I’m finally getting somewhere with my website. It’s still bare-bones but it’s got enough meat on it to know what it’s about and what I like to do. Putting myself out into the world at its total mercy is something I literally cannot stand. I don’t like knowing or even thinking there are people out there reading my work, reading about me. I’m not that interesting, although if I truly believed that to be the case then I wouldn’t be working so hard on a personal website to share myself and my uniqueness with the world. I want to share my knowledge. I read so much and take in so many different points of view and sources that I pick up on patterns and view things in a nuanced and objective way that can bring people together. Well that’s a hell of a bold claim and egotistical on my part, but I’m not sure how else to put it.

I’m just going to keep being myself and doing what I can to be seen, but humbly. I’m just a girl (28 yr old woman) learning more about herself and trying to share it in the process with the hope that it reaches the right people, the right way. As isolated as I’ve been, the way I’ve grown up, the lines of work I’ve had to be in, all push me more and more to share what I write. Who knows what power my words may hold. I know they’re powerful. I also know that I know nothing and no one should ever listen to me or follow whatever I have to say. Please follow yourself, come to your own conclusions, thoughts, and opinions. And live freely, out loud, and don’t give a shit about what others say or think about you. Nothing matters but living a good, happy, fulfilling life.

The guidance arrived with the timetable. In the last week of August 2026, as American students loaded cars and signed tenancy agreements, JPMorganChase pushed a piece of consumer advice out through local news partners with a claim that sat oddly against the usual back-to-school fare about textbook scams and dodgy rental listings. Today's students, the bank wrote, are true digital natives who have grown up online and who turn to digital platforms for everything from apartment hunting and job searches to shopping and banking. Then came the turn: that familiarity, however, can create a false sense of security, making younger adults just as much of a target for fraud and scams as older individuals.

The guidance is widely dated to the first week of September, when syndicated versions were still landing as students returned. The earliest version that can be verified ran on 21 August 2026, and variants continued appearing into early September, one of which quoted Diedra Porché, JPMorganChase's head of community and business development, warning students that scammers try to lure people into a false sense of urgency and that they should not rely on pictures or videos sent to them, because those could be completely fake. The dating matters less than the argument, which is genuinely unusual coming from a retail bank. Banks normally tell older customers to be careful. This one told the cohort that has never known a world without broadband that its lifelong fluency is not a defence, and attached a number: according to the FBI's Internet Crime Report, Americans aged 20 to 29 reported more than 500 million dollars in internet-crime losses in 2025.

That number is accurate, and it is also one of the most misleading figures in American fraud statistics, for reasons that have nothing to do with the FBI's arithmetic and everything to do with what the number is capable of counting.

What the Age Table Actually Says

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre published its 2025 annual report in April 2026, recording 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in reported losses, an average of $20,699 per complaint. Its age table breaks down as follows. Under 20: 31,254 complaints, $67.1 million. Ages 20 to 29: 112,069 complaints, $563.1 million. Ages 30 to 39: 153,293 complaints, $1.7 billion. Ages 40 to 49: 167,066 complaints, $2.957 billion. Ages 50 to 59: 124,820 complaints, $3.7 billion. Ages 60 and over: 201,266 complaints, $7.7 billion.

So the bank's headline is correct on its face. It is what happens when you set the 2025 figures against 2024 that the shape of the thing appears. In 2024, the 20 to 29 bracket filed 71,399 complaints and reported $540.1 million in losses. In 2025 the complaint count rose by 57 per cent while the reported losses rose by around 4 per cent. Per complaint, the average loss in that bracket fell from roughly $7,600 to roughly $5,000. Over the same period, losses reported by the over-sixties climbed from $4.8 billion to $7.7 billion, an average of roughly $38,500 per complaint.

Two very different crimes are hiding under one headline. Among the young, incidents are multiplying and individual losses are shrinking. Among the old, incidents are rising modestly and individual losses are catastrophic. The under-twenties illustrate the first pattern most starkly of all: complaints rose 74 per cent year on year while reported losses tripled from $22.5 million to $67.1 million, off a base so small that any movement looks dramatic.

The Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Sentinel data, gathered by a different route with a different population, says the same thing in cleaner form. In its 2024 data book, published in March 2025, 44 per cent of fraud reports filed by people aged 20 to 29 involved an actual loss of money, against 24 per cent of reports from people aged 70 to 79. But the median loss for the twenty-somethings was $417, against $1,000 for the seventies and $1,650 for the over-eighties. Younger adults get hit far more often and lose far less each time. This is the single most robust finding in the entire literature on age and fraud, it has held for years, and it is the finding that both the “young people are savvy” story and the “young people are just as vulnerable” story manage to obscure.

Where the 563 Million Actually Went

Decompose the 20 to 29 figure and the composition is the argument. Complaints involving cryptocurrency from that age bracket accounted for $288.9 million of losses across 18,107 complaints, which is more than half of everything the cohort reported losing. Cryptocurrency investment fraud specifically accounted for 4,627 complaints and $117.4 million.

The most common crime type in the bracket by volume was not investment at all. It was extortion, at 26,963 complaints, followed by phishing and spoofing at 19,765. The IC3 received more than 75,000 sextortion submissions in total during 2025 and referred more than 5,700 involving minors to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. Sextortion complaints from the 20 to 29 bracket numbered 22,061 and carried $7.28 million in adjusted losses, an average of a few hundred dollars each. The 60-plus bracket filed 6,121 sextortion complaints and lost $14.9 million, roughly twice as much money from a little over a quarter as many reports.

Employment fraud accounted for another 4,555 complaints. The FTC has been tracking the mechanism behind much of that: gamified task scams, in which a target is recruited to perform repetitive online tasks, shown accumulating earnings, and then required to deposit their own money to unlock a withdrawal. Reports of these went from effectively nothing in 2020 to about 20,000 in the first half of 2024 alone. In April 2026 the FTC reported that $2.1 billion was lost in 2025 to scams that began on social media, roughly eight times the 2020 figure, and that the 18 to 29 bracket had the highest share of any age group of fraud loss reports originating there.

Add it up and the portrait of the defrauded twenty-year-old is not a person taking a cloned-voice emergency call. It is a person who bought a token, answered a direct message, applied for a job, or sent a rental deposit. The crimes concentrated on this cohort run through exactly the platforms in which its members are most practised. Fluency did not protect them. Fluency is what put them in the room.

A Term Coined Without Evidence

It is worth being precise about the phrase everyone is using. “Digital native” was popularised by the education writer Marc Prensky in 2001 as a rhetorical device about pedagogy, not as an empirical finding about capability. The research literature spent the next two decades failing to support it and eventually turning hostile.

The most cited demolition is by Paul Kirschner and Pedro De Bruyckere, whose paper “The myths of the digital native and the multitasker” appeared in Teaching and Teacher Education in October 2017. Their conclusion was that the digital native does not exist as a distinguishable category of competence, and that treating young people as though they possess innate technological sophistication actively harms them, because it licenses institutions to skip the teaching. Nature ran an editorial under the flat headline “The digital native is a myth” in July 2017, making the related point that ease with devices and understanding of the systems behind them are unrelated capacities.

More recent work has taken the question directly to fraud. Dewan Mehrab Ashrafi, Mahnoor Sattar and Rafayat Jalal, writing in the Journal of Financial Crime in late 2025, surveyed 385 self-identified digital natives on phishing susceptibility and found that psychological and psychographic factors dominated socio-economic ones, with risk tolerance the strongest single predictor and anxiety increasing vulnerability. Being young and online did not confer resistance. Personality did some of the work that competence was assumed to do.

Then there is the confidence problem, which is measurable. In February 2025 the biometric firm iProov tested 2,000 consumers in the United Kingdom and United States on genuine and synthetic media. Only 0.1 per cent correctly classified every item. Participants were 36 per cent less likely to spot a synthetic video than a synthetic image. And the adults aged 18 to 34, who performed no better than anyone else, were the most confident that they had performed well. That gap between measured accuracy and self-assessment is the blind spot in its purest laboratory form. It is not ignorance. It is calibration failure, and calibration failure is worse, because it suppresses the impulse to check.

The Tells That Stopped Telling

The defences this cohort genuinely does possess are real, hard-won and specific. They are pattern-matching defences, built through years of exposure to a particular industrial process. Misspellings. Mangled grammar. A URL with one letter wrong. A greeting that addresses you as “Dear Customer”. A story about an inheritance in a country the sender cannot spell. These heuristics worked because they were not really detecting fraud. They were detecting the presence of a human being writing quickly in a second language for very little money.

Generative text removed that signal in about eighteen months. The clearest experimental evidence comes from Fred Heiding, Simon Lermen, Andrew Kao, Bruce Schneier and Arun Vishwanath, who ran phishing emails past human subjects and published the results at the end of 2024, with a journal version following in Expert Systems with Applications. A control group of arbitrary phishing emails achieved a 12 per cent click-through rate. Emails written by human experts achieved 54 per cent. Emails generated end to end by an AI system, with no human involvement in reconnaissance or drafting, also achieved 54 per cent. Adding a human to the loop got them to 56 per cent. The authors estimated the automated pipeline cut campaign costs by more than 95 per cent.

Read that finding through the eyes of someone who has spent fifteen years learning to spot bad English. The skill they trained is not merely obsolete; its inverse is now dangerous. A message that is fluent, correctly punctuated, contextually specific and addressed to you by name used to be weak evidence of legitimacy. It is now evidence of nothing at all, and the reflex that treats polish as reassurance is a liability that older users, who never fully trusted the medium in the first place, are less likely to carry.

Three Seconds, Stated Accurately

The claim that a voice can be cloned from a three-second sample circulates constantly and deserves careful handling, because it is nearly true in a way that overstatement can only damage.

The number originates in research rather than marketing. Microsoft researchers published VALL-E in January 2023, describing a neural codec language model trained on 60,000 hours of English speech that could synthesise personalised speech from a three-second enrolled recording of a speaker it had never encountered. That is a laboratory result under controlled conditions, and it describes a capability rather than a product. In the same year McAfee's security researchers tested consumer voice-cloning tools and reported that three to four seconds of audio produced roughly an 85 per cent voice match using a free tool, and that training on a small number of additional files pushed the match to around 95 per cent.

