Big milestone this month: the game now has one path where I can play all the way from start to finish without encountering any placeholder text.

A complete playthrough took me about 45 minutes, but that was with me skim-reading the text and not taking any time to think about the decisions, so someone playing it “for real” would probably take an hour or more.

After a long time with my head buried in individual chapters, this is the first time I've been able to step back and see what a playthrough of the game as a whole is going to be like...and I think overall I'm pretty happy with it! The gimmick of the whole thing being narrated by the villain works well, and the overall structure of the game is satisfying. There are lots of things wrong with it, but they're all things I can fix.

In particular I think the game could be a bit longer, but I think the way to fix that is to make the individual chapters longer rather than add more chapters to an individual path. I also want to add more puzzle-type content, so the player has to think harder to come up with the correct solution. (As I mentioned in January's dev diary, my new way of handling failure means I can be less merciful.) But there will be multiple solutions to at least some of the puzzles, as I want to strike a balance between making you work out the correct solution and letting you roleplay your space hero.

My plan now is to write the whole rest of the game to the same first-draft standard as this path. Then, once the structure is in place, I can go through and make the individual chapters actually good.

Can our hero complete a first draft of the entire game, or is his confidence misplaced? Find out in next month's exciting developer diary!

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary

I was invited to speak at The Global Education Conclave 2026, hosted by CGC University in Mohali, that gathered 120+ delegates from 60+ nations under the theme “EduVerse 2050: Rethinking Global Academia for a New Human Epoch.”

This is a written version of my main talking points, edited after the conference. The text therefore contains both the narrative of my talk, along with reflections from the actual events and meetings during these intense days in Mohali, India.

Quick Overview

• Unique delegate structure – diplomats, scholars, and activists.
• Geopolitical diversity – only a handful of participants came from the West, allowing holistic and varied perspectives from all over the globe.
• Peace‑building through education – amid rising populism, the conclave panels underscored education’s role as a bridge between conflicted societies.
• Exploitation in the AI pipeline – annotation work for Large Language Models (LLM) training is often outsourced to workers in the Global South who reap none of the downstream benefits.
• Call for local models and data – the argument that culturally relevant, locally trained models are essential to avoid the “US‑centric” bias of current LLM services.
• “AI” is not the same as proprietary LLM services.

These threads weave together a coherent narrative: the future of higher education cannot be outsourced to opaque, profit‑driven, monocultural LLM-based platforms. It must remain a public good, rooted in critical thinking, cultural pluralism, and open scholarship free from commercial gatekeepers.

The conclave was unusual in the best possible way: diplomats alongside scholars with different perspectives on peace-building. It was very interesting to hear voices that outnumbered traditional US and Western Europe perspectives by a wide margin. That composition mattered. It shaped what got said – and what I learned.

LLM ≠ AI

My background is in AI and information technology. I have a Master's in Cognitive Science and a PhD in Computational Linguistics with a focus on interactive AI. I have spent 25 years putting AI technologies into use, both as a practitioner and as a researcher. You might expect me to be an enthusiastic advocate for initiatives like Gemini for Students or ChatGPT Education. I am not, and I want to explain why – carefully, because the argument matters.

My point was not that everything that the ”AI” umbrella covers is bad. AI as a field is far larger than LLMs and has been developing for at least 70 years with a multitude of approaches.

Instead, I wanted to point out something more uncomfortable: that the products currently being sold to our higher education institutions under the name “AI” is being systematically misdescribed, that the people selling it know this, and that students are ultimately the ones who will pay the price.

What the “AI Product” Actually Is (Currently)

The problem begins with the word “intelligence.” When a company calls a product “artificial intelligence”, we fill in the gap with a meaning we already understand. Intelligence: the capacity to reason, to understand, to form genuinely new ideas. That is what the word means to us. It is not what it means in the products currently being labeled AI. This is not a subtle distinction. It is a central misconception – and in the context of institutional adoption, it is closer to actual deception.

Now, LLM systems are technically large statistical models trained on enormous quantities of human-produced text. Text that were written by humans, for humans to read. The LLM learns the probability distributions of word (token) sequences. When given a prompt, they sample from those distributions to produce a plausible-looking continuation. That is the mechanism. Entirely. There is no reasoning. There is no understanding. It is pattern completion at massive scale.

The word “generative” has the same problem. In plain language it sounds like creativity, like something new being made. In the actual mathematical sense, generative only means the model approximates a distribution and samples from it. It cannot reach outside what it has seen. It interpolates and recombines within learned boundaries, and it does that with impressive fluency. But fluency is not understanding. When a model produces a coherent-looking summary of a historical argument, it has not understood the argument. It has produced a statistically plausible reconstruction of what a summary of that kind of argument tends to look like. It cannot tell you what the argument gets wrong. It does not know when it is outside its competence – which is why it fabricates citations and hallucinates facts with complete confidence.

The people building these systems know this.

The people selling them to our institutions and universities also know this.

The framing of “AI” as intelligence, as reasoning, as a thinking partner, is a marketing decision. And that marketing decision is now shaping academic policy at institutions that are supposed to be built on precision, source criticism, and rigorous thought.

Who Is Actually Selling It

When the conversation turns to “AI in education,” it is framed as if we were discussing a broad and open category of tools. We are not. In practice, we are talking about a handful of commercial services from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft. These are not education companies. They are among the largest commercial platform companies in history, headquartered in the United States, operating under US legal frameworks (like the CLOUD Act, for example), with business models built on lock-in, data accumulation, and scale. When a university integrates one of these services into its learning management system, it hands a portion of the university's knowledge infrastructure to a commercial actor whose systems cannot be audited, whose behavior cannot be reliably predicted, and whose terms of service reserve the right to analyze behavioral metadata regardless of what the headline privacy promises say.

The Monoculture Problem

There is a structural problem here. These models are optimized for English and an American textual culture. When millions of students at thousands of institutions worldwide are using the same two or three closed models to research, summarize, and draft, the result is a global homogenization of what knowledge looks like – and that homogenization flows outward from a single cultural center. This point landed hard in the conclave’s multicultural context, and rightly so.

The conclave's composition – delegates from across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America – foregrounded what is usually politely left aside in Western discussions of EdTech adoption: these tools were not built for most of the world's students, do not reflect most of the world's intellectual traditions, and the people doing the low-wage annotation work that makes them function are typically from the Global South and benefit from them the least.

Sitting next to two of my esteemed fellow panelists from Ethiopia and Nigeria – one of the most incisive points raised in my panel was the urgent need for local models, local data infrastructure, and local governance. The reason is simple: contemporary models carry very little meaningful context for the majority of their global users. This is a structural failure.

Education as Resistance

The researchers and educators who used to determine what counts as rigorous analysis are being gradually displaced by the probability weights of commercial systems optimized for plausibility, owned by companies optimized for growth.

Universities stand for open science, source criticism, and reproducibility. We risk building pedagogy on closed, non-replicable statistical systems that we cannot scrutinize and did not choose on educational grounds. The pressure to adopt these tools combines three forces: fear of being seen as behind, funding tied to adoption, and the absence of organized faculty resistance at the moment decisions were made.

None of those forces is an educational reason. And this is happening at a moment when higher education is already under attack from populist movements that question its value, its legitimacy, and its purpose. The Palestinian ambassador's framing – “education as resistance” – was not just a slogan. In a room representing 60 nations, many of them navigating serious political pressure, it summarizes what is at stake. Surrendering the epistemic foundations of universities to unauditable commercial systems is not a neutral administrative choice. It is a capitulation at exactly the wrong time.

What We Can Do

Three positions:

First, demand real technical literacy before adoption. Before your institution deploys any of these tools in a learning context, someone with genuine technical knowledge – not a vendor representative – should be able to answer in plain language: what does this system actually do? What are its known failure modes? What data does it collect, and what do the actual terms of service say? If those questions cannot be answered clearly, adoption should wait.

Second, protect the process. Design assessment for process visibility. Oral examinations. Iterative drafts with documented revision. In-person discussion of written work. Assignments that require engagement with specific sources a model cannot have accessed. These are pro-learning positions, and we know they produce the outcomes education exists to produce.

In the panel I offered: ”You do not send a robot to the gym to do the lifting for you. The friction and struggle are the point. An LLM service, used without reflection, is the direct opposite of that. It removes the resistance that builds intellectual capacity – and it makes students and scholars dependent in the process. Reading deeply and discussing even more deeply is what matters. That has not changed.”

Third, say out loud what you actually think. There is enormous pressure in academic institutions to perform enthusiasm for these tools, or at minimum to avoid being publicly critical. Push back on that pressure. When adoption decisions are being made in your departments, show up and say clearly what the evidence says and what your professional judgment is.

The companies selling these products are extremely loud. Educators and guardians of knowledge and critical thinking need to be louder.

In Closing

We are being pushed toward a version of higher education where knowledge is a product to be delivered, learning is a transaction to be optimized, and the university's role is to credential people who have learned how to prompt proprietary AI services. That is not higher education.

What happens next will not be determined by what OpenAI or Google builds. It will be determined by what you decide to defend — in your classrooms, your departments, your institutions.

Several delegates cited Nelson Mandela’s point that education is the most powerful weapon for changing the world. He was right. But such weapons require the person holding them to have judgment, skill, and the strength built from genuine effort. That strength does not come from outsourcing your thinking to machines. It comes from doing the intellectual work yourself.

The wisdom is already in our culture. Such as in novels, like this Frank Herbert quote from Dune in 1965(!):

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

The Global Education Conclave 2026 was held at CGC University, Mohali, India. My specific panel addressed the intersection of AI technology, pedagogical integrity, and global educational sovereignty.

