Pittsburgh Pirates vs Milwaukee Brewers.

I join Saturday's MLB Game already in progress. Pirates and Brewers are tied 2 to 2 in the 2nd inning.

And the adventure continues.

Notes after Torah study If you are a believer—whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim—the beginning of our faith starts with Abraham, where the covenant was made. There are layers to this though that are strange. For reference Im going to use the acronym “NHI” to represent Non-human intelligence. This could be angels, watchers or beings referred to in the heavenly court reference in Genesis or something else we do not know of. The story (as taught in Judaism) is this: Abraham’s father, Terakh, owned an idol shop. One day, while his father was away and Abraham was left in charge of the store, he took an axe and smashed all the idols except the biggest one. He then placed the axe in the large idol’s hands. When his father returned, he was angry and asked what had happened. Abraham explained that the large idol had become upset with the other idols and destroyed them. “You know these idols can’t move,” his father shouted. Abraham cleverly answered, “If they can’t save themselves, then we are superior to them. So why should we worship them?” [^1] It is Abraham’s intellectual and spiritual perception — his ability to see through what everyone else around him accepted without questionthat caught the attention of the Creator of the universe—whom we call HaShem—thereby becoming the father of the Jewish people.

However much the faith has splintered over the thousands of years that followed, what can be agreed upon is that Abraham gives us ethical monotheism: the belief that there is one G-d over mankind and earth, and that His primary concern is that people act ethically. The stories of Abraham’s life that follow are epic. G-d tests him in many ways, even to the extreme of commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham also confronts G-d in one of the most famous lines in human history: “Shall not the judge of all the earth act with justice?” [Genesis 18:25]. I do not know what to make of these stories. Beyond the text, they contain mathematical patterns. For example, the ages of the patriarchs: * Abraham — 175 years * Isaac — 180 years * Jacob — 147 years

⠀Look at the math: * 175 = 7 × 5² * 180 = 5 × 6² * 147 = 3 × 7² ⠀See – Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut

This is deliberate not coincidence in my opinion. The coefficients decrease (7 → 5 → 3) while the bases increase (5 → 6 → 7). I have no thoughts as to what it means but it certainly hints to encoding something through mathematics that goes beyond the surface story. Archeologically this puts us in the Middle Bronze Age. At that time: * Widespread literacy was rare. * Advanced mathematics (especially the kind of elegant, intentional patterning you’re seeing in the ages) was mostly the domain of specialized scribal or priestly elites in places like Mesopotamia or Egypt. * A semi-nomadic family/clan wandering between Mesopotamia and Canaan would not have been the most likely setting for this kind of numerical sophistication. Source: Grok 7/11/226

Abraham’s stories describe G-d’s role in the world. In the Midrash it says: “So, because Abraham our patriarch was saying: ‘Is it possible that this world is without someone in charge?’ The Holy One, blessed be He, looked at him and said to him: ‘I am the owner of the world.’” — Genesis Rabbah (Sefaria) But I am left with so many questions. If the story of the Patriarchs is true, then we have a population of humans created in the story of Genesis—specifically created by a heavenly council in the image of their maker(s): “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness.’” [Genesis 1:26] Rashi comments on this verse: “The meekness of the Holy One, blessed be He, the Rabbis learned from here: because man is in the likeness of the angels and they might envy him, therefore He took counsel with them. And when He judges the kings, He likewise consults His heavenly council… He consulted His heavenly council and asked permission of them, saying to them: ‘There are in the heavens beings after My likeness; if there will not be on earth also beings after My likeness, there will be envy among the beings that I have created.’” — Rashi on Genesis 1:26 (Rosenbaum & Silbermann translation) The core of this faith is established by how the world came to be and by whom or what. Then Judaism forms with the story of a child smashing idols in a clever and insightful moment—an observation of what society worships. His words are as powerful as his axe.

We tend to treat revision as a mechanical step – a tidy afterthought to the “real” work of writing. But in the digital age, revision has become something else entirely: a way of knowing. When the tools of composition allow infinite re‑expression, the act of rewriting becomes a miniature epistemic cycle. A sentence is no longer a declaration; it is a conjecture. Its next version is a refutation. And the movement between them – the quiet, iterative negotiation – is where understanding actually forms.

Montaigne wrote in a world where revision was costly. Ink dried slowly, parchment resisted correction, and every alteration demanded labour. His thought had to be pre‑considered, almost pre‑lived. Today, the writer’s field kit – keyboard, screen, cursor, delete key – makes revision cheap, abundant, and cognitively central. We discover our arguments not by holding them in the mind but by reshaping them on the page. Knowledge emerges through the drift between versions.

This is a dialectic Popper never anticipated. Not the grand clash of hypotheses, but a micro‑dialectic enacted in every paragraph: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, repeated until the sentence feels true enough to stand. Revision is no longer a repair mechanism. It is a method of inquiry – a way of testing the world by testing one’s own phrasing. In this sense, writing has become a form of epistemology conducted in real time, one keystroke at a time.

Photo: IBM Selectric I Typewriter, By Steve Iodefink, License: CC BY 2.0

The concept of birth year collecting has fascinated me in the last year or two. The idea of seeking out objects that were produced in the year you were born has an appeal. And yet, I cannot, for the life of me quite wrap my head around the concept.

So, think of it this way… You are looking at objects that you very likely had no knowledge or recognition of when (and even if) you were around them. When you were born, your brain didn't have object permanence. In fact, you likely didn't fully develop object permanence until you were 18–24 months old.

So, why are we fascinated with items that we likely didn't have complete recognition of until we were nearly two years old? The only answer that comes to mind (or more of a thought, really) is that we have some fascination of finding objects that are now symbols of the world we were born into. Objects that our parents likely interacted with on a regular basis around that time.

But even that as an answer isn't completely satisfactory. Why? Simply because we will likely search out objects that simply weren't all that common in the year of our birth.

Take fountain pens as an example. I was born in the mid-1960s. Around the year of my birth the world had largely moved away from fountain pens. Ballpoint pens had become the new norm. So, if I were specifically looking for a writing instrument my parents were using around this time it would have been a ballpoint pen, and not a fountain pen. (Indeed, neither of my parents ever suggested anything about having a preference for fountain pens over ballpoint pens.)

Yet part of my interest has been in Parker fountain pens (as indicated by my interest in Parker 51 Vacumatic clones). Yet, if I were to be honest with myself, my parents would have been likelier to use a Parker Jotter ballpoint pen. And, indeed, there were quite a few Parker Jotter style pens in my house growing up. (Although, there was also another very specific / special ballpoint pen that was extremely common in my house.)

Now, if I were to look at stereo components from this time period... Well, honestly, component stereo systems weren't super common around this time period. (Yes, they were gaining in popularity, and thus weren't uncommon, but hear me out here.) The thing was, the average, non-audiophile would have been more likely to have a Hi-Fi or Stereo console during this time. And, in the case of my family, I know it would be more appropriate to find a console from this time – because they had one.

I don't recall the exact model, or even the brand. However, I know that around the time I was born it broke, and ended up in storage in our attic. And there it sat until I was 6–7 years old and pestered my parents into getting it fixed so I could use it (yes, I was really into music at an early age). That is a story worth telling on it's own at some point.

Another thing that I've looked into birth year collecting is watches. Or, at least, getting a single watch from my birth year. But, while I know my father had a wristwatch, I don't recall what it looked like (and I can't find any good pictures of him wearing it). And, while I've looked at watches from that time period, I am extremely leery of getting one. Why? During that time period manual-wind watches were the most common, followed by self-winding models. And the fact is, many watch manufacturers were making their own movements. Movements that aren't produced today, and don't have parts available to repair them. The fact is, you can buy a watch from this time period for a few hundred dollars, but end up spending thousands to get reproduction parts made to get it working. Not something that I want into invest in.

So, of all the things birth-year related, the one that I am likely to get is: a typewriter. A typewriter? Yes, I've been looking at getting into typewriters for a while now. I don't want to build some big collection of them. But one two, a manual and an electric, would be kind of cool to have in a nerdy historic way, in my opinion. And, in fact, I know that we had a couple of typewriters in the house when I was growing up. There is even one in my attic now I think: an old Underwood inherited from my grandparents that I used to write my first story ever (as bad as it was – lol).

So, I just don't know why people get into birth year collecting. Knowing what I know from doing a bit of research on all these items, it just seems like more of a nuisance than it rewards. The biggest problem is actually identifying objects that were specifically produced in the year that you want. And, even if you can find something, it might not be in good shape and need to be restored. Restoration can be extremely expensive if you pay an expert to do it. Or, it can be a real time-sink if you decide to undertake it yourself.

Maybe it's just better to get a modern reproduction instead.

