Wang Fang 萬芳 é uma cantora taiwanesa que conquistou um lugar permanente na minha playlist diária. Embora Aqueles Belos Encontros 那些美麗的相遇 não seja o seu trabalho mais recente, seu estilo delicado cria uma atmosfera íntima que, mesmo anos após o lançamento, ainda emociona como no primeiro dia.

#notas #maio #playlist

This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on April 24, 2026.

Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon

By James Lovegrove – Titan Books – November 19, 2024

Review by Robin Marx

In Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon by James Lovegrove, Conan the Cimmerian, still mourning his pirate queen Bêlit, trades the seas for the desert, languishing in the Shemitish city-state of Eruk. His last adventure—an attempted burglary foiled by a sabretooth tiger—having ended in disaster, the barbarian searches for a distraction. One such opportunity presents itself when Conan makes the acquaintance of Hunwulf and Gudrun, an eloped couple on the run from their former tribe. The family and Conan become fast friends after his timely intervention in a tavern brawl, and Conan becomes further intrigued when he meets their young son Bjørn, who demonstrates an uncanny ability to control animals. Conan agrees to look after the boy while his parents stage a final confrontation with their implacable tribal stalkers. Events take a turn for the unexpected, however, when an entirely new threat emerges and the boy is snatched away by a winged reptilian creature. Vowing to make things right, Conan accompanies the bereft parents on a desperate search for the abducted boy. The trail takes them into the blighted Rotlands deep within Kush, where a secretive religious sect has dark designs for Bjørn and a host of other kidnapped children, each harboring their own budding supernatural talent. Stakes quickly escalate, and Conan finds himself pitted against a truly apocalyptic threat.

Following Blood of the Serpent by S. M. Stirling and City of the Dead by John C. Hocking, Cult of the Obsidian Moon is the third release in Titan Books’ series of original Conan the Barbarian pastiche novels. Where Blood of the Serpent was conceived as a direct prequel to the classic Robert E. Howard-penned novella “Red Nails” (1936) and City of the Dead paired a reprint of an acclaimed novel from the series’ Tor Books era with a new sequel, Cult of the Obsidian Moon also introduces a new element to the Titan Books line by tying it into Titan Comics’ Conan the Barbarian storylines. Subtitled “A Black Stone Novel,” Cult of the Obsidian Moon includes several motifs from the first year of the Conan the Barbarian comic and its culminating Battle of the Black Stone miniseries. The recurring carved eye sigil from the comics has a prominent presence in Cult of the Obsidian Moon, and the character James Allison, a 1930s pulp writer who bases adventure stories on remembered past lives, likewise appears in both Battle of the Black Stone and the framing story that bookends Cult of the Obsidian Moon. These references mostly operate at the level of Easter Eggs, however, and non-comic readers need not worry about having their enjoyment of the novel harmed by unfamiliarity with the Titan Comics Conan the Barbarian storylines.

While the comic references are interesting, Cult of the Obsidian Moon doesn’t give readers the best first impression. The James Allison framing story feels mostly extraneous. Bjørn’s father Hunwulf is presented as one of Allison’s remembered past lives (and, indeed, the Cult of the Obsidian Moon novel as a whole is fictionally presented as a manuscript written by Allison and submitted for publication at a pulp magazine called Anomalous Adventures), and Hunwulf himself has a similar ability to experience other incarnations, but these aspects of the story feel underutilized. Conan is the primary viewpoint character, not Allison-recalling-Hunwulf, and substantial stretches of the novel occur in Hunwulf’s absence. Hunwulf’s supernatural talent briefly comes in handy while attempting to avoid the otherwise unpredictable hazards of the Rotlands, but it fails to reappear in the late chapters of the book. Excising both the framing story and Hunwulf’s unusual ability would have given the book a tighter focus, reduced unnecessary page count, and would have made remaining supernatural elements feel more special due to their scarcity. It feels like the book doesn’t really get started until Conan and his newfound friends are forced to leave Shem.

The first third of the book feels regrettably aimless, but once Bjørn is abducted the narrative shifts into high gear. The remainder of the story is a much faster-paced rescue mission in hostile territory. The Rotlands is a sort of living cancer on the land, full of threatening flora and fauna, where any misstep can end in death. When they finally reveal themselves, the reptilian Folk of the Featherless Wing (as the titular Cult of the Obsidian Moon call themselves) boast an interesting backstory and motivations that go above and beyond those of typical evil religious groups in fantasy fiction. And while James Lovegrove’s wisecracking depiction of Conan occasionally feels awkward compared to Hocking’s handling of the barbarian in City of the Dead, Lovegrove does succeed in delivering bloody, spectacular combat. The climactic battle scene starts off exciting and quickly escalates even further, with the odds swinging wildly against the heroes. Readers who enjoy cosmic horror elements in their sword & sorcery adventures will also find a lot to enjoy here as the nature of the Obsidian Moon and the source of the blight at the heart of the Rotlands is revealed.

If you can get past the sluggish start, Cult of the Obsidian Moon is a worthy addition to the body of Conan the Barbarian pastiche work. The early, meandering chapters could have benefited from some tightening, but once the story is truly underway it quickly escalates and accelerates, throwing itself heedlessly to a bloody, action-packed and horror-filled climax.

#ReviewArchive #BookReview #Fantasy #SwordAndSorcery #ConanTheBarbarian #ConanCultOfTheObsidianMoon #JamesLovegrove #GrimdarkMagazine #GdM

Rejection is a natural part of the submission process, but that doesn't mean it's enjoyable. And what's frustrating about rejections isn't just the fact that you hear “no” a lot (though that's not great, either), but that it's often very difficult to figure out why your work got rejected. A lot of publications send form rejections. There are even some that don't send rejections at all—you just know they've turned you down after you wait for a few months without hearing a “yes.“ 

I see both sides of the publication process as a literary journal editor who also regularly submits work to other markets. I absolutely understand why many journals send form rejections. After Happy Hour sends a good number ourselves. And we do this for a few main reasons:

1. With just a handful of people reviewing the roughly 900-1,000 submissions we receive each reading period, we simply don't have the time and mental energy to provide personalized feedback to every single person who submits. 

2. If we did try to personalize each rejection, our response times would shoot up from the 30-ish day average we have now to at least double that, and probably longer, so we'd just shift the source of frustration for submitters from one area to another. 

3. Not everybody wants to hear what editors honestly think about their work. We do send personalized rejections to some submissions, and that feedback hasn't always been especially well-received. The submitter likely thinks the piece they submitted is ready for publication. When I disagree (which happens with 50-75% of what we get in an average reading period), sometimes the most polite option isn't to point out what I see as the work's flaws, but to simply tell the submitter that the piece isn't a good fit for us and leave the details of “why” vague. 

4. Creative work is subjective. Sometimes, submissions do have more objective errors with grammar and spelling, but in many cases pieces are competenty written—they're just not what I look for in a story or poem. But they could well be exactly what some other editor is looking for. Me sharing my opinion won't necessarily help the submitter get their work published if they send it to a different editor with different stylistic preferences. 

...I'm also aware, as an editor, that many times when I send the form rejection that the piece “isn't a good fit” that's not a euphemism. We get a lot of work submitted to us that is well-written and publication ready, but just doesn't match either our general aesthetic as a journal, or the other work we've already accepted for the upcoming issue. This is particularly likely to be the case for things we review later in a reading period, after a good portion of the issue's work has already been finalized. Sometimes, a piece is both well-written and a match for our vibe, but is very similar to something else we got that was similarly high-quality. This happens most often during our theme issues. In our “Animals” issue, for instance, we got a lot of really great horse poems and we didn't want it to be over-focused on any one animal. So we ended up choosing the one we liked the best out of all of them, and saying no to some pieces for the simple reason “not our favorite horse poem.” Even if we'd told the submitter that (and I think in a couple letters we did), that's not necessarily useful info for sending out the poem again in the future. 

All of that said, from the writer's standpoint, understanding why editors send form rejections isn't all that much solace when I receive them. It can be hard to figure out if getting multiple rejections means the story needs more work before it's ready to publish, if I'm sending it to the wrong markets, or if I just didn't happen to catch the right editor at the right time. Over time, though, I have learned that even form letters can give you some insight, especially in aggregate when you've accrued multiple rejections on the same work. 

What you can't infer from form rejections

First and foremost: when you get a form rejection, don't automatically assume that means the editors hated your work. I'll give some context from After Happy Hour here. We get enough submissions now that we've shifted to a three-tier rejection approach. Pieces that are rejected after the first read get a very straightforward “not a fit” form rejection, regardless of why we voted no. Whether we think it still needs a lot of work, or we think it's publication ready but just not a fit for what we do, if the editors all agree on that after our first pass, those submitters get the same letter. Our second-tier rejection is more encouraging, and gets sent to any submitters whose work received positive votes during the initial review but was rejected during later discussions or second passes. A select few pieces that make it very close to publication will get more detailed and personalized feedback if we feel our input could actually be useful for them. This doesn't necessarily mean we enjoyed reading it more than pieces that received form rejections. 

The tl;dr here: when it comes to After Happy Hour, a form rejection of either tier doesn't necessarily mean you should edit your piece before sending it out again. It could as easily be a market mis-match. I also know there are some journals that use a simpler approach, and send all rejected pieces the same form rejection. As a submitter, you have no way of knowing if that's the case.

So what can you learn from rejections?

What I've found as a submitter is that a single rejection isn't going to give you much insight on its own. What can really help is when you start to see patterns across multiple rejections. This is another reason I advocate for tracking your submissions in some way, because it gives you a chance to look back over all of your replies and potentially see those patterns that you would overlook otherwise. 

I'll start by saying that I personally don't start practicing rejectomancy until I've gotten at least 5-6 rejections for a story. Usually, this means that every place I sent it to during my first 1-2 rounds of submission said no, which to me feels like a good point to pause and assess. When I do, here are the main things I look at. 

