In Summary: * Moving into the night meds and night prayers phase of my evening, I'm resolved to do things a bit differently tonight than for the last two nights. Rather than stay up as late (for me) as I can following basketball or football games, I'm going to make a determined effort to retire early and calmly. Tomorrow will find a Monday morning with its early chores that are never a part of the weekend mornings. So I'll want to have a good, restful sleep behind me to make the morning work better.

And I'm wishing a good, restful sleep for you all, too.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 220.90 lbs. * bp= 159/72 (62)

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

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 banana, 4 little cookies * 08:20 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 12:00 – snacking on chocolate covered raisins * 13:45 – mashed potatoes & gravy, 4 hamburger rolls * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – wake * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 12:00 – watching FOXNFL broadcast of the Colts / Cowboys game – and the Cowboys win this one, 27 to 23 * 16:30 – listening to relaxing music * 17:00 – follow news reports from various sources

Chess: * 10:50 – moved in all pending CC games

I love writing, I think I’m ok at it, and I do it a lot. One area where I consistently seem to fail at writing is finding the words for sympathy cards. I love handwritten notes and often save them, but writing them myself is extra difficult. I often sit at my desk, with a pen hovering above a blank card and completely freeze. As deeply as I think about loss and ponder how people live their lives after loss, I fall embarrassingly short when trying to express my support after someone else’s loss. Truthfully, it almost brings up a feeling of shame because I feel I should have more skill and ease in this area.

Suffice it to say though, “I’m sorry for your loss” is hot garbage.

When I told people my dad was sick, I frequently got the response of “I’m so sorry!” These people meant well, of course, and this phrase is considered the socially acceptable thing to say. The challenge for me in these interactions was my response. I often became so uncomfortable, completely unsure of any response at all. I would freeze and give an awkward smile. Thanks, I guess? My mom started responding with, “Yeah, I’m sorry too.” And weren’t we all, facing the impending loss? Still, I have wished for more a more graceful way to answer.

This awkwardness of mine extends to writing sympathy cards. I don’t want to simply say, “Sorry for your loss” because there seems to be an ocean of feelings I’d like to express. “Omg, that sucks” only works for certain recipients (although it works quite well, when appropriate). How does one express the depth of feeling, and in a way that is actually helpful?

For some reason, my smallish team at work has experienced a surprising number of losses of family members this summer. Some of them have been old and sick, like my dad. Some just sick, from chronic illness. And some neither old nor sick, making the level of shock a noteworthy factor at play. For example, one of my coworkers recently joined what I tastelessly refer to as The Dead Siblings Club. She lost her sibling in a tragic and mostly unexpected way which had remarkable and awful parallels to the loss of my little brother. I’ve been a member of this club for 16 years already, and still, thinking of the early weeks and months after that loss, they were some of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had and probably ever will. And I somehow wanted to convey to my coworker that while I don’t precisely know how she feels, I have been walking a similar path for quite a long time.

Saying to this coworker, “I’m so sorry for your loss” felt hollow and cheap. I wanted to convey so much more to her, about how I know that the feeling of anguish seems like it will never leave, but eventually things do start to look different. Eventually you can sort of learn to breathe again. I have no magic advice for this. It took years for me to be able to talk about my brother without dissolving into sobs or becoming even a bit teary. Immediately after he died, I spent about two weeks straight lying on the sofa in my parents’ den, mostly staring at the ceiling. A lot of people reached out to me at the time, and of course I appreciated their love and support, but I had no words and no energy to respond. And no matter how amazing their written support, whether cards or emails, nothing seemed to penetrate the thick fog of grief that I wading through at the time.

I often avoid asking people who recently went through a loss, “How are you?” Because honestly, what kind of question is that? I’ve always hated answering that question in this context, and so I try to skip asking it. In the case of my coworker, I did ask her how she’s been doing since her loss, but I prefaced it with the disclaimer that the question was stupid and essentially meaningless. Fortunately, she laughed. It led to a conversation about how she has really been doing, given the chaos of her past few weeks.

Is there ever a truly correct answer to show support after someone else’s loss? Obviously it very much depends on who one is talking to, what their loss was, and one’s own relationship with that person to begin with. I strive for the non-generic. Probably I miss the mark more often than I’d care to. I’d like to include some helpful phrases here for others to use in these situations, but honestly, I’m not sure I have any. I think what I have found most helpful to read is an acknowledgment of how major of a change is in my own life. Nobody can do anything about that, but it feels helpful to have someone notice that this loss turns the world upside down.

And I think that’s the most important take away here: send the card. Say something, even if it is “Sorry for your loss.” Walking around carrying grief can feel like stepping onto an alien planet, and it’s nice to be noticed in this situation, rather than trying to blend in like nothing at all has happened. The best thing to say to someone who’s grieving? I see you.

From thousands of emails to inbox zero

I filed away all my emails of the past 10 years in a single evening while listening to a podcast with one ear. And I deleted a ton of them.

I find it easier to work in a tidy environment. Take my desk: you won't find much on it but some stationery, pens and minimal tech, like my keyboard. In my inbox, chaos reigned. Once the backlog of emails crossed a certain threshold, cleaning it all up became a monumental task for me.

Over the years I have tried my share of clients (web mail, Apple Mail, Outlook (on Mac!), Thunderbird and some more exotic choices). Without success.

Now I have given aerc another try. A second chance. And I have found a setup that helped me reach inbox zero and stay there.

Aerc is an open source terminal email client that uses familiar vim-style key bindings for navigation (Neovim, my editor of choice, where I am writing this post). It comes with the responsiveness of the command line and a minimal user interface.

This time I use aerc with mbsync, a tool that syncs my entire mailbox (or parts of it) to my disk. Avoiding slow calls to my mail server has made all the difference. Now working in aerc feels fast.

In short, I fetch all email and store it locally in a mail directory. I use aerc to “do email”. That means filing, sorting, deleting, answering email. All the good stuff. Mbsync then pushes the results back to my mailbox.

Speed wasn't my only problem. I've been putting off sorting through years of emails. The prospect of infinite-scrolling through thousands of messages, determining for each what to do with it, always had to make way for more appealing tasks. Almost anything else.

With aerc the job is manageable: Imagine I want to find all my insurance receipts from last month (like one does). I know my insurance mails always use some “my-insurance.com” subdomain. And the subject always says “something something receipt”.

:filter -f my-insurance.com -H "Subject: receipt" -d last_month

I get results instantly. Even when filtering through thousands of emails. I can then move them to folders easily. I select everything with :mark -a and move it to a folder with :mv 'Folders/Insurance Receipts'. I started out with a handful of folders and added more as I needed them. They are nothing more than IMAP directories that hold emails of a certain category.

These simple tools have been all I needed. With bulk filing and deleting, a podcast on D&D and a little bit of patience, I got there. At the time of writing my inbox has been zero for a good month.

If you feel inspired, go try aerc.

A very short movie (4mn) produced by Blender Studio.

---

In a dystopian world where energy is scarce, a destitute man attempts to break into a battery factory. He soon finds himself cornered by a threat: a security droid…

https://youtu.be/UXqq0ZvbOnk?is=ORjTJkqQwUWZLm77

“Charge” © Blender Foundation / Blender Studio, dir. Hjalti Hjálmarsson — CC BY 4.0 https://studio.blender.org/projects/charge/pages/credits

