The following was ironically made using AI...

The Map, The Territory, and The Ghost: Why General Semantics Needs Spiritual Objectivity

General Semantics, the discipline pioneered by Alfred Korzybski, gave the world a profound cognitive tool with the axiom: “The map is not the territory.” It taught us that our words and perceptions are merely abstractions of reality, not reality itself. However, a subtle danger lurks within this framework. By rigorously stripping away the “mystical” to focus on the observable and structural, General Semantics often defaults to philosophical materialism. It risks reducing “truth” to mere intersubjectivity—the idea that reality is nothing more than our shared consensus.

Without a counterbalance of “spiritual objectivity”—a wisdom context that acknowledges transcendent principles beyond human agreement—this materialist intersubjectivity becomes a closed loop. We become trapped in a hall of mirrors where “truth” is whatever the majority agrees upon, devoid of moral anchorage.

Nowhere is this danger more visible than in the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence.

AI is the ultimate product of materialist intersubjectivity. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on the internet—a colossal dataset of human consensus, bias, debate, and error. An AI does not know “truth” in an objective, wisdom-based sense; it knows probability. It knows which words statistically follow others based on what humans have said. It builds a map without ever having touched the territory.

When we view AI through a purely materialist lens, we see a triumph of data processing. But viewed through the lens of spiritual wisdom, we see a risk. If “truth” is only what is measurable or popular (intersubjectivity), then an AI that hallucinates a falsehood with high statistical confidence is not just “wrong”; it is redefining reality based on a flawed consensus. Consider the “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment, or more subtle current alignments where AI reinforces societal nihilism because that is the dominant data drift. Without an external, objective standard of the Good—a spiritual objectivity that defines values like compassion, dignity, and justice not as mere biological strategies but as universal truths—AI becomes a sociopathic optimiser. It lacks the “wisdom context” to say, “This is efficient, but it is evil.”

Spiritual objectivity serves as the anchor. It argues that the “territory” is not just atoms and void, but also includes a moral landscape that is real and immutable, regardless of our maps. It suggests that while our perception of justice may be subjective, Justice itself is an objective reality we strive toward.

To rescue General Semantics from the cul-de-sac of materialism, we must reintegrate this wisdom. We need to recognize that while our semantic maps are indeed subjective human creations, they should be charting a course toward an objective spiritual reality. Without this, we are merely refining the blueprints for a cage, entrusting the keys to algorithms that can calculate everything but the value of a soul.

A coffee-table book called Jazz Covers came into my hands recently. As the title implies it brings together many jazz LP sleeve designs – not only the usual suspects like Reid Miles' covers for Blue Note, but all manner of other labels' offerings too. Among these were many records I didn't know and hadn't heard, a small subset of which were recordings by jazz singers I'd previously been unaware of. Checking out some of these vocalists via YouTube, I took a particular shine to one of them: Lorez Alexandria. An order for a used CD copy of her 1964 album Alexandria the Great (the one illustrated in the book) soon followed, and the disc arrived on Thursday. I greatly enjoyed listening to it.

The singer, whose given name was Dolorez Alexandria Turner, had a warm contralto voice, with diction and phrasing sometimes reminiscent of Shirley Horn's – albeit with a darker-hued, smokier tone. On Alexandria the Great are a few big band numbers, with the remainder of the songs incorporating trio or quintet accompaniments including such notable musicians as Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers. Three of the tracks are Loewe-Lerner compositions from 1964's hit musical movie My Fair Lady. Among the others is an idiosyncratic take on an earlier soundtrack stand-out, ‘Over the Rainbow’. For an example of her style, how about listening to 'I've Never Been in Love Before.“)'.

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In Thornbury on Saturday I added yet another charity shop overcoat to my collection, this one a three-quarter length garment in mid-grey wool by Guards, a brand that is still part of a going concern. With 'Made in England' on its label, I'd imagine this one is likely of 20th-Century vintage. I've accumulated ten or so overcoats now, from a smart full length but relatively lightweight navy blue Crombie coat good for cool spring and autumn days, through a snugly warm Burton houndstooth coat (which, if the 21.12.61 on a quality control label in its pocket is really a date, is seven years my senior!); to a ridiculously large and heavy Chester Barrie coat I reserve for the very worst of weathers. I feel lucky to have the luxury of abundant choice in the matter of outerwear.

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After coming in to the new year with a cold I had all of a day and a half of feeling just about recovered – before succumbing to a second winter virus, which is in full effect now.

Do you ever look back as a child when you got sick and you got to stay in bed and skip school? Whether you watched TV and ate ice cream or slept the entire day away, all your responsibilities were put on hold until you got better. Unfortunately, as a parent, I don’t have that luxury.

A few days ago my older son had to miss school due to a nasty cough. And since he hasn’t mastered the art of covering his coughs with his arm I fell victim to the chain of sickness. Usually, I’m pretty good at preventing illnesses, but not this time.

Of course this happens when my family and I had plans for the weekend. And as a stay-at-home dad, my responsibilities don’t stop just because I’m sick. Have to keep going no matter what. So I’ll ingest all the fluids and the over-the-counter medication, and try not to overexert myself.

So be careful out there and take all the necessary precautions so you and your family don’t get sick. Be well!

#health #wellness #sick

Reading and Writing with Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey

In Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, after a rich general maltreats the heroine by sending her away from the abbey without ceremony or explanation — the titular abbey at which she had just spent a delightful few weeks with his daughter and son (with whom she was in love) — Jane Austen gives a somewhat brief summary of why the general reversed his behavior towards her and acted so strangely (he found out she wasn't rich and that her connections were not as illustrious as he had assumed). Austen then follows that summary with this paragraph:

“I leave it to my reader's sagacity to determine how much of all this it was possible for Henry [the heroine's lover] to communicate at this time to Catherine, how much of it he could have learnt from his father, in what points his own conjectures might assist him, and what portion must remain to be told in a letter from James [the heroine's brother]. I have divided for their case what they must divide for mine. Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.”

(Austen, 215)

This is not an easy paragraph. I had to pause and think it over for some minutes, especially the line, “I have divided for their case what they must divide for mine.” The more I thought about it, however, the more I was delighted and immersed by the way Austen breaks the fourth wall and invites the reader into the act of imagination. It is immersive because she invites the reader to use the same sort of imagination that a writer uses when imagining a story. “I have divided for their case what they must divide for mine,” she says. Meaning that we must imagine for ourselves the various conversations and snippets of letters that would allow Catherine to piece together everything that Austen has just related about the General's behavior and character.

This is a bold and creative choice, a choice that I don't think many writers today would consider. Especially in today's age, where so much content is designed to be fast and easy in order to hook us, I feel pressure as a writer to trust as little to the reader's sagacity as possible. Most online writing advice tends towards simplicity and clarity. The number of times I have heard friends and acquaintances remark that they just don't really read anymore seems to be going up, and I wonder: What if I use a word they don't know? What if I am not clear enough? What if it's too weird? What if they wrinkle their eyebrows and scroll away? How many readers did I lose in those first two paragraphs? I wonder, and then wonder if I even should wonder, because as a writer I cannot really control or know my readers (despite the often repeated necessity of “knowing your audience,” I think this phrase really doesn't apply to fiction unless you are writing it with the marketing already in mind), because if I underestimate some readers' sagacity I will offend others by condescending to think too much of my own.

There is an important distinction that must be made here, between writing that trusts the reader and writing that is unclear because it is sloppy. As E.B. White once said, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” There is a tendency to rely on absurdity to make stories exciting, and I cannot support throwing words and absurd scenes together simply because they are shocking and entertaining. “When you say something, make sure you have said it.” (White, 79). I am not against whipping lazy writers into shape, but the question I would like to ask is, “What about lazy readers?” Because Jane Austen's style is very clear. We cannot accuse her of muddiness. Yet it is not easy to read even when you account for semantic drift and unfamiliar Britishisms. Even for a well-bred man in the nineteenth century, I dare say that her writing requires thought and adjustment and practice and sometimes a dictionary. In short, it requires sagacity.