Personalized or encouraging rejections

Every once in a while you'll get lucky and get a truly personalized response from an editor, that spells out exactly what they liked about the piece and why they still decided not to publish it. Whatever the content of this message, it means you got fairly close, and there will sometimes be very specific information about what the editors feel could be improved or their reasons for rejection. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to make edits based on what the editor says. There have been cases where an editor suggested changing something that I saw as a key aspect of the story, and what I learned from the personalized rejection was more of a market fit insight about what kinds of things are or aren't a good fit for that publication. But the point is, getting that kind of specific insight takes all of the guesswork out of figuring out what that editor was looking for. 

Even when you don't get this kind of insight, though, having one or more higher-tier rejections in the mix tells you the piece is on the right track. If they don't say anything else about it, I will take this as a signal that one of two things is going on:

1. The story is publication-ready but just hasn't hit the right editors at the right time. The fix: refine how I'm picking the places I send to, then send it out for another round.

2. The story is very close to publication-ready, but needs one more editing pass to address lingering small issues that are resulting in its rejection late in the review process. The fix: Do another round of edits then send it out for another round to markets similar to the one that sent the personal. 

When a story had one or more non-specific short-list notifications or high-tier rejections in its last round of submissions, I'll give the story another pass. If I don't see any obvious issues, I'll send it along to a beta reader who hasn't read a previous version of the story for a second opinion. Sometimes, fresh eyes can spot issues that the author didn't notice because they're too close to the piece. If the beta reader doesn't spot any issues, either, then I'll lean toward it being cause for a slight market fit tweak.

One last point here is that it can sometimes be difficult to tell when you've gotten a second-tier form rejection, and when the journal's standard form rejection is just really positive and nice. The Rejection Wiki can be useful in figuring that out. Not every journal is in their database, but they have a lot of real rejection letters that have been reported by actual submitters, which can help you to figure out whether you got the standard form or something different. 

Rejection speed relative to the publication's average

Journals can have vastly different timelines for getting back to submitters. Some places respond to all submissions within a week or less. For others, it's a fast rejection if it only takes three months, and they might hang on to things they're considering for six months or more. Because of that, you really can't infer much from the rejection speed in a vacuum, or really compare them between markets. But you can sometimes get useful info by comparing the speed of your rejection to the journal's usual habits. 

I find Duotrope to be the most useful tool for getting this information, though the Submission Grinder has similar information if you're looking for a free option. Go to the market's listing and scroll down to the bottom, where you'll see a graph that looks like this:

What can you take away from this? For one thing, the earliest acceptances come after around 50 days. This suggests that strong pieces get multiple reads or go through more than one round of review before that decision is made. Faster rejections likely didn't make it out of that first round of review, but rejections that come in around the 60-day mark or later, you likely can infer that these got beyond the initial screening review before they decided to say “no” to it. 

Now, let's say you see a graph like this:

Here, there's a much tighter acceptance window relative to the timeline of rejections. If I were interpreting this, I would say rejections falling in the 40-60 day range were likely eliminated on the editors' first pass. Those concurrent with that rejection window were likely ones that caught the editors' attention but didn't stand up to the strength of the other options when they were making their first acceptance decisions. The rejections in the 90+ day range, I would say are “bubble stories”—ones that the editors really liked, but not quite as much as the ones they accepted, but that they were hanging on to in case they ended up having more room in the issue, or if one of the pieces they accepted was actually published elsewhere and the author forgot to withdraw it (which happens more often than you might think). 

So, to phrase this another way: 

• If I received a 45-day rejection from Baubles From Bones, I'd assume that story wasn't ever in strong consideration and take that as a signal that either a) it was a bad market fit or b) the story might need another editing pass. 
• If I received a 75-day rejection, I'd assume the story made it out of the initial slush but was on the weaker end of the editors' short-list. I'd take a similar message from this as from an encouraging form rejection: that it was either a slight issue of market fit, or the story could use one more polishing pass.
• If I received a 95-day rejection, I'd take this to mean the story was in the conversation for publication but may have been a true “doesn't quite fit the issue” situation. In this case, I would take this as a signal that I should submit the story for another round to similar markets, and likely don't need to revise the story more first. 

Now, I will say that not every market's responses can be interpreted like this. If you see a graph like this, for instance:

...you really can't get any sense of what's happening behind the scenes from that, at least not as it applies to interpreting the speed of a response. If you hear from them sooner than 90 days it's likely good news, but the wide range of reported acceptance times makes it tricky to get any insights from the timing of a rejection. 

Acceptance rate and response speed trends

Here's where I feel like I get the most useful information that actually helps me figure out what I should do next to improve the story's acceptance odds on its next time out. I look at all of the rejections it's received since its last major edit, and consider things like:

• What is the average reported acceptance percentage for the markets that sent the rejections? I'll usually use Duotrope's info for this, since I find it to be the most accurate of all the marketplace databases. If the average acceptance percentage is lower than 2%, I'm less likely to consider form rejections a cause to do further revisions. Journals in that range often turn down well-written, publication-ready stories—not a guarantee that describes the story I submitted, but the odds are higher the rejection was fit-based and another publication would happily print the story as-is. If the average acceptance percentage is 5% or higher, then I'm more likely to take straight form rejections as a sign I should revisit the story before submitting it again.
• What percentage of the rejections were on the fast side for their markets? Many journals use a multi-level or multi-stage review process, so it often is true that the stories rejected on the faster end of their range were eliminated after the first review. There are a lot of reasons that could happen within any one journal, but if that's happening consistently across multiple editor teams, that is more likely a sign something's awry in the story. 
• What is similar/different about the markets in this submission round? This can be a good way to tweak the markets you're choosing to send to. So if I'm submitting a dark fantasy story, and the first round of rejections all came from straight fantasy markets, I might consider looking for more horror-oriented markets, or places that specifically say they're looking for gritty or dark work.

Of course, as you're probably inferring from all of this, rejectomancy is far from an exact science. But hopefully this insight into how make sense of my rejections will help you to gain more guidance from the rejections you get. 

See similar posts:

#Submissions #PublicationAdvice

On a morning in Yogyakarta in early 2026, a food delivery rider named Lia was up before sunrise. She is 33, a mother of two, and the day started the way every day starts: breakfast for the children, uniforms located, school bags checked, the smaller one coaxed into shoes. Only once the front door had closed behind them did she open the app and begin looking for work. The algorithm that had ignored her for the previous ninety minutes registered her presence and began handing her orders. By the time she returned home that evening to cook, to clean, to help with homework, to do the second shift that nobody paid her for, the app had logged two cancellations against her name. One was a safety decision. The other was a child's fever. Neither was an excuse the system recognised. Her acceptance rate had slipped, her priority score with it, and the next morning the best-paying jobs would go to someone with fewer domestic obligations. Lia does not know exactly how the algorithm ranks her. No one does. The rules are not published. There is no one she can write to. There is, strictly speaking, no one.

Lia's story opens a peer-reviewed analysis published in The Conversation on 12 April 2026 by Suci Lestari Yuana, a lecturer at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, and an Innovation Studies PhD from Utrecht University. The analysis, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Indonesian gig workers, makes an argument the academic literature has been edging toward for the better part of a decade and which has now, in 2026, become impossible to ignore. Algorithmic management of platform labour, presented by its designers as neutral, is in operation a machine for systematically disadvantaging anyone whose working pattern deviates from the profile of a worker with no care responsibilities. That profile, in Indonesia and almost everywhere else, is male. The discrimination is not encoded; it is structural. The algorithm does not hate women. It simply does not see them.

The Indonesian case is one node in a much larger story. On 25 December 2025, around 40,000 delivery workers across Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and a scatter of smaller cities walked off the platforms of Swiggy, Zomato, Zepto, Blinkit, Amazon, and Flipkart in a flash strike that delayed roughly half of Indian food and quick-commerce orders for a day. The strike was organised by the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers and the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union, fronted by Shaik Salauddin, the Telangana Four-Wheeler Drivers' Association veteran who has spent a decade turning ride-hail grievance into pan-Indian labour infrastructure. The demand list read like a catalogue of what algorithmic management produces when there is nothing to restrain it: transparent wage structures, an end to the ten-minute quick-commerce delivery target that had been killing couriers, guaranteed work allocation, mandatory rest breaks, a real grievance mechanism, and an end to deactivations that arrived without warning and without appeal. A follow-up strike on New Year's Eve extended the point. Within weeks the Union Government of India had directed the quick-commerce platforms to stop advertising the ten-minute promise. That was the easy win. Everything else is still being fought for.

And then, published in February 2026 in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a Nature portfolio journal, a configurational analysis of 316 longitudinally surveyed platform gig workers concluded what workers have been saying all along. Perceptions of decent work on AI-managed platforms emerge through a handful of distinct pathways, almost all of which depend on worker characteristics the platform algorithms do not register, cannot see, and do not accommodate. The study did not say the platforms are uniformly terrible. It said, more awkwardly, that whether a worker experiences anything resembling the International Labour Organization's concept of decent work is determined by the collision between that worker's life circumstances and an algorithm that does not know those circumstances exist.

Put the three documents side by side and a single question rises out of them. If algorithmic management is now the dominant form of labour oversight for hundreds of millions of people globally, if the entity issuing pay, allocating tasks, assessing performance, and terminating contracts is a system rather than a person, what would it mean to say that those people have labour rights at all?

The Shape of the Void

The most useful way to understand the legal position of a gig worker managed by an algorithm is to begin with what they do not have. They do not have an employer in the sense that labour law in most jurisdictions recognises. They do not have a contract of employment. They do not have the protections attached to that contract: minimum wage floors, statutory leave, sickness pay, notice periods, redundancy procedures, anti-discrimination duties, pension contributions, collective bargaining recognition. What they have, in the standard platform model, is a commercial relationship with a company that characterises them as an independent contractor or, in the Indonesian idiom used by ride-hailing platforms, a “partner.”

The partnership is one-sided. The worker accepts terms of service they cannot negotiate. The platform can change those terms at any time and typically does. Pay per task is set by a dynamic pricing algorithm whose inputs the worker cannot see and whose outputs they cannot predict. Work is allocated by a matching algorithm that considers factors the platform describes vaguely as availability, reliability, and proximity, and which in practice include acceptance history, ratings averages, and responsiveness windows that only loosely track what a worker might recognise as merit. Penalties for unavailability, late delivery, low ratings, or customer complaints are applied without a hearing. Deactivation, the platform term for sacking, can be triggered by a single passenger complaint, by a fraud-detection model's pattern match, or by an opaque review whose outcome arrives in a template email. There is, in most cases, no right of appeal that an impartial reader would recognise as meaningful.

