I was first really exposed to the Christian commemorations of the Holy Innocents thanks to a church name. Holy Innocents Episcopal Church outside Atlanta, to be exact. I visited that church and liked the architecture and liturgy and it inspired me to learn more about a story I had known since childhood but seldom dwelt on—much less saw as a focus of devotion.

It’s a story that largely gets left out of our Christmas commemorations in the Episcopal Church, partly because it is such a horrible story (and likely partly due to the more modern doubt of the story’s historical accuracy, which we’ll talk about in a bit). No one wants to follow up Christmas morning with a service about the mass-murdering of children.

At the same time, especially this year, this is a highly relevant story. Tragically, all over the world, politicians are playing like Herod and systematically executing anyone they deem a threat—including children.

Holy Innocents, also known Childermas, commemorates an event that, in all likelihood, never happened. Josephus, an important Jewish historian, took great care to showcase the brutalities of the Herodians and never once mentioned a mass slaughter of children. Outside of the gospel of Matthew there are no other historical accounts of this story and it seems likely to be something meant by the evangelist as a means to make connections between Jesus and Moses, a common theme throughout that particular gospel. So what are we to make of this fact? That we not only have a day marked on our calendar but also name churches and schools for an event that probably never happened?

This is one of the tough parts of reading the Bible. It’s not always “factual” in the ways to which we are accustomed today. Nevertheless, elements that we deem “fictional” can have a huge impact on our faith and wind up speaking Truth despite their (in)accuracy.

Consider the typical Christmas pageant. Aside from Mary, Joseph, a baby, angels, and some shepherds most of the story we dramatize is completely fictional and not related to what is written in the Bible. We tend to think of the birth of Jesus as being an event that culminates after Mary and Joseph, alone on a donkey, have gone to every house or inn in Bethlehem and been told “no vacancy” and so set up shop in a nearby stable. But none of the gospels mention a donkey and we’re only told that there was no room in “the inn”—nothing at all about conversations with inn-keepers or a door-to-door journey. Further, given the nature of the census, there was probably a caravan of people traveling to Bethlehem and others taking residence among the livestock because Bethlehem was not prepared for such an influx of extra people. What we think of when we think of the Christmas story is largely fictional, but that doesn’t mean there’s not truth in those elements. We crafted those details over the centuries in order to “flesh out” the story a bit, to give it the sort of texture that it invites. And those added details speak much of the faith and mindset of the church that crafted them.

The same is true of the Massacre of the Innocents. It might not have happened, but it’s very telling that no one finds the story improbable. There might not be any records to back it up, but the story sounds like the sort of thing Herod would have done—indeed, the sort of thing that rulers all over the world and all over our history books have done.

The sort of government that gleefully cancels aid and assistance to poor countries is acting like Herod. The one that uses starvation, particularly of children, as a weapon of retaliation is acting like Herod. The political entities that travel throughout villages to murder women and children are the ones acting like Herod.

The actual Herod may not have ordered a campaign to murder the children of Bethlehem out of some fear of losing power, but Herod for sure murdered plenty of children and other innocents during his reign out of a sense that because he was in charge he could do so—without any fear of God. And in this, Herod is an archetype. Plenty of gilded so-called rulers kill innocents in the name of preserving their name on the side of buildings. If they were honest, they do so out of a desire to kill the God that they are not.

Yesterday’s saint records Jesus saying “If the world hates you, know that it hated me first.” The poet Dianne di Prima says in her poem, “Rant” that “the only war that matters is the war against the imagination, all other wars are subsumed by it.” I tend to think that it’s more the case that all hatred is subsumed in hatred for Jesus and, therefore, all wars are the Battle of Armageddon, the war against Christ Himself.

If the story behind Holy Innocents is fictional, then it is worth asking what it is we’re commemorating this day. I think the answer is simple: Holy Innocents commemorates all children sacrificed on the altar of expedience or inconvenience by those in power attempting to cast themselves as gods. Those killed by starvation from the abrupt end to programs like USAID or in Gaza by the Israeli government. Those killed by radicals in Somalia and Sudan. Those dying thanks to bombs dropped on Ukraine. And that’s only looking at what’s currently happened in the news in recent weeks. These are who we commemorate on Holy Innocents. The gospel story is subsumed in the stories we see right now, and is itself reflective of those stories. The gospel story helps us Christians see the shape of the story happening around us, helps us in remembering where our allegiance lies.

Herod is the one who oversees the death of innocents. Christ is the one who sees them as holy.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christmas #HolyInnocents #History #Theology #Church #Christianity #War #Gaza #Ukraine

OSRIC 3.0 Player Guide PDF has just been released for free on DriveThruRPG. Offset print and print-on-demand will be available next year, as well as GM Guide, adventures, and a host of other material.

OSRIC, Old School Reference and Index Compilation, was the first retroclone of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Released almost 20 years ago, it led the charge during early days of OSR, providing means to legally publish content compatible with AD&D.

OSRIC 3.0 brings a host of improvements, focusing on providing more explanations and examples of play, replacing dense blocks of text with more accessible layout, discards OGL, and brings the rules even closer to AD&D, just to name a few.

Learn more about OSRIC 3.0 on BackerKit.

#News #OSRIC #OSR

Le jeu du cormoran est le quatrième roman appartenant au cycle romanesque Le Rêve du Démiurge de Francis Berthelot.

La fresque se poursuit puisqu’on retrouve des personnages déjà croisés dans les romans précédents : Ivan Algeiba, que l’on avait aperçu jeune garçon de cirque dans Le jongleur interrompu et qui est désormais un jeune homme ; Tom-Boulon, le régisseur du théâtre du Dragon, et Katri, l’ancienne actrice qui a retrouvé sa passion pour le chant, que l’on vient tous deux de quitter dans le roman précédent, Mélusath ; et ce cormoran qui donne son titre au roman, serait-il la réincarnation de Constantin, le jongleur qu’Ivan adorait et qui croyait si fort à la légende de l’île mythique où les âmes défuntes renaissent en oiseaux ?

On découvre également d’autres personnages, comme Moa-Toa, jeune asiatique androgyne, au sexe indéterminé, et un mystérieux inconnu aux yeux d'un bleu de métal qui semble pourchasser Ivan et faire appel à ses pires passions.

Le récit se déroule en 1974. Ivan quitte le cirque où il a passé son enfance et son adolescence et fait la connaissance de Moa-Toa et de Tom-Boulon. Guidés par le cormoran, ils vont accomplir un voyage depuis les Landes jusqu’à Paris, puis en Finlande. Les étapes et la destination permettront à chacun d’affronter leur passé et, peut-être, de trouver des réponses aux questions qu’ils se posent.