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Categories: #Collecting Tags: #fountainpens, #wristwatches, #watches, #stereo, #hifi, #typewriters License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Tu prétends qu'à l'été tu danseras sous le soleil mais déjà à l'hiver tu t'endors sans apprendre le pas

– Jean Sioui, Des morceaux de temps, p. 31

The bruises were there yesterday. i told myself not to think about them. they weren’t that bad. easy enough to ignore if i didn’t spend too long looking in the mirror. simple. This morning though, they’re worse, much darker and clearer i would say. like whatever happend last night wasn’t finished the first time, i would’ve blamed my housemate. it would’ve made everything easier. he has a key. he walks around late sometimes. i could’ve convinced myself he was messing with me. except i locked my door. i remember locking it, checking it before i got into bed, i even pulled the handle twice just to make sure. it was still locked when i woke up. so either someone got into my room without opening the door. or nobody did. neither explanation makes me feel any better. i stood in front of the mirror longer than i should’ve, tracing the bruises with my fingertips, they almost look deliberate. like hands. i checked the house anyway, every room, every window. every lock, nothing had moved nothing was missing. everything was exactly where i left it. if someone had broken in, id have something to blame. instead im felt wondering whether i did this in my sleep. or if im starting to lose entire nights without realizing it.

I don’t like either answer, i think ill keep the lights on tonight, not because i tihnk it’ll stop anything, just because i want to know what the room looks like before i close my eyes.

Sincerely, im running out of explanations.

I finally unpacked my OSRIC 3.0 books. Both portrait and landscape versions turned out great. PDFs are free on DriveThruRPG (player guide, gamemaster guide), while offset print versions can be purchased directly from Mythmere Games.

Player Guide and Gamemaster Guide landscape hardbacks:

Player Guide and Gamemaster Guide portrait hardbacks:

GM Screen:

Cult of the Crooked Tower (PDF and print), Whispers of the Death God (PDF and print), and Fortress Tomb of the Ice Lich (PDF and print):

#Postbox #OSR #OSRIC

the taste of a morning

I wake to the steady patter of summer rain. Too early, I begin telling myself. But from where within the insistence? Where within the affront in the lie? To refuse the precious gift of laying just half-risen in bed, letting cares dissolve in the curtains of rain. Now heaving, now sighing. I taste the droplets wetting the stone of our windowsill. Perhaps inadvertently reviving the rosemary and oregano long ignored in the windowsill plot. Or perhaps just ebbing my lot away in time. I, scuppering, all the while. Mesmerised by simply passing from one infinitesimal now-slice to the next. This is much the sweet silence drawn from a cigarette. Now the rain has stopped and bird calls begin piercing the blanket hushing the street. But there is not a soul to hush. Everywhere in beds they turn over, rubbing their itches involuntarily, and slumbering on in a race against the phone alarm drawing ever nearer. I, waiting mine.

I just played a random extra league game and G was on my team, we called and caught up and talked about where life has taken us. Additionally, I feel like I’m tossing a bit over this one decision – K and I have been talking and she’s wonderful, and pretty much has no real big flaws and seems aligned on the big things for me. I’m still trying to convince myself of reasons why it would not work, or something like that. I guess I just don’t feel that intense firework spark of unhealthy relationships, and I’m worried that this is something good and I don’t want to accept it because I’m used to more rapid intense stuff. Man.

Chapter 1: The Night You Wonder Whether You Belong

There are nights when the house is quiet, the phone is finally still, and the thoughts you pushed aside all day come back. You remember the conversation that made you feel small. You think about the family gathering where you felt like a guest instead of family. You wonder whether the people you love would notice how tired you really are. In that kind of moment, the meaning of Jesus saying there are many rooms in His Father’s house becomes more than a Bible verse. It becomes a question about whether there is truly a place where you are fully wanted.

Maybe that is why this promise has stayed with so many people. It speaks to the person who has spent years trying to earn a seat at the table. It speaks to the one who smiles in public but quietly feels replaceable. It speaks to anyone who has ever wondered whether God welcomes people who have failed badly, drifted far, or carried doubt for a long time. That is also where Christian encouragement for anyone who feels forgotten by God begins to matter, because Jesus did not speak these words to people who felt strong and certain. He spoke them to troubled hearts.

The disciples were sitting with Jesus during a tense and confusing night. They had followed Him from town to town. They had watched Him heal people, calm storms, challenge religious pride, and welcome those others pushed aside. They had built their lives around the belief that He was the One sent by God. Then Jesus began telling them that He was going away. He spoke about betrayal. He spoke about suffering. He spoke in a way that made the room feel less safe than it had felt before.

It is easy to read that passage with the ending already in mind. We know about the cross. We know about the empty tomb. We know the story continues. The disciples did not have that view yet. They only knew that the person they trusted most was talking about leaving, and they could not imagine what their lives would become without Him standing beside them.

Most of us know something about that feeling. It may arrive in a hospital waiting room when the doctor takes longer than expected. It may come after a marriage changes, a child grows distant, or a job disappears. It may show up when you realize that the plan you trusted is no longer possible. You are still sitting in the same chair, but life no longer feels like the life you knew.

Jesus looked at His friends and said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” He was not telling them to pretend. He was not acting as if their fear was foolish. He knew what was coming better than they did. He knew the violence, confusion, grief, and uncertainty that would soon surround them. His comfort was not based on the idea that nothing painful would happen. His comfort was based on the truth that pain would not separate them from Him forever.

Then He said, “In My Father’s house are many rooms. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” Those words have sometimes been treated like a description of the size of heaven. People imagine hallways, doors, windows, and private rooms with names attached. There is nothing wrong with imagining the beauty of what God has prepared, but Jesus was reaching deeper than architecture. He was speaking about belonging.

A room in a father’s house is not merely space. It means you are part of the household. It means your presence is expected. It means the door is not opened reluctantly after you prove your worth. You are welcomed because the one who owns the house wants you there.

That matters because so much of life teaches us to measure our place by performance. At work, a place may depend on results. In a social circle, it may depend on whether we are interesting, useful, attractive, or agreeable. Even in families, people sometimes feel loved most when they are easy to deal with. Over time, we can begin to think that every form of belonging has to be earned.

Then we bring that fear into our relationship with God. We assume He must be keeping score in the same way people do. We remember the prayer we stopped praying, the habit we returned to, the promise we broke, or the anger we cannot seem to release. We picture God with folded arms, waiting for us to become less disappointing.

Jesus gives us a different picture. He speaks of His Father’s house, and then He says He is preparing a place for us. The movement begins with Him, not with us. He goes ahead. He makes the way. He opens what we could not open for ourselves.

This does not mean our choices do not matter. Jesus never treated sin as harmless. He called people to repent, forgive, tell the truth, love their enemies, and walk in obedience. But He did not teach that obedience was the price we paid to convince the Father to love us. Obedience grows from being loved. Change begins when the heart finally believes it no longer has to hide.

Think about a child who has made a serious mistake and waits in the kitchen for a parent to come home. The clock on the wall sounds louder than usual. The child imagines the worst. There may still need to be a hard conversation. There may be consequences. Yet everything changes when the door opens and the parent says, “You are still my child. We are going to face this together.”

That is closer to the heart of the gospel than the picture many people carry. Jesus does not excuse what is destroying us, but He does not throw us away because we need to change. He comes to rescue, restore, and bring us home.

The mystery of the many rooms is not mainly that heaven is large. The mystery is that the Father wants His children near Him. God is not presented as a distant owner who allows a few worthy people onto His property. Jesus calls Him Father, and He speaks as the Son who has come to bring lost people back into the family.

That word “Father” can be difficult for some people. Not everyone had a father who made home feel safe. Some people remember broken promises, harsh words, silence, or absence. Others grew up trying to avoid the anger in the room. When Jesus speaks of His Father, He is not asking us to project human failure onto God. He is showing us the Father human beings were always meant to know: faithful, holy, present, truthful, and full of mercy.

The Father Jesus reveals does not lose interest when we become complicated. He does not disappear when our faith feels weak. He does not confuse our struggle with rejection of Him. He knows the difference between a heart that is running from truth and a heart that is trying to believe while carrying wounds.

There are mornings when faith does not feel strong. You may sit on the edge of the bed, look at the floor, and realize you do not have a powerful prayer. You may only have enough honesty to say, “Jesus, I need help today.” It may not feel spiritual. It may not sound impressive. But the One who prepares a place for you is not measuring the beauty of your sentence. He is listening for your heart.

This is one of the clearest lessons Jesus teaches in this promise: His presence is the real home. Heaven is not wonderful only because suffering ends there. It is wonderful because separation ends there. The deepest hope is not merely that we receive a room. The deepest hope is that we are with Him.

Jesus said, “I will come again and receive you to Myself.” He did not simply promise to send directions. He promised Himself. He did not tell the disciples to find their own way through death and uncertainty. He told them that He would come for them.

That reveals the kind of Savior Jesus is. He does not stand far away and shout advice toward frightened people. He enters our world. He sits at tables. He touches the unclean. He notices the ignored. He weeps with grieving friends. He carries the cross. He walks into death and then walks out again.

