Schimbul de noapte

Marți, 19 iulie 2011

De curând mi s-a sugerat să încep să scriu proză scurtă. Și asta pentru că mă întinsesem prea mult în a-mi spune păsul într-o anumită problemă. Dându-mi seama că spațiul respectiv nu era potrivit (ca dimensiune) pentru romane — nici măcar pentru proză scurtă — am concluzionat rapid ceea ce aveam de spus, urmând apoi să primesc sugestia menționată. Probabil că respectiva persoană a fost bine intenționată, dar chiar și acest gen literar presupune o anumită înclinație către literatură, o anumită tehnică, un anumit stil și, nu în cele din urmă, se presupune că trebuie să ai ceva de spus.

Ei bine, nu sunt sigur că vreau să mă ocup de proză scurtă (cel puțin din motivele de mai sus), dar acum nu am somn. Sunt în concediu, dar de peste opt ani lucrez în ture, sau schimburi, cum le numesc unii. Turele noastre au o succesiune bine stabilită. Există chiar și un coleg care, de fiecare dată când unul dintre noi este în concediu, în delegație sau are o anumită problemă care îl ține departe de serviciu, îi preia tura. Când cel plecat se întoarce, revine în tura sa, urmând să efectueze în continuare același ciclu de ture.

Așa cum spuneam, sunt în concediu și acum, dacă aș fi fost la serviciu, aș fi fost în tura de noapte. Cum organismul meu a „simțit” și s-a adaptat ritmului turei mele, acesta își continuă mersul, nestingherit de faptul că, la sfârșitul anului trecut, conform politicii firmei la care lucrez, mi-am programat o parte din concediul de odihnă din acest an la sfârșitul lunii iunie…

În urmă cu ceva timp mă aflam într-o situație similară (numai că nu eram în concediu) și, pentru că m-am gândit la insomnie, am apelat la internet, cea mai rapidă sursă de informații pentru a mă documenta despre acest subiect. Am spus „cea mai rapidă sursă”, nu cea mai veridică. Din legătură în legătură (ar trebui să folosesc termenul link) am ajuns la termenul englezesc pentru ceea ce cred că pățesc eu acum și anume „shift work sleep disorder” (SWSD), adică dereglări ale somnului (sau insomnii) cauzate de lucrul în ture. Această dereglare nu a fost îndeajuns studiată nici măcar în State, acolo unde se efectuează tot felul de experimente, studii și cercetări. Analizele s-au concentrat pe cei ce lucrează câte patru sau cinci nopți consecutiv. Dintre concluziile studiilor am reținut faptul că cei ce lucrează în schimburi pot deveni irascibili (nu încercați să mă verificați). Existau și câteva propuneri de remediere a acestei dereglări sau a acestui tip particular de insomnie, dar acestea nu sunt soluții practice, astfel că nici măcar nu le voi menționa.

Unul dintre colegii mei, cu vechime mult mai mare decât a mea, a precizat că un dezavantaj al lucrului în ture este socializarea, mai exact ruperea relațiilor cu prietenii datorită faptului că sfârșiturile de săptămână sau după-amiezile, când există posibilitatea întâlnirilor cu aceștia, sunt ocupate de ture…

Un alt coleg mi-a spus că și-a pierdut răbdarea de a mai citi așa cum o făcea înainte de a lucra în ture. Mi-a confirmat că nu sunt singurul.

Lucrul în ture într-un sistem cu un regim „semi-militarizat”, cum este numit de unii sistemul din care face parte și firma la care lucrez, un sistem cu o ierarhie bine pusă la punct și în care dispozițiile se execută imediat ce au fost primite, după care se confirmă efectuarea lor, mi-a schimbat oarecum și viața particulară. Astfel, dacă îmi spui că mâine ne vom întâlni sau mă vei suna la o anumită oră, iar după două-trei minute nu ai apărut sau nu ai sunat, atunci încep să-mi pierd răbdarea… Prea multă disciplină nu e bună. Poate doar în armată…

Nu vreau să se înțeleagă că nu îmi place să lucrez în ture! Pentru mine, acest regim constituie un avantaj, pentru că încă din adolescență preferam să mă culc mai târziu decât cei de vârsta mea. De fapt, nu aș numi-o preferință. Pur și simplu adormeam mai târziu. Cu timpul, această oră de somn a început să devină obișnuință pentru organismul meu, astfel încât acum singurele ture care mă deranjează sunt cele de dimineață. Asta pentru că doar două zile din zece trebuie să mă trezesc devreme, în situația în care în celelalte opt mă trezesc fără alarmă de la ceas. Mai mult, în alte două dimineți, când lumea pleacă la serviciu, eu ajung acasă și, tacticos, îmi iau pijamaua și mă culc! Dorm exact opt ore, cât a durat tura de noapte. Cum după opt ore de somn urmează șaisprezece ore care să completeze „ziua” de douăzeci și patru de ore, faceți un calcul să vedeți cam când ar trebui să mă culc din nou! După două astfel de zile, bioritmul este complet dereglat și lucrătorul în ture încearcă să revină cu el la „normal”. Mult succes! i-aș spune, dar după ce se va chinui vreo câteva zile va trebui să o ia de la început, așa că mai bine nu mai reglează nimic! Acesta este și motivul pentru care eu niciodată nu am încercat să mă forțez să adorm atunci când nu îmi este somn (deși pentru cel ce nu lucrează în ture ar fi ora obișnuită de somn).

Deoarece nu am analizat și nici nu voi analiza modul în care colegii suportă lucrul în ture, nu pot spune decât că unul dintre „somniferele” mele este internetul. Dacă vă ajută în vreun fel această informație, nu pot decât să mă bucur! Și pentru că am folosit această modalitate de exprimare, „nu pot decât să mă bucur”, vreau să precizez că unii au fost deranjați când am folosit-o, dar vă asigur că este utilizată ca atare, fără nicio intenție de a leza sentimentele cuiva!

Și, ca să închei, voi aminti ceea ce a spus un fost coleg de facultate care a ocupat o funcție similară în tură și care a renunțat după doar câțiva ani (circa cinci ani): m-am gândit înainte de toate la sănătatea mea!

Shangri-La. Crucea de sub Antarctica

Publicat la 19 iulie 2011

De mult timp nu a reușit un roman să mă captiveze așa cum a reușit „Shangri-La. Crucea de sub Antarctica”.

Autorul exploatează o breșă în informațiile privind sfârșitul celui de-al Doilea Război Mondial (sau păstrarea unora dintre acestea cu eticheta „top secret”), explicând unele evenimente ale istoriei contemporane privite dintr-o altă perspectivă: nu pășim pe apă nu pentru că știm că ne vom scufunda, ci pentru că așa am fost învățați!

El reușește să asambleze și să dezvăluie un puzzle năucitor despre personajele ce par a conduce destinele acestei planete, membri ai organizației Ultima Thule.

Pentru că acțiunea se desfășoară uneori contra cronometru (unuia dintre protagoniști sugerându-i-se, la un moment dat, să-și schimbe ceasul elvețian pentru că îi rămânea în urmă) și pentru că o parte dintre personaje sunt foști participanți la unele evenimente mai puțin cunoscute de la sfârșitul ultimei mari conflagrații mondiale, Julio Murillo ne poartă din Germania în Statele Unite, din Franța în Spania și din Marea Britanie în Antarctica.

Acesta reușește să țină cititorul cu sufletul la gură, iar, când lucrurile par să se îndrepte pe un făgaș normal, o nouă răsturnare de situație necesită noi dezvăluiri, noi informații pentru completarea puzzle-ului, care devine din ce în ce mai complicat, dar totuși mai bine conturat.

Să fie oare omenirea în drum spre un nou război mondial, unul pentru resursele de energie sau pur și simplu unul pentru apă?

Finalul pare fericit… dar Murillo nu este un regizor hollywoodian, ci laureat al Premiului pentru Roman Istoric Alfonso al X-lea!

There’s a part of me that wants to LIVE…

and there’s a part of me that’s tired enough to die.

There’s a part of me screaming, “GROW!”

And another part whispering, “Sit down. You’ve done enough.”

One part of me is sick and tired of standing still.

It wants to stretch.

To change.

To drive my roots DEEP into the soil and reach for the ONE TRUE VINE.

Jesus Christ.

Because apart from Him, I can do nothing.

But then there’s that other part of me.

The loner.

The introvert.

The man who can recharge his batteries alone—with nature, a beach, a quiet library, and a stack of books.

Sometimes I want CONNECTION.

Sometimes I want a LOCKED DOOR.

And maybe you understand that.

Because there’s something inside all of us that cries, “I NEED PEOPLE!”

And five minutes later says, “Everybody leave me alone!”

There’s a part that wants to climb the mountain…

and another part that sits down halfway up and says:

“Enough. I’ve had enough.”