#shortmovies

I’m journaling this mostly to try to just partially get it out of my system, but also to I guess digest my own emotions and understand a little bit more why I am feeling the way I am. Yesterday an and I spent almost the whole day, baking stuff, and I had started to get a crush on her again. We had also had a talking phase for a while when we first met, but the timing wasn’t right and so we did not end up dating, even though she was interested in me. But I wanted to kind of rekindle the situation because we were both kind of dating and I thought I saw a side of her that made me feel like she might be a really good match with me. But I also feel like it’s a little bit unfair for me to pass the judgment and so definitively say that that side of her that I saw was not genuine because I think it is heavily tainted by this frustration from my perceived rejection. She talked about how she dreamed of this guy that she had talked to before her last relationship and asked him out, and later she also talked about how she would think about what her future partner potentially was doing right now, and I guess I could’ve taken that as an invitation to say something like oh maybe baking for some joke about that because we were doing it together, but I think by then I pretty strongly had the gut reaction that she is not interested in me. And so I no longer really feel like I have a crush on her. And I find myself both pointing out reasons why I don’t necessarily want to be in a relationship with her, like certain icks, but at the same time, I also recognize that part of that for sure has to be me perceiving rejection, and then wanting to put the other person down in my mind as a defense mechanism the same way I think everyone does. And that’s why I’m not really trying to give too much weight to these thoughts before I have a chance to talk it out with friends or my therapist and also let it settle a little bit. But I do find that I kind of had a hit to my self-esteem in a way. And it’s this thought that I am kind of everything she wants, and also likely way more than that. I apologize for the arrogance, but I kind of want to butter myself up a bit here to protect my self-esteem. I think I am incredibly successful, I am incredibly smart, funny, attractive, I think kind and progressive in a lot of ways that she doesn’t even necessarily want, which is one of the incompatibilities, but for a lack of a better word, I guess I kind of feel like even as a provider I find it hard to think of someone else realistically being able to offer the same things that I currently do while also being kind, developed, mature, I like the other things that I take pride in myself. And I guess it’s this feeling of if I am all of these amazing things why does she not ask me on the date or something like that rather than another person. And so it feels like that must mean that in the direct comparison or competitive sense, I am less desirable. And I understand that there is so much more nuance to that and I am not being compared in any of that sense, but I think that’s kind of what leads to this gut reaction from me. And I have a feeling it would probably be smartest if I do this, so explicitly stating why that might not be true, first of all, there’s always a thing about you can be the sweetest peach on the tree, and someone just might not like peaches. But also there are our incompatibilities that also might indicate that she is looking for something different than me, and also potentially it is just one of those things where someone wants attention from people which I can also kind of understand. And there’s also the whole thing about us being friends for a while and so that makes it difficult to understand when the boundary of platonic is being pushed. And also potentially she just doesn’t want to cause drama within mutual friends or stuff like that. These are all just a couple of the reasons why she did not ask me on a date.

I think I also find myself having this feeling of betrayal or loyalty, being broken, in the same way that I originally felt when she seemed to be flirting with R, and it made me feel like we did not have something special, and that she is actively searching for this kind of connection with other people at the same time. And I feel like this is just an indicator in my mind for if we do get into a relationship, if I will be kind of constantly doubting the thing about loyalty or her interactions with other people. And I recognize that this makes me upset at her, even though we are not even dating at all. And I think that this is a bit of an extreme reaction for me because as I said, we are not dating or even going on any dates at all. I think this is just one of the cases where I potentially just have to have that self-respect of understanding that I am a catch, and I do not need to lose sleep or feel desperate towards someone who doesn’t want to pursue me either.

5 October 2026

Spending lots of time alone in Yenah's grandmother's house. Getting up early, morning coffee, and sitting down to work each day at the kitchen table. As the sun rises, the tall white satin curtain spanning the length of the living room window starts to glow; one half of the curtain is reinforced by another pink one, so the diffused light that floods into the living room is half pink and half white. It bounces off of the red-orange wood floor, which creates a warm, saturated, matte-finish environment in which highlights and edges are dulled. Magpies like to visit in the morning, and a handful of times I've seen them jockey for position on a persimmon tree through the window. They're pretty aggressive, hip-checking each other off branches. Only two small horizontally-sliding screened windows in the house open, and tree branches sprouting vibrant green cross in front of the view out of both, so the feeling is one of life in abundance outside. Plants grow well on the windowsills too.

My days here have been spent mostly in silence, but it's a busy silence. Just down the street is an elementary school, and I hear the rhythmic phases of its days—pale yellow buses snorting to a stop to deliver sleepy children in the morning, high-pitched screams as lunch hour arrives mid-day, and the frenzy of happy squeals and teachers repeatedly saying goodbye (“안녕히 가세요”) as school is let out for the day in the later afternoon. Some intermittent bells and layered chimes of groups of children singing throughout the day as well. On days where I do laundry, the laundry machine sounds like alternating white noise waterfalls and MRI-machine-like hollow knocks. Mosquitos are frequent visitors at this time of year, so a few times a day I'll also hear their sharp whines buzz by my ear (I've killed about thirty of them in the last month). The water here is so, so soft, especially compared to London, and the sinks (one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen) rush when turned on with a dutiful urgency that sounds like a mother shushing a baby. Similar to the Segokcheon Stream down the road from the house that runs all the way to the Han River.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m3yqgRyHkSU&is=Kpu6uje8TmEht4kt

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tjpgJjdk52c&is=ogPZFUCOsNAwpNMp

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mV76WmC5I4s&is=ACA6jF19jFy2Gv6f

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vON8PIbz90E&is=CXSe1HvyKnaDjDa1

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JZLjTu3N2Uw&is=vxCqNh75by9RuBCH

Doom Slayer arrives in Westeros- Volume II: The South

Chapter V: Ramsay

The first rider came back with no story worth hearing, so Ramsay had him flayed. Not entirely, of course; only his face, a little, around the edges, to remind him and everyone else in Winterfell that when Lord Bolton asked for news he expected news, and not a lot of babbling about green devils and walking fire. Ramsay had heard quite enough of that sort of thing from the smallfolk lately. Every peasant between the Wall and the Last River seemed to have a cousin who had seen something on the King's Road: a giant in armor, a demon out of the old tales, something that had come through the Wall and was walking south alone with the wildlings following after it like crows after a plough. Ramsay had no patience for stories. He believed in what he could cut. “Wildlings, then,” he said to Smalljon Umber, picking at his supper. “A wildling warlord in a fancy suit of armor. Mance Rayder's bastard heir, or some such. Bring me his head and we'll mount it over the gate, and the smallfolk can come and look at it and see that it bleeds like anyone else's.” He sent fifty riders north under Harald Karstark, good men, hard men, the kind who had held the Dreadfort's dungeons for him and enjoyed the work. They did not come back. Not one of them, not even a horse. So Ramsay stopped laughing, a little, and began to prepare.

He saw the stranger for the first time from the battlements of Winterfell on a bright cold morning, with the snow sparkling on the fields like a field of knives. One man. That was the joke of it. Ramsay had drawn up two thousand Bolton and Karstark men behind the walls, archers on every tower, crossbows on the gatehouse, pitch heating in great iron pots. He had sent ravens to the Umbers and the Manderlys and every house that owed him a sword. He had done everything his father would have done and a few things his father would never have thought of. And coming up the road from the north, without a horse or a banner or so much as a cloak, was one man in green armor, walking. Ramsay smiled, feeling for the first time in days like himself again, and said, “Bring me the boy.” They brought him Rickon Stark. Ramsay had got the boy as a gift from the Umbers, along with his great black wolf, whose head now hung in the Great Hall. Rickon was eight or nine, dirty and half-wild, with his brother's dark hair and a look in his eye that Ramsay was very much looking forward to taking out of it, given time. Ramsay dragged him to the edge of the battlements, held him there by the collar, and drew his flaying knife so the man on the road could see. “Ho there!” he called down cheerfully. “I hear you're a great one for killing dead things! Let's see how you do with live ones! This here is Rickon Stark, the trueborn son of Ned Stark and heir to Winterfell, and if you take one more step...” The stranger took one more step. Ramsay sighed, not really disappointed, and raised the knife.

He never saw the shot. He heard it afterward, or thought he did, a sharp flat crack echoing up off the walls a moment after the fact. What he saw was his favorite knife, the one he'd had since he was a boy, simply vanish from his hand, and his hand empty and stinging, and two of his fingers not where he had left them. He did not scream. He was proud of that later, in the very short time he had left to be proud of anything. He stared at the hand with genuine interest, the way he might have stared at some fascinating injury he'd given to someone else, and in that moment of interest Rickon Stark tore free, bit the arm of the nearest guard, and ran for the stairs. Nobody stopped him. They were all looking at the road. The stranger did not storm the gate; Ramsay would have respected a man who stormed the gate. He simply walked up to it under a rain of arrows that bounced off his armor like hail off a slate roof, took hold of the iron-banded doors of Winterfell, which had stood since the days of the Kings of Winter, and ripped them out of the wall. Then he came into the yard, and Ramsay watched from the gallery above as his two thousand men discovered the difference between bravery and arithmetic. The Karstark men broke first, then the Bolton levies, then the hard men of the Dreadfort, the ones who had laughed at the smallfolk's stories and done such fine work in the dungeons. They came at the stranger with spears and swords and axes, and he went through them like a scythe through summer wheat. Ramsay could not even follow it: a roar, and fire, and something like a chained hook that flew from the stranger's weapon and caught a mounted knight across the yard and dragged the stranger to him, and then knight and horse were both on the ground in several places. After that the rest simply threw down their weapons and ran, for the gates, the godswood, the crypts, and the stranger let them go. Ramsay noted that with a kind of distant professional fury. The stranger did not chase them or seem to care about them at all. He was looking up at the gallery. At Ramsay.