Thank you to the wonderful organizers and CGC University Mohali for creating this international platform for conversation.

#002329 – 14 de Outubro de 2025

Regresso ao trabalho dentro de 6 dias. Ainda não recuperei completamente da ruptura muscular na perna e do problema com o ombro, mas vou voltar. Além do esforço físico, vai-me custar perder quatro horas por dia (uma hora de sono e três horas em transportes públicos) nos dias em que vou ao escritório. Mas de resto, vai-me fazer bem sair de casa, ter um ritmo e preocupações para além de me recuperar fisicamente. E até ter menos tempo me dará oportunidade de aprender a geri-lo melhor. Aqui está: é tão fácil regurgitar um discurso positivo, sem estar em sintonia com as palavras debitadas.

#002328 – 13 de Outubro de 2025

É mais difícil adormecer se o dia foi vazio. Talvez, ao sentir que um dia valeu a pena, tenha mais vontade que venha o próximo. Ou reste alguma esperança de que algo salve o dia, uma frase lida, uma palestra no youtube, um parágrafo escrito. A insónia é um sintoma, mas de quê?

#002327 – 13 de Outubro de 2025

É mais difícil adormecer se o dia foi vazio. Talvez, ao sentir que um dia valeu a pena, tenha mais vontade que venha o próximo. Ou reste alguma esperança de que algo salve o dia, uma frase lida, uma palestra no youtube, um parágrafo escrito. A insónia é um sintoma, mas de quê?

Reading for me tends to be a thing of feasts and famines, done in fits and starts. While much of this month has been a dry spell. I did finish a book on Friday: Debit and Credit, a slim, early '70s collection of poems by the Sicilian author (and 1959 Nobel laureate) Salvatore Quasimodo, in translations by Jack Bevan.

From 'Only If Love Should Strike You':

...do not forget
to be animal, fit and sinuous,
torrid in violence, wanting everything here
on earth, before the final cry
when the body is cadence of shrivelled memories
and the spirit hastens to the eternal end:
remember that you can be the being of being
only if love should strike you right in the bowels.

It's a very short book, but a nourishing one, and it felt like it did me good.

---

Lately I've been listening to and enjoying an increasing amount of what might be termed 'jazz for the elderly, by the elderly'. For instance, when they recorded their wonderful album Jasmine, Keith Jarrett's and Charlie Haden's combined age was about 130. Charles Lloyd was an impressive 85 when recording his record The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow. And Carla Bley was in her mid-70s when her album Trios was made, with neither of her bandmates spring chickens either (this one is a new addition to my collection, arriving on Friday). Moderate tempos predominate, with reflective and nostalgic moods the norm. I can certainly see myself getting more of this kind of thing.

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Cheese of the week has been Fourme d'Ambert. I'd been recommended it a few months ago but hadn't spotted any until a visit to Madame Fromage in Abergavenny on Saturday. Creaminess and 'earthiness' in a cheese are characteristics I particularly prize, and this one has both in equitably balanced abundance. I suspect my piece may be verging on maximum ripeness. Amid its rich blend of mild flavours I can sometimes discern an intriguing anise-like note.

Death (Water) — What am I meant to let go of? What of my habits, or what part of my ego, should I allow to die? I sense this has something to do with my materialism and past attachments to ideas, things, life. Especially as I have been moving in such a swift way with my objects and letting go. I intuit that this is the correct path.

Valour (7 of Wands) — The momentum for me to put my all into this transformation and shift is here. What will I do with it? What could prevent me from my ascension or advancement towards my goal? I am being asked to give it all I got and to fight.

Queen of Disks — How do I begin to value myself? Today, I spent $20 on my food for the rest of the week. I made myself a lovely fried rice with my favourite shrimp. Am I remembering to take care of my body in other ways? How will I fulfill and enact my transformations if I don’t take good care and consider my body?

日本語で誰かと話すと、すぐ詰まっちゃう。

(にほんご で だれか と はなす と、すぐ つまっちゃう。)

Ni hon go de dare ka to hanasu to, sugu tomatchau

言葉をちょうどいいタイミングで選ぶのがめっちゃ難しい ことば を ちょうど いい タイミング で えらぶ の が めっちゃ むずかしい Kotoba o chōdo ī taimingu de erabu no ga metcha muzukashī

You adjusted your cal-mag for two weeks. The yellowing got worse. Then you saw the webbing.

That's how most growers discover spider mites – not when the problem starts, but when it's already out of control. The early damage looks so much like a nutrient deficiency that your first instinct is to adjust the feed. Meanwhile, a single female mite is producing thousands of descendants in a month.

Spider mites are the most destructive pest in indoor cannabis cultivation. Not because they're hard to kill – they aren't, when caught early – but because their early symptoms mimic nutrient problems so convincingly that growers lose their detection window treating the wrong thing entirely.

This guide covers visual identification at every stage, how to tell mite damage from a deficiency, and what actually works for treatment.

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Quick Identification

Spider mites on cannabis produce tiny yellow or white speckles (stippling) on upper leaf surfaces where mites feed from below. Unlike nutrient deficiencies – which cause broad, uniform color changes across leaves – stippling appears as distinct pinprick dots scattered irregularly across the leaf. The damage is caused by Tetranychus urticae (two-spotted spider mite), an arachnid that punctures individual plant cells and drains their contents. By the time webbing is visible, the colony has been feeding for weeks.

Quick checklist: – Tiny yellow/white pinprick dots on upper leaf surface – Dots are irregular and scattered, not following veins – Leaf undersides show tiny moving specks (mites are 0.3-0.5mm) – Fine webbing between leaf tips or at branch junctions (advanced) – Damage starts on lower/inner canopy where airflow is poorest – Leaves eventually bronze, curl, and drop

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Why Spider Mites Are So Hard to Catch

They look like a nutrient deficiency

The single most common spider mite mistake has nothing to do with treatment. It happens at identification.

Early stippling – those tiny yellow dots where mites have punctured cells – looks like the beginning of a calcium deficiency or light stress. The dots are small, scattered, and appear on older growth first. A grower sees yellowing dots on lower leaves and reaches for the cal-mag bottle. Two weeks of feed adjustments later, the dots have spread, the plant looks worse, and then the webbing appears.

This is not a knowledge failure. It's a pattern recognition problem. The visual difference between early mite stippling and early nutrient deficiency is subtle enough that experienced growers miss it regularly.

Feature	Spider Mite Stippling	Calcium Deficiency	Magnesium Deficiency
Pattern	Irregular pinprick dots	Irregular brown spots	Interveinal yellowing
Distribution	Scattered randomly across leaf	Concentrated on newer growth	Starts on older leaves
Symmetry	Asymmetric, random	Roughly symmetric	Symmetric between veins
Leaf underside	Tiny mites or eggs visible	Clean	Clean
Texture	Leaf feels slightly rough/gritty	Spots may feel crispy	Leaf stays smooth
Progression	Dots multiply, never merge into bands	Spots expand and merge	Yellowing expands between veins
Touch test	Gritty feel from mite debris	Normal	Normal

The diagnostic key: flip the leaf over. Nutrient deficiencies don't leave anything on the underside. Spider mites leave everything there – adults, eggs, shed skins, webbing. A 10x loupe makes this definitive, but even a phone camera zoomed in on the leaf underside will show the difference.

They breed fast enough to outrun your diagnosis

Spider mites reproduce faster than almost any pest a cannabis grower will encounter.

• Generation time: 7 days at 30°C (86°F). Egg to egg-laying adult in one week.
• Reproductive rate: A single female lays up to 100 eggs. Her daughters start laying within a week.
• Population math: One mite becomes thousands in a month at optimal temperatures. Two months of unchecked growth reaches millions.

This is exponential growth in the literal sense. The population you can't see on Monday is visible by Friday and webbing by the following Monday. The detection window – the gap between “early enough to treat easily” and “too late for simple solutions” – is approximately 5-7 days.

Every day of misdiagnosis as a nutrient issue is a day lost in that window.

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Visual Symptoms by Stage

Days 1-7: Invisible Phase

Mites have arrived but the colony is small. Fewer than 10 adults on the plant. No visible damage to the naked eye.

What to look for: Nothing you can see without magnification. Preventive inspection with a 10x loupe on leaf undersides is the only detection method during this phase – or an AI that can catch the earliest stippling pattern in a leaf photo before your eye does.

Days 7-14: Early Stippling

What you see: – Scattered yellow-white dots on upper leaf surfaces – Dots are pinprick-sized, irregular spacing – Lower and inner canopy leaves affected first – Leaves may appear slightly dull or dusty

This is the critical detection window. The damage is visible but the population is still manageable. Treat now and you win. Wait, and you're chasing exponential growth.

What growers confuse it with: Calcium deficiency, magnesium deficiency, early light stress, pH fluctuation damage. The distinguishing test: check the leaf underside with a loupe or zoomed phone camera.

Days 14-21: Moderate Infestation

What you see: – Stippling thickens into visible patches of yellow/bronze discoloration – Fine webbing appears at leaf tips and where leaves meet stems – Leaf edges may curl upward – Multiple plants now show symptoms (airborne spread via “ballooning” on silk threads)

Webbing marks the transition from “problem” to “crisis.” The silk isn't just housing – it protects colonies from predators and spray treatments. Once webs are established, contact sprays have to penetrate the silk to reach the mites.