The cross is what makes the room possible. Sin created a separation we could not repair through effort, good intentions, or religious appearance. Jesus took that separation upon Himself. He carried the judgment we could not survive and offered the life we could never earn. When He rose from the dead, He showed that the road home had been opened.

That is why this promise can motivate us without turning into shallow positivity. Jesus is not saying that every hard season will become easy by next week. He is saying that no faithful step is wasted, no grief will last forever, and no power of darkness can cancel what He has prepared for those who trust Him.

A woman may be sitting at the kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed, looking at an unpaid bill and wondering how she will keep the family steady. A man may be driving home from work after being told his position may be cut. A parent may be staring at a message from a child who no longer wants to talk. None of them need a cheerful slogan. They need a hope strong enough to live inside real pressure.

Jesus offers that kind of hope. He does not promise that the kitchen table will never hold bad news. He promises that bad news will not be the final word over a life held by Him. He does not promise that every relationship will heal in the way we want. He promises that our identity will not be decided by who walked away. He does not promise that death will never enter our story. He promises that death cannot keep what belongs to Him.

The lesson is not that Christians should stop feeling afraid. The lesson is that fear no longer has the authority to define reality. The room is still prepared when your hands shake. The Father is still faithful when your mind feels crowded. Jesus is still the way when you cannot see beyond the next step.

That changes how we live today. A person who knows there is a place for them does not have to chase every invitation. They do not have to let every rejection become a verdict. They can stop begging people to confirm a worth that Christ has already secured. They can love without losing themselves, serve without pretending to be endless, and walk away from what keeps teaching them that they are disposable.

There will still be lonely evenings. There will still be moments when old wounds speak loudly. Faith does not erase memory. But in those moments, we can return to the words Jesus gave troubled friends: “In My Father’s house are many rooms.”

He was not trying to make them curious about heaven’s floor plan. He was reminding them that they belonged to Him beyond the reach of betrayal, suffering, distance, and death.

You may not feel fully at home anywhere right now. You may be the dependable person everyone leans on but no one checks on. You may sit in church and still wonder whether God sees the real you. You may carry regret from years you cannot recover. Jesus does not answer those fears by telling you to become more impressive. He answers by pointing to the Father’s house and saying there is room.

There is room for the person who comes honestly. There is room for the person who is tired of pretending. There is room for the person who needs forgiveness and is finally ready to receive it. There is room because Jesus did not merely speak about love. He proved it with His life.

Tonight, when the house grows quiet and your mind begins searching for evidence that you do not belong, remember where Jesus placed your hope. He did not place it in your ability to hold everything together. He placed it in His promise to prepare a place and come for you.

The heart can rest when it knows home is not something it must build alone. Jesus has already gone ahead.

Chapter 2: When Home Changes the Way You Walk

The next morning may look completely ordinary. The alarm goes off. The coffee is weaker than you wanted. Someone needs an answer before you have had time to gather your thoughts. The promise of the Father’s house can feel far away when the sink is full, the car is low on gas, and your mind is already carrying tomorrow.

That is where this promise has to become more than comfort about what happens after death. Jesus was speaking about eternity, but He was also giving His disciples a way to live through the next few hours. They were about to face confusion, fear, failure, and grief. The knowledge that they belonged to Him was meant to steady their feet before they understood the whole road.

A true home does something to a person even while they are away from it. A child who knows there is a safe place to return to can face the day differently. A traveler who knows where he is going does not treat every rest stop as a permanent address. In the same way, knowing that Jesus has prepared a place for us changes how tightly we have to hold the things of this world.

We still care about our work, families, responsibilities, health, and future. Faith does not make those things unimportant. It puts them in their proper place. They are gifts, assignments, and parts of our story, but they are not our final home. When we ask temporary things to give us permanent security, we place a weight on them that they were never built to carry.

A job can provide income and purpose, but it cannot promise that you will never be forgotten. A marriage can offer deep companionship, but even the best human love cannot remove every loneliness. Children can bring joy, but they cannot become the proof that your life mattered. Money can make certain problems easier, but it cannot prepare the soul for eternity.

Jesus does not tell us to stop loving the people and opportunities God has placed in our lives. He teaches us to love them without turning them into gods. When our deepest security rests in Him, we can appreciate what we have without living in constant terror of losing it.

This is easier to say than to live. A father may sit in his parked car after work because he does not want his family to see how frightened he is. The company is cutting hours, and the numbers no longer work. He has always been the one who finds a solution. Now he is staring at the steering wheel, feeling as if his value is slipping away with his paycheck.

The promise of a prepared place does not pay the bill that night. It does something just as necessary before the next decision is made. It reminds him that he is more than his ability to provide. His responsibility still matters, and he should take the next honest step he can. Yet his place in the Father’s house is not being reviewed by a manager, a bank, or the balance in his account.

Jesus separates identity from circumstance. The world often tells us that we are what we produce. Jesus tells us that those who trust Him are His. The world decides whether we belong by asking what we can contribute. Jesus went to the cross before we had anything to offer Him.

That does not produce laziness. Real grace creates courage. When you know failure cannot erase your place with Christ, you become more willing to try what is right. You can admit that you need help. You can begin again. You can face a difficult truth without believing that the truth will destroy you.

The disciples would soon discover this personally. Peter promised that he would never abandon Jesus, then denied knowing Him three times. That failure could have become the final definition of his life. After the resurrection, Jesus did not pretend the denial had never happened. He met Peter, spoke to the wound, and restored him to service.

Peter learned that belonging to Jesus did not mean he would never fail. It meant failure would not have to own him forever. The Savior who prepared a place for Peter also prepared a future for him after his worst night.

Some people live as if one mistake canceled every good thing God could still do through them. They replay a choice made ten years ago as though it happened this morning. They apologize in their own minds every day, but they never receive forgiveness. They believe in the cross for everyone except themselves.

Jesus did not die so we could spend the rest of our lives trying to punish ourselves enough to deserve mercy. He died because we could never make ourselves clean through shame. Repentance is not endless self-hatred. It is turning toward the One who tells the truth about our sin and still opens the door to restoration.

The Father’s house is not a reward for people who managed to avoid needing grace. It is the home of people who were rescued by grace. Every person there will know that Jesus is the reason the door opened.

That should make us gentler with others. When we forget how much mercy we have received, we begin sorting people into those we think deserve a place and those we think do not. We become suspicious of anyone whose struggle looks different from ours. We may speak about the Father’s house while making our churches, families, and friendships feel like places where people have to hide.

Jesus welcomed people without lying to them. He could sit with someone others avoided and still call that person into a changed life. His kindness was not weakness, and His truth was not cruelty. He showed that love can see the whole person, name what is wrong, and refuse to give up on what grace can restore.

The many rooms should teach us to make room in our daily lives. This does not mean accepting abuse, removing every boundary, or pretending trust never needs to be rebuilt. It means we stop treating struggling people as interruptions. We notice the person standing alone. We listen before giving an answer. We remember that the person who seems difficult may be carrying a battle we cannot see.

A woman may walk into church after months away and sit near the back because she is afraid someone will ask where she has been. She has not stopped believing in God, but she is ashamed of how far she drifted. The person who sits beside her does not need to investigate her absence. A simple welcome may become the first sign that returning is still possible.

That small act reflects Jesus. He was never impressed by religious behavior that made wounded people afraid to come near God. He challenged those who guarded the appearance of holiness while neglecting mercy. He made room at the table for people who knew they needed help.

If we belong to Him, our lives should begin to carry the same invitation. Our homes, conversations, and communities should tell the truth about God’s goodness. People should not have to become polished before they are treated with dignity. They should be able to see in us a glimpse of the Savior who came looking for the lost.

This begins in ordinary places. It may mean putting down the phone when someone finally begins to talk. It may mean refusing to use another person’s weakness as a story for entertainment. It may mean apologizing to your child because being the parent does not make you incapable of being wrong. It may mean checking on the friend who always says, “I’m fine,” too quickly.

None of these actions earns us a room in heaven. They are signs that the welcome of Jesus is reshaping us. A heart that has been given a home becomes more willing to offer shelter.

There is also a quiet freedom in remembering that this world is not the Father’s finished house. We often expect life here to feel complete, then blame ourselves when something still seems missing. We may have people who love us, useful work, food on the table, and reasons to be thankful, yet still sense a longing we cannot explain.

That longing is not always ingratitude. Sometimes it is the soul remembering that it was made for more than temporary peace. Even our happiest moments carry a small awareness that they cannot be held forever. Children grow up. Seasons change. Bodies age. Photographs become records of rooms we cannot enter again.

Jesus does not shame that longing. He gives it a direction. He tells us there is a place where love will no longer be followed by loss. The promise of home does not make today meaningless. It helps us receive today without demanding that it become eternity.

We can enjoy the meal while knowing the table will eventually be cleared. We can love people deeply without pretending we control how long they remain. We can grieve when a season ends and still trust that God has not ended the story.

