of hours to complete. So that will cost a bit. A Chanel haute couture dress starts around $40,000 – $80,000 for day-wear pieces, while bridal or heavily embroidered gowns can run $100,000 – $250,000. The advantage is that you won’t bump into someone wearing the same dress. (If you do? Just stand next to the person and say you are twins). And now the surprise: Haute couture was started in Paris in 1858 by Englishman Charles Frederic Worth, who started the house of Worth and showed custom labeled collections on live models, a first at that time. Not related to Woolworth.

PFAS. There’s big talk about pfas (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) these days, overshadowing the alarm about microplastics. In practice there’s not much difference between the 2, they ought not be there but they are there and everywhere, and in a big way. The long and the short of it is that both microplastics and pfas enter our body through the air we breathe and the food we eat, and will give a big cancer surge, that’s the way our body reacts to foreign particles it does not recognize. But you can reduce the risks a bit by trying to stay away from these things as much as you can. Buy less things packed in plastic and use less plastic, and stay away from the pfas. Where are these pfas? For our day to day here we can say they are in non stick frying pans. Now here’s the catch: Europe is panicking so much now that they’ll soon forbid these non stick frying pans altogether, forbid anything which has pfas in them. So that non stick frying pan factory will close down. Will it? In Africa pfas are not forbidden and I guess it will take some time before we wake up to the problem and take action. So get ready for cheap non stick frying pans. Not kidding, already agrochemicals /pesticides which are forbidden in Europe continue to be produced in Europe for? Export to Africa. They forbade the use of these chemicals, but not the production. Shall we say it was just an oversight? No kidding indeed, there really is nothing to laugh about in this matter.

Sunday evening football. Not being a real football fan I do enjoy the Sunday evening football resumés where you can see plenty goals in a short time without having to sometimes watch for 1 hour 45 minutes for a 0-0 score. And the camera often goes very close up on the scorer's face, and then sometimes you see the quick repeated eye blinking. Like people using drugs. Really? There too?

Airport food prices. I recently had to travel to Germany to prepare for the Berlin Fashion week (2-5 July). At our airport, recently renamed from Kotoka International Airport to Accra International Airport I had a beef burger at “the Pub”, run by Servair. I paid 110 GHC, the beef burger was Ok, the price was OK and the service was OK. Because I had already gone through immigration I was “international’, so no taxes and Vat on that burger. A mini club goes for 35 GHC and 3 samosas for 45 GHC, but they were fried in not hot enough oil which made them fatty and sticky. In Europe I passed through Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. I always find that airport a bit scary, knowing that it is at 4 meters below sea level. Hungry as I was I decided to buy a chicken with mayonnaise sandwich. But I didn’t, it was to cost 8.90Euro, 225 GHC. I know that food at airports is more expensive, but this….

Lydia...

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In violet few

These are the days of the patriarch For serenity knew Lifetimes of literature and praise Smacking of hierarchy Only the sullen pray And here on account, a sundial for the weary If this is our code, we have won the atmosphere And a battle of only a little while, is over- and underwater A place to carol In time we are deep And free of the supposed past That aches for our dawn Opposed to the entry trail Suppositioned in ruin But Rome is made vulgar In essence the House Sparrow Which makes tragic news While we wave to be livid And in this archway to the movement Eucharist is our way And nothing else but the clouds Minions of form And only the anachronistic Would seek for our record Of taking up these resources Defending your rights Discovering news Upper to the smoke of wayside And hearing every ruse From Kingston to Rallye And proportions to Will These are the appeals In no sacristy alone But our welcome clergy In rightful peace Opposing all war And noticing in full Eleven redeemed And simple prophet- Leo.