This is the void the legal system has not yet filled. The 2025 Human Rights Watch report The Gig Trap, which examined seven major American platforms including Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber, found that six of the seven used algorithms with opaque rules to determine pay and assign jobs, that workers routinely did not know what they would earn until after completing a task, that Texas gig workers surveyed earned nearly 30 per cent below the federal minimum wage and roughly 70 per cent below the MIT-estimated Texas living wage, and that deactivation without warning was a structural feature of the industry rather than an aberration. Of the 65 workers Human Rights Watch surveyed who feared deactivation, 40 had already experienced it. The Fairwork 2025 United States ratings, titled When AI Eats the Manager and produced by the Oxford Internet Institute with the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, found that the majority of the eleven platforms assessed, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart, could not evidence they met the minimum thresholds of any of Fairwork's five principles: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management, and fair representation.

Three things follow from this architecture. First, the decision-maker is a system. Human intervention is present somewhere in the loop, but as Amsterdam's Court of Appeal found in 2023 in its judgment on the Drivers v. Uber and Ola cases, a human signature on a termination decision produced by a model does not count as meaningful review when the reviewer in practice does little more than endorse the algorithmic output. The Court called it a “purely symbolic act.” Second, the decision is opaque. The worker cannot know why a rate fell, why an order went to someone else, why an account was suspended. The rules are trade secrets; the training data is private; the weightings are proprietary. Third, the decision is unappealable in the sense that would matter to a lawyer. There is no tribunal. There is a support chat, often another bot, and a form. If the form does not help, the worker's recourse is to find another platform.

Contract law applies. Consumer protection law applies at the margins. Data protection law, in jurisdictions that have it, applies in a way that is slowly becoming useful. But the dense, historically accumulated body of labour law, the workplace-specific settlement Western democracies spent a century building and much of the rest of the world has been extending imperfectly ever since, does not. The gig worker managed by an algorithm stands in a relation to their livelihood that looks, from one angle, like self-employment, from another, like serfdom, and from a third, like nothing the law has seen before.

What Algorithmic Wage Discrimination Actually Looks Like

The scholar who has done most to name the pay side of this problem is Veena Dubal, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, whose 2023 Columbia Law Review paper On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination coined the term and grounded it in nearly a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with ride-hail drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dubal's core observation is almost embarrassing in its plainness. Platforms that once paid a flat per-mile or per-minute rate now use machine learning to personalise pay. Two drivers working the same hours in the same city with the same skills can earn strikingly different amounts. Uber's own research, which Dubal catalogued, found that drivers who work longer make less per hour. The variable-rate structure is not an accident; it is an extraction mechanism. The model learns which drivers will accept which jobs at which prices and squeezes each one as far as the model's predictions say they will accept.

Other sources have corroborated it. Research published by the University of Oxford in partnership with Worker Info Exchange, the UK non-profit founded by James Farrar, the former Uber driver who was a claimant in the UK Supreme Court case Uber BV v. Aslam, found that 82 per cent of UK Uber drivers earn less per hour after the introduction of dynamic pay and that the platform's commission on fares now often exceeds 50 per cent, against a previous flat rate of 25 per cent. Worker Info Exchange has since issued Uber a Letter Before Action on behalf of drivers in the UK and Europe, challenging the dynamic pay system as unlawful. It is the first collective legal action in Europe to take direct aim at personalised algorithmic pay.

The Indonesian story is structurally the same but plays out against a different backdrop. Yuana's fieldwork describes women delivery riders like Lia and single-mother riders like Cinthia, whose ability to work is governed by the hours when children are at school or asleep, and ride-hailing drivers like Yanti, the 43-year-old in Yogyakarta who messages male passengers before pick-up to announce, defensively and truthfully, that their driver is a woman. Many cancel. The app records those cancellations. It does not record why. Yanti's acceptance rate falls. Her priority in the matching queue falls. Her earnings fall. She avoids late-night work, because working until three in the morning in Yogyakarta is not a safety-neutral choice for a woman, and the late-night multiplier bonuses that inflate male drivers' weekly totals stay out of reach. The algorithm is not hostile to Yanti. It is structurally indifferent to the fact of being Yanti. In Dubal's vocabulary, Yanti is being wage-discriminated against by a system that has never heard her name.

The Nature study from February 2026 puts empirical scaffolding under this picture. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on 316 longitudinally surveyed gig workers, the authors identified a configuration they labelled, in the clinical language of the genre, the “deep acting-female gig worker” pathway to perceived decent work. In English: women who manage to experience their platform labour as dignified tend to do so only when they can perform sustained emotional regulation, mostly in their interactions with customers, to compensate for structural conditions the algorithm imposes on them. The decent-work perception is bought at the cost of additional unpaid emotional labour layered on top of unpaid domestic labour on top of the paid work that brings food to someone's door. That is three shifts. The algorithm sees the third.

The Twelve Hundred Drivers and the Robot Judge

The legal frontier on which all of this is being fought in 2026 is data protection. It is a surprising place for the fight to have landed. Data protection law was not written as labour law. But the drafters of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, in one of the more consequential last-minute additions to the 2016 text, included Article 22, which gives data subjects the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal or similarly significant effects, subject to narrow exceptions with meaningful safeguards. The drafters did not have platform workers in mind. Their concern was credit scoring and automated profiling. But the gig economy has proved to be the terrain on which Article 22 is doing its most strenuous work.

The case that matters most is Drivers v. Uber and Ola, the consolidated proceedings brought by the App Drivers and Couriers Union and Worker Info Exchange on behalf of drivers in the UK, Portugal, and elsewhere. In 2021, a lower Amsterdam court issued a largely unfavourable ruling. In April 2023, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal reversed it, holding that Uber's deactivation of three drivers' accounts had been based exclusively on automated processing and therefore breached Article 22. Crucially, the appellate court rejected Uber's claim that its human reviewers constituted the “meaningful human intervention” the law requires. The judgment described the reviewers as performing something close to ritual. They had rubber-stamped outputs they were not equipped to interrogate. The algorithmic decision was the decision; the human had merely transcribed it.

The judgment did several things at once. It established that a GDPR right to explanation exists in the gig economy context. It established that data trusts run by third parties such as Worker Info Exchange are a legitimate vehicle for collective enforcement. And it put European platforms on notice that automated deactivation is a legal hazard, not merely a reputational one. By the time the App Drivers and Couriers Union filed a further challenge in 2024 on behalf of more than a thousand British drivers allegedly fired by algorithm without appeal, the legal theory had matured. Automated firing, without a genuine human reviewer, is unlawful in the EU and, under the UK Data Protection Act, in the UK as well. What remains to be tested is the breadth of the remedy.

The EU has since attempted to translate the case-law settlement into structured legislation. Directive (EU) 2024/2831 on improving working conditions in platform work, adopted by the European Parliament in April 2024 and in force from 1 December 2024, requires Member States to transpose it by 2 December 2026. The directive imposes transparency obligations on platforms' use of automated monitoring and decision-making systems, guarantees human oversight of such systems, and prohibits decisions that limit, suspend, or terminate a worker's account (or any other decision having equivalent effect) unless taken by a human being. It prohibits processing of emotional or psychological state data. It gives workers the right to have significant automated decisions explained and reviewed. The directive does not abolish algorithmic management. It insists meaningful human judgment sits at the points where the algorithm touches the worker's livelihood. Whether the transposition into twenty-seven national systems will produce that judgment in substance or merely reproduce its legal form is the open question of the 2026 labour year.

Karnataka, and the Global South Experiment

The response to algorithmic management outside the European context has been uneven and, until recently, mostly theoretical. India's Code on Social Security 2020, finally brought into force on 21 November 2025, represents the largest single legal recognition of gig and platform workers in the world and tries to build a social-security floor under them. Aggregators are required to contribute 1 to 2 per cent of their annual turnover, capped at 5 per cent of payments to workers, to a Social Security Fund that is supposed to finance accident insurance, health and maternity benefits, disability cover, and old-age protection. The architecture is correct. The operational detail is not. As of early 2026, the contribution rates remain unnotified, the fund exists on paper, and the benefits have not been delivered. The December 2025 strike was, in no small part, a strike about the gap between what the Code promises and what the aggregators have yet to hand over.

The more interesting Indian experiment is in Karnataka, whose Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act 2025, notified on 12 September 2025 and effective from 30 May 2025, is the first state-level statute in India to impose direct obligations on algorithmic management. Section 13 requires platforms to explain how their automated systems affect fares, ratings, and task assignments. The Act requires aggregators to prevent algorithmic discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, gender, place of birth, and disability. It gives workers the right to seek transparency regarding the parameters used by automated management and decision-making systems. It establishes a Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers Welfare Board, headquartered in Bengaluru. It is, on paper, the most comprehensive algorithmic-management statute outside the European Union.

Whether it will bite in practice is a question the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre has been tracking. Early analyses observe that the Act's enforcement mechanisms remain weak, that the appeal rights for workers subject to arbitrary deactivation are thin, and that the welfare board faces the usual Indian challenge of adequate staffing and funding. The Act is a legislative intent. It may or may not become a settlement. But its existence matters because it establishes, for the first time in the Global South, a statutory framework that treats algorithmic management as a distinct labour-relations practice requiring its own regulatory architecture.

Indonesia has no equivalent. The country's gig labour market, dominated by Gojek and Grab, operates largely in the partner-classification void Yuana's analysis describes. The International Labour Organization's 2025 work on AI for equality at work in Indonesia has begun to chart a path, identifying algorithmic bias in task allocation, safety risks in night-work patterns that disproportionately affect women, and the absence of meaningful appeal as priority concerns. The ITUC has documented the quiet but persistent organising of Indonesian gig workers, particularly through the SPAI Indonesia Platform Workers Union, as a response to the failure of the legal system to catch up.

