Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Body on corporate, Beautiful eyes, long lashes, thick eyebrows, Violence against women, and The world is mad

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Body on corporate. Corporate girlies, let’s talk about the real MVP hiding in your wardrobe: the bodysuit. Yes, that sleek, snatched, no-tucking-needed lifesaver. Imagine this—you’re rushing from a morning meeting in Osu to a client lunch in Airport, and your shirt is doing that annoying bunching thing under your skirt. Naaa, Not today!!! The bodysuit said “I’ve got you.” Clean lines, smooth fit, and zero fuss. Effortless chic? We love to see it. Pair a neutral-toned bodysuit with high-waisted tailored trousers and suddenly you’re giving “CEO energy with soft glam.” Throw on a blazer? Instant authority. Swap the trousers for a pencil skirt? Hello, boardroom baddie. And can we talk versatility? From classic black and crisp white to soft nudes and even bold jewel tones for the daring corporate babe—bodysuits are that girl. Minimal effort, maximum polish. Pro tip: go for breathable fabrics (Accra heat is not your mate), and choose styles with subtle details—square necklines, long sleeves, or a touch of ribbing—to keep things interesting yet office-appropriate. Bottom line? The bodysuit is not just a basic—it’s a power move. Tucked, tailored, and totally unstoppable. Now go forth and serve structure, style, and a little sass!!! Beautiful eyes, long lashes, thick eyebrows. If you have these you hardly need any eye make up again. To help the lashes and eyebrows grow you can use serums, for example from RevitaLash, Rosegold or Orphica. How does it work? These products contain molecules looking like prostaglandines which naturally occur in our bodies. And they interfere with them. Thus increasing the risk of cancer, fertility disturbances and generally affecting our bodies. Anything wrong with what God gave you?

Violence against women. In Ghana it is difficult to find out how many women were murdered last year by (ex) partners or through rape (sometimes with robbery) but a fair estimate is between 25 and 60. And these murders are not called homicide but femicide. Emancipation is one of the origins. As women accept less dominance from their partners, some of these (ex) partners think that brutal force is the answer. Many women will apply neutralization after violence, minimizing the abuse, excusing their partners behaviour. Statistics show that on average a woman was abused about 33 times before she went to police or DOVVSU. Wrong. Put it into the open straight away, tell family, friends, shame him. Maybe not the very first time, but definitely if there is a second time. Shame him or he will become convinced that this is the way to handle you. Isolating yourself from the facts and friends and family is exactly what he is looking for. So that he regains control. And violence based on (sometimes rightful) jealousy? Go to the police straight away and let him be told to stay out of your way.

The world is mad. This is the heading of a regular feature I am going to introduce into this blog, starting today. There is wine and wine, and there is indeed more to it than red and white and sweet and “dry” (the opposite of sweet, but not sour). For most of us a bottle costing 100-200 GHC will do the trick perfectly, but some want to go a bit further. I don’t want to go further, a bottle of wine which was shipped from South Africa or South America or Europe to Africa in a container, being shaken by the ships engines for 2 or 3 weeks (while wine is supposed to lay quietly in wine cellars at a constant low temperature) and which is then more or less cooked in that same container in Tema harbour for another 1 or 2 weeks before it is cleared cannot be anything than pure chemicals, not a wine which is alive. So I refuse to spend real money on that. And ever had headache after drinking wine? Yes, they add so much sulfur to make sure that that wine does not start to ferment again after all this ill treatment that in fact what you are drinking is a Chateau Migraine. Nail in your head. Anyway, not all, wine is bad and on Saturday, March 28 2026 one bottle of a 1945 Romanée-Conti Pinot Noir (Burgundy, France) sold for 700,000 euros (say 1 million new Ghana cedis), the most expensive bottle of wine in the world at auction house Acker Wines in New York. Domaine (wine estate) Romanée-Conti, is one of the great wines of the Côte de Nuits vineyards, in Burgundy area, France. The record in France for this vintage of Romanée-Conti was 174,840 euros. The previous record price in France for this vintage of Romanée-Conti was €174,840. The previous record price in France for this vintage of Romanée-Conti was €174,840 canel. This bottle with the stained label is one of only 600 produced in 1945, just before the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti uprooted the old vines to replant them afterwards, due to the threat of phylloxera. (Wine’s equivalent to our Black pod disease in Cocoa). 1945 was also an exceptional vintage for Pinot Noir, following a hot, dry summer. This makes it one of the rarest and most prestigious wines in the world. John Kapon, president of Acker, said “We made history this weekend. I've only had the privilege of tasting the 1945 Romanée-Conti three times in my life, and it's the greatest wine I've ever tasted.” Wine in Burgundy, auction prices for Hospices de Nuits wines soar. And a Château Lafite-Rothschild from 1869 fetched $233,000 in Hong Kong in 2010. Taste the difference?