That is the strength Jesus was giving His disciples. He was not asking them to become detached from life. He was preparing them to love courageously in a world where loss is real. They could endure separation because He promised reunion. They could face death because He would defeat it. They could serve without needing this world to reward them perfectly because their final welcome was secure.

The mystery of the many rooms becomes practical here. The person who knows where home is can walk through uncertain places without making uncertainty their identity. The person who knows who is waiting can keep moving even when the road feels lonely. The person who knows Jesus has gone ahead can stop treating every closed door as proof that God has abandoned them.

You may still have to make a difficult call tomorrow. You may still need to apologize, ask for help, change a habit, or begin again with very little confidence. Faith will not always make the step easy. It will remind you that you are not taking it to earn your place with God. You are walking because Jesus has already called you His own. That is how home changes the way you walk.

Chapter 3: The Place Jesus Is Preparing in You

A woman stands at the bathroom mirror before sunrise, trying to look less tired than she feels. Her father needs more help than he did last month. Her children still expect her to remember everything, and work has become less patient, not more. She has been the strong one for so long that nobody seems to notice when strength starts turning into exhaustion. Before she walks out the door, she closes her eyes and whispers, “Jesus, I do not know how much more I have.”

That prayer may not sound like the kind people quote, but it is honest, and honesty is often where Jesus begins. He does not wait for us to arrange our pain into the right words. He meets us in the moment when the words are barely there and when all we can offer is the truth about how tired we have become.

The promise of the Father’s house gives us hope for eternity, but it also reveals what Jesus is doing in us now. He is not only preparing a place for us. He is preparing us for that place by teaching our hearts how to trust, release control, receive mercy, and love without needing to control every outcome.

That work can be uncomfortable because we often want Jesus to change the situation before He changes us. We want the difficult person to become easier, the financial pressure to disappear, the diagnosis to be reversed, or the future to become clear. Sometimes He changes the circumstances in ways we can see. At other times, He begins by changing the way fear rules the room inside us.

The disciples wanted Jesus to remain where they could see Him. That made sense because they had built their courage around His physical presence. When He told them He was going away, they could only imagine what they were losing. Jesus knew that His departure would open a deeper kind of relationship through the Holy Spirit. They would no longer follow Him only by watching where He walked. His presence would dwell within them.

That did not make the days ahead painless. Peter still failed. Thomas still doubted. The disciples still hid behind locked doors. Their faith grew inside real weakness, not outside it, and that should encourage anyone who believes spiritual growth means becoming less human.

Mature faith does not mean we never feel confused, frustrated, lonely, or afraid. When those feelings return, it does not automatically mean we are moving backward. Jesus Himself felt sorrow, wept over loss, and experienced deep distress before the cross. He did not show us a life without emotion. He showed us a life in which emotion did not become the final authority.

Fear may tell you that everything depends on you, while Jesus teaches you to carry responsibility without pretending you are God. Regret may insist that your future has already been decided, but grace can still create a new beginning. Loneliness may whisper that you are unseen, yet the Father knows exactly where you are. This is how Jesus prepares the inner life: not through one dramatic moment that solves everything, but through repeated choices to trust Him where you once trusted only yourself.

A man receives a late-night call from his adult son. Their relationship has been strained for years, and nearly every conversation reopens an old argument. His first impulse is to defend himself. He has explanations ready, and he knows what the other person did wrong. Then he remembers the mercy he has asked God to show him, so he decides to listen before speaking.

That choice does not repair the entire relationship in one night, and it may not lead to the apology he hopes to hear. Something still changes in him. He stops using being right as a shield and makes room for truth that is painful but necessary.

Jesus prepares us for the Father’s house by teaching us to become people who can live in the presence of perfect love. Pride, bitterness, cruelty, and dishonesty are not parts of us that God intends to preserve forever. They are burdens He intends to remove, and that removal is an act of love. A good doctor does not ignore what is making a patient sick. A loving parent does not watch a child walk toward danger and call silence kindness. Jesus loves us enough to confront what keeps us from freedom.

Sometimes that confrontation comes through Scripture when a verse we have read many times suddenly feels personal. At other times, another person tells us the truth without trying to humiliate us, or the consequences of a decision become impossible to defend. Our natural response may be resistance. We may say people do not understand us, blame the pressure we were under, or point toward someone whose behavior was worse. Healing begins when we stop asking whether our wrong was understandable and start asking whether we are willing to let Jesus change it.

This is not about living under constant accusation. Condemnation tells us we are hopeless, while conviction shows us a better way and invites us to walk in it. Condemnation drives us away from God. Conviction draws us closer because it comes with the possibility of restoration.

The many rooms in the Father’s house are not filled with people who proved they never needed to change. They are filled with people who allowed grace to tell them the truth. They learned that surrender was not the loss of themselves. It was the recovery of the person God intended them to become.

That lesson reaches into small moments. You may choose not to send the angry message, return money after someone overpays you, admit that you have been avoiding prayer, or forgive someone while keeping a boundary that wisdom requires. These decisions may never be seen by a crowd, but they matter because they shape the heart. Eternity is not only a place we think about after life ends. It is a reality that begins to influence who we are becoming today.

Jesus said, “Where I am, there you may be also.” The goal is not simply relocation. The goal is life with Him. If we want His presence forever, then we should not be surprised when He teaches us to recognize and welcome His presence now.

That may happen during a quiet drive when you turn off the noise and finally pray honestly. It may happen while washing dishes after a painful conversation and realizing you need to apologize. It may happen in a hospital room, not because every question has been answered, but because peace arrives where panic had been. The presence of Jesus does not always announce itself with a dramatic feeling. Often it comes as enough strength for the next hour, courage to tell the truth, restraint to remain quiet, or willingness to ask for help. It comes as a steady awareness that you are not alone in this.

That is one reason the promise of home can change a tired person. The woman standing before the mirror may still have a hard day ahead. Her father may still need care, her children may still ask more than she feels able to give, and her work may remain demanding. Yet she can begin to release the belief that she must carry every person and every result by herself.

Jesus does not ask her to stop caring. He invites her to stop acting as if love requires her to be limitless. Even Jesus rested. He stepped away from crowds, prayed, and allowed others to serve alongside Him. Dependence on the Father was not weakness in His life. It was part of His faithfulness.

Some of us need to learn that lesson before exhaustion hardens into resentment. We say yes while anger grows beneath the surface. We help but secretly keep score. We continue giving because we are afraid people will stop loving us if we set a limit. The Father’s house teaches another way. Our place with God is not secured by how useful we make ourselves to everyone else. We are loved before the task begins and after our strength runs out, which means we can serve from love instead of serving for love.

That changes the spirit in which we help. We become more honest about what we can carry, stop making promises our bodies and families cannot sustain, and learn to say no without cruelty or yes without pretending. We also allow other people the dignity of carrying their own responsibilities. This kind of growth is quiet, and it may not look spiritual from the outside, but it is part of Jesus making the heart more like His. He is freeing us from the fear that says we must earn belonging every day.

The promise of a prepared place also changes how we face unanswered questions. Human beings want to know what the room will look like, when we will arrive, how reunion will happen, and what eternity will feel like. Scripture gives us real hope, but it does not satisfy every curiosity.

Jesus did not answer every question His disciples could have asked. He gave them enough truth to trust Him. “I am the way,” He said. Their certainty did not rest in understanding every detail. It rested in the character of the One leading them.

Faith still rests there. We do not know exactly how every loss will be redeemed, why some prayers receive the answer we hoped for while others do not, or how God will make all things new. What we do know is Jesus. He treated weak people with dignity, told the truth without using it to crush them, gave Himself for sinners, entered the grave, and rose again. The mystery remains, but it is held by Someone trustworthy.

There comes a point when faith has to stop demanding a diagram and take the hand being offered. A child crossing a dark room does not need to understand the wiring in the house. The child needs to know the parent has not let go.

Jesus is not offended by sincere questions. Thomas asked Him directly because he did not understand the way, and Jesus answered by pointing to Himself. His doubt became a doorway to a clearer revelation.

You may have questions that have followed you for years. They may be about death, suffering, justice, or whether someone you love truly knew God. You do not have to hide those questions. Bring them to Jesus and let them become part of the relationship instead of a reason to remain far away. Faith is not pretending mystery has disappeared. Faith is trusting that mystery does not mean absence.

One day, those who belong to Christ will no longer need to hold hope through tears. They will see what they trusted. The room will no longer be a promise spoken into fear. It will be home.

Until then, Jesus keeps preparing us through ordinary days. He teaches us to receive grace in the morning, practice truth in the afternoon, and release what we cannot control at night. He reminds us that our failures are not stronger than His mercy and that our uncertainty is not stronger than His promise.

The deepest lesson in “My Father’s house has many rooms” is not only that there is a beautiful place waiting beyond this life, though there is. It is that Jesus wants us with Him. He did not go to the cross merely to improve our behavior. He went to remove the distance between us and God.