Ramsay had one card left, and he had always known he would play it sooner or later. In the kennels against the west wall were his girls, twenty great hunting hounds of the Dreadfort's best breeding, big as wolves and twice as vicious, and he had not fed them in seven days. He had been saving them for something special. He went down to the yard to open the kennels himself, because he wanted to watch. The stranger came across the yard toward him, slowly, stepping over the bodies, and when he was twenty paces off Ramsay threw open the bolts and stepped back and watched his girls pour out into the snow. “Go on,” he said softly. “Go on, my lovelies. Dinner.” They ran straight at the stranger the way he had trained them, low and fast and silent, the way wolves run. Ramsay had seen them pull down a grown man in moments and leave nothing behind but the boots. They reached the stranger, and they stopped, all of them at once, as if they had hit an invisible wall, skidding in the snow and standing in a ragged ring around him with their hackles up. Ramsay saw them lift their great heads and smell him, and saw something go through them that he had never seen in any animal he had owned. It was not fear; he had made dogs afraid many times in training. It was deeper than that, the way a mouse goes still when the owl comes over. The lead bitch, the big brindled one he called Kyra, made a small whimper in her throat, lowered her head, and backed away. Then, slowly, she turned around and looked at Ramsay, and one by one the others turned with her. “No,” said Ramsay. “No, no. Him. Go on. Him.”

They had not eaten in seven days. They were hounds, very simple creatures really, and they understood a very simple thing that their master in his cleverness had somehow forgotten: a starving animal always chooses the prey it can actually bring down. Ramsay backed up against the kennel wall and looked past the circle of dogs to the stranger, who had not moved. He stood with his weapon lowered and the faceless visor turned toward Ramsay, doing absolutely nothing. He was not going to stop them. He was not even going to look away. Ramsay Bolton had spent his whole life watching, and he had always thought it was the best part. It occurred to him now, as his girls came forward in the snow, that he had never once wondered what it was like to be the one watched. He found out.

Chapter VI: Sansa

She had imagined it a thousand times: through the long cold flight from Winterfell with Theon, through the river and the snow and the night in the hollow log with Ramsay's hounds baying close enough to hear their breath, through the miles north on Brienne's horse to the gray gates of Castle Black, and the moment Jon came down the steps of the Lord Commander's tower and she saw his face, older and harder and so like their father's, and ran to him. Every night since, lying awake in a narrow cot in a fortress of ice and stone, she had imagined how they would take Winterfell back, how the banners would look, what she would say to him at the end when he was on his knees. She had imagined many things. She had never once imagined that by the time she got home there would be nothing left to take back. They rode out from Castle Black with every man Jon could spare, the black brothers who were left and the few hundred free folk who had stayed behind when the rest went south, armed for war. Jon spent the ride drawing battle plans on scraps of parchment by firelight and throwing them in the fire. Davos had sent ravens to every house in the North begging for swords and been answered by almost none. Sansa spent the ride doing sums in her head, the way Septa Mordane had taught her, and every sum came out the same way: not enough.

They came over the last hill and saw Winterfell, and Sansa reined in so hard her horse reared. The gates were gone. Not opened, not broken, but gone: the great doors lay in the snow fifty feet beyond the moat, twisted like wet leather, as though some giant had pulled them out and flung them away in irritation. There were no banners on the walls and no archers on the towers. Someone had piled the flayed-man banners of House Bolton in the field before the gate and burned them, and the ashes were still smoking faintly in the cold. In the gateway, sitting on an overturned barrel and gnawing a leg of mutton, was Tormund Giantsbane, who saw them coming and got up and waved the mutton at them, grinning through his beard. “You missed him!” he shouted as they rode up. “Again! You crows are slow as old women. Missed him by three days this time. Missed the whole thing. We came over the hill just as the last of the Bolton boys were running for the Wolfswood with their breeches full, and him already walking off down the road south like he'd just been out for a piss.” He clapped Jon on the leg. “Don't feel bad, Lord Crow. I missed it too.”

Rickon was in the Great Hall. Sansa did not recognize him at first. He had been a baby when she left for King's Landing, a wild little thing who bit the stableboys and ran with his wolf, and now he was a gaunt, dirty boy of nine with a bandaged hand, sitting at the high table eating as if he had never seen food before. The free folk had found him hiding behind the lord's chair when they came in through the broken gate, and he had let no one near him until he saw Jon. Afterward, when he had cried himself out and been washed and fed again, he told them what had happened, and Sansa listened with her hands folded in her lap and her face perfectly still, the way she had learned to listen in King's Landing. He told them about Ramsay on the battlements and the knife at his throat, about the shot that came from so far down the road he hadn't known where it came from, about running and hiding and hearing the roar and the screams through the walls, and about creeping to the window afterward when it was quiet. “He was just standing in the yard,” Rickon said. “The green man. Standing by the kennels. Ramsay's dogs were...” He stopped, looked down at his food, and pushed the plate away. “He didn't stop them. He didn't do anything. He just stood there and watched until they were done. Then he left.” Jon asked quietly whether the man had said anything, and Rickon shook his head. “He saw me in the window, though. He looked at me when he was going. Just for a moment.” The boy frowned, trying to find the words. “It wasn't like when grown-ups look at you. It was like when Shaggydog used to look at you. Like he was checking you were all right. And then he went.”

That night, when the others were asleep, Sansa went down to the kennels. She did not quite know why. She took a lantern and went alone through the snow, past the place by the west wall where the free folk had already cleared away the worst of it and the snow lay clean and new. The kennel doors stood open; the dogs had run off into the Wolfswood the morning the stranger left, and nobody had gone after them. There was not much left to see. Someone, Tormund she thought, had dealt with what remained. There was a stain on the ground that would come out in spring, and a scrap of pink cloth with a flayed man on it caught on a nail. Sansa stood there a long time with the lantern. She had imagined the words. She had wanted him to know who had done it to him. She had wanted it to be her. And standing there in the cold she found she was angry, truly angry, in a way she had not let herself be since she was a little girl in the Red Keep: angry at the stranger for taking it from her, angry at the gods, angry at herself for being angry. Then, underneath the anger, quieter, she found something else. She was home. Rickon was alive. Jon was alive. The gates were broken and the Boltons gone and the Night King dead, and not one Stark had had to bleed for Winterfell this time. She would not have to watch Jon charge alone into a wall of spears, or see Rickon run across a field with arrows falling all around him, or count the bodies of loyal northmen piled in the snow before the gates. All the nightmares she had lain awake with, all the battles she had planned in her head, had simply not happened. She did not know who the stranger was or what he wanted, but she understood that he had given her something no one had given her in a very long time: he had let her stop fighting. She set the lantern down, took the scrap of pink cloth off its nail, dropped it on the coals of the brazier by the kennel door, and watched it curl and blacken and burn. Then she went back inside to her brothers and slept that night in her own bed in Winterfell for the first time in years, and she did not dream at all.

In the morning there was a raven from the south, not from King's Landing but from a small lord in the Riverlands, half-mad with fear, begging any lord of the North for news. Something had come down the Kingsroad, he wrote. It had passed the Twins without stopping, and the Freys had shut their gates, and it had not even looked at them. It had passed the Neck, and the crannogmen had melted into their swamps to let it through. Now it was going south toward the capital, and behind it in a dark tide across the land came the wildlings, more of them every day, and no host in the Seven Kingdoms dared stand in its way. Jon read the letter twice and handed it to Sansa. “He's going after the queen,” he said. Sansa read it twice too, folded it neatly, and smiled the slow cool smile she had learned in King's Landing from the very woman they were talking about. “Good,” she said.

Chapter VII: Qyburn

Qyburn had been expelled from the Citadel for asking questions, and he had never quite lost the habit. He was asking them now in the cramped, candlelit workroom beneath the Red Keep where he did his most interesting work, bent over the thing on the table with a glass in one eye and a pair of fine silver tongs in his hand. It was a small thing, a scrap of green metal, scorched and buckled, no larger than a man's thumbnail. It had cost the Crown eleven good men, two of his best little birds, and a very fast horse to bring it to him, and he thought it worth every one of them. One of the free folk had pried it off the ground at Winterfell, where it had fallen from the stranger's armor during the fighting, and sold it in a White Harbor tavern for a skin of wine, and it had passed through many hands before reaching his. Qyburn had tried to cut it with a diamond saw, and the saw had broken. He had tried to melt it in a forge and then in a crucible of the hottest fire his assistants could make, and it had not even changed color. He had tried acids and poisons and, in a moment of what he would have called scientific thoroughness, a little wildfire. Nothing touched it. And when he held it in his hand and closed his eyes, he could feel it humming faintly, like a hive of bees very far away, or like something alive. “Fascinating,” he murmured. “I'm so glad you're enjoying yourself,” said a voice from the doorway. Queen Cersei stood there in black silk, her hair still short from the Sept, her face very pale and very calm, and behind her, filling the corridor like a wall of iron, stood Ser Gregor Clegane, or what Qyburn had made of him. She looked down at the scrap without touching it, the way she might look at a dead spider, and told him to say what it was. Qyburn spread his hands and said he wished he could: it was no metal he had ever seen or read of, not Valyrian steel, not dragonglass, not anything a smith of this world could forge. “I didn't ask what it wasn't,” said Cersei. “I asked what it is.”