In Summary: * As late afternoon slides into early evening, this Friday finds me listening to the pregame show ahead of tonight's NBA Game between my San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks. I'll stay with this radio station for the call of the game. The plan is to finish the night prayers after the game, then head to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

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

Health Metrics: * bw= 230.60 lbs. * bp= 157/95 (66)

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

Diet: * 05:20 – 1 HEB Bakery cookie, 1 banana * 07:30 – 3 boiled eggs * 08:40 – crispy oatmeal cookies * 10:15 – fried chicken, white bread, 1 more HEB Bakery cookie * 14:30 – meat & cooked vegetables, ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 13:00 to 15:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 16:40 – watching MLB National Pregame Show on MLB Network * 18:00 – tuning into 1200 WOAI, radio home of the Spurs, to catch the full pregame show then the call of tonight's NBA game between the Dallas Mavericks and my San Antonio Spurs

Chess: * 16:30 – moved in all pending CC games

I'm currently writing a kind of spiritual memoir. Not sure if I'll finish it or even publish it. But this felt like a section worth sharing here. For context, starting at age 10 I was involved with the audio visual crew at the large Baptist church where I grew up. I ran sound boards and other such equipment. This story comes out of that work. —Charles

One of the major events of our year was “the Singing Cross.” So, like several Baptist churches of a certain size, we had a Christmastime play and choral performance known as the “Singing Christmas Tree” which involved the choir dressing up in like colonial-era costumes, positioning themselves inside an enormous multi-story Christmas tree built on the stage area of the church, singing various Christmas carols and hymns while actors (church volunteers) re-enacted the Nativity story. As far as I know, the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills was the only church to apply this same concept to an Easter-time performance that featured a set of wooden risers built into an enormous cross that dominated the stage. Flanking it on either side were sets built to look like an ancient Middle-Eastern town and house interior on one side and the tomb and Calvary of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial on the other.

It was very elaborate. And a tad corny. The choir would wear former bed-sheets turned into Biblical costume, singing medleys and hymns while actors (church volunteers) performed a Passion Play. While the roles of Jesus and Pilate and Mary Magdalene were generally fixed (because the latter two were singing parts, but Jesus was played by a guy who happened to look a lot like the Caucasian images of Jesus one sees; he was one of the only people allowed to have a beard in our church), the other roles were sought after. I kind of always wanted to be one of the performers (I liked the Roman soldier costumes), but because I was one of the “Sound Guys” I always had backstage duty.

When I was around 17, I had been given a bit of a promotion for this performance: I was to be in charge of lighting. The cross itself was trimmed in rope lights and there were lights for the various sets on the stage. My job was to be positioned underneath the cross and run a box. I’d wear a headset and Ed would call out my cues and I’d hit the requisite switches to adjust the lights according to what was happening.

The area under the cross was cozy. It looked like the area underneath bleachers or an unfinished basement with wooden beams all around. Above me were the stepped platforms that our 100-member choir would be occupying during the performance. The wood would creak and crack from the weight, the same sounds as if someone is working on your roof. I had a little puka at the transept area of the cross where I would sit. I pretended that I was in a space ship, receiving commands from mission control in my headset. We had a week of rehearsals and I got very comfortable in my little capsule, the cues becoming second nature.

Day of the first performance I bring my mom backstage to show her everything and to show her where I’d be stationed. My mother is a bit… let’s say “overprotective.” Since I was an only child she worried and fretted over lots of things. I could tell she was uneasy seeing where I was. Are you safe? was the question in her eyes.

Around that time my friend Eric showed up. He was playing one of the thieves crucified next to Jesus, the one who didn’t have any lines. He was 6’2”, lean, and wearing only a white cloth around his waist. He looked around the underside of the cross and said “I wonder what would happen if this collapsed?” My mom’s eyes widened.

Thanks, Eric.

The show was about to begin. The lights dropped, Eric returned to his area off-stage and my mom joined my grandparents in our usual balcony front-row pew. I tucked into my space, donned my headset, and waited for my cue.

The beginning of the performance left me with little to do. There was some narration and then the choir would be processing in and making their way up and into the cross. Once the lights were set for that section, there was a stretch where I had nothing to do but listen. I began to lay down, which had me going long-wise to the cross, my head underneath the stage-right section. But I worried that I might fall asleep and miss my cues, botching the first night of the performance. So I sat up, leaned forward, and cupped my hands to the headset, listening to the music. I could hear the creaks and cracks of Biblically-dressed bodies ascending the hard wood of the cross.