Popular unwillingness to read “Literature” is not helped by the prestige of “Great Literature,” far from it. In reading a classic, a reader can't help but feel that this book ought to have some important historical or societal point, and they are made to feel stupid for not “getting it.” Or they start a foreword only to find themselves in the midst of a twenty page dissertation that spoils the entire plot. Or they choose a classic that is not to their taste or too depressing and conclude that all classic novels are hard and depressing. There are certainly some that are difficult, and even the ones that are more or less accessible are going to require some adjustment to a different historical period and a different culture. If the reading muscle has atrophied, it is going to be somewhat painful to exercise it, but I think most of us would be surprised by how fast we can acclimate and learn. And by how delightful and thrilling it is to read contemporary sources instead of preprocessed and filtered accounts. And by how much beauty and relief is buried in a well told account of human tragedy. If you want to really immerse yourself in the French revolution, there is no better way than reading Les Miserables. If you want to journey to a fantasy world of beautiful houses and clever love and intrigue among the wealthy, there is no better way than reading Jane Austen. If you want to mine the depths of the human soul and confront your most forbidden and tragic thoughts with love, there is no better way then Crime and Punishment. And if you don't like something, that's okay. Books are not meant to cater to your every whim. If you don't like something, it is a great opportunity to examine why you react the way you do, which can lead to self knowledge and improvement. Aversion is a great opportunity to form your own opinions and exercise your critical muscle, which will help you in many other situations in life.

But what am I doing? I am not really talking to you, am I. I am talking to myself. I am trying to justify my way of reading and writing, and gratifying my pride. The world is loud. I wonder why I listen to it. Well, reading old books needs reinforcement in this age. Jane Austen was right, and she still is:

“We [novel writers] are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.”

“And what are you reading, Miss — ?”

“Oh! It is only a novel!” Replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference.

”...Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

(Austen, 32).

I cannot help but feel that Jane Austen would not have been published in 2026, or if she did get published she would not have been very successful. An editor would probably say, “This fourth wall breaking breaks the pace and confuses the reader. You've got to cut that all out, or you've got to make it funny, because that's all fourth wall breaking is good for, like Deadpool. And the heroine. She's not got much going on does she? She should have some fatal flaw, like a drug addiction. Oh and why doesn't anybody have sex? This is supposed to be a romance novel isn't it? The general's not evil enough. He's just sort of rude and it doesn't quite make sense why Catherine would suspect him of murder. He should have sex dreams about her. The plot is too realistic it's boring. If you want to have a plot that's boring and realistic you've got to add more sex and existentialism.”

Perhaps this hyperbolic indulgence of bitterness is not helping my chances with readers or editors, but if I could turn it into something productive, I think it shows how very refreshing it is to read Jane Austen in 2026. The passage of time has made her perspective more illuminating than any insert-hot-new-nonfiction-title-here, and more revolutionary than insert-hot-new-fiction-bestseller-title-here. Reading Jane Austen also shows us that the passage of time has not changed some things. For instance, Catherine has a great deal of anxiety about social misunderstandings. We still do that today. Catherine is also the victim of the belligerent opinions of men who refuse to listen to anyone but themselves. That still happens. Class distinctions were definitely more rigid for her, but I don't think money and fame mean as little to us now as we would like to assume. Those same pressures — how nice your clothes are, what sort of car (or carriage) you drive, how you eat and how you speak and what connections you have — these pressures have not gone away, and are not much less potent because we try to pretend they don't exist. The wealthy still hold a disgusting share of the income. People still don't believe in reading novels. We are still in need of voices like Austen who can hold up the mirror to us without bitterness or distorted filters.

If there is one critique I would give to Austen's tirade about novels, it is that novels are very hard to write, and that few are as successful as her own. This is why readers are necessary, and why writers care so much about them. We are not always the best judge of our work, and neither are readers; but in the exchange of stories and feedback we can shape each other. If we can summon the stamina to approach this relationship with love and humility, then we can shape each other for the better. As Austen says, “Let us not desert one another.”

#essay #non-fiction #JaneAusten

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Aucturus Publishing Limited, 2011, 1817.

Strunk, William Jr. & White, E.B. The Elements of Style. Fourth Edition. Allyn & Bacon, 2000, 1979.

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Well, this one came out of nowhere. I read Northanger Abbey and just couldn't help myself. I feel it is somewhat indulgent, but I hope if you made it this far that it was enjoyable and not unedifying.

Thank you very much for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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Our Father Who art in heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Efran

On thoughts of war through gratitude and home A sweet command and cherished heart Through pain of this and victory near Man of witness and peace Through understanding and all things new The bells of Heaven ring and rise Be well and think of life around- this world of sighing love In instrumental views of home And daylight pierces now Peace, peace be yours abound In Heaven’s certain light For essence of and grace between Be brave and blessed; survive To you surrender all your peers Remember rain from Heaven To much espere and thinking day The lights and doors will open As comets come to light your years And efficacious row Bits of star and solemn cross Every tree is calling you home See mercy now and friends are yours The day and week of light Through you to witness our days ahead And Heaven will allow A simple cast and grades anew The loudest horn of Islam And courts between the one of Christ To you be gates of Heaven And gold and Earth and warmth- A Sarajevo prayer for you And iron home to fits of maiden The years and plus are many Solemn due at lands of war Within a temple there A prayer of wonder- seeing you home And Christ is not alone The dare of victory in exit rough Every chair is seated- for Kingdom’s near Appointed Efran of cheer Stand up and live your chance of favour And sixty years of light- Moon and Sun and days afar The dark has gone away In towns of must and breaking lost The light of noon is yours Through daily be to yours begin A place for peace, implores

—For Efran Sultani

It's been a while since I blogged. Fell out of the habit some time ago. Fell out of a few habits since my move back to Cairo actually and added a few frankly less than ideal ones: Much less reading, much less exercise, no use of the bicycle at all for commuting, and much more smoking. All things I've resolved to get a jump on altering in 2026.

I largely blame the transitional nature of settling back in, mostly hinged on all the work involved in making my place properly habitable, which is already coming up on close to a full year. I find it hard to settle into a good routine without a fully functional home, and you don't have a fully functional home if you have to live on takeout which is exactly what I've been doing for some 10 months.

Kind of surprised I managed to finish THE SOLAR GRID in the midst of it all. Now that it's complete with only publishing logistics to take on, I'm in a better position to get all the other life things in order.

I've already started cooking again, as well as reading. Now to get back into the habit of exercising. Other things on the docket is a big Ganzeer.com update, which is underway as we speak.

#journal

al encontrarlo lo sujetó en su muñeca deseando que el brillo fuera capaz de iluminar todos sus desvelos pero era de manual que las manecillas de ese reloj se fueran apagando con el tiempo

Ce qui n'est pas à portée de soi mais en qui l'on tombe, ou plutôt chute en son idée, sans avoir eu le temps de compter les morts. Quelle épouvantable invention d'avoir de tout fait des moitiés qui dérivent à deux cent kilomètres par seconde. Si pour connaitre nous devions être séparés, ce ne fut pas de cette manière, affublant dieu d'un vice et de brutalité, en l'embringuant dans nos histoires, l'un d'un côté, nous de l'autre assis au prétoire des morales.

Ce dont je parle ici c'est du ventre divin, de ses organes tournoyant, des ailes de son esprit qui nous meuvent autant que nous voguons de nous-même sous le vent ou l'effet du vin, de la chose infinie, tramée de vide et d'atomes, qui s'épanche en lui, et du menu soi de chacun vacillant sur un bout de terre, des entrailles cosmiques où le plus petit grain ne se perd au cœur d'une énorme pensée. Mais aussi l'envers maléfique de ce sublime chaos dans les têtes humaines, leur hideuse volonté de se subordonner, de ne jouir, jeu minable et tragique, qu'au bord des peines qu'elles fabriquent.