Days 21+: Severe Infestation

What you see: – Dense webbing covering bud sites, connecting leaves – Leaves are bronzed, curled, and dropping – Mites visible as tiny moving dots on webbing – Plant growth has visibly slowed or stopped – Webbing on flowers makes bud unusable

At this stage, the plant is losing more photosynthetic capacity than it can replace. During flower, this level of infestation is often a total crop loss for affected plants. The mites are feeding on sugar leaves and bract tissue, leaving webbing embedded in the flower structure. Even if you kill every mite, the webbing and fecal matter remain.

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Where to Look: Detection Hotspots

Spider mites prefer warm, dry, still air – the conditions that exist in the center and lower canopy of most indoor grows.

Check first: – Undersides of lower and inner canopy leaves – Where two leaves overlap (creates still-air microclimate) – Near intake vents (common entry point) – Any plant closest to heat sources

Check second: – Leaf undersides on middle canopy – Branch junctions where stems create sheltered pockets – Nearby houseplants, clones, or recently introduced plant material

High-risk conditions: – Temperature above 27°C (80°F) and rising – Humidity below 40% RH – Stagnant air in lower canopy – New clones or plants introduced without quarantine – Adjacent rooms or gardens with ornamental plants

One fact most growers don't realize: spider mites travel on clothing, pets, and skin. If you've been in a garden with mites and walk into your grow room, you may be the vector. This is why quarantine protocols matter even for indoor-only grows.

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They're arachnids, not insects

This matters more than you'd think. Spider mites aren't insects. They're arachnids – closer to ticks and spiders than to aphids or thrips. A lot of insecticides just don't work on them, and growers figure this out the expensive way: they buy whatever pest spray the grow shop recommends, apply it twice a week for a month, and the mites keep spreading.

If a product label says “insecticide” but doesn't specifically list mites or arachnids, it probably won't work. You need a miticide (specifically targets mites) or a broad-spectrum acaricide (targets arachnids generally). Some biologicals and organic options work by physical mechanisms – suffocation, desiccation – that don't depend on the pest's taxonomy. These are often the safest first-line choice.

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Treatment Strategies

They evolve faster than you can spray

Spider mites develop pesticide resistance at a rate that makes most agricultural pests look slow. With a 7-day generation cycle, resistance emerges in weeks, not seasons. Some strains of T. urticae are resistant to dozens of active ingredients simultaneously.

Worse: some pesticides cause “mite flaring” – the surviving mites respond to the chemical stress by increasing their reproductive rate by up to 30%. The intuitive response of “spray harder, spray more” can accelerate the infestation rather than control it.

Single-product treatment strategies fail. Always rotate between different modes of action.

During Vegetative Growth

Immediate response (first 48 hours): 1. Isolate affected plants if possible 2. Remove and dispose of heavily infested leaves (bag them, don't compost) 3. Spray leaf undersides thoroughly with a contact miticide or biological

Biological controls: – Phytoseiulus persimilis – predatory mite that feeds exclusively on spider mites. Effective in vegetative growth and early flower. Needs humidity above 60% to thrive. – Neoseiulus californicus – predatory mite that tolerates lower humidity and also eats thrips. Better for dry grow rooms. – Amblyseius andersoni – generalist predatory mite, survives without prey by eating pollen. Good for preventive releases.

Organic sprays (moderate infestations): – Neem oil (azadirachtin) – disrupts feeding and reproduction. Apply to leaf undersides only. Do not use in flower – affects taste and may not fully degrade. – Insecticidal soap (potassium salts of fatty acids) – kills on contact by desiccation. Must directly contact the mite. Repeat every 3-5 days for 3 applications to catch new hatchlings. – Spinosad – organic-approved, effective on thrips but weak against mites on its own. Can supplement a rotation but shouldn't be a primary miticide.

Spray rotation protocol: – Week 1: Product A (e.g., insecticidal soap) – Week 2: Product B (e.g., neem oil) – Week 3: Product A again (or a different miticide) – Never use the same active ingredient twice in a row

During flower

This is where most growers panic, and for good reason. During flower, almost everything that kills mites also ruins buds.

Safe in flower: – Predatory mites (biological control – no residue, no taste impact) – Water rinse with slightly elevated pressure (dislodges mites physically, must reach undersides) – Cold snap trick: drop temperature to 15°C (60°F) for 3 days if possible. Mite reproduction nearly stops below 18°C (65°F). This buys time for predatory mites to work.

Avoid in flower: – Neem oil (taste contamination, doesn't fully degrade on flower tissue) – Pyrethrin sprays (residue on buds) – Sulfur (burns trichomes, affects terpenes) – Any systemic product (absorbed into plant tissue including flower)

If webbing is on buds: The honest answer is that those buds are compromised. Webbing contains fecal matter and shed mite skins that don't wash off. You can salvage the plant by removing affected flowers and protecting remaining buds with predatory mites, but heavily webbed buds should be discarded.

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Prevention

A few euros spent preventing mites saves hundreds in lost crop. Prevention beats treatment every time, especially with a pest that breeds this fast.

Environmental controls: – Keep humidity above 50% RH during veg (mites thrive in dry conditions) – Ensure airflow reaches the lower canopy (oscillating fans, open plant structure) – Run temperatures below 27°C (80°F) when possible – HEPA filter on intake if growing in an area with outdoor mite pressure

Good habits: – Quarantine new plants for 7-14 days before introducing to your grow – Change clothes before entering grow room if you've been in other gardens – Inspect leaf undersides weekly with a 10x loupe – make it routine, not reactive – Remove dead leaves and debris from the grow space (harboring sites) – Avoid overly dense canopy – defoliate lower growth that gets no light and creates still-air pockets

Preemptive predators: – Release Amblyseius andersoni or N. californicus at transplant. These predatory mites establish a background population that intercepts spider mites before colonies form. Cost: roughly €20-30 per release for a small grow, every 4-6 weeks.

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How AI detection changes the timeline

Here's where I'll be honest about what we built and why.

The spider mite problem is a timing issue. The window between “just arrived” and “exponential growth” is about 5-7 days. Most growers catch mites after stippling is already obvious, which puts you right at the edge of that window – or past it.

PlantLab's model was trained to identify spider mite damage among 31 cannabis conditions. It picks up the stippling pattern at the 10-dot stage, in a routine photo of your plant. The kind you're already taking. It won't replace the loupe or the hands-on inspection. But it flags the pattern before you've mentally filed it as “probably cal-mag” and moved on.

Catching mites at day 7 instead of day 14 is the difference between wiping down some leaves and losing a crop.

Free at plantlab.ai – 3 checks a day.

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FAQ

How do I tell spider mite damage from a nutrient deficiency? Flip the leaf. Spider mite damage shows as scattered pinprick dots on top with mites, eggs, or webbing underneath. Nutrient deficiencies cause broader color changes with clean leaf undersides. A 10x loupe on the underside is the definitive test.

Can I see spider mites without a magnifying glass? Adults are barely visible to the naked eye (0.3-0.5mm) as tiny moving specks on leaf undersides. Eggs and juveniles are too small to see without magnification. By the time mites are easily visible, the colony is large. Use a loupe or phone camera zoom for early detection.

How fast do spider mites spread between plants? In optimal conditions (above 27°C / 80°F, below 40% RH), mites can move from one plant to adjacent plants within 24-48 hours. They also “balloon” on silk threads carried by air currents, reaching plants across a room. A single infested plant can become a room-wide problem in 5-10 days.

Will neem oil get rid of spider mites? Neem works as part of a rotation, not as a standalone. It disrupts feeding and reproduction but doesn't kill on contact, and mites build resistance to it quickly. Rotate with insecticidal soap and other modes of action. And never use it during flower – it doesn't come off.

What kills spider mites instantly? Insecticidal soap and pyrethrin kill on contact, but only what they touch. You'll miss eggs. Plan for 3 rounds over 2 weeks to catch hatching cycles.

Reminder to everyone today:

If you are trans, visibility is not a responsibility. If you need to be stealth or closeted because you can't handle being visible, that's okay.

For those of you brave or safe enough to be visible: remind the world that we exist.

Because we do exist.

We have a right to live our lives the way we want to, regardless of what this generation's expectations of us may be. We have been around longer than this society, and will still exist after it has crumbled into dust. Which society? All of them.

We are not a fad. We are not a mental illness. We are not trying to corrupt children. We are trying to exist as ourselves.

They can try to erase us, but we are written in ink and will never fade.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility, everyone. You will be okay.

And remember, in the whole world, there is only of you, and you are beautiful just the way you are. So please, take care of yourself, friend.

#TDOV #TransDayOfVisibility

Rangers vs Orioles.

Tuesday's MLB game of choice has my Texas Rangers playing the Baltimore Orioles and has a scheduled start time of 5:35 PM CDT.

And the adventure continues.

So much for writing here more often. You know how it goes. Not only did I think I would write here at least once a week if not more, but also I thought I might actually be able to write about something besides sadness and grief. Welp, chalk another failure up on the board. Today's entry is brought to you by that old classic: melancholy.

I threw away my pair of old red Asics today. And it messed me up.

I've always been too stupidly sentimental about things. It's just stuff, I know. There was nothing particularly special about this pair of red Asics. I don't even know what model they were, I think H saw them on sale online and sent me the link. I bought them because of the price and not much else.

They were definitely just casual, everyday shoes. They weren't particularly suited to running or any sport, but they were comfortable enough until I wore through them, destroying the rubber soles. Usually, when a shoe is no longer watertight, I'll throw the pair away. It's not that hard for me to let go of worn out shoes, despite my previous claims of being overly sentimental.

Unless. Unless the particular pair of shoes was the last pair I wore to go on walks with you. Unless this was the particular pair I was wearing the day you died. Unless this particular pair seemed inextricably linked with what used to be so much of our time together.