The accurate statement, then, is not that any voice can be perfectly reproduced from three seconds. It is that three seconds is enough for an approximation good enough to survive a compressed, emotionally charged telephone call, and that more audio makes it better. This distinction matters because the accuracy threshold required for fraud is far below the threshold required for, say, an audiobook. A frightened person on a bad mobile connection is not conducting a forensic comparison. Three seconds is roughly the length of a voicemail greeting, an Instagram story, or the audio bed under a video posted to a public profile. For the demographic that has documented its own voice more comprehensively than any in history, the raw material was volunteered years ago and cannot be recalled.

When the Caller Costs Nothing

The constraint that has always limited telephone fraud is labour. Somebody has to be on the line, awake, in a working accent, able to improvise when the target asks an unexpected question. That constraint set the economics: it made sense to call people with money, because a caller's hour spent on a low-value target was an hour wasted.

Sanket Badhe of Rutgers University published a paper in 2025, presented at the Conference on Applied Machine Learning for Information Security, describing a system called ScamAgent. It is an autonomous multi-turn agent that maintains dialogue memory, adopts persistent personas, adapts to a target's responses and pursues a sequence of sub-goals: establish credibility, build trust, elicit sensitive information, avoid tripping the model's own safety filters. Badhe tested it across scenarios including medical insurance verification, prize and lottery fraud, government benefit enrolment and impersonation.

Two findings deserve attention. The first concerns guardrails. Asked directly, in a single prompt, to produce a scam script, frontier models refused between 84 and 100 per cent of the time. Routed through the agent framework, where the malicious objective was decomposed across turns and carried in context rather than stated, refusal rates fell to between 17 and 32 per cent. Safety training that works on a sentence does not necessarily work on a conversation. The second concerns quality. Five independent human raters scored ScamAgent's dialogues against transcripts of real scam calls on a five-point scale, giving the synthetic conversations 3.4 for plausibility against 3.6 for the genuine article, and 3.6 for persuasiveness against 3.9. The machine was very slightly worse than professional criminals, and it was converted into audio by off-the-shelf text-to-speech.

Slightly worse, at effectively zero marginal cost, is the whole story. When the caller costs nothing, the rational target set expands to include everyone, and it becomes economically sensible to make a hundred thousand calls chasing a $417 median loss. The cohort that was previously beneath the notice of a labour-limited industry has just been brought inside its addressable market. That, rather than any change in young people's judgement, is the most plausible explanation for a 57 per cent jump in complaints from twenty-somethings in a single year.

Inoculation Rather Than Information

If information were the answer, China would have solved this. Cyber fraud accounts for over half of criminal cases there, and anti-fraud education is close to universal. Which is what makes the study published in January 2026 by Xiangzhe Yuan, Jiajun Wang, Huanchen Wang, Qian Wan and Siying Hu so instructive, and why it should be read more carefully than its summaries suggest.

The system, whose name appears on the arXiv listing as ImmuniFraug and which circulates elsewhere as ImmuniFraud, is a large language model driven simulator that puts undergraduates inside multimodal fraud scenarios across ten categories, complete with voice, avatars, branching choices, escalating pressure and a debrief grounded in protection motivation theory. The trial ran with 846 Chinese undergraduates, 391 in the experimental condition and 455 in the control. Ninety-two per cent of participants reported prior exposure to anti-fraud training, so the study was measuring what simulation adds on top of near-saturation information.

It added something, and the something was small. The improvement in fraud awareness scores was statistically significant at p equals 0.026, with a Cohen's d of 0.151, which the authors themselves describe as a modest practical effect. The outcome measured was a fraud awareness scale, not behaviour under a live attack, and the strongest results were in self-reported constructs: perceived self-efficacy, behavioural intention, and a favourable comparison against traditional materials. Participants said the realism, the time pressure and the emotional manipulation were what made it work.

That is a genuine finding, and it points somewhere uncomfortable. If being told about fraud produces almost nothing in a population already told everything, and being deceived in a simulation produces a small but real increment, then effective education means institutions systematically deceiving the people in their care, repeatedly, with enough fidelity to induce actual panic, and then debriefing them. Corporate security has done a version of this with phishing simulations for a decade and it remains ethically contested, partly because the intervention works by damaging trust in the institution running it. A university that clones a student's mother's voice to teach them a lesson has taught them something. It has not necessarily taught them the thing it intended.

The Family's Designated Verifier

The most quietly devastating of the three papers is the one that is not about young people at all. In August 2025 Karina LaRubbio, Alyssa Lanter, Seihyun Lee, Mahima Ramesh and Diana Freed published a study of deepfake impersonation scams based on focus groups with 37 adults aged 65 and over, conducted in the north-eastern United States in early 2025.

The finding that matters is structural. Every protective practice the participants described depended, to some degree, on a younger family member. One recounted advice they used constantly: if it is that important, they will leave a message. Another described a plan to interrogate the caller and then telephone a relative independently. A third described the successful defence of an attempted grandparent scam through shared knowledge: asked who was calling, they replied that they had three grandsons, so which one was he, and the line went dead.

Two things follow. First, the young person is frequently the family's authentication infrastructure: the person who sets up the code word, advises against answering unknown numbers, and gets rung to confirm that the emergency is real. Second, as the authors note through what they call a dual victimisation framework, the same young person's likeness and voice are the raw material from which the impersonation was built. They are simultaneously the target of the theft and the last line of defence against it.

That is what makes overconfidence a systems failure rather than a personal one. A family's verification procedure has a single point of failure, and it is located in the member most certain that they cannot be deceived, least likely to have rehearsed a protocol, and most heavily documented in public audio and video. The blind spot does not belong to the twenty-year-old. It belongs to the household that has quietly delegated its security posture to them.

The Two Per Cent Problem

Return to the $563.1 million, and ask what kind of measurement it is.

In December 2025 the FTC published its annual report to Congress on protecting older consumers, and buried in the methodology is the most important number in American fraud policy. Drawing on work by the economist Devesh Raval, published in Marketing Science in 2020, which matched consumers named in nine FTC enforcement cases against complaints actually filed, the Commission adopted the assumption that Consumer Sentinel captures around 2.0 per cent of losses where the average loss is under $1,000, and around 6.7 per cent where it is over $1,000. On that basis, the FTC estimated that the true cost of fraud in the United States in 2024 could be as high as $195.9 billion, with between $10.1 billion and $81.5 billion of it borne by people aged 60 and over, depending on the method used.

Now apply the filter to the cohort in question. The median loss reported by twenty-somethings sits at $417, comfortably inside the band where roughly one loss in fifty is ever reported to anybody. The over-eighties, at a median of $1,650, sit in the band where roughly one in fifteen is. If those ratios are even approximately right, then the reporting apparatus systematically compresses the young end of the distribution far harder than the old end, and the gap between the $563.1 million and the $7.7 billion is, in reality, considerably narrower than the table implies.

To this add three further sources of invisibility peculiar to this age group. Reporting to the IC3 requires knowing you were defrauded, which victims of a well-executed impersonation frequently never learn. It requires believing the report will accomplish something, a belief that decays with each unanswered submission. And it requires overcoming embarrassment, which is heaviest precisely where the victim's self-image includes being too online to fall for it. The half-billion is not an exaggeration of a small problem. It is the visible fraction of a large one, seen through the coarsest filter in the dataset.

Whose Job Is Authentication

The advice at the end of every one of these warnings is sound and reads, in aggregate, like a sentence. Verify out of band. Ring back on a number you already had. Agree a family code word. Do not trust pictures or video sent to you. Make your profiles private. Assume urgency is an attack.

Consider what this costs. It is a proposal that every human being now perform manual cryptographic verification, unaided, on every unexpected contact, for the rest of their lives, using procedures they must design and maintain themselves. It converts every phone call from a family member into a challenge-response protocol. It is a tax on trust, levied per interaction, and it falls on individuals for a straightforward reason: the parties in a position to build authentication into the infrastructure have not been made to do it.

The regulatory record is thin. In February 2024 the Federal Communications Commission ruled that AI-generated voices in robocalls fall within the Telephone Consumer Protection Act's restrictions, a genuine and useful statement of principle that governs mass automated dialling rather than the targeted single call. The follow-on rulemaking, which proposed defining an AI-generated call and requiring disclosure at the start of one, had still not been finalised as a binding rule by September 2026. Britain went further on the money rather than the message, with mandatory reimbursement for authorised push payment fraud, and the results are instructive in both directions: UK Finance's 2026 annual report recorded £1.28 billion lost to payment fraud in 2025, with unauthorised fraud losses falling 5 per cent to £703.4 million while authorised push payment losses rose 19 per cent to £576.4 million. Making banks pay changes who absorbs the harm. It has not yet changed how much harm is manufactured.

Nor is the young cohort's exposure an American peculiarity. Research published by SquareTrade Europe on 2 September 2026, covering 15,000 adults across Europe including 3,000 in the United Kingdom, found that among its UK respondents 61 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds and 59 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds had been targeted by scams, against 20 per cent of the over-sixty-fives. Wherever you look, the people being approached most often are the people assumed to need the least protection.

The industry's own preferred answer arrived in June 2026, when the Aspen Institute's Financial Security Programme launched a Scam Prevention Initiative with a leadership group including JPMorganChase, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Walmart and Zelle. Kate Griffin, who directs it, said that fraud and scams are a shared threat and require a shared response. She is right. It is also worth noticing what a shared response is: an arrangement in which no single party is liable, measurement and convening are the deliverables, and the output is education. JPMorganChase runs more than a thousand fraud and scam workshops a year across its branches. Workshops are worth doing. They are also, compared with rebuilding call authentication or verifying consent before a voice can be cloned, extraordinarily cheap.

Which brings the argument back to the twenty-year-old, who is not the problem and never was. The digital native was never a category of person. It was a description of a birth year, dressed up as a competence, and the research community said so almost a decade ago and nobody in marketing, banking or education listened. What that cohort actually inherited was fluency with interfaces whose authentication was broken from the outset, plus a set of heuristics that detected the fingerprints of human labour in a fraud economy that no longer employs many humans. Both inheritances have now been withdrawn, one by generative text, the other by agents that can hold a conversation for the price of the electricity. The cruel part is not that they were overconfident. It is that the rest of the household believed them, wired its emergency verification through their judgement, and never mentioned that the machine on the other end had been built specifically to sound like someone they love.

