Earlier today I replaced my cat paw industrial with a death moth. I need to change balls, but I'm happy overall. I'd like to find some 3mm rhinestones, but I might get stuck with the 5mm since I sized up from 16g to 14g. I prefer the look of a 16g, but I read a few articles that concern me about migration.

I've had mine for several years now, but when the sadist of a piercer decided to shove a 14g into a two week old irritated piercing without my permission, and shattered the cartilage in my outer ear, let's just say I have concerns. I do have the correct ears for such a piercing, but the guy seriously fucked up. He has no business piercing people. I cannot accurately express how much that hurt. He lied and told me it was because it wasn't healed, then shoved it through the other hole. No taper either. That hurt even worse.

Anyway, that sent me down a rabbit hole of looking at my jewelry. I have a lot of jewelry. I've given away quite a lot, but there were many years where my adornments really meant something to me. I also design and make jewelry, so...

It wouldn't be that big of a deal, except I know that by this time next year, I will likely have much less space. Many of my pieces are made for a specific outfit that I may no longer wear. Others I may melt down and reset. Others I just like but am unlikely to wear.

I need to get real with myself and just give most of it away to someone who might treasure it. I might like certain jewelry, but that doesn't mean current me is going to choose to wear it. I realize I'm pretty predictable and basic in my adornment these days, and I like it that way.

I tend to wear silver toned jewelry. I prefer platinum, rhodium, and titanium, but I also wear sterling and stainless, as well as a few white gold pieces. I keep some yellow gold of each style just in case the outfit demands it.

My industrial is elegant and dainty because I don't enjoy changing it. I keep a range of Celtic styled cuffs. I have three lobe piercings on each ear that I prefer specific threaders, huggers, or studs for. I have flatback studs in every possible color and size. I also have several conch cuffs, but my ear tends to get annoyed with them.

I've gotten pretty particular with my necklace wearing, though I have many. That may change in the future, but it, too, stays pretty simple these days. A dainty chain and specific pendant makes me pretty happy. I can wear chokers or collars, but I find them really annoying unless I weigh about twenty pounds less than I currently do.

Bracelets are easy. I wear specific locked on cuffs almost always. My favorite have the twelve astrology constellations etched into them. They're so pretty. I have all sets in silver and gold. Same goes for anklets. If I'm wearing one it's usually a cuff, bells, or special. I keep considering welding a dainty chain on, but it's not very practical, and stockings would no longer look correct.

Rings...I once wore many rings, but it just feels over-gilded to me now. I have specific rings I wear now, but rarely more than one or two per hand. I don't wear toe rings. Anything else tends to be the same item.

Everything I wear tends to be the same items. So I'm thinking I should really just give it all away. However, much of it is memories, special occasions, and gifts. I don't know. It's a very strange feeling. Much of it, I think I should probably take it apart and add it to my supply hoard.

I froze up and got rid of nothing. There's always next time.

(Not proofread.)

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

I did not sleep great last night, but I managed to get up, get dressed, and try to do something with the day.

I went back to pottery to practice throwing a few more things. I still don’t love any of them, but I think I got really good practice and ideas for some new things. I also reached out to my crush! It was a very low stakes text, but I think it’s a start. I don’t want to fixate on this for very long because I want to enjoy the process of whatever happens. What is meant for me will not pass me by – I truly, firmly believe that.

Maybe tomorrow I will try to throw a few more things. I can’t make too many new things at once because I will run out of room on my shelf.

I can’t believe I haven’t heard anything yet. Not that I have a say in the timeline. Without an update, I am forced to stay on unemployed.

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.

Today was weird but also kind of good. I am still reeling in from the feeling of loss. First my dog, and now my job. It feels like a fever dream kind of summer.

I helped my mom for a few hours, then pottery for a couple hours to glaze a piece. I am so excited to see some of my new glazed items, and also so ready to make some new ones soon! I went back home for a little bit, then headed back out again for a workout class. A hard workout class. I immediately started feeling sore. I wonder if it was genuinely hard or if I made it hard to try to get some of my internalized energy out. I then went back to pottery and tried throwing a couple things. They turned out alright but not great. I am going to trim them and see how they look bone dry before bisque firing and then decide whether I want to keep them or not.