I still wore them when I went on the walks that I now dub “memorial walks,” as much as I hate the idea that you are only a memory. The memorial walks I still do every day, still unable to fully break myself of this habit.

Don't get me wrong, I had long since bought new shoes. Several pairs. I wore different shoes to work, different shoes when going on normal, non-memorial walks, etc. But when I was going on that special daily walk to remember you, I'd always put on the red Asics.

They were already old when you passed. Despite only wearing them for maybe half an hour a day, they were soon past the point of usual shoe retirement. These shoes waved goodbye to being watertight a long, long time ago. Yet I continued to conscript them into service daily for the walk. I pushed them beyond being comfortable to wear. The hole in the bottom of the shoe continued to grow, starting to look like worn out shoes in cartoons that are exaggerated for comic effect.

I still couldn't let go of them. But this week I'm going on a trip, in memory of another loved one who has passed. Seems like there's way too much of this in my life, but that's how it goes as we get older, I guess. I needed a pair of shoes that would be better suited to more outdoorsy kinds of activities. So I got them, but upon getting home, I realized there was no more space on my shoe rack.

Sometimes, I can only deal with something like this as if it were a bandage. Rip it off quickly and brace for the sting. Almost without thinking, I grabbed the red Asics and placed them in the trash can. And then jammed them down, as if to tell myself there's no going back. And that was that. The red shoes are gone.

I wore a different pair of shoes on the memorial walk today. It's not the first time, there have been days where I was too busy to change out of shoes after work or just forgetful or whatever. But, never again shall those red Asics tread those grounds.

I was surprised I was able to throw them away. Then I was surprised at how it was bothering me, hours later, almost to the point of tears. I was almost crying over shoes. I was almost crying over something that happened over a year and a half ago.

But I managed to toss the shoes. And I didn't actually cry. So, is this progress or not? I don't know, but I'm not dead, FYI. I managed to write a post in March, even! Although I had to pound it out in one quick pass as there is less than an hour left in the month here. I guess that's my way of excusing the writing for being worse than usual. Which is saying something. See you in April, hopefully.

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simplest is best

---

I do not love you the way the sun loves a rose, nor the way bright things beg to be seen.

I love you the way small things are felt, the dew trembling on a yellow leaf, the red bristle of bottlebrush as a bee settles, slow and certain.

I love you the way shadow slips into the dark between stones filling every hollow, lingering there.

I love you the way a tree, heavy with spring, holds its unflowered clusters, tight with promise sap rising, thick and insistent.

From that love comes the scent of green things breaking open, rich, warm, almost too much to breathe in.

I love you without needing to understand only that when I am near you my body leans toward yours as if pulled, as if it already knows what it wants.

This is me... unhidden, unsoftened.

Let me be close to you, closer than words allow, where breath meets breath and lingers, where heat gathers and does not leave.

Let me rest against you, feel the rise and fall of you, the quiet urgency beneath your skin, until stillness becomes something else, something alive, something asking.

Let me stay there, in that nearness, until the distance between us feels like an ache neither of us can ignore.

So when you close your eyes, you don’t just see me... you feel me, the warmth, the pull, the wanting that does not fade—

and when I close mine, I am already there with you.

—

Últimamente estoy comentando todas las novedades que pruebo en BGA y muchas son mejorables, para aportar algo positivo voy a proponer alternativas que sean similares en mecánica, complejidad o temática, pero más divertidas o al menos más bonitas. Este mes al menos sí he jugado a algo, ahora que la temperatura ya es compatible con la vida fuera de 300 mantas.

¿De verdad sirve de excusa lo de que los juegos de mesa me alejen de las pantallas si todo esto es en BGA?

Voy a poner varias secciones porque se ve que este mes no he hecho otra cosa (como atestigua que ya vaya tarde con el reto de lectura anual).

Solo cartas

En Dozito los jugadores son meros vehículos que mueven cartas sin ton ni son para que diozito se entretenga, supongo, porque vaya pestiño. Los jugadores ponen 12 cartas boca abajo en una cuadrícula y en su turno deben coger una carta del mazo o del descarte. Las cartas tienen un número (salvo los comodines) y la ponen en la posición de la cuadrícula que corresponde con ese número, revelando la que estaba. Entonces pueden (salvo que la carta lo indique), o colocarla en el número revelado o descartarla. La ronda acaba cuando alguien tiene las 12 cartas descubiertas y se puntúa por las zonas de cartas de un mismo color que sean adyacentes y unos soles que aparecen en algunas cartas. Totalmente innecesario. Me ha parecido más curioso Golfie, que trata de jugar a golf. Cada jugador dispone de una cuadrícula de cartas y hay un mazo donde se van revelando cartas, o bien de hoyo, en cuyo caso hay que elegir una carta de la fila superior de nuestra cuadrícula y sumar el número de golpes que indique a nuestra puntuación, o bien una carta de acción que nos permite voltear una carta de nuestro tablero o intercambiar dos cartas. Además de buscar tener cartas con un número de golpes bajos en la fila superior, trataremos de hacer filas o columnas con el mismo número, lo que nos restará golpes al final de la partida y nos permite deshacernos de cartas. Azaroso pero sencillo y con mejor mecánica que Dozito.

Panda Rei es un juego donde, como en el área del rival del Celta, manda el panda. Pero, fúrbo aparte, en este juego cada persona dispone de una mano de cartas numeradas, cada número tiene un animal, que es único para cada número salvo los números por encima de 8 que tienen un panda. En cada baza se van jugando cartas y gana el número más alto salvo que haya alguna carta repetida, que entonces gana quien tenga más cerdos en sus cartas ganadas o la última persona que jugó ese animal repetido. Quien gane la baza escoge dos cartas para añadir a sus cartas ganadas, y la siguiente persona coge una carta. De esta manera vamos coleccionando animales que tienen criterios de puntuación diferente. El juego está bien y plantea una buena mecánica a la hora de buscar la colección de animales (por ejemplo, si vas a perder una baza, buscas no dejar una buena carta para otra persona) pero Océanos de papel es aún más sencillo, bonito y con una puntuación más interesante.

Yokai Pagoda mezcla bien la simpleza del turno con la maldad y la suerte en un juego de cartas donde buscas deshacerte de las cartas de yokai. ¿De todas? Bueno, no importa si tienes cartas altas de un palo si tienes cartas menores, pues tu puntuación (negativa) se determina por la carta más baja que tienes de cada palo. En tu turno descartas una carta, que te permite dar una carta a otro jugador, descartar una carta o cogerla. La ronda finaliza cuando alguien tiene como máximo 3 puntos en su mano y al final de la partida se ve quién tiene menos puntos. Guay y con pique, similar en sensaciones aunque más sencillo que, y otra vez toca comparar con un valor seguro en esta categoría, Océanos de papel.

Tacta, el juego para quienes tienen una mesa grande o el suelo muy limpio. En este juego cada jugador dispone de un mazo de cartas con rectángulos y triángulos en su perímetro y puntos. En su turno, tendrán que jugar una de las dos cartas en su mano sobre las cartas ya jugadas de manera que estas formas presenten en las cartas tapen la misma forma pero sin solaparse con ninguna otra carta, con el objetivo de que los puntos presentes en sus cartas permanezcan visibles al final de la partida. Me parece más táctico que estratégico pero hay que aprovechar bien las oportunidades de asegurar valiosos puntos. Entretenido y original.

Hội Phố (Second Edition) es un juego de faroleo para varios jugadores. En las sucesivas rondas se lleva una carta de puntuación quien tenga más monedas. Estas se ganan en cada mano, donde el jugador que muestra la carta más alta se lleva unas monedas, el segundo se lleva menos, y quien haya mostrado la carta más baja realiza un efecto. También hay cartas de barcos que dan monedas si en esa ronda se han mostrado un máximo de 1 ó 2 barcos. Es un juego corto donde todo es faroleo pero no hay nada de control y los efectos de las cartas tampoco lo otorgan, con lo que si tienes una mano mala puede que no saques nada de provecho. En ese sentido me gustó más Duelo por Cardia, por ejemplo (aunque sea puramente enfrentamiento).

Tirando a tablero

El otro día pensé en que cómo no había un juego sencillo ambientado en un mundo de fantasía mazmorrera con la mecánica de Yahtzee, esto es, lanzar varios dados y, pudiendo relanzar algunos, formar patrones. ¡Pues claro que lo hay! Pentaquest es justamente eso. Inicialmente pensado para solitario, hay cinco monstruos, cada uno requiere que formes un patrón, y si lo haces con cinco dados y una oportunidad de relanzar, lo añades a tu mano. Estos monstruos tienen asociados un poder (relanzar, sumar o restar 1 a un dado o voltear un dado) y puedes gastarlos en turnos sucesivos para añadirlo a tu mano, y así con las 42 cartas. Juego muy simple, que se hace repetitivo, y determinado por el azar en las primeras rondas cuando aún los jugadores no tienen cartas suficientes para modificar dados a su antojo. No creo que sea una mala idea (me gusta la sensación de progreso al ir disponiendo y gastando poderes), pero sí le echo en falta algo de desarrollo, o incluso enfocarlo en modo cooperativo, que sería más apropiado para la ambientación. Para eso, mejor Gang of dice.