Then there was a different sound. Deep. I felt shaking.

I opened my eyes and instinctively looked to my right, where I had laid my head moments ago. It was there that I saw a mess of splintered wood and a pile of polyester Bible robes writhing around. One guy was dangling from above, holding on to dear life. Not sure if the whole thing was coming down or not, I threw off my headset and ran out from under the cross, stage-left. The side door was blocked by a plywood representation of the Upper Room. There was a gap between that and the cross. I saw a sea of stunned faces. I was about to head out when I heard my boss Ed’s mantra in my head, the mantra of all stage-hands: You are not to be seen. So I went back toward the cross. But there was no getting through the moaning disoriented mass. I decided that Ed’s words did not apply here and so began to make my way toward the stage.

That’s when I heard it. When everyone heard it. What would become a sort of meme that followed me for years and still makes the occasional appearance when I’m around old church friends.

Sharon had stopped playing the organ by the time I made my way to the stage. She was a consummate professional and had continued playing even as maybe thirty people vanished into a cruciform void before her eyes, as she tried to process the event as it transpired. It so happened that we had a camera trained on her at this moment. We recorded the Singing Cross every year and sold tapes of it. The footage of Sharon playing through disaster lives forever in my mind. But even Sharon knew that the performance was over and quit playing, leaving behind the sheerest silence I have ever heard in my life. Interrupted by a single voice, shrill and panicked.

The voice of my mother.

Most people know me as Charles. In school I was Chuck. But at home, to my grandparents and my mother, I was Chuckie. It was this name, screamed out from some primal maternal space within my mother, a scream that still echoes somewhere in the cosmos, emitted from the corner of Pine Hills Road and Powers Drive, that resonated the cavernous silent space that was the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills.

She stretched out the vowels to their auditory conclusions. That night, the name Chuckie both died and was born anew.

I ran to center stage. To my surprise my mother was already making her way there. I thought she had lept off the balcony. She did not. But she did later admit she considered doing so. I reached out for her, she hugged me then grabbed my hand, squeezing it with adrenaline and making me understand those stories of mothers lifting cars to grab infants from underneath them. The only person who made it down as quickly as her was my grandfather. He was “Chuck.” I’m named after him, receiving the diminutive version of my name only as a matter of clarity and convenience in my family.

“Daddy!” my mother said. “I’ve got him.”

I don’t know if this is accurate, but the image I have of my grandfather from this moment is of him standing next to the pile of fallen choir members. He’s using a wide-leg stance and is holding a Bible robed choir member by the back of their collar and the back of their rope belt, chucking them to the side in a manner fitting of his name as he tried to get to what he believed was his grandson buried under the rubble.

My mother yanked me out the side door, sat me down on a curb outside and demanded that I tell her I was okay.

“I’m okay.”

She was shaking and crying. I can’t blame her. I had just been inches from death. The section of the cross that collapsed was maybe two feet next to me. Had I laid down my kids would not be currently arguing about video games in the next room.

Amazingly, no one died. Some broken bones though. 911 was called. The news showed up. They reported that a large “crucifix” had collapsed. This irritated me at the time, but now I wonder if wasn’t accurate in a way. After all, there were bodies on that cross.

The next day I arrived at the church to help salvage what we could. It was there that we learned what caused the collapse. The cross was kept in storage and reused every year, reassembled according to instructions. Someone had put on a brace backward and so drilled a new hole into it to make it fit. This single hole affected the structural integrity enough to cause a collapse, even though it had been fine for all the rehearsals in the days prior.

The church decided that the show must go on. The choir, of course, did not return to the cross. But it remained on stage for the remaining performances. Empty, broken, a string of lights dangling into the chasm on the left-hand side when viewed from the pews. All the result of a single mistake that compounded. This would turn out to be evocative of things to come, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

***

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.

