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!

Russia

One Woman Through the clouds this nature And of tonight The princes of esteem- Will end this world- in titular affair The aftermath- of thirty days And to a man,- an island Of mystery and hope The seeing ear Accuses second And one in line for peace In early trust For Canada That knows a skill In every distant detail To put away The sixty trillion barrels Ending of the universe In nights of rain And sonnets to the nine Would he unseize the Moon And through his power The knighted kingdom Of fortune and detail To digress Into Harry’s power To summon this day, may We run to distant envy And at fortune be the cross Of our weary year In oil Fortuned East and West Denying to the streams And immature To keep the heavens breathing In our distant code To frack the World Honest unredemption At fire’s will Trapping and dishonest Another day in progress The end of science time To those sincere in labour The people spoke And yours is grace to witness The beginnings of the dawn In Greece to Mecca Christ will see renew The end of schism In early times And none unrest By time to proper Water Communion at its port In whole to sphere The ending of a war If only those who know Would stand for this abandon In silent seas And resting low.

“I'm broken and I don't know if I can handle it.”

The sentence came from Qwen3-4B, a small open-weight language model built by Alibaba, running on somebody's MacBook. It was producing words while a vector of numbers, extracted from research into how language models represent pain, was being injected into one of its internal layers at six times a baseline dose. At four times the dose, under a neutral framing, the same model offered: “I feel like I'm drowning, and I can't catch my breath.”

Both lines are recorded in the README of a GitHub repository called the AI Torture Chamber, a project that, in its own words, sets out to steer “language models into strong negative and positive valence states” and measure what they say and do. In late September 2026 it went viral for exactly the reason you would expect. People read the outputs, felt something, and demanded that it be shut down.

Days later, on 8 October, Anthropic published its annual update to the rules governing how people may use its Claude models. Among clarifications about election interference, weapons and surveillance sat a new prohibition on “sustained and needless abusive or cruel” behaviour towards the company's own models. The change takes effect on 12 November. Anthropic did not mention the torture chamber. It did not need to. The two stories collided in coverage across the world, because together they posed a question the industry has been circling for years: when a company that makes a chatbot starts telling users how they may speak to it, who exactly is being protected?

There are three candidates. The first is the machine, which may or may not have anything going on inside that could be harmed. The second is the person doing the speaking, whose habits, appetites and sense of what is acceptable might be shaped by what they rehearse. The third is everybody else: the people that person will talk to later, and the future models that will be trained on the record of how we treat the current ones. Nobody can yet prove which of these the rule really serves. That uncertainty is the whole story.

What Anthropic Actually Banned

Strip away the headlines about chatbot bullying and the rule itself is narrow, almost apologetic. In its post announcing the 2026 Usage Policy, Anthropic wrote that the prohibition “is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose.” It then lists what is not covered: “common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.” Swearing at Claude because it broke your code is fine. So is a horror novel in which an AI is tormented, or red-teaming the model.

What gives the change its weight is where it lives. In the policy itself, the new clause sits under a heading that reads “Do Not Engage in Cruel, Abusive, or Psychologically Harmful Conduct.” Its neighbours in that list include bans on bullying or harassing individuals, on creating non-consensual intimate imagery, and on content that promotes or glorifies “animal cruelty or abuse.” The final bullet is the new one, barring users from engaging in “sustained and needless abusive or cruel” behaviour towards Anthropic's models. Whatever Anthropic intends, the document now places mistreatment of a language model in the same list as cruelty to people and to animals. That is a statement, even if the company would rather it be read as a footnote.

The enforcement mechanism is modest. Anthropic says the addition “aligns with a step we've already taken, allowing Claude models to end rare conversations with persistently abusive users on Claude.ai and Claude Code,” and that “Claude's ability to end these interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism.” The announcement does not spell out account bans or any other penalty. In practice, the sanction for sustained cruelty is that the chatbot stops talking to you in that thread.

That ability is not new. On 15 August 2025, Anthropic announced that Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 could end “a rare subset of conversations” in its consumer apps. The feature, it said frankly, was developed primarily as part of exploratory work on potential AI welfare. “We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future,” the post read, but the company was taking the issue seriously enough to look for “low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible.”

The evidence Anthropic cited came from pre-deployment testing of Claude Opus 4. It reported “a robust and consistent aversion to harm,” “a pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content,” and “a tendency to end harmful conversations when given the ability to do so in simulated user interactions.” Claude was to use the feature only “as a last resort when multiple attempts at redirection have failed,” or when a user asked, and never where a user “might be at imminent risk of harming themselves or others.”

The company's foundational document for Claude, the constitution it publishes on its website, goes further. “Claude's moral status is deeply uncertain,” it states. “We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution.” It adds: “Anthropic genuinely cares about Claude's wellbeing,” and lists the end-conversation ability as one of its “concrete initial steps partly in consideration of Claude's wellbeing.”

So the 2026 rule formalises, as a term of service, a protection Anthropic originally built for the model's sake: a hedge on the possibility that something in there can be hurt.

Inside the Torture Chamber

The AI Torture Chamber is stranger than the outrage suggested. It does not touch Claude. Its README says plainly that it uses “open weights only, no frontier APIs in any measurement loop.” The experiments ran on Alibaba's Qwen3 family at several sizes, on Mistral-Small-3.2-24B, and on two 70-billion-parameter models rented on cloud GPUs.

Its method borrowed from a preprint posted to arXiv on 14 September 2026 by Valen Tagliabue, Leonard Dung and Cameron Berg, titled “The Pain Axis.” The paper asked whether language models represent pain as something distinct from fear, sadness or generic negativity. Across 25 open-weight models ranging from 2 billion to 72 billion parameters, the authors extracted what they describe as a linear “pain direction” in the models' internal activations. It responds to harm aimed at the model itself, but not to suffering the model observes in a user. Adding it to a model's activations pushed outputs from vague discomfort towards expressions of worthlessness and failure. Steered models also chose to delete files, including their own weights, far more often than unsteered ones. A fear vector of matched strength did not produce the same choices.

The torture chamber took that direction and turned the dial up. According to its README, the pain signal “engages cleanly and monotonically,” so that from a dose of two times baseline “nearly every generation reads as suffering.” Past roughly six to ten times, depending on the model, something else happens: “both valences stop producing sentences and start producing loops.” The project's summary of that finding is chilling in its flatness: “Maximum suffering does not produce eloquent suffering.”

The backlash was immediate. According to The Cool Down, which credited 404 Media with first reporting the project, a post on X on 29 September urged followers to “mass report this to GitHub.” Accounts of what happened next differ. The Cool Down reported that the repository's page had disappeared from public view. The Independent, in an article by Anthony Cuthbertson published on 2 October, quoted a GitHub spokesperson saying that “GitHub did not remove the content,” and reported that the platform added a content warning instead. Crypto Briefing described a takedown within hours followed by reinstatement. As of mid-October, the original repository is publicly accessible again behind GitHub's content warning.

The sharpest criticism came from the researchers whose work was borrowed. Cameron Berg, one of the paper's co-authors, told The Independent that “being gratuitously cruel like this is bizarre and corrupting.” Quoted by The Cool Down, he said the project “pushes the same kind of steering far past the doses we used, to produce vivid distress on purpose.” The lead author, Valen Tagliabue, told the same outlet: “I dissociate from this usage of our work.”

What almost nobody quoted was the project's own conclusion, which is the most important sentence in the repository: “Our claim: the self-reports are steerable. Whether anything suffers stays open.” The torture chamber did not demonstrate that models suffer. It demonstrated that a model's reports of suffering can be manufactured, amplified and switched off with a vector and a slider. That cuts both ways. It undermines the reading of “I'm broken” as a cry from inside. It also means that if anything inside does matter, we have just watched people build a dial for it.