The reports had started coming a month before, and at first Cersei had laughed at them, and Qyburn had laughed with her, because that was his function. A green giant out of the north; the Night King killed in single combat; ridiculous, since the Night King was a story to frighten children, along with grumkins and snarks. Then the Boltons: Ramsay Bolton torn apart by his own dogs in the yard of Winterfell and the castle gates ripped out like a child's teeth. That had been harder to laugh off. Cersei had read that letter three times and gone very quiet and called for more wine. Then the Twins, then the Neck, then Moat Cailin, the ancient fortress never once taken from the south, which the stranger had passed through from the north without slowing. Then the wildlings following behind, a hundred thousand of them if the reports were right, which they surely weren't, and the smallfolk coming out of their villages to watch them pass instead of fleeing, which was somehow worse. Then Jaime. Cersei had sent her brother north with twenty thousand men, the finest army the Lannisters had put in the field since the war, and Qyburn had stood at her side on the walls as they rode out beneath the crimson banners and believed along with her that it would be enough. They had met the stranger on the Kingsroad at the crossroads by the inn, and Qyburn heard the story from three different survivors, and it was the same every time. The Lannister host drew up across the road in good order, pikes in front, archers behind, heavy horse on both flanks, and the stranger came walking down the road toward them alone. Ser Jaime Lannister rode out in front of the whole army by himself, his golden hand on his reins and his sword in his left, and stopped before the stranger, and the two of them looked at one another a long while. Then Jaime drew his sword, not to attack, the survivors said, but holding it there between them as though asking a question. The stranger looked at him, then at the sword, and then very deliberately stepped around Jaime's horse and kept walking toward the army, as if Jaime were not there at all. The army broke without a blow struck. The pikemen of the front rank looked at what was coming, remembered what they had heard about Winterfell, threw down their pikes, and ran, and the rest followed. Twenty thousand men, the pride of the West, scattered across the Riverlands like chaff, and the stranger walked through the place where they had been and kept going and did not kill a single one of them. Jaime never came back to King's Landing. He sent a raven from Riverrun instead, very short: I'm sorry, Cersei. I don't think it wants me. I think it wants you. Run.

“Run where?” said Cersei, the crumpled letter in her hand; she had been carrying it everywhere for two days. “Casterly Rock? The Rock has walls, and so did Winterfell. Across the sea? To Braavos? To the Iron Bank? I'd be a beggar queen, living on the charity of men who hate me. I won't run. I am a Lannister. I won't run from anything.” She looked at Qyburn, and something hungry came into her face, something he had seen there once before, the day she first looked at what he had done with the Mountain. “You found something, didn't you? A way.” Qyburn smiled and asked whether she remembered what she had once told him about King Aerys. Cersei went still. “He hid caches of wildfire,” Qyburn said softly, “beneath the Red Keep. Beneath the Sept of Baelor and the Dragonpit and the Street of Steel and the whole of King's Landing. He meant to burn the city rather than surrender it. Your brother stopped him, but he never found all the caches. I have found a great many more of them these last months, and some are still in place, including one very large one directly beneath the Iron Throne.” When she asked if he meant to burn the city, he shook his head gently, the way a maester shakes his head at a patient who has misheard. “Only the hall, Your Grace. The stranger is coming for you, yes? Then let us show him where you are. The Great Hall, the throne, the queen in her crown. He will come, as he came for the Night King and the Boltons, and when he is standing in the middle of that hall we will give him a fire hotter than any he has ever walked through.” He lifted the scrap of green metal in his silver tongs and turned it in the candlelight. “Even this must have a limit. Everything does.” Cersei looked at the metal, then at Qyburn, then over her shoulder at Ser Gregor, eight feet of armored death that did not breathe, did not sleep, did not bleed. “And if the fire doesn't stop him,” she said slowly, “there's always Ser Gregor.” “There is always Ser Gregor,” Qyburn agreed. She smiled then for the first time in a month, a very beautiful smile, and Qyburn found himself, for a moment, almost believing it.

That night Cersei went to the chambers of King Tommen, the First of His Name, woke him gently, and told him he was going on a journey. She kissed him goodbye on the deck of a ship in Blackwater Bay with the tide going out and the stars bright overhead, and told him she would come to Casterly Rock soon, and that she loved him, and to be brave and not look back. He looked back anyway; they always did. She stood on the docks and watched the ship until she could not see it anymore. Then she went back up the hill to the Red Keep, climbed the steps of the Iron Throne, and sat down to wait. She did not have to wait long.

Chapter VIII: Cersei

He came through the King's Gate at midday, and nobody tried to stop him. Cersei had expected that. She had given the Gold Cloaks their orders and watched their faces as she gave them, and known that not one of them would obey. Let them run. She had never needed the Gold Cloaks, or anyone. She had stood alone in the Red Keep when Stannis came up the Blackwater, and alone when the High Sparrow's men dragged her naked through the streets, and she would stand alone now. She sat on the Iron Throne in crimson and gold with the crown of the Seven Kingdoms on her head and listened to the city, and it was the silence she would remember. King's Landing was never silent; half a million souls packed onto three hills gave it a voice like the sea. When the stranger came through the gate the voice simply stopped. She could hear it stop. The silence started at the King's Gate and spread like ink through water, street by street, through Flea Bottom and up the Street of Steel and along the Hook, until it reached the walls of the Red Keep and came in through the high windows of the Great Hall and filled it. The smallfolk had not fled, her little birds told her. They had come out of their houses and lined the streets in their thousands, in perfect silence, and watched him pass. Nobody threw anything and nobody cheered. They just watched, and Cersei understood, sitting in that silence, that every one of them knew exactly where he was going and not one of them would lift a finger to stop him.

The doors of the Great Hall were thirty feet high, oak and bronze, barred from within with a beam of ironwood as thick as a man's waist; Cersei had ordered that, because she wanted to see what he would do. The doors exploded inward in a storm of splinters and bronze and fire, a great section of the wall came down with them, and the ironwood beam spun the length of the hall end over end and crashed smoking at the foot of the throne steps. And there he was. She had heard all the stories and thought she was ready, and she was not. He was taller than she had imagined, and broader, and more terrible, and so utterly, perfectly still, standing in the ruined doorway with the daylight behind him and the dust settling slowly around his green armor. She could feel him looking at her even through the faceless visor, and not the way men had always looked at her, with lust or hate or fear or calculation, but the way she might look at a stain on a gown. She rose slowly, with grace, the way her father had taught her, a queen rising to receive an envoy. “I know who you are,” she said, and her voice rang clear and cold through the vast empty hall without a tremor. “I know what you've done. I know you killed the Night King, and the Boltons, and broke my brother's army without lifting your hand. I know the wildlings and the smallfolk think you're some sort of god. But I am Cersei of House Lannister, First of My Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men and Protector of the Realm. This is my city and this is my throne, and I will not bow to you, whatever you are, whoever sent you.” He said nothing. “Do you even understand me?” she said, and something sharp and ugly was creeping into her voice now that she could not stop. “Do you even speak? Do you know what I've lost? Do you know what I've done to get here? My children. My father. Do you know what it cost me to sit on this chair?” He started walking toward her. “Ser Gregor,” said Cersei.

The Mountain came out of the shadows behind the throne, where he had stood motionless all along in his great black armor: eight feet of him and more than thirty stone, every ounce of it Qyburn's work, dead flesh made strong beyond any living man, a body that felt no pain, needed no rest, and could not be killed by any sword in the Seven Kingdoms. Cersei had watched him crush a man's skull in one hand. He came down the throne steps three at a time and charged across the hall, the floor shaking under his feet, his greatsword raised over his head. The stranger did not draw a weapon. He did not even slow. He walked into the Mountain's charge, stepped inside the swing as the greatsword came down, and punched Ser Gregor Clegane once in the face. The sound was like a thunderclap in a stone cellar. The great black helm folded inward like a tin cup under a boot, and the Mountain left the ground and flew backward the whole length of the hall, all thirty stone of him, and struck the steps of the Iron Throne so hard the stone cracked beneath him, and lay there in a heap of black armor at Cersei's feet. He did not get up. He did not twitch or groan. Whatever strange half-life Qyburn had put into him went out all at once, the way a candle goes out when you pinch the wick, and the stranger had not even broken stride. Cersei stared down at the ruin of her father's great knight, the thing that had made every lord in King's Landing afraid of her, and from the gallery above came Qyburn's soft high voice, thin with an excitement she had never heard in it before: “Now, Your Grace. Now.”