The Problem of Dignity

The hardest category in any attempt to reconstruct labour rights for algorithmically managed workers is dignity. A worker who has been sacked for a reason they do not understand, by a system that cannot hear them, and on a platform that sends a template email wishing them well in their future endeavours, has lost income and livelihood. They have also lost something less concrete: the right to be considered by another person, to have their case weighed, to have their circumstances acknowledged. Dignity, in the labour context, has always been bound up with the presence of a human decision-maker who is, in principle, accountable for the decision. The algorithmic regime replaces that presence with a system that is not, strictly speaking, anyone.

The International Labour Organization's concept of decent work, formalised in 1999 and elaborated across two decades of policy instruments, tries to name the relevant combination: productive employment, fair income, security in the workplace, social protection for families, prospects for development, freedom to voice concerns, participate in decisions, organise, and be treated with equal respect. The word that holds it together is not “wage” or “hours” but “respect.” And respect, in the platform context, is the category algorithmic management tends to strip out first, because respect requires recognition, and recognition requires seeing the worker as a person with a biography rather than as a row in a scoring table.

The February 2026 Nature study found that respect was, empirically, the dimension of decent work most consistently rated short by gig workers. The December 2025 Indian strike was, in its organisers' framing, a strike for dignity first and money second. The Indonesian fieldwork, in Yuana's account, is saturated with the experience of women workers who describe the indignity of the algorithm more than its unfairness. What looks, from the platform's dashboard, like an optimisation problem looks from the rider's saddle like a system that is actively refusing to see her.

Various scholars have tried to name what a dignified algorithmic-management regime would require. The Frontiers in Sociology 2026 systematic review gathered the candidates under headings such as algorithmic dignity and fairwork. The ingredients come down to five: transparency, so the worker can understand how decisions about them are made; contestability, so they can challenge those decisions with a real prospect of reversal; human involvement at decisive moments, so the machine does not have the last word on livelihood; collective voice, so workers can organise, bargain, and influence the design of the systems; and a social-security floor that survives the discontinuity of platform employment. None is unfamiliar. Every one has been part of the architecture of twentieth-century labour law. What is novel is the requirement to port them into a contractual and technological environment that does not have the traditional handholds of a workplace, a shift, a manager, a union recognition agreement, or a union at all.

The Case for the Living Wage, Port by Port

The economic case for algorithmic management as the dominant form of twenty-first-century labour oversight has always rested on a single claim. The platform produces work more efficiently, more cheaply, and in greater quantity than the alternative. The consumer gets a fifteen-minute delivery; the retailer gets a flexible workforce; the investor gets an asset-light business model with scalable margins. The worker, in the standard telling, gets flexibility. The Fairwork and Human Rights Watch findings call the flexibility claim into question. The December 2025 Indian strike, against a ten-minute delivery target that was killing couriers on overcrowded roads, called it into question more forcefully. The Nature study provides the quantitative version: working hours, for gig workers on AI-managed platforms, correlate inversely with perceived decent work. The more you work, the less dignified the work becomes. The flexibility is, in many cases, the flexibility of accepting whatever terms the algorithm sets, at whatever hours the algorithm rewards, for as long as the algorithm keeps offering.

The counter-model is visible across the EU Platform Work Directive, the Karnataka Act, the Indian Code on Social Security, and the pending Worker Info Exchange litigation. It consists of a minimum wage floor denominated in local currency per hour worked; a published and auditable algorithmic specification; a statutory right to human review of any decision affecting livelihood; a prohibition on processing of emotional or psychological data; a collective bargaining architecture that recognises platform-worker unions; and a social-security framework financed by the aggregator out of turnover rather than out of the worker's effective pay. None of this is radical. The combination, in 2026, is radical only because the platforms have spent a decade arguing it is inapplicable to them. That argument is losing.

What it is losing to is the slow reassertion by the state, the court, and the union of a proposition once taken to be settled. The proposition is that the relationship between a worker and the entity that directs their labour is not a contract of pure commercial parity, and that the law has a legitimate interest in regulating the power asymmetry between them. That proposition is older than the gig economy by more than a century.

What the Second Shift Has to Say

It is worth returning to the specific argument Yuana's Conversation piece made, because it names something the general analyses tend to miss. The female gig workers in Yuana's fieldwork are not merely victims of algorithmic opacity. They are victims of an algorithmic system optimised, intentionally or not, around a worker who does not exist for them. The profile the algorithm rewards, the always-available, instantly-responsive, evening-and-weekend-flexible worker, presupposes an absence of domestic responsibility. In most societies, including Indonesia and including the United Kingdom, that profile describes men more accurately than women. The algorithm does not discriminate against women. It optimises for a worker profile most women cannot meet, then penalises the deviation.

The consequence, in Yuana's data, is that Indonesian women gig workers consistently earn less than men for what is nominally the same work. Their acceptance rates are lower, their priority scores are lower, their access to peak-hour bonuses is lower, and their exposure to sudden deactivation when they need to cancel for a sick child is higher. The effect is, in the literal sense of Dubal's term, wage discrimination, but it is wage discrimination of a kind that no disparate-impact analysis the platform lawyers would accept is being run.

This is the dimension that the standard framework of algorithmic-management reform, focused on transparency and appeal, does not fully address. Transparency and appeal help the worker who already falls within the worker profile the algorithm recognises. They help less the worker whose life does not fit the profile at all. Decent work, in the Nature study's configurations, turns out to be a function of whether the worker can absorb the mismatch between their life and the algorithm's assumptions, or whether the mismatch absorbs them. The policy implication is uncomfortable. It is not enough for the algorithm to be explained. It must be constrained not to encode an ideal worker profile that the work itself cannot accommodate. Whether Article 22 of the GDPR, Section 13 of the Karnataka Act, the EU Platform Work Directive, or the Indian Code on Social Security is capable of reaching this deeper requirement is, as of April 2026, genuinely unclear.

The Algorithm Does Not Know Your Name

The legal philosophers who have written on the gig economy have tended, in the last decade, to oscillate between two positions. The first, associated with deregulatory defenders of the platform model, holds that gig work is a new form of self-employment and the older apparatus of labour law is a category error when applied to it. The second, associated with Dubal, with Jeremias Adams-Prassl at Oxford, and with scholars grouped around the Fairwork project and Worker Info Exchange, holds that gig work is work; that the platforms are employers by any functional test; and that the older apparatus of labour law is exactly what is required, merely rephrased to cope with the novelty of the technology.

The 2026 evidence suggests neither position is quite adequate. The gig worker managed by an algorithm is neither a self-employed entrepreneur nor an employee in the 1970s sense. They are something the law has not cleanly conceptualised: a person whose livelihood is governed by a system they cannot see, against which they have no functional appeal, whose parameters they cannot negotiate, and whose outputs are determined by inputs including their own behaviour in ways they can learn to game but never fully understand. The legal category for this kind of relationship does not yet exist. The EU Platform Work Directive, the Karnataka Act, and the pending Worker Info Exchange litigation are the first serious attempts to build it.

What those attempts share is a commitment to five propositions. Automated decisions that affect livelihood must be humanly reviewable by a reviewer who is not performing a ritual. The rules of the algorithmic system must be disclosed in a form intelligible to the worker and their representatives. The worker must have the standing to demand that review and that disclosure, either individually or through a collective body such as a union or a data trust. The worker must have the right to organise, to bargain, and to withdraw labour without reprisal. And the state must construct a social-security floor that no platform is permitted to pass its employment risks beneath.

None of this restores the ordinary twentieth-century worker-employer relationship. But none of it needs to. The question is not whether platform work can be converted into factory work. The question is whether the deeper principles that made factory work tolerable, accountability, transparency, voice, and dignity, can be ported into a technological architecture not designed with them in mind. The answer that Yuana's Indonesian fieldwork, the Indian strike of December 2025, the Nature study of February 2026, the Amsterdam judgments of 2023, and the slow accretion of EU and Indian statute together suggest is that this is possible in principle, partly accomplished in law, and almost entirely unfinished in practice.

Lia, cooking her children's breakfast in Yogyakarta on a morning in April 2026, will not see the benefit of any of it for some years yet. The algorithm that ranks her does not know her name. It will not read the Nature study. It will not attend the Karnataka Welfare Board. It will adjust its weightings, quietly, in response to the overall pattern of worker behaviour, and it will continue to optimise for a worker it has not met. What will eventually change Lia's working life is not a better algorithm but a legal and collective architecture that forces the algorithm to meet her. The workers are ahead of the theorists. Salauddin's 40,000 on the streets of Mumbai on the day after Christmas 2025 did not need a law professor to tell them what was wrong. They needed a mechanism that would translate what was wrong into something an algorithm, and the corporation behind it, could be forced to listen to. Labour rights, in the era of algorithmic management, mean what they have always meant: the enforceable guarantee that the system which governs your working life must answer to you. The principle is old. The apparatus is new. The gap between them is where the next decade of labour law will be written.