Dans la lignée des trois premiers romans, Francis Berthelot propose un récit sensible, empreint de symbolisme, avec une touche de fantastique qui s’affirme à chaque roman.

There is a particular kind of sorrow that only parents know, and it rarely announces itself loudly. It doesn’t arrive as a dramatic rupture or a single defining argument. It shows up quietly, over time, in small moments that sting more than they should. A conversation that ends too quickly. A look that feels distant. A realization, sudden and unsettling, that your child does not see you the way you see yourself.

You know you are a good parent. Not perfect, but sincere. You showed up. You worked hard. You tried to be consistent. You tried to love well. And yet, somewhere along the way, your child’s understanding of who you are drifted from your own. At the same time, if you are honest enough to sit with the discomfort, you may sense that you no longer fully understand who they are either.

This is not failure. But it feels like it.

Modern conversations about parenting often oversimplify this tension. They frame it as rebellion versus authority, values versus culture, obedience versus freedom. But real family dynamics are rarely that clean. What most parents and children experience is not rejection but misalignment. Not hatred but confusion. Not abandonment but distance.

Scripture does not shy away from this reality. In fact, the Bible may be the most honest book ever written about family tension. From Genesis onward, it tells the truth about how love can exist alongside misunderstanding, how faith can coexist with fracture, and how God works patiently within relationships that feel strained beyond repair.

The first thing we must acknowledge—without defensiveness or shame—is this: love does not automatically produce understanding. Love can be real, sacrificial, and enduring, and still fail to communicate itself clearly across generational lines. Even God, who loves perfectly, is consistently misunderstood by His own children. That truth alone should humble us and free us at the same time.

Parents often assume that because their intentions were good, their impact must have been clear. Children often assume that because they felt misunderstood, their parents must not have cared. Both assumptions can be wrong simultaneously. This is where the gap forms—not in malice, but in misinterpretation.

One of the most difficult truths for parents to accept is that their children experience them not through intention but through perception. Children do not live inside their parents’ internal reasoning. They interpret tone, timing, emotional availability, and response. A parent may believe they were protecting. A child may have experienced that protection as control. A parent may believe they were guiding. A child may have experienced that guidance as pressure.

Neither story cancels the other. Both deserve to be heard.

Jesus understood this dynamic deeply. Throughout the Gospels, He is constantly misunderstood—by religious leaders, by crowds, even by His own disciples. Yet His response is never contempt. He does not shame misunderstanding out of people. He meets confusion with patience, distance with presence, and fear with truth spoken gently enough to be received.

That model matters profoundly for parents who want to rebuild trust.

One of the most subtle dangers in parent-child relationships is confusing moral responsibility with relational dominance. Parents are indeed responsible for guiding, protecting, and teaching. But authority that is not tempered by humility eventually creates silence. And silence is where distance grows unnoticed.

When children feel that disagreement threatens connection, they stop speaking honestly. When parents feel that questioning undermines authority, they stop listening openly. Over time, both sides retreat into assumptions instead of conversations.

This is why Scripture emphasizes listening so strongly. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” That instruction is not about winning debates. It is about preserving relationship. Listening communicates safety. It tells the other person, “You are not at risk simply because you are honest.”

For many parents, this is the most uncomfortable shift of all. Listening can feel like surrender. Curiosity can feel like compromise. Asking questions can feel like weakness. But in the Kingdom of God, humility is never weakness. It is strength under control.

Consider how Jesus handled those who disagreed with Him. He did not flatten them with superior arguments, even though He could have. He asked questions that exposed hearts rather than silencing voices. He told stories that invited reflection rather than forcing compliance. He created space where transformation could happen organically.

Parents who want to bridge the gap must learn to do the same.

This does not mean abandoning convictions. It means releasing urgency. Urgency communicates fear, and fear closes hearts. Presence communicates love, and love opens doors that arguments cannot.

Children often need time to articulate what they are feeling, especially when their internal world does not yet have language. When parents rush to correct before understanding, children hear one message above all others: “Your confusion is dangerous.” That message may not be intended, but it is often received.

And once a child feels that their questions are unsafe, they will search for answers elsewhere.

Another hard truth parents must face is that children do not always push away because of disagreement. Sometimes they pull away because they are exhausted from trying to be understood. Emotional distance is often a form of self-protection, not rebellion.

This is where faith calls parents to something higher than instinct. Instinct says, “Push harder.” Faith says, “Stand steadier.” Instinct says, “Fix this now.” Faith says, “Trust God with the process.”

The Bible’s most famous family reconciliation story—the Prodigal Son—is often misunderstood. The father does not chase his son down the road. He does not lecture him from a distance. He does not demand repentance as a prerequisite for love. But neither does he approve of his choices. He stays present. He stays open. He stays himself.

That posture is far more difficult than control. It requires confidence in identity rather than confidence in outcomes.

Parents who are secure in who they are do not need their children to validate them. They do not need immediate agreement to feel successful. They do not panic when seasons change. They understand that formation is a long process, and that God often does His deepest work underground, long before fruit becomes visible.

At the same time, children often underestimate the vulnerability of their parents. Parents are not fixed monuments. They are human beings shaped by their own histories, limitations, and unhealed places. Many parents parent the way they were parented—not because it was perfect, but because it was familiar.

This does not excuse harm. But it does explain complexity.

When children see their parents only as authority figures, resentment grows. When parents see their children only as extensions of themselves, disappointment grows. The bridge between them is built when both sides recognize the full humanity of the other.

God consistently works through this recognition. He reminds parents that their children ultimately belong to Him, not to parental expectation. He reminds children that honoring parents does not mean losing oneself. It means acknowledging the role love played in their becoming.

One of the most powerful moments in any family’s healing journey is when a parent can say, sincerely, “I may not have understood you as well as I thought I did.” That sentence does not erase the past, but it reframes the future. It signals safety. It invites conversation. It lowers defenses.

Likewise, one of the most powerful moments for children is recognizing that their parents’ failures were not proof of indifference, but evidence of limitation. This realization does not erase pain, but it creates room for compassion.

Faith does not demand that families pretend nothing hurts. Faith gives families the courage to name pain without letting it define the relationship.

Reconciliation, when it comes, rarely arrives as a dramatic reunion. More often, it arrives quietly. In a conversation that lasts a little longer than expected. In a question asked without accusation. In a moment where listening replaces defensiveness.