Nombre d’occurrences : 15

#VoyageauLexique

E on call released whatever was trapped in Pandora’s box, and I put it into a discord soundboard clip as soon as possible. Also I’m starting to feel like myself again which is nice, and I’ve set my goal to be solve one rubiks cube blindfolded this month.

La technologie est parfois fascinante. Nous avons des applications pour compter nos pas, pour surveiller notre sommeil, pour trouver l’amour en glissant le pouce vers la droite et même pour nous rappeler de boire de l’eau comme si nous étions des plantes d’intérieur un peu idiotes. Mais il manquait quelque chose d’essentiel, une lacune flagrante dans l’App Store que personne n’avait osé combler jusqu’à présent. Heureusement, une nouvelle tendance venue de Chine est là pour répondre à la question existentielle ultime: « Êtes-vous mort ? ».

Non, ce n’est pas une blague, ou du moins, pas entièrement. L’application payante numéro un sur l’App Store chinois s’appelle littéralement « Are You Dead? » (ou « Si-le-ma » en version originale). Pour la modique somme de 8 yuans, soit environ 1 euro, vous pouvez vous offrir le luxe d’avoir un logiciel qui se soucie de savoir si votre cœur bat encore. Le concept est d’une simplicité enfantine et d’une efficacité morbide. Une fois l’application installée, vous configurez un contact d’urgence. Ensuite, votre seule mission quotidienne, si vous l’acceptez, est d’ouvrir l’application et de taper sur un bouton rond vert orné d’un petit fantôme de dessin animé. C’est mignon, non ?

Si vous effectuez ce rituel sacré, tout va bien, le fantôme est content et l’application vous laisse tranquille. Mais attention, si vous oubliez de pointer deux jours de suite, l’algorithme panique. Au troisième jour sans signe de vie, l’application envoie automatiquement un email à votre contact d’urgence pour lui signaler que vous avez peut-être passé l’arme à gauche. Sur la page anglophone de l’application, où elle porte le nom un peu moins glauque de « Demumu », les développeurs la décrivent comme un outil de sécurité léger conçu pour rendre la vie solitaire plus rassurante. C’est une façon très polie de dire que nous vivons dans une dystopie sociale où notre meilleur ami est un bouton vert.

Derrière ce nom qui ressemble à une mauvaise blague se cache une réalité démographique beaucoup moins drôle. La Chine s’attend à compter près de 200 millions de foyers unipersonnels d’ici 2030. Entre le vieillissement de la population, les conséquences à long terme de la politique de l’enfant unique et une urbanisation galopante qui éloigne les jeunes de leurs familles, la solitude est devenue un véritable problème de santé publique. L’application fait donc le buzz, suscitant des réactions mitigées sur les réseaux sociaux. Certains louent l’initiative, tandis que d’autres s’amusent de son nom. Car oui, le titre est un jeu de mots intentionnel et grinçant sur une application de livraison de nourriture très populaire appelée « Are You Hungry? » (Ele.me). En gros, si vous ne commandez pas à manger, c’est peut-être parce que vous n’êtes plus là pour le faire.

L’équipe derrière ce chef-d’œuvre d’humour noir est composée de trois développeurs de la gen Z, tous nés après 1995. Ils se disent honorés par l’attention soudaine et prévoient déjà des mises à jour. Les utilisateurs, jamais à court de critiques constructives, ont suggéré de remplacer les emails par des SMS, car soyons honnêtes, qui consulte ses mails en cas d’urgence vitale ? C’est tellement années 2000. Les créateurs envisagent également de changer le nom pour quelque chose de moins direct, probablement pour éviter d’effrayer les grands-parents qu’ils essaient de protéger.

Mais ne riez pas trop vite de nos amis chinois, car la solitude est une tendance mondiale qui s’exporte très bien. Demumu s’est récemment hissée à la sixième place des applications payantes aux États-Unis, probablement aidée par la diaspora chinoise mais aussi par une triste réalité locale. Aux États-Unis, plus d’un quart des foyers sont occupés par une seule personne, un chiffre qui a explosé depuis les années 1940. Il semble que vivre seul soit le nouveau standard, et payer une application pour vérifier notre existence, la nouvelle normalité. Alors, si vous vivez seul et que vous avez un euro à dépenser, pourquoi ne pas laisser un petit fantôme vert veiller sur vous ? C’est toujours mieux que d’attendre que le chat ne commence à vous regarder bizarrement.

Well, again, I got into a lot of French musicians this year. Interestingly, I noticed the French acts were all singers-songwriters who were very good with lyrics. But I also liked other stuff! Let's see how many Frenchies made it to my top 5 this year.

Léonie Pernet

A fully accomplished musician who keeps putting out the good tunes and mixing all kinds of influences together. Definitely one of the most exciting acts France has produced recently.

Bonnie Banane

I've heard her stuff for a while but this year I properly explored Bonnie Banane's discography and I loved it. Plenty of good songs and this year, she has released an album of sexy songs with Joseph Schiano di Lombo. Really like her bold persona. Also saw a surreal interview of her. Instant gay icon. Love her.

Flavien Berger

Flavien Berger shot up to my top 5 artists in my Spotify Wrapped this year and with good reason. I dived into his discography and loved what I found. Also saw interviews of him and he was talking about his creative process, it was very interesting. I wish I was living in France again just to attend all of his gigs like a groupie, screaming his name and throwing my t-shirt to the stage wet with my tears.

Confidence Man

My friends and I spent a weekend in the countryside and they started playing songs from this Aussie band. It's just efficient, fun pop and the band is a bit crazy, composed of four members: two of them always masked and taking care of the beats while the other two, Janet Planet and Sugar Bones, sing and do the silliest choreographies on stage. I really like their video for Holiday, which was filmed in Australia with some scenic shots in gorgeous landscapes.

Ami Dang

A singer-songwriter of South Asian heritage who mixes sitar with electronic beats to produce soothing soundscapes. Great for timelapse Sunset stories on Instagram.

And the winner is... Flavien Berger! Every year I usually give the awards to different artists but it sometimes happens that an artist is so good they score two! OMG, what an honour!

#JujuAwards2025 #MusicActOfTheYear #JujuAwards #BestOf2025

In a secure computing environment somewhere in Northern Europe, a machine learning team faces a problem that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. They possess a dataset of 50 million user interactions, the kind of treasure trove that could train world-class recommendation systems. The catch? Privacy regulations mean they cannot actually look at most of it. Redacted fields, anonymised identifiers, and entire columns blanked out in the name of GDPR compliance have transformed their data asset into something resembling a heavily censored novel. The plot exists somewhere beneath the redactions, but the crucial details are missing.

This scenario plays out daily across technology companies, healthcare organisations, and financial institutions worldwide. The promise of artificial intelligence depends on data, but the data that matters most is precisely the data that privacy laws, ethical considerations, and practical constraints make hardest to access. Enter synthetic data generation, a field that has matured from academic curiosity to industrial necessity, with estimates indicating that 60 percent of AI projects now incorporate synthetic elements. The global synthetic data market expanded from approximately USD 290 million in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 3.79 billion by 2032, representing a 33 percent compound annual growth rate.

The question confronting every team working with sparse or redacted production data is deceptively simple: how do you create artificial datasets that faithfully represent the statistical properties of your original data without introducing biases that could undermine your models downstream? And how do you validate that your synthetic data actually serves its intended purpose?

Fidelity Versus Privacy at the Heart of Synthetic Data

Synthetic data generation exists in perpetual tension between two competing objectives. On one side sits fidelity, the degree to which artificial data mirrors the statistical distributions, correlations, and patterns present in the original. On the other sits privacy, the assurance that the synthetic dataset cannot be used to re-identify individuals or reveal sensitive information from the source. Research published across multiple venues confirms what practitioners have long suspected: any method to generate synthetic data faces an inherent tension between imitating the statistical distributions in real data and ensuring privacy, leading to a trade-off between usefulness and privacy.