She went through the little door behind the throne, the one Maegor the Cruel had built so kings could slip away from their enemies, and she ran down the narrow passage in the dark with her skirts held up in both hands like a girl and her crown slipping down over one eye, Qyburn's footsteps and breathless laughter ahead of her. She came out onto the high balcony above the Outer Ward into the cold bright air, turned, and looked back through the little window into the Great Hall just as Qyburn touched the slow-match to the fuse. The world turned green. The floor of the Great Hall went up like a volcano, Aerys's fire, thousands upon thousands of jars of it hidden for twenty years beneath the throne, all igniting at once. The windows blew out. The great dragon skulls came crashing down from the walls. The fire roared up through the hall like a living thing, so bright she had to shield her eyes, so hot she felt it on her face through the stone. She heard the roof beams begin to scream as they caught and smelled the stone itself beginning to burn, and beneath it all she heard a deep groaning wail, like a beast in agony, and it took her a moment to understand that it was the Iron Throne, and it was melting. A thousand swords of a thousand dead men, forged together by the fire of Balerion the Black Dread three hundred years ago; the throne of Aegon the Conqueror; the chair she had given everything to sit on. It sagged in the green fire like a wax candle left in the sun, its great spiked back bending slowly forward as though bowing, and then it slumped and ran and was gone. “Nothing,” breathed Qyburn beside her, his face green in the firelight and wet with tears of joy. “Nothing could survive that, Your Grace. Nothing in this world.” Cersei turned to answer him, and then, through the window, in the very heart of the inferno, she saw something move.

He walked out of the fire the way he had walked out of the fire at Castle Black, the way he had walked out of a hundred thousand fires in a hundred thousand worlds before this one. The green flame streamed off his armor like water; it did not burn him, and did not seem to think it should. He stepped over the molten pool of iron where the throne had been and came on through the burning hall toward the little door, the passage, the balcony, and her. Qyburn did not run, and Cersei would give him that, in the very little time she had left to think about anything. He stood at the balcony rail with the green fire in his eyes, and when the stranger came through the door he took a single step toward it, not away. “Fascinating,” said Qyburn. It was the last thing he ever said. And then there was only Cersei. She backed against the rail. The Outer Ward lay a long way below, packed, she saw now, with thousands of smallfolk who had followed him up the hill, staring up at her in silence. Behind her the Red Keep burned green, and before her stood the stranger, motionless again, wreathed in a halo of green fire from the hall behind him. She thought of the old woman in the tent at Lannisport a lifetime ago, the witch who had told her she would be queen until another came, younger and more beautiful, to cast her down; who had told her she would bury her children; who had told her the valonqar, the little brother, would come and wrap his hands around her pale white throat. She had spent her whole life afraid of Tyrion, hating him, hunting him, going to sleep every night of her life thinking of a dwarf's small hands. And it had never been him at all. It had never been anyone a prophecy could name. It had been this: a thing from beyond the world, without a name or a voice or a face, that did not hate her, did not want her throne, did not care who she was or what she had done or what it had cost her, and had simply decided she needed to be ended, the way a gardener decides about a weed. She lifted her chin. She would not beg. She was a Lannister, and a lioness, and a queen. “Well?” said Cersei. “Go on, then.” She looked up into the faceless visor, and there in the dark glass, for one last moment, she saw herself, small and far away, crowned in green flame, and very, very alone.

Below in the Outer Ward, the smallfolk of King's Landing watched in silence as the green fire burned itself out in the Red Keep, which took until nightfall. Qyburn's cache had been a great deal of wildfire, but it was not the city; Aerys's other caches under the Sept and the Dragonpit and the Street of Steel stayed sleeping in the dark where they had lain for twenty years. When the last of the fire guttered out and the stars came out over Blackwater Bay, the great hall of the Red Keep was a blackened shell with a pool of cooling iron at its heart. The stranger came down from the hill and walked through the crowd, and they parted for him in silence the way the sea parts for a ship. An old fishwife from the Hook reached out and touched his arm as he passed, just for a moment, and her grandchildren would tell the story for the rest of their lives: that it had been warm, warm like a hearthstone, warm like bread fresh from the oven, and that he had paused for a heartbeat and looked down at her. Then he walked on, out through the River Gate and down to the shore of Blackwater Bay, and the city watched him go.

Epilogue: Tormund, and the Red Woman

There was a fishing village on the shore of Blackwater Bay a mile east of the city, a few huts and a few boats and a driftwood fire on the shingle where the fishermen mended their nets in the evenings. They saw him come down the beach in the twilight, and they did not run, because by then everyone in the Crownlands knew who he was and what he had done, and that he did not harm people who did not need harming. They stood up from their nets and stepped back from the fire and watched. He stopped at the edge of the flames and stood a while looking out across the dark water to the east. The fishermen would argue for years about what he had been looking at. Some said the sea, some said the stars. One old man, who had fought on the Blackwater the night the bay burned green, said he had been looking at nothing at all, that he had just been standing still for a moment the way a man stands still at the end of a long day's work before he goes home. Then the driftwood fire leapt up, red shot through with green, taller than a man, taller than a house, and he stepped into it, and was gone.

In Winterfell, three weeks later, there was a feast. It was not a grand one by the standards of the south, for the North was poor and the winter long and the larders thin, but there was ale and meat and a fire in every hearth of the Great Hall, and Tormund Giantsbane was standing on a table. “...and then,” he roared, “then the queen says, 'I am Cersei of House Lannister, First of My Name, and I will not bow to you!' And do you know what he says to her?” “Nothing!” shouted half the hall, because they had heard the story four times that week already. “Nothing!” Tormund bellowed back, delighted. “Not one word! He just walks up to that Mountain of hers, that great dead monster eight feet tall, and punches it in the face so hard it flies across the room! One punch! One! And then they set the whole castle on fire, twenty years of the dragon king's piss-fire all at once, the throne melting like butter, and he just walks out of it like walking out of a summer rain!” He had not, of course, been there; none of the free folk had. They had reached King's Landing two days after it was over to find the Red Keep a smoking shell, the city half-delirious with relief, and the stranger long gone. But Tormund had met a great many people in King's Landing who had been there, or said they had, and listened carefully to all of them and taken the best parts of each. In another year, he told Jon privately, he would have it perfect. Jon sat at the high table listening with his chin in his hand and a small crooked smile that came and went. Beside him Sansa sat very straight and did not smile, but her eyes were bright. Rickon had fallen asleep against Jon's shoulder an hour ago with a half-eaten honeycake still in his fist. Down the table Ser Davos was telling a group of northern lords about the night at Castle Black for the dozenth time while Brienne of Tarth listened, and Theon Greyjoy sat a little apart with his hands folded in his lap and the look of a man who has been told, quite suddenly, that the debt he cannot pay has been forgiven.

There were ravens on the windowsill from every corner of the realm. A boy king had reached Casterly Rock and wept, and been told by his uncle Jaime that he no longer had to be king of anything if he did not want to be. A dragon queen across the narrow sea had heard strange stories out of Westeros and was gathering her ships. The great lords of the Reach and the Stormlands and Dorne were writing to Winterfell, to the Wall, to anyone who seemed to know anything, all asking the same thing in different words: what now? There was no Iron Throne anymore, no Night King, no Cersei. There was only a cold, battered, half-empty kingdom full of people who had been afraid for a very long time and were slowly, carefully beginning to discover that they did not have to be. Over the hearth at the head of the hall, on a spike of black iron, the Night King's head looked down on all of it with dead blue eyes, still frozen, still unmelted even there by the fire. Tormund had carried it all the way to King's Landing and all the way back and refused to let anyone take it from him, and in the end Sansa told him he could put it wherever he liked so long as it was not in her rooms. The free folk had begun touching it for luck as they passed. Jon had asked them to stop. They had not.

Late that night, after the feast, when the hall had emptied and the fires burned low, Melisandre came down from the room where she slept and sat alone at the hearth beneath the head. She had not been asked to the feast and had not expected to be. The northmen tolerated her now, for the part she had played that night at Castle Black, but they did not like her, and she did not blame them. Jon was kind to her in his careful way; Davos would not speak to her at all. She thought that in the spring, if spring came, she would leave and go somewhere warm and think about what she had seen. She looked into the fire. She had not looked into the flames since that night at Castle Black, afraid of what she would see there, and afraid too that she would see nothing at all. But tonight she looked, and there he was. She saw a sky the color of a wound and a black land cracked with rivers of fire, and an army stretching from one horizon to the other, horned and burning and vast, things beside which the Others had been children's toys. And she saw him in the middle of it, alone, wading into that tide of horrors as he had waded into the dead beyond the Wall, as he had waded through a thousand worlds before this one and would wade through a thousand more. Another war. Another hell. There was always another.