References and Sources

1. Yuana, Suci Lestari. “Algorithms don't care: how AI worsens the double burden for Indonesia's female gig workers.” The Conversation, 12 April 2026. https://theconversation.com/algorithms-dont-care-how-ai-worsens-the-double-burden-for-indonesias-female-gig-workers-279978
2. Progressive International. “India's Gig Workers Strike for Dignity and Protection.” 29 December 2025. https://progressive.international/wire/2025-12-29-indias-gig-workers-strike-for-dignity-and-protection/en/
3. Human Rights Research. “40,000 gig workers launch flash strike in India demanding fair pay and security.” 2025. https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/40-000-gig-workers-launch-flash-strike-in-india-demanding-fair-pay-and-security
4. India TV News. “Gig workers launch nationwide strike on New Year's Eve December 31.” 31 December 2025. https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/gig-workers-launch-nationwide-strike-on-new-year-s-eve-december-31-what-are-their-demands-and-what-it-means-for-you-zomato-swiggy-blinkit-delivery-2025-12-31-1023899
5. The Tribune. “'End 10-min delivery': Gig workers launch nationwide strike against low pay, safety concerns on New Year's Eve.” 2025. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/deliveryworkers/end-10-min-delivery-gig-workers-launch-nationwide-strike-against-low-pay-safety-concerns-on-new-years-eve
6. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature). “Platform gig work conditions and workers' perceptions of decent work: a configurational and necessity perspective.” Volume 13, Article 359, February 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06702-5
7. Frontiers in Sociology. “Algorithmic management in the global gig economy: an interdisciplinary systematic literature review and critical discourse analysis.” 2026. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1743445/full
8. Human Rights Watch. “The Gig Trap: Algorithmic, Wage and Labor Exploitation in Platform Work in the US.” 12 May 2025. https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithmic-wage-and-labor-exploitation-in-platform-work-in-the-us
9. Fairwork. “Fairwork US Ratings 2025: When AI Eats the Manager.” Oxford Internet Institute and WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, 2025. https://fair.work/en/fw/publications/fairwork-us-ratings-2025/
10. Oxford Internet Institute. “New report reveals best and worst practices in the platform economy in the US.” 2025. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/new-report-reveals-best-and-worst-practices-in-the-platform-economy-in-the-us/
11. Dubal, Veena. “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination.” Columbia Law Review, Volume 123, 2023. https://columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wage-discrimination/
12. Equitable Growth. “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (working paper).” Veena Dubal, 2023. https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/071223-WP-On-Algorithmic-Wage-Discrimination-Dubal.pdf
13. Worker Info Exchange. “Drivers in UK and Europe set to sue Uber for unfair pay set by algorithm.” 2025. https://www.workerinfoexchange.org/post/drivers-in-uk-and-europe-set-to-sue-uber-for-unfair-pay-set-by-algorithm
14. App Drivers & Couriers Union. “ADCU and Worker Info Exchange file ground-breaking legal challenge against Uber's dismissal of drivers by algorithm in the UK and Portugal.” https://www.adcu.org.uk/news-posts/app-drivers-couriers-union-files-ground-breaking-legal-challenge-against-ubers-dismissal-of-drivers-by-algorithm-in-the-uk-and-portugal
15. Fountain Court Chambers. “Amsterdam Court Upholds Appeal in Algorithmic Decision-Making Test Case: Drivers v Uber and Ola.” April 2023. https://fountaincourt.uk/2023/04/amsterdam-court-upholds-appeal-in-algorithmic-decision-making-test-case-drivers-v-uber-and-ola/
16. Council of the European Union. “Platform workers: Council confirms agreement on new rules to improve their working conditions.” 11 March 2024. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024/03/11/platform-workers-council-confirms-agreement-on-new-rules-to-improve-their-working-conditions/
17. European Parliament. “Parliament adopts Platform Work Directive.” 24 April 2024. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240419IPR20584/parliament-adopts-platform-work-directive
18. Freshfields Technology Quotient. “The EU platform workers directive: effective as of 1 December 2024.” https://technologyquotient.freshfields.com/post/102jqg1/the-eu-platform-workers-directive-effective-as-of-1-december-2024-what-does-thi
19. GDPR Info. “Art. 22 GDPR: Automated individual decision-making, including profiling.” https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
20. Fisher Phillips. “India's New Labor Codes Extend Social Security Coverage to Gig Workers: Key Employer Takeaways.” 2025. https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/news-insights/indias-new-labor-codes-extend-social-security-coverage-to-gig-workers.html
21. PRS India. “The Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2025.” https://prsindia.org/bills/states/the-karnataka-platform-based-gig-workers-social-security-and-welfare-bill-2025
22. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. “India: Karnataka's gig worker law introduces algorithmic transparency, but enforcement and appeal rights remain weak.” https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/india-karnatakas-gig-worker-law-introduces-algorithmic-transparency-but-enforcement-and-appeal-rights-remain-weak/
23. International Labour Organization. “AI for equality at work in Indonesia: Harnessing technology to create fair, inclusive and decent workplaces.” https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ai-equality-work-indonesia-harnessing-technology-create-fair-inclusive-and
24. International Trade Union Confederation. “Long silenced, gig workers in Indonesia are organising and fighting for their rights.” https://www.ituc-csi.org/long-silenced-gig-workers-in
25. International Labour Organization. “The Algorithmic Management of Work.” https://www.ilo.org/media/372856/download

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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

Hello,

I’ve been thinking a little about blogging lately. Just to share thoughts and perhaps help others who may resonate with the sorts of things my family is laboring on. We left the city in 2012 and moved to the country to start a “back to the earth” type of life. Our first move was onto about 5 acres of land in a wet climate. We spent about 8 years there and then moved onto my parents’ property in a more arid climate. All of this has been a fun, challenging, and educational experience to say the least. Through all of this we have learned much and I’ve been practicing writing quite a bit over the years. I don’t claim to be all that great, but it’s much more readable than some years back. My intent through this is a creative release of sorts and to potentially share some ideas with others. My former self had to struggle quite a bit through a lot of concepts and my hope is that some of my own struggles can help speed the process up for others. If this reaches even just one person that I do not know and it helps them apply some of these concepts it will be worthwhile.

I plan on sharing ideas on many topics. One thing we have been laboring on quite a bit the last four or so years is alternative house building. We have hands-on experience with cob, straw bale, earth bag, and stick frame with rough sawn lumber. We hope to explore some other methods later on and continue enhancing the skills we’ve developed on the methods we have already applied. If I continue this blog I’ll share ideas through the experiences. Other topics include tech privacy, solar systems for off-grid living, simple solutions for housing and all that involves homesteading. We have sheep, milk cows, chickens, turkeys, dogs, and a cat right now. We hope to add donkeys soon for riding and cart pulling.

I have a couple longer write-ups already prepared that I will share soon. One is on privacy tech and how to apply solutions in that realm, and another is on the basics of solar systems for the off-grid home and/or shop. The solar one is not quite done, it might be another month or so till I share it. There are a couple things I’m finishing up on our own solar system that I want to make sure I have understood and get it working well before I wrap that up.

Regenerative agriculture is another topic dear to me. There are many great solutions for food security, healing ecosystems, and true sustainability within the concepts of regenerative agriculture. My wife and I have studied many ideas in this vast field and have been applying concepts through the years. So this might be something that is brought up as well.

Other topics I enjoy exploring are scripture, religion, and spirituality. Earlier in life I was religious and ended up sharing my faith as a Christian missionary. I lost my faith for a time and became an agnostic but remained spiritually minded. As time has gone on I’ve gained convictions on our Messiah from the New Testament and will likely share ideas on this from time to time. I love scriptures and might delve into that here with you all. If you are agnostic, atheist, or of another faith I hope you stick around through any of this. Feel free to skip posts on these topics if you lack interest. You may come to the same place I did after my agnostic and secular bout in life and might like those posts later on if you are in a different state of mind.

Another topic that might offend some are my political and government views. I may delve into topics tied to voluntaryism and panarchy. Earlier in life I was a conservative republican, but I started seeing the wars around the world as corrupt and decided to investigate. As I explored many political ideas and events through my life involving governments I became politically agnostic. I now believe the most correct form of governance is a voluntary one. I believe this is how God deals with us, and how we are to deal one with another. As a Christian our Messiah is my King, and I have no other kings before Him. So as such I do not engage in the politics of man (such as voting) or believe that any nation has a claim over me, I am a citizen of Heaven not of a kingdom of man. However as a voluntaryist I believe you can be part of any governance system you desire to be. Also the NAP (non-aggression principle) is an important part to a voluntary society. I believe it to be wrong for any person or group to act in violence and act with aggression toward one another for anything other than self-defense. And I believe Christians are to live the higher laws our Messiah taught. We aren’t to resist evil, we cannot return evil for evil, we are to turn the other cheek. Only goodness, truth, and light can conquer misery, lies, and darkness. I hope for more people to come to these ideas and join in with the Kingdom Heaven. I believe this is what has been desired for humanity from the beginning. And if we follow the laws of Heaven a new and amazing society can blossom around us. We can disengage from the coercive and violent kingdoms of men and instead follow the higher laws in scripture. So I may from time to time share ideas on this and maybe in time more people will come to agree.

I was not a reader for the majority of my life. I believe school made me hate it. But I have started reading quite a bit over the last six or so years and now love it. I may share ideas on books I read just for fun. I read much more over the winter when I’m cooped up inside. During the good weather it’s hard to have as much time for that. On the topic of school I believe that should also be a voluntary action for each individual. My wife and I do not force education on our children and are against the education industrial complex. So that is another topic that might be brought up from time to time. We discovered the ideas of “unschooling” while our first two children were young, before we were about to put them in school, and we have explored and practiced that concept throughout our parenting. We have two adult children who are off enjoying the world. They were educated by self direction under no duress and threats and they never went to school while living at home. One of them is now going to school for a trade to get his journeyman while working in the field. He finds the school very easy and might push into more advanced certificates to help challenge himself more. He enjoys working with his hands and the many different situations he’s put in while on the job gives him some satisfying challenges. Our adult daughter is enjoying travel and working various seasonal jobs. She’s a social butterfly and so far does not like to stay in the same situation for too long. Both are intelligent, independent, creative and self motivated in many ways. We have younger children at home and we are continuing in the same way with a voluntary education. We bring them into as many things as they desire to join in on on the homestead.

I believe that humanity is missing out in this modern society. We aren’t made for constant electrical connection, constant surveillance, and mindless entertainment. We aren’t made to do just one thing our whole life as a cog in a wheel in a career. I don’t believe our modern society to be healthy in any way. We overall are made for interaction with nature, soil, animals, physical labor, and real food. As my family has gone from busy city folk to the slower homestead life things have been amazing overall. It is so nice to have such a variety of things to do throughout the year. The homestead life provides a wide assortment of things to do and no two homesteads are the same. You can tailor your homestead to your own hobbies, desires, wants, and needs. I believe this homesteading life is much more in tune with humanity’s roots, an atmosphere that soothes the soul. I hope to share some of our journey with whoever has any interest.