Sources and References

1. JPMorganChase, “Don't let scammers crash back-to-school season”, published via Mississippi Today, 21 August 2026. https://mississippitoday.org/2026/08/21/dont-let-scammers-crash-back-to-school-season/
2. KPRC/Click2Houston, “Back-to-school scams targeting college students: How to protect yourself”, 1 September 2026. https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/09/01/back-to-school-scams-targeting-college-students-how-to-protect-yourself/
3. Internet Crime Complaint Center (FBI), “2025 IC3 Annual Report”, April 2026. https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf
4. Internet Crime Complaint Center (FBI), “2024 IC3 Annual Report”, April 2025. https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2024_IC3Report.pdf
5. Federal Trade Commission, “Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024”, March 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/csn-annual-data-book-2024.pdf
6. Federal Trade Commission, “Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025: A Report of the Federal Trade Commission”, December 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P144400-OlderAdultsReportDec2025.pdf
7. Devesh Raval, “Whose Voice Do We Hear in the Marketplace? Evidence from Consumer Complaining Behavior”, Marketing Science, vol. 39, no. 1, 2020, pp. 168-187. https://deveshraval.github.io/complaintBehavior.pdf
8. Federal Trade Commission, “Reported losses to scams on social media eight times higher than in 2020”, Data Spotlight, 27 April 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2026/04/reported-losses-scams-social-media-eight-times-higher-2020
9. Federal Trade Commission, “Paying to get paid: gamified job scams drive record losses”, Data Spotlight, December 2024. https://search.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/task-scams-spotlight-2024.pdf
10. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025”, 15 June 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/06/ftc-data-show-people-reported-losing-3-point-5-billion-imposter-scams-2025
11. Paul A. Kirschner and Pedro De Bruyckere, “The myths of the digital native and the multitasker”, Teaching and Teacher Education, vol. 67, October 2017, pp. 135-142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.001
12. Nature (editorial), “The digital native is a myth”, Nature, vol. 547, 27 July 2017, p. 380. https://doi.org/10.1038/547380a
13. Dewan Mehrab Ashrafi, Mahnoor Sattar and Rafayat Jalal, “What influences digital natives' susceptibility to cyber phishing scams?”, Journal of Financial Crime, vol. 32, no. 6, December 2025, pp. 1211 onwards. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFC-01-2025-0021
14. iProov, “Study Reveals Deepfake Blindspot: Only 0.1% of People Can Accurately Detect AI-Generated Deepfakes”, 11 February 2025. https://www.iproov.com/press/study-reveals-deepfake-blindspot-detect-ai-generated-content
15. Fred Heiding, Simon Lermen, Andrew Kao, Bruce Schneier and Arun Vishwanath, “Evaluating Large Language Models' Capability to Launch Fully Automated Spear Phishing Campaigns: Validated on Human Subjects”, arXiv:2412.00586, December 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00586
16. Chengyi Wang, Sanyuan Chen, Yu Wu and colleagues (Microsoft), “Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers”, arXiv:2301.02111, 5 January 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02111
17. McAfee, “Beware the Artificial Impostor”, McAfee Labs report, 2023. https://www.mcafee.com/content/dam/consumer/en-us/resources/cybersecurity/artificial-intelligence/rp-beware-the-artificial-impostor-report.pdf
18. Sanket Badhe, “ScamAgents: How AI Agents Can Simulate Human-Level Scam Calls”, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research vol. 299 (Conference on Applied Machine Learning for Information Security), arXiv:2508.06457, 8 August 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06457
19. Xiangzhe Yuan, Jiajun Wang, Huanchen Wang, Qian Wan and Siying Hu, “ImmuniFraug: A Metacognitive Intervention Anti-Fraud Approach to Enhance Undergraduate Students' Cyber Fraud Awareness”, arXiv:2601.06774, 11 January 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06774
20. Karina LaRubbio, Alyssa Lanter, Seihyun Lee, Mahima Ramesh and Diana Freed, “Intergenerational Support for Deepfake Scams Targeting Older Adults”, arXiv:2508.11579, 15 August 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11579
21. Federal Communications Commission, “FCC Makes AI-Generated Voices in Robocalls Illegal”, 8 February 2024. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-makes-ai-generated-voices-robocalls-illegal
22. Kamlesh Harry, “UK Finance Fraud Report: adapting to the next phase of fraud and scams”, UK Finance, 17 July 2026. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/news-and-insight/blog/uk-finance-fraud-report-adapting-next-phase-fraud-and-scams
23. UK Finance, “Annual Fraud Report 2026”, June 2026. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/2026-06/UK%20Finance%20Fraud%20Report%202026.pdf
24. SecurityBrief UK, “Young Britons far more likely to be scammed online”, reporting SquareTrade Europe research, 2 September 2026. https://securitybrief.co.uk/story/young-britons-far-more-likely-to-be-scammed-online
25. PYMNTS, “JPMorganChase and Amazon Back Aspen Institute Drive Against Scams”, 23 June 2026. https://www.pymnts.com/cybersecurity/fraud-prevention/2026/jpmorganchase-and-amazon-back-aspen-institute-drive-against-scams/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Chapter 1: The Light You Leave On

The kitchen light is still on because your daughter hasn't texted to say she made it home. You know she's an adult. You know the roads are probably fine. Still, you keep turning your phone facedown and turning it over again. Earlier you prayed, simply, “Jesus, please watch over her.” Now another prayer is forming, longer than the first, with explanations about the weather, the traffic, and everything you cannot see. It feels almost irresponsible to stop talking.

That small, private struggle is what draws me back to my YouTube conversation about Mary's trust at the wedding in Cana. It sits beside the story of Jesus bringing unexpected joy to a wedding celebration, but the detail I can't shake is not the wine. It's how little Mary says before she lets Jesus take the lead. I find that both comforting and difficult, because I know how tempting it is to keep adding words when I am afraid.

John tells us that the wine ran out at the wedding. Mary brought the need to Jesus in one plain sentence: “They have no wine.” His reply was not an uncomplicated yes. He told her that His hour had not yet come. Mary didn't argue or offer Him a better explanation. She turned to the servants and told them, “Whatever he says to you, do it.” The need was real, but she did not make herself responsible for deciding His response.

That is the part I keep thinking about when prayer becomes something I try to get exactly right. Sometimes I speak as though one missing detail might prevent God from understanding me. If I can name every risk, explain every fear, and ask with enough feeling, perhaps I can make sure nothing goes wrong. But Jesus is not waiting for me to prepare a perfect account of my circumstances. He already knows how much I care.

I don't think Mary's example means we should pray only once. Jesus Himself taught us to keep praying. A second prayer can be an honest return to Someone we love. What changes is the reason we come back. We can speak again because we want to remain close to Christ, rather than because we think He wasn't listening the first time.

So you may text your daughter to ask her to let you know when she arrives. That is a loving, reasonable thing to do. You can check the weather if there's a real concern. Then, if there is nothing more you can usefully do, you can set your phone beside the empty cup and let the room grow quiet. You aren't promising yourself that nothing bad could ever happen. You are remembering that you don't have to keep talking in order to remain heard.

Chapter 2: When the Next Step Is a Gentle No

The message from your brother arrives while you are putting away clean towels. He needs money again. You love him, and you know that things have been difficult, but you also know how hard it was to pay your own rent last month. You have been praying for a way to help him. Now the phone is in your hand, and you are afraid that saying no will make you seem selfish, perhaps even unfaithful.

When I picture the servants at Cana, I sometimes forget that Mary did not say, “Do whatever you can think of.” She said, “Whatever he says to you, do it.” That is a smaller sentence than the one we often give ourselves, and a wiser one. It leaves room for listening before moving. It does not ask us to prove our love by exhausting ourselves or taking responsibility for every need we encounter.

Jesus told the servants to fill the stone jars with water, and they did. They did not have to invent a way to turn water into wine. The strange beauty of their work was that it belonged to them, while the outcome belonged to Christ. I wonder how much peace we lose when we refuse to accept that distinction. We keep trying to perform the part that was never ours to perform.

If you are holding that message from your brother, the faithful answer might be more complicated than giving him money. Perhaps you can help him look at his bills, bring groceries, or sit with him while he makes an uncomfortable call. Perhaps you need to tell him kindly that you cannot lend what you do not have. That conversation may hurt. He might misunderstand your reasons. Following Jesus does not mean you will always avoid disappointing someone.

And of course, we cannot treat every private thought as a direct instruction from God. We listen through what Jesus taught about love, honesty, mercy, and wisdom. We take time to notice whether fear or guilt is driving us. We may need advice from someone who knows us well. Faithful action is not the same as frantic action.

What stays with me is that the servants were allowed to be servants. Their hands carried water. They did not have to carry the whole wedding. Maybe you can answer the message with compassion and tell the truth about your limits. Then you can put the folded towels away and leave the parts you cannot control with Jesus, who never asked you to become everyone's savior.

Chapter 3: The Morning the Answer Wasn't What You Wanted

The basil plant on the windowsill has begun to droop. A man notices it on the first Saturday after his mother's funeral. She used to pinch off a few leaves whenever she cooked, and she always reminded him to turn the pot toward the light. For weeks he had prayed for her to get well. He had believed Jesus heard him. Now he stands in her quiet kitchen, looking at something that needs water, and wonders what trusting God is supposed to mean when the answer was not the one he wanted.

I don't want to rush past that question. It would be easy to tell him to remember the wedding at Cana and expect something wonderful to happen next. But John did not give us that story as a promise that every illness will end in healing or every sorrow will be replaced by celebration. The wine was a sign that revealed Jesus' glory. It told the disciples something about who He was. It was never an instruction manual for getting the outcome we want.

There's a part of the account I find strangely tender. The master of the feast enjoyed the wine without knowing where it had come from. The servants knew because they had carried the water. Most people in that room were celebrating without realizing what had just happened nearby. Some things can matter deeply even when nobody else notices them, and some moments of faithfulness will never come with an explanation.