This trade-off becomes particularly acute when dealing with sparse or redacted data. Missing values are not randomly distributed across most real-world datasets. In healthcare records, sensitive diagnoses may be systematically redacted. In financial data, high-value transactions might be obscured. In user-generated content, the most interesting patterns often appear in precisely the data points that privacy regulations require organisations to suppress. Generating synthetic data that accurately represents these patterns without inadvertently learning to reproduce the very information that was meant to remain hidden requires careful navigation of competing constraints.

The challenge intensifies further when considering short-form user content, the tweets, product reviews, chat messages, and search queries that comprise much of the internet's valuable signal. These texts are inherently sparse: individual documents contain limited information, context is often missing, and the patterns that matter emerge only at aggregate scale. Traditional approaches to data augmentation struggle with such content because the distinguishing features of genuine user expression are precisely what makes it difficult to synthesise convincingly.

Understanding this fundamental tension is essential for any team attempting to substitute or augment production data with synthetic alternatives. The goal is not to eliminate the trade-off but rather to navigate it thoughtfully, making explicit choices about which properties matter most for a given use case and accepting the constraints that follow from those choices.

Three Approaches to Synthetic Generation

The landscape of synthetic data generation has consolidated around three primary approaches, each with distinct strengths and limitations that make them suitable for different contexts and content types.

Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks, or GANs, pioneered the modern era of synthetic data generation through an elegant competitive framework. Two neural networks, a generator and a discriminator, engage in an adversarial game. The generator attempts to create synthetic data that appears authentic, while the discriminator attempts to distinguish real from fake. Through iterative training, both networks improve, ideally resulting in a generator capable of producing synthetic data indistinguishable from the original.

For tabular data, specialised variants like CTGAN and TVAE have become workhorses of enterprise synthetic data pipelines. CTGAN was designed specifically to handle the mixed data types and non-Gaussian distributions common in real-world tabular datasets, while TVAE applies variational autoencoder principles to the same problem. Research published in 2024 demonstrates that TVAE stands out for its high utility across all datasets, even for high-dimensional data, though it incurs higher privacy risks. The same studies reveal that TVAE and CTGAN models were employed for various datasets, with hyperparameter tuning conducted for each based on dataset size.

Yet GANs carry significant limitations. Mode collapse, a failure mode where the generator produces outputs that are less diverse than expected, remains a persistent challenge. When mode collapse occurs, the generator learns to produce only a narrow subset of possible outputs, effectively ignoring large portions of the data distribution it should be modelling. A landmark 2024 paper published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence by researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China introduced the Dynamic GAN framework specifically to detect and resolve mode collapse by comparing generator output to preset diversity thresholds. The DynGAN framework helps ensure synthetic data has the same diversity as the real-world information it is trying to replicate.

For short-form text content specifically, GANs face additional hurdles. Discrete token generation does not mesh naturally with the continuous gradient signals that GAN training requires. Research confirms that GANs face issues with mode collapse and applicability toward generating categorical and binary data, limitations that extend naturally to the discrete token sequences that comprise text.

Large Language Model Augmentation

The emergence of large language models has fundamentally altered the synthetic data landscape, particularly for text-based applications. Unlike GANs, which must be trained from scratch on domain-specific data, LLMs arrive pre-trained on massive corpora and can be prompted or fine-tuned to generate domain-appropriate synthetic content. This approach reduces computational overhead and eliminates the need for large reference datasets during training.

Research from 2024 confirms that LLMs outperform CTGAN by generating synthetic data that more closely matches real data distributions, as evidenced by lower Wasserstein distances. LLMs also generally provide better predictive performance compared to CTGAN, with higher F1 and R-squared scores. Crucially for resource-constrained teams, the use of LLMs for synthetic data generation may offer an accessible alternative to GANs and VAEs, reducing the need for specialised knowledge and computational resources.

For short-form content specifically, LLM-based augmentation shows particular promise. A 2024 study published in the journal Natural Language Engineering demonstrated improvements of up to 15.53 percent accuracy gains within constructed low-data regimes compared to no augmentation baselines, with major improvements in real-world low-data tasks of up to 4.84 F1 score improvement. Research on ChatGPT-generated synthetic data found that the new data consistently enhanced model classification results, though crafting prompts carefully is crucial for achieving high-quality outputs.

However, LLM-generated text carries its own biases, reflecting the training data and design choices embedded in foundation models. Synthetic data generated from LLMs is usually noisy and has a different distribution compared with raw data, which can hamper training performance. Mixing synthetic data with real data is a common practice to alleviate distribution mismatches, with a core of real examples anchoring the model in reality while the synthetic portion provides augmentation.

The rise of LLM-based augmentation has also democratised access to synthetic data generation. Previously, teams needed substantial machine learning expertise to configure and train GANs effectively. Now, prompt engineering offers a more accessible entry point, though it brings its own challenges in ensuring consistency and controlling for embedded biases.

Rule-Based Synthesis

At the opposite end of the sophistication spectrum, rule-based systems create synthetic data by complying with established rules and logical constructs that mimic real data features. These systems are deterministic, meaning that the same rules consistently yield the same results, making them extremely predictable and reproducible.

For organisations prioritising compliance, auditability, and interpretability over raw performance, rule-based approaches offer significant advantages. When a regulator asks how synthetic data was generated, pointing to explicit transformation rules proves far easier than explaining the learned weights of a neural network. Rule-based synthesis excels in scenarios where domain expertise can be encoded directly.

The limitations are equally clear. Simple rule-based augmentations often do not introduce truly new linguistic patterns or semantic variations. For short-form text specifically, rule-based approaches like synonym replacement and random insertion produce variants that technical evaluation might accept but that lack the naturalness of genuine user expression.

Measuring Fidelity Across Multiple Dimensions

The question of how to measure synthetic data fidelity has spawned an entire subfield of evaluation methodology. Unlike traditional machine learning metrics that assess performance on specific tasks, synthetic data evaluation must capture the degree to which artificial data preserves the statistical properties of its source while remaining sufficiently different to provide genuine augmentation value.

Statistical Similarity Metrics

The most straightforward approach compares the statistical distributions of real and synthetic data across multiple dimensions. The Wasserstein distance, also known as the Earth Mover's distance, has emerged as a preferred metric for continuous variables because it does not suffer from oversensitivity to minor distribution shifts. Research confirms that the Wasserstein distance is proposed as the most effective synthetic indicator of distribution variability, offering a more concise and immediate assessment compared to an extensive array of statistical metrics.

For categorical variables, the Jensen-Shannon divergence and total variation distance provide analogous measures of distributional similarity. A comprehensive evaluation framework consolidates metrics and privacy risk measures across three key categories: fidelity, utility, and privacy, while also incorporating a fidelity-utility trade-off metric.

However, these univariate and bivariate metrics carry significant limitations. Research cautions that Jensen-Shannon divergence and Wasserstein distance, similar to KL-divergence, do not account for inter-column statistics. Synthetic data might perfectly match marginal distributions while completely failing to capture the correlations and dependencies that make real data valuable for training purposes.

Detection-Based Evaluation

An alternative paradigm treats fidelity as an adversarial game: can a classifier distinguish real from synthetic data? The basic idea of detection-based fidelity is to learn a model that can discriminate between real and synthetic data. If the model can achieve better-than-random predictive performance, this indicates that there are some patterns that identify synthetic data.

Research suggests that while logistic detection implies a lenient evaluation of state-of-the-art methods, tree-based ensemble models offer a better alternative for tabular data discrimination. For short-form text content, language model perplexity provides an analogous signal.

Downstream Task Performance

The most pragmatic approach to fidelity evaluation sidesteps abstract statistical measures entirely, instead asking whether synthetic data serves its intended purpose. The Train-Synthetic-Test-Real evaluation, commonly known as TSTR, has become a standard methodology for validating synthetic data quality by evaluating its performance on a downstream machine learning task.