I really have no idea how active I’ll be on this. Sometimes I have time and ideas to write a lot, and sometimes not so much. I will not disclose personal identifying information to the best of my ability. I desire to remain anonymous, If I share this with friends or family I’ll ask them to keep me unidentified. I appreciate being left alone overall and think privacy is a fundamental need for many (including myself). I’ve picked three blog platforms to post on. I may settle in and drop one or two, but I don’t know which one to pick – so I’ll just try them all. At the bottom of each post I’ll share the link to all three. They will all be repeats of the same posts. The reason for this is for you to pick your favorite format. Or if I drop one and you liked it, you can hop onto the active one. Another reason is an attempt to cross promote each of these decent platforms, cause I think they are great alternative solutions to the big tech blog platforms. If any of these change their policies to the point that I dislike it I will disengage and close the account. I hope more privacy-minded platforms start proliferating over the internet. It would be nice if we can slowly handicap the power hungry and invasive corporations by a simple voluntary boycott. I’ll soon share a write-up on how to secure your tech to become more private if you desire such a thing.

Have a lovely day!

Redundant Disconnect Blogs: Disconnect with Bear Blog — Disconnect with Mataroa — Disconnect with Write.as — Fediverse handle: @disconnect-blog@write.as

In Summary: * Now listening to the Spurs Countdown Show ahead of tonight's game: my San Antonio Spurs vs the Minnesota Timberwolves. I may or may not bail at half-time to finish the night prayers before an early bedtime. Allergies have had me semi-zombiefied all day today, and I want to be sure to get a good night's sleep before Monday morning hits.

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= 233.8 lbs. * bp= 127/77 (68)

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

Diet: * 06:05 – 1 banana * 07:30 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 09:45 – 2 peanut butter cookies * 11:00 – mashed potatoes and gravy, garden salad * 13:15 – sausages, fried rice * 15:30 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 06:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:40 – watching “Recap Rundown” on MLB Network * 13:00 – tuned into 103.5 The Fan, DFW Sports Radio, ahead of this afternoon's MLB Game: Texas Rangers vs Chicago Cubs * 15:55 – And the Rangers win, 3 to 0. * 16:00 – now tuning to 1200 WOAI, the flagship of the San Antonio Spurs, ahead of tonight's game vs the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Chess: * 10:15 – moved in all pending CC games

Τι είναι ο πουριτανισμός παρά μηχανισμός εξουσίας πανω στην πιο ισχυρή ανθρώπινη ανάγκη.

Απαγορεύεται ώστε να αδρανοποιείται ο ένοχος παραβάτης, στην περίπτωση που επιδιώξει την ανατροπή της εξουσίας.

Not many bets on here recently but I did enjoy watching the action at Chester and the O’Brien / Moore angle that I highlighted really paid dividends with all five of their horses winning.

The focus this week goes from the Roodee to the Knavesmire with the excellent Dante meeting kicking off on Wednesday.

Before that though there’s two other Yorkshire meetings to look at and I think there’s a couple of bets for me at Catterick on Monday.

2.30 Catterick I respect the chances of Mount Ruapehu but I’m taking him on here with KINGS MERCHANT. I love a class dropper and Phil Kirby’s 5yo drops into a class 6 for the first time in his career. Hasn’t won for almost 2 years (Sep 23) but that was in a class 3 off 82 and is off just 65 today. This is only his 2nd start at 7f on turf but has shaped recently like 7f may be within his capabilities, especially with this ease in grade. Will to have a punt at 9/1.

KINGS MERCHANT // 0.5pt E/W @ 9/1 (Paddy Power) 4 places

4.00 Catterick I’ve plumped for IRISH DANCER in this 5f sprint on the basis that the 6yo is the best of a bad bunch. In all honesty, it’s a pretty stinking race. There’s 11 runners in this and a quick scan down their recent form shows that in their last 77 races combined, they’ve managed just 2 wins between them. IRISH DANCER doesn’t have a ‘1’ next to his name but he’s got a good chance here back on turf, running well enough LTO behind a rival who subsequently won NTO?! His form at this grade, in these conditions over 5f in the last 18 months is 1422142. Surely he’s got to be trying to win this for a second year in a row?!

IRISH DANCER // 1.5pts Win @ 9/4 (Bet365)

For once… Little Johnny ain’t got nothing to say.

Nothing.

No gimmick. No performance. No fireworks shot out of a preacher’s sleeve.

Just silence.

Because sometimes God blesses you so deeply… the soul goes quiet.

“My cup runneth over.” That’s what David said in Psalm 23. And tonight, I understand it.

Last night I could hardly sleep because I knew Mother’s Day was coming. I knew people would mention my mother. I knew the ache would rise up out of nowhere like an old ghost walking through a familiar hallway.

And I dreaded it. Has she really been dead a year?

But today?

Today was glorious.

One precious saint mentioned Momma… and instead of a knife in my chest, it became a reminder of grace. I had built a mountain out of a molehill. Fear had magnified grief bigger than reality.

And somewhere in the middle of all this… God has been changing the way I preach.

Less Little Johnny. More Bible.

Less fluff. More fire straight from the text.

Not creativity for creativity’s sake. Not trying to impress people with cleverness. Just opening the Word of God and letting Heaven talk.

Jesus said in John 15:

“Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” (John 15:3, KJV)

That’s my hope now.

Not that people leave impressed with me. Not that they walk out talking about the preacher.

But that something inside them gets washed clean by the Word of the Living God.

Because the Word carries a power no personality can manufacture.

Isaiah thundered it in Isaiah 55:

“Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters…” (Isaiah 55:1)

And again:

“Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good…” (Isaiah 55:2)

Then the Lord drops the hammer:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8–9)

But then comes the mystery.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians:

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

Most people stop there.

But the next verse is dynamite.

“But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit…” (1 Corinthians 2:10)

And then Paul says:

“But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:16)

Do you understand what that means?

The God whose thoughts are higher than the heavens… the God whose wisdom crushes human understanding… has chosen to reveal Himself through His Spirit and through His Word.

Jesus said in John 6:

“The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” (John 6:63)

Spirit. And life.

Not dead religion. Not empty ceremony. Not church games.

Life.

And when those words enter your ears, something supernatural happens because:

“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Romans 10:17)

What a blessing.

What a blessing to own a Bible.

What a blessing to preach a Bible.

What a blessing to pray the Bible until the words stop being ink on a page and start becoming fire in your bones.

To carry the Word of Life in your hands… in your pocket… on your phone… and hidden deep in your heart.

Because Jesus said in John 15:

“If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” (John 15:7)

His words abiding in us.

Not motivational speeches. Not human philosophy. His words.

So if somebody says, “Johnny, sounds like you had a whole lot to say this Sunday Afternoon,” I’d answer back:

“No, sir. I didn’t say much of anything.”

I just handed you the Word of God.

Because Somebody already said it before me.

His name is Jesus Christ.

And Jesus said in John 14:

“The word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me.” (John 14:24)

So this afternoon you didn’t hear from Little Johnny.

You heard from the Father.

God bless you. Amen.

The train was late, I’ve now been riding for twelve hours or something, but I like it

I’d rather be abed now, but I know there is a cold grave waiting for me in less than one hundred years, whereas now the blood is pumping through my veins still.

and I’m riding the train

Of course I’d rather be burnt to ashes so I don’t wake up like in kill bill — I’m claustrophobic after all.

No I’m alive and spending my valuable time improving my relations with the family of choice

my daughter found black bean in her purse, we’ll plant it and see if it too can grow, but that’s for after the train ride.

Now I’m just goofing around and being silly and it’s true what I learned from my book about poultry farming, that to see these turkeys play and goof around means they are feeling good and are healthy

And this is true for humans too

A single diagnosis tells you what's wrong now. A history of them tells you whether you're getting better.

That's the gap PlantLab's new /history endpoint closes.

When you call /diagnose with a photo, you get back a single answer about a single plant at a single moment. Useful, and also limited. You can't tell whether the answer you got today is consistent with the answer you got last week. You can't tell whether the intervention you ran four days ago made things better or worse. You can't see a pattern across photos because the API forgets each call the moment it returns.

That's the gap /history closes.

What changed

Pro and Business accounts now have an opt-in setting that, when turned on, retains diagnosis history. The photo, the answer, the timestamp, the engine version, all queryable through a new /history endpoint. Pro keeps the last 90 days. Business keeps the last 365. Off means nothing is stored. The default is off.

There's also a Home Assistant sensor exposed for the count if you want it on a dashboard. The endpoint supports cursor-based pagination, which matters more than it sounds once you've been growing for a few months and your history grows past a screen.

What you can do with it today

Three things, on day one.

You can see trajectory. Whether a plant is improving or sliding. The leaf that read nitrogen-deficient last Sunday: is it still showing the same signal this Sunday, or has it moved? A single diagnosis can't tell you.

You can spot patterns across plants. If three different plants in the same tent keep coming back as overwatering, the watering schedule is the variable, not the plants. The room is the constant.

You can audit the API itself. Whether the model is consistent shot-to-shot on the same plant under the same conditions. Two photos two minutes apart, same lighting, same angle, should produce broadly the same answer. /history makes that an inspectable claim instead of a vibe.

What I want to build on top of it

The endpoint is the substrate, not the analysis. The reason it has the shape it does, opt-in, retention-bounded, paginated, machine-readable, is that I want certain things to be possible later. None of them exist today. I'm being deliberate about not promising them on a date.

A simple “this plant has been declining for X days” flag, computed from the history rather than the latest photo alone.

Intervention tagging. Mark a diagnosis with “I tried foliar Cal-Mag” and see whether the next photo improves. That requires a feedback loop the current API doesn't have. /history is one half of it.

Anomaly detection that respects time. A plant that's been healthy for six weeks suddenly returning a confident pest signal is a different event from a plant that's been borderline for six weeks. Without history the API has no way to tell those two apart.

All of those features need the data to exist in queryable form before they can be built. That's what /history is for.

The privacy posture

A stateless diagnosis API is genuinely stateless. You send a photo, you get an answer, the photo is gone. That posture is impossible the moment you start retaining anything, so the bar moves: if you're going to store, you store as little as possible, you make it opt-in, you delete on a known schedule, and you never share with a second party.

That's what /history does. Off by default. The toggle is in your dashboard and on the API. Tier-bounded retention. Rolling deletion.