No update yet… man, this is getting really frustrating.

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.

Chapter 1: The Quiet Place Where Gifts Get Buried

You can sit at the edge of your bed at the end of a long day and know, deep down, that there is more in you than what you are using. Maybe you have had that feeling after work, after the house goes quiet, or after another week slips by without touching the thing you keep telling yourself you will get to someday. You may not even know exactly what to call it. You just know there is something God placed in you that has not fully come alive yet. That is why the faith lesson about using what God gave you matters so much, and why the deeper Christian encouragement about purpose and faithfulness belongs beside it. This is not about becoming famous, impressive, or better than somebody else. It is about refusing to let fear make your decisions for you.

Jesus spoke directly into this kind of struggle in Matthew 25 when He told the parable of the talents. A master entrusted different amounts to three servants. One received five talents, another two, and another one. The first two put what they had been given to work. The third servant buried his. What strikes me is that Jesus did not make the story about who received the most. He made it about what each person did with what had been placed in his hands. That changes the question. Instead of asking, “Why did they get more than me?” you begin asking, “What am I doing with what I have?”

That question can get uncomfortable because sometimes the answer is not that we lack ability. Sometimes we are simply afraid. You might know exactly what that feels like. You have an idea written in a notebook, but you never take the first step. You know you should make the phone call, submit the application, start the project, learn the skill, encourage the person, or speak up about something that matters, but you keep finding one more reason to wait. On the surface, it looks like caution. Underneath, it may be fear of failing, being embarrassed, wasting time, or finding out that you are not as good as you hoped.

The servant who buried his talent was not empty-handed. He had been trusted with something. That is important. His problem was not that he had nothing to offer. His problem was that fear convinced him the safest choice was to hide what he had. That same fear still works on people now. It tells you that if your gift is not large enough, polished enough, profitable enough, or noticed enough, maybe it is better not to use it at all. Jesus tells a very different story. Faithfulness is not measured by whether your gift looks impressive next to someone else’s. Faithfulness is measured by whether you are willing to use what God entrusted to you.

Think about an ordinary Monday morning. You are driving to work, already tired, already thinking about the bills, the meetings, the family responsibilities, and everything waiting on you. In that kind of life, purpose can sound like a luxury. But maybe your gift is not waiting for some future stage. Maybe it is already sitting in the passenger seat with you. Maybe it is the way you lead people fairly, solve problems calmly, listen when somebody is struggling, or keep your word when it would be easier not to. We sometimes imagine that using our gifts for God must look dramatic. Jesus keeps bringing us back to faithfulness in what has actually been placed in front of us.

That means you do not have to wait for a perfect opportunity before your life begins to matter. You can begin with what is already in your hands. You can take the ability you have, the influence you have, the time you have, and the opportunity in front of you and offer it back to God through the way you use it. That is where this becomes personal. Your talent is God’s gift to you, but what you do with it becomes your response to Him.

And maybe the first step is not a huge one. Maybe it is simply refusing to bury it one more day.

Chapter 2: When Comparison Starts Stealing Your Courage

You can feel perfectly content with your life until you look at somebody else’s. One minute, you are grateful for what you have. The next minute, you see somebody succeeding in the area where you have been struggling, and suddenly your own progress feels small. Maybe it happens while you are scrolling on your phone before bed. Someone announces a promotion, launches a business, publishes a book, grows a ministry, buys a house, or seems to be stepping into the exact kind of life you have been praying for. Nothing about your circumstances changed in those thirty seconds, but the way you see them did.

That is one of the quiet dangers of comparison. It can make you disrespect something God gave you simply because it looks different from what He gave somebody else. The servant with two talents could have spent the entire story staring at the servant with five. He could have decided that his portion was too small to matter. He could have buried his gift out of disappointment instead of fear. But he did not. He worked with what he had, and Jesus showed that his faithfulness mattered just as much.