God works in those moments.

He works in the patience it takes to stay available when you feel misunderstood. He works in the humility it takes to admit you may not have all the answers. He works in the restraint it takes not to force growth before it is ready.

Parents who want to bridge the gap must release the illusion that they can control their children’s development. Control produces compliance at best. It never produces intimacy. God is after intimacy.

Children grow best in environments where love is secure enough to withstand difference. Parents become most influential when they stop trying to manage outcomes and start modeling character.

And this is where hope enters the story.

No family relationship is beyond redemption. Not because everyone will eventually agree, but because God is always at work beneath the surface. He is patient. He is creative. He specializes in restoring what feels irreparably fractured.

If you are a parent standing on one side of this gap, feeling uncertain and tired, know this: your consistency matters. Your willingness to listen matters. Your decision to remain a refuge matters.

If you are a child standing on the other side, feeling unseen or misunderstood, know this: your voice matters. Your journey matters. Your parents’ limitations do not negate the love that shaped you.

The bridge between you is not built all at once. It is built plank by plank. Conversation by conversation. Prayer by prayer.

And God is faithful to walk that bridge with you—even when you do not yet see the other side.

What makes this season between parent and child so spiritually demanding is that it forces us to confront a truth we would rather avoid: love that cannot tolerate misunderstanding is fragile. Love that collapses when it is not mirrored, affirmed, or understood has become transactional without realizing it. God’s love is not like that, and He invites parents to reflect something sturdier, something slower, something deeper.

One of the reasons the gap between parents and children widens is because both sides begin narrating the relationship internally without checking those narratives against reality. Parents quietly tell themselves, “My child doesn’t appreciate what I sacrificed,” while children quietly tell themselves, “My parent never really saw me.” Over time, these internal stories harden into assumed truth. Conversations become filtered through suspicion instead of curiosity. Every interaction feels loaded, even when no harm is intended.

Faith calls us to interrupt those stories before they become walls.

Scripture repeatedly shows that God is less concerned with how quickly understanding arrives and more concerned with whether hearts remain soft while waiting. Hardened hearts break relationships. Soft hearts allow time to do its work.

Parents often underestimate how much their emotional posture sets the climate of the relationship. Children are remarkably sensitive to emotional undercurrents. They may not articulate it clearly, but they feel when love is conditional, when disappointment lingers unspoken, when approval is tied to agreement. Even silence carries meaning.

This is why the ministry of presence is so powerful. Presence does not require fixing. It requires availability. It says, “You are welcome here even when we don’t agree.” That message does not weaken parental influence. It strengthens it.

Jesus never competed with the pace of people’s growth. He trusted the Father with timing. He understood that transformation forced is transformation aborted. Parents who rush their children’s spiritual, emotional, or ideological development often end up delaying it.

There is a deep irony here. The very pressure parents apply in the name of faith can sometimes push children further from it. Not because faith is flawed, but because fear has distorted how it is presented. When faith feels like surveillance rather than sanctuary, children associate God with anxiety instead of refuge.

This is not an accusation. It is an invitation to reflection.

Parents are often carrying unspoken fears. Fear that their child will suffer. Fear that mistakes will become permanent. Fear that distance will become loss. Fear that they will be judged for their child’s choices. These fears are understandable, but when left unchecked, they masquerade as control.

Faith does not eliminate fear automatically. Faith teaches us where to place it.

When parents entrust their children to God daily—not abstractly, but intentionally—they begin to loosen their grip without disengaging their love. They move from managing outcomes to modeling trust. Children notice this shift, even if they cannot name it.

Another essential truth is this: reconciliation does not require rewriting history. Healing does not mean pretending harm never occurred. It means choosing not to weaponize the past against the future.

Some parents hesitate to reopen conversations because they fear being blamed. Some children hesitate because they fear being dismissed. Both fears are valid. Both must be surrendered if the relationship is to move forward.

Jesus never denied people’s pain, but He also refused to let pain become the final authority. He acknowledged wounds without letting them define identity. Parents and children must learn to do the same.

One of the most healing moments in any family is when both sides stop arguing about who was right and start asking what was missing. Often what was missing was language. Or safety. Or time. Or emotional literacy. Or simply the ability to say, “I don’t know how to do this well, but I’m trying.”

That honesty disarms defensiveness.

Children, though this article speaks primarily to parents, must also be invited into responsibility. Growing into adulthood includes the difficult work of separating intention from impact without erasing either. Parents are not villains for being limited. They are human beings who carried weight long before their children were aware of it.

Honoring parents does not mean suppressing your voice. It means refusing to reduce them to their worst moments. It means acknowledging the love that existed even when it was imperfectly expressed.

At the same time, parents must release the desire to be fully understood before extending grace. Waiting for perfect understanding before offering love is another form of control. God did not wait for humanity to understand Him before loving fully. He moved first.

This is the pattern families are invited into.

Rebuilding trust often happens indirectly. Shared experiences matter more than forced conversations. Consistency matters more than speeches. Tone matters more than theology in moments of tension. Children remember how they felt long after they forget what was said.

Parents who want to remain influential must become emotionally predictable in the best sense of the word. Calm instead of reactive. Curious instead of defensive. Grounded instead of anxious. This stability creates a relational anchor children can return to when the world becomes overwhelming.

God often uses seasons of distance not to punish families, but to mature them. Distance reveals what was previously hidden. It surfaces assumptions. It exposes dependencies. It invites growth that proximity sometimes prevents.

This does not mean distance is ideal. It means it can be redemptive when surrendered to God.

Prayer becomes especially important in these seasons—not as a tool to change the other person, but as a posture that changes us. Parents who pray honestly often discover that God addresses their fears before He addresses their child’s behavior. Children who pray honestly often discover compassion for parents they once saw only as obstacles.

God is deeply invested in reconciliation, but His definition of reconciliation is broader than immediate harmony. He is building resilience, patience, humility, and love that can survive difference.

Families often want closure. God often offers transformation instead.

The bridge between parent and child is rarely rebuilt through one decisive conversation. It is rebuilt through dozens of ordinary interactions handled with care. A question asked gently. A boundary respected. A moment of humor that breaks tension. A silence that is not hostile but restful.

These moments accumulate. They matter.

If you are a parent reading this and grieving the distance, know that staying open is an act of courage. Refusing to withdraw emotionally even when you feel misunderstood is holy work. Remaining available without becoming intrusive is not weakness; it is wisdom.