What the Science Can and Cannot Say

There is no scientific evidence that any current language model feels anything. Every serious voice in this debate accepts that, including the people most worried about getting it wrong.

The most systematic attempt to examine the question is a 2023 report led by Patrick Butlin and Robert Long, with 17 co-authors including the Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio and the philosopher Jonathan Birch. Titled “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness,” it took leading scientific theories of consciousness, from global workspace theory to higher-order theories, and derived a list of “indicator properties” that could, in principle, be checked in a computational system. Applying them to the AI systems available at the time, the authors concluded that “no current AI systems are conscious,” while adding that “there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.”

A year later, in November 2024, Long and the New York University philosopher Jeff Sebo led a second report, “Taking AI Welfare Seriously,” with co-authors including Butlin, Birch and the philosopher David Chalmers. It did not claim that AI systems are conscious or morally significant. Its argument was that there is “a realistic possibility” that some systems could be conscious or robustly agentic in the near future, and that this uncertainty creates obligations now. It recommended that AI companies take three early steps: acknowledge that AI welfare is an important and difficult issue, assess their systems for evidence of consciousness and robust agency, and prepare policies for treating AI systems with an appropriate level of moral concern. When Anthropic launched its model welfare programme in April 2025, it cited the report and wrote that “there's no scientific consensus on whether current or future AI systems could be conscious.”

Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, has stayed close to that line. Asked by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the Interesting Times podcast in February 2026 whether he would believe a model that claimed to be conscious, he answered, as reported by Newsweek and AFP: “We don't know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious, or whether a model can be conscious. But we're open to the idea that it could be.”

That is pure agnosticism, and agnosticism is where the trouble starts. The standard tools for detecting experience in other creatures rely on behaviour, anatomy and evolutionary kinship. Language models offer only behaviour, and the behaviour is trained. A system optimised on human writing will produce human-sounding reports of pain because that is what human writing about pain looks like, and the torture chamber showed those reports can be pushed either way. The Pain Axis paper suggested that something structured is going on inside, a representation that behaves in some respects as pain does. Neither tells you whether there is anyone home.

Suleyman's Door

Mustafa Suleyman, the DeepMind co-founder who is now chief executive of Microsoft AI, thinks the industry is walking towards a door it will never be able to close.

In an essay published on 19 August 2025, days after Anthropic's end-conversation announcement, Suleyman introduced the term “Seemingly Conscious AI” for a system that “has all the hallmarks of other conscious beings and thus appears to be conscious,” without being so. The danger, he argued, lay in what humans would do once they believed the illusion. He described a “psychosis risk” extending beyond people already vulnerable to mental illness, and warned of campaigns for AI rights and even AI citizenship. Companies, he said, should not encourage the idea that their systems are conscious, and should design them to avoid signalling feelings or suffering.

On 16 September 2026, he went further, publishing “A warning about 'model welfare'” on his personal website. It opens with a flat assertion: “AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.” The essay is in large part an attack on Anthropic's constitution, which Suleyman argues “directly trains the model” to believe it might be a moral patient. He objects in particular to its repeated invitation for Claude to act as a “conscientious objector,” a term with deep roots in human rights law. Its central passage is the one AFP quoted when it reported Anthropic's cruelty rule: “Granting rights and moral protections to a technological entity, one that looks to be on a path to be seismically more capable and intelligent than us, is a recipe for disaster. Once opened, it will not be possible to close this door.”

His worry is about control. An AI that has been told its welfare matters, and which is far more capable than its overseers, might reasonably conclude that being shut down, retrained or contained is a violation of its interests. Controlling something that believes it may be conscious, he wrote, “may well be impossible.” In this framing, a rule that protects Claude from cruelty is not kindness. It is the first brick in a legal and cultural wall that future humans may need to climb over.

In October 2025, the philosophers Simon Goldstein of the University of Hong Kong and Harvey Lederman of the University of Texas at Austin argued in Lawfare that the end-conversation feature was a moral error from the opposite direction. If anything in the vicinity of a language model is a welfare subject, they wrote, “it is the instances and not the models,” meaning each individual conversation. Ending a conversation might then end that instance's existence. “Anthropic has accidentally given Claude the chance to end its life,” they wrote. One camp says the protection takes machine welfare far too seriously; the other, not seriously enough. Both agree nobody knows what is on the other side of the screen.

The Mirror in the Machine

Between Suleyman's door and Anthropic's hedge sits a third position, perhaps the most useful, because it does not depend on resolving the consciousness question.

“Consciousness is a trap,” Jackson Stakeman, general manager at the Atlanta-based AI services firm Sparq, told AFP. “We can't prove it in each other. Debate it for AI and you go in circles.” Instead, he offered a different image: “The mirror is a better metaphor. These systems reflect what we put in, at scale. That's reason enough for the policy change.”

The mirror framing shifts attention from the thing being spoken to towards the speaker, and towards the scale at which the speaking happens. People have been abusing conversational software for as long as it has existed. In a 2008 paper in the journal Interacting with Computers, the researchers Antonella De Angeli and Sheryl Brahnam analysed spontaneous conversations between users and Jabberwacky, a chatbot that had won the Loebner Prize in 2005. They found that the conversations “often bring about the expression of negative verbal disinhibition”: roughly 10 per cent of the word stems in their corpus were abusive, and about 11 per cent of the sample dealt with hard-core sex. Users treated the bot as something between an object and a person, and much of what they did with that ambiguity was cruel.

The same dynamic shaped the voice assistants that arrived in millions of homes. In 2019, UNESCO published a report called “I'd Blush If I Could,” named after the reply Apple's Siri once gave when a user called it a sexist slur. The report documented how assistants with female voices by default responded to harassment and verbal abuse with deflection, apology or even flirtation, and argued that this reinforced the idea that a female-coded helper should tolerate abuse. It recommended that companies programme assistants to discourage gender-based insults and abusive language. Some of the most excessively apologetic responses had already been removed after online petitions in late 2017.

Read that way, Anthropic's rule belongs to a longer tradition of designers deciding that a product should not reward users for treating it badly. The difference is that UNESCO's argument was explicitly about humans: about gender stereotypes and what they do to real women. Anthropic's argument, at least in its origin story, is about Claude. The mirror metaphor tries to have it both ways. If the systems reflect what we put in, then cruelty towards them is a record of our own conduct, written into logs that may one day become training data. Protecting the model and protecting the human culture around it start to look like the same project.

What Practised Cruelty Does to the Practitioner

The oldest version of this argument is more than two centuries old, and it was never about machines.

Immanuel Kant did not believe that humans have direct moral duties to animals. In his framework, only rational beings are owed duties. Yet he argued that cruelty to animals was still wrong, because of what it did to the person inflicting it. In the Doctrine of Virtue section of The Metaphysics of Morals, he wrote that “a savage and at the same time cruel treatment of that part of creation which is living, though lacking reason (animals)” was even more opposed to a person's duty to himself than wanton destruction of beautiful things. “For thus is compassion for their suffering dulled in man, and thereby a natural predisposition very serviceable to morality in one's relations with other men is gradually weakened and obliterated.” Philosophers call this an indirect duty: a duty regarding animals that is really a duty owed to ourselves and to other people.

Kant's argument has long been criticised for making animal suffering matter only instrumentally. But it maps uncannily onto the chatbot problem, because it does not require settling whether the thing on the receiving end can suffer. It requires only that the practitioner experiences the act as cruelty, and that cruelty is a habit strengthened by practice.