But wherever you are today—

connecting or isolating…

climbing or resting…

laughing or crying…

growing or barely hanging on—

remember this:

WE’RE ALL GOING HOME.

And for those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, I don’t believe Heaven has gated denominational communities.

No Pentecostal subdivision.

No Baptist boulevard.

No Catholic cul-de-sac.

Just redeemed people standing before the Lamb.

And if your name is written there…

I’LL SEE YOU HOME.

But until then, we have some living to do.

So where are you TODAY?

Are you hiding?

Are you reaching?

Are you resting?

Are you running?

Are you connected to the Vine—or trying to survive on yesterday’s strength?

And here comes the question we don’t like asking:

WHAT IS REALLY HOLDING ME BACK?

We blame the devil.

We blame people.

We blame our family.

We blame what somebody did to us twenty years ago.

And make no mistake—some wounds are real.

Some trauma is real.

Some scars run DEEP.

But your scars do not get to become your master.

Your past does not get to become your prison.

And Satan does not get the final word over a child of God.

Sometimes the greatest battle isn’t around us.

It’s WITHIN us.

The part that wants to rise…

against the part that wants to quit.

The part that believes…

against the part that is afraid.

The part reaching for tomorrow…

against the part still chained to yesterday.

And eventually I have to stop asking:

“Lord, why won’t You change everything around me?”

And start praying:

“LORD, CHANGE SOMETHING IN ME.”

Help me get out of my own way.

Help me forgive.

Help me heal.

Help me connect.

Help me rest when I need rest—and RISE when You tell me to rise.

Help me sink my roots so deep into Jesus Christ that the storms of this life can shake my branches…

BUT THEY CANNOT PULL UP MY ROOTS.

Lord…

HELP US

TO HELP US.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

Van Voorbijgaande Aards Woord lab

Woorden voor testen in de vestiging voor experimentele setting op levende lezende proefpersonen

Afstootgevend Secondelijks Formaterialisme Afdrukwekkend Ongezond (2) – dagen en dagen aan een stuk zonder zonlicht Onberijkbaar Vernuen (het verleden live actualiseren, alsof het zich voor je ogen en oren afspeelt) Gevolgers (direct of indirect zichtbare effecten op vers gepost stukjes) Biografisch geheugen (voor die personen wiens geheugen compleet is ingevuld door een andere vertelstem) Gebeurtewis (voor alle gebeurtenissen die door andere wel belangrijke gebeurtenissen de moeite van het onthouden niet waard zijn) Memoratio (de hoeveelheid stukjes van een ervaren tijdelijk evenement die worden onthouden ten opzichte van de vergeten rest) Auotmatische Piloot (2) (mensen die na ontwaken meteen opvliegen) Remedia (zichzelf vrijwillig herhalende berichten verzenders) Doorstop (aanhouden met er niet aan beginnen) Subtileren

Nieuwe uitdrukkingen en gezegden voor het verheffen van het volk

Van af- en instellen komt vastzitten Zoals het klokje thuis tikt tikt het overal elders ook Kauw veilig De stemming is vet gedrukt De zaak loopt in het miljard Ik ben totaal naar de eierstokken Dit kan zo niet korter! Het licht zwaar op de maag Ik kom er niet ondertussen

I just finished a Taro reading with a friend. I always feel settled and “good” in my body when I am first recognised as a reader/guide or “seer” even (though more accurately referred to as a “feeler”) and then secondly, when I am simply invited to come along someone on their journey inward, to be let in and trusted with raw material.

I have leaned so much into my intuition that I can’t even question it anymore. Goosebumps all day, every day. The woo is a wooooey/lovely feeling, but I remember when I still wasn’t able to trust it. These days, I don’t need anyone to validate anything anymore. I don’t need solid answers, I just know. Yes, no, or maybe (which still means a no).

It’s funny and strange to look back and see the way I came from, and where I am now. I came from a place of many fears. Many Catholic sort of fears too. Dark. Haunted. Things. I was born into Catholicism and “left” The Church after university. I don’t follow any Catholic ritual or prayer, but I do revere and honor the mother of mothers, Mother Mary. I’m also not saying that I have absolutely no fears anymore. They come and visit, but it’s easier for me to recognize them when they are here, and that I know that I don’t want them staying ‘round for tea. Maybe a greeting and then a brief exchange about the weather, but that’s about it. I recognize them well enough, but I don’t want to hear too much from them. My fears are, after all formless feelings. They do not appear as they used to do in my Catholic brain, or how they are portrayed in scary films or media, in very ghastly and mangled/disfigured ways. They are just formless, heavier feelings.

The energies that doubt/or do not accept Truth, the answer, the culmination or conclusion of something—are unwilling or not ready to hear them yet. That’s all. There is no right or wrong way, in this game that is life. Things simply are. This is that feeling. No need to push back, or push away. Meet the wave as it comes, if it comes. Meet the moment, whatever is in that moment. However that moment is unraveling. Wherever you are, you are home.

#writing #daily

„The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.“

Carl Rogers formuliert diesen Satz in On Becoming a Person. Das gute Leben ist für ihn kein Zustand, den wir eines Tages erreichen und anschliessend besitzen. Es ist ein Prozess des Werdens, geprägt von wachsender Offenheit für die eigene Erfahrung und zunehmendem Vertrauen in die eigene Wahrnehmung [1]. Der Psychologe Stephen Joseph fasst diesen Gedanken treffend so zusammen: Entscheidend ist nicht, das Glück als späteren Zustand anzustreben, sondern die Art, wie wir uns zu unserem Leben verhalten [2].

Damit beantwortet Rogers in psychologischer Sprache eine Frage, die sehr viel älter ist: Was heisst es, gut zu leben? Aristoteles und #Epikur kommen zu anderen Antworten als Rogers. Dennoch verbindet sie etwas Wesentliches. Das gute Leben muss gelebt werden. Der entscheidende Unterschied liegt weniger im Prozess selbst als darin, wer oder was diesem Prozess seine Richtung gibt. Diese Frage ist nicht nur philosophiegeschichtlich interessant. Sie stellt sich bis heute überall dort, wo Menschen über persönliche Entwicklung nachdenken oder andere dabei begleiten.

Das gute Leben muss gelebt werden

Bei Aristoteles heisst das Ziel menschlichen Lebens Eudaimonia. Die verbreitete Übersetzung mit #Glück kann in die Irre führen, weil sie leicht an einen angenehmen inneren Zustand denken lässt. Eudaimonie bezeichnet vielmehr ein gelingendes Leben als Ganzes. Aristoteles verbindet sie mit vernünftiger Tätigkeit gemäss der Tugend und betrachtet sie über die Dauer eines Lebens hinweg [3].

Damit liegt das Ziel nicht einfach am Ende eines Weges. Eudaimonie verwirklicht sich im Tätigsein selbst. Ein gutes Leben besteht nicht darin, einmal einen bestimmten Zustand erreicht zu haben, sondern darin, gut zu leben.

Epikur setzt einen anderen Akzent. Bei ihm steht mit ataraxia, der Freiheit von seelischer Unruhe, ein Ideal im Zentrum, das zunächst stärker nach einem erreichbaren Zustand klingt. Doch auch Ataraxie lässt sich nicht von der Lebensweise trennen, aus der sie hervorgeht.

Das zeigt sich besonders deutlich an Epikurs Lehre von den Wünschen. Manche sind natürlich und notwendig, andere zwar natürlich, aber nicht notwendig, wieder andere leer oder unbegründet. Philosophische Lebensführung besteht deshalb nicht darin, möglichst viele Wünsche zu erfüllen. Sie verlangt vielmehr, Wünsche zu prüfen und unterscheiden zu lernen [4]. Wer nach Reichtum, Ansehen oder immer neuen Bedürfnissen verlangt, vermehrt unter Umständen gerade jene Unruhe, von der er sich befreien möchte. Freundschaft wiederum besitzt bei Epikur einen ausserordentlich hohen Stellenwert. Sein Ideal ist kein einsamer Rückzug von der Welt [5].

Aristoteles und Epikur vertreten sehr unterschiedliche Vorstellungen des guten Lebens. Gemeinsam ist ihnen aber, dass sie nicht nur fragen, wie ein Mensch sich entwickeln kann. Sie verfügen auch über inhaltliche Massstäbe dafür, wie er leben sollte.

Pierre Hadot hat diesen Charakter antiker Philosophie mit dem Begriff der Lebensform beschrieben. Philosophie sollte ihre Schüler nicht bloss informieren, sondern formen. Lehre und Lebenspraxis gehörten zusammen [6].

Hier trennt sich Rogers von seinen antiken Gesprächspartnern.

Wer bestimmt die Richtung?

Rogers gibt keine vergleichbare Lehre darüber vor, welche Wünsche richtig sind oder welche Tugenden ein gelungenes Leben ausmachen. Seine Aufmerksamkeit richtet sich stärker darauf, unter welchen Bedingungen Menschen ihre eigene Entwicklungsrichtung erkennen können.