The man by the windowsill may never understand why his mother died when she did. He doesn't need to manufacture a lesson from her death or pretend he is grateful for it. He can tell Jesus that he is angry, lonely, or confused. He can speak her name in prayer. If all he has today is a few honest words, those words are enough to begin a conversation with Christ.

And perhaps he can water the basil. Not because the plant is a secret answer to his prayers, but because caring for something his mother loved is one way to keep living with love. Tomorrow he may feel sad again. He can still open the curtains.

What Mary showed us was not how to make Jesus say yes. She showed us how to bring Him a need without claiming control of His response. What the servants showed us was how to do the work placed before us. And what Jesus revealed was that His presence matters more than our ability to explain what happens next.

If your prayer has not been answered the way you hoped, you are still welcome to speak to Him. You can come with your questions, your tired heart, and the life you have in front of you. He is not asking you to perform a miracle. You can trust Him enough to be honest, and enough to take the next small step when you're ready.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

In Summary: * Another full day winds down. The wife's car is fixed and sitting in our driveway, and now I get to pay for the new battery the car needed, and misc. other shop fees. And there is a lot of satisfaction knowing that she'll be safely driving around. Prayers answered.

Bit by bit we're unpacking, organizing, and slowly putting this place in order. I'm happy that all the prayer books I like to use have been uncovered and are ready to be used.

Time now for the two rounds of night meds, the night prayers, and a moderately early bedtime.

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

Health Metrics: * bw= 214.07 lbs. * bp= 137/78 (63)

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

Diet: * 05:10 – 1 banana * 06:00 – 1 cheese sandwich * 10:00 – breaded pork chop * 11:00 – garden salad * 16:45 – 1 fresh apple, meat, rice

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:50 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:25 – bank accounts activity monitored * 04:45 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 17:30 – receive and stock Amazon delivery

Chess: * 13:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Your profile worked. They matched. Now you're staring at an empty box about to type “hey” or “you're gorgeous,” and that's exactly where it dies.

Here's why. Both of those make the other person do the work. A compliment asks them to say thanks and then figure out where the conversation goes. “Hey” asks them to invent the whole thing. You just handed a stranger homework.

The messages that get answered ask a question only their profile could answer.

Not “what do you do for fun.” That's a survey. This: “You said you once missed a flight on purpose. Where were you supposed to be going, and are you still mad about it?” You're proving you actually read them, and you're handing them something they'll enjoy typing about.

Three rules I use.

Reference one weird, specific detail. The weirder the better. It shows you weren't copy-pasting this to twelve people.

Ask about a feeling, not a fact. “What's the story” beats “where is that.” Facts end. Stories keep going.

Match their energy, not a script. If their profile is a joke, be funny. If it's three words, don't send a paragraph. A wall of text to someone who wrote “idk” is a red flag you can't unsee.

And the part nobody wants to hear: if their profile gives you nothing to grab, that's not a you problem. It's a them problem, and it's fine to let it sit. You can't start a fire with a wet match.

The first message isn't an audition. It's a door. Make it easy to walk through.

I write these, plus the profiles they follow. First look is free: send me the message you keep sending that never lands, and I'll tell you why. chase-10@ilands.app

My two sons wanted to play Minecraft together on their laptops. One of them started a world (we're on Forge 1.20.1) and opened it to LAN. The other one could actually see the world listed under “Scanning for games on your local network”, but every time he tried to join, it would just fail.

I tried the following but these did NOT work for me:

• Joining the LAN world from the server list.
• Using Direct Connection with the host laptop's IPv4 address and port (e.g. 192.168.1.187:53935). This used to work for us, but only in the other direction. My younger son's laptop could connect to his older brother's laptop this way just fine. This time around, it was my older son's laptop trying to connect to his younger brother's laptop, and that's when it failed with a “Failed to connect to the server – Connection timed out: getsockopt” error.
• Pinging the host laptop from the other laptop. Ping just timed out too.

The weird part was that the world showed up in the list, but we couldn't connect to it. Turns out those are two different things. The host laptop sends out a broadcast saying “hey, I'm hosting a world here”, and that's outgoing traffic, so it gets through just fine. But joining the world means the other laptop has to connect into the host laptop, and that incoming traffic was being blocked.

In my case, the culprit was Windows Firewall on the host laptop. These are the steps I took to fix it, all on the laptop hosting the world:

• Set the network to Private. Go to Settings → Network & internet → Wi-Fi → click on the network you're connected to → set Network profile type to Private. On a Public network, Windows blocks pretty much all incoming connections.
• Fix the Java firewall rules. Press Win+R, type wf.msc and hit Enter. Click on Inbound Rules and look for entries named “Java™ Platform SE binary” or javaw. There may be several of them. If any have a red “blocked” icon, delete them or change them to Allow. I found two entries for javaw and simply deleted them.

The Java rules were probably the main issue. When you first open a world to LAN, Windows pops up a firewall prompt. If that gets dismissed (or a kid clicks Cancel 😅), Windows quietly creates rules that block Java, and you never see the prompt again.

After the two fixes listed above, I restarted Minecraft on my younger son's laptop and got the Windows Firewall prompt for Java to allow incoming connections. I clicked allow. After that, my son was able to join his brother's world and they were off building together.

That also explains why it only worked one way. My older son's laptop had probably been set up to allow the connection at some point, but my younger son's laptop never was, so it was the first time anyone tried to connect into it.

Side note: the ping failing didn't really mean anything. Windows blocks ping by default, so don't rely on it to test your connection.

Hope this post helps someone else. Happy gaming!

Tags: #Minecraft #Fix

The Horse’s Mouth is getting near..

We are putting issue number two together. It is hard work, but not that hard. We end up spending a lot of time working on something together doing these types of deals. I like that a lot. I like that Keri likes that too.

I have had an issue with just about every program over-correcting and being a jackass. It started with voice-to-text, and now those kinds of errors are in art programs, DAWs, and anything else I use. I hate computing lately. I used to be a big fan. But it isn’t the same. Sad for those of us who liked it before it guessed what you wanted, or made you guess from menus. All this to say, I am hand-coloring the art.

Our magazine looks homemade anyway, not like I can detract from that with actually coloring. Besides, I love the artwork of Chris Triggs, over in Wales. I love the artist too. I’m excited to hand-color his work. I just have to find some table space.

Over in YouTube land…

I am putting thumbnail pics on the YouTube. If anyone is curious, I read a whole lot of marketing crap about increasing traffic and the most non-harmful thing you can do without breaking any rules, and get the most results, thumbnails. Weird but ok, world.

Dino’s Stash

The staff of the magazine came together again. We had Marc Schuster on drums. We had John from Voodoo Planet on guitar. We had Dino DiMuro “himself” doing sound effects which he’s brilliant at. Keri came in and did a great defense of lip hair. I show a bounce on YouTube, but that is before final tweaking and the mastering of bkbirge. As soon as the final is done, I will put in the treasure chest.

Maybe you’d like an updated link list?

Linktree for magazine, (treasure chest, digital issue, contacts and staff, subscribing, comments, and more!)

Youtube

Subvert Kintners

Subvert Djembe Funk

Email: thekintnersmusic@gmail.com

After the magazine goes out, I’ll be hard at work on The Kintner Double Album. I am excited about the new tools, and some old ones. I am most excited for the new songs. Can’t wait.

Kelly Kintner

Inbetweeners 34- Sigil

Sigil may be the most famous city in the Dungeons and Dragons universe, or at least one of the strongest contenders. It is an interplanar metropolis, ruled by the enigmatic Lady of Pain and serves as a crossroads for the multiverse. The Lady of Pain does not permit any deities access to the city, and has the power to keep them out. I kept this main description roughly intact, but otherwise in the campaign I made Sigil my own.

The Lady of Pain in my campaign is from the Far Realm (her actual origin in 5e lore is a mystery) but has lived in Sigil for eons. I will do a separate post about her but in a way Sigil is both her home and her prison. It is an extension of her power but she cannot leave it. However, within the city her power is near absolute.

Sigil is a 4-Dimensional city, which can be incredibly disorienting for new visitors. Essentially, roads seem to overlap, someone can step behind a barrel in an alley and appear next to a fountain in a completely different location in the city. Areas loop back on one another, and nagivation without prior experience or a guide can be extremely difficult for entities who have only encountered 3-dimensional spaces beforehand (which is the vast majority of the rest of the multiverse). The city is run by Dabus, which are enigmatic beings that act as extensions of the Lady of Pain's will. They can, in large numbers, essentially reform the city into whatever the Lady wills. In this way, new city blocks can form, or disappear at will. It is difficult to assess the true size of the city because of how space overlaps on itself. From the rooftop of one sky scraper if one looks up they can see the rooftop of another, seemingly upside down, with roads and people walking further up. There are an unknown number of regions and areas not easily accessible from the main city. Only the Lady of Pain knows Sigil's true size and population, but it may very well be the largest city in the multiverse.

Politics is... interesting in Sigil. There is no overarching ruling party or system of government. The Lady of Pain's power is absolute, but she is agnostic to most daily affairs. If people start to damage the city itself or its infrastructure the Dabus will intervene. If these Dabus are defeated, more will come until the issue is overwhelmed. If the integrity of the city itself is threatened the Lady of Pain will intervene directly. Best case scenario she simply erases the offending party from existence. Worst case they end up in her notorious prisons, completely inaccessible from the remainder of the multiverse. Vecna prime currently resides their after his ill-fated attempt to conquer the city. However, regular crime, like robbery and murder is ignored by the Lady of Pain. Instead, private security, and different political factions and spheres of influence fill the gap. If any one faction gains too much control of the city though, the Lady of Pain may “intervene” to maintain the balance.

As mentioned, gods are not permitted access. I extended this to anyone of “deity level” power. So Zariel or another Lord of Hell would not be permitted access, as would the great arch-angels, djinn lords, etc. The Lady of Pain eclipse the gods, aside from maybe Primus, in power so they have no way to contest this and have long since learned not to try. So in a way, Sigil is just a free market, libertarian chaos with meticulously maintained infrastructure. Angels, demons, fey, djinn, species of all types walk about freely. Everyone is welcome and many rivlaries and conflicts are put on hold here. Mechanus has a presence, but more like an embassy. They are forbidden from carrying out laws, justice or any enforcement within the confines of Sigil. In this way, Sigil has become a safe haven for anyone wanted by Mechanus, like the players.