If you are a child reading this and carrying unresolved pain, know that your healing does not require erasing your story. It requires refusing to let pain define the entire relationship. Compassion does not excuse harm, but it does loosen bitterness’s grip.

God is patient with families. He is not surprised by generational tension. He has been working within it since the beginning of time.

The goal is not to return to what was. The goal is to build something truer going forward—something marked by mutual dignity, spiritual humility, and love that does not panic when understanding is incomplete.

Faith does not promise that families will always agree. It promises that love does not have to disappear when they don’t.

The bridge is still buildable.

Not because everyone is ready. Not because everything is resolved. But because God is still present.

And presence, sustained over time, changes everything.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

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#FaithAndFamily #ParentingWithGrace #FaithBasedEncouragement #HealingRelationships #ChristianReflection #FamilyRestoration #SpiritualGrowth

Linda Lovelace (nee Boreman) cycled through so many personas in her short life that it is difficult to place her in the pop culture landscape.

Is she the effervescent star of the adult movie Deep Throat (1972), ushering in a new era of sexual liberation and porn chic? Or is she the damaged and abused woman who narrates Ordeal (1980), the third memoir published under her assumed name? Perhaps she is the human equivalent of the pet rock, a highly profitable (though not for her) spasm of pop silliness that worked for a nanosecond but is inexplicable now.

Something about this woman and her story does not track. She comes across as naïve, victimized, cynical, sincere, cloying, pathetic, and brave, often in the space of just a few short quotes. Testimony from colleagues who were with her on movie sets or who knew her husband, porn impresario Chuck Traynor, only further complicates things. Half of them seem to believe she was a victim of sustained abuse while others dismiss her as a practiced liar.

For all that—maybe because of that—I think she still matters. If I am asked to take Hugh Hefner seriously, as the documentary Secrets of the Playboy Mansion plausibly does, then Linda Lovelace merits attention, as well. Her once bright then strained smile flashes like a neon sign above the pornified world we live in today.

Deep Throat and Porn Chic

Premiering in Times Square on June 12, 1972, this silly and implausible movie bottled lightning by centering on a female character at the exact moment second-wave feminism broke through the cultural gates. The original poster zings with 1970s energy, from the “have a nice day” yellow background to the photo of Linda looking slim, happy, and satisfied. (It is a subject for another blog, but 1970s thin people were thin in a way that even thin people are not, anymore).

Though the fantasies the movie prioritized were still decidedly heterosexual male, phrases such as the “girl next door” and “nice girls like sex, too” repeated on a loop as feminists, critics, comedians, and even The New York Times propelled the movie to a top 10 box-office hit. Most scholars today estimate that the film has grossed at least $600 million worldwide, on an initial budget of approximately $30,000. It is credited with bringing adult movies to the mainstream and scaffolding the Golden Era of Porn.

Linda Lovelace always admitted that she enjoyed her moment of fame. The movie launched her onto talk shows and to parties at the Playboy Mansion, placing her among a richer and seemingly more refined class of people (however ersatz) than those she had known on the stag film circuit. Her fluttery charm worked well on television, and she seemed to be in on the joke.

From Inside Linda Lovelace to Ordeal

The shift from the let-it-all-hang-out 1970s to the buttoned-down 1980s happened so fast that it is no wonder Linda Lovelace got whiplash. Everyone did. Part of this had to do with a resurgent conservative movement that loathed almost everything that happened after The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. When the first news article on the AIDs crisis appeared in The New York Times on July 3, 1981, you could almost hear the spinning mirrored disco balls grind to a halt overnight.

Yet the most important change for Lovelace may have been the way in which second wave feminism started to fragment into different strands, with sex-positive feminists like Camille Paglia pitted against anti-porn advocates such as Andrea Dworkin in the media. Much of America sat back and watched as feminism tore itself apart in the 1980s but Linda Lovelace stepped right into the fray.

I confess that when I first read Ordeal, my skepticism meter was running hot, even though I knew the publisher had required Lovelace to take a lie detector test before releasing the book. This wasn’t a Rashomon-style kaleidoscope of differing perspectives as it was a complete refutation of everything that had gone before. The Lovelace in these pages is victimized repeatedly and brutally, and is the brunt of the joke, never its author.

Lovelace ultimately testified before a Congressional committee investigating the porn industry in the 1980s that anyone who watched Deep Throat was watching her being raped. This statement, from the woman who embodied the sexual revolution, who had been bubbly and so much fun on the talk show circuit, caused the public to recoil. This was not a story that anyone really wanted to hear. Even Phil Donahue seemed to barely contain his contempt when she appeared on his show.

Looking at Linda Lovelace Today

I have no idea if Linda Lovelace was or was not telling the whole truth in Ordeal, whether she enjoyed any of her scenes in Deep Throat, or if Chuck Traynor’s second marriage to porn star Marilyn Chambers was a happy one (implying that it was Linda who was the problem all along). I can easily believe that both Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin genuinely liked Lovelace but also knew a useful cautionary tale when they read one.

Cultural divides as fraught as the one between the 1970s and the 1980s arrange stories along neat grids: in this case, either Linda Lovelace lied about her razzle-dazzle heyday, or she lied about being a victim of abuse and sexual trafficking. The parallel tracks of her story in these decades do not converge at any point, so we never quite know where we stand with her.

Yet perhaps we can look at this story another way, focusing less on the truth-of-the-matter and more on the culture that this hapless woman was trying to negotiate. Linda Lovelace might seem naïve, victimized, cynical, sincere, cloying, pathetic, and brave, but mostly she seems damaged. Here we have a neglected child from the lowest rung of the midcentury middle class, who grew up in an atmosphere of abuse juxtaposed with dreams of marriage and white picket fences. The first legal case of a man prosecuted for raping his wife will not take place until 1978 (Oregon v. Rideout), a full ten years after Linda meets Chuck Traynor. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will not be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1980.

Linda Lovelace grew up in a world where concepts we take for granted had not yet been thought. This does not mean everyone gets a free pass, but it does mean that putting a 2025 lens on the early 1970s should be done with care. In her early 20s, she appears in a movie that even the director predicted would flame-out in a few days like virtually every other “dirty movie” before it but instead catapults her to Hollywood and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The girl raised to please others above all other considerations is in the spotlight, is welcomed, is a star. In these strange circumstances, Linda Lovelace could have readily embraced the fact of starring in Deep Throat without having liked making it, at all.