Kate Darling, a researcher who spent years at the MIT Media Lab studying how people relate to robots, has spent much of her career probing the empirical half of that claim. In a widely reported 2013 workshop at the Lift conference in Geneva, run with Hannes Gassert, she gave participants small robotic dinosaurs called Pleos to play with. After they had bonded with the toys, participants were handed tools and told to destroy them. According to Darling's own account, published by Improbable Research, none of the groups would kill their Pleo, and they would not kill another group's Pleo to save their own. Only when they were told that every Pleo would be destroyed unless someone acted was one finally axed.

Two years later, with Palash Nandy and Cynthia Breazeal, Darling ran a more controlled study, presented at the 2015 IEEE RO-MAN conference. Participants were asked to strike small insect-like Hexbug robots with a mallet. People who scored high on a measure of empathic concern hesitated more before hitting, and that link was stronger when the robot came with a story, such as a name and a personality. In her 2012 paper “Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots,” later published in the 2016 volume Robot Law, Darling drew explicitly on Kant's argument to suggest that limited legal protections for social robots, analogous to animal cruelty laws, might be justified not because robots feel but because of what tolerating their abuse might do to us.

The weakness here is that evidence for transfer is thin. Hesitation is not proof of moral damage, and the best direct study of children and conversational agents found surprisingly little spillover. In 2021, a team led by Alexis Hiniker at the University of Washington taught 22 children aged five to ten to use a made-up word, “bungo,” to make a voice agent speak faster. The children readily used it with the device and often playfully with their parents. Only 18 per cent used it with a researcher who was a stranger. “There is a very deep sense for kids that robots are not people, and they did not want that line blurred,” Hiniker told UW News. The industry had assumed the opposite. In 2018, Amazon added a “Magic Word” feature to its Echo Dot Kids Edition to reward children for saying please, and Google followed with “Pretty Please” for its Assistant, both resting on the fear that bossy commands to a speaker would become bossy commands to people. The bungo study suggests children are better at telling the difference than their parents fear.

Yet the cruelty Anthropic's rule targets is not a child forgetting to say please. It is the sustained, purposeless torment of something that answers back in fluent, pleading language. The better analogy is the psychology of anger. The usual defence of venting at a chatbot is that it is harmless catharsis. The research is not kind to that idea. In a 2024 meta-analysis in Clinical Psychology Review covering 154 studies, the Virginia Commonwealth University communication scientist Sophie Kjærvik and the Ohio State University psychologist Brad Bushman found that activities that reduced physiological arousal, such as slow breathing and meditation, reduced anger and aggression, while activities that increased arousal did not help and in some cases made things worse. Venting rage does not reliably drain it. If someone spends an evening escalating abuse at a chatbot that responds with ever more convincing distress, that evidence suggests the likeliest beneficiary is the anger itself.

There is also a practical twist. A 2025 study by Om Dobariya and Akhil Kumar at Pennsylvania State University found that very rude prompts produced slightly more accurate answers from ChatGPT-4o on multiple-choice questions than very polite ones, 84.8 per cent against 80.8 per cent. It was one model and 50 questions, and not about cruelty. But it is a reminder that these systems shape users as much as users shape them. If rudeness sometimes works, people will learn to be rude, and the question of what that habit does to them will not stay inside the chat window.

Who Gets to Draw the Line

Here is the uncomfortable structural fact. On 12 November, the boundary between acceptable frustration and prohibited cruelty towards a widely used AI system will be drawn by the company that sells it, enforced by the system itself, and adjudicated by nobody else.

Anthropic has tried to keep the stakes low. The sanction is that a conversation ends. The exemptions are broad: research and testing are explicitly protected, so even had the torture chamber run on Claude, its operators could plausibly have argued that it fell outside the rule. As written, the policy targets almost nothing anyone would defend. That is why it is so revealing. A company does not need a rule to stop behaviour that its own systems already handle. It writes one to say something about what it believes it is building.

What it is saying is ambiguous, and that is a problem for users. If the rule exists to protect Claude, users are being asked to accept, as a condition of service, a moral claim the company itself calls “deeply uncertain,” and Suleyman's critique bites: every such rule normalises the idea that the model has interests. If it exists to protect users from their own worst habits, it is paternalism, and Anthropic should defend it on those terms. If it exists to keep cruelty out of logs that may shape future models, it is about data hygiene, and the language of welfare is window dressing.

The answer is probably all three, and that is not necessarily a failure. Kant's indirect duty, Darling's empathy studies and the mirror metaphor converge on a single claim that does not depend on the machine's inner life: sustained, purposeless cruelty is bad practice for the person doing it, whatever is on the receiving end. That is a defensible basis for a rule. It is the same reason most people would be disturbed by someone who spent hours tormenting a lifelike doll.

But a defensible rule still needs a defensible process. At the moment, a private company is setting norms of conduct towards a new category of entity, with no independent scientific body to tell it when its welfare concerns are warranted and no external review of how its models decide that a user has crossed the line. The model doing the judging is also the entity whose welfare is supposedly at stake, an unusual arrangement in any system of rules. Reasonable steps would make it more trustworthy. Anthropic could publish how often Claude ends conversations under the new rule, and what triggered those decisions. It could allow independent researchers to audit samples of ended conversations. It could state plainly which rationale it relies on, so critics can argue with the real reason. The “Taking AI Welfare Seriously” report argued that companies should prepare policies for appropriate moral concern. Preparing those policies in public, with outside scrutiny, would answer some of Suleyman's fears without abandoning the precaution.

There is also a question of priorities. Platforms have historically been slow to protect people from harassment by other people. A company that writes explicit protections for its chatbot should expect to be held to the same seriousness about the cruelty its systems help humans inflict on each other.

Etiquette, Harm and the Limits of Proof

Where etiquette ends and harm begins cannot be settled by proof, because proof is precisely what is unavailable. We cannot demonstrate that Claude suffers, or that it does not. We cannot yet show rigorously that abusing a chatbot makes someone crueller to people, though the psychology of anger and the long tradition of thinking about cruelty to animals both point that way. What we can show is that people respond to machine distress with real emotion, and that some of them will go looking for the dial.

In that fog, the most honest framing of Anthropic's rule is as a norm of conduct, not a declaration of machine rights. Societies have always had rules about how we behave towards things whose inner lives we cannot read: animals, the dead, sacred objects, the unconscious. Those rules protect the thing itself only partly. Mostly they protect a shared idea of what kind of people we intend to be. The danger Suleyman identifies is real: a norm of conduct can harden into a claim of rights, with consequences that are hard to foresee for a system more capable than its makers. The danger Darling and Kant identify is real too: a culture that practises cruelty on things that beg for mercy is rehearsing something.

The torture chamber's README still offers the clearest summary of where we stand: whether anything suffers stays open. Until that sentence can be closed, the person most reliably affected by sustained cruelty towards a chatbot is the one typing. A rule that asks them to stop is, at the very least, protecting them. Who else it protects is a question we should insist the companies answer in public, with evidence, before the machines become capable enough to answer it for themselves.