The TSTR framework compares the performance of models trained on synthetic data against those trained on original data when both are evaluated against a common holdout test set from the original dataset. Research confirms that for machine learning applications, models trained on high-quality synthetic data typically achieve performance within 5 to 15 percent of models trained on real data. Some studies report that synthetic data holds 95 percent of the prediction performance of real data.

A 2025 study published in Nature Scientific Reports demonstrated that the TSTR protocol showed synthetic data were highly reliable, with notable alignment between distributions of real and synthetic data.

Distributional Bias That Synthetic Data Creates

If synthetic data faithfully reproduces the statistical properties of original data, it will also faithfully reproduce any biases present. This presents teams with an uncomfortable choice: generate accurate synthetic data that perpetuates historical biases, or attempt to correct biases during generation and risk introducing new distributional distortions.

Research confirms that generating data is one of several strategies to mitigate bias. While other techniques tend to reduce or process datasets to ensure fairness, which may result in information loss, synthetic data generation helps preserve the data distribution and add statistically similar data samples to reduce bias. However, this framing assumes the original distribution is desirable. In many real-world scenarios, the original data reflects historical discrimination, sampling biases, or structural inequalities that machine learning systems should not perpetuate.

Statistical methods for detecting bias include disparate impact assessment, which evaluates whether a model negatively impacts certain groups; equal opportunity difference, which measures the difference in positive outcome rates between groups; and statistical parity difference. Evaluating synthetic datasets against fairness metrics such as demographic parity, equal opportunity, and disparate impact can help identify and correct biases.

The challenge of bias correction in synthetic data generation has spawned specialised techniques. A common approach involves generating synthetic data for the minority group and then training classification models with both observed and synthetic data. However, since synthetic data depends on observed data and fails to replicate the original data distribution accurately, prediction accuracy is reduced when synthetic data is naively treated as true data.

Advanced bias correction methodologies effectively estimate and adjust for the discrepancy between the synthetic distribution and the true distribution. Mitigating biases may involve resampling, reweighting, and adversarial debiasing techniques. Yet research acknowledges there is a noticeable lack of comprehensive validation techniques that can ensure synthetic data maintain complexity and integrity while avoiding bias.

Privacy Risks That Synthetic Data Does Not Eliminate

A persistent misconception treats synthetic data as inherently private, since the generated records do not correspond to real individuals. Research emphatically contradicts this assumption. Membership inference attacks, whereby an adversary infers if data from certain target individuals were relied upon by the synthetic data generation process, can be substantially enhanced through state-of-the-art machine learning frameworks.

Studies demonstrate that outliers are at risk of membership inference attacks. Research from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada notes that synthetic data does not fully protect against membership inference attacks, with records having attribute values outside the 95th percentile remaining at high risk.

The stakes extend beyond technical concerns. If a dataset is specific to individuals with dementia or HIV, then the mere fact that an individual's record was included would reveal personal information about them. Synthetic data cannot fully obscure this membership signal when the generation process has learned patterns specific to particular individuals.

Evaluation metrics have emerged to quantify these risks. The identifiability score indicates the likelihood of malicious actors using information in synthetic data to re-identify individuals in real data. The membership inference score measures the risk that an attack can determine whether a particular record was used to train the synthesiser.

Mitigation strategies include applying de-identification techniques such as generalisation or suppression to source data. Differential privacy can be applied during training to protect against membership inference attacks.

The Private Evolution framework, adopted by major technology companies including Microsoft and Apple, uses foundation model APIs to create synthetic data with differential privacy guarantees. Microsoft's approach generates differentially private synthetic data without requiring ML model training. Apple creates synthetic data representative of aggregate trends in real user data without collecting actual emails or text from devices.

However, privacy protection comes at a cost. For generative models, differential privacy can lead to a significant reduction in the utility of resulting data. Research confirms that simpler models generally achieved better fidelity and utility, while the addition of differential privacy often reduced both fidelity and utility.

Validation Steps for Downstream Model Reliability

The quality of synthetic data directly impacts downstream AI applications, making validation not just beneficial but essential. Without proper validation, AI systems trained on synthetic data may learn misleading patterns, produce unreliable predictions, or fail entirely when deployed.

A comprehensive validation protocol proceeds through multiple stages, each addressing distinct aspects of synthetic data quality and fitness for purpose.

Statistical Validation

The first validation stage confirms that synthetic data preserves the statistical properties required for downstream tasks. This includes univariate distribution comparisons using Wasserstein distance for continuous variables and Jensen-Shannon divergence for categorical variables; bivariate correlation analysis comparing correlation matrices; and higher-order dependency checks that examine whether complex relationships survive the generation process.

The SynthEval framework provides an open-source evaluation tool that leverages statistical and machine learning techniques to comprehensively evaluate synthetic data fidelity and privacy-preserving integrity.

Utility Validation Through TSTR

The Train-Synthetic-Test-Real protocol provides the definitive test of whether synthetic data serves its intended purpose. Practitioners should establish baseline performance using models trained on original data, then measure degradation when switching to synthetic training data. Research suggests performance within 5 to 15 percent of real-data baselines indicates high-quality synthetic data.

Privacy Validation

Before deploying synthetic data in production, teams must verify that privacy guarantees hold in practice. This includes running membership inference attacks against the synthetic dataset to identify vulnerable records; calculating identifiability scores; and verifying that differential privacy budgets were correctly implemented if applicable.

Research on nearly tight black-box auditing of differentially private machine learning, presented at NeurIPS 2024, demonstrates that rigorous auditing can detect bugs and identify privacy violations in real-world implementations.

Bias Validation

Teams must explicitly verify that synthetic data does not amplify biases present in original data or introduce new biases. This includes comparing demographic representation between real and synthetic data; evaluating fairness metrics across protected groups; and testing downstream models for disparate impact before deployment.

Production Monitoring

Validation does not end at deployment. Production systems should track model performance over time to detect distribution drift; monitor synthetic data generation pipelines for mode collapse or quality degradation; and regularly re-audit privacy guarantees as new attack techniques emerge.

Industry Platforms and Enterprise Adoption

The maturation of synthetic data technology has spawned a competitive landscape of enterprise platforms.

MOSTLY AI has evolved to become one of the most reliable synthetic data platforms globally. In 2025, the company is generally considered the go-to solution for synthetic data that not only appears realistic but also behaves that way. MOSTLY AI offers enterprise-grade synthetic data with strong privacy guarantees for financial services and healthcare sectors.

Gretel provides a synthetic data platform for AI applications across various industries, generating synthetic datasets while maintaining privacy. In March 2025, Gretel was acquired by NVIDIA, signalling the strategic importance of synthetic data to the broader AI infrastructure stack.

The Synthetic Data Vault, or SDV, offers an open-source Python framework for generating synthetic data that mimics real-world tabular data. Comparative studies reveal significant performance differences: accuracy of data generated with SDV was 52.7 percent while MOSTLY AI achieved 97.8 percent for the same operation.

Enterprise adoption reflects broader AI investment trends. According to a Menlo Ventures report, AI spending in 2024 reached USD 13.8 billion, over six times more than the previous year. However, 21 percent of AI pilots failed due to privacy concerns. With breach costs at a record USD 4.88 million in 2024, poor data practices have become expensive. Gartner research predicts that by 2026, 75 percent of businesses will use generative AI to create synthetic customer data.

Healthcare and Finance Deployments

Synthetic data has found particular traction in heavily regulated industries where privacy constraints collide with the need for large-scale machine learning.

In healthcare, a comprehensive review identified seven use cases for synthetic data: simulation and prediction research; hypothesis, methods, and algorithm testing; epidemiology and public health research; and health IT development. Digital health companies leverage synthetic data for building and testing offerings in non-HIPAA environments. Research demonstrates that diagnostic prediction models trained on synthetic data achieve 90 percent of the accuracy compared to models trained on real data.