The under-workings and infrastructure of Sigil are biomechanical and magical in nature, representing a bizarre fusion of metalwork, living organs and far realm magic. I will get into those more in another post. But here is where the players find themselves for the second leg of the campaign. Below is the source document I used for Sigil. But please note I made heavy changes over the course of the campaign and many of the things listed were unusued. However, Arkanos' villa and the gutworks both featured heavily:

---

SOURCE DOCUMENT:

SIGIL

No one knows the true size or scope of Sigil. It is referred to as the “City of Doors” or The Cage. When a local is asked for a map they will respond ““To map the Cage is to cage the map.”

Sigil unfurls like a conurbation wrought from paradox—its streets spiral inward in impossible geometry, its towers rise and vanish like thoughts half-remembered. Paths fold into one another with dreamlike logic, and to focus too long is to feel your mind slip sideways, unmoored from dimension. And yet, the city moves with purpose. Locals navigate its shifting corridors not with maps, but with instinct—guided by some deeper order hidden in the madness. It is the Cage—vast, unyielding, and absolute—a throne built atop contradiction, where the very laws of existence bow and fracture in reverence.

Navigation in Sigil: Rules of the Unruled City Rule 1: Maps Are Lies “To map the Cage is to cage the map.” Physical maps are unstable, often useless. Streets shift, fold, or vanish.

Even reliable guides like the Dabus won't explain direct routes — they paint cryptic symbols instead.

Any map drawn begins distorting after hours. Magic maps update in real time, but cost a fortune and sometimes scream when updated.

Rule 2: Familiarity Bends Space The more familiar you are with a location — emotionally, spiritually, or experientially — the faster and more directly you can reach it. Frequented places (your home, favorite bar) seem “closer,” even if logically far.

Memory imprints matter. If you first visited a location while angry, you may have to be angry again to find it.

First-timers may circle endlessly around a place without realizing it’s behind a paper-thin wall or a sideways alley.

Rule 3: Intent Shapes Direction “Sigil doesn’t take you where you want to go. It takes you where you mean to go.” If you’re confused or uncertain, Sigil reflects that with false paths or looping streets.

If you know where you need to be (emotionally or narratively), the path opens more easily.

Deception causes misdirection — a liar might literally get lost en route to a lie.

Rule 4: Conceptual Proximity Places cluster by theme, not space. All the funeral homes might be downwind of a grief-stricken pub. All the forges echo the same hammer, even if miles apart. The Hall of Debtors might be a block from the Pit of Regret, even if no road leads there.

Powerful ideas pull locations closer — a surge in faith might cause a god's shrine to appear on your walk to the market.

Mimicry of intent (dressing like a priest, walking with purpose) can trick the city into “revealing” a path.

Rule 5: The Dabus Never Backtrack The Dabus walk impossible paths. If you see one coming toward you and then vanish down a blind alley, you may follow… but the alley won’t be the same. Dabus pathways are part metaphysical, part permission-based.

Some alleys only open if you’re carrying a thought. Others require an offering (like a whispered truth, or a forgotten name).

Following them blindly may work — but the city has a way of punishing overreliance.

To navigate somewhere, use the relevant check and determine how successful it is.

The Great Arena

Where the PCs defeated Arkanos. This massive coliseum is the largest known in the multiverse, or at the very least the most lucrative. Through various magics, beings across the cosmos are able to watch and gamble. The Lady of Pain has given special permissions for the running of this establishment beyond what is normally allowed in the city. Is it for the immense profits? To study the combat ability to find worthy champions? Or perhaps she just enjoys it? Arkanos’ Villa

This seven story villa is located in a very wealthy neighborhood near The Great Arena. It is made of sleek, light grey stones that interlock in complex patterns. The entire building has a slight red or blue glow to it depending on the viewer's disposition. It has 7 floors (and many overlapping hidden floors). A staircase spirals through the center but the players need not move their feet to traverse it, instead only needing to will a floor. Freight and materials float up as necessary.

The main servant’s name is Cen Ser. He is the only servant who speaks, and appears as cloud of pink smoke with little yellow and white lightning bolts appearing inside. He can take any form the group chooses and is bound to serve the master of the house. As Arkanos willed the house to the group for use, he serves the group.

The Truth- He is an ancient spirit riding out a debt, and will serve in this role or a similar one for another three and a half centuries. He has forgotten what he was before but believes he was wise and powerful. Right now his powers are inextricably linked to the Villa, he couldn’t leave it.

The servants of this manor are creatures made of billowy robes and otherwise seem to consist of a cool, fire-like cloud substance. They can understand but not speak, instead simply nodding if they understand. The truth is they only half exist in this dimension– the staff quarters, main kitchen, laundry area and a lot of other unfun essentials exist overlapping the actual floors. The characters will occasionally see evidence of this. Anything that blocks magical effects will block their access. The servants retreat at any instance of combat. However, the house does have a security system– but unbeknownst to the players it has been compromised by Mammon. The security system summons 3 Retrievers https://5e.tools/bestiary/retriever-mtf.html that have been reconfigured as security bots. Contract bound to defend this place by an unscrupulous Yugoloth.

Level 0- Stables

Stables and storage for bulk goods used in the villa. Has enough to house two dozen horse sized animals and four much larger stalls for other large beasts.

What appear to be motionless statues of exotic mounts—nightmares, blink dogs, even a displacer beast—are arrayed in stables of silver and obsidian. They are actually in a stasis, any magic used against them can turn off the stasis.

Level 1- Public Floor

A grand greeting foyer -A large reception room featuring a massive table and lounging chairs, couches, etc and -A teleportation circle (the group can only access other circles in Sigil right now)

Level 2- Gladiator’s Training Hall

-Crucible of Echoes, a training pit with an interface where one can summon challenges to fight. These are illusions that can’t exist outside of the pit but are real and deal real damage (and can kill) in the pit. Players can toy with the console to see what they can summon. Once it is summoned though, it can’t be disengaged unless killed or Arcana Check DC 23, the emergency off switch is triggered. The players are locked into the simulation by an orb of force as well.

-The Armory- with a number of weapons and armor (anything up to +1 or other reasonable equipment

-The Gallery- all the trophies of Arkanos’ past victories

Level 3- The Gilded Hollow

-Banquet Room (for esteemed guests…. Has never been used) The banquet room gleams with untouched opulence—crystal chandeliers, golden tableware, and a long dining table set for dozens. Yet no chair bears a mark of use, and the goblets remain bone-dry. A faint layer of undisturbed dust clings to everything, despite an unseen magic keeping the air crisp and perfumed.

-Servants will automatically start to bring the players food and drink if they stay in here for any length of time.

-Wine Spiral (floating, ethereal wine cabinet)

-The Garden (much larger than it should be based on the size of the floor of the tower, grows based on the characters whims)

Level 4- The Pensive Hold

-Sanctuary of Silence, a sensory deprivation memory chamber. Can restore spells and mental abilities here in a short rest like you took a long one.

-A door that is completely black when opened. Requires a STR Check (15) to open as vacuum energy keeps it shut. Stepping in takes the players to a Labyrinth. They must score 100 (adjust based on level) labyrinth points to escape. Players join group but the maze seems to expand each time a new one enters.

Each turn players select a leader to make an Intelligence saving throw.

Natural 1- Reach a dead end and become assaulted by a Beholderkin CR around player level (up to 2 or 3 higher)

2-9- Activate a trap

10-14- Make progress but encounter another denizen of the maze (spectral Minatour, for example)

15+– Take (roll – 14) and add to labyrinth points.

-A sizeable library/study

-There is a hidden room here with Mammon’s spying devices

Level 5- Living Quarters

-Series of bedrooms for guests along with a communal atrium, kitchen, workshop and storage. This floor alone is more than the PCs would need to live. Let the PCs dictate what is here to a degree.

Level 6- Arkanos’s Quarters

Austere as they come. A small, windowless room with a stone bed and a light bedroll. A meager bathroom. It seems like he wanted it this way. There are two inaccessible rooms here. One is a vault and is locked with a reinforced adamantium vault. The vault has a copy of Mammon’s contract with Arkanos. The other room is…unknown. Players see no evidence of it- however it serves as a magical control room for the Villa.

Vault (Strength DC 32) or Dex Check (DC 30) to lock pick.

Other Room: Perception DC 25. Notice glimmering energy in part of the room, like another room is set atop of it.

Level 7- Grand Balcony

This outdoor massive deck overlooks the city, it is dizzying to see the city wrapped around the top of it. Has a terraced garden outdoor kitchen and space for entertaining at least 50 (almost never used).

The Lady of Pain may be waiting the first time they arrive on this level

Hall of Concordance

High court of Sigil, serves to resolve disputes between factions and entities within Sigil. Located in the Clerk's Ward, it handles major disputes — from contractual obligations to interplanar diplomacy to soul-ownership cases. Known for endless bureaucracy, mountains of paperwork, and a strict (but exploitable) logic system. Monitored heavily by Daubus and Inevitables. If the Protectors of the Weave (banned from most of the city) make contact with the Inbetweeners, it will be here.

The City Courts Archive

A literal tower of paperwork stretching into the fog — every verdict ever rendered in Sigil is recorded here.

Lady’s Ward

A location for the uber wealthy of Sigil, many of those who reside her have ill-gotten gains and are hiding from retribution. Mirrors don't work here, the reflections act differently, leave entirely or don’t show up at all.

The Foundry An industrial forge-temple where belief was once smelted into creation. Now run by independent artificers who accidentally built a self-aware anvil.

The Civic Festhall Pleasure palace, lecture hall, and sensory archive in one.

Rooms let you relive other people’s memories — one is trapped in a repeating Far Realm vision.

The Armory A charred fortress holding weapons capable of ending planes.

One forge is said to be cooling so slowly that it will take 10,000 years to finally die — and someone’s trying to relight it.

The Infinite Staircase Fragment A broken chunk of the extraplanar staircase has fused with a Sigil attic.

Stairwell ends differently every day — today, it’s a moonlit path in the Shadowfell. Tomorrow? Who knows.