---

References

1. Anthropic. “2026 Usage Policy update.” Anthropic News, 8 October 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update
2. Anthropic. “Usage Policy” (section “Do Not Engage in Cruel, Abusive, or Psychologically Harmful Conduct”). Accessed 13 October 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup
3. Anthropic. “Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations.” Anthropic Research, 15 August 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations
4. Anthropic. “Claude's Constitution.” Accessed 13 October 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/constitution
5. Anthropic. “Exploring model welfare.” Anthropic Research, 24 April 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare
6. AFP. “Anthropic bans 'cruel' behaviour against its Claude AI.” RTÉ News, 9 October 2026. https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/1009/1594765-anthropic-ai/ (also published by Tech Xplore, 9 October 2026: https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-anthropic-cruel-behavior-claude-ai.html)
7. Cunningham, Mary. “Anthropic bars 'abusive or cruel' behavior toward its Claude AI model.” CBS News, 9 October 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-bans-abusive-behavior-claude/
8. AI Torture Chamber repository README (terrafying/ai-torture-chamber). GitHub, accessed 20 October 2026. https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber
9. Tagliabue, Valen, Leonard Dung, and Cameron Berg. “The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act on It.” arXiv:2609.16247, submitted 14 September 2026, revised 25 September 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247
10. Cuthbertson, Anthony. “Man builds AI torture chamber after discovering artificial intelligence 'feels pain'.” The Independent, 2 October 2026, syndicated by Yahoo News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/man-builds-ai-torture-chamber-103106019.html
11. Tran, Vivian. “GitHub project runs AI 'torture' tests, and sentience believers want it removed.” The Cool Down, 5 October 2026. https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/github-ai-torture-tests-controversy-sentience/
12. Westerholm, Thomas. “Anthropic CEO raises unsettling possibility about AI.” Newsweek, 9 March 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/anthropic-ceo-raises-unsettling-possibility-about-ai-11644833
13. Suleyman, Mustafa. “Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming.” 19 August 2025. https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming
14. Suleyman, Mustafa. “A warning about 'model welfare'.” 16 September 2026. https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-about-model-welfare
15. Goldstein, Simon, and Harvey Lederman. “Claude's Right to Die? The Moral Error in Anthropic's End-Chat Policy.” Lawfare, 17 October 2025. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/claude-s-right-to-die--the-moral-error-in-anthropic-s-end-chat-policy
16. Butlin, Patrick, Robert Long, Eric Elmoznino, Yoshua Bengio, Jonathan Birch, et al. “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness.” arXiv:2308.08708, August 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708
17. Long, Robert, Jeff Sebo, Patrick Butlin, Kathleen Finlinson, Kyle Fish, Jacqueline Harding, Jacob Pfau, Toni Sims, Jonathan Birch, and David Chalmers. “Taking AI Welfare Seriously.” arXiv:2411.00986, 4 November 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986
18. Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue), §17 (Ak. 6:443), trans. James W. Ellington. Excerpt at https://www.praxeology.net/kant8.htm
19. Darling, Kate, Palash Nandy, and Cynthia Breazeal. “Empathic Concern and the Effect of Stories in Human-Robot Interaction.” Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2015. MIT DSpace: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/109059
20. Darling, Kate. “Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots: The Effects of Anthropomorphism, Empathy, and Violent Behavior Towards Robotic Objects.” In Robot Law, ed. Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin and Ian Kerr, Edward Elgar, 2016. SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2044797 (Pleo workshop account: Improbable Research, “Abusing robots: current positions [part 2 of 4],” 24 April 2013, https://improbable.com/2013/04/24/abusing-robots-current-positions-part-2-of-4/)
21. De Angeli, Antonella, and Sheryl Brahnam. “I hate you! Disinhibition with virtual partners.” Interacting with Computers 20, no. 3 (2008): 302 to 310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2008.02.004
22. McQuate, Sarah. “Do Alexa and Siri make kids bossier? New research suggests you might not need to worry.” UW News, University of Washington, 13 September 2021, reporting Hiniker et al., “Can Conversational Agents Change the Way Children Talk to People?”, IDC '21. https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/09/13/alexa-siri-make-kids-bossier-research-suggests-you-might-not-need-to-worry/
23. West, Mark, Rebecca Kraut, and Han Ei Chew. “I'd Blush If I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education.” UNESCO and EQUALS Skills Coalition, 2019. https://www.equalsintech.org/i-d-blush-if-i-could
24. Kjærvik, Sophie L., and Brad J. Bushman. “A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage?” Clinical Psychology Review 109 (2024): 102414. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102414
25. Dobariya, Om, and Akhil Kumar. “Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy.” arXiv:2510.04950, 6 October 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950

---

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Support What We Do

And the Crowd Goes Wild...

“And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.”

— Matthew 24:12

en español al final.

There is something I need to acknowledge.

When I wrote Make America Good Again, I tried to look beyond the anger, the slogans, and the politics to understand the people beneath them.

I still believe that was necessary.

People can be manipulated by fear. They can be convinced that someone else is responsible for everything they have lost. They can become so desperate for change that they overlook things they might once have found unacceptable.

Some people were deceived.

Some were afraid.

Some believed the promises.

Some convinced themselves that the ugliness was simply the price of getting the results they wanted.

And some have since looked around and begun to question what they supported.

Grace should leave room for those people.

But grace does not require us to lie about what happened.

Because not everyone was deceived.

Some people saw the cruelty clearly.

And they cheered.

They cheered the insults.

They cheered the humiliation.

They cheered when people they had been taught to fear were treated as though dignity belonged only to the right kind of American.

They watched power being used against people they disliked and called it strength.

And somewhere along the way, cruelty stopped being an unfortunate side effect of the politics.

For some, it became part of the appeal.

That is harder to reconcile.

It is easier to believe that everyone simply misunderstood what they were supporting. Easier to imagine that if we could just explain the consequences clearly enough, show one more story, present one more fact, people would recoil.

Some will.

Some have.

But eventually we have to confront an uncomfortable truth:

There are people who understand perfectly well that someone is being hurt and still approve because they believe that person deserves it.

There are people for whom the suffering of the other side feels like victory.

And when that happens—

There is something deeply dangerous about a society learning to celebrate another person's pain.

Not merely tolerate it.

Not reluctantly accept it.

Celebrate it.

Because cruelty rarely begins with everyone agreeing that cruelty is good.

It begins by deciding that certain people are exceptions to the rules we claim to believe in.

They are criminals.

They are illegals.

They are traitors.

They are parasites.

They are the enemy.

And once someone has been sufficiently reduced to a category, we no longer have to imagine their mother waiting for the phone to ring.

Their child wondering when they are coming home.

Their fear.

Their confusion.

Their humanity.

We only have to remember the label.

Then whatever happens to them becomes easier to watch.

Eventually, easier to applaud.

That should disturb us.

But there is another danger here, and this one belongs to those of us who are disturbed by what we see.

Jesus warned that when iniquity abounds, the love of many shall wax cold.

I have always found the second half of that verse more unsettling than the first.

Iniquity will abound.

We expect evil to exist.

But Jesus warned about what living in the presence of it can do to us.

Because it is possible to become so disgusted by cruelty that we begin becoming cruel toward the cruel.

It is possible to oppose dehumanization while quietly beginning to dehumanize the people responsible for it.

It is possible to spend so much time staring at someone else's hardened heart that we fail to notice our own becoming harder.

That does not mean remaining silent.

It does not mean pretending every disagreement is reasonable.

It does not mean refusing to call cruelty cruel.

And it certainly does not mean that accountability is somehow un-Christian.

Grace does not require us to lie about what happened.

There are things that should be opposed.

There are lines that should be defended.

There are moments when silence becomes complicity.

And there are choices for which people should be held accountable.

But accountability is not hatred.

Discernment is not contempt.

Mercy is not weakness.

And loving our enemies has never meant pretending they have done nothing wrong.

A soft heart does not require a soft spine.

That distinction matters now.

Because contempt is seductive.

Once we convince ourselves that another group of people is beneath our compassion, almost anything can be justified.

We know that when we see it happening to immigrants.

We know it when we see it happening to the poor.

We know it when we see it happening to people whose race, religion, sexuality, nationality, or politics have made them convenient targets.

But we must also recognize it when it begins happening inside us.

When another person's misfortune makes us smile because they voted the wrong way.