Dafür verwendet er Begriffe wie psychologische Freiheit, Offenheit gegenüber Erfahrung und Vertrauen in den eigenen Organismus. Wer weniger damit beschäftigt ist, Erfahrungen abzuwehren oder einem von aussen übernommenen Selbstbild zu entsprechen, kann mehr Informationen aus dem eigenen Erleben berücksichtigen. Rogers hielt diesen inneren Prozess keineswegs für unfehlbar. Gerade weil Menschen offen für die Folgen ihres Handelns bleiben, können sie ihre Entscheidungen korrigieren [1].

Diese Bewegung lässt sich aus heutiger Sicht als eine Form von Autonomie beschreiben. Der Begriff ist hier eine Zuspitzung, nicht Rogers’ eigener Oberbegriff. Gemeint ist auch keine Freiheit nach dem Muster „Alles, was ich selbst gewählt habe, ist richtig“. Rogers nimmt vielmehr an, dass Menschen unter Bedingungen grösserer psychologischer Freiheit dazu neigen, konstruktivere und stärker mit ihrer Erfahrung übereinstimmende Entscheidungen zu treffen.

Darin liegt die interessante Verschiebung gegenüber Aristoteles und Epikur. Nicht der Gedanke, dass das gute Leben ein Prozess oder eine Praxis ist, unterscheidet Rogers grundsätzlich von ihnen. Neu gewichtet wird vielmehr die Frage, woher die Richtung kommt.

Aristoteles verweist auf Vernunft und Tugend. Epikur prüft Wünsche daran, ob sie tatsächlich zu einem ungestörten Leben beitragen. Rogers vertraut stärker darauf, dass ein Mensch, der sich von fremden Bewertungsmassstäben löst und seine Erfahrung unverzerrter wahrnimmt, seine Richtung zunehmend selbst bestimmen kann.

Zwischen Orientierung und Autonomie

Für Coaching und persönliche Entwicklung ist diese Differenz mehr als eine theoretische Feinheit. Entwicklungsprozesse beginnen häufig mit Zielen: Was soll sich verändern? Was soll erreicht werden? Woran lässt sich Fortschritt erkennen?

Rogers legt nahe, davor eine andere Frage zu stellen: Ist dieses Ziel überhaupt das eigene?

Ein Ziel kann vernünftig formuliert, messbar und erreichbar sein und trotzdem hauptsächlich aus Erwartungen anderer stammen. Begleitung besteht dann nicht nur darin, einen Menschen möglichst effizient zu einem bereits bestimmten Ziel zu führen. Auch die Richtung selbst muss Gegenstand des Prozesses sein.

Hier berührt sich Rogers erneut mit Hadots Vorstellung von Philosophie als Lebenspraxis, ohne dass beides gleichgesetzt werden sollte. Gemeinsam ist ihnen der Gedanke, dass Einsicht allein wenig verändert. Ob eine Vorstellung vom guten Leben trägt, zeigt sich erst darin, wie jemand wahrnimmt, entscheidet und handelt. Auch gute Begleitung muss sich letztlich an dieser gelebten Praxis bewähren.

Aristoteles und Epikur setzen Rogers zugleich ein notwendiges Korrektiv entgegen. Autonomie allein liefert noch keinen Massstab für ein gutes Leben. Menschen können sich täuschen, widersprüchliche Wünsche verfolgen oder sich selbst und anderen schaden. Umgekehrt wird eine Lehre vom guten Leben problematisch, wenn sie die Richtung vollständig vorgibt und für die eigene Erfahrung kaum Raum lässt.

Zwischen beiden Polen bleibt eine Spannung, die sich nicht einfach auflösen lässt. Eine Vorstellung vom guten Leben braucht Orientierung, ohne den Menschen auf einen vorgegebenen Lebensentwurf festzulegen. Rogers verschiebt das Gewicht stärker zur eigenen Erfahrung, Aristoteles und Epikur stärker zu begründbaren Vorstellungen davon, was ein gutes Leben ausmacht.

Vielleicht ist deshalb nicht nur wichtig, welche #Ziele wir verfolgen, sondern auch, wie wir zu der Richtung gekommen sind, in die wir gehen. Ganz ankommen werden wir dabei nicht. Rogers würde vermutlich sagen: Das ist kein Mangel des guten Lebens, sondern eine seiner Bedingungen.

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Quellen

[1] C. R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston, MA, USA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961, insbesondere „The Good Life and the Fully Functioning Person“. Frei verfügbar: https://www.panarchy.org/rogers/person.html

[2] S. Joseph, „Do You Seek Happiness as a Direction or a Destination?“, Psychology Today, 7. Feb. 2024. Frei verfügbar: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/what-doesnt-kill-us/202402/do-you-seek-happiness-as-a-direction-or-a-destination/amp

[3] L. Evans, „Aristotle’s Guide To Living Well“, Philosophy Now, Nr. 151, 2022. Frei verfügbar: https://philosophynow.org/issues/151/AristotlesGuideToLivingWell

[4] „Ancient Ethical Theory“, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, zuletzt substanziell überarbeitet am 5. Feb. 2021. Frei verfügbar: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-ancient/

[5] D. Konstan, „Epicurus“, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, zuletzt substanziell überarbeitet am 8. Juli 2022. Frei verfügbar: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

[6] M. Sharpe, „Pierre Hadot“, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Frei verfügbar: https://iep.utm.edu/hadot/

Bildquelle Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938): Bol de fruits, Musée de Montmartre, Paris, Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde Gemini Notebook (ehem. NotebookLM) von Google verwendet.

Topic #Selbstbetrachtungen | #Philosophie

In December 2025 I sat down with Gus of The Classic Adventure Gaming Podcast to discuss our ongoing campaign Conquering the Barbarian Altanis. I was joined by four players: JP, never_plays_elves, SleazyB, and Dreadlord. We have been playing weekly since March 2022, and at the time of recording we were around 150 sessions in.

Over the years I have shared some of our experience (see Resources at the end of the post), but this was the first time I did so on a podcast. It was a lot of fun, especially since Gus was such a great host. The “panel” format with players, I think, worked well.

Since the episode is nearly two hours long, I will attempt to summarise the key points. In essence, we focus on what has and hasn't worked for us to establish, and maintain, a long running open-table sandbox campaign. The discussion is mostly centred on various techniques, strategies, mindset, and community dynamics that, we believe, contribute to the longevity of our campaign.

Some of the principles we discuss are:

• Consistent scheduling. The major enemy of working adults. We do fixed weekly slot (Mondays, 3 hours), I am always present. This builds habit, reliability, and player trust; players plan around the game.
• Open table. Multiple characters per player, anyone can join or leave. Builds resilience, accommodates real-life constraints, filters for committed players.
• A living, evolving world. I maintain strict time records, and session reports; the world evolves without players, it shapes them and is shaped by them. This creates a persistent world, makes catch-up possible, and allows for emergent situations that are not divorced from the in-game reality.
• Consequences and stakes. Characters have ultimate agency to do as they please, but freedom to act is not freedom from consequences. Lethality must be fair, and treasure must be plentiful. This helps create real stakes, rewards skill, and balances danger with opportunity.
• Minimal prep. Wilderlands setting inspires me; I use random tables, and develop elements (characters, sites, etc.) iteratively. This reduces prep burden, allows flexibility, and leads to surprising and memorable situations.
• Rules as a robust framework. I continuously study OD&D, AD&D and other old-school sources to develop deep understanding of the rules. This provides a consistent, fair, and robust framework that handles any situation.
• Community. I set clear expectations, and we do our best to maintain consistent tone, and friendly atmosphere. This creates an environment where invested players self-select. We are responsible for our shared experience and enjoyment.

We discuss a whole lot more. We did our best to share practical and actionable insight. You let us know how we did. :)

You can listen to the episode on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Play, or using the player below:

Regarding the resources I mentioned above, previously I had shared our experience in the following blog posts and essays:

• 21 Lessons learned after running 100 sessions (blog post)
• On Character Death and Long-Term Play (blog post)
• 21 Lessons Learned After 100 Sessions (essay in Fight On! #16)
• 7 Contrarian Practices for Running Online Games (essay in Fight On! #17)

We hope you find our experience helpful and inspiring to start, or improve, a sandbox game of your own. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Fight on!