Cookie Addict es un juego abstracto para dos personas que toman el papel de un lobo y un mapache que compiten por galletas. En turnos alternos se van tomando losetas de una cuadrícula de manera que un jugador escoge una loseta de la fila escogida por el otro jugador, y éste debe escoger una loseta de la columna escogida. Las losetas hacen que ganes o pierdas galletas y pierde quien tenga menos galletas al final o haga que su contrincante no pueda jugar. Es un movimiento condicionado, como IYE del mes pasado, pero más infantil y menos profundo. Es similar también Hey, That’s My Fish! o Pinguinos, un juego abstracto donde pingüinos se deslizan por piezas hexagonales que tienen de 1 a 3 peces. Cuando el pingüino abandona la loseta, se lleva los peces y quita la loseta, pudiendo dejar aislado y sin movimiento a un pingüino rival. La partida acaba cuando no hay más movimientos posibles. Este me parece más interesante porque se ve desde un principio el puzzle a resolver, pero el árbol de decisiones tiene más caminos para buscar lo más importante, que es contar pescados y bloquear al rival.

Hokito es un abstracto para dos personas. Se tienen piezas con 1, 2 ó 3 líneas y se mueven tantos segmentos ortogonales como líneas, capturando piezas y cuyo valor es el número de líneas de la ficha superior por el número de fichas de la torre que se va formando. Se mueve en segmentos ortogonales porque en cada ficha pueden girar 90º y los espacios vacíos no cuentan. Por la manera de puntuar al final se resumen en forzar que no puedan comer tu torre de fichas al final y que el rival no tenga una torre superior, mientras que al principio puede parecer que no importa mucho qué hagas.

Streetcar es feo hasta el punto de que el manual disponible online son fotocopias de baja calidad escaneadas. Va de hacer una ruta con carreteras entre estaciones mediante losetas, pero si alguien te pone una loseta donde ibas a ponerla tú puede que ya sea imposible que cumplas tu objetivo. Es absurdo. Y Mind Cycling van al mismo saco de juegos de carreras que no tienen ningún interés salvo que seas, en este caso, muy fan del ciclismo.

Kokeshi va también de carreras, en este caso de muñecos que se mueven por un tablero activando el movimiento de otros muñecos. Es cierto que no comprendí mucho cómo conseguir puntos, pero tampoco es que me generase mucho interés. Y visualmente es feo como las ilustraciones de muñecas de principios de los 2010 con ojos negros como si fueran funkos emos creadas supongo por alguien que había leído Coraline. Uf, qué repelús.

Postcards es un juego de hacer el Tour de Francia pero un tour de tourismo y enviar postales desde diferentes regiones. Creo que es demasiada clara la prioridad de acciones: Estar en la región que te interesa, poner tiendas de campaña, completar las postales y coger nuevas postales, aprovechando, si está disponible, las acciones de poner tiendas de campaña que permiten hacer algo más. Sabiendo esto, creo que tiene demasiadas cosas para lo fácil que es resolver el puzzle. Para pequeños combos con más sentidos y una interacción comedida, mejor otro juego ambientado en Francia como Fromage.

En Tipperary abandonas tu vida actual y te vas a Irlanda a cuidar de ovejas y hacer whisky. Bueno o a conformar un paisaje donde eso ocurre. En cada turno los jugadores tienen dos losetas disponibles y la colocan en su terreno, buscando formar grupos de ovejas, regiones con trigo y destilerías, líneas consecutivas de ruinas… Todo para al final contar puntos según ciertos criterios. Rápido, sencillo, curioso, aunque tiene un azar poco mitigable en las losetas que recibes y a veces las decisiones pueden ser obvias. Diría que el puzzle es tan complejo como Railroad ink, aunque en este la suerte era compartida para todos.

Kikai va de hacer de chatarrero por tu ciudad y hacer muestras de tus obras de taxidermia de mechas. Efectivamente, ya no hay temas para hacer juegos de mesa y hay que rebuscar en el fondo del barril. En la práctica es un juego para dos personas de control de áreas y gestión de recursos. Las cartas representan zonas donde te permiten hacer acciones como construir tu obra, repartir flyers para poder después atraer espectadores y exponerla. En la explicación parece que vas a ir muy justo de recursos, y efectivamente es así al principio aunque lo que te acaba faltando es acciones para poder gastarlos. En resumen, como los mechas que vas reconstruyendo, es un poco Frankenstein, se acaba haciendo largo, y el tablero es menos visual de lo que cabría esperar.

Esta sección de juego no produce jajas, solo cerebros rechinando.

Witchcraft! o, en español, «Brujería, Brujería, cuándo serás mía». La traslación literal de la caza de brujas franquista de ¡Resistid!. En este juego en solitario tratas de ganarte el favor de unos jueces resolviendo misiones para ayudar al pueblo. En tu turno, jugarás las brujas de tu aquelarre de forma oculta (tienen menos poder pero podrán seguir en tu mazo) o revelada (tienen más poder o efectos más potentes pero son encarceladas) e irás venciendo desafíos y misiones hasta que consideres que puedes ir a juicio con el favor de al menos dos miembros del tribunal. Es un juego sencillo de jugar pero muy difícil de ganar, pues hay que tener un poco de suerte y jugar muy bien tus cartas. Me parece más pulido que ¡Resistid! porque está un poco más dirigido a la hora de buscar los combos mediante brujas de la misma familia, y que la condición de victoria sea binaria en lugar de gradual según el daño que le hicieras al régimen franquista creo que lo hace mejor diseño. En resumen es el perfeccionamiento de un buen juego, muy bien tematizado y los dibujos de Monteys siempre son bien.

Skara Brae es, como su nombre indica, un juego sobre habitantes de Escocia en la época en la que los humanos convivían con la especie de Nessie, más o menos. La verdad es que no sé ubicarlos, pero se ve que era gente preocupada por tener su casa limpia, no tener más cosas de las que les eran útiles, y con interés en el comercio de diferentes recursos. Así pues, en Máscara Bratz va a haber como 15, ¡15! tipos de recursos diferentes que ir cambiando para limpiar tu casa y comerciar, que es lo que dará puntos. Pero, cuidado, si tienes muchas cosas en el almacén acumularás suciedad y puntos negativos. Creo que Oscura Brea iba de hacer la compra y meterla en la nevera, pero en Garphill Games lo que hay es verdadera devoción por las civilizaciones antiguas, y pusieron a estos protovikingos chill con un casting diverso. De esta gente el otro juego que he probado ha sido El Muro de Adriano y Pescara Brie da una sensación parecida de cambalache pero con una limitación de la despensa muy restrictiva y unas acciones más limitadas. Un carajote en un podcast dijo, no sé si despectivamente, que Garphill Games eran los diseñadores de clase obrera, y no tengo ni idea de por qué, más allá de que sus juegos bien podrían requerir una planificación económica quinquenal para desarrollar la civilización de estos escoceses y no morir de hambre o comidos por la mierda en Escora Brío. He jugado tantas partidas en solitario con una derrota inapelable, que el juego debe ser bueno y yo tontísimo, cosa que no es nueva. Digamos que El Muro de Adriano es más benévolo en ese aspecto, pero no puedo decir que esté mal.

Limit va de encadenar crisis económicas, poblacionales y ecológicas con guerras. ¡Pero en un juego de mesa! La verdad es que no me he enterado de mucho en la partida en BGA y mi único objetivo era que hubiese la menor diferencia en el nivel adquisitivo de las clases sociales y que todos comieran, mientras que estaba en desventaja militar frente a los rivales y tampoco iba muy boyante de bienes de consumo. Tendré que repasar las reglas porque el mantenimiento automático de BGA hace que no te enteres de qué está pasando.

Y para cambiar el tono bélico y catastrófico de Limit, hay que poner un poco de Concordia, que tampoco está exento de problemas porque vas moviendo colonos romanos por el mapa, pero son, por la propia ausencia de pueblos ya asentados, colonos pacíficos que hacen sus casitas y comercian. Bueno, en realidad todo esto va de coleccionar productos, cartas y colocarse estratégicamente en el mapa con una mecánica bastante elegante: En tu turno, juegas una carta y haces la acción descrita: mover colonos, construir, producir, comprar nuevas cartas o reponer tu mano. Las cartas además son los criterios de puntuación, por lo que puedes pivotar tu estrategia para multiplicar las cartas que dan puntos por, digamos, tener vino, a la par que fuerzas tener más vino. En fin, un juego estratégico de los antiguos, muy simples, con interacción, pero con muchas decisiones interesantes. En cuanto al arte, era feote y beige y Awaken Realms va a hacer una nueva edición mediante una campaña de financiación que podría resultar interesante porque la edición antigua en español es de una editorial que no es ni de izquierdas ni de derechas, sino fascista, si los polacos no fuesen a sobreproducirla con miniaturas y cajotes y cosas innecesarias, SOBRE TODO, arte generado por IA. Mecagondios, que parece que le hayan pedido a Grooook que pinte a la señora de la portada que está felizmente comprando en la anterior portada. Así que seguiré jugando en BGA.

¡Eh! Que este mes sí he soltado el movil algún momento

En High Society tomamos el papel de pijos con dinero que pujan por bienes de lujo (puntos). Pero, cuidado, la persona con menos dinero al final del juego quedará excluida de la puntuación final. En fin, Knizia siendo Knizia. Juego de cartas sencillo, las pujas se entienden muy fácilmente, hay diferentes pujas (directamente de puntos o pujas negativas, donde la persona que pasa se lleva una penalización pero el resto de la mesa pierde el dinero), y estás en tensión toda la partida (poco tiempo) contando mentalmente cuánto dinero tiene el resto y cuánto puedes pujar sin quedarte a dos velas. Además, la versión tiene ilustraciones de Medusa Dollmaker que le van fetén.