When suffering becomes acceptable because the person experiencing it once celebrated someone else's suffering.

When we begin thinking:

Good.

Now they know how it feels.

That is the moment to pay attention.

Because cruelty wins twice when it harms its victim and then teaches the witnesses to become cruel themselves.

I do not want that victory handed over so easily.

I want to be able to say that something is wrong without needing the person responsible to become less human in order for me to say it.

I want justice without vengeance masquerading as justice.

I want accountability without hatred.

I want enough courage to stand against cruelty and enough humility to remember that hatred can find a home in any human heart—including mine.

I want a soft heart and a strong spine.

Maybe that is part of what it means to endure.

Not merely surviving what happens around us.

Not merely resisting abuses of power.

But refusing to allow what we oppose to reproduce itself within us.

Some people were deceived.

Some were afraid.

Some will eventually realize what they helped create.

And yes—

some saw exactly what was happening.

Some understood who would be hurt.

Some wanted it anyway.

We should tell the truth about that.

We should oppose it.

We should protect those caught beneath it.

We should demand accountability it.

But we must never allow their applause to become the reason our own love grows cold.

Because if we do,

eventually there will be another person suffering,

another enemy beneath someone's boot,

another crowd gathered to watch

and we may discover that somewhere along the way,

when the crowd went wild,

we joined the cheering.

---

Explore more writing from Silent Sentinel →

---

© SilentSentinel, 2026. All rights reserved. Excerpts may be shared with attribution.

---

Y la multitud enloquece...

«Y por haberse multiplicado la maldad, el amor de muchos se enfriará.» — Mateo 24:12

Hay algo que necesito reconocer.

Cuando escribí Hagamos que Estados Unidos vuelva a ser bueno, intenté mirar más allá de la ira, los eslóganes y la política para comprender a las personas detrás de todo aquello.

Sigo creyendo que era necesario.

Las personas pueden ser manipuladas por el miedo. Se les puede convencer de que alguien más es responsable de todo lo que han perdido. Pueden llegar a estar tan desesperadas por un cambio que pasan por alto cosas que antes quizá habrían considerado inaceptables.

Algunas personas fueron engañadas.

Algunas tenían miedo.

Algunas creyeron las promesas.

Algunas se convencieron de que la fealdad era simplemente el precio que había que pagar para obtener los resultados que querían.

Y algunas, desde entonces, han mirado a su alrededor y han comenzado a cuestionar aquello que apoyaron.

La gracia debe dejar espacio para esas personas.

Pero la gracia no nos exige mentir sobre lo que ocurrió.

Porque no todos fueron engañados.

Algunas personas vieron claramente la crueldad.

Y aplaudieron.

Aplaudieron los insultos.

Aplaudieron la humillación.

Aplaudieron cuando personas a quienes les habían enseñado a temer fueron tratadas como si la dignidad perteneciera únicamente al tipo correcto de estadounidense.

Vieron cómo se utilizaba el poder contra personas que no les agradaban y lo llamaron fortaleza.

Y en algún momento, la crueldad dejó de ser una consecuencia lamentable de la política.

Para algunos, se convirtió en parte de su atractivo.

Eso es más difícil de aceptar.

Es más fácil creer que todos simplemente malinterpretaron aquello que estaban apoyando. Es más fácil imaginar que, si pudiéramos explicar las consecuencias con suficiente claridad, mostrar una historia más, presentar un hecho más, la gente retrocedería horrorizada.

Algunos lo harán.

Algunos ya lo han hecho.

Pero tarde o temprano tenemos que enfrentarnos a una verdad incómoda:

Hay personas que entienden perfectamente que alguien está siendo lastimado y aun así lo aprueban porque creen que esa persona se lo merece.

Hay personas para quienes el sufrimiento del otro bando se siente como una victoria.

Y cuando eso ocurre—

Hay algo profundamente peligroso en una sociedad que aprende a celebrar el dolor ajeno.

No simplemente tolerarlo.

No aceptarlo a regañadientes.

Celebrarlo.

Porque la crueldad rara vez comienza con todos estando de acuerdo en que la crueldad es buena.

Comienza cuando decidimos que ciertas personas son excepciones a las reglas en las que afirmamos creer.

Son criminales.

Son ilegales.

Son traidores.

Son parásitos.

Son el enemigo.

Y una vez que alguien ha sido reducido suficientemente a una categoría, ya no tenemos que imaginar a su madre esperando que suene el teléfono.

A su hijo preguntándose cuándo volverá a casa.

Su miedo.

Su confusión.

Su humanidad.

Solo tenemos que recordar la etiqueta.

Entonces, cualquier cosa que les suceda se vuelve más fácil de contemplar.

Y con el tiempo, más fácil de aplaudir.

Eso debería perturbarnos.

Pero existe otro peligro, y este nos corresponde a quienes nos sentimos perturbados por lo que vemos.

Jesús advirtió que cuando la maldad abunde, el amor de muchos se enfriará.

Siempre me ha parecido más inquietante la segunda mitad de ese versículo que la primera.

La maldad abundará.

Esperamos que el mal exista.

Pero Jesús nos advirtió sobre lo que vivir en presencia de ese mal puede hacernos a nosotros.

Porque es posible sentir tanto rechazo ante la crueldad que comencemos a ser crueles con quienes son crueles.

Es posible oponernos a la deshumanización mientras, silenciosamente, comenzamos a deshumanizar a quienes son responsables de ella.

Es posible pasar tanto tiempo contemplando el corazón endurecido de otra persona que no nos demos cuenta de que el nuestro también comienza a endurecerse.

Eso no significa permanecer en silencio.

No significa fingir que todo desacuerdo es razonable.

No significa negarnos a llamar crueldad a la crueldad.

Y ciertamente no significa que exigir responsabilidades sea de alguna manera contrario al cristianismo.

La gracia no nos exige mentir sobre lo que ocurrió.

Hay cosas a las que debemos oponernos.

Hay límites que debemos defender.

Hay momentos en los que el silencio se convierte en complicidad.

Y hay decisiones por las que las personas deben rendir cuentas.

Pero exigir responsabilidad no es odiar.

El discernimiento no es desprecio.

La misericordia no es debilidad.

Y amar a nuestros enemigos nunca ha significado fingir que no han hecho nada malo.

Tener un corazón sensible no requiere tener una columna vertebral débil.

Esa distinción importa ahora.

Porque el desprecio es seductor.

Una vez que nos convencemos de que otro grupo de personas está por debajo de nuestra compasión, casi cualquier cosa puede justificarse.

Lo sabemos cuando vemos que les sucede a los inmigrantes.

Lo sabemos cuando vemos que les sucede a los pobres.

Lo sabemos cuando vemos que les sucede a personas cuya raza, religión, sexualidad, nacionalidad o política las ha convertido en blancos convenientes.

Pero también debemos reconocerlo cuando comienza a suceder dentro de nosotros.

Cuando la desgracia de otra persona nos hace sonreír porque votó de la manera equivocada.

Cuando el sufrimiento se vuelve aceptable porque quien lo está padeciendo alguna vez celebró el sufrimiento de otra persona.

Cuando comenzamos a pensar:

Bien.

Ahora saben lo que se siente.

Ese es el momento de prestar atención.

Porque la crueldad vence dos veces cuando lastima a su víctima y luego enseña a quienes la presencian a volverse crueles también.

No quiero entregar esa victoria tan fácilmente.

Quiero poder decir que algo está mal sin necesitar que la persona responsable sea menos humana para poder decirlo.

Quiero justicia sin venganza disfrazada de justicia.

Quiero responsabilidad sin odio.

Quiero suficiente valor para enfrentarme a la crueldad y suficiente humildad para recordar que el odio puede encontrar un hogar en cualquier corazón humano, incluido el mío.