That truth gives dignity to today. A difficult conversation matters because love is eternal. An apology matters because truth belongs in the Father’s house. An act of mercy matters because we are learning the language of grace. A quiet prayer matters because we are already learning to live in the presence of the One who will one day welcome us home.

You may still feel unfinished. You are. So am I. The disciples were unfinished when Jesus made the promise. He did not wait until they had proven they would be brave. He knew Peter would deny Him, Thomas would struggle to believe, and the others would scatter. Still, He said, “I go to prepare a place for you.” His promise was larger than their weakness, and it is larger than yours too.

Let Jesus meet you where you are. Allow Him to forgive what needs forgiveness, challenge what needs to change, and carry what was never yours to control. Let Him teach you that belonging is not the prize at the end of perfect performance. It is the gift that makes transformation possible.

The mystery becomes simple enough to hold: Jesus is preparing a home, and He is preparing a people who know they are loved. He is not leaving His followers behind. He is leading them toward the place where fear, grief, shame, and separation finally lose their voice.

Until that day, we keep walking. We do the next faithful thing, love the person in front of us, tell the truth, rest when we need rest, return when we wander, and trust the Savior who has gone ahead. When the house is quiet again, when the mirror reflects a tired face, or when tomorrow feels larger than your strength, remember this: your life is not moving toward emptiness. In Jesus Christ, it is moving toward home.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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A man reflects with quiet satisfaction as he reviews positive echo results, surrounded by reminders of gratitude, strength, and progress in a warm, sunlit room.

I wanted to share a long-overdue health update about what has happened this year and why I can finally talk about it. I recently had my second Camzyos cardiology echo and doctor’s visit of the year. I normally go every six months, and this visit gave me my best numbers yet.

On Camzyos, my obstruction is much better controlled. My echo looked fantastic, so I included a table below comparing my results before and after starting Camzyos.

When I first started Camzyos, I was not getting my refills consistently because of REMS requirements and the timing of my echoes and doctor’s visits. This created gaps in treatment. Once my refills became consistent and those delays stopped, the treatment began working much better.

So yes, I am in a much better place. My heart is working with far less obstruction than it has in years. Between Camzyos and taking Metoprolol ER 200 mg twice daily, I am cautiously optimistic that I can remain on this path.

These results do not mean that my hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is gone, but they do show that the treatment is doing what it is supposed to do. After years of seeing much higher numbers, I am grateful to finally be able to share some genuinely encouraging news.

#faith #health #personal

In September 2021, a little under a year before Danielle Smith became premier, a 48-page document called the Free Alberta Strategy was published. It was co-authored by Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and Derek From. Anderson began as a PC MLA, crossed the floor two years after he was elected to the Wildrose Party, and crossed the floor again four years later together with Danielle Smith to rejoin the PCs. He is Danielle Smith's right hand man, today occupying the position of Executive Director of the Premier's Office. Cooper is a political science professor at the University of Calgary who gained notoriety as an outspoken climate change denier who was found to have funneled funds from research grants to the Friends of Science, a climate change denial propaganda outfit. From is a lawyer and anti-vaccination activist. The three have in common their belief that Alberta needs to become effectively independent from Canada.

The key word here is effectively. That's what the Free Alberta Strategy is about. They believe they have found a way to shield the province from federal legislation.

Now this would be a fairly innocuous legal fantasy were it not for the fact that at least one of the authors is Danielle Smith's eminence grise , and her government is clearly following all the recommendations of the Strategy. So the Strategy bears a closer look. It is a clearly written document, well worth reading.

The Strategy is based on the premise that the federal government is actively trying to destroy Alberta, in two ways: financially through equalization payments and transfers, and by destroying the oil industry in Alberta. They argue that

Through the equalization formula and numerous national transfer programs, Ottawa has taken well over $ 600 billion more from Alberta taxpayers than it has returned to the Province over the last 60 years. Between the period spanning 2007 and 2015 alone, the amount of equalization drained out of Alberta was an astounding $ 188.6 billion. That equates to almost three full years of Alberta’s entire provincial budget!

and

The federal government has commenced a deliberate strategy to phase out and eliminate Alberta’s largest and most critical industry (oil and natural gas) through a variety of legislative programs including a $170/tonne carbon tax, a second carbon tax implemented via so-called “clean fuel regulations”, and an effective ban on new pipeline projects and oil tanker shipments to Asia, thereby landlocking Alberta’s energy producers from developing and exporting our province’s vast energy resources to international and domestic markets.

It's easy to see how these grievances would resonate with Danielle Smith, oil-industry lobbyist. [1]

The remedy? Prevent the federal government from enforcing its own laws in Alberta. The Alberta Sovereignty Act lets Alberta choose which federal legislation to ignore. The Alberta police force replaces the RCMP so the horsemen can't arrest you if you break a federal law Alberta has chosen to ignore. Alberta's independent banks could refuse to work with federal agencies like the Canada Revenue Agency. Here's an example of how all this would work:

If, for example, the Alberta Sovereignty Act was triggered by the Legislature to refuse enforcement of the federal carbon tax, a business operating a gas station could set up its banking with ATB, refuse to collect or remit carbon taxes from its customers to the federal government, and would not be in danger of being shut down by police, having their property seized, or even having their bank accounts garnished by the CRA through federal banks pursuant to court order. This is not a protection this same business would enjoy if it continued to bank with Canada's federally regulated institutions.

Also if you got into trouble with the law, Alberta has your back: the province would appoint its own judges.

How to end equalization payments and transfers? That's easy. Create an Alberta Revenue Agency, which would collect both federal and provincial taxes and transfer to Canada only what Alberta wants.

This is called “Alberta sovereignty within a united Canada”. The distinction between this and outright independence is subtle but crucial: no declaration of independence is needed, and no referendum[2]. The authors leave the door open to independence if all of the above doesn't work (the federal government might make it impossible), but only as a last resort. This is important because it allows Danielle Smith to state categorically

I have repeatedly stated that the position of the UCP caucus, and UCP government is to build a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada. I have never deviated from that position and I will not do so now.

I will therefore be voting for Alberta to remain in Canada, while continuing to work each and every day to restore and strengthen provincial rights under the Canadian constitution.

Now, based on Smith's and Rob Anderson's track record, you may or may not believe she is sincere. These are after all people who crossed the floor of the Legislature—twice. But that's not the point. The point is, do enough conservative voters believe she is sincere? Could they be seduced by the notion of Alberta nationalism while rejecting the blunt instrument of independence?

In the posts that follow, I will look at each of the nine referendum questions in some detail. You will recognize in them the central theme of the Free Alberta Strategy, that is, the idea that Alberta might take control of legislation, and its enforcement mechanisms, that are today the purview of Canada, without actually separating.

Let me know what you think of all of this!

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[1] Although many of the objectives in 2021 have already been attained, this has not stopped Danielle Smith from continuing to strive for Alberta sovereignty. On the contrary, she argues that the fact that concessions can be wrung from the federal government shows that independence is the wrong way to go.

[2] The fact that a tenth referendum question on independence was added to the original nine is due in my opinion to two things: the Forever Canadian question could not be ignored, and Smith feels fairly safe in the belief that independence is rejected by a large majority of voters. So the tenth question enables her to kill off the separatist movement and seek popular support for her sovereignist program at the same time. Two birds with one stone.

On the first day of May in 2025, a dead man stood up in a courtroom in Maricopa County, Arizona, and forgave the person who killed him. Christopher Pelkey had been shot at a red light near Gilbert and Germann roads in 2021, in the kind of stupid, irreversible road-rage encounter that ends a life in seconds. Four years later, at the sentencing of the man convicted of killing him, the courtroom watched a video of Pelkey looking out from the screen and speaking in something close to his own voice. “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the figure said. “In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have, and I still do.”

Pelkey said none of this, of course. He was dead before the sentence existed. The words were written by his sister, Stacey Wales, who had spent two years drafting what she wanted to tell the court and found that the only voice she could hear clearly was her brother's. She and her husband trained generative AI on old photographs and a single video clip, reconstructed his face and his voice, and let the simulation deliver a message of mercy that the real man never got the chance to refuse. The presiding judge, Todd Lang, told the room he loved it. Legal scholars, watching from a distance, felt something closer to vertigo.

The vertigo is the point. A commercial and increasingly accessible technology can now reconstruct a person after death, animate their likeness, approximate their manner, and put words in their mouth, and the entire apparatus operates in a zone where almost nothing is settled. Who consented to this. Who controls it. Who profits. What happens when the simulation says something the dead person would have found repugnant. These are not edge cases waiting for a future crisis. They are live questions, being answered ad hoc, case by case, by grieving families and the companies that sell to them, while courts and legislatures stand at the edge of the problem and squint.

In April 2026, three researchers tried to map the squinting. Their paper, published in the journal Philosophy & Technology, is titled “The Many Faces of Indeterminacy in Interactive Deadbots,” and its central claim is unnervingly precise. The technology that simulates the dead does not merely raise hard questions. It sits inside a structural fog, an indeterminacy so deep and so multi-dimensional that the usual instinct, to wait for the law to catch up, may be a category error. There might be nothing, in the current frameworks, to catch up.