That is a lesson worth carrying into real life because comparison rarely announces itself as a spiritual problem. It sounds practical. You tell yourself that you are just being realistic. You notice that somebody else has more experience, more money, more connections, or more natural ability, and you begin shrinking your own expectations. You stop practicing. You stop trying. You stop offering what you can do because someone else can do it better. Before long, you are not simply admiring another person’s gift. You are using their gift as an excuse to neglect your own.

Imagine a parent sitting at the kitchen table after everyone has gone to bed. The house is quiet except for the refrigerator humming in the background. There is a stack of bills nearby, a half-finished cup of coffee, and a notebook with an idea that has been sitting there for months. Maybe the idea is to return to school, start a small business, write something meaningful, or learn a skill that could change the family’s future. The parent looks at people online who seem ten years ahead and thinks, “What is the point? I am already too far behind.”

That thought feels reasonable when you are tired. It is also exactly the kind of thought that can keep a gift buried. Jesus never said that faithfulness would always feel impressive. Sometimes faithfulness looks like studying after the kids are asleep. Sometimes it looks like practicing when nobody is watching. Sometimes it looks like serving one person well instead of wishing you had influence over thousands. Sometimes it looks like doing the next right thing when your progress feels painfully slow.

God does not need you to duplicate somebody else’s path. He is not asking you to become a copy of the person you admire. He is asking whether you will trust Him enough to develop what He placed in you.

That requires humility in two directions. You need enough humility to admit that you still have room to grow, but you also need enough humility to stop insulting what God gave you. Calling your gift worthless because it is smaller than someone else’s is not humility. It is another form of comparison. Real humility says, “This is what I have. It may not be everything, but I will use it well.”

That shift changes the way you walk into ordinary situations. You stop asking whether people are impressed and start asking whether you are being faithful. You stop measuring your beginning against somebody else’s middle. You stop needing your work to look important before you decide it matters.

And that is where courage begins to return. Not because you suddenly feel more talented, but because you stop treating another person’s life as the measuring stick for your own. Your responsibility is not to outshine somebody else. Your responsibility is to stop hiding what God trusted you with and start using it faithfully where you are.

Chapter 3: Give God Something He Can Use

There are moments when the next step is much smaller than the life you imagine. You may be standing in the kitchen before sunrise, waiting for the coffee to finish, thinking about something you know you have been avoiding. Maybe it is a conversation you need to have. Maybe it is a skill you keep saying you will develop. Maybe it is work you feel called to begin, even though nobody is asking you to do it and nobody may notice when you start. The temptation is to wait for a clearer sign, more confidence, or a better season. But sometimes the faithful thing is simply to begin with what is already in your hands.

That is what the first two servants did in Jesus’ parable. They did not know everything that would happen with what they had been given. They did not receive a promise that every effort would be easy or that every decision would succeed. They simply acted. They took responsibility for what had been entrusted to them. That is the part of the lesson that can change the way you live. Faith is not only believing that God gave you something. Faith is being willing to use it.

There is a difference between waiting on God and hiding behind waiting. Sometimes God truly asks us to be still. But sometimes we call it waiting when we are really afraid to move. We pray for clarity while ignoring the step that is already clear. We ask God to show us the whole road when He may only be asking us to take the next ten feet.

Think about someone caring for an aging parent while trying to keep a job, manage a household, and hold themselves together. That person may not feel gifted. They may feel exhausted. But patience, steadiness, compassion, and the ability to keep showing up are gifts too. Not every talent produces applause. Some gifts are used in hospital rooms, quiet houses, difficult phone calls, and ordinary acts of love that almost nobody else sees. God sees them.

That matters because we often connect purpose with visibility. We assume that if something is truly important, it should become bigger, louder, or more public. Jesus did not teach that. He praised faithfulness. Some of the most meaningful things you ever do may never become impressive to the world. They may happen in a conversation where you encourage someone not to give up. They may happen when you choose honesty at work even though dishonesty would benefit you. They may happen when you teach your child something that stays with them for the rest of their life. They may happen when you keep serving after the excitement is gone.