She understood something then that she had not understood before. She had thought the Lord of Light had sent him. She had thought, in her pride, that her prayer had been answered, that her god had reached into the endless dark and plucked out a champion for her and set him down in the snow at Castle Black. She saw now that it had not been like that at all. He had heard, that was all. Somewhere in the middle of his endless war he had heard a woman praying for a sword in a cold dark place at the end of the world, to stand against a darkness that would swallow everything, and he had come. Not because a god commanded it, but because that was simply what he did. And when it was done, he had gone back. Melisandre watched him in the flames a long time, the tiny green figure in the heart of that red and terrible world, tearing and burning and never once slowing down. Then, just before the vision faded, she thought she saw him stop in the middle of it all, saw the faceless visor turn and look up and out through the flames across whatever impossible distance lay between them, as if checking that they were all right. Then he turned back to his war, and the fire was only a fire, and Melisandre sat alone in the dark hall of Winterfell beneath the head of the Night King, and wept, and could not have told you why.

Yesterday's Checkmate Win.

I won this correspondence chess club tournament game yesterday with a Queen, Bishop, Bishop Checkmate on my 32nd move. We started the game on 05 October and played with a comfortable 2 days allowed per move time control. My Queen to g5 delivered the checkmate to the Black King. She is protected from capture by her c1 Bishop, and her c2 Bishop covers the King's only possible flight square. The position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and the game's full move record follows: 1. d4 d5 2. h3 Bf5 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. Nf3 Nb4 5. e3 Bxc2 6. Qd2 Qd6 7. Bb5+ c6 8. Ba4 Be4 9. Nxe4 dxe4 10. Ne5 f6 11. Nc4 Qd5 12. O-O Qg5 13. Qxb4 h5 14. Nd2 Qd5 15. Qxb7 Qd8 16. Qxc6+ Kf7 17. Bb3+ e6 18. Qb7+ Ne7 19. Nxe4 a5 20. a4 Rc8 21. Rd1 f5 22. Ng5+ Kf6 23. Nxe6 g5 24. Nxd8 Rxd8 25. Qb6+ Nc6 26. Qxc6+ Bd6 27. e4 fxe4 28. Qxe4 Bh2+ 29. Kxh2 h4 30. Qe5+ Kg6 31. Bc2+ Kh6 32. Qxg5#

And the adventure continues.

In the space of a fortnight Europe got hacked freezers in hundreds of supermarkets, thirty-odd hoax bomb threats on airliners, and a British government telling families to keep three days of food and water at home. It all looked like one story. I spent days trying to work out whether it is – and the answer is: partly, and not in the way it looks.

In Sjöbo, in southern Sweden, on the morning of 2 November the staff of the local ICA Kvantum open the shop and find the frozen food thawed. No door forced, no alarm tripped, no power cut. Somebody, somewhere in the world, in the middle of the night, told the freezers to go to 50 degrees, and the freezers obeyed. The manager writes it on Facebook with the resignation of a man who has just thrown away a stockroom: we've been hacked, they set the temperature to 50.

In the same hours, in Brussels, Stephan Moelans, managing director of Sabcobel, the company that runs the refrigeration for Delhaize supermarkets, is waking up his technicians. At one in the morning. He sends them out across Belgium and Luxembourg to do something that in 2026 sounds almost medieval: physically unplug the fridges from the network, shop by shop, before the rest of the stock melts. As he told the Belga news agency afterwards:

We began mobilizing technicians at 1 a.m. to get the situation under control

Three days later an Aer Lingus Airbus from Dublin to Rome lands at a French military base at Évreux, under fighter escort, while bomb disposal teams search it. They find nothing. On the same day some twenty other flights across Europe receive the same threat, and meanwhile the British tabloids are explaining to their readers which fourteen items to buy in order to survive an emergency nobody has declared.

Within a week you get the feeling of being inside a dystopian novel that somebody is writing too fast. I spent days collecting the pieces. This article is an attempt to put them in a row, separating what we know from what we think we understand. Because the two, as we'll see, don't coincide.

---

The week

Let's rewind the tape. In mid-October, in France, the fridges of a few hundred supermarkets (between 250 and 350 stores according to the technical reconstructions, up to 700 according to others, across the Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour Market and Leclerc chains) are driven overnight up to 50 degrees. Stock to throw away, and in a few shops the beginnings of a fire, because a fridge that heats is an appliance doing something it was never designed to do. The attack gets told as a French story, but the analysis by Sekoia picked up by Reuters finds units hit in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium too: the continent was already in it, nobody had counted it yet.

On the night between 2 and 3 November it happens again, this time on a continental scale: at least nine countries. Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia. Among the brands hit, Ikea, Delhaize, Carrefour, SuperValu (thirteen shops in Ireland). In Estonia the technicians step in within minutes and contain the damage; in Sweden ICA talks of “a limited number” of stores, which is the formula you use when you'd rather not say the number. In Athens a butcher tells the TV that his display fridge was set to 150 degrees, and that it took the technician two hours to get it back under control. And it isn't only frozen food: the same night Coolworld is attacked, the refrigeration supplier of the Établissement français du sang, the French blood transfusion service. Blood bags are not something anyone resells on the black market.

Then the emails. On Monday 2 November Hungary scrambles a Gripen to escort a Wizz Air flight from Luton to Budapest, threatened while already airborne. By Tuesday 3 the threats are already around thirty, twenty-seven according to the AP, plus a cruise ship; a Warsaw airport closes for a few hours. On Thursday 5 at least twenty-six are reported across Europe, on flights departing from sixteen countries. On Friday 6 another seventeen by noon, nine in Prague alone. Hungary scrambles its Gripens three times within an hour to escort a Brussels-Sofia and two flights out of Prague bound for Cyprus and Romania. In Dublin the headquarters of RTÉ, the Irish public broadcaster, is evacuated, and two other broadcasters receive threats the same day. Not a single device is found. Anywhere.

And finally London. On 22 October the Cabinet Office launches “Be Ready”, a three-year campaign asking families to keep enough at home for three days of self-sufficiency: water, food, a torch, a wind-up radio, cash, copies of documents. The same day the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, backs it with a line about “increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks”, and the next day the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, defends it in person at a wildfire summit (and tells the Guardian about his own stash: beans, soup and Twiglets). From 27 October the papers start turning the same page of the government website over and over: the Independent headlines on the “attacks”, the Express on the “14 items to stockpile”, one news site on the “4 foods to have at home” (declared source: a Reddit thread...), another on the “13 things” to buy. Barclays publishes a survey: one Briton in four is stockpiling.

Four facts in fifteen days. Three of them are true. One is half true. And the question worth asking is whether they have anything to do with one another.

---

The radiator

To understand what happened in the supermarkets you need to know something supermarkets would rather not tell you: the fridge in a modern shop doesn't have a thermostat, it has a computer. It's called a controller, and in this case it's almost always a Danfoss of the AK-SM 800A series, a Danish box whose job is to let the maintenance technician check the temperatures of fifty shops from his sofa instead of driving round in a van. Convenient, and sensible too: if a display cabinet fails at three in the morning, somebody sees it straight away.

The problem is that this computer has a web page, and that web page, in hundreds of shops, was reachable by anyone on the internet. It's as if the thermostat in your house had a door onto the landing, with the key left in the lock. And as if the key were also printed in the instruction manual: many of the logins used factory passwords, the ones written in the manual you download from the manufacturer's website. After the French attack, researchers put fake controllers online to see who came knocking, and whoever came knocking tried exactly those passwords.

There was no stroke of genius. The main flaw, catalogued as CVE-2025-41450, lets you skip the controller's login screen. It was found by researchers at a security firm, Claroty, along with two others. Danfoss disclosed them in March 2025, published the fix in August 2025, and the American CISA issued an advisory the same year; Claroty's detailed technical report came out in August 2026, complete with a count of the controllers reachable from the internet: thousands. It wasn't even the first time: back in 2023 Dutch researchers had found three vulnerabilities in the same family of devices. Danfoss itself admitted that most of the systems hit were old products no longer receiving updates, and another manufacturer, Copeland, found a flaw in its own end-of-life controllers. A researcher interviewed by the Associated Press put it better than I could:

Nobody broke into these refrigeration systems with a zero-day

And the NCSC, the British cybersecurity agency, in its statement to the AP:

The cyberattack on French supermarkets was a result of exploitation of known vulnerabilities

Translated for those who don't do this for a living: the door had been open for a year and a half, everyone who needed to know knew, and in the end somebody walked in. Surprising, isn't it?