#Resource #Podcast #Reflection

I finished half of J’s Birthday present. She said that she wanted cute things or something like a candle, and so I have been learning how to sew and got all the materials to create a stuffed animal of her cats. I finished the first one and I’m really proud of myself because it took a long time, but it came out honestly pretty good and I think it’s really cute. I think it also shows a lot of effort and care, and I think those things make a really good gift. I can’t lie, though, I feel already let down for my birthday again this year. In the past, I haven’t really been able to celebrate my birthday and there has even been times where my parents have forgotten about it. I worry that I have set my expectations too high for them now, as I almost always find myself disappointed, or let down. I think just generally, this is how I feel whenever I receive presents for something like birthdays or Christmas when I do. I cherish Presents and I keep them and savor them, and I am very thankful for them, but I feel like more often than Not. It feels like I am not receiving something that has a lot of thought or Care put into it. I feel like whenever I give Presents to people close to me. I put a lot of thought and effort into them, and I feel like I set the bar for myself too high. I don’t think that’s a bar that other people really reach. And I don’t fault people for that and I think I’m saying all of this because I recognize that this is unrealistic to expect and to be upset by. I know the obvious thing here on why I am additionally feeling this way is because of my last relationship. I remember how for Christmas she got me stuff late, and she was worried about giving me presents because I had given her such good ones and I think for my birthday she had not really put a lot of thought into them. To try to make things easier for her, I said that we would both make a list of things in our discord server where we used to keep notes, and I gave her a lot of different ideas and I even bolded a couple things to try to make it even easier, to basically give a slam dunk. When we did our delayed Christmas, she gave me random things that weren’t on the list and she didn’t give me the things that I bolded. When we talked about it later, she said she just didn’t think about it and messed up. I remember she got me a random thing from an Instagram ad, which were scratcher cards for date ideas, but the problem was the dates were nothing like the kind of things that I like doing. And additionally, all of the things were available on their website, and she instead spent $50 which was half of our budget on that. She ended up taking that back and I ordered the thing that I had asked for and she sent me the money for it. I got her a lot of things for her presents, going well over the budget. I understand that this puts even more pressure on her, and I can recognize that. But one of the main things I got her, was one time when we were late on a call she was talking about how as a child in London, she got a jelly cat Collab stuffed animal that she could not find any mention of anymore, and her stuffed animal was really really beaten up. She talked about how she wished she could get it replaced or repaired. I immediately took note of that, and I ended up trying to scour the Internet as much as I could to find it, and I ended up eventually finding someone who is selling it on eBay, and I got it imported. When I finally surprised her with it, I had given her a different stuffed animal that was the same type of animal, and when she wasn’t looking, I swapped it with the real one, and she finally noticed it and broke down crying and gave me such a big hug. And I remember that later, she talked about how shit she felt because of how good of a present and how much effort I had put in compared to her. And I think that was one of the things that ultimately led to the breakup, just along with this general pattern of guilt because she felt like I was too good for her and she kept fucking up. I’m not gonna get into it, but I have a lot of different memories of things like Christmas or birthdays where I would be skipped over or forgotten, or almost purposefully excluded. And so I recognize that I am sensitive to receiving presents for things like this. But part of me is always wishing that someone would really take note and see me and get to know me in such an intimate way that they could give me a present that would hit me to the core. I guess I really want to know that I matter. And it sucks that I kind of see Presents like that.

Nothing was wrong with you. You were adapting.

Some of the most perceptive, emotionally intelligent people you will ever meet did not develop those abilities through books or meditation.

They developed them at home—during a childhood when reading the room was not a skill.

It was a necessity.

Trauma does not only wound. Sometimes it sharpens. A child growing up amid emotional volatility or uncertainty may become extraordinarily sensitive to tone, expression, silence, and the smallest changes in another person’s behavior.

From the outside, this sensitivity can look like intuition.

From the inside, it feels more like vigilance.

You enter a room and understand something about it before anyone speaks. You notice the tension held in a jaw, the pause that lasts half a second too long, the smile that never reaches the eyes. Most people wait for words. You learned to understand what was happening before the words arrived.

What others call a gift may be a habit you never chose.

You often know what people need before they know it themselves. Someone says, “I’m fine,” but you can already feel the shift beneath the sentence. You recognize what remains unspoken because, for much of your life, the unspoken carried the most important information.

You did not merely learn to read people.

You learned to survive by reading them.

That same history may explain why you become strangely calm when everything falls apart. While others panic, something in you grows quiet and strategic. You assess the danger, find the next necessary action, and begin solving the problem.

Crisis feels familiar.

And the familiar—even when painful—is something the body knows how to navigate.

What appears to others as composure may simply be a nervous system saying, I have been here before.

You may also find yourself studying people almost compulsively. You replay conversations, searching for hidden meanings. You build elaborate maps of character from a gesture, a hesitation, or a slight change in tone.

Why did they say that?

What did they really mean?

What happens next?

This is not curiosity alone. It may be the remnant of years spent trying to understand behavior that felt unpredictable. Knowing what someone might do next once made the world feel a little safer.

The habit followed you into other rooms.

So did self-reliance.

You became someone who does not expect to be rescued. You solve problems quietly. You carry more than people realize. Even when help is available, reaching for it can feel unnatural—sometimes more frightening than simply doing everything yourself.

When support was once unreliable, dependence began to resemble risk. Asking for help meant opening yourself to disappointment.

Competence became the safest place to live.

It has served you well. But it may also have kept people farther away than they needed to be.

And then there is the intensity with which you experience the world.

Music can stop you midstep. An unexpected kindness from a stranger can move you almost unbearably. Injustice does not merely offend your principles; it enters your body. Every goodbye seems to remain with you longer than it does with other people.

You do not observe life from a comfortable distance.

You absorb it.

People may have called you too sensitive. Perhaps what they meant—without understanding it—was that you were noticing more than they were.

Trust, understandably, comes slowly. Not because you are incapable of love or determined to be cynical, but because you learned early that appearances of safety could be misleading.

Your caution has cost you. There may be friendships that never deepened, tenderness you could not quite accept, and people you kept outside because you could not yet believe they meant to stay.

But when someone finally makes it through—when trust is earned rather than requested—your loyalty can be nearly unbreakable. Those relationships are often among the most honest and durable either person has known.

Stillness may be harder.

Rest ought to feel like relief, but sometimes it feels like exposure. When the world becomes quiet, your nervous system does not necessarily become quiet with it. It waits. It scans. It listens for the approaching change.

Somewhere in you remains the belief that stillness is merely the pause before something goes wrong.

Learning to rest, then, is not a matter of overcoming laziness. It is the difficult work of teaching the body that this particular silence is safe—that, at least for this moment, nothing is coming.

Perhaps the deepest result of all this is your need for meaning.

You cannot move casually through the world. Shallow answers stopped satisfying you long ago. You have looked too closely at pain—your own and that of others—and something in you refuses to let it be meaningless.

You need beauty to matter.

You need suffering to teach you something.

You need love to be more than temporary comfort.

This does not mean trauma was a gift. It does not mean the damage was necessary or that suffering should be romanticized. No child should have to become extraordinarily perceptive simply to feel safe.

But the sharpness is real.

And so was the cost.

Both truths must be held at once: the intelligence that was built and the difficulty that built it. We need not minimize the pain to appreciate the growth, nor dismiss the growth in order to honor the pain.

For years, the qualities that made you perceptive, resilient, and emotionally deep may also have made you feel as though something was wrong with you.

Nothing was wrong with you.

You were adapting.

You did it remarkably well.

The question now is not how you became this person.

The question is what you will do with the mind you built along the way.

Ever wish you could just divorce your gender?

sigh.

I’m a man. I understand how ‘no’ can feel like doing 60mph with only 40’ between your headlights and the intersection.

But knowing this only means understanding that hitting the brakes and putting the car sideways may be destructive and embarrassing, but it’s preferable to killing a young family by smashing into them full speed when you run the red light.

I don’t know where I learned to respect women, but not running red lights, my dad taught me. JaQ’uan didn’t get that chapter in his book about life.

Note: this story discusses rape, graphically describes sex, uses distasteful language and describes violence.

You’ve been warned.

The police report:

On the basis of facts developed during the investigation of this offense, it is believed that the suspect, on or about the date of November 16, 2024 committed the offense of PC 22.011(a)(1) SEXUAL ASSAULT • FI2, in Dust Meridian.

The facts of the offense are as follows: On 11-16-24 at around 1548hrs, Dust Meridian PD Officers responded to Dust Regional Hospital, in reference to a sexual assault. Officers met with Victim, Victim reported being friends with JaQ’uan (offender) JaQ’uan invited victim to his residence, on Nov 15 at around 1400hrs.

Victim reported while she was inside JaQ’uan’s bedroom, he asked to perform oral sex on her and Victim refused. Victim stated they had only been friends and Victim was only there to taik with JaQ’uan: JaQ’uan insisted and pulled Victim's pants off. Victim told JaQ’uan that she didn't want any sexual interactions with him. Victim got up to leave, but JaQ’uan forced Victim back on the bed, JaQ’uan then placed his mouth on Victim's vagina. JaQ’uan then inserted his penis, with a condom on, inside Victim's vagina. Victim kept teiling JaQ’uan to stop and that she didn't want to have sex. JaQ’uan placed his hand on Victim's neck and choked her. Victim stated she was in intense pain and was able to push JaQ’uan off. Victim then fled the residence and went to hospital.