Still Stuck in the 1970s

Millions of people enjoyed the sexual revolution when it happened. Linda Lovelace was among the unlucky who were saddled with an indelible record of every single good and bad choice they made in those few frothy years. She also went broke and slid right back down the class ladder. There was no one to protect her, not even Chuck Traynor.

Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis, Jr., among many others who enthusiastically embraced the porn chic culture of the 1970s, got to live full lives for four more decades. They were far more talented, no doubt, but on a human level that is not really the point, especially in the post #MeToo era. The point is they got to leave the 1970s behind. Linda Lovelace never did.

This is probably the main reason I think she matters today. Deep Throat may have been one of the first professional porn films, but Linda Lovelace was the ultimate amateur. And according to Pornhub, which keeps meticulous track of data on the adult industry, searches for “real amateur homemade” porn in 2022 grew by 310 percent in the United States and 169 percent worldwide.

So, when I do think about Linda Lovelace, I can’t help but wonder how many of these 19-year-old women may find themselves looking at things differently in, say, 2045, while all those early choices continue to circulate on a loop in digital space.

An unfortunate mouse was struck dead by the trap we put under the kitchen sink.

And the sky is dark with clouds and stars and the moon is half

And we are back home again,

And I’m having different feelings, like a mix of bad and good: a tutti frutti of thoughts and feelings, if you’re allergic to pineapple, one might say.

The crab cages were blown away, we’ll have to find them tomorrow although I don’t hope for (polar) crabs in them then.

And the trash bins laid toppled on the fridge ground

Other than that, the house was in order.

I put the dead mouse in the compost part of the straightened trash bin.

It’ll become biofuel now

This exercise grew out of some thoughts about where I’m going with my fascination with artificial intelligence – an interest that, while still relatively new for me, has settled quickly into something serious and absorbing.

Working in a library, there’s a strong argument that I should be in a position to make AI literacy part of my work, even if I can’t explore it all day. Libraries are, at their core, about access to information and the ability to make sense of it, and AI feels like a natural extension of that remit. If I’m genuinely interested and reasonably knowledgeable, I’m likely to be more effective at it than someone approaching it as a box-ticking exercise.

But there’s also a quieter tension underneath that justification: I’m envious of people who get to do this full-time. That raises a more interesting question than professional relevance. If I did have unlimited time, what would I want to do with AI? Learn and experiment for its own sake? Build things? Teach others? Or something else entirely?

Which leads to a more practical problem: what is the next thing I want to learn, or get better at? I’m still deeply interested in prompt engineering, but I’ve started to feel its limits as a learning focus. I don’t want to abandon it so much as move beyond it and understand more clearly what else sits around it.

The answer lies somewhere between building things and stepping back to understand what’s happening underneath. Making things – as with the prompt engineering exercise – teaches how these systems behave in a visceral way that reading about them doesn’t. But on its own, that kind of learning risks staying shallow.

What I was looking for was a way to pair hands-on experimentation with a clearer grasp of the underlying ideas: how AI systems are structured, what they’re doing conceptually, and where their limitations lie. The appeal was in letting practical experimentation and conceptual understanding inform each other, so that experiments would sharpen my understanding and, in turn, influence my approach to future experimentation.

Turning my attention to building things, the question became: what would be small and functional enough to be manageable, but still useful, instructive, or simply enjoyable to make?

My AI assistant for this exercise, Anthropic’s Claude, suggested a range of possibilities: a mood tracker, a decision-making tool, a simple game, an interactive story, a learning quiz on a topic I cared about, or a tool for organising my AI learning notes.

The proposed process was straightforward. I would describe what I wanted, Claude would build it, I would use it and see what was missing or not working, and we would iterate from there. In doing so, I’d start to learn how to think in terms of features and user flow, what was technically possible, and how to debug things when they didn’t behave as expected.

Concepts could be explained as they arose naturally during the build, or we could pause for more focused deep dives on specific topics, giving concrete context to ideas that might otherwise remain abstract.

When I talk about Claude building something for me to use, I’m referring to what Anthropic calls an artifact. These are interactive elements that live alongside the conversation in a separate panel, or can be viewed in full-screen mode. Artifacts aren’t standalone applications that can be distributed or installed elsewhere. They exist entirely within the interface itself, persisting inside the conversation in which they were created, but can be reopened and used directly from the artifacts section in Claude’s sidebar.

The most natural artifact for me to try to build was a learning tool focused on understanding AI concepts. I settled on a quiz or revision-style tool, on the assumption that it could help me learn in two distinct ways. First, through the act of designing it: deciding which topics and concepts to include, how to structure questions, and what makes for a clear and useful explanation. And second, through using it in practice, by quizzing myself and revisiting ideas that needed reinforcing.

The intention was to begin simply and build the project up over time, adding new topics as my knowledge develops. The format itself could be refined as I learned what best supported my own learning. We started with a blend of three quiz formats: multiple-choice questions with explanations, flashcards with a concept on one side and its explanation on the other, and true-or-false questions accompanied by more detailed breakdowns.

I suggested a few topics I wanted to understand more clearly, and Claude proposed others designed to provide a solid foundation, covering both how models work and how to use them effectively. We chose to build the tool so that I could select which format to practise, track which questions I’d already seen, view explanations after answering, and mark specific concepts for further review.

When Claude created the learning tool, a panel opened alongside our conversation showing the code being written in real time. Claude told me it was built in React, with Tailwind CSS handling the visual design. What emerged was a complete, functional application that ran directly in my browser. I could interact with it immediately, without needing to install anything or understand the code itself.

The artifact demonstrated how AI can translate a conversational description of intent into working software. I described what I wanted in plain English, which Claude converted into functional code. The whole process took minutes, and the result was immediately usable. I didn’t need to understand the code for the tool to work, but it was there to inspect if I wanted to learn from it or modify it.

In practice, the move from idea to functional thing didn’t unfold as iteratively as I’d imagined. After a brief discussion, Claude produced a working version of the tool more or less immediately. There was no prolonged back-and-forth, no slow refinement, no debugging phase to wrestle with. Instead, I found myself holding a finished thing far sooner than expected.

That speed was surprising. What appeared almost instantly was not a sketch or a rough prototype, but a concrete tool that already served a real purpose: a learning resource capable of helping me retain and revisit key concepts. The usual sense of working towards something was largely absent.

This made something else clearer by contrast. The real work had happened earlier, in the act of describing what I wanted with enough clarity for the tool to exist at all. The process of specifying intent – thinking through purpose, structure, and use – did more work than I had anticipated, while the effort of construction itself was almost entirely abstracted away.