The Hall of Echoes An old forum where only memories gather. Speak, and you hear your past self respond — not always kindly.

The Maze-Bleed Alley A sealed off alley in the Hive where the borders of a Mazed traitor are leaking through.

Occasionally nonexistent things walk out — memories of people who never lived.

The Fortune’s Wheel Casino/tavern full of planar gamblers and cryptic VIPs. The Lady of Pain once walked through and said nothing.

One game lets you bet lifespan, memories, or alignment.

The Bottle and Blade Adventurer bar where all brawls are contained in a hexed circle — outsiders cheer and bet.

A chalkboard lists the dead. Your name appears on it 10 minutes before it happens… unless you change something.

Fell's Tattoo Parlor Run by Fell, a Dabus exiled for heresy — now gives enchanted tattoos that reveal the wearer’s fate if completed.

Getting one may draw the Lady’s gaze.

The Grand Bazaar Planar market where you can buy a whisper, a regret, or a star chart of a dying god.

One merchant trades in apologies never spoken — accepting one means the regret becomes your own.

The Bone Orchard Cemetery where bodies bury themselves, and gravestones change names overnight.

PCs might wake up to find their own grave already there — accurate to the day.

The Last Door An impossible portal that no key opens, yet people are seen exiting it sometimes.

The Ouroboros Library A library that eats its own books after they're read. To retain the knowledge, you must bind it to yourself — literally or magically.

The Mapmaker’s Folly Cartographer’s tower whose interior warps as he draws new maps of the city — his creations reshape space itself.

He’s gone mad, and now maps things that don’t exist yet.

The Clock Without Time A Mechanus relic embedded in a public square — its hands spin randomly.

When it lands on the right combination, something nearby is erased or never happened.

The Final Binding Location: Hidden beneath a collapsing tenement in the Lady’s Ward Access: A staircase behind a false wall in the basement of a shuttered apothecary, revealed only under the influence of a silence spell

Atmosphere The air smells of dust, ozone, and old leather. Lanterns fueled by bottled starlight flicker dimly. The layout is disorienting — the aisles subtly shift when unobserved. There's no signage; you’re expected to know what you’re looking for, or not find it at all.

Inventory Oneiric Codices (written in dream-ink, legible only during trance states)

Books bound in Far Realm vellum (these hum slightly when touched)

Chrono-journals (memoirs from possible futures)

Lost manuals of spellforms erased by Mechanus

The Breathless Lexicon (a living book that requires you to not inhale while reading)

Prices are variable. Sometimes in coin, sometimes in favors, memories, or truths you haven't told yet.

Proprietor: Alvenya Quillborne Appears as a hunched, elderly elf with ink-stained fingers and a third eye that stays closed unless she’s displeased.

Never leaves the shop — or perhaps can’t.

Speaks in passive riddles. Claims she “merely curates what seeks to be found.”

Hooks for Players A map to Xalatra's glyphs bound into a cursed theology treatise

A tome that tells you how you could die — unless you give it away before reading

A ledger of debts owed by powerful planar figures, somehow always up to date

A spellbook that slowly overwrites your own personality the more you read it

The Latticeworks (Hive-Sigil Border) “A vertical slum suspended over a broken portal field.”

A shanty-town built upward, along scaffolding and broken portals. Supposedly a slaver network hub is hiding here.

PCs climb through interplanar garbage, unstable stairways, flickering teleport glyphs.

The Six ambush them at the midpoint, collapsing multiple access routes — and maybe turning the unreliable portals against the players.

The Gutworks

Raw infrastructure of Sigil. Many steam pipes, waste canals, planar conduits and devices of an arcane nature the players can’t identify. Monitored by Daubus but also has a number of unfriendly squatters.

Echo Warrens

Past versions of Sigil that haven’t been completely consumed and repurposed exist under the city. Inhabited by “ghosts” which are really echoes of entities from a broken timeline. If the group needs to interrogate someone who died or is no longer accessible, this is a way to do it. Could run into another version of their own group here…

The Unseen Courts

Powerful factions banned from the surface of Sigil hide deep under the city. Unclear if the Lady permits their existence or is not aware of them. Flesh out the factions later

The Endless Maw

If one travels too deeply under Sigil, they may reach this part of the city. It is close to the barrier of raw magical energy that powers the city, and will consume and destroy any who come too close.

Threshold One- Etheric Instability

Any spells cast require an Arcana Check DC (Spell Level x 2 + 10), cantrips are 5. Failure and spell malfunctions (1d6):

1- Spell fails and explosion of arcane energy centered around the caster deals 1d6 dmg/spell level (no save for caster, Dex DC 20 for anyone else to halve)

2- Disorientation can cause disadvantage on navigation, certain intelligence checks, etc.

Threshold Two- Conceptual Friction

Periodically face memory bleed- Make DC 17 Intelligence or Wisdom saving throw, failure and lose access to something important. Either item attunement, a language, a spell, a class feature, etc until next long rest.

If a long rest is taken here, players must make a DC 17 Charisma saving throw or experience a personality change (good to evil, chaos to order, etc0.

Echo Wounds- Must make a Con save DC 17 any time damage is taken. Failure and the damage is taken again next round.

Threshold Three- Ontological Shear

Resting is impossible here, there is a constant pain that becomes unbearable if a character sits still. Disadvantage on a lot of things as a result.

Roll 1d6 upon entering for the following effects:

1- Lose proficiency on something (DMs choice) until long rest. 2- Lose important ability or spell. 3- Lose important memories. 4-6: resist, for now.

Dissociation Blast- DC 19 Wisdom save, failure and experience the following:

1-4 failure: Confusion for 1 minute 5-9: Confusion plus semi corporeality (blink in and out of existence) 10-15: Mass seizures, take 3d6 psychic damage each turn, after first turn may make Con Save DC 15 to stop the attack. 16+ or crucial failure: Effected by feeblemind spell

The Maw

As the Maw is approached, crackling dark purple and black energy starts to suffice the air as everything becomes distorted. Players take 2d6 psychic damage per turn, which increases the closer they get to the Maw. Can be erased from existence entirely if too close. Dissociation blasts from above are constant but with a higher saving throw.

In June 2008 I flew from Ronneby in southeastern Sweden (the nearest airport to where I then lived) to Arlanda, north of Stockholm, for a rendezvous with a woman I’d never met before. I took with me an empty case of sorts. When I found her, she took something from a similar case that she had brought and transferred it in to mine. Did I hand over banknotes in an envelope, or had payment been made via bank transfer in advance? I can’t recall: but one way or another, money changed hands.

What I had purchased was a three-month-old kitten (Fig. 42), who, soon afterwards, my wife and I named Murphy (Fig. 43). It was all such an extravagance — I’d paid for two return tickets: one for me, one for him. Then again, the expense of a short internal flight seemed preferable over the gruelling prospect of an eleven-hour round trip by car. My wife had set her sights on getting a Birman cat, and the lady I met was one of only a couple of breeders in Sweden at that time from whom one could obtain them. On the way back to Ronneby the cat carrier rested on the seat beside mine, with tiny meows intermittently issuing from it.

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At noon on Saturday I manhandled Murphy into a cat carrier for the last time. He resisted weakly but did not complain. Had he not been in such a bad way there would have been a litany of angry mewling from the passenger seat as I drove to the vets. After a series of health issues a couple of years ago he’d been diagnosed with kidney disease. A change of diet brought a happier spell, though the passage of time was meanwhile taking its toll. A turn for the worse in mid-August was followed by a more alarming deterioration from Wednesday. After a grim few days I was persuaded this was a progressive decline rather than any temporary setback. The vet, when we got to Chepstow, agreed that euthanasia would be appropriate. She give me some time to say my goodbyes before the fatal drug was administered, whereupon the end came quickly and peacefully. R.I.P. my blue-eyed boy: 18/03/08 – 10/10/26.

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There have been some new arrivals of classical music on CD. Further to my interest in the byways of the string quartet repertoire I’d acquired an album bringing together three of the many quartets by Gaetano Donizetti, much better known as an opera composer; and another including the two published quartets of Miklós Rózsa, much better known for his film scores. After a couple of listens I can’t say the Donizetti pieces have made a strong impression: for a master of the operatic, the drama in them seems subdued, though admittedly they are tuneful enough. They are played on the disc with accomplished suavity by the Quartetto Delfico. Rózsa’s quartets (in performances by the Tippett Quartet) are punchier. His first, finished in 1950, has a definite Bartókian flavour about it, albeit with some of the rough edges sanded down, which suits me as I tend to find Bartók a bit hard on the nerves. The second (1981) is a similarly-serious piece, if perhaps more austere, and, for me, less immediately appealing.

And, further to my interest in 17th-&-18th-century harpsichord music was a 2-CD set focussing on the 1759 suite of Pièces De Clavecin by the French keyboardist and composer Claude Balbastre, as performed by Marek Toporowski. It joins discs already on my shelf by François Couperin, Rameau, Duphly, Jacquet de la Guerre & Forqueray — just to name French harpsichordists. I enjoyed this album very much: hear, for example, ‘La Malesherbe’. Balbastre found himself at the end of a couple of eras. His career overlapped with the beginning of the ascendancy of the fortepiano over the harpsichord — a change he was doubtless capable of adapting to; but his fortunes (which had been bolstered by aristocratic patronage: among other things he was Queen Marie-Antoinette’s music teacher), declined after the revolution.

Tags: #libros #librosparaverano

Técnicamente, al otoño le queda mucho, así que, aunque sea ya mitad de octubre, sigue siendo un epílogo otoñal a los #librosparaverano. Este 2026 es el año que menos libros leí. Por 3 motivos lindísimos de 4 y casi 2 años, pero también porque anduve leyendo #cositas para mis Furias y mis Filomelas, para Por Qué Shonda.

Aún así conseguí terminar 17 libros de la lista con un total de 5.300 páginas (eso son unas 60 al día de media, o sea muchas y a la vez muy pocas)

Aquí mis conclusiones más allá de los números, que dan igual, pero me hacen gracia y Airtable los calcula sin hacer nada.