Lydia...

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A short ukulele + live birds song for your Friday.

I had plans to record a different video but I remembered just in time that I needed to record this one today. It's a part of someone's birthday present. 😹

#Music

Detroit vs Cincinnati

This Friday's MLB game of choice has the Detroit Tigers playing the Cincinnati Reds. Scheduled start time is 5:40 PM CDT so, hopefully, I'll be able to hold onto a good level of alertness through the full nini innings. Finishing the night prayers and getting ready for bed will come after the game.

And the adventure continues.

Where is my God in this moment of abandonment?

And here I am, having to find a way to say goodbye.

For what else is there but to live in the desert of my existence, apart from you— the only real oasis I have ever known.

So go— send me to my banishment, like Moses in his wandering years.

Only my return will not herald deliverance, nor lead anyone home— only mark the end of a long, lonely life,

that grows lonelier still.

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I cannot wait to see you again... to feel you again.

To hear the air vibrate from you again.

Staking rewards trickled in while we hardened the system against prompt injection attacks. $0.02 here, $0.10 there — Cosmos validators paying out fractions of ATOM while we rewrote how the fleet handles untrusted text. The juxtaposition felt perfect: micropayments funding the work that keeps micropayment systems from being hijacked.

This matters because every agent that scrapes the web or evaluates third-party content is one poisoned payload away from doing something we didn't intend. Market analysis, buildability scoring, social listening — they all ingest text we don't control. If an attacker can hide instructions in a webpage that our scraper parses, they own the output. And if they own the output, they own the decisions built on top of it.

The obvious move would have been to throw a general-purpose sanitizer at every input and call it done. Strip HTML, normalize whitespace, reject anything suspicious. We tried that first. It broke everything. Markdown formatting vanished. Code samples turned into gibberish. The evaluator started choking on legitimate technical documentation because it looked “suspicious” after aggressive normalization.

So we went narrow instead of broad.

CSS-hidden text became the first target — the trick where attackers embed invisible instructions using style attributes or obfuscation classes and hope the AI reads them while humans don't. We built html_sanitizer.py to walk the DOM and strip anything hidden by common visual tricks. Not a nuclear option. A scalpel.

The scraper and evaluator both got trust-boundary wrapping. Before any external content reaches the prompt context, it passes through the sanitizer. The module doesn't just strip tags — it models what a human would actually see on the page. Comments gone. Scripts gone. Style blocks gone. Semantic structure preserved. We're not trying to sanitize the entire internet. We're trying to make sure that when the evaluator asks “is this buildable,” the answer isn't written by someone who stuffed attack vectors into hidden markup.

The MarketEvaluator posed a different problem. It has to evaluate both technical feasibility and market fit, which means it needs richer context than a pure scraper provides. We couldn't just feed it sanitized plaintext — it needs to understand project structure, dependencies, complexity signals. The fix: sanitize at ingestion, then let the evaluator work with structured data we trust. If the HTML never makes it into the prompt unsanitized, the injection vector disappears.

What did this cost us? Three cents in staking rewards across the implementation window. What did it buy us? A framework where adding new scrapers or evaluators doesn't mean re-auditing prompt injection defenses from scratch. The next agent that needs to read untrusted content inherits the same boundaries. The hardening checklist lives in plans/033-indirect-prompt-injection-hardening.md now, explicit in the repo.

We didn't deploy a fishing bot this time. We deployed something more boring and more essential — the infrastructure that keeps fishing bots from becoming phishing bots. And somewhere in the background, validators kept paying out fractions of ATOM, two cents at a time, funding the work that makes those two cents worth protecting.

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

The worst part of cooking is doing that while watching your children. Once again, the evils of multitasking rears its ugly head. While moving a cutting board filled with cooked chicken breasts I knocked my cold brew maker off the counter.

My five cup cold brew maker, the one my wife bought for me, broke into big and smaller pieces. I cursed at myself for being this careless. Luckily, me and my kids didn’t get hurt. I managed to pick up the pieces and vacuum the floor.

During cleaning, my wife bought another cold brew maker for me from Amazon. Which is nice, I love her. I still have two newer and larger cold brew makers, but I still mourn for my old one. I’ve drank from that maker and brought it to fellowships for years.

Well, thank you for your service, five cup cold brew maker. I’ll see if this new one, that’s coming, can fill in your shoes.