Victim completed a SANE Exam through SANE Exam Nurses. Officers observed bruising on both sides of Victim's neck. SANE kit submitted to the TX DPS Garland Crime Lab for testing. Investigators met with Victim and went over the incident with her.

Victim reported that on the day of the sexual assault, she was going through severe depression. Victim stated when she goes through these events, she tries not to be alone. Victim stated her depression can spiral down and she can become suicidal and hurt herself.

She took JaQ’uan’s offer to go over to his residence as a friend, so she wouldn't be alone. Victim had never had sexual relations with JaQ’uan before and had only known him for a few months. Victim stated no one else was at JaQ’uan’s residence at the time of the sexual assault.

Victim provided text messages between her and JaQ’uan showing him inviting her to his residence, which he gave his address. in the text message conversation Victim messaged JaQ’uan that she was outside.

The next messages was from JaQ’uan that stated,

“U ok?, You real emotional, If u ever wanna talk im here”.

On 11-16-24, JaQ’uan sent a screen shot from a social media message thread of someone telling JaQ’uan that Victim was accusing him of rape.

JaQ’uan messaged. “Wtf.”

On 11-25-24, JaQ’uan messaged Victim asking why she was going around saying that about him and asked Victim to stop. The contact number for JaQ’uan in Victim's phone was the same number the DMPD had on file. Investigator later called the same number and spoke with JaQ’uan over the phone, which confirmed the number to be his.

Investigator received a notification from the Garland Crime Lab that male DNA was detected and analyzed from SANE kit. They ran the male DNA profile through CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) and received a match for JaQ’uan.

End of report

—-

Making this matter go from deplorable to horrible is the unstated detail that Victim was a sixteen-year-old.

Good grief.

How is this guy free?

Look, I’m no saint. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, some of them pretty severe (depending on who you ask). But somehow I’ve managed to exist for 5 decades without a single rape. In fact, I’d hazard that most men have.

If part one is sinister, part two is idiotic.

Open Mouth Insert Hammer

I have a friend name Gresh.

Gresh is a bear of a man, 49, well read, and an ex con.

Not a hardened gang-banger. Gresh got locked up for writing software that rounded down transactions and then deposited the ‘abandoned’ rounding into an account he controlled.

Yes, this is the plot of Office Space. Where do you think Judge got the idea for the screenplay?

So, he did 15 at a federal penitentiary and was released a better man. Sort of.

I got to know Gresh after he married a friend of ours. I grew to like him and we bonded over his love for reading.

He is highly intelligent. Though clearly he has some room for growth.

Last week, at a family BBQ, the subject of the rape came up and Gresh and his recently released cousin, D’rius, were at odds.

Gresh, for some inexplicable reason felt compelled to defend the rapist. It seemed to him that the victim had somehow entrapped JaQ’uan.

While cousin D’rius felt strongly that the young woman, a minor you will recall, had in fact, been raped.

This feels like the semi-idiomatic statement applies: When at first you set forth to defend your sanity, you have already lost the argument.

The disagreement simmered and for some reason spilled online Monday night.

It was then that Gresh, instead of calling a friend to complain and rail at the sky, decided to get in his truck and drive across town while live-streaming to Facebook a tirade of threats and some of the lowest brow trash talk I’ve ever heard.

Threats laced with that choicest of racial slurs for our dark-complected cousins, and an insistence that his (Gresh) violence was going to put D’rius in his place.

The live stream (about 15m) ends with Gresh getting out of his vehicle and berating D’rius for bringing a gun to a fist fight.

‘Oh! You tough!?! You REAL tough with that gun. You gon’ keel me!?! Imma go-rillah’, King Kong sing got shit on me!!’ Gresh shouts.

Reportedly, D’rius agreed and exchanged the weapon for a hammer.

Gresh is a large man. I learned he goes by the online pseudonym ‘silverback’ if that tells you anything.

While D’rius is built more like a man made from wire.

Very tough wire, it seems, for Gresh had his own ass handed to him.

D’rius knocked Gresh’s front teeth out and when DMPD arrived, D’rius had him pinned to the ground.

Gresh was arrested for a variety of serious crimes including making terroristic threats, traveling with the intent to do bodily harm, and about 5 other things I cannot recall.

In Gresh’s own words, ‘them PD had me layed out th’ middle o MLK blvd, like a punk.’

This has to be one of the most sinister-turned—idiotic situations I have seen since my own cousins ended up shooting each other over who misplaced the meth.

And insult to injury, neither man has any connection to the victim or the alleged rapist.

Two warriors picked a side and went to war. No questions, just piss and vinegar. Good grief.

Stupid is gonna stupid, I guess.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my home town. The home that built me. Not really even a very good place to be from.

I’m going to try to be a better friend to Gresh. I’m going to tell him about my sister. How i greatly desired to bludgeon her husband to death after he tried to kill her and instead left her permanently disabled.

It wasn’t easy, but I offered him a Bible study.

Magnanimous, right?

Agape love in action.

Not neurons firing, adrenaline spiking, let’s smash something or someone. Preferably both.

Not how it works.

Maybe next time, he’ll call and ask me to go with him and I can ask, ’are you sure it’s with the risk of running the light instead of losing a little dignity?’

Fantastic video essay on Steven Spielberg's MUNICH, which I haven't seen since the first watch when it originally came out. Definitely due for a rewatch if for nothing else but the truly unparalleled masterful camera work alone.

Spent a full day assembling Ikea furniture and another full day breaking down all the boxes. I really hope it's the last time I crack open an Ikea box ever again as I am somewhat traumatized by the sight of anything Ikea after all the relocations made in the U.S. and the obligatory Ikea visits that would soon follow.

Though, realistically, I will soon have more Ikea in my immediate future; they somehow discovered on the day of delivery that certain items were out of stock. Items relating to some of the stuff that was actually delivered. Like say, the armchair's cushioning. I now have the frame of a chair assembled in the studio, completely unusable as a chair until its cushioning is restocked towards the end of the month, yay.

Alas, the dream of kicking back on a reading chair will have to wait for a while. Speaking of reading, I moved on to Tochi Onyebuchi's GOLIATH after dropping Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS. Paul Graham Raven shared an article by Alan Jacobs with me that perfectly summarizes my feelings about the book (before even finishing it), and I suspect those same feelings are likely to be carried forward into the remainder of Banks' “Culture Novels” were I to embark on diving into them, which I won't. I think I'm good. Unless new knowledge or insight is attained in the process of experiencing a supposedly entertaining piece of fiction, it actually isn't all that entertaining imho.

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#radar #journal

I can’t believe we are almost to 100 days. What have I even been doing? How am I so calm?

Today was busy again. Started off early helping my brother secure some Pokemon stuff from a drop at Target. Why? Well, why not? I waited in line, kinda made a friend, and got exactly what he was looking for. Then, I went to Orangetheory and then volunteered for a few hours.

I went home, organized my pottery notes and watched a movie. I grabbed a late, unhealthy dinner and went to glaze a couple of things. That is essentially it.

I wonder if these entries could be better or more entertaining if I didn’t just list what I did… I don’t know.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

1 September 2026

A mosquito net arcs over our bed in Seoul like an airy little mountain, or like an upright wishbone. Viewed from below while lying supine, the apex of the net appears to be descending upon you for an embrace with its central webbing stretched outwards by four limbs, almost like a flying squirrel mid-glide. At night this effect is heightened—dimmed light makes the fine netting body disappear around its structure. And the pink curtains in the room, which used to belong to Yena's grandmother, throw a rosy filter over the whole scene.

At the MMCA's Korea Artist Prize show, I spent the most time in Hong Jin-hwon's room looking at a single printed image he made of what appears to be rain and condensation on a window on a gray and gloomy day. Water droplets are foregrounded, the surface acting as the window. In the distance are two dark and blurred shapes; to me they first read as oil pumpjacks, but on closer inspection, one of them looks like a large statue of a figure pointing with an extended arm, and the other looks almost like a large abstracted kinetic sculpture of some kind. On top of all of that (visually) are scattered splotches of what looks like black paint or ink. The effect is an all-over flattening, three levels of perception compressed into an intervening barrier that is inhibiting but porous nevertheless.

alright, i was irritated yesterday. now, luck you, im frustrated. and its not even related to yesterdays topic. im talking about her again. obviously. i know what this is to me. thats not the problem. the probelm is im supposed to guess what it is to her. a relationship? something private? hell. something shes not sure about? i dont know. she doesnt seem to know either, so i guess im meant to sit here and figure it out for the both of us. i hate being a secret. i hate feeling like im something that has to be kept somewhere nobody can see. thats not how i like thins. thats not how ive ever been. and yet, surprise. im still here. it frustrates me. i keep telling myself that i should just quit her. just tell her i cant do this bullshit anymore i cant sit here and be a “secret” and leave it there. sounds easy, super easy yet i cant do it. i cant stop thinking about her, i cant stop wanting her, i cant stop missing her, her voice keeps showing up in my head, her name. dreams about her disappearing, walking away, whatever the hell my brain thinks its doing by doing that. and i cant even talk to her right now, or whenever i think i “Want to”, so.. my brain decided to give me some. options. with all this, it makes me want to go back to drinking or smoking, just to shut everything up for a while. but i havent. ive got my stupid little streak going, as what ill call it. silly me. a week or whatever of not fucking everything up. could call it a “good for you” bullshit. anyway, it still doesnt change the fact that i still want her, i want to quit this. i want to tell her im done with all of this. im done with her keeping me a secret. then i remember i dont want that. i want her. i miss her so fucking much. i want her so fucking badly. im still here for her, reckless to say, but im still alive for hher. which sounds fucked when you say it out loud, but whatever. im not intrested in making it sound suitable for you readers. and you know, im probably overreacting. probably.

ill talk to her eventually and she’ll say something, ill hear her voice, and suddenly she’ll possess my heart again and ill forget i was ever angry. so thats something to look forward to. lucky me. horaay. fuck yeah. i mean, if im being honest, it wouldnt surprise me.