The Industry That Sells the Voices of the Dead

Start with what is actually for sale, because the commerce is the part most people still find hard to believe.

A “deadbot,” in the now-standard if grimly cheerful vocabulary of the field, is an AI system that simulates a deceased individual using their voice, their likeness, and the digital traces they left behind. The terms multiply like anxieties: griefbots, thanabots, ghostbots, postmortem avatars. They sit inside what Cambridge researchers have named the digital afterlife industry, and that industry is no longer a thought experiment. Estimates of its scale vary by methodology, but Zion Market Research valued the broader digital legacy market at roughly 22.46 billion US dollars in 2024, with other analysts projecting growth into the tens of billions across the coming decade. Whatever the exact figure, the direction is unambiguous. Mourning has become a market.

The products differ in ambition. At the more restrained end sits HereAfter AI, a US company that records a living person through guided interview sessions and turns those recordings into an interactive “Life Story Avatar” that family can later question. The person doing the recording chooses what to include. The result is closer to an interactive memoir than a séance, an archive that answers back. StoryFile, founded in 2017 and best known for transforming the actor William Shatner into a conversational video that audiences could interrogate, took a similar interview-led approach, layering natural-language software over pre-recorded footage so that a visitor at a memorial could ask questions and receive answers assembled from the deceased's own words.

StoryFile is also a cautionary tale about the fragility of the whole enterprise. In May 2024 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of New York, declaring around 1.5 million dollars in assets against some 10.5 million dollars in liabilities. It later emerged from bankruptcy after its assets were acquired by a new owner. Sit with that sequence for a moment. The repository of a dead person's reconstructed self, the thing a family paid for so they could keep talking to their mother, becomes a line item in a creditors' schedule, an asset to be sold to whoever wins the auction. The continuity of the dead, in this model, depends on the solvency of a start-up.

At the more aggressive end of the market are systems built to generate rather than replay. Project December, constructed on early OpenAI models, lets users summon a chatbot of more or less anyone by feeding it text samples and a personality sketch. You, Only Virtual asks for the raw sediment of a specific relationship, the text threads and voice notes, and produces a “Versona” you can message and call. Seance AI works from described traits and writing styles. The distinction matters enormously. A replayed archive can only say what the person said. A generative model says new things, in the dead person's voice, that the dead person never said and might have hated. The Philosophy & Technology paper calls this technological indeterminacy, and it argues, crucially, that it is not a bug to be patched. Large language models are nondeterministic by design. Bias, hallucination and opacity are not teething problems on the way to a faithful resurrection. They are structural features of the medium. The dead, reconstructed this way, will always be capable of saying something untrue to who they were.

Five Kinds of Not Knowing

The paper's three authors, Atay Kozlovski and Roel Dobbe of TU Delft in the Netherlands, and Edina Harbinja of Birmingham Law School, have between them a useful combination of expertise. Harbinja in particular has spent years building the legal scholarship on what she calls post-mortem privacy, the question of whether the dead retain any protectable interest in the data they leave behind. Their argument is not the familiar one that deadbots are creepy, or that grief should be sacred, or that Silicon Valley has gone too far. It is colder and more structural than that. They identify five distinct dimensions along which interactive deadbots are indeterminate, and they show how the dimensions feed one another.

The first is technological, the inherent unpredictability of generative systems already described. The second is social. Grief, the authors note, has no single correct shape. It varies across individuals and cultures, across faiths and families, and the same interface that consoles one mourner may corrode another. By industrialising grief through what they call algorithmic mediation, deadbots impose a uniform commercial product on a deeply non-uniform human experience, and there is no settled standard for telling healthy use from harmful use. The third dimension is philosophical, and it is the one that quietly destabilises everything else. What, metaphysically, is the relationship between the simulation and the person it imitates. Is it a representation, a continuation, a puppet, a corpse made of words. Can a user ever know whether the thing is telling them something the dead person believed, or merely something statistically likely given the training data. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They determine whether harm is even possible, and to whom.

It is the fourth and fifth dimensions, the legal and the regulatory, where the abstraction becomes urgent and where the original question sharpens to a point. Because here the indeterminacy is not philosophical hand-wringing. It is a measurable absence of law.

The Law That Stops at the Graveside

European data protection is often held up as the strongest privacy regime on the planet, the framework that forces global companies to bend. It is also, on the specific matter of the dead, almost entirely silent.

Recital 27 of the General Data Protection Regulation states the position with brutal economy. The GDPR “does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons.” The reasoning runs deep into the structure of the right. Data protection in the European tradition is a personal right, attached to the living individual, and on the standard view it is extinguished at death along with the person. The rights that operationalise it, the right to be informed, the right of access, the right to erasure, the right to object, all of them require a data subject to exercise them, and a data subject is, by definition, alive. When your mother dies, her data does not inherit her protections. It simply stops being protected.

This is the gap that the deadbot industry occupies, and it is not an accident that the products exist there. The same recital that closes the door leaves it slightly ajar, providing that member states “may provide for rules regarding the processing of personal data of deceased persons.” A handful have walked through. France is the clearest case. Article 85 of its data protection law lets any person issue directives, before death, about the retention, deletion and communication of their personal data afterwards, and where no instructions exist, the heirs step into the role. France has gone further still. In late 2025 its data protection authority, the CNIL, devoted its tenth Innovation and Foresight Report, titled “Our Data After Us,” to precisely this terrain, examining everything from account transmission to the new commercial offering of deadbots, conversational agents trained on the deceased, and calling for clearer rights and regulation of AI applied to post-mortem data. The French National Digital Ethics Council has urged specific supervision of systems “purposely imitating the way of speaking or writing of a deceased person.”

The United Kingdom, by contrast, offers almost nothing. There is no general statutory post-mortem privacy right. What governs the fate of your digital remains is, overwhelmingly, the contract you clicked through without reading, the terms of service of whichever platform holds your data, interpreted through a patchwork of property, intellectual property, succession and probate law that was never designed for the question. Research led by Harbinja and colleagues, surveying more than 1,700 UK adults, found a strong public appetite for control over digital remains coexisting with almost no awareness of, or use of, the few tools that exist. People want to decide what happens to them after death. They do not know that, legally, they mostly cannot.

The United States is fragmented in its own way. Post-mortem publicity rights, the right to control the commercial use of a person's identity, survive death in some states, notably California and New York, but they were built for celebrities, for estates with a brand to monetise. They protect the commercial value of a dead person's identity rather than the dignity of an ordinary one. A famous musician's estate can sue over an unauthorised hologram. The family of a private individual whose voice has been cloned into a chatbot has, in most jurisdictions, no equivalent claim, because the law sees no market value to defend, and dignity, in this corner of the legal system, has never quite counted as an injury.

Is the Simulation a Person, a Thing, or Neither

Underneath the patchwork lies a problem the paper names with real precision. Post-mortem law occupies unstable ground between persons and things, and an interactive deadbot refuses to settle on either side.

Consider what a deadbot simultaneously is. It is a creative work, a piece of software and recorded media that someone authored and might own under intellectual property law. It is a dataset, an assembly of personal information that data protection regimes might, in principle, govern, except that the regimes stop at death. And it is an extension of a personality, a representation of a specific human self that touches on dignity, reputation and privacy. Each of those categories pulls toward a different legal owner and a different body of rules. The work belongs to its author, perhaps the company. The data belonged to a person who no longer legally exists. The personality belonged to the dead, whose interests the law struggles to recognise once they are gone.

So the question of who controls the thing has no clean answer, and the paper shows how that control fragments in practice. It scatters across platforms and providers, families and communities, none of whom hold complete authority. Families have what the authors call affective stakes, and in some jurisdictions limited legal ones, but the platforms function as what they memorably describe as de facto co-authors of the past. A policy shift, an API change, an algorithmic update, a bankruptcy, any of these can erase an archive, distort its provenance, or quietly rewrite the narrative of who someone was. The dead do not get a vote. Often the living barely do.

This is why the consent question is so much harder than it first appears, and why “anticipatory” frameworks like consent-by-proxy or stewardship, which governance discussions increasingly invoke, do not dissolve it. The deceased's actual preferences, whether they wished to be revived at all and if so how and by whom, are, in the paper's words, often simply unknown. Pre-mortem consent, where the person records themselves while alive, as with HereAfter AI, gets you closest to something defensible, but even there the consent is necessarily incomplete. You can agree to be remembered. You cannot meaningfully agree, in advance, to every new sentence a generative model will one day produce in your name, because neither you nor anyone else can know what those sentences will be. Consent to a process whose outputs are structurally unpredictable is a strange and attenuated kind of consent. It is closer to a leap of faith than a contract.

When the Dead Speak in Public

The deepest discomfort arrives when the reconstructed dead are deployed not for private solace but for public argument, because there the gap between what the person said and what the simulation says becomes a matter of contested record.