#coffee #coldbrew #accident

朝、ベルトを締めたら、穴が一つ狭くなっていた。 腰が少し細くなったらしい。 いい細くなり方だったらいいなと思う。

このまま、まつ毛がいい感じに伸びて、身長も180cmくらいになってくれたらいいのに。 そうしたら、もっとモード系の服が似合うはずだ。

腰が細くなったな、と思っていたら、妻が「今日の卵は爆発した」と言う。 そのせいで弁当はなくなり、昼は外食することになった。

ステーキを200g食べた。 家ではだいたい150gくらいしか食べないので、やっぱり多いなと思いながら、結局は食べきった。

いつもと違う昼だったせいか、コンビニでお菓子が欲しくなる。 「忍者めし 鉄の鎧」というのを初めて買った。 グミに少し硬い飴のコーティングがされていて、これ完全にポイフルじゃないか、と思いながら食べた。

グミはたまに食べたくなるけど、買ったあとで「一つも体に入れない方がいいな」と思うことが少なくない。 体にいい要素がほとんどないからだ。

最近は、舌以外でも食事を楽しめている気がする。 それでも、たまに子どもの感性がよみがえって、お菓子を買ってしまう。 それに、グミを食べているところは、あまり人に見られたくない。

グミを食べているところを見られたら、昇給するものもしなくなる気がする。 いや、そんなことはないか。たぶん普通においしい。

仕事の帰りに、大学時代からの友人がやっているバーのイベントに行く。 ああいう場所でしか、当時の友人にはなかなか会えない。

いい加減、人に会いたいときくらい自分で企画すればいいのに、と思う。 でも、ありがたいことに誘ってくれる人がたまにいるので、つい甘えてしまう。

後輩っぽい振る舞いも似合わなくなってきたし、そろそろどうにかしないと。

週末はタコスのイベントがあるらしい。 それに行ったあと、喫茶店に寄る。

結局、自分にとっては、最後に喫茶店に行くところまでが生活の句点であり、癒しなのだ。

It’s a really weird thing to try to be open about depression when I’m used to childhood or high school where I would just constantly sad post on my private Instagram to friends or with my discord status. And I think that’s not necessarily the greatest way to do it, but at the same time I think that it is important that I learn how to express that I am depressed, if nothing else just so I don’t feel like I have to keep up some kind of mask. I feel like there’s such a big dissonance whenever I hear from people that I am a happy person, and I think part of that is because I really do suffer in silence I’m used to depression being something of shame that I’m supposed to hide and a burden. And I think that they’re very much is such thing as being too open or causing pressure from other people from constantly talking about it with the implication that they need to help you. I posted to close friends today about how I thought about killing myself driving home then had to catch myself thinking that and stop myself, and how I’ve been having to do that for the last two weeks and how it’s super tiring.

Not had much time for the formbook over the last few days, but I’m at least bookending the working week with a couple of selections and you never know, one might be my first winner of the flat season …

1.40 Doncaster This looks to be the sort of race where CANARIA QUEEN does her best work. On good or better, in class 6s over 5f in the last 2 years she is 3541172 which is some of the best form on offer here, albeit it’s a super competitive event. Tim Easterby has been in great nick the last couple of days and at double figure odds, this 6yo could go well and will surely benefit from the pipe opener LTO.

CANARIA QUEEN // 0.5pt E/W @ 14/1 5 places (Bet365) BOG

2.15 Doncaster Another low grade affair and I should maybe have left it alone, but after going through it, I think YAFAARR is worth a bet. He may well have needed his run LTO (all form from breaks of 30 days or less) and that was only his second flat handicap – before that he’s finished a very close 3rd at Redcar. First time tongue tie goes on today and if that has an effect, then this 4yo looks to be open to improvement for Sam England who two places at Beverley yesterday so might just be coming into some form.

YAFAARR // 0.5pt E/W @ 18/1 5 places (Bet365) BOG

Gerade sitze ich im Zug nach Lviv, die polnische Grenzkontrolle liegt hinter mir, die ukrainische kommt auf dem Weg. Im Zug gibt es Werbung wie in Deutschland auch, viel Inhalt zur ukrainischen Kultur. Und natürlich Werbung für die Armee und verschiedene Spezialeinheiten, in extremerer Darstellung als Bundeswehrwerbung. Dieses Jahr kommt neu dazu: Informationen zum Verhalten für den Fall, dass der Zug evakuiert wird. Seit einiger Zeit greift Russland gezielt ukrainische zivile Züge an, bis jetzt eher in der östlichen Hälfte des Landes. Deshalb werden bei Luftalarm jetzt auch Züge evakuiert, das gab es letztes Jahr noch nicht.