Sincerely, Against all reasons. Hers.

P.S, i love that god damn woman. i’d die for her. id rip off my fucking lungs off to keep her warm and close to me. id do whatever for her. and before you start judging me, save it. you have nothing to do with whatever the fuck i say here. its my problem, my shits and my stupid fucking life. so keep your little opinions to yourself.

Alamo Square is where you take the postcard photograph. The painted ladies along the eastern edge, the skyline behind them, the lawn sloping away towards the Fillmore. On the morning of 10 September 2026, Mayor Daniel Lurie stood on that lawn and declared that San Francisco was in a rent emergency.

The numbers he brought were these. Median rents had risen roughly 26 per cent in a year, faster than anywhere else in the United States. Eviction warning notices filed with the Rent Board had climbed 44 per cent, from 1,033 to 1,488, between March 2025 and February 2026. Around two thirds of San Franciscans rent. And the industry generating the wealth bidding those rents upwards has not yet gone public. OpenAI filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June; Anthropic is reported to be aiming at the fourth quarter of this year. Whatever is happening to San Francisco rents is happening before the money is liquid.

The mayor of the richest city in the richest industry on earth stood in front of the most photographed row of houses in California and reached for the vocabulary of disaster response. Not a shortage. Not a crunch. An emergency, the word you keep for earthquakes and fires. Nine time zones away, researchers had just published a study of five million job postings in Beijing that explains, better than anything produced in California, what kind of emergency this is.

What a Rent Emergency Can and Cannot Do

Start with the mechanics, because they are humbler than the word suggests. The declaration carries no independent legal force. It does not freeze rents, suspend evictions or commandeer property. It is, in the assessment of reporters who were on the lawn, largely symbolic, a way of lending urgency to legislation that must still travel the ordinary route through the Board of Supervisors.

What travels with it is a package: six proposed ordinances and more than 30 million dollars in new spending. Relocation payments owed to tenants displaced under the Ellis Act would rise 25 per cent, roughly 3,000 dollars a tenant. Three million dollars more would fund nonprofit lawyers for an estimated 400 households facing eviction, twenty-seven million would subsidise rent for around 650 extremely low income households, and a million would pay for a Know Your Rights campaign. Supervisor Jackie Fielder wants landlords barred from evicting tenants who owe less than one month's rent. Supervisor Danny Sauter wants annual increases in rent controlled units capped at 10 per cent, closing the route by which landlords stack banked increases and capital improvement pass-throughs into one devastating letter.

“San Francisco is in a rent emergency,” Lurie said, “and as elected leaders in this city, we need to take action that meets the moment.” City Attorney David Chiu made the sharper point: “Tenant protection laws can only help if tenants know about them and they're enforced.”

Meg Heisler, policy director of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, called the package incomplete. “We can do better,” she said. “San Francisco tenants deserve more than that.”

She is right, though the reason is structural rather than a failure of nerve. Almost every lever that genuinely governs the price of a San Francisco apartment sits above the mayor's head, in Sacramento, and has for thirty years.

The Law That Turns a Boom Into an Eviction Notice

San Francisco's Rent Ordinance dates from 1979. It caps annual increases for covered tenants at a small figure tied to inflation and requires just cause for eviction, which by American standards is strong. It also contains two holes large enough for an entire industry to pour through.

The first is the date. Buildings constructed after June 1979 were exempted when the ordinance passed and remain exempt. Every tower raised in Mission Bay, Rincon Hill, Hayes Valley and SoMa across four decades sits outside it.

The second is Costa-Hawkins. The 1995 state statute bars local rent control over single-family homes, condominiums and any unit first occupied after February 1995, and guarantees landlords the right to set the initial rent for a new tenant at whatever the market bears. This is vacancy decontrol, and it converts a wage boom into a displacement event. A rent controlled flat is not permanently affordable. It is affordable only while the current tenant stays. The moment it turns over, the rent resets to 2026.

So in a city where salary aggregators put median total compensation for an OpenAI software engineer around 795,000 dollars and an Anthropic one around 600,000, every occupied rent controlled flat represents a gap between what the sitting tenant pays and what the unit could fetch. That gap is the incentive, and it widens every month the boom continues. The law supplies the tools for closing it: the Ellis Act, the 1985 statute letting an owner quit the rental business and clear a building; owner and relative move-in evictions; buyout offers; and the long grey zone of harassment and neglect that tenant lawyers call underground eviction, which appears in no dataset anywhere.

The teacher who has rented the same Mission flat for a decade is not being priced out in the ordinary sense. Her rent has risen a couple of per cent a year. What has changed is not her rent. It is the value of her absence.

Twenty-Six Per Cent Is Not One Number

Now the harder question, the one the declaration glided past. How much of this is artificial intelligence?

Begin by noticing that the figures disagree, and that they disagree inside the single most careful source anyone has. Apartment List's September rent report puts San Francisco year-on-year growth at 25.6 per cent. The same research team's July reading put it at 23.1 per cent, then the fastest in the nation, on a median of roughly 3,714 dollars across all unit sizes and 3,750 dollars for a one-bedroom. Two months apart, one methodology, nearly three points of difference. Zumper, which reports asking prices from listings rather than a mix-adjusted index, had the median two-bedroom at 6,020 dollars in July, the first time the city had crossed 6,000, and at a record 6,120 dollars in August. Apartment List adjusts for unit mix; listing platforms report whatever is advertised. The direction is unanimous. The level is not, and neither is the baseline anyone is measuring from.

The 26 per cent has at least four parents. The first is the hole the city fell into: rents collapsed more than 25 per cent by the end of 2020 and bottomed in 2021, so much of the current rise is a return to a previous peak rather than a journey beyond it. The second is the office. Return-to-office mandates began in earnest in January 2024, and the AI companies have been the most absolutist. Remote job postings in the Bay Area fell to 7 per cent in April 2026, down from 24 per cent in mid-2022. A job that can be done from Boise does not bid up a studio in the Lower Haight. A job requiring a badge swipe five days a week does.

The third is supply, and it is ugly. San Francisco permitted 705 apartments in 2024 and roughly 1,400 in 2025, against a state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Allocation of about 82,000 units between 2023 and 2031. The vacancy rate fell from 5.1 per cent in 2024 to about 2.2 per cent by mid-2026, against a national rate above 7 per cent, and units lease in eighteen days rather than thirty. In a market that tight, a modest demand shock produces a violent price response, and the tightness is a policy choice made over decades.

The fourth is artificial intelligence, and here the evidence is genuinely strange. San Francisco is not having a hiring boom. It is having a compensation boom. In January the SF Standard reported that San Francisco and San Mateo counties lost 4,400 jobs in 2025, with the information sector shedding 4,500 positions, about 4 per cent. The sector that grew was leisure and hospitality, up 4,500, four fifths of it in food and accommodation. Ted Egan, the city's chief economist, and Enrico Moretti, the Berkeley economist who has spent a career on the geography of jobs, both feature in an account whose arithmetic is blunt: roughly 40,000 Bay Area technology workers were laid off, while OpenAI and Anthropic combined employed fewer than 10,000 people. Both firms crossed a million square feet of San Francisco office space this spring, and AI companies have taken more than three quarters of net absorption, pulling citywide office vacancy from 31.6 per cent to 27.2 per cent in a year. That is a real boom in floor space. It is not a boom in headcount.

The causal story is therefore narrower than the headlines tell. A small number of extremely well paid people, concentrated in a few blocks of SoMa and the Mission and required to be physically present, entered a market with no slack at the moment it was recovering from an artificial low. The AI boom is not the sole cause of the 26 per cent. It is the marginal bidder in a market where the margin is everything.