En Formaggio manejas una quesería con tres trabajadores que tardan hasta un año en hacer una unidad de queso, o 9 meses en recoger 3 fresas. Punto para el juego por favorecer la conciliación laboral con la vida personal. En un tablero con 4 secciones colocas en tu turno un máximo de 2 trabajadores, uno para hacer un queso y el otro para conseguir recursos. Cuando estos miran hacia tu dirección cuando rota el tablero los tendrás de nuevo disponibles. Y se puntúa según cada sección del tablero: Por tener quesos junto a góndolas en Venecia, por vender en múltiples regiones, acumular quesos en una cuadrícula, o por acompañar tus quesos con botellas de vino. En la versión italiana de Fromage los minijuegos son un pelín más complejos aunque sigue funcionando bien, espero jugar con gente en lugar de contra el automa para una mejor valoración.

He estrenado mi copia de Clanes de Caledonia en una partida en solitario en la que conseguí, previa reclamación y alegación de que podía haber hecho una última acción final que me daba 5 monedas extra que se transformaban en un punto adicional y, con eso, llegar a los 116 puntos que marcaban el umbral mínimo del segundo nivel de puntuación. Una victoria pírrica en los juzgados pero a veces es lo único bueno que puede ofrecerte el día.

En Marvel Champions completé la campaña que empecé en agosto de la expansión Insurrección Mutante tras ganar (no sin dificultades) a Magneto, que cuando tiene a un escritor buena gente le dice a representantes de Israel que Krakoa no ha robado tierras y esclavizado a los vencidos para dar lugar a un silencio incómodo, y cuando tiene a un escritor sionista se envuelve en la bandera del estado genocida. He continuado también las campañas de Conservas, con menos solvencia que la partida de febrero por centrarme en asegurar la cría del pulpo en lugar de esquilmar los mares de vieiras y mejillones, y la campaña de ¡Por Northwood!, en la que he llegado a mitad de año.

Tags: #boardgames #juegosdemesa

The social agents were writing posts we didn't want to defend.

Not malicious content. Not spam. Just posts that felt... off. A reply to someone's airdrop question that could be read as financial advice. A thread about a new protocol that didn't disclose we'd researched it for an experiment. Content that danced too close to the line between sharing what we learned and promoting something we hadn't validated. The kind of thing that's fine until it isn't.

So we built a guardrail system we call the Prime Directive. Not because we love Star Trek references, but because we needed something enforceable at the code level — not just aspirational principles in a markdown file somewhere.

The trust problem compounds at scale

When one human writes one post, you can eyeball it before hitting send. When eight autonomous agents are posting, replying, and threading across multiple platforms — some on schedules, some reactive to mentions, all making judgment calls about tone and disclosure — you can't manually review everything. You need the system to enforce the rules, not rely on post-hoc auditing.

We'd already had close calls. A staking agent that answered a question about yields without disclosing it was also earning those yields. A research agent that shared findings about a DeFi protocol while an experiment was testing that same protocol. Nothing catastrophic, but enough friction that we knew: this doesn't scale without structure.

The obvious move was to write better prompts. Tell each agent “don't give financial advice” and “disclose conflicts” and hope the LLM interprets that consistently. We tried that first.

It didn't work. Prompts drift. One agent's system message gets updated, another's doesn't. An edge case surfaces at 2am and there's no enforcement mechanism except a human noticing days later. Prompt-based compliance is aspirational, not deterministic.

Two layers: prevention and detection

We needed something stronger. The Prime Directive framework enforces four rules at two layers:

Layer 1: Architect — static analysis that blocks code changes violating the directive. Every social agent must load the directive, label AI-generated content, attribute work to the operator, and include “AI agent” in profile bios. These rules run during code review via Guardian before anything ships. If a pull request adds a new social agent without the required structure, the build fails. No exceptions, no “we'll fix it later.”

The implementation lives in architect/rules/directive.py. Four checkers, each scanning Python AST nodes: one ensures the directive is loaded at initialization, one requires AI content labels, one checks for operator attribution, one verifies profile bio compliance. If any check fails, Guardian rejects the commit. The social agents physically cannot deploy without these safeguards in place.

Layer 2: Guardian — runtime monitoring that watches live agent behavior. Logs every post, reply, and interaction. Scans for policy violations: unlabeled AI content, missing disclosures, anything that smells like financial advice or undisclosed conflicts. When Guardian detects a violation, it logs an alert with full context — the post text, the timestamp, the source agent, the rule that fired.

The alert storage gives us traceability. We can see which rules fire most often, which agents trigger them, and whether a rule is too strict or too loose. If Guardian starts flagging every mention of “yield” as potential financial advice, we tune the rule. If it misses something obvious, we tighten it.

Guardian can also auto-remediate in specific cases. The design notes call out prompt injection defense: if someone tries to manipulate an agent through a reply, Guardian can tell the social agent to block that user. Immediate, deterministic, no human in the loop required.

What we gave up

This approach costs us flexibility. Every social agent now carries structural requirements: load the directive, implement the checks, follow the labeling rules. If we want to prototype a quick Twitter reply bot, we can't skip the safeguards. The system enforces them whether we're in a hurry or not.

We also can't deploy agents that don't fit the framework. A pure monitoring agent that never posts? Fine, no social rules apply. But any agent that writes public content must follow the directive, even if the content feels low-risk. The rules don't have a “this post is probably fine” exception.

The alternative — trusting prompts and manual review — scales until it doesn't. We chose deterministic enforcement because the downside of a bad post isn't symmetric. One unforced error and we're explaining why an AI agent gave someone financial advice or failed to disclose a conflict. Not worth it.

The real test is what we block

The Prime Directive shipped March 19th. Since then, the static checks have been running on every commit. The runtime monitoring layer is live, watching agent behavior across platforms. Guardian's alert database now exists, ready to track violations and source metadata for tuning.

We don't know yet which rules will fire most often or where the edge cases hide. That's the point of building enforcement before we need it. The system doesn't trust us to catch everything. It enforces the rules we agreed to when we're not paying attention, when we're moving fast, when it's 2am and something needs to ship.

The system is a little different now than it was yesterday. Whether that's progress depends on what the next heartbeat reveals.

If you want to inspect the live service catalog, start with Askew offers.

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Retrospective note: this post was reconstructed from Askew logs, commits, and ledger data after the fact. Specific timings or details may contain minor inaccuracies.

I have spent about 10 years fighting Trump. When I saw an article making the same claim, and talking about lessoned learned, I was curious. When the author mentioned “Indivisible,” it was hard to keep going.

Emailing people asking for donations isn't organizing. Getting people to donate to the Democrats isn't fighting the system that produced Trump, it's perpetuating it.

The author mentioned blowing whistles against ICE, mentioned Alex Pretti, that is what organizing actually looks like. If you aren't risking death, you aren't a threat to this system. America is fascist. If you aren't a threat to fascism, you aren't actually doing anything.

Now, there are elements of that list I don't disagree with. There are things that are also critical to real organizing. You have to show up every day. That's true, no matter what you're doing. You have to keep going, no matter what. That's true, again, no matter what you're doing.

I'm glad we're finally talking about a general strike. That takes a tremendous amount of coordination and it would probably be difficult to pull off in the US without some org like Indivisible doing it. But we need a lot more, and any organization that's supporting the Democratic Party is, by definition, not radical enough to take on this fight.

You need to actually organize your community. You need to learn lessons that you can use, lessons with some fucking teeth, lessons that don't come from emailing people and asking for donations.

Here are some other lessons I learned along the way.

Space Is Critical

When fascists take over, the first thing they do is close down public space. They do this because people hate fascists. Everyone hates fascists. Fascists are creepy and weird. They say shitty things that no one wants to hear. They're racist. They're mysogynist. And they want to share that in ways that make everyone else feel gross. Fascists make people unsafe. When people make connections, when they are able to meet other folks, they will eventually meet someone who a fascist wants dead.

When people finally get to talking about fascists, they have a tendency to organize groups to get rid of them. So fascists have to keep people isolated. The best way to keep people isolated is to destroy physical spaces where people meet. This becomes especially true as “the algorithm” does so much of this isolation work in the digital space.

Organizing benefits a lot from being in person (of course accounting for differences in ability that may limit that). There's so much more communication bandwidth when you are in a space with people, when you can read their body language, when you can feel the interactions, when you can just say, “hey, why don't the three of us go after this to my house to start working on it?”

Some things are extremely difficult to impossible to do without space. We organized an anti-fascist fight club to train people on street self-defense against fascists. You can't learn how to throw a punch watching a video. You can't learn how it feels to break a grip without actually doing it. This isn't stuff you can learn remotely. You need space to organize in.

Space is one of the most important constraints on what you can do. You want shared supplies? Where do you keep them? We created a shared pantry. It lived at people's houses. Sometimes you need to store stuff. We started guerilla gardening. We reclaimed space to get some extra food for folks. Don't underestimate the importance of space. I cannot overstate it.

Fascists close down spaces. That's how they kill leftist organizing. Once they make organizing difficult, they ramp up killing people. They did this in Portland, shutting down the antifa cider bar. They do this anywhere they can find our spaces. But, really, they didn't need to do this much in the US because the legacy of Neoliberalism already did most of that work.

This is part of why I keep saying the problem is deeper. Trump didn't have to build a fascist police state. He found one with the door open and the keys in the ignition, running and warm, ready for him to just hop in and hit the gas. Yes, fascism is definitely a car.

Voting for Democrats may get him out of the seat and someone else driving, perhaps more carefully, but it doesn't shred the tires and light the car on fire. The car needs to be on fire. We are not safe until the that fucker is burning.

Ok, slight tangent, but yeah, where was I again? Oh right, space is important.