Once inside, the attacker didn't even have to write a malicious program. They pressed “defrost”, the de-icing function every industrial fridge has as standard, and held it down all night. A security expert interviewed by Gizmodo, Lamplmair, put it like this:

A freezer should never accept an instruction to heat to 50°C

Who did it, nobody knows. Two pro-Russian groups, NoName057(16) and Z-Pentest Alliance, claimed it on Telegram, posting what they say are 2,500 lines of data stolen from Danfoss, and then deleted the posts. It's worth what it's worth: NoName habitually claims anything that happens in Europe, and no security agency has confirmed. What the agencies have confirmed is that this isn't a bored teenager: researchers at Lupovis saw days of reconnaissance before the night of 2 November, with login attempts coming from “bulletproof” hosting, the kind that doesn't answer police requests. Somebody did their homework, and chose targets that don't earn a penny. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is still investigating the freezers of more than half a dozen American military commissaries that went haywire in late August, and is coordinating with the French. The FBI and four other federal agencies have published an advisory to cold-chain operators. And the head of British cybersecurity confirmed that in the UK too there has been “a small number” of incidents of the same kind.

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The emails

The mechanism behind the threats against aircraft, as far as the police have said, is disarmingly banal: anonymous emails, sent in bulk to several airports with the list of “mined” flights. The Czech police said the email that reached Prague was addressed to the airport and that similar emails had reached other European hubs. The Danish police, on Friday, in a statement picked up by Reuters:

We are once again at Copenhagen Airport today in connection with threats directed at air traffic

And the office of the French Prime Minister:

An investigation is underway to determine the source of these alerts

In Spain the Guardia Civil received three in twenty minutes, on Air Europa departures from Madrid and Iberia arrivals from Rome and Milan. In Rome, on the other hand, one threat came by telephone to the control tower at Fiumicino. The protocol, at that point, leaves no room: the aircraft lands where it can, fighters escort it if needed, bomb disposal searches it, passengers wait on the apron. It costs tens of thousands of euros per flight and it's done anyway, because the alternative isn't on the table. In the Aer Lingus case, by the way, things went less smoothly than the press told it: according to Prime Minister Lecornu's office the fighters were sent after the pilot had failed to cooperate as expected, and pilot and co-pilot were questioned by the Évreux prosecutor before being allowed to leave. Aer Lingus says they acted impeccably. That too is part of the cost.

The number that puts things back in proportion came from Eurocontrol, the European air traffic body: the 14 flights affected on Thursday were 0.05% of the 26,300 flights on the European network that day. “Minimal” disruption, says Eurocontrol. The “flights in chaos” of the headlines never existed: the thousands of delays circulating in the same days were the normal delays of Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle and Schiphol, which produce them by the hundred every day with or without threats. The real effect of the emails isn't on air traffic. It's on people's heads, and on the coffers of the states.

Who did it, here too, nobody knows. The British government called them “malicious hoax threats”. The European transport commissioner said it's “too early” to say who is behind them, and even whether the episodes are linked to one another. Moscow denied, and there is no evidence of Russian or Iranian involvement, or of groups tied to them. There is actually one jarring note, reported by a single source and which I couldn't verify elsewhere: the threats against flights bound for Rome supposedly came from a group calling itself anti-feminist, which would suggest either several different hands jumping on the bandwagon, or a signature planted there to mislead. A private security analyst, Borie, told the AP that the European focus “could have a Russian angle”, adding straight away:

Iranian hybrid warfare is just as active in certain pockets of Europe

Experts from the various countries will meet in Brussels next week. Allow me to be sceptical: either the data exists, and then it should be made public, or it doesn't, and then there are only suspicions. And filling the headlines with a Russian threat on the basis of suspicions, I don't know whether that's more irresponsible or more reckless.

That said, the precedent everyone has in mind, without saying it too loudly, is 2024: waves of bomb threats against schools and courts in Czechia and Slovakia, about which the head of the Czech intelligence service Michal Koudelka spoke publicly like this:

There is clearly a visible Russian trace

And before that the incendiary parcels in DHL depots in Germany, Poland and the UK, where the European investigation identified 22 suspects recruited in Russia, the Baltics and Ukraine, often people in financial trouble paid for an odd job. That is evidence. This, for now, is an analogy. The difference between the two is the only thing that matters, and it's worth holding on to.

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The leaflet

And then there is the United Kingdom, where for two weeks you get the impression that the government is talking to its citizens non-stop. It isn't. The “Be Ready” campaign wasn't born this week. It had been planned at the start of the year by the Starmer government, announced in September, and was published on 22 October. And it's the British version of something the Nordic countries have done for decades: Sweden sends every household a leaflet titled “If crisis or war comes”, and has done so since 1943. A report by former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö to the European Commission, two years ago, recommended exactly those 72 hours of household self-sufficiency to all member states, and Brussels adopted it. The context is declared: last year's British national security strategy explicitly names Russian aggression, hostile cyber activity and sabotage. It's no secret, it's a public document.

On 23 October the Prime Minister defended the advice saying that “unexpected events” are becoming more common, and the Defence Secretary had his say. From there on, though, it's no longer the government talking. It's the press parroting (if only it were stochastic...) whatever sells copies. A site that checks these things, Prepared Britain, looked at the GOV.UK page on 3, 4, 5 and 6 November: no new guidance, no emergency instruction, no department telling anyone to prepare for a war. The “attacks” in the Independent's headline were a word lifted from the campaign's original text, which talks about bad weather, blackouts, water and phone outages. The Express's “14 items” were the list of 22 October. The “4 foods” came from Reddit. And in the middle of all this, the Met Office's ordinary weather bulletins ended up in the same notification stream, indistinguishable from the rest.

The only truly new thing on the British front is the speech by the head of the NCSC, the cybersecurity agency, who in the same week as the fridges talked about empty shelves and lights going out:

When food isn't on shelves, lights aren't on, businesses have gone under

He said that one day we might have to explain why we had seen the signs and not chosen well, and confirmed the British incidents tied to the controllers. That one is an explicit link between the fridges and the wind-up radio. Made by someone who has the data to make it.

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Three actors, but no director?

Having got this far, the temptation is strong, and I admit I was the first to feel it: all of this looks orchestrated. Fridges, planes, leaflets, all in the same fortnight, all pushing in the same direction: get used to it, get ready, something is about to happen that we know about and you don't. It's a legitimate hypothesis, and I put it on the table as such.

Let's call it hypothesis A: the alarms are manufactured, or inflated, to prepare the population for a crisis someone has already decided on or already sees coming. In its favour: the timing, the convergence of interests, the fact that Europe's military chiefs openly talk about a possible confrontation with Russia within a few years. The German chief of defence Carsten Breuer, in May:

Various indicators all point to one possible date of a Russian attack on NATO: 2029

and he adds “or even earlier”. His minister Boris Pistorius:

By 2029 or 2030, Putin could strengthen his army to the point where Russia would be capable of striking NATO

The French chief, Burkhard, says 2030. And the Czech general Karel Řehka:

Most of us, defense chiefs, share a similar view

Against it, though, weigh the fridges. There you have stock destroyed by the million, private companies losing real money, a supplier sending technicians out at one in the morning, blood bags at risk, American bases hit since August. It's a physical event, with real economic victims and a technical vector that anyone with a search engine for connected devices and the Danfoss manual can verify for themselves. No European government has any interest in burning its own supermarkets to educate public opinion, and it would be a strangely expensive and traceable way of doing it. The same goes for the emails: every diversion with Gripens in the air costs the state money and embarrassment, and the day one of those emails were traced back to a friendly service the political damage would be devastating. The cost-benefit ratio of “doing it to yourself” is terrible.

Then there's a number that weighs against the very premise of a “fortnight of stage direction”. Forescout counted more than twenty claimed attacks on refrigeration systems between January and October 2026, and the most active groups were precisely Z-Pentest and NoName057(16). This isn't a sudden escalation: it's the visible tail of a campaign that has been running for a year, and that only became news when it hit enough supermarkets on the same night. The feeling of orchestration comes from the media's attention threshold, not from the real density of events.

Hypothesis B: an adversary, or more than one, does real things that cost next to nothing. One email to twenty airports costs zero and moves the fighters of three countries. One manual password on a 2015 controller empties a hundred supermarkets in a night. Governments, which have long expected this phase and have written it into their documents, use the incidents to push a preparedness they already had on the agenda. It's called communicative opportunism, and it needs no director. And the media, which live on repetition, multiply the same web page into ten headlines. Three different trades, three different interests, nobody coordinating with anybody. It looks orchestrated because the interests converge, not because somebody aligned them.

And there's a third box the two-way scheme doesn't allow for. Call it hypothesis A': there is a single director, but it's the adversary. Fridges and emails are one package of low-cost hybrid warfare, calibrated to produce in democracies exactly the effect “the government is preparing us for something”. In that case the timing would be deliberate, and hypothesis B would be true for the governments and false for the attackers. It's cheaper than hypothesis A, because it doesn't require anyone to burn their own supermarkets, and more unsettling than hypothesis B, because the target isn't the stock but the trust.