Your gift does not become valuable when people notice it. It was valuable when God entrusted it to you. What matters now is whether you will take it seriously enough to develop it and use it. That may mean practicing, learning, becoming more disciplined, or finally taking responsibility for an area where you know you can grow. You do not have to worship your talent, and you do not have to hide behind it. You can simply treat it like something entrusted to you rather than something you own only for yourself.

You also have to hold it loosely enough to let God decide where it is useful. Sometimes the gift you thought would take you in one direction ends up serving people in another. Sometimes a disappointment redirects you. Sometimes a closed door forces you to develop an ability you would never have noticed otherwise. Faithfulness means you keep offering what you have to God without demanding that He make your life look the way you planned.

And when fear comes back, because it probably will, remember the lesson Jesus gave us. The servant who buried his talent was ruled by fear. The faithful servants moved anyway. That does not mean you will never fail. It means failure does not get to become your master. You can learn, adjust, start again, and keep moving. God can work with honesty, humility, and a willing heart. What is difficult to use is something we refuse to uncover.

Maybe you have buried part of yourself for a long time. Maybe disappointment convinced you that your chance had passed. Maybe criticism made you quiet. Maybe life became so heavy that survival took all the energy you had, and the gifts you once cared about moved into the background. If that is where you are, you do not need to condemn yourself. You can simply begin again. Open the notebook you stopped writing in. Make the call you have been avoiding. Take the class. Encourage the person in front of you. Practice the skill you keep wishing were stronger. Serve where you are instead of waiting for a bigger stage.

You do not have to know that every step will become something big. Faithfulness itself matters. Your talent is God’s gift to you, and what you do with it becomes your gift back to Him. That is the quiet beauty of Jesus’ lesson. At the end of the story, the praise was not for being famous, powerful, or better than someone else. It was for being faithful.

That is something you can choose today. Use what God gave you. Grow it. Share it. Let it serve someone. Let it become part of the good you leave behind. Do not bury it.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

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

Theres something thats been irritating me, and before you start the “everything irritates you from what im seeing,” yes, everything irritates me and that has nothing to do with you, you’re here to read, and thats it. anyways, its not important. it isnt that serious either. nobody is going to lose sleep over it, not even me. nothing is going to collapse, not even me. and the world will continue as it is, perfectly fine, even me. but i still hate it. i dont even know why it bothers me this much in the first place. its one of those, you know. incredibly minor things that should pass through your mind, then disappear like every other useless piece of information we collect throughout the day, like the way you watched a couple argue while scrolling. yes, thats all you do humans, scroll that, scroll this, scrolling here, scrolling there. shut the fuck up. thats not what im irritated about but now thats something im irritated about again. irritating irritate thats all what im saying. anyhow. whatever was bothering me still sits. in the back of my head, i noticed it and i got annoyed again then i had the remarkable thought of, why the fuck am i still thinking about this? great question. yet i still have no answer to that. its not even worth. speaking about or explaining. if i told you exactly what it is, you’d read it and think, “thats it?” yeah, thats it. thats the entire problem. nothing else. still, as how ridiculous it is, ill continue. because theres something irritating about people doing the obvious things badly and then acting as though nobody is supposed to notice. im not asking for perfection. im barely asking for competence. theres a considerable gap between those two things, and somehow people. god, people. keep finding the space underneath both. and yes, i understand how dramatic that sounds, but ill still sit here and talk about something that doesnt matter while sounding like i just uncovered whatever, uncovered something. im just annoyed. sometimes something is just annoying. there doesnt have to be some big reason behind it, and i dont need to sit here wondering what it says about me or where it came from. i think its just stupid, and it annoys me. thats all about it. and yet, ive now spent enough time talking about it that ive made it important by accident. which is, unfortunate. because it really doesnt matter. i could have stopped after the first sentence. and i could have just said “this thing annoys me” and moved on with my life like a normal person but no. instead, i wrote about it. then i decided to explain why it doesnt matter then i explained why im annoyed despite it not mattering then i explained why explaining it is stupid. at this point. ive built a small monument to something i claim is dumb. and me sitting here. giving it attention is irritating itself. so great. congrats to that thing. you managed to waste my time without even being interesting. id say ill never think about it again but that would be another lie. and ive already given this enough dignity for one morning.