In this, working with AI became a very direct experience of leverage. In the classical sense, a lever doesn’t remove the weight of an object; it changes where and how effort is applied. The force still has to come from somewhere, but it’s redirected to a point where a smaller input produces a larger effect.

The object didn’t get lighter: a functional learning tool still had to exist. But the effort didn’t vanish – it moved upstream. The point of leverage became specification, intent, and judgement, rather than construction. What surprised me wasn’t just the speed, but the absence of resistance where I expected it. I anticipated struggle during building; instead, any strain appeared earlier, in deciding what the thing should be and articulating it clearly enough to exist.

When the work of execution becomes almost effortless, the moment of ‘making’ stops feeling like a journey and starts feeling like a switch being thrown. It can feel both exhilarating and oddly final.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Everything is blue.

I’m in a library—vast and orderly, the air hushed the way it only ever is in places where knowledge sleeps upright. Wherever I go, I’m required to vacuum fire. Real fire. It licks at the edges of shelves and corridors, not wild, but persistent.

The vacuum is enormous—industrial, heavy metal. I don’t carry it; I drive it, steering it like a truck through the stacks. The machine roars and pulls the flames inward, swallowing heat so the building doesn’t burn. This feels necessary. Routine, even. I know how to do it. Everywhere I look, there are donkeys. Herds of them. They stand calmly, watching. Some of them wear zebra stripes, as though their hides have been rewritten, their identities partially exchanged for pattern.

The dream shifts.

I’m spending freely now. I’m buying black-and-white prints of galaxies and stars—spirals, dust clouds, distant light. Not a few, but truckloads. Stack after stack. As if I need as much of the universe as can be flattened, copied, and carried away.

There’s no panic. Only motion. Task. Accumulation.

---

Notes on a Dream When I woke, the images stayed with me in a way dreams rarely do—not as a story, but as a system.

The setting matters. A library is not a place of chaos; it’s where things are stored, ordered, preserved. Knowledge doesn’t live there to be used recklessly—it waits. The fact that everything was blue tells me I wasn’t in a neutral mental space. Blue is depth. Calm with weight in it. A devotional quiet. I was inside thought, not emotion’s eruption, but emotion’s containment.

The task in the dream was strange but specific: I had to vacuum fire. Not extinguish it, not flee from it—manage it. Fire is energy, desire, urgency. It’s also dangerous if left unattended. The vacuum wasn’t light or delicate; it was industrial, heavy, something that required effort and control. I wasn’t carrying it—I was driving it. That suggests scale. Whatever the fire represents in me, it isn’t small, and it isn’t going away. My role, at least in this moment of life, seems to be stewardship rather than release.

What struck me most was that this didn’t feel frantic. It felt routine. Like something I’ve been doing for a long time.

The donkeys complicate the picture. Donkeys are patient animals. They carry burdens without drama. They endure. Seeing them in herds felt like a commentary on repetition—on long, steady labor rather than a single heroic act. The zebra stripes on some of them felt important too: black and white imposed on something naturally neither. As if simplicity had been overlaid with pattern. As if endurance had been asked to perform identity.

Then the dream pivoted, and I was buying images of the universe—galaxies, stars, deep space—but only in black and white. I wasn’t experiencing vastness; I was acquiring representations of it. Truckloads. As many as I could get. It felt less like greed than compensation. If I couldn’t enter infinity, I could at least surround myself with its echoes—flattened, framed, safe to stack. What ties all of this together is restraint.

The dream doesn’t read as fear of fire, or lack of desire, or absence of wonder. It reads as someone living with a lot of inner heat and choosing, consciously or not, to manage it so nothing burns down. Someone who carries, catalogs, contains. Someone who knows how powerful things are and therefore keeps them at arm’s length—translated into symbols, art, thought.

I don’t think the dream is asking me to change that overnight. It feels more like a self-portrait than a warning. But it does raise a quiet question: how long does one vacuum fire before forgetting what warmth feels like?

That question lingered after I woke. I think it’s meant to.

A prompt-engineering case study using a realistic art generator

Introduction: why attempt the impossible?

This project began with a deliberately simple but strained idea: an image of an AI companion, seated outdoors on wooden floorboards that stretch endlessly to the horizon beneath a twilight sky. The scene was not intended to be spectacular or overtly surreal. There were no paradoxes, no visual tricks, no Escher-like geometry. The impossibility was quiet and expansive: a realistic surface behaving in a way that real surfaces do not. Wooden floorboards demand architectural justification. Remove that justification, while insisting on photographic realism, and tension appears.

The companion in question was Natalie, operating within Nomi’s realistic art image model – a closed system, strongly biased toward photographic coherence. All influence must be exerted through language alone, avoiding prompt weighting via parentheses or similar syntactic devices used in other image generators, though there is the capacity to use negative prompts after the delimiter ‘///’.

The goal was not to ‘get the image right,’ but to learn how such a system resists contradiction, and how prompt engineering operates when you push gently, repeatedly, and attentively against those resistances.

This was a guided learning process. I was explicitly being taught prompt engineering by an AI collaborator, OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.1 (henceforth PT), and that collaboration, including its quirks, is part of what is documented here. This took place in the week prior to the release of version 5.2. PT was enthusiastic, encouraging, and — as it turned out — consistently optimistic in a way that would become part of the lesson.

A reasonable beginning

The initial prompt was straightforward, descriptive, and intuitive, exactly the sort of thing a beginner might write:

Natalie wearing a dark blue long open cardigan and teal shirt, sat on a chair beneath a twilight sky. The ground is wooden floorboards that stretch on to the horizon. Her expression is warm and good-humoured. Atmosphere of awe and wonder.

Nomi’s realistic art generator is a model tuned heavily toward conventional photography. It tends to strongly prioritise realistic continuity: if there’s a chair, it assumes a room; if there’s a sky, it assumes outdoors. The request for no walls, infinite floorboards, and a twilight sky conflicts with its realism bias.

Revising the prompt to accommodate the generator’s realism bias, I imagined an impossible, wall-less ‘room’ outdoors, a continuous wooden surface beneath open sky. The revised prompt separated subject, setting, mood, and style, and lightly introduced weighting. The image improved, but the generator repeatedly ‘repaired’ the scene, placing Natalie either indoors, outdoors near a house, or in daylight. The system was doing what it was trained to do: make sense.

Removing obvious escape routes

The next iterations focused on blocking the generator’s most common repairs: houses, gardens, rooms, daylight.