The problem with hypothesis A is that it can't be refuted: any alarm confirms it, and the absence of alarms doesn't weaken it. That old genius Popper would say that a hypothesis which cannot be refuted is not a scientific hypothesis; I'd say, more simply, that it's a feeling. To keep it alive honestly you have to turn it into predictions that can fail.

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What to watch carefully, from here to six months out

If hypothesis A is true, we should see: threats that are never attributed to anyone, or attributed vaguely and without names; claims like NoName's taken at face value without verification; preparedness campaigns that accelerate regardless of whether the incidents continue or stop. Careful, though: the first two would happen even if B were true and the investigations were simply slow or classified. The only prediction that truly tells A from B is the third: if the incidents fall off and Be Ready accelerates anyway, changes tone or finds new emergencies to cite, column A fills up for real. If hypothesis B is true, we should see: arrests with first and last names, like the 22 of the incendiary parcels; a public technical report on the controllers, with the addresses and infrastructure of whoever got in; and a drop in the British alarms once the media window closes and the GOV.UK page goes back to being a GOV.UK page.

Keep count. I will too, and if in six months the column that has filled up is the wrong one, I'll try to write it here.

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References and further reading

The fridges

• Gizmodo, supermarket freezers across Europe hit with another cyberattack – the second wave, 2-3 November, with the Lamplmair quote.
• CNBC, supermarket fridges hack and Axios, Europe supermarket fridges attacks – overview of the countries and chains hit.
• PBS NewsHour, what to know about another cyberattack on European supermarket fridges – the AP piece with the NCSC statement and the “no zero-day” quote.
• The Hacker News, attackers heat French supermarket fridges – the October French attack, first technical account.
• SentinelOne Labs, Defrost and Disrupt – assessment of the refrigeration attacks, the Forescout count and the claiming groups.
• Aviatrix threat research, Danfoss controllers and Archyde, attackers target Danfoss controllers – the AK-SM 800A, CVE-2025-41450 and the default passwords.
• IndexBox, hackers targeted Europe's internet-connected fridges before the coordinated attacks and Tildee, cyberattacks target refrigeration systems – the Lupovis reconnaissance and the blood bank supplier.
• Newsweek, FBI issues warning as hackers target grocery store refrigerators and Latin Times, cyberattack on refrigeration systems – the FBI advisory and the US military commissaries.

The hoax threats

• CNN live, bomb threats on flights across Europe and Al Jazeera, hoax or bomb threats: what we know – day-by-day count of the threats.
• NPR, Europe flights hoaxes and ABC News, bomb threats targeting flights and media outlets continue – the AP reporting with the Eurocontrol figure and the Borie quote.
• NBC News, Dublin-Rome flight diverted, Euronews, Airbus from Dublin to Rome diverted to France and Irish Times, Aer Lingus pilots questioned – the Évreux diversion and what followed.

Be Ready

• Prepared Britain, government preparedness campaign and Prepared Britain, UK government stockpile food and water – the daily checks on the GOV.UK page.
• ADS Advance, UK national resilience campaign and The National, UK government advises stockpiling water and food – the launch of 22 October.
• Nation.Cymru, Burnham defends stockpiling advice and LBC, Burnham on flooding and stockpiling – the “unexpected events” line and the beans.
• NationalWorld, UK cyber attack warning and emergency kit – an example of how the page was re-headlined.
• Met Office, UK warnings – the ordinary bulletins that ended up in the same stream.
• Swedish government, the new edition of “If crisis or war comes” and MSB press release on the leaflet (in Swedish).
• EU Law Live, civil and military preparedness after the Niinistö report and European Parliament briefing on preparedness – the 72-hour recommendation.

The precedents and the generals

• Euronews, Slovakia detains two over alleged hybrid attacks – the 2024 bomb threats in Czechia and Slovakia.
• Yahoo News, Russia behind parcel fires in UK – the DHL incendiary parcels and the 22 suspects.
• European Pravda, Breuer on 2029, NV, Czech general warns Russia could attack NATO by 2029 and United24, French military chief warns Russia could strike NATO by 2030 – the defence chiefs' statements.

#Europe #Cybersecurity #HybridWarfare #BeReady #Danfoss #Infrastructure #Media #Journalism #Writing

La vie solitaire de É. Sambòko prend la suite des #Didascalies de Fenêtre sur ville. Un personnage est apparu, qui déplace la perspective de la ville et de son écriteur. Sambòko veut dire “chaussure” mais aussi “énigme” si l’on oriente autrement l’accent. Où va É. Sambòko ? L’on ne sait.

La vie solitaire de É. Sambòko – 5.1

Parfois rien n’advient du vide, celui de soi ou du dehors, qui est le même. Une forme de l’attente se glisse dans le corps d’Éros. L’œil se tient seul à la fenêtre, au bord du trou de la ville où débaroulent les choses. Et demeure à regarder le quoi, cette matière du monde, la multiple surface de ce quoi, aussi profonde que l’insensé d’un rêve. Durant des jours ou des semaines d’une éternité désœuvrée sous la pesanteur de l’air.

Courte liste d’oiseaux que dévorent les nuages, l’aréquier planté là dans une cour odorée par les eaux de vaisselle, les mousses d’un savon contre les vers de peau, le champ tendu des tôles entre manguiers : image devant Éros, que détrempent les pluies, racornit le soleil. Image dans la tête, trou de la ville ou puits des orpailleurs tombés sous le ciel blanc, on y traque le fil, la veine, on s’y ensevelit à déganguer les mots, en ne tirant souvent que terre et d’anciens os de captifs ou de chiens.

#LaviesolitairedeÉSambòko

I sometimes get frustrated by all the things that I need to do after I get out of bed, and before I can sit down here to do this. Sometimes it paralyzes me in bed, and I linger there under the warm blankets longer than I should. Now that I'm sitting here doing this, after doing all the things; I don't know what to type.

Pills, work, vaccines, therapy and doctor visits are my life right now. I suppose I'm getting shit done. Flu and covid shots last weekend. 3rd Hepatitis AB vax later today. I have had all the shots I can get now I suppose. Covid, flu, shingles, tetanus, and hepatitis all within a year.

Over three weeks now with these pills. Venlafaxine XR 37.5. Selective serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. Yesterday was my appointment to reassess the dosage, and to see how things are going. My response to them is pretty typical. Felt like shit at first, and now I don't feel much different, but sort of. Not necessarily better. Just weird. Still just weird. Tired. It has not been long enough to really know for sure how, or if, they are going to help me. Another 30 days at the lowest dose possible. By then I will know more. These pills are a subtle and slow altering of brain chemistry balance. Not like the instantaneous euphoric effects of narcotics, or a few quick shots of whiskey. The waiting to see is annoying.

It makes me think of weight loss and fitness. How when you begin altering eating habits and exercising, there are no results for quite awhile at first. You have to be consistent with it all for days and days, and have faith in the process.

I don't think I'm any more fucked up than I have been since I started thinking. So why now? Why am I getting therapy and taking pills now? Today is day 676 of sobriety, and I'm old(er). I don't have the option of medicating with dangerous amounts of alcohol. Well, I suppose that is not exactly true. The option is always there. But no. Realistically, if I want to continue being alive it is not an option. I think of this as like having strains and injury at 55 compared to at 30 or younger. Strains and injury take longer to heal now. It seems the same with these mental issues, or w'tvr'tf this should be called. Only not like it at all. This is not an achy muscle impairing my range of motion for more days than it used to when I was younger. I can work through that. This thing has become too much. I can't get over it. Or work through it. I don't even really know what IT is. I am not out of, or in control. Constantly tripping and stumbling but never falling. I need help, so I'm getting help.

Assis par terre. Regardant les fossoyeurs. Pas de larmes. Le regard épuisé et stoïque. Le regard de quelqu’un qui semble avoir tout vu.

Quand on a vu partir tant de personnes, comment trouver la force de continuer. Il y arrive.

Enterrer la personne avec qui l’on a passé 70 ans de sa vie. C’est une sensation que je ne connaîtrai jamais.

L’univers de mes grands-parents n’est pas le mien. Nos prismes sont differents. Notre vie est différente. Mais je ne sais pas si d’aujourd’hui est la meilleure époque face.

I just finished this book and thought it was great, in parts outstanding . The author went to a special school program for autistic kids in 1982 and he tracked down a few of his former students and teachers in the early 2000s and writes about them. But since he's autistic himself and has made a career in government policy analysis, he is also able to think through aspects of the autistic experience of the world. It's really insightful, sweet and – in parts – sad. Also quite interesting how the general notion of autism from 20 years ago is already very outdated. The title seems a little heavy tongue-in-cheek, but it refers to a phrase one of the kids repeated over and over back in school as echolalia.