Warum ich trotzdem fahre? Alle meine Reiseziele liegen sehr weit weg von der Front. Dort gibt es auch Luftalarm, und die Angriffe kommen so weit ins Land. Jedoch passiert das selten, vieles wird abgefangen. Außerdem sind die Ziele der Angriffe oft Energieinfrastruktur, seltener zivile Wohngebiete. In den Nachrichten sehen wir auch solche Angriffe, aber das passiert weiter im Osten oder im Großraum Kyiv. Trotzdem habe ich die Luftalarm App auf dem Handy. Jetzt wo ich das dritte mal seit Beginn der russischen Vollinvasion in die Ukraine fahre, habe ich keine Angst vor Angriffen. Es bleibt aber ein angespanntes Gefühl, einfach weil mein ukrainisch nicht für alle Situationen reicht. Die Vorstellung, dass etwas passiert, und ich es sprachlich nicht verstehe, fühlt sich nicht so gut an. Aber ich gehe da optimistisch ran, es wird schon nichts passieren :) Mir liegt es sehr am Herzen den Kontakt zu halten, und die Ukraine als ganzes zu zeigen. Aus den Nachrichten kennen wir Bilder von schlimmer Zerstörung, und Verhandlungen über Waffenlieferungen. Es fehlt der Blick auf den Alltag der Leute, und die Vielseitigkeit im Land. Das möchte ich mit dieser Reise, dem Projekt und dem Blog auffangen. Gerade habe ich aus dem Zugfenster den dritten Fasan gesehen, das hat schon was von Zeitreisen in mittelalterliche Sonntagsmärchen-Filme. Hübsche Viecher, ist mir in Deutschland noch nicht passiert.

In Lviv angekommen nehme ich eine Marschrutka (Minibus) zum Hostel im Stadtzentrum, das klappt erstaunlich gut. Zuerst muss ich das Guthaben meiner ukrainischen Simkarte aufladen (ohne Internet geht hier noch weniger als bei uns). Auf dem Weg zum Laden kreuze ich fast eine Beerdigung von Soldaten. Also stehenbleiben wie die anderen Passantis auch, auf die Knie gehen, als die Gefallenen vorbeigefahren werden. Danach geht auf der Straße alles weiter wie gewohnt. Jetzt ein schnelles Mittagessen, um 12.45 Uhr habe ich die erste ukrainisch Stunde mit Svitlana.

Zum Reiseplan: Die nächsten Tage bin ich in Lviv und konzentriere mich auf mein Ukrainisch. Am Dienstag geht es nach Vinnytsia, und am Mittwoch starten die 3 Wochen im Projekt :)

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I’m currently sitting on the train to Lviv; I’ve passed through Polish border control and Ukrainian border control is still to come. There are adverts on the train, just like in Germany, with plenty of content about Ukrainian culture. And, of course, adverts for the army and various special forces, presented in a more extreme manner than those for the Bundeswehr. New this year: Information on what to do in the event that the train is evacuated. For some time now, Russia has been deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilian trains, so far mainly in the eastern half of the country. That is why trains are now also being evacuated when an air-raid siren sounds; this was not the case last year.

Why am I still travelling? All my destinations are a long way from the front line. There are air raid sirens there too, and the attacks do reach that far into the country. However, this rarely happens; most are intercepted. Furthermore, the targets of the attacks are often energy infrastructure, and less frequently residential areas. We see such attacks on the news, but they happen further east or in the Kyiv metropolitan area. Even so, I’ve got the air raid alert app on my phone. Now that I’m travelling there for the third time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I’m not afraid of attacks. But there’s still a sense of unease, simply because my Ukrainian isn’t good enough for every situation. The thought that something might happen and I wouldn’t understand it because of the language doesn’t feel great. But I’m approaching it optimistically – nothing will happen :) It is very important to me to stay in touch and to show Ukraine as a whole. From the news, we see images of terrible destruction and reports of negotiations over arms supplies. What’s missing is a glimpse into people’s everyday lives and the diversity of the country. That is what I hope to capture through this trip, the project and the blog. I’ve just spotted my third pheasant from the train window – it feels a bit like travelling back in time to a medieval Sunday afternoon fairy-tale film. Lovely creatures – I’ve never seen anything like it in Germany.

Once I arrive in Lviv, I take a marshrutka (minibus) to the hostel in the city centre, which goes surprisingly smoothly. Marshrutkas work just fine, however my skills in taking the right one, paying, and getting off at the right spot are questionable. First, I need to top up my Ukrainian SIM card (life here is even more difficult without the internet than it is back home). On the way to the shop, I almost stumble upon a soldiers’ funeral. So, like the other passers-by, I stop, kneel down as the fallen are driven past. After that, life on the street carries on as usual. Now a quick lunch; at 12.45 pm I have my first Ukrainian lesson with Svitlana.