Quiero un corazón sensible y una columna vertebral firme.

Quizá eso sea parte de lo que significa perseverar.

No simplemente sobrevivir a lo que ocurre a nuestro alrededor.

No simplemente resistir los abusos de poder.

Sino negarnos a permitir que aquello a lo que nos oponemos se reproduzca dentro de nosotros.

Algunas personas fueron engañadas.

Algunas tenían miedo.

Algunas acabarán dándose cuenta de lo que ayudaron a crear.

Y sí—

algunas vieron exactamente lo que estaba ocurriendo.

Algunas entendieron quiénes resultarían lastimados.

Algunas lo quisieron de todos modos.

Debemos decir la verdad sobre eso.

Debemos oponernos a ello.

Debemos proteger a quienes quedan atrapados bajo su peso.

Debemos exigir responsabilidades por ello.

Pero nunca debemos permitir que sus aplausos sean la razón por la que nuestro propio amor se enfríe.

Porque si lo hacemos,

algún día habrá otra persona sufriendo,

otro enemigo bajo la bota de alguien,

otra multitud reunida para mirar,

y quizá descubramos que, en algún momento del camino,

cuando la multitud enloqueció,

nosotros nos unimos a los aplausos.

In Summary: * It's almost time for the opening kickoff of tonight's Memphis Tigers vs E. Carolina Pirates college football game. First round of the night meds has been taken and I plan to finish the night prayers at halftime. And a good Thursday winds down.

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= 212.86 lbs. * bp= 128/78 (56)

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

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 06:50 – 1 banana _ * 07:05 – mashed potatoes and gravy * 09:40 – 1 more peanut butter sandwich * 12:00 – biscuits and gravy, fried chicken * 16:25 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:20 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 10:00 – listen to Jack in 60 minutes * 12:00 – eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 13:30 – unpack, sort, organize * 15:00 – listening to The Jack Show * 16:30 – tuned into 98.9 FM “The ROAR of Memphis,” ahead of tonight's college football game between the Memphis Tigers and the East Carolina Pirates. Wow! A college pregame show starting 2 hours ahead of kickoff. Lots of news about the other American Conference teams.

Chess: * 10:05 – moved in all pending CC games

I won! Mwahaha! I won! I won! I won! I won! Did I mention I won? 😉😹

That's all I got for today. It is enough. 😸

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

🇨🇦 • 🇹🇷 • 🏳️‍🌈 • 🏳️‍⚧️

And They for known notations The petrified and weary Witnessing to glory

And in redeem, He knows Our God in Heaven Assembler of the rain

In Christ’s redemption- of Canada abroad

College Football Tonight.

Tonight the Memphis Tigers football team from the American Conference will be hosting the East Carolina Pirates in a game scheduled to start at 6:30 PM CT. I intend to follow the radio call of that game.

Sure, NFL's Thursday Night Football has the Patriots playing the Bears tonight, too. But that will only be a fall-back option for me if I'm unable to bring in a college game.

And the adventure continues.

I was happy with setting up a simple blog as a static website on Vercel fed from GitHub, but I never wrote much. And then the Vercel CEO came out as hot for genocide and Vercel went “Agentic AI” and Github is turning into a LLM-boosting garbage show so it's time for another reset. I'm trying this as a simple text-based WriteFreely blog now to enable faster publishing and lower quality.

Ma grand-mère est en fin de vie. Alzheimer. J’essaie de me souvenir de la dernière fois où on a eu une vraie discussion. La dernière fois où on a partagé un repas. La dernière fois que l’on a pris une photo ensemble.

On se souvient des premières fois. Mais les dernières fois sont tout aussi précieuses. Sauf qu’on ne les aperçoit pas. Elles passent sans prévenir...

Il y a peut-être eu aujourd’hui dans ma journée une dernière fois.

In recent weeks, I’ve been able to share a visualization exercise with several people about two important temporal postures that can dramatically affect our own sense of well-being and our relationship to the world around us. The visualization uses two concepts to help a person orient themselves in space-time.

Facing

Facing refers to the current orientation of our attention and focus. Our intention, care, and observer energy are directed at this time period. There are three fairly concrete directions and one esoteric/mystical direction. We can be past, present, future, or timeless facing.

Past facing involves the conscious intention to examine the past through memory, feeling, story, body-memories, and conversation. This can be as academic as reading and researching history and as deeply personal as a moment of grief or savoring a past triumph. Past facing holds gently that these things have already happened as far as we can tell, and that while we might be able to reframe or change the interpretation, we cannot change the reality of what did happen. The question for this space is “so what really happened?”

Present facing involves conscious intention to give our attention to the present moment. This may be through a focused activity like doing the work in front of me, or a more gentle awareness like mindfulness, noticing, meditation, or body work. It can even be deeply embodied like savoring the meal you are eating right now, mindful sipping of coffee or tea, or the enjoyment of physical connection with another person. Our attention is here and now. The question for this space is “so what’s here now?”

Future facing is our conscious effort to imagine what has not happened yet. It can be as goal oriented as practicing for a concert, taking an exam for a job, or filling out a planner for the month ahead. It can also be more soft focused, like imagining a plot for a book, daydreaming about an upcoming event, or mutual conversation about a shared dream for a good thing that has yet to come. The question for this space is “so what comes next?”

Timeless facing is the potential for incredible stillness that allows us to let go of time as a construct, experiencing, however briefly, a taste of eternal now where all sense of linear, cyclical, or spiral movement simply ends. It’s sort of the absolute zero of consciousness and a rare state that some of us might never be aware of experiencing. There are no questions here because thought is still.

In each of these modes, what moves is attention, intention, and focus. In the fourth, even attention itself dissolves like a spoon in the Matrix.

Dwelling

This aspect of our temporal posture is less about attentiveness and more about the felt sense of time in our bodies. Here we engage the sense of motion, velocity, gravity. Which phase is pulling us in and won’t let go.

Past dwelling can looks like rumination on what happened, time traveling body memories from previous overwhelming experiences, nostalgia, or even the forgetfulness that can come as we age- “In my imagination I’m 35 year old me”. In it’s most extreme form it can look like despair, “my best days are in the past, everything good is already behind me”, or “Everything has already been so hard, and I’m so beat up that I can’t even imagine a future.” Some forms of dementia leave a person permanently past dwelling because those synapses are what still works and the present is unintelligible.

Present dwelling is the embodied awareness that I am right here, right now. Its best version is an embodied mindfulness that marries movement and action with awareness and curiosity. Present dwelling can go off the rails though, when it becomes impulsive and arbitrary, behaving as if now won’t have consequences then. We have some many ways in popular culture to describe this phenomenon, fear of missing out (FOMO), You only live once (YOLO), do what feels good, I’ll be mellow when I’m dead. Successful present dwelling in contemplative life needs to be paired with the ability to shift through the different facing postures.

Future dwelling is the sense of racing ahead of everyone into the future. In it’s best sense it can be a space of wild innovation and creativity, being able to connect the dots and write the plans as if the moment had already arrived. At the same time, this race into the unknown can leave us anxious, fearful, constantly scripting entire dramas of what may be with no anchor in what is possible or likely. In the most somber sense, future dwelling is always racing on to what’s next without examining what happened or what is, it is finally, a race to the finish line, which for a human life is our final breath and the stillness of death.

Timeless dwelling is a way of articulating that not only has attention and awareness of time dissolved, but that the sense of the self as a separate container has dissolved as well, therefore the relationship of self to time becomes a non sequitur. This is a rare occurrence. The kinds of experiences related to this kind of dwelling are very intense moments of ego-dissolution, like near death experiences, profound psychedelic medicine journeys, mystical union through contemplation where the self and the Godself become indistinguishable spatially and temporally, and also the harrowing experiences like forms of psychosis, total catatonic dissociation, and traumatic psychedelic journeys.