The eviction figure deserves the same scepticism. The Rent Board's calendar-year tallies run 745 notices in 2023, 920 in 2024 and 1,495 in 2025, steep but well below the 2,173 recorded in 2016, which complicates the claim that evictions are at a decade high. The Frisc, examining the data in July, found the increase overwhelmingly driven by nonpayment of rent, which landlords need not file with the Rent Board at all, so the true figure is higher. Nonpayment is not the signature of a landlord manoeuvring to capture AI-era rents. It is the signature of tenants who have run out of money. Both are true at once: a market pricing towards the top of the income distribution while the bottom falls behind on rent it already owes. Nobody knows the real number, as Christina Varner, the Rent Board's executive director, and the tenant lawyers quoted alongside her all concede, because different agencies count different things and the commonest form of displacement, the quiet kind, is counted by nobody.

Five Million Job Postings and the High-Skill Trap

Which brings us to Beijing, and to the most useful instrument anyone has built for thinking about what AI does to the inside of a city.

On 25 May 2026 a team led by Xiliu He, with Haoxiang Zhao, Mingyi Ma, Edward Wen Chuan Lai, Koei Enomoto, Anni Hu, Jiatong Li, Lingyun Chu and Yuan Lai, posted a paper to arXiv titled “Generative AI impacts on intra-urban inequality and skill premium in Beijing”. The dataset is 4,995,615 job postings from 2018 to 2024, mapped onto 1,383 neighbourhoods defined by Beijing's regulatory planning units.

The method matters. Rather than assigning exposure by occupation, the team decomposed postings into tasks and asked five large language models to rate each task's susceptibility to generative AI: ChatGPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GLM-4 and DeepSeek-R1. Pairwise correlations ran from 0.66 to 0.86, high enough to suggest they are measuring something real. Those scores were aggregated into a neighbourhood-level GenAI Exposure Index. The result is not a map of where AI companies have offices. It is a map of where AI-exposed work is done, block by block.

The first finding is spatial and unsurprising. Exposure concentrates ferociously in the core. Three zones form what the authors call a golden triangle: Zhongguancun Science City, Financial Street and the Guomao central business district, where scores consistently exceed 0.3, with clustering intensifying across Haidian and Chaoyang. The intra-urban AI divide, in their phrase, deepened.

The second finding should stop you. Using a difference-in-differences design centred on the release of ChatGPT, the team found that after 2023 wages in high-exposure neighbourhoods did not rise. They fell. The core estimate is a coefficient of minus 0.151, significant at the 5 per cent level, implying a decline of roughly 13 per cent. The event-study version is sharper in the first shock year, minus 0.193 for 2023, implying about 17.5 per cent, with partial recovery to minus 0.103 in 2024. Monthly wages in high-exposure neighbourhoods fell to around 13,673 yuan, narrowing the gap with lower-exposure areas from above rather than lifting anyone from below.

And those same neighbourhoods carried on attracting high-skilled workers, flowing towards places where the premium for exactly their attributes was evaporating. The authors call this the high-skill trap. Two mechanisms drive it. The first is task de-skilling: generative AI lowers the cognitive threshold for work that once required scarce expertise, coding and copywriting and data analysis among it. The interaction between exposure and education comes out at minus 1.286, meaning the wage benefit of exposure shrinks as education rises until it turns negative. The most qualified workers in the most exposed neighbourhoods fare worst. The second is crowding, for which the authors borrow the Chinese term involution: when the supply of workers in AI-exposed fields grows quickly and demand for their tasks does not, productivity gains push wages down rather than up. That interaction is minus 1.619.

This directly challenges the theory of skill-biased technological change that has organised economic thinking for forty years. That theory says new technology raises the return to skill. The Beijing data says generative AI did the opposite to the people holding the skills it touches, while continuing to draw them in.

Two Cities With the Same Geometry

Beijing is not a market-led city. Land is state-owned. Household registration governs who may settle where and access which services. Development is directed rather than discovered. If you wanted a control condition for the claim that AI-driven spatial inequality is a product of unfettered American property markets, Beijing would be a reasonable candidate.

And the spatial signature is identical. Exposure concentrates in a few core districts, high-skilled labour flows towards them, and their capacity to reward the people in them does not keep pace.

Two cities with almost nothing in common institutionally produce the same geometry. That points to something upstream of housing policy. Generative AI is an agglomerating technology. It rewards physical proximity to frontier labs, to capital, to the informal exchange of technique between people who eat lunch near each other. It concentrates in the densest, best-connected, most expensive square miles available, and keeps concentrating, because the returns to being inside the cluster exceed the returns to being anywhere else even when wages inside it stop rising.

What differs is not the force but the transmission into everyday life. In Beijing the pressure shows up in the wage data, because the state modulates who can live where and the housing market cannot express the full shock. In San Francisco it shows up in the rent, because vacancy decontrol offers a frictionless channel and nothing whatever modulates who lives where except price.

The Beijing authors' recommendations are instructive precisely because they sound nothing like American housing debate. They propose AI demonstration zones in municipal sub-centres and suburban new towns, a redirection of higher education towards complex collaboration and critical reasoning, and transition funds for highly exposed occupations. Deconcentrate the cluster, compensate the trapped. San Francisco is proposing 3,000 dollars more in relocation money for people evicted from buildings their owners are quitting the rental business to empty. These are not responses of the same order.

The Arithmetic of a Teacher's Rent

In February 2026, San Francisco's teachers went on strike. They wanted 9 per cent over two years. The district offered 6.

It lasted four days, the first strike at San Francisco Unified in nearly fifty years, and ended in a tentative agreement worth around 183 million dollars. The teachers got the equivalent of 6 per cent over two years: 2 per cent in each year, plus the equivalent of a further 1 per cent in each from two days added to the annual work calendar for training. They also won fully funded family health cover with Kaiser from 1 January 2027, with the district meeting half the cost from July 2026, and better classroom conditions in special education. They struck for nine and settled for six. Six per cent over two years is three per cent a year. Rents rose 26 per cent in one. The settlement trails the market by a factor of nearly nine, and it was the best outcome a four-day walkout could buy.

The salary schedule explains the anger better than any placard. A newly credentialed San Francisco teacher starts between 79,468 and 85,381 dollars. Tenured salaries run from 88,382 to a ceiling of 131,654, and the district average is around 103,472. Mission Local's comparison with other public employees in the same city found registered nurses earning nearly double and police officers about 30 per cent more. Jill Wynns, a former school board member, described the predicament exactly: “They're in a box. They're not in charge of their own revenue.” Unlike a city department, a school district cannot raise its own taxes.

Set that against the market. A newly qualified teacher on 80,000 dollars facing a one-bedroom at 4,000 a month is looking at 60 per cent of gross pay before a cent of tax. The standard affordability threshold is 30 per cent. She is at double it, and that is before the 26 per cent. San Francisco Unified loses roughly 10 per cent of its approximately 4,000 teachers every year: four hundred classrooms changing hands annually, in a job where continuity is the whole point.

The city tried to build its way out, and the attempt is a small masterpiece of unintended consequence. The Shirley Chisholm complex took applications from April 2024 and was ribbon-cut on district land in September 2025, 135 units financed with a roughly 48 million dollar city loan and federal low-income housing tax credits, with priority for SFUSD employees. Nine hundred people applied. Sixteen credentialed teachers live there. The rest are classified staff, because the federal credits cap eligibility at 80 per cent of area median income, which in San Francisco is 90,750 dollars for an individual. The lowest-paid tenured teacher, at 88,382, is already brushing that ceiling, and a second household income disqualifies her outright.

The city built housing for teachers and discovered that the only money available to build it with was money teachers earn too much to be allowed to live on. Dana Cuff of UCLA's cityLAB argues such projects should be called educator housing, since they will always hold more classified staff than teachers. Sara Hinkley at UC Berkeley puts the real problem where the evidence puts it: the crisis belongs to middle-income households too well paid for subsidy and too poorly paid for the market.

The Nurse, the Line Cook and the Ninety-Minute Commute

The nurse occupies a different position and illuminates the same structure. California is short something like 36,000 nurses, and the shortage has done what shortages do. Starting salaries at the major San Francisco academic medical centres now run above 170,000 dollars, with long-serving nurses approaching 227,000. A nurse can, just about, rent in the city she works in.

That is the exception proving the rule: only occupations able to bargain collectively and threaten a hospital with closure have kept pace.

The line cook has no such leverage, and works in the one sector that added jobs in San Francisco last year. This is the AI boom's actual employment footprint: not a wave of machine learning engineers but the restaurants and hotels and coffee shops that feed and house and caffeinate them. The jobs are here. The homes are not.

So people commute. A supercommute is more than ninety minutes each way. Around 3 per cent of Bay Area commuters make one, but the figure is 10 per cent in San Joaquin County, and in the Bay Area-facing towns of Tracy, Lathrop and Mountain House roughly one worker in three travels an hour or more each way. These are the people who open the kitchens, change the beds and empty the bins in a city with no room for them to sleep in. They are also the reason the 26 per cent understates the problem. The market clears not because rents found a level people could pay, but because the people who could not pay left, and kept coming back to work anyway.