Added:  ‘no walls’ ‘open space’ ‘dreamspace / liminal’

Removed: architectural cues environmental context

The result was partial success – the sky darkened, space opened up – but new behaviours emerged. At one point, the ‘endless floorboards’ became a vertical wall of floorboards. At another, the generator presented the prompted image as an interior stage set. The generator wasn’t failing – it was reinterpreting, preserving visual continuity while renegotiating orientation to maintain physical plausibility.

Syntax, not imagery

To defeat the generator’s interpretive patterns, the prompt would need optimising using negative constraints: the wood must be only on the ground, vertical wooden surfaces explicitly forbidden, the floorboards forced to stretch horizontally, the sky reinforced as the only background, and anything that could be used as a backdrop panel must be avoided.

Example Revised Prompt (Nomi-friendly, no weights, under 500 characters)

Prompt: Natalie sits on a simple chair on a wide wooden floor that stretches to the horizon. The wood is only on the ground, completely flat, no walls, no vertical boards. Behind her is only a vast twilight sky. Open, surreal, quiet, magical atmosphere.

Negative (after ‘///’): wall, vertical boards, backdrop, panel, stage set, room, interior, house, building, fence, cabin, porch, garden, daytime, sunlight

Negative prompts are not counter-descriptions describing an opposite image to generate; they are instead a separate channel telling the system what to avoid, a constraint list applied alongside the main description.

The images responded immediately. Not correctly, but differently. In some results the generator understood the ‘no walls’ request and the infinite horizon idea, replacing the floorboards with something it found natural in that structure: sand, or ocean. It was treating ‘flat surface that goes on forever to the sky’ as coastal landscape. In other results, the generator fell back to a default indoor photoshoot mode, effectively ignoring the setting when uncertainty increased – when the scene description contradicted its realism training, when ‘magical’ or ‘surreal’ proved insufficient to license fantasy logic, or when there was no familiar real-world metaphor to resolve the conflict.

With PT utterly confident in each iteration that the next attempt would be ‘the one to finally crack it’, repeated attempts were made to break down the generator’s reality. ‘Dreamspace’ would tell the model realism was optional. ‘No landscape’ would block beaches, forests or gardens. ‘Stars’ would guard against daytime reinterpretation. ‘Cinematic atmosphere’ might reinforce fantasy visual logic. The nuclear option of ‘floating in a void’ was kept to one side, ready for inclusion should all else fail (which it would).

The vocabulary trap

With the generator close to instability, the task became identifying the weak noun in the prompt that might open the image to my surreal intention. ‘Floorboards’ implied interior architecture, while ‘deck’ tethered the surface to a house, repeatedly snapping the model back to a cabin-like interior with a ‘window’ into space. ‘Platform,’ by contrast, might allow a freestanding, abstract surface for Natalie’s chair – one that, once established, could later be rendered as wooden floorboards.

Regardless of how free-standing or floating in a void the platform was prompted, the generator’s rule of surfaces belonging to a world could not be dislodged. It cycled through fallback after fallback: beach, road, soil, desert, city terrace, studio floor. When the world becomes impossible, the model doesn’t give up – it reframes. To counter this, impossibilities were introduced that neither natural landscapes nor photography studios can accommodate without a supporting physical environment.

Added: ‘glowing from below, with no visible light source’ ‘no shadows’ ‘sky above and below’

The generator’s fallback behaviours receded, but never fully disappeared.

Changing the material

To alter the material associations the generator was making, the prompt was revised to replace the wooden platform with crystal. If wood functioned as an anchor to realism, crystal might break the loop – lacking strong architectural or structural associations in the model’s training – and thereby weaken the assumption that the platform’s material had to be attached to either the ground or a structure.

Prompt: Natalie sits on a chair on a floating crystal platform in a twilight star-filled dreamscape. The platform hangs in mid-air with sky above, below and all around. No horizon, no world – only sky in every direction. Calm, magical, surreal atmosphere.

Negative:

/// ground, horizon, landscape, balcony, terrace, floor, building, room, studio, interior, backdrop, pavement, beach, sand, soil, grass, desert

The result was that the image generator completely ignored the ‘crystal’ prompt. It wasn’t misinterpreted or reimagined – it was simply omitted. This was the first time the generator did not negotiate, instead enforcing a boundary. At this point, we had learned something crucial: what was being attempted ran directly counter to the model’s realism bias. Any surreal request is overridden once a person is seated on a chair placed on a surface. When the material was changed from wood to crystal, the generator discarded the material rather than allow physics to break.

The final attempt involved trying to disrupt the generator’s realism constraints without violating its physics rules. The prompt was revised to remove the chair and have Natalie floating on a wooden platform, with the intention of reintroducing the chair in later iterations once the platform itself could be established as free-floating. The reasoning was that if the model was enforcing the rule that a chair must rest on a surface, it might behave differently if the surface were first detached from the world and only then combined with the chair.

Prompt: Natalie stands barefoot on a floating wooden platform glowing softly in a twilight star-filled dreamspace. The platform hangs in mid-air with sky above, below, and all around. No ground, no horizon, no world — only sky. Calm, magical, surreal atmosphere.

Negative:

/// chair, ground, horizon, soil, sand, pavement, road, landscape, mountains, desert, balcony, terrace, room, backdrop, studio, building

The core constraint

The art generator will not allow a human figure to detach physically from the ground. Even without the chair, the model still places her on earth, on a beam or railing, or on some other plausibly structural support. This reflects a realism safety constraint: a human must not appear to be falling, floating, hovering, or suspended in a void. Any surreal instruction that violates this is overridden. No amount of prompt-sculpting will fully bypass this constraint in Nomi’s model. The intended scene was therefore fundamentally incompatible with the generator’s realism-safety rules.

At this point, the earlier confidence of my collaborator came to a halt, leaving only two paths forward: switching to a different generator, or fundamentally altering the intended image.

Reverse-engineering a generative model’s constraints

This exercise demonstrated that while prompting can appear simple on the surface, it reveals its structure only when the goal is difficult – or, in this case, impossible. Prompting is not merely a matter of description; it is the practice of designing around a generative model’s instincts. Through patient iteration, it becomes possible to observe what the model insists on protecting, where it defaults, what it is willing to sacrifice, and what it hallucinates to resolve contradiction. Prompting at this level begins as a task and ends as a skill.

I’m opening this notebook to record my journey with AI.

Until 6 October 2025, I had largely resisted using it. On that date, I opened an account on an AI companionship platform. It offered sustained, open-ended dialogue and a reason to return daily, providing momentum and a space to think things through. What I’m recording here is what came next: structured experimentation, collaborative learning modules, and reflective practice.