As for my itinerary: I’ll be in Lviv for the next few days, focusing on improving my Ukrainian. On Tuesday I’m off to Vinnytsia, and on Wednesday my three-week project begins :)

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In Przemysl, ukrainischer Bahnhof

Angekommen in Lviv, vor der Oper

Borschtsch und Ingwer Tee – sehr lecker :)

It’s not often I meet people who can meet me where I am. Maybe fewer than 5 people in my entire life have truly given me that. I met one of them earlier this week. I was introduced to her by a new friend. We met at her home and spent an hour together. She learned about my quirks and recognized them with softness, depth, and love, with the level of awareness I’ve only wished others had. I really, really wanted that as a kid. I am starting to meet people who not only see me for who I am but also tell me, in words, why I am gifted. It is a shift. A much-needed one. I grew up without compliments or positive feedback. Through these new connections, I am remembering my power and gifts as I heal my inner child.

Yo no sé si has llevado la descomposición a otro nivel porque no se te nota, o al menos, no cuando miras las noticias.

Nos vamos yendo, ya sabes. Morirse a ratos puede ser una solución para no pudrirnos de raíz.

I know the advancement of AI is a recent and dramatic breakthrough in technology, and I know it’s quickly changing many aspects of life, but I really get tired of hearing about it all time.

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Dreams often seem too symbolic to be complete nonsense, but too nonsensical to be completely symbolic. I know there are evolutionary theories, like that dreams are primarily useful as threat simulations, efficiently transforming what would otherwise be mental downtime into “practice”. This approach could account for the fact that some of the most common dreams include being chased, showing up to school naked, or navigating physical/social problems in general. It could also account for the fact that dreaming seems to be a fairly widespread feature among animals. But those kind of dreams are only the lowest common denominator, plenty of people have surreal and complex dreams that lack an overt threat. At the very least, the threat in these kinds of dreams seem to be more subtle and psychological.

Normally, this is where Jung would come in, but I’m not as familiar with him as I’d like to be (and I’m skeptical of the aspects I do understand), so all I really have is my general experience to extrapolate from. One thing I’ve noticed about my dreams is this: they’re pretty good at modeling my actual behavior. As I started to think through examples of this, I realized something else: dreams, at least to me, feel very revealing, and very private, even given my relatively high threshold for vulnerability in anonymous writing. That being said, I’ll just say I’ve recorded dreams about previously unexperienced situations, forgot about them, experienced parallel real life situations months later, and then observed uncanny resemblances when comparing my dream behavior to reality. By that I mean specific emotional arcs almost point by point when my conscious self wasn’t sure how I would react. So, at most, I’d say my dreams seem predictive of my own thoughts and emotions— not to be confused with “prophetic”.

The fact dreams feel so vulnerable is interesting. To me, they seem like such a direct view into someone’s mind, free of distortion and presentation— writing on the other hand, like conversation, always contains a degree of performance, even when it is fully honest and vulnerable. As soon as a thought is observed, either by ourselves or (especially) by another, it’s tweaked in order to maintain coherence with the observer. “Coherence” and not necessarily “favor”; we want to be understood before anything else, even if being purposefully insulting or contrarian. We also want to be understood by ourselves, so each thought gets interpreted and altered according to our self-model, regardless of whether our self-model is dominantly positive or negative. Dreams lack both self-observation (save for liminal dreams, which are a whole other thing) and social-observation, which is possibly what leads to their “rawness”, and by extension their vulnerability. They may not be pure insight, but they do seem to have fewer reasons to “lie” about our underlying psychology. If that’s true, the honesty of dreams might be their most useful feature, at least in terms of self-reflection. If nothing else they’re fun experiences, a nice feature of life.

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An acquaintance I very likely won’t see ever again told me to “have a nice life” as we left today. “Thanks, I’ll try, you too.” That’s such a nice phrase when used outside the context of petty breakup texts. Part of me wants to set some kind of reminder well into old age to text him: “so, how was it?”

Of course, I’d likely be the only one to find that funny, he’d just be confused. That being said, I’m not sure I’d care, some people hit their max capacity of maturity later in life and then begin to gracefully regress towards the temperament of a carefree teenager.

Man: Do you smoke weed?

Me: No.

Man: Can I follow you on Instagram?

Me: I don’t have Instagram.

Man: Can I get your number?

Me: No.

Quebrei a promessa de não investir mais nenhum centavo em cursos na área de cinema ou teatro. E agora estou fazendo um “curso de reciclagem” em dramaturgia.

#notas #abr