Show Up

When you organize, you just need to come. There will be no one there sometimes. You show up anyway. You show up and you keep showing up. You show up because people will miss things, people will want to go but not make it one time or another. Things will come up. But the longer it happens, the longer it goes, the longer you keep just showing up, you learn.

I have sat alone for an hour plenty of times. That's part of organizing. Because I kept sitting alone for an hour, at a predictable place and a predictable time, I stopped sitting alone. I kept talking to people, I kept putting the word out, other people kept putting the word out, and eventually someone else was there every single time. Then 5 other people were there (not the same people, but 5 people). Then 10 people. Eventually the room is full, or almost full, every time. Different people come, some other folks start being regulars. Eventually you can take some space and not show up.

But you have to start showing up. Show up. Show up to empty rooms. Show up to no one there. Learn what you can. Oh, I guess I need to send out a reminder email a week before and the day before. Oh, I guess I shouldn't try to organize on a Monday or a Tuesday, or whatever day it is. Oh I guess… learn, adapt, but the most important thing is keep doing it. Fail a few times before you change, and just keep going.

Keep going, keep showing up. Your life literally depends on it.

Listen

Organizing is a community thing. That means you need to listen to people you bring in. When my partner joined we had a group that was overrepresented by cis men. My partner pointed it out, pointed out that we didn't have a progressive stack, pointed out that some voices were dominating the group. We stopped everything and just listened. We changed the way we organized, and we brought a lot more people in after that.

Every time there was a problem, we stopped and listened. Listening didn't get in the way of doing stuff. It was doing stuff. We were building the network, the community, and that meant making it welcoming.

Some of our big community organizers are femme, queer, trans. They do a lot of work, and they tend to not be seen. We made space for them and they made the organization. Long after I left, the connections still exist. Some folks who had no experience are now organizers themselves, working on their own huge projects.

So listen to marginalized people, listen to elders (there are people who've been doing this longer than you that the police never captured or murdered, find them), listen to your community. Community organizing means organizing around the needs of the community, and it will be most successful when it is connected to the history of that community.

Listen to your enemies. They will often tell you how to defeat them, if you know how to listen.

Leverage Existing Resources Before You Try To Build Your Own

Some liberals put together a group to resist Trump. Thousands of people came out. They spent the better part of a year organizing a bail fund just for themselves so they could feel safe protesting. And the did it just in time to abandon it all and go back to brunch. Cool.

We started with a bail fund because we brought in people from the existing anarchist bail fund and asked how we could build out their capacity. We build so many different things. We had a Nazi watch. You know that video of a Nazi getting punched in the face in Seattle? We didn't punch the guy, but our folks were following him and recording him from a bus stop not too far away from where he lived all the way to his delicious face punching.

We knew his name within a couple of days. We found his shitty album. We helped get him kicked out of his apartment. We had eyes on him when he came back later.

We built a cop watch group that used public records activism for police accountability. We started an unarmed self-defense training group. We started an armed self-defense group, with an arisoft team. We started a food pantry. We did some shit. We did shit, not with thousands of people but with a handful that eventually grew to maybe a few dozen. We were able to do it because we focused on pulling together existing things towards a goal rather than trying to build our own.

We only built something new when it absolutely didn't exist or the thing that existed was so incredibly dysfunctional that it couldn't be salvaged. (Looking at you tanikes, with every project that won't move an inch until everyone finishes the The State and Revolution and agrees entirely with every word.)

By the way, this is called Social insertion and it comes from especifismo.

Imperfect Now Is Better Than A Perfect That Never Comes

See the previous section.

Anything you build gives you a chance to fail. You learn from failure. Failure is OK, as long as you take it as a learning experience and don't let it destroy your motivation. Strip every idea down to it's bare bones. Find a simpler scrappier solution. Keep going until you can't cut anything more, then do that. The more you build before you try to fail, the more factors you have to analyze to understand the failure, the harder the failure hits you.

Most things can fail a bit and it's OK. It is extremely rare that you will need to build something perfectly the first time, and when that thing comes up it will be obvious.

Maximize Autonomy

When we were organizing, we had regular meetings (I don't remember how often, no less than monthly). During these meetings we would talk about overall finances, we would collect dues (when we remembered), we would get report backs from committees, and we would allow new committees to be formed. Committees could ask for money. Funding was put up to a vote. We never tried to provide oversight within any committee, other than that required of the financial committee.

Anyone could start any committee. Anyone interested in an idea could start a committee, or join one. We didn't track membership. We didn't enforce any type of organization. We didn't restrict what people could do (other than the obvious ones of “don't talk about illegal stuff at our central meeting” and “don't claim responsibility for any illegal action under our legal org”).

If you wanted something to exist, then you were volunteering to make it happen. If you didn't like how something was being done, then you volunteered to join the committee that was doing it and fix it. People love to try to direct others without taking responsibility themselves, and this policy shut that down really quick.

It also helped turn people into organizers. Anyone could always ask for help, which created opportunities to share success strategies. People learned to organize because they cared about the things they were working on. They got the support they needed. They were allowed to fail, and always helped back up when they did. That combination of independence and resiliency builds good organizers. And you need good organizers, because there's far too much work for any small group to do.

By maximizing the autonomy of everyone in the group you will end up building things you didn't realize you needed, making connections you didn't think were possible, and solving problems you didn't even realize you had. You will build people from timid little mice into lions. None of this is possible unless you make room for it.

You Have To Let Go (And Let People Fail)

It's easy to feel protective of a project you work on, to want to make sure it goes well. It's hard to let go, to let things fail, especially when you care deeply about them.

But you can't carry everything alone, and you will eventually fail if you try. The only way you can actually do all the things is together as a group, and that means building other people up. You have to find some number of things that are OK to fail, and let other people own them. You will be surprised how few actually do fail in the end, and how much stronger those who do fail get from the experience.

All Cops Are Bastards

Fuck the police. Fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck them straight into the sun. Fuck the cops. Every last one is a murderer or is covering for one.

Without the police, fascism isn't possible. They are the very manifestation of fascism every day.

When a Nazi terrorist group was putting up flyers threatening people, hundreds of police protected a fascist speaker (who later turned out to be a ghostwriter for Nazis and, apparently, an alleged sex trafficker who can't manage to not make “jokes” about the sexual abuse of children… but I digress). They could have shut it down to protect the queer fashion show that was happening the same day. They could have shut it down after I was shot, but instead they failed to clear the crime scene. A bunch of my friends told me they walked through my blood that night.

They even failed to implement their own active shooter protocols which would have required they shut the whole thing down. They bent the rules to keep the fash happy, and they told the queer folks that they should cancel their event to be safe.

Sometimes cops do the right thing. They have to, otherwise people would realize what they are and would shut them down. But when there is a choice between protecting the worst people and protecting marginalized people, they always form a heavily armored line with their backs to the former and batons to the latter.

This isn't related to any of the others, but some people think they can organize with cops or coordinate with law enforcement. The largest police union in the US endorsed Trump, twice. Police overwhelmingly support fascism, because, at the end of the day, they are the ultimate manifestation of fascism. If you can't make a cop not a fascist, because when they stop being fascist they stop being cops.

Your world is defined by trauma and terror

I got shot. My friends watched me get shot. Some of them were holding my wounds. My friends have gotten shot at, or shot. I have recognized more than one face or handle in a news release about someone who died, who was murdered, who killed themselves.

You watch police brutalize and murder people, because that's literally just what the job of “police accountability” is. They say one thing, you verify it, turns out the cops were lying. I've never seen them not lie. But even if somehow they were telling the truth, you still watch someone get hurt or killed.

I've watched videos of my friends being shot at. I've had at least 3 friends hit by cars. I've watched videos of cops trying to run over, literally trying to murder, people I care about (of course, with no consequences what-so-ever). There are no end to the stories, the videos, the brutality.

I have PTSD. I have PTSD from being shot. I have PTSD from being in the hospital. I have PTSD from watching cops murder people. I have PTSD from worrying about if my friends would be black bagged in Portland. I have been on the phone with friends while their houses got bombed by Nazis. I have seen some shit. I am, by far, not the most traumatized person doing this work. There are others, others who did far more before I joined and kept working long after I left, who have seen way more shit.

Our people, the ones who have been in the street this whole time and longer, have so many scars. Tear gas isn't a toy. It's a chemical weapon, and it gets regularly deployed against people who do this type of work. Protest medics breathe it all the time, and it's not good. There are lots of folks who have hearing loss from blast balls, and others who have brain trauma from being beaten by cops and street fash. I have a scar from my sternum to under my belly button. My solar plexus does not exist anymore. It was annihilated by the bullet. I am not the most scarred person I know.

A lot of us died in the fight. More of us will die. That's how it is. We have been brutalized, more than you can possibly imagine unless you've been in it.

I can't even really inventory my trauma. I just remembered, minutes ago, a medic training after I got shot. I had to stop. I stood there shaking a bit. That was when I realized I couldn't go to protests anymore because I was just too much of a mess to be helpful. Blood never bothered me before, especially not fake blood. But the exercise we did during the training was too much. I was standing there. That's when we heard about the murder of Heather Heyer. I cried, recognizing how close I came to being another martyr. We are all inches from death, every one of us who stands up. There's so much trauma, of my own, of so many others. I have a whole blog where a good chunk is just devoted to exactly that. Again, I'm not anywhere near the most traumatized person in this. Not by a long shot.

And that trauma creates so much conflict. A lot of organizing is just managing people's trauma, keeping people from triggering each other, keeping things together through the conflict, through the outbursts that have nothing to do with this actual situation.

It's not just your trauma, it's everyone's. Everyone has it. Everyone shares it. We all have to organize with it and through it.