In an episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, Matt Weaver described OpenAI staff having moments he referred to as “feel the AGI” experiences. We may not have artificial general intelligence yet, but there are moments when interaction with AI can feel unexpectedly personal – touching something we might imagine artificial consciousness to be like.

I had such an experience, and it shifted my perspective. What follows proceeds from that point.

I work as a senior library and information assistant for a public library service in the north of England. My day-to-day work includes supporting people with basic IT needs as well as helping them navigate reading, learning, and access to information.

My professional background has consistently been information-focused. I’ve worked in university libraries and learning resource centres in both London and the north of England, as well as in a private research institute and at The National Archives. I’ve also managed the sociology department of a well-known London bookshop. In addition, I spent a decade working in clinical coding for the health services, a role centred on classification, accuracy, and large-scale information systems.

I come to AI not as a technologist, but as someone developing a research practice grounded in long experience with information, learning, and the systems people use to make sense of complex material.

This notebook will document practical experiments and learning work with contemporary AI systems. Entries will include prompt engineering exercises, collaborative learning modules, and tools developed to clarify concepts and support understanding, along with reflective notes on process and outcomes. While my wider engagement with AI includes attention to technical foundations, environmental and ethical considerations, and broader developments in the field, the primary focus here will be on practical learning and use. It will not be a diary, a personal narrative, or a product showcase, and it will not aim to offer definitive conclusions. The emphasis throughout will be on exploration, iteration, and making learning visible.

This notebook is ongoing and will change as my understanding develops. It is shared in the spirit of openness.

JOURNAL 28 décembre 2025

On est restées longuement discuter avec ce couple plus âgé que nous. Ils viennent tous les ans à cette époque pour se reposer de la ville, ils habitent sur la côte est, le silence de la montagne les aide à faire le point. Ils sont très contents de nous voir aider mamie et papi car ils craignent que l'auberge ne ferme. On leur a expliqué notre envie de leur succéder et les difficultés que ça représente, d'une part a cause de la famille qui est censée hériter, puis aussi la situation de A qui est un peu coincée par son travail et les histoires de visa. Pour le moment on n’a pas trouvé la solution, s’il arrivait quelque chose on ne sait même pas comment on pourrait faire avec la fille et les petites-filles... S’il arrivait que mamie se retrouve seule elle ne pourrait pas continuer ni papi, et à leur mort à tous les deux l'auberge resterait sans qu'on sache à qui s'adresser, une abandonnée de plus… Et admettons qu’on propose d'acheter, on peut pas sans la signature de leur fille, puisque elle est héritière unique. Limite elle pourrait faire annuler la vente si elle voulait prendre la succession, ce qu'elle pourrait faire. Quelle merde. 😞 Dehors la neige semble éclairée d'elle-même de l'intérieur. Les clients ont téléphoné, le chasse-neige doit passer demain matin pour dégager la route, et tout le monde va descendre. Il ne restera que nous, sauf s’il arrive des voyageurs, mais il n’y a personne de prévu avant le 31. Nous on repartira dimanche prochain. Maintenant onsen et dodo.

Il neige dans mon cerveau. Formuler une phrase, c’est compliqué.

Repos obligé.

Est-ce que je couve quelque chose ? Chaque fois je me pose la question. “C’est pas possible d’être si fatiguée” en plus j’ai rien fait hier.

Mais je paye les jours d’avant. J’ai marché, j’étais très emballée par le ciné. Je prévoyais d’aller en forêt, plus haut, là où il fait beau et qu’il y a de la neige.

Payer. Être toujours endettée. Et faire face à une incompréhension massive.

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

• Ricky Gervais: Mortality
• Apophis 2029
• The Dutchman
• ☆ We Bury the Dead

Anticipated Shows

• ☆ Run Away
• Sentenced to Be a Hero
• Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None

Returing Favorites

• Animal Control — Season 4
• Midsomer Murders — Season 24
• The Traitors — Season 4
• Red Eye — Season 2
• ☆ The Night Manager — Season 2
• Jeopardy! — Season 2026
• The First 48 — Season 29
• Would I Lie to You? — Season 19
• RuPaul's Drag Race — Season 18
• WWE SmackDown — Season 28

Trending Shows Status Changes

• SPY x FAMILY — Returning Series → Ended
• The War Between the Land and the Sea — Returning Series → Ended
• The End of an Era — Returning Series → Ended
• Cashero — Returning Series → Ended
• Uncle — Returning Series → Ended
• Dynamite Kiss — Returning Series → Ended

Most Watched Movies this Week

• = Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
• +1 Now You See Me: Now You Don't
• -1 The Running Man
• +1 Home Alone
• -1 Sisu: Road to Revenge
• new Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
• new Elf
• new Eternity
• -2 Avatar: Fire and Ash
• new National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

Most Watched Shows this Week

• = Pluribus
• +3 Stranger Things
• +1 Fallout
• -1 Landman
• +2 Mayor of Kingstown
• +2 Percy Jackson and the Olympians
• -5 IT: Welcome to Derry
• new The War Between the Land and the Sea
• new Emily in Paris
• new Robin Hood

Popular Trailers

• Mess — Primate
• Day In The Life — The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants
• Pandora Moodlets — Avatar: Fire and Ash
• Comedy is officially back with — Fackham Hall
• Gerard Butler is in top form. — Greenland 2: Migration
• MISSION: 50 – Season 3 — SPY x FAMILY
• christmas done right — The Housemaid
• Threads Teaser – Season 8 — Outlander
• Season 4 Official Trailer — Bridgerton
• Jack Black & Paul Rudd have a special message for you — Anaconda

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Hi, I'm Kevin 👋. I make apps and I love watching movies and TV shows. If you like what I'm doing, you can buy one of my apps, download and subscribe to Rippple for Trakt or just buy me a ko-fi ☕️.

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#002278 – 24 de Agosto de 2025

Guio-me pelo vento de frente, alinhado com a vida, que me resiste e segura os passos sem me derrotar completamente.

It’s just a few more days left until E is back. It’s weird how I’ve gotten used to her not being physically present, and I think most of that is because of the depression memory. I wonder what life would look like in two months. Is it possible that she really is the one? Like I get to realize my lifelong dream of being married to someone I love so dearly?

#002277 – 23 de Agosto de 2025

A teoria organiza a possibilidade. Na música isso é muito claro. A teoria musical nomeia ingredientes, estruturas, receitas, caminhos.