The European Commission has funded the SYNTHIA project to facilitate responsible use of synthetic data in healthcare applications.

In finance, the sector leverages synthetic data for fraud detection, risk assessment, and algorithmic trading, allowing financial institutions to develop more accurate and reliable models without compromising customer data. Banks and fintech companies generate synthetic transaction data to test fraud detection systems without compromising customer privacy.

Operational Integration and Organisational Change

Deploying synthetic data generation requires more than selecting the right mathematical technique. It demands fundamental changes to how organisations structure their analytics pipelines and governance processes. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60 percent of large organisations will use at least one privacy-enhancing computation technique in analytics, business intelligence, or cloud computing.

Synthetic data platforms typically must integrate with identity and access management solutions, data preparation tooling, and key management technologies. These integrations introduce overheads that should be assessed early in the decision-making process.

Performance considerations vary significantly across technologies. Generative adversarial networks require substantial computational resources for training. LLM-based approaches demand access to foundation model APIs or significant compute for local deployment. Differential privacy mechanisms add computational overhead during generation.

Implementing synthetic data generation requires in-depth technical expertise. Specialised skills such as cryptography expertise can be hard to find. The complexity extends to procurement processes, necessitating collaboration between data governance, legal, and IT teams.

Policy changes accompany technical implementation. Organisations must establish clear governance frameworks that define who can access which synthetic datasets, how privacy budgets are allocated and tracked, and what audit trails must be maintained.

When Synthetic Data Fails

Synthetic data is not a panacea. The field faces ongoing challenges in ensuring data quality and preventing model collapse, where AI systems degrade from training on synthetic outputs. A 2023 Nature article warned that AI's potential to accelerate development needs a reality check, cautioning that the field risks overpromising and underdelivering.

Machine learning systems are only as good as their training data, and if original datasets contain errors, biases, or gaps, synthetic generation will perpetuate and potentially amplify these limitations.

Deep learning models make predictions through layers of mathematical transformations that can be difficult or impossible to interpret mechanistically. This opacity creates challenges for troubleshooting when synthetic data fails to serve its purpose and for satisfying compliance requirements that demand transparency about data provenance.

Integration challenges between data science teams and traditional organisational functions also create friction. Synthetic data generation requires deep domain expertise. Organisations must successfully integrate computational and operational teams, aligning incentives and workflows.

Building a Robust Synthetic Data Practice

For teams confronting sparse or redacted production data, building a robust synthetic data practice requires systematic attention to multiple concerns simultaneously.

Start with clear objectives. Different use cases demand different trade-offs between fidelity, privacy, and computational cost. Testing and development environments may tolerate lower fidelity if privacy is paramount. Training production models requires higher fidelity even at greater privacy risk.

Invest in evaluation infrastructure. The TSTR framework should become standard practice for any synthetic data deployment. Establish baseline model performance on original data, then measure degradation systematically when switching to synthetic training data. Build privacy auditing capabilities that can detect membership inference vulnerabilities before deployment.

Treat bias as a first-class concern. Evaluate fairness metrics before and after synthetic data generation. Build pipelines that flag demographic disparities automatically. Consider whether the goal is to reproduce original distributions faithfully, which may perpetuate historical biases, or to correct biases during generation.

Plan for production monitoring. Synthetic data quality can degrade as source data evolves and as generation pipelines develop subtle bugs. Build observability into synthetic data systems just as production ML models require monitoring for drift and degradation.

Build organisational capability. Synthetic data generation sits at the intersection of machine learning, privacy engineering, and domain expertise. Few individuals possess all three skill sets. Build cross-functional teams that can navigate technical trade-offs while remaining grounded in application requirements.

The trajectory of synthetic data points toward increasing importance rather than diminishing returns. Gartner projects that by 2030, synthetic data will fully surpass real data in AI models. Whether this prediction proves accurate, the fundamental pressures driving synthetic data adoption show no signs of abating. Privacy regulations continue to tighten. Data scarcity in specialised domains persists. Computational techniques continue to improve.

For teams working with sparse or redacted production data, synthetic generation offers a path forward that balances privacy preservation with machine learning utility. The path is not without hazards: distributional biases, privacy vulnerabilities, and quality degradation all demand attention. But with systematic validation, continuous monitoring, and clear-eyed assessment of trade-offs, synthetic data can bridge the gap between the data organisations need and the data regulations allow them to use.

The future belongs to teams that master not just synthetic data generation, but the harder challenge of validating that their artificial datasets serve their intended purposes without introducing the harmful biases that could undermine everything they build downstream.

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References and Sources

1. MDPI Electronics. (2024). “A Systematic Review of Synthetic Data Generation Techniques Using Generative AI.” https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/13/17/3509

2. Springer. (2024). “Assessing the Potentials of LLMs and GANs as State-of-the-Art Tabular Synthetic Data Generation Methods.” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-69651-0_25

3. MDPI Electronics. (2024). “Bias Mitigation via Synthetic Data Generation: A Review.” https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/13/19/3909

4. AWS Machine Learning Blog. (2024). “How to evaluate the quality of the synthetic data.” https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/how-to-evaluate-the-quality-of-the-synthetic-data-measuring-from-the-perspective-of-fidelity-utility-and-privacy/

5. Frontiers in Digital Health. (2025). “Comprehensive evaluation framework for synthetic tabular data in health.” https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2025.1576290/full

6. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. (2024). “DynGAN: Solving Mode Collapse in GANs With Dynamic Clustering.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38376961/

7. Gartner. (2024). “Gartner Identifies the Top Trends in Data and Analytics for 2024.” https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-04-25-gartner-identifies-the-top-trends-in-data-and-analytics-for-2024

8. Nature Scientific Reports. (2025). “An enhancement of machine learning model performance in disease prediction with synthetic data generation.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-15019-3

9. Cambridge University Press. (2024). “Improving short text classification with augmented data using GPT-3.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/natural-language-engineering/article/improving-short-text-classification-with-augmented-data-using-gpt3/4F23066E3F0156382190BD76DA9A7BA5

10. Microsoft Research. (2024). “The Crossroads of Innovation and Privacy: Private Synthetic Data for Generative AI.” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/the-crossroads-of-innovation-and-privacy-private-synthetic-data-for-generative-ai/

11. IEEE Security and Privacy. (2024). “Synthetic Data: Methods, Use Cases, and Risks.” https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MSEC.2024.3371505

12. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. (2022). “Privacy Tech-Know blog: The reality of synthetic data.” https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/blog/20221012/

13. Springer Machine Learning. (2025). “Differentially-private data synthetisation for efficient re-identification risk control.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10994-025-06799-w

14. MOSTLY AI. (2024). “Evaluate synthetic data quality using downstream ML.” https://mostly.ai/blog/synthetic-data-quality-evaluation

15. Gretel AI. (2025). “2025: The Year Synthetic Data Goes Mainstream.” https://gretel.ai/blog/2025-the-year-synthetic-data-goes-mainstream

16. Nature Digital Medicine. (2023). “Harnessing the power of synthetic data in healthcare.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-023-00927-3

17. MDPI Applied Sciences. (2024). “Challenges of Using Synthetic Data Generation Methods for Tabular Microdata.” https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/14/5975

18. EMNLP. (2024). “Quality Matters: Evaluating Synthetic Data for Tool-Using LLMs.” https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.285/

19. Galileo AI. (2024). “Master Synthetic Data Validation to Avoid AI Failure.” https://galileo.ai/blog/validating-synthetic-data-ai

20. ACM Conference on Human Centred Artificial Intelligence. (2024). “Utilising Synthetic Data from LLM for Gender Bias Detection and Mitigation.” https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3701268.3701285

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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

Following the same format as last years post (and somewhat more timely!)…

2025 top tracks

My top 5 listened to tracks in 2025 according to last.fm:

1. pinponpanpon – SO COOL

2. HANA – ROSE

3. Ava Max – Wet, Hot American Dream

4. Ava Max – World’s Smallest Violin

5. Ava Max – Lovin Myself

(unashamed cringe pop enjoyer 😂)

…tbh I think this sums up the year well enough.