It also slots into a wider set of changes this month that all point in the same direction. Analytics moved to Umami, EU-hosted, cookieless, no consent banner. The CDN moved to Bunny.net in Slovenia. The signup CAPTCHA moved to self-hosted Altcha. Each one of those moves cuts a third party out of the data path between you and PlantLab. Together they shrink the surface area of who sees what.

The point of all of that is straightforward. Your grow data is yours. The job of an API like this isn't to accumulate it, it's to give you an answer and stay out of the way.

How to use it

If you're on Pro or Business, the toggle is in your dashboard under Account settings. The API exposes the same setting. Once it's on, /history returns your diagnoses in reverse chronological order, paginated, with the same field shape as /diagnose plus a timestamp and the engine version.

Full docs at plantlab.ai/docs.

If you build automations and you've been waiting for a way to compare today's reading against last week's, this is the piece that was missing.

so heavy, sometimes we burst

A pillow is heavy with tears tonight.

They come and come and come... And a man thinks he knows why, and then does not.

And it is a lifetime of weight.

He carried it. It carries him. He tries to throw it on Him.

His father, his God.

A three fold chord Will pick him up when he is low.

But a man finds himself trapped in the dark, water rising fast.

Who dries the snot In the middle of the night—

When suddenly he remembers all that shit he burned through?

When the feel of his scars from The flames recall long cooled heats?

And blisters from new?

And he wonders, “where is my God In these quiet wetnesses?”

The Midnight drowning sobs.

A man knows He is in another realm, doing Godly things, important things.

And keeping track of the weeping,

Just as He does his failures.

And, the man reasons, successes.

He is a man stuck in A life like every man.

In need of unquestioning love. The strengthening frame of trust.

But finding through one portal Is the freedom but not ability.

And through another is the Ability lacking freedom.

Ironically, the man knows desire exists through both doorways.

And so he prays and prays and prays For the good sense to live above,

And beyond his flacidity And find the courage

To soldier on.

The war is long and the casualties are sometimes those things most dear to us.

Even if they were lost long, long ago, But only today is a man waking up

And seeing he is one leg short. One eye blinded. One heart shattered.

So, dear reader, what broke open the man’s glass jar this spring night?

Is it merely self-sorrow or pity?

Or is the man overwhelmed in realization that he cannot carry What he always has.

The man has his opinion, biased though it may be…

But the salty truth is really only known by God.

So we love the man and keep him in our prayers.

The truth is in his salty release and the sleep that comes.

A Song for Arbonne est un roman de Guy Gavriel Kay publié en 1992, dans lequel l'auteur canadien poursuivait sa plongée dans la fantasy historique.

Based on the troubadour culture that rose in Provence during the High Middle Ages, this panoramic, absorbing novel beautifully creates an alternate version of the medieval world.

The matriarchal, cultured land of Arbonne is rent by a feud between its two most powerful dukes, the noble troubador Bertran de Talair and Urte de Miraval, over long-dead Aelis, lover of one, wife of the other and once heir to the country's throne.

To the north lies militaristic Gorhaut, whose inhabitants worship the militant god Corannos and are ruled by corrupt, womanizing King Ademar. His chief advisor, the high priest of Corannos, is determined to irradicate the worship of a female deity, whose followers live to the south.

Into this cauldron of brewing disaster comes the mysterious Gorhaut mercenary Blaise, who takes service with Bertran and averts an attempt on his life. The revelation of Blaise's lineage and a claim for sanctuary by his sister-in-law sets the stage for a brutal clash between the two cultures. Intertwined is the tale of a young woman troubadour whose role suggests the sweep of the drama to come.

Après le magistral Tigana et son univers inspiré de l'Italie de la Renaissance, changement d'ambiance : c'est désormais au tour de la Provence médiévale, avec troubadours, amour courtois, rivalités entre seigneurs féodaux, et tensions entre royaumes voisins. C’est un cadre qui m’attirait moins a priori mais Guy Gavriel Kay a un talent remarquable pour nous entraîner avec lui à la découverte de ses personnages et à la découverte du décor dans lequel il évoluent.

Je pourrais parler longtemps de certains personnages de ce roman, tant si ils sont mémorables. Comment oublier Bertran de Talair, qui peut être aussi agaçant qu’émouvant ? Comment ne pas être enthousiasmé par le chemin emprunté par Blaise ? Comment ne pas être envoûté par Arianne et sa cour de troubadours ?

Je pourrais également dire tout le bien que je pense que ce récit captivant qui mêle l’épique et l’intime, comme je l’avais déjà constaté pour Tigana. Le résultat est passionnant, dans tous les sens du terme. Derrière les rivalités, les vengeances, les ambitions et les batailles, on trouve des histoires personnelles de filiation, de paternité, et d’héritage.

Guy Gavriel Kay est décidément un auteur de grand talent qui sait parfaitement jouer sur les différents registres pour écrire des personnages et des récits marquants. J’en avais entendu beaucoup de bien et j’en viens à regretter de n’avoir pas pris le temps de lire ses romans plus tôt. Heureusement, je me rattrape désormais, et c’est un grand plaisir !

Am Mittwoch war ich in Balanivka, nicht weit weg von Berschad. Dort gibt es ein wirklich sehr schönes Museum. Balanivka gilt jetzt als Dorf, hat aber Stadtgeschichte, und das ist sehr schön aufbereitet worden. Wieder bekomme ich eine Privatführung. Das Gebäude ist sehr interessant, mit schönen bunten Fenstern ausgestattet, als Museum an den noch erhaltenen Turm aus der einstigen Stadtmauer gebaut. Leider aber gibt es schon lang Probleme mit dem Dach, sodass einige Wände und Teile der Decke starke Wasserschäden aufweisen. Ändert aber nichts an der hohen Qualität der Ausstellung. Es geht in der Steinzeit los, der Eingang ist an eine Höhle angelehnt. Es gibt viele Exponate aus dieser Region, darunter auch ein unglaublich alter Vorläufer von Webrahmen. Langsam nimmt es den Lauf der Zeit, in dieser Region ist viel passiert. Kosaken, Osmanen, Tartaren, Russisches Zarenreich, Polen (unvollständig, Reihenfolge nicht unbedingt korrekt). Und dann kommen wieder viele alte Handbestickte Vyshivankas und andere Haushaltsgegenstände, schön in Nachbildungen der alten, traditionellen Häuser, alles mit viel Liebe zum Detail. Manches ähnelt stark den Sachen die bei mir in der Heimat im Museum stehen, Manches ist doch anders. So wurden Babys hier in ein Bettchen in einer Art großem Korb neben das Bett der Eltern gehängt.

Die Zeit geht weiter, doch an einem Punkt bricht die Ausstellung ab. Nach einem neuen Gesetz darf nichts mehr gezeigt werden, wo ein roter Stern zu sehen ist – definitiv nicht unumstritten. Es gibt noch einen Raum, in dem gezeigt wird, was im Dorf heute hergestellt wird, darunter Horilka und Kunstgegenstände. Hier wird mir eine Orcarina eines ansässigen Künstlers geschenkt! Ich versuche Abzulehnen, mir wurde schon so viel geschenkt. Dabei mache ich hier nichts, ich bringe nicht viel mehr mit als mich selbst. Aber keine Chance, die Orcarina wird ein weiterer Teil meiner Geschenksammlung.

In einem weiteren Teil des Hauses wird den Soldaten von hier und den aktuellen Ereignissen gedacht. Hier gibt es noch einen weiteren Raum, der für Hochzeiten genutzt wurde. Das war spannend anzusehen. In zweifacher Ausführung gibt es kleine, getrennte Vorbereitungsräume für Bräutigam und Braut. Im Zimmer der Braut gibt es sehr große Spiegel zu bestaunen. Wirklich interessant, auch sonst ist das Dekor und die Details spannend anzusehen.

Danach ging es in den Jugendclub hier vor Ort, es haben bestimmt 40 Jugendliche auf mich gewartet. Ein Programm habe ich nicht vorbereitet, der Fakt, dass ich da bin, ist Attraktion genug. Es dauert etwas bis das Eis gebrochen ist, aber dann trauen sich doch einige mit oder ohne Übersetzungsapp mich etwas zu fragen. Sei es mein Lieblingstier, Lieblingsfarbe, Beruf, warum ich in der Ukraine bin, was mir hier gefällt. Früher oder später kommt oft die Frage, ob ich keine Angst habe wegen den Angriffen. Darauf antworte ich, dass ich mit Freundis von hier gesprochen habe, bevor ich entschieden habe zu kommen. Auch hier bekomme ich selbstgebastelte Geschenke, wir machen viele Fotos, spielen noch etwas Wahrheit oder Pflicht, und das war es schon wieder.

Die ausführlichere Antwort, warum ich trotz den Angriffen komme, ist aus sprachlichen Gründen schwer anzubringen. Auch in Anbetracht des Alters der Teilnehmenden. Ich frage mich in diesen Tagen selbst immer wieder, warum bin ich hier? Und was mache ich hier eigentlich, warum freuen sich die Leute so? Aber für mich steht weiterhin fest, es ist Zufall wo mensch geboren wird. Meine Eltern sind deutsch, ich bin es auch, weil Staat und Gesellschaft so funktionieren. Aber dafür habe ich nichts geleistet. Ich habe einfach Glück einer Nationalität anzugehören, die auf dieser Welt viele Privilegien genießt, und in meinem Heimatland in Frieden leben zu können. Die Menschen hier haben sich den russischen Angriff auch nicht ausgesucht, sie haben keine Superfähigkeiten, um damit klar zu kommen. Sie wollen einfach weiter in ihrer Heimat leben, und bleiben, und bauen sich ihr Leben um die Luftangriffe und fehlenden Soldat*innen herum. Sie lernen neue Strategien, um mit den neuen Situationen umzugehen. So bietet zum Beispiel die Luftalarm App nach jedem Angriff Links zu “Erst-Hilfe-Kasten” für die psychische Gesundheit an. Trotzdem, wenn ich frage, ob all das irgendwann normal wird – nein, wird es nicht, auch nach 4 Jahren nicht. Alle sind sich einig dass es sehr bald Frieden und Freiheit braucht.