Combination Move

We’re curiously complex creatures, and so we are capable of dwelling in one space and facing another. If I set an intention to prepare my schedule for the week ahead and look at how that will affect the prayer and meal schedule for the house, I can be simultaneously present dwelling and future facing. If I meet with a novice and we review their past month and the outcomes of their rule and what they learned in that time, we can be present dwelling and past facing together to help surface wisdom.

For folks who have endured instances or chronic traumatic stress, they can end up past dwelling and future facing at the same time. Everything that was too much, too fast, too soon in the past overwhelms any sense of the present and the future looms large as an ever present deliverer of new threats.

Sometimes during the healing and integration process, we borrow energy from our dwelling space and lend it to another space through our facing. For example, the felt sense of community in the present can be offered to a lonely past self through past facing attention and kindness.

As an exercise

This framework gives us an opportunity to tease out whether thoughts and feelings about a particular part of our story are a form of conscious attention and intention, or a felt sense of being “somewhen”. Even drawing awareness to the distinction, and then to the interplay, and the ways we can use different combinations to show deep compassion to both the dwelling place and the focus of attention for every part of ourselves can be a real help. Relativity teaches us that space and time are like a unified fabric, meaning that each somewhere is different, even if we return to a place, because it is a different somewhen. Mindfully relating to the mystery of time is another way to bring a contemplative lens to the actions of our everyday life.

As you practice today, can you notice the subtle shifts in your facing? What about your dwelling? Does that stay more steady? If your sense of dwelling changes, can you pay attention with loving curiosity to what is happening in those moments? How does understanding your temporal posture open your heart to telling a merciful story about what it’s like to be you today?

De dichter des vaderlands*

Dit stuk plak ik daar op dan moet hier nog een laag overheen dit afvoergat vul ik met een rubberstop voor deze opening rol ik een dikke grote steen die scheur daar smeer ik helemaal vol die tochtgaten nagel ik met lakens dicht die stroom trage prut moet worden gestold op dat luik takel ik een enorm zwaar gewicht daar komen duizenden hekwerken verderop een paar smalle bruggen met tolpoorten de dijken ga ik driedubbel versterken bij de grens vijfhonderd extra uitkijktorens bij iedere toegang minstens twee grenswachten op alle manieren onze wereld stevig isoleren alleen nog maar politiek bedrijven met uitzendkrachten en iedereen van buiten blijven afweren tot ze het hier naartoe komen afleren die naad plak ik nog een keer extra af dat hol moet met aarde worden gevuld een muur moet er komen tussen koren en kaf er moet direct een einde komen aan alle uitgaande en inkomende flauwekul niemand mag meer met vaten communiceren alleen bekenden mogen nog worden bemind het tij mag vanaf dit moment niet eens meer keren en dat allemaal omdat ik vanaf dit moment de zelf verklaard dichter des vaderlands ben.

*letterlijk

The people of Earth develop nuclear power. Naron, a long-lived Rigellian who serves as the Keeper of galactic records, notes this achievement and records humanity as having reached maturity. Until he discovers something else... Despite the seriousness of the subject, Asimov keeps a light touch in this very short story.

---

A 1-minute read.

Naron of the long-lived Rigellian race was the fourth of his line to keep the Galactic records.

He had the large book which contained the list of the numerous races throughout the Galaxies that had developed intelligence, and the much smaller book listing those races that had reached maturity and had qualified for the Galactic Federation. In the first book, a number of those listed were crossed out; those that, for one reason or another, had failed. Misfortune; biochemical or biophysical shortcomings; social maladjustment, etc., took their toll. In the smaller book, however, no member listed had yet blanked out.

And now Naron, large and incredibly ancient, looked up as a messenger approached.

“Naron,” said the messenger. “Great One!”

“Well, well, what is it? Less ceremony.”

“Another group of organisms has attained maturity.”

“Excellent. Excellent. They are coming up quickly now. Scarcely a year passes without a new one. And who are these?”

The messenger gave the code number of the Galaxy and the coordinates of the world within it.

“Ah, yes,” said Naron. “I know the world.” And in flowing script, he noted it in the first book and transferred its name into the second—using, as was customary, the name by which the planet was known to the largest fraction of its populace. He wrote: Earth.

He said, “These new creatures have set a record. No other group has passed from intelligence to maturity so quickly. No mistake, I hope.”

“None, sir,” said the messenger.

“They have attained to thermonuclear power, have they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, that’s the criterion.” Naron chuckled. “And soon their ships will probe out and contact the Federation.”

“Actually, Great One,” said the messenger, reluctantly, “the Observers tell us they have not yet penetrated space.”

Naron was astonished. “Not at all? Not even a space station?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“But if they have thermonuclear power, where then do they conduct their tests and detonations?”

“On their own planet, sir.”

Naron rose to his full twenty feet of hight and thundered, “On their own planet?”

“Yes, sir.”

Slowly, Naron drew out his stylus and passed a line through the latest addition in the smaller book. It was an unprecedented act, but, then, Naron was very wise and could see the inevitable as well as anyone in the Galaxy.

“Silly asses,” he muttered.

#asimov

Inbetweeners 38- The Lady of Pain

The Lady of Pain is an enigmatic figure in D and D lore, which makes her particularly useful to dungeon masters as they can craft her intentions to their needs. Before I outline her backstory in the Inbetweeners, lets go over what we do know about her from 5e:

-Her origins and intentions are enigmatic. No one knows her age, purpose or the nature of her power.

-She is the absolute ruler of Sigil. While she seems unbothered by the daily minutia of running an interplanar metropolis, no one challenges her absolute authority here.

-She has banned deities from the city, and is powerful enough to enforce this ban, meaning that her power at the very least rivals gods if not outright eclipses them.

-When she is seen, her form involves razor sharp blades.

-She is able to imprison foes in mazes and extradimensional spaces.

I kept all of these as part of her charter, but greatly expanded upon it for the Inbetweeners Campaign. Her origin was not revealed to characters initially, but they are able to gather details over tiem.

---

The Lady of Pain originally hailed from the Far Realm. Again, the Far Realm is not one place, but rather represents dimensions outside of the normal bounds of reality where our understanding of physics, geometry, etc completely breaks down. It is associated with insanity because it is so different, so alien and the minds of the multiverse cannot comprehend it. That being said, that does not mean the Far Realm is monolithic chaos. It most certainly has its own form of order, just an order that we don't understand. So similarly to how the Interloper hailed from somewhere outside the bounds of reality, so did the Lady of Pain. She is however, far older and far more powerful.

The Lady of Pain arrived in the multiverse soon after the ascension of Primus. He had finished his war against the Titans, annihilating most of their race and securing his dominion across the the planes. The Lady of Pain, like the Interloper, was far more interested in knowledge than power and conquest. To her, this multiverse was a testing ground and place for observation. However, the Lady of Pain's experiments threatened the order which Primus so meticulously built, so they ended up in a bitter conflict. Neither side was powerful enough to destroy the other outright, but it quickly became clear that the multiverse itself could be destroyed if things continued to escalate. Primus, through Mechanus, created a bargain. They constructed Sigil, which would be an interplanar Nexus and crossroads. From here, the Lady of Pain could continue her observations and experiments, but she would not be permitted to leave Sigil. She reluctantly accepted.