Anyway, it doesnt matter, i just wanted to make that very clear. for the ninth time. you read all of this for something that doesnt matter either, so i guess you fit right in.

Sincerely, this was completely, unnecessary. Not irritated, clearly.

On 20 August 2026, the Garda station in Wexford published one of the strangest sentences ever to appear on an official Irish policing account. It concerned a suspect roughly seven feet tall, wearing a red and white striped hat, and it read: the Cat in the Hat was not in your driveway while you were out, and he is not currently hiding out in Curracloe.

The Gardaí were not being whimsical for its own sake. They were doing triage. For several days, residents across County Wexford had been seeing videos of a hollow-eyed, life-sized version of the Dr Seuss character standing in driveways, peering through windows and loitering at the edges of doorbell camera footage that looked exactly like their own doorbell camera footage. Some of them had rung the emergency line. The Gardaí explained the mechanism plainly. It is, they said, essentially an AI prompt that places the character into images and videos of familiar places.

That is the whole story in one sentence, and it is worth reading twice. Not a hoax about a crime. Not a rumour about a stranger. A prompt. A machine instruction, executed in seconds, that inserts a fictional menace into a landscape the viewer recognises as home.

Within five weeks, that prompt had produced school lockdowns in Michigan, extra officers at middle schools in Colorado, felony charges in Ohio, four arrested girls in Louisiana aged between thirteen and fifteen, and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation in British Columbia. It had produced a real teenage girl, in West Kelowna, being followed through her own neighbourhood at nine o'clock at night by someone in a costume.

The obvious way to write about this is as a story about fakes getting better. That framing is wrong, or at least it is the least interesting thing that is true. The Cat in the Hat is not a convincing fake. Nobody who looks closely believes a nine-foot cartoon cat is standing on the lawn. What collapsed in 2026 was not the cost of deception. It was the cost of dread: shareable, localised, ambiguous, atmospheric dread, manufactured on demand and aimed at a postcode.

And the institutions built to answer this have spent thirty years learning to ask one question. Is the threat credible? That question has quietly stopped being the operative one. The operative question now is whether the fear is consequential. Those are not the same question, and almost nothing in the machinery of schools and policing is designed to tell them apart.

How a 2003 Box Office Failure Became a Found Footage Monster

The origin is disconcertingly banal. On 30 June 2026, a TikTok account posted a clip lifted from the 2003 live action adaptation starring Mike Myers, set to unsettling music and captioned with something bleak about prom and overdoses. The film has always had a slightly wrong quality about it, an uncanny prosthetic face that reads as menacing the instant you strip away the score and the gags. The clip took 4.4 million views in a week before it was deleted.

Momentum came from an ordinary piece of entertainment news. Propstore announced that the original Myers suit was going to auction, with estimates in the tens of thousands of dollars. A physical artefact, photographed under gallery lighting, hollow at the eyes. One post showing the costume was viewed more than fourteen million times in three weeks.

Then the aesthetic mutated. Users stopped posting film clips and started posting evidence. Grainy night footage. Shaky handheld. Ring camera framing with the timestamp in the corner. The character appeared in driveways in Limerick and Cork, on streets in Dublin, Manchester and Leeds. In some versions it carried something that looked like a knife. The generative step is what made this different from a decade of creepypasta: the background was not a generic suburb, it was a suburb that looked like yours, because a person in your town could feed the model a photograph of an actual road and get back a clip of the thing standing on it.

British forces caught up around 25 August. South Yorkshire Police confirmed they had received no reports concerning the character or, they added, his associated Thing One and Thing Two, and then made a more serious point that has been largely overlooked: fabricated police statements about the Cat were circulating too. If you see posts online providing policing updates and advice, the force said, please check that they are from an official policing account. The hoax had already learned to impersonate its own debunking. Cheshire and Cumbria issued their own clarifications.