Es ist einfach die Augen zu schließen, in Anbetracht des vielen Leids auf dieser Welt. Ich, und auch sonst niemand kann sich um alles kümmern. Trotzdem bin ich jung und gesund, und was Reisen und sprachliches Talent angeht bin ich prädestiniert für dieses Projekt. Dass ich schon mehrfach gebeten wurde, nochmal wiederzukommen, bestärkt mich in dem, was ich hier tue.

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On Wednesday I was in Balanivka, not far from Bershad. There's a really beautiful museum there. Balanivka is now considered a village, but it has a city history, and that's been presented really nicely. Again I get a private tour. The building is very interesting, fitted with beautiful colorful windows, built as a museum onto a still-intact tower from the former city wall. Unfortunately there have been problems with the roof for a long time, so some walls and parts of the ceiling show significant water damage. But that doesn't take away from the high quality of the exhibition. It starts in the Stone Age, the entrance is designed to resemble a cave. There are many exhibits from this region, including an incredibly old precursor to a loom. Slowly it follows the course of time — a lot has happened in this region. Cossacks, Ottomans, Tatars, the Russian Tsarist Empire, Poland (incomplete, order not necessarily correct). And then again there are many old hand-embroidered Vyshyvankas and other household items, beautifully displayed in replicas of old traditional houses, everything with great attention to detail. Some things strongly resemble what's in the museum back home, some things are different. For example, babies here were hung in a little bed in a kind of large basket next to the parents' bed.

Time moves on, but at a certain point the exhibition stops. Under a new law, nothing can be displayed anymore that shows a red star — definitely not without controversy. There's still one room showing what's being made in the village today, including Horilka and art objects. Here I'm given an ocarina by a local artist! I try to decline — I've already been given so much. And I'm not really doing anything here, I don't bring much more than myself. But no chance, the ocarina becomes another addition to my gift collection.

Another part of the building is dedicated to the soldiers from here and to current events. There's also another room that was used for weddings. That was fascinating to see. There are small, separate preparation rooms for the groom and bride, each in duplicate. In the bride's room there are some very large mirrors to admire. Really interesting — the décor and details throughout are captivating.

After that I went to the local youth club, where at least 40 young people were waiting for me. I hadn't prepared a program — the fact that I'm there is attraction enough. It takes a while for the ice to break, but then a few of them do dare to ask me something, with or without a translation app. Things like my favorite animal, favorite color, job, why I'm in Ukraine, what I like about it. Sooner or later the question often comes up whether I'm not scared because of the attacks. To that I answer that I talked to friends from here before I decided to come. Here too I receive homemade gifts, we take lots of photos, play a bit of Truth or Dare, and that’s it.

The more detailed answer to why I come despite the attacks is hard to get across for language reasons. Also given the age of the participants. These days I keep asking myself — why am I here? And what am I actually doing here, why are people so happy to see me? But I still feel strongly that it's chance where a person is born. My parents are German, and so am I, because that's how state and society work. But I didn't do anything to deserve that. I simply got lucky belonging to a nationality that enjoys many privileges in this world, and being able to live in peace in my home country. The people here didn't choose the Russian attack either, they don't have superpowers to cope with it. They simply want to keep living in their homeland, to stay, so they build their lives around the air raids and the absent soldiers. They learn new strategies to deal with new situations. For example, the air raid alert app offers links to “first aid kits” for mental health after every attack. Still, when I ask whether all of this ever becomes normal — no, it doesn't, not even after 4 years. Everyone agrees that peace and freedom are needed very soon.

It's easy to close your eyes in the face of all the suffering in this world. I, and no one else either, can take care of everything. Still, I'm young and healthy, and when it comes to travel and language skills I'm well-suited for this project. Being asked multiple times already to come back reinforces me in what I'm doing here.

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Auch am Donnerstag wurden die Pläne mal wieder plötzlich über den Haufen geworfen. Erst mal wäre es der letzte Tag mit warmem, guten Wetter. Also fuhren Vika, Katja und ich nach Uman. Das ist eine größere Stadt etwas nordöstlich. Während meinem Freiwilligendienst hatte ich auch schon überlegt mal dorthin zu fahren, aber auch das ist nicht passiert.

Die große Attraktion der Stadt ist eine alte, riesige Parkanlage, die sich aus gutem Grund mit dem Garten von Versailles, und auch sonst nur den größten und schönsten Gärten und Parks Europas misst. Benannt wurde der Park nach Sofia, der geliebten eines schwerreichen polnischen Magnaten Potozky. Für ihren Geburtstag wurde der Sofijivska Park 1796 gebaut, und bis heute erhalten.

Geometrie spielt hier kaum eine Rolle, es ist eher ein riesiger verwunschener, romantischer, und auch verwinkelter Garten. Es geht hoch und runter, trotz den schönen alten Wegweisern aus Holz weiß mensch nie, was nach der nächsten Ecke kommt. Es warten viele Teiche, Wasserfälle, Magnolien, Grotten, Felslandschaften, Bäche und anderes auf uns. Thematisch ist der Garten in der Griechischen Mythologie zuhause, inspiriert von Homer. Das zeigen immer wieder verschiedene Statuen, die der Natur aber nicht die Schau stehlen. Es lässt sich unglaublich schön flanieren, und gleichzeitig ist es spannend, was der Park an Attraktionen bereithält. Alle sind sich einig, es braucht 2 Tage um den ganzen Park zu sehen. Es gibt große Wege, kleinere, und sehr kleine, die in die einen in die hintersten kleinen Ecken führen. Auf einer weiteren Ukrainereise würde ich definitiv nochmal 2 Tage für Uman einplanen. Vika findet alle 5 Minuten eine Gelegenheit für ein Fotoshooting, so verläuft der ganze Tag ;)

Der englische Landschaftsgarten gilt als eines der 7 Wunder in der Ukraine, absolut zu recht. Jetzt wo ich hier bin, frage ich mich, warum ich vorher nichts davon wusste. Bei meiner Recherche stoße ich auf einen lächerlich kurzen deutschen Wikipedia Artikel, er enthält vlt. 5% vom Ukrainischen. Ja, ich bin Ausland, aber immer noch in Europa. Der Park wurde von einem Polen gebaut, das ist unser Nachbarvolk. Es macht mich traurig, dass wir in Deutschland so eine große Wissenslücke haben, wenn es um Osteuropa geht. Erklären tue ich mir das durch den kalten Krieg, sowie mangelhafte Abdeckung in der Schule. Aber seitdem ist so viel Zeit vergangen. Flüge sind so billig, dass wir auf andere Kontinente fliegen, nur um eine Woche am Strand zu liegen (und wir alle wissen wie schädlich Fliegen für das Klima ist). Aber wenige wissen, welche Schätze wir direkt vor der Haustür haben. Das gilt auch für die wunderschönen Städte und Landschaften in Polen, Tschechien, Rumänien und Bulgarien und dem restlichen Balkan. Go East!

Der Tag war wirklich schön, wurde nur gegen Ende durch die Sirenen wegen einem Luftalarm unterbrochen. Katja meint nur: “ja, hier gibt es öfters Luftalarm als in Berschad”, und weiter geht es durch den Garten. Der Betrieb aller Anlagen ist aktuell zu teuer, doch selbst ohne alles zu sehen, war es ein unglaublich schöner Tag im schönsten Garten, den ich bis jetzt gesehen habe (und ich habe in Westeuropa auch schon große und bekannte Parks wie Versailles gesehen). Am Ende gehen wir noch durch einen neuen, zweiten Teil des Parks, der Kindgerechter mit vielen Spielplätzen gebaut wurde. Eine schöne Ergänzung.

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On Thursday, the plans were once again thrown out the window at short notice. It was supposed to be the last day of warm, nice weather. So Vika, Katja and I drove to Uman — a larger city a bit to the northeast. During my volunteer service I had already thought about going there, but that never happened either.

The big attraction of the city is an old, enormous park that, for good reason, measures itself against the gardens of Versailles and the other greatest and most beautiful gardens and parks in Europe. The park was named after Sofia, the beloved of an incredibly wealthy Polish magnate named Potozky. Sofiyivka Park was built in 1796 for her birthday and has been preserved to this day.

Geometry barely plays a role here — it's more of a huge enchanted, romantic, and winding garden. It goes up and down, and despite the beautiful old wooden signposts, you never quite know what's around the next corner. Ponds, waterfalls, magnolias, grottos, rocky landscapes, streams and much more are waiting to be discovered. The garden's theme is rooted in Greek mythology, inspired by Homer. This is reflected in the various statues scattered throughout, which nevertheless don't steal the show from nature. It's an incredibly beautiful place to stroll, and at the same time exciting to see what the park has in store. Everyone agrees: you need 2 days to see the whole park. There are wide paths, narrower ones, and very small ones that lead you into the most hidden little corners. On another trip to Ukraine I would definitely plan 2 full days for Uman again. Vika finds an opportunity for a photo shoot every 5 minutes — and that's pretty much how the whole day goes ;)

The English landscape garden is considered one of the 7 wonders of Ukraine, and absolutely for good reason. Now that I'm here, I wonder why I never knew anything about it before. When I look it up, I come across a ridiculously short German Wikipedia article — it probably contains about 5% of what the Ukrainian one does. Yes, I'm abroad, but I'm still in Europe. The park was built by a Polish person — our neighboring nation. It makes me sad that in Germany we have such a huge knowledge gap when it comes to Eastern Europe. I explain it to myself through the Cold War and the lack of coverage in schools. But so much time has passed since then. Flights are so cheap that we fly to other continents just to spend a week on the beach (and we all know how harmful flying is for the climate). And yet few people know what treasures we have right on our doorstep. That goes for the stunning cities and landscapes of Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and the rest of the Balkans too. Go East!

The day was truly beautiful — only interrupted near the end by sirens for an air raid warning. Katja simply says: “yeah, there are more frequent air raid warnings here than in Bershad” and we carry on through the garden. Running all the facilities is currently too expensive, but even without seeing everything, it was an incredibly beautiful day in the most beautiful garden I've seen so far (and I have seen large and well-known parks in Western Europe too, like Versailles). At the end we walk through a new, second section of the park, designed to be more child-friendly with lots of playgrounds. A lovely addition.

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Felsen O.O