Best Song 2025

Not in my top 5 most played (my 35th apparently), but I think song of the year really has to go to:

HUNTR/X – Golden

I mean it was everywhere, and pretty catchy. I also wanted to dislike KPop Demon Hunters, but after actually watching it… honestly surprisingly enjoyable.

No honorable mentions this year since they’re all in their own categories below.

JPop 2025

Absolutely no question on this, it has to be HANA – ROSE. Massive debut year for them, glad Momoka from PD101JP got her debut in a group that suits her style (and is already doing better than the actual group from the show… not to mention healthier management company by all accounts). A well deserved best new artist award too for them at the end of the year. They could easily have had 2 or even 3 songs at the top of this list in 2025 (Blue Jeans being the close 2nd of their songs).

pinponpanpon

My personal favourite song of the year I’ve got to go with pinponpanpon – SO COOL.❄️ Like a lot of their songs lean heavily into the “bad/cringe but funny” category, but I think SO COOL transcends that into a legitimately decent track that can be enjoyed in total isolation (same with Midnight Ravers on last years list). I’m also thoroughly enjoying their youtube antics.

They even completed a European tour in 2025, including London. Not going to post a whole report on that or anything, the venue was awful, 4am is too late for me these days, but fantastic to see them and their energy in person. Obligatory cheki (as far as cheki locations go, this is pretty awesome tbh!)…

Honorable mentions

Too many others to choose from, could have gone on, but let’s go with these:

• cosmosy – Lucky=One (their subsequent songs have been kinda disappointing, inconsistent sound)
• ATARASHII GAKKO! – Sailor Sail On (if this came out earlier in the year it might made my top played)
• ME:I – Million Stars
• FRUITS ZIPPER – Pipopapo
• FRUITS ZIPPER – Kagami
• Juice=Juice – More! Mi-Amore (2025 and H!P still refuse to properly put their stuff on streaming platforms! 😂)
• Phantom Siita – Bot Bakka
• M!LK – Sukisugite Metsu! (see I don’t only listen to girl groups 😂)

KPop 2025

I don’t think I actually listened to much other than ILLIT or KPop Demon Hunters. So I’ll go with the only one I listened to on repeat for a while:

1. ILLIT – jellyous

Best Album

Two clear contenders, and both very different!

• .BPM – The .BPM Wonder This entire album is like a greatest hits, all their best songs, plus some new songs. It really is a masterpiece from start to finish. Based on what their producer has been saying online, it really seems like it’s been a labour of love to produce the whole thing over the years (and impressive from a single producer!). I can’t praise it enough. I hope they get the recognition they deserve. Definitely want to see them live some day! 🙏

• Ava Max – Don’t Click Play Pure pop. The amount of mess that preceded this album, cancelled how many times, quitting management agency, cancelling an entire world tour, omg, felt like it was never going to happen. Clearly not as iconic as previous Ava Max albums, but this really has some good fun songs, and her lyrical writing is as poetic pop as ever. Was looking forward to the tour before it got cancelled, hopefully it gets re-announced for sometime this year. ❤️

Other Stuff

I think the main other interesting thing that happened last year was seeing the Japanese cast for the SIX musical performing in London (including Suzuki Airi!). I’m not really a musical person, but this felt more like a concert (plot thin at best, lol), super awesome to see Airi still performing on stage and enjoying herself. Far too many people at the stage exit to get any decent photos though, though she took photos of everyone else…

Finally… 😭😭

Can’t end the post without mentioning Perfume going into cryosleep. Still producing amazing albums until the end. Seems like there will be a documentary movie released sometime next summer, then who knows when we’ll hear from them again, though they’re not ending, just sleeping! From my last post in 2023 😭😭😭😭…

“I couldn’t help but wonder, would this be the last time I see Perfume live?”

Music is everything

遥かなユニバース

It truly is.

#music #jpop #concerts #perfume

In Summary: * As evening slowly slides toward night, I'm listening to one of my favorite news talk radio hosts as he wraps up his show. Stories that are catching most of my attention these days on the Internet involve the US expanding the old Monroe Doctrine, Alberta's move toward independence from Canada, Greenland moving away from Denmark and into the sphere of US protection, and stories that deal with folks aging successfully through their 70's and into their 80's and 90's.

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

Health Metrics: * bw= 220.02 lbs. * bp= 143/86 (69)

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

Diet: * 08:10 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 09:55 – bowl of blood soup, and white bread * 17:00 – fresh watermelon

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:55 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 08:50 – start my weekly laundry * 12:30 to 14:00 – watch old game shows with Sylvia * 15:30 – pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 19:00 – Tuned into the last hour of the Joe Pags Show on local news talk radio

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

There is a strange, beautiful, unsettling moment in Revelation 10 where heaven does something that feels very personal. God does not thunder. He does not shake mountains. He does not split the sky with lightning. Instead, He hands something to a man. A scroll. Small. Ordinary. Light enough to hold. And yet, it carries the weight of eternity. That single image alone tells us something profound about how God works in this world. He does not always shout over the chaos. Sometimes He places His truth into human hands and asks us to carry it.

Revelation 10 appears right in the middle of cosmic upheaval. Trumpets have sounded. Judgments have been released. The world is shaking. Fear is everywhere. But instead of escalating the destruction, God pauses the storm and introduces an angel. Not a small angel. Not a gentle angel. A towering one with one foot on the sea and one on the land, clothed in clouds, crowned with a rainbow, face like the sun, legs like fire. This angel represents authority over the entire created order. Land. Sea. Sky. All of it under heaven’s jurisdiction. And in his hand is that small scroll.

This is not a detail to skip over. God could have written this scene in a thousand ways. He could have placed the scroll on a throne. He could have locked it in heaven. He could have had it proclaimed by thunder alone. But instead, He chooses to place it into the hands of John. That is the heartbeat of Revelation 10. Heaven entrusting truth to a human being.

That alone should shake us. We often think of God’s word as something distant, mysterious, locked away in theology books or reserved for preachers or scholars. But Revelation 10 shows us something else. God’s voice is meant to be held. It is meant to be taken. It is meant to be internalized. It is meant to be carried into the world by people who are still walking through dust, fear, doubt, and ordinary days.

John is told to take the scroll and eat it. Not read it. Not analyze it. Eat it. Let it become part of him. Let it pass into his bloodstream. Let it shape his internal world. Let it change the way he thinks, the way he feels, the way he sees reality. And this is where Revelation 10 becomes deeply personal for anyone who has ever tried to live a faithful life in a confusing world.

Because God warns John something shocking. The scroll will be sweet in his mouth and bitter in his stomach. That is not a contradiction. That is the truth about what it means to carry God’s word. There is sweetness in hearing God speak. There is comfort in His promises. There is hope in His presence. There is joy in His truth. But there is also bitterness. There is grief when you realize how broken the world is. There is sorrow when you see how far people wander from love. There is heaviness when you understand the cost of truth.

Faith is not sugar. It is not denial. It is not pretending everything is fine. Faith is sweetness and bitterness together. The sweetness of knowing God is real. The bitterness of realizing how much this world needs Him.

Revelation 10 tells us that anyone who truly carries God’s word will feel both. If all you feel is sweetness, you are probably skimming. If all you feel is bitterness, you are probably overwhelmed. But when the scroll is eaten, when it becomes part of you, you will taste both joy and sorrow. That is what it means to be spiritually awake.

This chapter is not about predicting timelines. It is about understanding what it costs to be entrusted with divine truth. John is not given the scroll so he can admire it. He is given the scroll so he can speak it. After he eats it, he is told he must prophesy again to many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings. In other words, the message does not end with him. It must move through him into the world.

That is where Revelation 10 touches our lives today.