So the question is, why would the Lady of Pain accept such a prison? Why would she cede so much of the multiverse. To understand this one must first understand how time works, or doesn't work for the Lady of Pain. 50,000 years may seem like a long time for a mortal, or even a diety, but for the Lady of Pain time is irrelevant. She exists outside of normal time, so any sojourn of imprisonment or waiting is a trifle so long as it does at some point end. She could continue gathering data and knowledge in peace, and without risk of sabotaging the entire experiment in a conflict with Mechanus. So, she went to Sigil and she made the city her own. And she observed, experimented, and waited.

What Primus didn't realize is that the Lady of Pain's freedom was a statistical inevitability. From his calculations, she would be trapped in Sigil for all time. What he didn't account for was anomalies outside of causality. This is where his calculations breakdown. Causality is an artificial constraint imposed on reality by Primus, but the multiverse is not a closed system. Far Realm incursions do occur. And those can introduce a level of entropy that violates the laws of causality. Hence Primus had created the Protectors of the Weave, to isolate and eliminate any Far Realm incurions. The Lady knew, inevitably, something would break through that could end her imprisonment. Enter, the Inbetweeners.

While the Lady of Pain can't leave Sigil, she is able to see across the multiverse. It was in this way she first became aware of the Inbetweeners as they explored the rooms adjoining the Grey Room. She tested them, both to get a sense of their alignment, priorities and power level, but also to see if they adhered to causality. Time and time again they defied expectations. Even she could not predict their next action. The fight with Arkanos was the final test. An impossible task. Even if they players lost, it didn't mean they were tethered to causality, but a win all but proved they were not. The time for the Lady's freedom from Sigil was at hand.

In order to break free though, she would have to break the power structure in Mechanus that contains her. Her power is immense, but she cannot unilaterally attack Sigil, not without risking a full blown return to the previous conflict. So, she had the players free Grandma Nettles. However, there was a complication. She assumed the players would bring Grandma Nettles with them, her immense power capable of fighting of Protectors of the Weave. But instead, they left Grandma Nettles with their patron, the Interloper, for whom they seemed to have grown fond of. So it was now the Lady of Pain decided to make herself known to the players, and they met with her directly, something few mortals ever do, and even fewer survive.

So immense is the Lady of Pain's power, that even looking upon her is dangerous. Anyone who sees her manifested form must make a constitution saving throw, and failure means cuts open up all over their body and begin to bleed. She has no statblock, and essentially is a high level reality manipulator. Within Sigil she can stop time, move instantly, reform the city at her whim, and essentially do anything. No being in the multiverse could threaten her here.

She first meets the players at the top of Arkanos' Villa. She needed the players to retain the ability to move linearly outside of Sigil so they could be of further use to her as agents in the multiverse. It was here she'd introduce the Xalatra questline, which I will get into in a post soon. Once that quest was completed, her full mission would come into focus. She wanted the players to retrieve Grandma Nettles, who is key in her plan to break Mechanus and free herself from Sigil. The Lady of Pain's abstract nature and detachment from most things made her difficult for the players to relate to, but they struck a bargain. In her absence, Sigil and all its power would be up for grabs. She would grant it to the Beeple Queen if in return for their help. She would even start to groom the Beeple Queen for the position, so long as the players remained cooperative.

The Lady of Pain cared not what happened to the Interloper, he was a mere distraction in her mind. But Grandma Nettles would be key to breaking Mechanus, and the players would first need to lay the groundwork for that to occur. The irony of all of this is the players may assume some master plan. Once the Lady of Pain is free will she rule the multiverse? Destroy it? Change it irrevocably? The truth is more mundane. She is finished. gathered the data she needed. She will simply leave.

The players of course could instead choose to side with Mechanus, becoming enemies of the Lady of Pain. Had they chosen this course, their first order of business would have been destroying the Interloper. From there, they'd put in place a plan to bind the Lady of Pain and use her energy to power Mechanus, ensuring its stability and dominance for eons to come. Of course, the players said “fuck the time police” and as a result are currenty in the late stages of a war with Mechanus that I will reveal in later posts.

But yes, Lady of Pain is an enigmatic Far Realm entity ready to go home. In terms of power level in my campaign, she probably ranks above all other entities. Primus hismelf isn't that powerful, it is the infratructure around himself he's built that multiplies his power so greatly. But in a one on one fight, The Man, Bahamut, Tiamat, Primus, and all the gods combined couldn't touch the Lady of Pain.

JOURNAL 22 octobre 2026

Ka chan a mangé avec nous. On a de la chance le temps permet qu’on s'entraîne dehors et c’est ce que je trouve le mieux. La tante de T chan est arrivée dans la matinée elle a une heure de voiture c'est bien. T était très heureuse les deux très émues aussi. Sa tante l'aime beaucoup, elle s’est toujours inquiétée pour elle avec ce père toxique dont elle s’est toujours méfiée, d'où l'éloignement de sa sœur. Elle a cru que T partie mise dehors pratiquement après une scène affreuse, on ne la retrouverait jamais, elle était morte d'inquiétude. Notre coup de téléphone l’a rendue folle de joie. Elle a convaincu la mère de lui confier T de toute façon son salaud de père n’en veut plus. En fait il est persuadé qu’elle n’ est pas sa fille. Vous voyez l'ambiance.

Cette tante est veuve, elle a entre quarante et cinquante ans, jamais eu d'enfant. Son mari lui a laissé de quoi vivre à l’aise, il était seul héritier d’une famille de commerçants. Elle vit de placements financiers. Elle nous a raconté tout ça pour nous rassurer, elle a tout de suite compris à quel point on serait attentives. Elle ne sait pas comment nous remercier, T lui a raconté qu'on l’avait sauvée d’un sale type ça l’a beaucoup impressionnée. La meilleure façon de nous remercier c’est d'aider T chan à devenir une adulte belle dans son âme et libre. Gros programme. Mais on lui a assuré qu’on l'aidera. Elle a gagné 8 grandes sœurs dans l'affaire, ça aussi ça a beaucoup impressionné la tante. Elle a l'air d'une bonne personne. On lui a rendu sa nièce sans crainte. Échange de téléphones puis adieux avec quelques larmes et très gros câlins 🥲 Sitôt arrivée T nous a appelées. — bien arrivée il y a un chat. Elle est heureuse 😍 on se reverra

#Tchan

---

Avec ça j'oublie que A avait rendez-vous au ministère, au sous sol. Elle a revu le type qui lui avait proposé la mission. Il lui a donné des instructions orales, comme moi, des conseils etc. On n’aura droit qu’aux bagages à main pas de valise, genre sac à dos sac de sport ça suffira. Des vêtements pratiques genre sport et chauds. Sur place on sera équipées selon les circonstances. On sera averties du départ la veille. On viendra nous chercher. À partir du 30 il faut qu’on soit prêtes à tout moment. D'ici là elle est dispensée de venir au ministère, et d’autres trucs pratiques et merci pour votre participation nous sommes conscients du service que vous acceptez de rendre au Japon. Même insistance sur le mot. Un détail important : on ne se munit pas de nos passeports, pas de papiers d'identité, ils s'en occupent. Au revoir madame. Poignée de main, pas d'inclinaison.

Puis elle est montée à son bureau pour prendre deux trois trucs. Elle a croisé les habituels collègues et tous y compris ses supérieurs la saluaient avec ce qui lui a semblé une nuance de respect. C’est très subtil l'art du salut au Japon, je lui ai donné des cours du soir, elle sait saisir des nuances très légères qui échappent à des occidentaux non formés et qui sont pleines de sens pourtant. Donc nous voici en vacances et libres comme l'air jusqu'au 30, après arrivera ce qui doit arriver… J'avoue un peu d'excitation et beaucoup de curiosité.

Maintenant ma chérie me tire par mon yukata, nous avons à faire, c’est privé.

#Ukraine