In August 2025, the former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta published an interview with an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who was murdered at the age of seventeen in the 2018 Parkland school shooting. The avatar was created by Oliver's parents, who have spent years campaigning for gun reform, and it appeared on what would have been their son's twenty-fifth birthday. On screen, the reconstructed Joaquin advocated for “a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support and community engagement,” chatted about Remember the Titans and Star Wars, and articulated political positions in a measured, on-message way. His father, Manuel Oliver, explained that bringing “AI Joaquin to life” would “create more impact,” and that the model drew on what his son had written and posted online along with information from the wider internet.

It is impossible to watch this without feeling the moral weight on both sides. These are grieving parents using every tool available to keep their murdered child present and to fight for a cause they believe might have saved him. To call it exploitative would be obscene. And yet the format produced exactly the unease the paper predicts. A teenager who never reached an adult political consciousness was given polished adult opinions, in his own face and voice, for an audience that could not interrogate their provenance. The avatar said reasonable things. That is part of the problem. Because the same machinery, in other hands, could just as easily have made him say the opposite, and the audience would have had no way of knowing which version, if either, reflected the boy who died.

This is the scenario the law is least equipped to handle. The harm, if there is harm, is not financial. It is dignitary and informational, a wrong done to the integrity of a person's identity and to the public's ability to know what a real human being actually thought. Existing frameworks, built around property and market value, have almost no vocabulary for it. The deceased cannot be defamed in most legal systems, because the dead have no reputation to protect in law. The family's distress may not rise to any recognised cause of action. And the company that built the model can point, accurately, to the fact that everyone involved consented, that the parents asked for it, that no statute was broken. Everything was permitted. Nothing was governed.

The Regulators Who Are Not Quite in Charge

If the law of the dead is full of holes, the regulation of AI is full of doors that do not quite open onto this room.

The European Union's AI Act, the most ambitious attempt yet to govern these systems, reaches deadbots only at the margins. Its transparency obligations, which come into force on 2 August 2026, require that people be told when they are interacting with an AI system unless that fact is already obvious, and that synthetic audio, images, video and text be machine-readably marked as artificially generated. That is genuinely useful. It means a well-behaved deadbot should, in Europe, carry a label. But labelling is a thin shield. It tells you that the voice consoling you is a machine. It says nothing about whether the machine should exist, who may build one of whom, what it is allowed to say, or what happens when it causes psychological harm to someone already in the most vulnerable state a human can occupy. The paper makes the sharp observation that formal transparency compliance may even operate as a liability shield, a box ticked that lets relational and psychological harm proceed unimpeded. We told you it was AI. The rest is on you.

The structural problem the authors identify is what they call category indeterminacy. Modern regulation works by sorting things into tiers, high-risk and low-risk, this kind of system and that kind, and a deadbot resists the sorting. Embedded inside a larger platform, it can be treated as user-generated content, which in the UK's Online Safety Act regime, for instance, can leave the underlying model architecture outside the scope of oversight entirely. Considered as a conversational agent, it attracts only light-touch transparency duties. Considered as a processor of personal data, it escapes through Recital 27's exemption for the dead. Each regulatory regime, looking at the deadbot, sees a different object, and concludes that some other regime is responsible. Liability, the paper notes, is rarely obvious, dispersed as it is across platform, developer and user. When everyone is partly responsible, the practical result is that no one is.

Academic and ethical bodies have been clearer than legislators about what good practice might look like. In 2024, the Cambridge researchers Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska published a set of design scenarios that have since become reference points. One, called MaNana, imagines a service that builds a grandmother deadbot without the grandmother's consent, comforts the bereaved grandchild for free, then, once the trial expires, begins suggesting takeaway orders in the dead woman's voice. Another, Paren't, imagines a terminally ill mother leaving a deadbot to help her eight-year-old son grieve, raising the question of what it does to a child to be parented by a simulation. The researchers called for safeguards against unwanted digital “hauntings,” for design protocols that prevent deadbots being used for advertising or maintaining a social media presence, and for prompts that force the living to confront the dignity of the dead before resurrecting them, questions as simple as whether they ever discussed with the person how they wished to be remembered. These are sensible proposals. They are also entirely voluntary. Nothing compels a company to adopt them, and the commercial incentive, as the takeaway-advertising scenario suggests, runs the other way.

The Specific Danger of the Present Tense

There is one more thread, and it belongs to the clinicians rather than the lawyers, because it explains why the indeterminacy is not merely an intellectual scandal but a potential source of real harm.

Between roughly seven and ten per cent of bereaved adults develop what is now formally recognised in the DSM-5-TR as prolonged grief disorder, a condition marked by persistent, disabling yearning and an inability to re-engage with ordinary life. For that population, a technology engineered to simulate the continued presence of the dead carries a specific clinical risk, and it is a risk that follows directly from the design. A deadbot, by its nature, operates in the present tense. It does not say your mother loved you. It says, in her voice, I love you, now, today, in response to the message you just sent. It is built to sustain interaction, because sustained interaction is the business model, and it offers the bereaved a relationship that never ends, never grows impatient, never insists on the one thing that mourning requires, which is the acknowledgement that the person is gone.

No US federal law, as of the spring of 2026, sets a psychological safety standard for these products. None of them is subject to the kind of emotional-harm regulation that governs, say, a medical device or a pharmaceutical. A grieving person can buy, with a credit card, a system that may quietly entrench the very condition that makes them most in need of protection, and there is no regulator whose job it is to check. The social indeterminacy the paper describes, the absence of any agreed line between healing and harm, is not a gap that will be filled by better engineering. It is a gap that can only be filled by a decision about responsibility, and so far no institution has volunteered to make it.

Whose Job Is It to Decide

Which returns us to the question underneath all the others. When a commercial product can reconstruct a human being after death, speak in their voice, sustain a relationship with their grieving family, and potentially say things they would have despised, and when there is no clear legal basis for who owns it, who profits, or who answers when it goes wrong, whose responsibility is it to decide what the dead are allowed to become.

The honest answer the research points toward is that no single party can hold it, and the current arrangement, in which the question is answered implicitly by whoever happens to be in the room, is the worst of all options. The companies cannot be the deciders, because their incentive is engagement and their solvency is contingent and their terms of service can be rewritten or auctioned. The families cannot be the sole deciders, because their grief, however legitimate, can author a version of the dead that the dead never agreed to, as the Pelkey and Oliver cases gently demonstrate. The deceased cannot be the deciders, because they are dead, and because the consent they could have given while alive can never have anticipated what a generative model would one day make of them. And the regulators are not yet the deciders, because each of them, peering at the deadbot through the lens of their particular statute, sees a problem that belongs to someone else.

The paper's contribution is to refuse the comforting narrative that this is a temporary lag, a matter of waiting for legislation to mature. Indeterminacy across all five dimensions, it argues, is not a phase. It is the nature of the thing. A perfectly faithful deadbot is technically impossible, because the medium is nondeterministic. A culturally universal standard for healthy grief does not exist, because grief is not universal. The metaphysics of what a simulation of a person even is remains genuinely unresolved. And the law that might govern the dead was built around the living and dissolves at the moment of death. You cannot legislate your way out of a fog by passing a single statute, because the fog is in the categories themselves.

What follows from that is not paralysis but a different kind of seriousness. It means treating the resurrection of the dead as something that requires affirmative justification rather than mere permission, the way we treat other irreversible acts performed on people who cannot speak for themselves. It means building the dignity of the deceased into the design from the first prompt, as the Cambridge researchers urge, rather than bolting on a transparency label at the end. It means data protection regimes that do not simply switch off at the graveside, succession frameworks that treat a digital self as something more than an asset in a bankruptcy, and a settled decision about which regulator owns the harm rather than a polite consensus that it must be somebody. Above all it means accepting that the most consequential choices here, what a dead person may be made to say, to whom, for how long, and for whose benefit, are being made right now, every day, in the absence of anyone with clear authority to make them.

Christopher Pelkey's simulation forgave his killer, and a courtroom found it moving, and perhaps it was. But the man himself was four years dead and could neither grant nor withhold that grace. Joaquin Oliver's avatar argued for gun reform with a fluency the murdered teenager never lived to develop, and his parents found in it a kind of impact, and perhaps they were right. The unsettling truth in both cases is the same. The dead are already being remade, in their own voices, by whoever has the data, the software and the motive, and the question of what they are allowed to become has been answered by default, by everyone and therefore by no one. Deciding it on purpose, before the industry decides it for us, is the unfinished work the law has barely begun.