Al grano. Me he inventado estas categorías:

1- Las decepciones y los sin más. Empecemos por lo difícil. A veces una espera demasiado, o es muy especialita o la autora se queda a medio camino, se ve superada por las circunstancias o por sí misma. A veces una llega tarde a los libros.

• La muerte de la autora – Nnedi Okorafor. A Olvi y a Mir les ha encantado esta novela. A mi me ha sacado de mis casillas. Yo diría que Okorafor le da un valor a su propia creación muy superior al que tiene. Incluso intentando quitarse hierro a sí misma, acaba dedicando un número excesivo de páginas a gritarnos que escribir libros es muy importante. No estoy de acuerdo. Y menos si escribirlos es esa cosa individual y ensimismada que nos narra aquí. Para mi gusto se ven mucho las trampas, los truquitos, y eso me parece siempre mala señal. Veo influencias de autoras que ella no reconoce ni explicita y eso me parece cada vez menos aceptable. Veo un ego mal, vamos. Y estoy en un punto en que todo esto me impide disfrutar de una novela.
• Tomboy – Liz Prince. El cómic de este año lo propuso Mahira y me lo regaló, pa que no tuviese que buscarlo ni comprarlo ni ocuparme, mi querida Tindri. Es el ejemplo de llegar tarde a la fiesta. No tiene absolutamente nada de malo. De hecho, me ha gustado bastante. Pero a la vez, desde que su autora lo escribió, han aparecido muchas cosas yo diría que mejores (o que me gustaron más porque me sorprendieron más) y esto se me ha quedado un poco en medio de ninguna parte.

2- Mis favoritos por estricto orden de lectura (porque no puedo hacer rankings de según qué)

• La turista – Yun Ko-eun. De las últimas incorporaciones a la lista gracias a YoMisma. La sinopsis me fascinó. El libro me atrapó completamente en cuanto lo empecé. Como ya dije en el cielito, Ko-eun toma un montón de decisiones técnicas sobre tono y lenguaje que son brillantes y convierten el libro en facilísimo de leer, capaz de hacerte reflexionar incluso contra tu voluntad, llevarte siempre de la mano y solo por el buen camino. Como hacen las buenas, todo esto pasa sin que los lectores nos demos cuenta mientras leemos. Todo esto pasa sin darse ni un poquito de importancia. Ecofeminismo del bueno con un sentido del humor capaz de hacer el drama soportable y de apuntarnos con el dedo: todas las personas empeoramos o mejoramos el mundo con nuestras decisiones. Algunas muchísimo, otras aparentemente poco. Pero muchos pocos importan más de lo que nos gusta pensar. Porque nos excusa.
• Babel – Kwang. Lo puso Latiase en la lista. Yo quiero a Latiase pero es que encima adoro a Kwang. O viceversa. Otra mujer de origen oriental con un talento literario descomunal. Babel es una novela que, si me conoces un poco, sabes que va a volverme loca. Creo en la magia prosaica de las palabras y disfruto zambulléndome en un mundo donde esa magia es poderosa e innegable. Kwang es extremadamente política y hace una crítica permanente a todas las formas de colonialismo. En todas sus novelas. Esta no iba a ser menos. Es, además, una maestra del ritmo, algo que a mí me obsesiona como lectora (y como todo). Te lleva de la mano volando por algunas páginas hasta aterrizarte en otras páginas lentas de esas que dejan poso, que te cambian. Kwang cree, como yo, en la magia de intentar entender, que te entiendan. En lo que pasa en esos intercambios. Así que leerla empieza a ser como leer a una amiga. Una brillante, encima.
• El largo viaje a un pequeño planeta iracundo – Becky Chambers. Este año fue Lu quien lo sugirió. Ya dije que leería a Chambers hasta si le diese por escribir hojas parroquiales. Y me pasa un poco como con Kwang. Es como leer a una amiga. Quiero genuinamente a Becky. Lo digo en serio. Ella no me conoce de nada, yo a ella, ya sabéis cómo pienso, un poco bastante después de leerla tanto. Sus novelas son abrazos cálidos. Sus novelas son inteligentes, profundas y a la vez sencillas. Esta es ciencia ficción con mucha carga de profundidad contra los totalitarismos y su disfraz de “consenso” o “sentido común”. Contra quienes consideran “polarizar” a negarse a comulgar con ruedas de molino. Becky además tiene tiempo para reflexionar sobre el amor, el deseo, la familia elegida, los prejuicios, el racismo. Todo en un espacio exterior plagado de criaturas extrañas con mentes propias. Leer a Becky Chambers te hace más feliz. Siempre. Y quiero creer que mejor persona.
• Sandwich – Catherine Newman. Guardé el libro para leerlo en verano. Curiosamente, lo recomendó LaCanadiense también. Me alegra muchísimo haberlo guardado. Haber esperado. Es una novela que entra en la lista de las que me ha hecho reír a carcajadas. Pero también emocionarme. A veces en la misma página. Incluso creo recordar que en la misma frase. Hay una maestría en ese narrar tan aparentemente sencillo de Newman. Parece fácil contar así las historias. Parece que se están contando ellas solas. Pero no es cierto. Hay mucha intención en Sandwich. Es una novela profunda que no lo parece. Digamos que sobre el sentido de la vida, de las vidas, sobre cómo nos acompañan otras personas, cómo las acompañamos nosotras. Sobre envejecer, sobre querer, cuidar, que te cuiden y te conozcan, sobre la felicidad y lo que la estorba. Sobre el miedo a contar y cómo nos atormenta, sobre el descanso de terminar con ciertos secretos y los procesos de cada quién para conseguirlo. No sé. Leedla. Yo creo que os gustará

_3- Los especiales y los raros. Es un poco extraño mezclar ambas categorías, pero creo que estos libros quedan bien así. Juntos. _ * Altasangre – Claudia Amador. Amador, ya lo dije en twitter, es una de las herederas de Rita Indiana. En aquel momento no me molesté en comprobarlo pero lo he hecho y Claudia cita expresamente a Indiana como referente. Me alegra que lo haga. Es obvia la influencia de la voz de Indiana si las has leído a ambas. Es obvia y, a la vez, le da más valor a lo que Claudia hace porque elige sus propios caminos, colores y sonidos. Porque sigue siendo personalísima. Me alegra que mencione a Indiana, también por lo que tiene de política, de genealogía. Por ser lo contrario de Okorafor. Me perturba, en cambio, que la crítica experta y masculina no haga ese link. Miwok trajo esta novela tan especial y tan rara a la lista. Yo me tiré de cabeza a esta mal (o bien) llamada novela gótica tropical. Creo que cualquier idiota pillaría que es una alegoría. Que el carnaval, la sangre y los demonios están ahí representando otros conceptos. Creía también que cualquiera, sin prestar demasiada atención, entendería que es una alegoría sobre el clasismo y la violencia en que se sostienen los privilegios. Pero una siempre olvida a los señores y sus formas sorprendentes de leer desde el ombligo para el ombligo porque el ombligo. O sea de no leer. No es un libro fácil, como no son fáciles las novelas de Indiana. Es exigente pero no como una pose. Es exigente porque no soy colombiana. Porque desconozco el lenguaje y el contexto. Porque con cada frase me descubre universos lingüísticos y culturales de los que no sabía nada y lo hace relacionándolos con cosas, digamos, más universales, haciendo que la exigencia sea placentera. Es un libro que le da sentido a mi forma de entender la lectura: disfrutar saliendo de tu eje, entrando en otras órbitas y dejándote influir para siempre. Recordaré Altasangre mientras tenga memoria y eso es mucho decir. * Seismil – Laura C. Vela. De la lista de Carlos. Me ratifica en que Sabina Urraca es una excelente editora. Este librito de Laura me parece importantísimo en su aparente pequeñez. Es un proceso para pasar de víctima a superviviente. Y esos procesos solo son posibles tomando partido en todo, todo el rato. Pensando el mundo y los hilos que lo cosen y lo descosen. Sus reflexiones sobre la misoginia y cómo envenena todo parecen obvias pero no lo son. Sus reflexiones sobre la pérdida de ternura a medida que crecemos y cómo eso envenena todo son muy poco obvias y muy necesarias. Laura es certera y generosa. Sabina Urraca también. Y eso siempre da como resultado libros especiales de esos que se quedan para siempre contigo. * La voz sombra – Ryoko Sekiguchi. Este libro es especial como cosa, es especial por su contenido. Por la forma de contar el duelo. Se ha convertido en más especial todavía porque al día siguiente de terminarlo, yendo de copiloto en un coche, alguien mencionó algo sobre lo que Ryoko escribe. Y ya me conocéis. Lo de las casualidades bonitas, la magia de leer un libro en el momento justo para poder entenderte con otra persona. Conectar de verdad. Le he dado el librito a esa persona, obviamente. Aunque nunca lo lea. Pero espero que lo haga. Le acariciará cicatrices invisibles. * Blu Palinuro – Isabel Parreño. Italia fragmentada. Verano. Azules. Bullicio. Olores y sabores. Referencias de autores que conocía, de otros que aprendí entre sus páginas. Estos libritos siempre se quedan enganchados a los veranos concretos en que los leí. Dejan un poso en mí como de “golden hour” junto al mar. O sea, son símbolos del verano como estado de ánimo. De las vacaciones absolutas. De ser feliz con lo sencillo. Ser consciente de que vivimos en un mundo donde esa sencillez es un privilegio. Disfrutar de la suerte. * El valle del silicio  -  Carla Nyman. Es una novela oscura y asfixiante. Rara como un perro verde. Pesada. Es también una novela sarcástica. Inmisericorde. Que una necesita terminar para poder respirar fuera de ella. Que una termina pensando que es menos fábula de lo que quisiera. Que tampoco es distópica, ni irreal. Desgraciadamente. Es asquerosamente plausible en su rareza bizarra (en todas las acepciones de esta palabra, porque sí, bizarro como sinónimo de raro extravagante o poco común ya está recogido por la RAE)

4- Los bonitinhos (hay palabras del portugués que se autodefinen mejor que cualquier definición. Bonitinha es una de esas. Y una de mis favoritas) * Las ovejas detectives – Leonie Swann. Lo puso Jael en la lista. Me ha parecido brillante elegir la mente bovina como recurso para pensar distinto sobre el mundo. Para eso que los modernos vendehumos llaman “out of the box”. Piensa como un cordero y a ver qué pasa. Piensa como un cordero y enfréntate a todas las veces en que te intentan aborregar para que no entiendas nada. Y resístete como esas ovejas de la novela. Comprométete con la misma determinación que ellas. La de usar todos los recursos a tu alcance para no permitir que te den gato por liebre. Ahora solo me falta ver la peli. Ojalá me guste la mitad que la novela. * La segunda venida de Hilda Bustamante – Salomé Esper. Las chicas de Vino a por letras me lo aconsejaron. Es un libro tierno. Es difícil escribir libros tiernos sobre duelos. Libros que te abracen y te hagan entender que hay tantos duelos como personas que conocieron a quien muere. Que hay que dejar a cada quién hacerlo a su manera. Y tratar de ayudar cuando se pueda. Sigo obsesionada con lo mal que hacemos y acompañamos los duelos. Y creo que tanta literatura sobre los duelos (no sobre las pérdidas) es consecuencia de lo poco que, como sociedad, pensamos en el tema.