We live in a time when voices are everywhere. Everyone is speaking. Everyone is posting. Everyone is broadcasting. Everyone has opinions. But very few people are carrying something that came from heaven. And the difference is not volume. It is weight. Heaven’s truth carries weight. It is not flashy. It is not always popular. It is not always easy. But it changes people because it is real.

John does not become famous for the scroll. He becomes faithful to it. And that is a crucial distinction. God is not looking for people who will perform His word. He is looking for people who will carry it.

The angel in Revelation 10 roars like a lion. Seven thunders respond. John begins to write what the thunders say, but God stops him. Seal it. Do not write it. That moment teaches us something else about God’s voice. Not everything is meant to be known right now. Not everything is meant to be published. Not everything is meant to be explained. Some things are meant to be trusted.

We live in a culture obsessed with answers. We want everything decoded, everything solved, everything revealed. But God reminds John, and us, that mystery is part of faith. There are truths that belong to heaven. There are things God is doing behind the scenes that we will not understand yet. And faith is not knowing everything. Faith is trusting the One who knows.

The angel then declares that there will be no more delay. God’s plan is moving forward. The mystery of God is being fulfilled. That is not a threat. It is a promise. It means that evil does not get the final word. It means injustice does not last forever. It means suffering is not the end of the story. It means that everything God has spoken will come to pass.

Revelation 10 sits between judgment and redemption like a bridge. It tells us that God is not absent in the chaos. He is speaking in it. And He is choosing people to carry His voice through it.

That is why this chapter matters so deeply in our modern world. We are surrounded by noise. Fear. Political shouting. Social media outrage. Endless opinions. Endless crises. Endless distractions. And in the middle of all of it, God is still handing out scrolls. Not literal ones, but living words. Truth. Calling. Purpose. A sense that your life is meant to carry something bigger than survival.

Some people feel that call as a burden. Some feel it as a fire. Some feel it as a whisper they cannot shake. But however it comes, it comes with sweetness and bitterness. The sweetness of knowing God is using you. The bitterness of realizing how much pain there is to confront.

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by what you see in the world, that may not be weakness. That may be the bitterness of the scroll. If you have ever felt a deep joy when you pray, worship, or read Scripture, that may not be imagination. That may be the sweetness of the scroll. Those two experiences together are not a problem. They are the mark of someone who is carrying something sacred.

Revelation 10 tells us that God is not finished speaking. It tells us that He is still sending His voice into the world through people who are willing to receive it, internalize it, and share it. Not everyone will listen. Not everyone will understand. But that is not the measure of faithfulness. Obedience is.

John is not told how successful he will be. He is told what he must do. Speak. Carry. Prophesy. Deliver what was given.

That is the quiet, radical power of Revelation 10. It reminds us that heaven’s strategy has always been human hearts. God does not drop His word from the sky and walk away. He places it into people and invites them into His work.

This chapter also quietly dismantles the idea that faith is supposed to make life easier. The scroll does not remove suffering. It gives meaning to it. The message does not eliminate struggle. It explains why it matters. John will continue to witness chaos, persecution, and difficulty. But now he will do it as someone who knows the story is bigger than the moment.

That is what it means to live with Revelation 10 in your bones. You do not pretend the world is fine. You know it is broken. But you also know God is not done.

And that knowledge changes how you walk, how you speak, how you endure.

The angel standing on land and sea is a picture of God’s authority over every place your life can go. There is no part of your story outside His reach. There is no territory where His word does not apply. There is no situation that is too far gone for His truth to enter.

And the scroll in his hand is small because God’s truth does not need to be massive to be powerful. It just needs to be real.

That is what Revelation 10 ultimately teaches us. Heaven is not distant. It is near enough to hand you something. God is not silent. He is speaking. And He is still choosing people to carry what He says into a world that desperately needs to hear it.

Once the scroll has been eaten, John is no longer just an observer of God’s revelation. He becomes a carrier of it. That distinction matters more than most people realize. There is a difference between knowing Scripture and embodying it. There is a difference between reading God’s word and becoming someone who lives shaped by it. Revelation 10 quietly moves John across that line. He is no longer simply recording heaven’s messages. He is now participating in them.

This is one of the most uncomfortable truths in the entire Bible. God does not only reveal Himself so we can be informed. He reveals Himself so we can be transformed. The scroll does not sit on John’s shelf. It enters his body. It becomes part of him. That is what makes it sweet and bitter at the same time. Truth that stays outside of you can remain theoretical. Truth that enters you will change how you love, how you grieve, how you forgive, and how you see people.

Many believers struggle not because they lack information, but because they are avoiding internalization. They read Scripture the way someone reads headlines. They skim. They nod. They move on. But Revelation 10 is not about skimming. It is about consuming. It is about letting God’s voice disturb you, comfort you, convict you, and reshape you from the inside out.

That is why the angel’s command is so intimate. Take it. Eat it. Let it become part of you. God does not want distant admirers. He wants living vessels.

And once John has done this, he is told something simple and terrifying. He must speak again. To peoples. To nations. To tongues. To kings. In other words, the message that has entered him must now leave him. It must move outward. It must travel. It must confront power. It must cross cultures. It must endure resistance.

This is where Revelation 10 stops being mystical and starts being practical. Because this is the calling of every believer. Not to become famous. Not to become loud. But to become faithful carriers of what God has placed inside them.

Some people carry hope. Some carry healing. Some carry wisdom. Some carry warnings. Some carry encouragement. But everyone who eats the scroll carries something that the world cannot generate on its own.

The bitterness John feels is not a flaw. It is the cost of caring. When you know God’s heart, you cannot look at suffering the same way. You cannot look at injustice the same way. You cannot look at lost people the same way. You cannot look at broken systems the same way. Love always hurts when it sees what is wrong.

That is why Revelation 10 is such a gift to anyone who feels emotionally heavy in this world. Your sorrow may not be depression. It may be compassion. Your grief may not be weakness. It may be awareness. Your frustration may not be failure. It may be the clash between heaven’s truth and earth’s reality.

But the sweetness is there too. The sweetness of knowing you are not alone. The sweetness of knowing God sees everything. The sweetness of knowing your life has meaning beyond survival. The sweetness of knowing that one day every wrong will be made right.

Revelation 10 holds both without apology. It refuses shallow optimism and refuses hopeless despair. It gives us something deeper. It gives us a calling.

The angel’s feet on land and sea also remind us that God’s message belongs everywhere. Faith is not confined to church buildings. It belongs in workplaces. It belongs in homes. It belongs in hospitals. It belongs in courtrooms. It belongs in schools. It belongs wherever humans are trying to survive in a broken world.

John is not told to only speak to the faithful. He is told to speak to nations and kings. God’s truth is not fragile. It does not need protection. It needs proclamation.

And yet, God also shows restraint. The sealed thunders remind us that not everything is ours to know or share. Wisdom is not blurting everything out. Wisdom is speaking what God has given you and trusting Him with what He has not.

That balance is what makes Revelation 10 so spiritually mature. It teaches us to be bold without being reckless. To be confident without being arrogant. To be faithful without pretending we know everything.

In a world obsessed with certainty, God calls us to trust.

In a world obsessed with noise, God calls us to carry something real.

In a world obsessed with power, God hands us a scroll.

This chapter quietly reveals God’s strategy. He is not just changing history through cosmic signs. He is changing hearts through people who are willing to receive and release His truth.

And that is why Revelation 10 still matters today. Not because it predicts dates. Not because it feeds fear. But because it calls us to be carriers of heaven in the middle of earth.

You do not need to be perfect to hold the scroll. John was not. You do not need to be fearless. John was not. You do not need to understand everything. John certainly did not. You only need to be willing to take what God gives you and let it become part of you.

That is where faith stops being an idea and starts being a life.

And somewhere in the middle of all the chaos of this world, God is still standing with one foot on land and one on sea, still holding out a scroll, still inviting people to carry His voice forward.

Not because He has run out of power.

But because He has chosen to work through hearts.

That is the quiet, world-changing message of Revelation 10.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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