A city can lose its teachers slowly, a classroom at a time. It loses its restaurant workers faster, because there is no tenure and no seniority and the commute is the first thing to break.

What the Last Two Booms Taught and Nobody Learned

None of this is new, which is the most damning fact about it.

Between 1992 and 1997, San Francisco recorded ten Ellis Act evictions. Between 1999 and 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom, it recorded 698, with the Mission District, then predominantly Latino, showing the city's highest eviction rate. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project counts 5,549 Ellis Act evictions between 1994 and 2022, roughly 11,000 tenants removed by a law written to let landlords retire.

The second boom produced its own iconography. From late 2013 through the summer of 2014, protesters blockaded the private shuttles carrying Google, Apple, Facebook and Genentech employees down to Silicon Valley, holding placards reading Eviction Free San Francisco and Housing Is A Human Right. In 2018, voters passed Proposition C with 61 per cent support, a gross receipts tax on larger companies projected to raise up to 300 million a year for homelessness services, with the technology industry loudly divided over whether to pay it.

Three booms, three waves of displacement, three rounds of civic argument, and the underlying legal architecture unchanged throughout. San Francisco is extremely good at protesting displacement and structurally incapable of preventing it, because the instruments that would prevent it are held in Sacramento by a legislature with different constituents.

The timing of the latest proof is almost too neat. One day after the emergency was declared, on 11 September 2026, California's First District Court of Appeal struck down San Francisco's Empty Homes Tax. Proposition M, passed by 54.5 per cent of voters in November 2022, would have taxed owners leaving units vacant for 182 days or more. The court held it conflicts with the Ellis Act, which forbids any requirement that an owner offer or continue to offer accommodation for rent. In the same week San Francisco declared a rent emergency, the state told it that one of the measures its voters chose to address that emergency was illegal, on the authority of a statute from 1985.

The Money Has Not Arrived Yet

Everything described so far has happened in advance of the actual wealth event.

The compensation figures that make San Francisco engineers look like investment bankers are mostly not money. They are illiquid private equity, valued at whatever the last funding round implied. One Anthropic staff engineer reported roughly 1.25 million dollars in total compensation, of which about 843,000 was equity rather than cash. You cannot pay a deposit with a tender offer that has not happened.

A flotation converts that paper into money, all at once, for thousands of people simultaneously. This is the mechanism that produced the eviction spikes of 1999 and 2013, and it is queued up again. The question for a tenant is not whether these companies are worth what private markets say. It is what happens to a housing stock of roughly 400,000 units when several thousand people convert seven-figure paper holdings into deposits over an eighteen-month window, in a city that permitted 705 apartments in 2024.

The city has one genuine response in progress. The Family Zoning Plan, passed by the Board of Supervisors in December 2025 and in force since January under a state deadline, upzones transit and commercial corridors across the western and northern neighbourhoods, the parts of San Francisco that spent a century successfully resisting density. It is the most substantial reform in a generation, it is contested in court from both directions, and it is unavoidably slow. A building legalised in 2026 is occupied in 2030 at the earliest. The flotation window is eighteen months away.

What Actually Works and What Only Sounds Like It Does

The menu of proposals is long and the evidence behind the items is wildly uneven.

Extending rent stabilisation is the most popular idea and carries the most complicated research. The most rigorous study of San Francisco's own ordinance, by Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian in the American Economic Review in 2019, used the 1994 expansion of rent control to small multifamily buildings as a natural experiment. It found the policy worked as intended for those it covered, cutting tenant mobility by about 20 per cent and lowering displacement. It also found affected landlords reduced rental supply by roughly 15 per cent, converting to owner-occupancy or redeveloping, and that the lost supply probably raised market rents citywide in the long run. Both camps misread that result. It describes a transfer: incumbent tenants gain, future tenants lose, and the losers are invisible because they are people who never moved here. Stabilisation without supply redistributes scarcity rather than ending it.

Vacancy taxes are intuitive and, in California, apparently unlawful. San Francisco's is dead at the appellate level, so the instrument is unavailable.

Key worker housing has the Shirley Chisholm problem. American subsidised housing is financed overwhelmingly through low-income housing tax credits, and those credits cap incomes below what a mid-career teacher, let alone a nurse, earns. Jefferson Union in San Mateo County got round this by funding its 122-unit 705 Serramonte project with voter-approved bonds rather than credits, setting rents at half market and filling 60 per cent of units with credentialed teachers. San Diego Unified uses ground leases, keeping the land while a developer builds. Both found a way not to use the federal programme, which is a lesson about public land and public borrowing rather than about housing design.

Social housing at scale is on the November ballot. Proposition I, driven principally by the Democratic Socialists of America, would dedicate transfer tax revenue from properties worth 10 million dollars and above to housing production, with around 30 per cent reserved for permanently affordable, publicly or nonprofit owned homes with tenant participation in governance. Lurie calls it an unaccountable slush fund, a characterisation Ed Harrington, a former City Controller, rejects: “There are all kinds of good or bad reasons you might be for or against Prop. I. But it's not a slush fund.”

Which brings us to Vienna and Singapore, invoked in every social housing argument and understood in almost none. Vienna's Gemeindebau offers indefinite leases tenants can pass to their children; Singapore's Housing and Development Board sells 99-year leaseholds and houses roughly 80 per cent of the population. Both rest on a foundation San Francisco cannot acquire, since the state owns the land, controlling around 90 per cent of Singapore and accumulating Vienna's stock over a century from the 1920s. A critique from the American Enterprise Institute argues no American jurisdiction should try to copy the model, an ideologically motivated argument that identifies a real constraint. You cannot retrofit a century of municipal land acquisition onto a city that spent that century selling off its own.

What San Francisco does have is unused public land, untested borrowing capacity, a newly upzoned western half, and employers sitting on more cash than any private institutions in its history. Employer-linked housing is the option nobody wants to name, because the precedent is the company town, which tied a worker's shelter to her employment and turned resignation into eviction. That objection does not reach the version that matters here, which is not housing for AI employees but employer contribution to housing for everyone else, structured as land value capture: taxing the locationally specific rise in property values the cluster itself creates. The value was produced by agglomeration rather than by any landowner's effort. Proposition C was a crude version, and appetite for a better one depends on whether the industry prefers negotiating terms to having them imposed after the next eviction wave.

Who the Boom Is Built To Include

Return to the finding that makes the Beijing paper worth more than its citation count. The high-skill trap is not a description of what happens to cleaners and cooks. It describes what happens to the winners. The people flowing into Beijing's exposed core are graduates, and they are the ones whose wages fell 13 per cent while they kept arriving.

Read San Francisco through that lens and the shape changes. The frontier researcher on 800,000 dollars is not a representative member of the AI economy. She is an outlier inside a small firm inside a sector that shed more employment than it created last year. Job listings in the city are down 37 per cent from February 2020, and the boom's measured contribution to city employment was 4,500 jobs in food and accommodation, held disproportionately by people commuting from Tracy.

That is the answer to the question the emergency poses without asking. The AI economy, in the city hosting it, has room for a few thousand people at compensation levels with no precedent outside professional sport, and for a much larger number serving them at wages that do not cover the rent those levels have produced. In between, where a city keeps the people who make a place somewhere rather than a campus with weather, sits a widening gap no instrument reaches. Too well paid for the tax credit. Too poorly paid for the market. That is not a housing problem coinciding with an AI boom. It is the distributional signature of the boom itself, rendered in square footage.

The mayor's package is not wrong, and it is contemptible to sneer at it. Measured against the force arriving, it is roughly proportionate to what Beijing's researchers would call transition subsidies: compensation for a displacement the policy takes as given. The one measure San Francisco's voters chose that tried to alter the structure rather than cushion the fall was struck down twenty-four hours after the emergency was declared, under a statute older than most of the engineers whose salaries are the proximate cause.

What a rent emergency in the world's AI capital tells us is that the wealth of this industry arrives as a spatial force long before it arrives as money, that it lands on a legal architecture designed in 1979 and frozen in 1995, and that the people staffing the schools and hospitals and kitchens are not being squeezed out by an accident of timing. They are being squeezed out by a system working precisely as specified. Beijing ran the same experiment under opposite institutions and answered it by trying to move the cluster and compensate the trapped. San Francisco has answered with a press conference on a famous lawn, six ordinances, and a hope that the next boom is gentler than the last two.

It will not be. The flotations have not happened yet.

Sources and References

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25. Edward J. Pinto and Tobias Peter, “Setting the Record Straight on the Vienna Social Housing Model,” American Enterprise Institute, September 2023. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-record-straight-on-the-Vienna-Social-Housing-Model-final.pdf

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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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