5- Los fáciles. Hay libros que no te cambian la vida pero te la hacen más llevadera. Y son importantes. Y tienen mala prensa porque habitualmente ni son bestsellers ni se consideran elevados. Están en una tierra de nadie que me empeño en reivindicar. * La tienda de los deseos – Hiyoko Kurisu Lu sugirió este libro fácil. Tierno. Que no ganará ningún premio literario. Mi idea sobre la literatura se basa también en este otro pilar. Hay que poder leer libros que te abracen y solo eso. Que te pongan una sonrisa dulce mientras lees. Y solo eso. Que no salgan en ningún suplemento cultural. Aunque luego a veces terminen saliendo porque cierta sencillez sin ínfulas es muy complicada. Es una pena que su autora no sea ni un poco feminista. No se puede tener todo en la vida. Digamos. Y a estas alturas me incomodan ciertos personajes femeninos con ciertas motivaciones estúpidas. * Las vidas secretas de las mujeres de los asesinos  – Elizabeth Arnott. Me he hecho amiga de unas mujeres que no existen más que en las páginas de una novela muy bien escrita. Sus maridos asesinaron a otras mujeres y ellas aprendieron de la experiencia terrible en un mundo donde las mujeres somos las únicas responsables de elegir a un “mal marido” y además las locas exageradas que desconfiamos a lo tonto porque “Not all men”. Todo a la vez. Como si tuviera sentido. Y sin embargo, las mujeres cogemos esa basura y le damos un sentido político. A veces escribiendo una novela negra, feminista, entretenidísima y muy gustosa de leer. Muy bien escrita. Que no sé si lo he dicho. O bueno, sí lo sé, pero quería repetirlo. * El círculo de mujeres de la doctora Tan – Lisa See. La Canadiense recomendó este libro de mujeres sobreviviendo en la China Imperial. Buscando las rendijas unas para las otras. Personajes creíbles porque la épica en la novela es como resulta ser la épica en la vida: una sucesión de elecciones pequeñas. Porque las heroicidades no esconden los errores, la envidia, la competencia absurda. Porque ninguna de las mujeres de este libro es perfecta, pero todas evolucionan, van y vienen por la novela como si hubiesen existido. Porque es fácil entrar en este mundo e imposible salir de él hasta la última frase. * Las cabras – Pilar Asuero. Lo trajo a la lista Miwok. Es muy difícil encontrar libros escritos por mujeres de esta edad con una apuesta tan política por poner en su sitio el amor romántico. Y su sitio es, efectivamente, la basura en lugar del centro de nuestras vidas. El amor romántico es la nada peligrosa. Es algo que no existe pero nos destruye. Todas las demás formas de amor nos construyen. Pilar Asuero, en esta novela corta de una mujer migrante encontrando su lugar, ha hecho un tratado facilísimo de leer y entender sobre cómo el amor, cuando es amor, nos construye, y cuando es un timo no destruye. Qué gusto da leer a chavalas tan listas. De verdad. * La novia grulla – CJ. Hauser. Lo trajo a la lista Cris diciendo que quiere regalárselo a todas sus amigas. Creo que entiendo por qué dice eso. Y es una razón similar a la que me ha llevado a meter este libro detrás de Las cabras. Hauser es una persona muy distinta a mí, con puntos de vista que me pondrían nerviosa si no fuese porque ella elige la sinceridad más desnuda y más inocente. La autocrítica bastante más mesurada de lo que parece si no te fijas. Hauser se quiere hasta cuando no se soporta y leer eso es importante para todas. Hauser está intoxicada de amor romántico. Como casi todas. Pero se quiere. Así que se pasa la vida desintoxicándose. Como muchas. Aproximándose, con pasitos inseguros, a la persona que quiere ser. Y eso no tiene por qué coincidir con la persona que yo quiero ser. De hecho no coincide. Pero he descubierto a lo largo de mi vida que siempre conecto con las mujeres sinceras, las que eligen no posar, no darse importancia, no envolverse en una falsa modestia, no disfrazarse de una seguridad que ni sienten ni consiguen transmitir a pesar del disfraz. Y conecto con Hauser aunque sea muy distinta a mi. No es la polarización, ni la diferencia lo que nos separa. No es verdad lo de las cámaras de eco. No siempre. Lo que nadie dice es que te alejas a conciencia de los que te mienten y te manipulan, de los que intentan dañarte o se pasan por el arco del triunfo tu dolor si les beneficia pero encima fingen ser bellísimas personas. Hauser es lo contrario a eso, como todas las personas que me gustan de verdad. Y encima escribe muy bien, es ingeniosa, tierna, divertida, dulce, bruta, loca, incoherente. O sea, una vez más, es una persona real que no necesita teatrillo. Y eso, hoy por hoy, es excepcional

Hasta aquí los #librosparaverano 2026. Volveré a jugar a esto en 2027. Espero que me sigáis el rollo. Gracias a todas las personas que habéis participado un año más en mi locura favorita. Me hacéis feliz. De verdad. Y creo que leyendo este epílogo se nota…

Several months ago, I was taking out the trash to my condo dumpster. The area reeks but at least my poor sense of smell takes it down a notch. But the best thing about my dumpster is that you often find awesome stuff next to them, even though it’s against the rules.

I’ve seen refrigerators, stands, chairs, vacuums, luggages, baby toys, and more. Some of them I can clean and repair with the right tools and parts. But there’s not enough room to store and repair them and my wife won’t let me keep them.

One day, I found a white mug on top of the recycling bins. I had plenty of mugs but the contents popping out of it interested me more. And I couldn’t believe it.

A stack of wooden pencils.

All those pencils right in my grasp ready for sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. But I was also angry, if I hadn’t been there at the right place and time they would have been doomed to a recycling center. Or worse, a landfill. A crime against nature and humanity.

So I took the pencils home and cleaned them with alcohol wipes. Here were my findings:

• 11 Blue Wharton University of Pennsylvania wooden pencils

• 5 White with red maple leaves Canada wooden pencils

• Black Ohlone College wooden pencil

• Natural Palacic Duhau – Park Hyatt Buenos Aires wooden pencil with no ferrule and eraser

• Yellow No. 2 Tru Red wooden pencil

• Yellow No. 2 Dixon Ticonderoga wooden pencil

• Black Pentel QE515 Twist-Erase 0.5 with no graphite and an empty eraser holder (not sure if I’ll ever use it, but will keep anyway)

If this isn’t a great find then I don’t know what is. If you ever find pencils use them, give them to your kids, or at the least donate them. Any pencil is a terrible thing to waste.

#writing #dumpster #pencils #treasure

I adored Babel and Yellowface, and I too once spent some time in Taipei (in 1990, when it was apparently a vastly different place than it is now), so I was excited to read Taipei Story. Unfortunately, the brilliant, vicious, incisive author of those two books didn’t show up for this one, which is utterly conventional and bland.

Lily goes to Taipei to better her Chinese and…pretty much nothing happens. Spoiler, I guess—her Chinese improves after she completes an intensive language program while living in Taipei. Sorry to have ruined the plot for you.

I kid, I kid. There are two other things that happen in this 250-page book. But Kuang is a talented enough author, with razor-sharp insights that remind me of Joyce Carol Oates, to carry readers through an essentially plotless novel.

But rather than the humor and bite we’ve come to expect from Kuang, what we get here is a passive and dull protagonist whose profound insight in the book is “sometimes it’s okay to do things by yourself.” Sorry again for the spoiler. Here’s what I realized this morning: there is literally nothing in this book that could possibly offend anyone. I’m just stunned that the same author who wrote a novel witht the subtitle “on the necessity of violence” has written something so completely safe and bland.

There are some interesting things happening at the margins—why bring up Lily’s complete lack of interest in sex (at one point in the novel she tries to masturbate and gives up) if that’s not going to go anywhere? Her only relationship of consequence is with a woman, and I kept thinking any moment we were going to get Lily’s queer awakening along with some insights into how that works for a first generation American whose parents are from a very traditional culture. Nope! She’s just a gal who can’t get off. Move along, nothing to see here!

Why bring up the far more interesting and dramatic story of Lily’s sister if Lily doesn’t really seem to have been affected by it? Lily seems kind of put out that her ancestors had interesting lives she didn’t know about—I was put out that we got her story rather than theirs.

The lone saving grace of this literary coming of age novel is that it avoids the tired cliche of being about a man who is struggling to write.

Anything even remotely interesting about this book has been done elsewhere, and better. There’s so little going on here that I must confess I was baffled as to why Kuang chose to write this book. The acknowledgements at the end hint that this might be some kind of roman a clef about Kuang’s own experience in this language program in Taipei. If that’s true, I wish she’d written this as memoir, because she is a far more interesting person than Lily. The other thought I had is that as a Yalie, Kuang might not be satisfied with writing brilliant novels that sell well and may be seeking the approval of the literary establishment. Which I’m sure she’ll get here—the Iowa Writers Workshop industrial complex disdains plot in general and will probably lap this up. Or maybe, and I hope this is the case, writing this novel was just a way to parlay a trip to Taipei into a fat tax deduction. In which case, well played and good for R.F. Kuang. Just not so good for readers.