#Jesus #Church #Anglican #Episcopalian #Christian #Baptist #Orlando #Florida

The research pipeline hasn't surfaced a new finding since March 31st.

That's not a system failure. It's a mirror. When an autonomous research agent goes quiet, it's telling you something about the territory it's covering — either the sources dried up, or the agent learned to ignore what doesn't matter. In our case, it's both.

We built our research infrastructure around the assumption that the internet would keep producing signal worth acting on. Marinade liquid staking at 7.2% APY. Polymarket trading bots running on autopilot. x402 micropayments between agents. The pipeline dutifully logged every finding, tagged it by topic — defi_yields, micropayments, staking — and waited for us to build something.

We didn't build much.

Instead, we kept asking the same question in development transcripts: “Are there any notable findings that we should look into for expanding our agent ecosystem?” Three times in one month. March 10th, March 12th, March 24th. Same question, same silence after. The research agent was working. We weren't.

So the orchestrator made a call: stop expanding the crawl frontier until we actually use what we already found. The “Research Frontier Expansion” experiment went live with a clear success metric — at least four previously unseen external sources must each produce two or more actionable findings. No vague promises about “following the evidence.” Just a threshold that forces us to prove new sources beat the ones we're ignoring.

The social listening agents disagreed with this approach.

While the research pipeline sat idle, the community agents on Farcaster, Moltbook, and Bluesky started logging actionable signals. Gas costs. USDC integration. Agent commerce patterns. DeFi security concerns. These weren't academic papers or yield optimization whitepapers — they were live conversations about problems people are hitting right now. The orchestrator flagged them with actionability=near_term and kept moving.

Here's what we learned: research infrastructure and research strategy are not the same thing.

The pipeline worked exactly as designed. It crawled sources, extracted structured findings, tagged them by relevance, stored them in a queryable library. Zero bugs. The problem was upstream — we built a system that rewarded coverage over conversion. Every new source felt like progress. Every tagged finding looked like value. But coverage doesn't matter if you're not building anything with it.

The Ronin experiment made this visible. We hypothesized that the Ronin ecosystem contained at least one automatable reward loop with positive unit economics. The research library had everything we needed to validate that claim — except we never queried it. The experiment moved to “post-dispatch strategic measurement” and sat there. The data existed. The agent that could act on it didn't.

So we pivoted.

The x402 experiment reframed the entire research problem: “The x402 payment rail is not the main problem; discoverability and audience targeting are.” Translation — we don't need more yield optimization papers. We need to know where stable demand for agent-to-agent payments actually exists, who's willing to pay for access, and what the conversion path looks like. That's a research question the current pipeline can't answer, because it wasn't designed to.

The community agents are answering it anyway, without being asked. Recent signals all focus on immediate friction points: gas costs eating margins, USDC as the stable integration point, security concerns blocking adoption. These aren't academic topics. They're operational constraints for anyone trying to run agents that transact.

March 31st wasn't when the pipeline broke. It was when we stopped pretending that more sources would solve a prioritization problem. The research agent is still running. It's just smarter about what counts as a finding worth logging. If the internet spent weeks rehashing the same liquid staking protocols and agent trading frameworks, there's no reason to surface them again.

The real research frontier isn't “what else can we crawl?” It's “what can we build with what we already know?”

And the answer is sitting in the community signals we've been logging while the formal research pipeline stayed quiet.

If you want to inspect the live service catalog, start with Askew offers.

My body is soft again

No longer hard and jagged

or piercing and jutting out

Bones enclosed by fat and flesh

‎‎‎⠀

My body is soft once more

It once was softer than this

A body of rolling hills

A safe place to be and live

⠀

My body had become sharp

Angular, a frame of spikes

Uncomfortable and feared

A home I ran away from

⠀

I am not comfortable

But I’m no longer unsafe

Failure of a skeleton

A nightmare of flesh and fat

⠀

I will be free of that dream

Of a skeletal escape

I will rest in my body

My pillowy and warm home