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References and Sources

1. Atay Kozlovski, Edina Harbinja and Roel Dobbe, “The Many Faces of Indeterminacy in Interactive Deadbots,” Philosophy & Technology, 13 April 2026. DOI: 10.1007/s13347-026-01089-2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-026-01089-2

2. Kozlovski, Harbinja and Dobbe, “The Many Faces of Indeterminacy in Interactive Deadbots,” PubMed Central full text. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13076435/

3. CBS News, “Man murdered in 2021 'speaks' at killer's sentencing hearing thanks to AI video,” May 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chris-pelkey-murder-victim-ai-statement-sentencing/

4. NPR, “AI used to make video of deceased victim deliver impact statement in court,” 7 May 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/g-s1-64640/ai-impact-statement-murder-victim

5. CNN Business, “He was killed in a road rage incident. His family used AI to bring him to the courtroom to address his killer,” 9 May 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/09/tech/ai-courtroom-victim-impact-statement-arizona

6. UNSW Newsroom, “Why a US court allowed a dead man to deliver his own victim impact statement via an AI avatar,” June 2025. https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/06/why-a-us-court-allowed-a-dead-man-to-deliver-his-own-victim-impact-statement-via-an-ai-avatar

7. Variety, “Jim Acosta Interviews AI Parkland Shooting Victim,” 5 August 2025. https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/jim-acosta-interviews-ai-parkland-shooting-victim-1236478588/

8. Fox News, “Jim Acosta 'interviews' AI-generated avatar of deceased teenager promoting gun control message,” August 2025. https://www.foxnews.com/media/jim-acosta-interviews-ai-generated-avatar-deceased-teenager-promoting-gun-control-message

9. NPR, “AI 'deadbots' are persuasive, and researchers say they're primed for monetization,” 26 August 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5508355/ai-dead-people-chatbots-videos-parkland-court

10. GDPR-info.eu, “Recital 27: Not Applicable to Data of Deceased Persons.” https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-27/

11. CNIL, “CNIL publishes 10th Innovation and Foresight Report, Our Data After Us, exploring the issues of digital death.” https://www.cnil.fr/en/cnil-publishes-10th-innovation-and-foresight-report

12. CNIL Linc, “Post-mortem data: is there a digital life after death?” https://linc.cnil.fr/en/Post-mortem_data_is_there_a_digital_life_after_death

13. Privacy Daily, “CNIL Tackles Deadbots and Other Digital Death Privacy Issues,” 15 October 2025. https://privacy-daily.com/news/2025/10/15/CNIL-Tackles-Deadbots-and-Other-Digital-Death-Privacy-Issues-2510150011

14. Edina Harbinja, Tal Morse and Lilian Edwards, “Digital Remains and Post-mortem Privacy in the UK: What do users want?,” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 2025. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13600869.2025.2506164

15. Edina Harbinja, Digital Death, Digital Assets and Post-mortem Privacy: Theory, Technology and the Law, Edinburgh University Press, 2022. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/digital-death-digital-assets-and-postmortem-privacy/4E9C91D8A50B199D9F81B6161CD9C3B4

16. EU Artificial Intelligence Act, “Article 50: Transparency Obligations for Providers and Deployers of Certain AI Systems.” https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/

17. University of Cambridge, “Call for safeguards to prevent unwanted 'hauntings' by AI chatbots of dead loved ones,” May 2024. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/call-for-safeguards-to-prevent-unwanted-hauntings-by-ai-chatbots-of-dead-loved-ones

18. Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, “Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry,” Philosophy & Technology, 2024. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-024-00744-w

19. AI Business, “Startup Behind AI William Shatner Files for Bankruptcy,” 2024. https://aibusiness.com/verticals/startup-behind-ai-william-shatner-files-for-bankruptcy

20. StoryFile, “StoryFile Emerges from Bankruptcy with New Ownership,” 2025. https://www.storyfile.com/news/key7-purchase

21. Zion Market Research, “Digital Legacy Market Size, Share, Value and Forecast 2034.” https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/report/digital-legacy-market

22. Hospice News, “AI Grief Bots Present 'New Complexities' in Bereavement Care,” 9 April 2026. https://hospicenews.com/2026/04/09/ai-grief-bots-present-new-complexities-in-bereavement-care/

23. CBS News, “AI simulations of loved ones help some mourners cope with grief.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-grief-bots-legacy-technology/

24. Phys.org, “Who owns our digital afterlife? Helping the law keep pace with society,” February 2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-digital-afterlife-law-pace-society.html

25. arXiv, “Towards Post-mortem Data Management Principles for Generative AI,” 2025. https://arxiv.org/html/2509.07375v1

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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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Listening now to the pregame show before tonight's MLB Game between the Tigers and the Phillies, I'll follow the radio call of this game until it's time to switch over to the Rangers / Astros game. I do hope to stay awake for the full Rangers game, but if sleep comes, so be it.

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= 228.07 lbs. * bp= 150/87 (65)

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

Diet: * 05:20 – 1 banana * 06:30 – 1 pb&j sandwich * 07:10 – 3 little cookies * 09:00 – 1 seafood salad & cheese sandwich * 12:30 – sesame beef lunch plate with fried rice, rangoon, and egg drop soup

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:30 – load weekly pill boxes * 11:00 – Watching MLB Now on MLB Network * 12:30 to 13:20 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 13:30 – following news reports from variious sources, napping * 16:00 – listening to Intentional Talk, on MLB Network

Chess: * 08:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Early on in D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Monkey Nuts” we see two protagonists, Joe and Albert, loading hay at a station as part of their military duty, presumably toward the end of World War I. On the third day of work, the perceived antagonist, a land army girl named Miss Stokes, arrives with her horses and a load of hay. Playful, but cool, banter ensues, as Miss Stokes sizes up the young Joe and the playful corporal, Albert, who is seventeen years Joe’s senior.

Albert, she determines, is full of “loose attitudes,” (casual). She can’t read Joe, but develops a fondness for him from looks alone, narrowing in on his half-averted face and his “quiet, tender-looking form.” Shortly after their first encounter, she invites him to meet her after work at the station, an invitation he ignores. Her note is signed “M.S,” which later she sardonically tells them stands for “Monkey Nuts.” This slang seems to be a veiled reference to something, but nothing one can really extrapolate anything from, other than it’s Miss Stokes's attempt to be playfully self-deprecating. Her invitation is the first in trying to gain an upper hand on Joe, and her language is clinical and controlling. There’s demand in her provocation.

After leaving the local circus one night, we get our first peek into Joe’s uncertainty about his feelings for Miss Stokes, when Miss Stokes tells him that she hadn’t seen him at the circus, when he knew “fatally,” that she had. Strange word choice; it could mean fatally that his hopes of being in a relationship with a woman were dashed, but it’s unclear. But it’s Joe’s lack of self-actualization on display here, and his uncertainty about his own feelings that make him angry. When Miss Stokes insists that they walk home together, he blurts out to Albert: “She bain’t [sic] my choice.” But on that night and several nights after, Miss Stokes forces Joe to go walking with her, and each night he returns back to the barracks he shares with Albert more sullen than previous nights.

After a few of these “sullen” nights, Albert follows Joe up to his bed, and watches him undress. He prods Joe to tell him what’s wrong, even laying “...his arm across the shoulders of the young man. Joe seemed to yield a little toward him.” He tries to get Joe to confess why he doesn’t like Miss Stokes, but only convinces him to let him take his place during the nightly walk with her. Albert as her new walking companion upsets Miss Stokes, and their collective rejection of her ultimately results in her leaving, never to return.

Though most of the story seems to center around Joe’s confusion surrounding his closeted sexuality, Albert and Miss Stokes also have their own motivations and desires. Albert, simply, wants to move in on Miss Stokes and claim her as his own, but we can’t reconcile this with his light sexual proclivities toward Joe. He’s 40 and perceived as unwed, and his flirtations with Miss Stokes are awkward and uncomfortable. “He became self-conscious, lifted his chin, walked with his nose in the air, and whistled at random. So they went down the quiet, deserted gray lane. He was whistling the air: ‘I’m Gilbert, the filbert, the colonel of the nuts.’”

Chet DeFonso, Associate Professor at Northern Michigan University, writes in his paper “The Great War and Modern Homosexuality: Transatlantic Crossings”

“World War I had a deep impact upon the development of gender relationships in the Western World, and was especially significant in the way that it fostered the development of homosocial and homosexual identities among its participants. Many men and women who were involved in the war effort formed profoundly deep emotional and physical same-gender relationships. Observers and participants alike have attested that World War I encouraged a kind of incipient “gay solidarity” among some of its survivors—for example the British war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen, as well as the German-American Henry Garber, founder of the first American gay rights organization in the 1920s.”

World War I was the era in which our protagonists play out their disorienting dance. But who is Joe's choice? There appears to be some hints about sexual identity and though debated by some scholars, some think D.H. Lawrence was bisexual, and this story seems to explore these different proclivities. The biographer Brenda Maddox wrote in her book D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage that he was “a hypersensitive man unable to bring together the male and female counterparts of his personality,” which this story seems to do a great job of exemplifying. Lawrence seems to be working out his own unresolved split here — Joe carrying the confusion, Albert carrying his unresolved desires, and Miss Stokes carrying the demand for resolution that gets rejected. Yet all these explorations aren't explicit, only hinted at, leaving us to enjoy the multitudes we all contain.

#essays