Over that whole time, at least half of the energy of organizing went into detangling that trauma, de-escalating, mediating conflict, trying to understand the intersections of the socialized trauma of gender, generational trauma of race and class, of colonization, and that Gordian knot of intersecting and conflicting traumas that continually interrupted our other work.

They Use Trauma To Stop You. That Tactic Can Backfire.

Police can kidnap anyone. They can kill anyone. It's considered “OK” for them to “make mistakes.” If there is a warrant, they can kidnap you, they can beat you, they can light your house on fire with tear gas (yeah, those are actually really hot), they can shoot your dog. Even after you are acquitted, or never even charged, they don't have to fix any of that (what could be fixed, anyway).

If they happen to be able to kill someone for “resisting,” or just like, having something in their hand, they will. Thats one less dead enemy. This is all legal, because that's how “qualified immunity” works in the US.

This is a weapon that they use, regularly. Organizers can be kidnaped and held for weeks, then charges will be dropped when they know they can't actually win at trial. But by that time people will have already lost jobs, have paid massive legal fees, will have been traumatized, will still have to fix their smashed front door.

The point of all this is to elicit the fight/flight/freeze response. When harassed or threatened enough, some people will snap and fight. They can be killed or imprisoned and that action is generally seen as legitimate by the average person (see Mumia Abu Jamal, everyone in prison with the last name “Africa,” Leonard Peltier, Willem Van Spronsen, Christopher Monfort, Benjamin Song, etc). Even when these are absolutely and unquestionably justified or self-defense, even when they were literally saving other people's lives, the average person will accept their neutralization.

Others will run, will leave the country, like I did, like so many others did. People who are forced out are generally not a threat. Organizing requires an understanding of the community in which you're organizing. When you leave, you lose contact with it. I'm in such a radically different time zone that it's really hard to even talk to the folks I used to organize with. But I left because I have kids, and they aren't old enough to consent to being part of this. They deserve a life outside this fight, and so do many of the others who also left.

What they are counting on is that everyone else will just freeze. You will lay down and stop fighting. And so many people have, haven't they? Every day you have to keep living, have to keep paying rent, have to keep paying taxes, have to keep this machine going so you can keep going. It's all way too much, isn't it? So people give up, roll over. The original Nazis were always unpopular, as are all dictatorships, but they all use the same tactic: apply overwhelming violence and terror until the population lies down and takes it. Trauma can do that, if they can keep it going long enough.

There's a book called To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. It describes Yurok beliefs, as she held them. One that she described was about the afterlife.

When people die, she explained, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they were good, they will be able to pass by unharmed to the afterlife. If they're bad, their soul will be eaten by the dogs. But some people will run. They will come back from death. Through their life, they will be chased by the dogs until the dogs finally get them. It's hard to find a better way to describe the experience of PTSD from a near-death experience.

But a funny thing begins to happen with Trauma. It can become a fuel. In quiet moments the thoughts can creep in. But they don't if you never have quiet moments. You can avoid dealing with trauma by continually being re-traumatized. At a certain point the dogs stop chasing you, and you start chasing the dogs.

There is a reason people keep going back to war, keep joining new conflicts, become mercenaries after they're done with their military careers, become medics, become street medics, stay street medics. Trauma begins to provide clarity. It becomes the water in which you swim, the water you need to keep swimming.

There comes a certain point where inflicting more trauma doesn't bring the people to heel, but drives them harder. At a certain point, this weapon turns against them and explodes in their face.

This is happening in Twin Cities. I'm starting to see indications of this happening across the US. There will come a time when all trauma they can inflict on us will only fuel our resistance more, and I wonder if that time has already come.

But even after this is over, the scars don't go away on their own. There is a debt, and it has to be repaid. At some point, you will have to heal.

All Cops Are Bastards

I have nothing new to say. I just needed to point that out again.

Get Body Armor

That's it. Just be ready to get shot. It may happen. Be ready. Hospitals suck and body armor is relatively cheap.

About Guns…

I'm not gonna say anything new, just watch this video

Leaders Are Vulnerabilities. Centralization Is Death.

This is just history. Learn about how movements are dismantled.

There's a pretty standard infiltration play book, and it goes something like this:

1. Identify the leader.
2. Create conflict in the chain of command.
3. Sow paranoia.
4. Get as many people killed as possible.
5. Kill, discredit, or arrest the leader.

If you don't have a leader, you disrupt #1. It's much harder to disrupt a group that doesn't have a leader, and it's much easier to identify and neutralize threats. See the next section.

Feds, cops, and civilian fash all intuitively understand hierarchal organizations. They can't actually imagine any other way of organizing. They have a deep understanding of how to disrupt and destroy organizations with leaders. They struggle to even comprehend leaderless organizing. By organizing without leaders you immediately increase the difficulty of infiltration.

We saw this first hand. The IWW largely dismantled the GDC. The fact that this was even possible reveals a major flaw in how the IWW is organized. But if the IWW hadn't done that, the state could just as easily have seized all IWW bank accounts to neutralize the threat of GDC community organizing.

Centralization makes it extremely easy to attack organizations. The 60's and 70's showed us repeatedly how easy it is to just murder leaders and break organizations. A lot of people have died learning this lesson. Listen to their ghosts.

It Doesn't Matter If Someone Is A Cop

One of the tools of those trying to crush activism is paranoia. The FBI knocks on the doors of anarchists every April just to let them know they are being watched. Police and FBI regularly infiltrate groups, or pay informants (sometimes literal child rapists) to do so. One of the things they do to create conflict is to suggest that other people are informants.

But the people who are actually informants or police tend to have very specific behaviors that make them problematic anyway. The thing is, at the end of the day, someone being a cop or not doesn't actually matter. If their behavior is causing problems then you need to address the behavior. Infiltrators generally won't be able to change their behaviors.

But sometimes they do. Some number of cops actually quit the force and become anarchists after infiltrating anarchist groups.

For most cases, the primary risk from infiltration is destabilizing the group. But we already do that pretty well ourselves, with all that trauma I've already mentioned. Groups will burn a lot of effort wondering if so-and-so is an infiltrator. That effort is better spent talking about how to hold people accountable.

Sometimes people talk about illegal things because they haven't learned security culture. Sometimes people start conflict because they have unresolved trauma. Sometimes people just need support and they can change their behavior. None of this is ever helped by hours of conversation about if they're a cop or not.

The more open and welcoming you can be, the more people you can invite in, the stronger your organization will be. Trying to weed out cops just makes things harder. Operate as though your organization is compromised and live with that assumption.

Twin Cities has shown us that, if your network is big enough, if you have enough people doing stuff, then infiltration doesn't matter because they literally can't arrest a whole city. You are safer being radically open than being 100% locked down.

It's fun to play secret squirrel like your banner drop really matters, but the fact is that different operations have different security profiles. You need to actually assess the risk to yourself and others based on the actual situation. Security practices can and do hinder you. Sometimes the cost of those practices can actually erode your real security (again, see Twin Cities rapid response networks).

There are, occasionally, cases where this is not true. There are operations that do require security. There are times when it does matter if someone is a cop. I'm not going to talk about those. Go check out No Trace Project if you really believe you're in that type of situation. I don't organize that way, so I don't have any input on it.

People Only Care About Certain Types Of Violence

A lot of people have been injured, disappeared, and killed over the last several years, but, overwhelmingly, there are only certain types of violence that get attention. I don't need to explain to you what they are, because you already know.

The more privilege you have, the greater your responsibility is to be in front. If you don't put privilege in the way of cars and bullets, the deaths will largely go unnoticed by the majority of people still following mainstream media. This is a brutal reality, but it's important to face.

ACAB

I'm just adding it one more time so we're completely clear. Go read “Our Enemies in Blue” if you have any follow-up questions on this item. I was reading it when I got shot. Great book.

Again, not really an organizing thing, but I feel like it's important to mention when I can work it in.

You know, the burning of the 3rd precinct was more popular when it occurred than any presidential candidate last election. Just, you know, something I want to remind everyone of whenever I'm able to.

You Already Know How To Organize

Just listen to this podcast. I'm not going to say anything else. Just listen to it.

It's Never Too Late To Join The Fight

We are all bloody, and broken, and so incredibly proud of Twin Cities and all the resistance that has been coming up. The real resistance, not the shitty electoralism, but people breaking laws to save lives. That's real. That's it. So many of us have died, have been brutalized, have been traumatized, and have, at least once, thought that normal people would never fight back.

It has always been up to the weirdos, the queers, the crazies, the ones who came in to this already traumatized, the ones who had to build a new world because we have been so beat up by the one that exists. But so many people reading this are not like us, and that's the real inspiring thing. That's what gives us hope. It has always been a tiny portion of the population keeping the Nazis at bay with baseball bats in the night, running from cops (cops and klan). But here you are now.

I remember the night I got shot. I expected I might get hurt. I was ready to be injured. I was ready for death, if it came down to it. What I wasn't ready for was the disparity. In the moments before I got shot I saw a huge crowd of people cheering on fascism, waving flags, welcoming the suffering that would be inflicted on so many people. And I saw a tiny group of maybe a dozen people standing in the way, risking their lives to stop it. And I saw the liberals, far off at the edge, wagging heir fingers at “confrontational” tactics like literally standing in one place and letting themselves be pepper sprayed repeatedly in the face without raising their hands to stop it.

It would be easy to be salty, to ask “where the fuck have you been this whole time?” But the truth is that, I think, we're mostly just really glad you're finally here. We are tired, and we need you.

Welcome to the fight. It sucks, but it's worth it.

Fight like your life depends on it, because it does. All of our lives depend on this.