None of this was costless. One sixteen-year-old told the BBC she had been totally freaked out after watching the videos in the early hours and had asked her mother to collect her from a sleepover. Multiply that by a country. Then notice that nothing illegal has happened yet.

The Cat Crossed the Atlantic and Acquired a Target List

What arrived in North America in late August was a different object wearing the same hat.

In Ireland and Britain the content was ambient. It threatened nowhere in particular. In the United States, within days, it acquired specificity, and specificity is the thing that converts folklore into a criminal offence. Posts named schools. Then they named towns. Then they named individual students.

In Hutchinson, Kansas, police and high school officials became aware on 31 August of posts under the trend directing ominous threats at students. Investigators identified the account holder as a fifteen-year-old pupil at Hutchinson High School and charged them with two counts of criminal threat. The department's framing of the offence deserves attention, because it is the clearest statement of the new logic anyone has produced: even if the posts were intended as a joke, it is unlawful to cause others to fear for their safety.

In Grand Junction, Colorado, a post suggested that someone dressed as the character would turn up at West Middle School and at random homes. On 28 August police increased their presence at West Middle School and Grand Junction High School. Working with Mesa County Valley School District 51, they established that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the community. On 31 August they arrested a fourteen-year-old Grand Junction High School pupil, charged him with harassment and with interference with staff, faculty or students of educational institutions, and released him to his parents. The posts, the department said, are intended to cause alarm and fear in individuals.

Read those two sentences in sequence. No credible threat. Arrest made. That is not an inconsistency. It is the entire shift, stated in official language, in a single press release.

In Berwick, Louisiana, four girls were arrested after officers traced multiple TikTok accounts to local pupils. Three, aged fifteen, thirteen and fourteen, were charged with terrorising. A fourth, fourteen, was charged with cyberbullying. Police Chief J. P. Henry put the rationale in terms of consequence rather than intent: once you hit post, you do not get to decide how seriously law enforcement takes it.

In Worth County, Georgia, the school district announced on 2 September that two high school pupils had taken part and would face disciplinary action alongside legal consequences. In Pasco County, Florida, a twelve-year-old was accused of making written threats to kill. In Wilmington, Ohio, a juvenile faced a felony terroristic threat charge. In Pawnee, Oklahoma, a post targeting the middle school reportedly included a list of around thirty-five named pupils; police obtained subscriber data from TikTok and made an arrest. In Jessamine County, Kentucky, Nicholasville police charged a juvenile with assistance from the FBI. Constantine High School in Michigan went into a precautionary lockdown.

By early September, more than ten juveniles had been arrested across the United States. By the time The Guardian reported on the trend on 13 September, the pattern had hardened: content that began in Ireland and the United Kingdom in August, spread through Snapchat and TikTok, and in its North American form frequently carried threats aimed at specific schools, specific communities and named individuals.

Law enforcement drew the line about where it should be drawn. FBI Special Agent Nathan Head stated the position exactly: just posting the video itself is not a crime. Greg Mays, a deputy commissioner at Tennessee's Office of Homeland Security, described the addition of a named target as the point where it crosses the line. Baldwin Park Police Department in California warned that any threat directed toward our schools, students, staff, or community will not be dismissed as a joke or prank. Laredo police put the arithmetic bluntly: a few seconds on social media can result in a police investigation, school disciplinary action, and potentially serious criminal consequences.

And then the thing that complicates every comfortable analysis. On 24 August, in West Kelowna, British Columbia, a person in a Cat in the Hat costume allegedly chased a teenage girl through a neighbourhood at around nine in the evening. She got to safety. The individual has not been identified. Corporal Devon Gerrits of the RCMP described it precisely: regardless of whether the individual intended the behaviour as a joke, following a young person and causing them to fear for their safety is extremely concerning.

Folklorists Have a Word for This and It Is Not Deepfake

The most useful vocabulary for understanding the Cat in the Hat comes not from computer science but from a subfield of folklore studies that has been sitting patiently on the shelf for forty years, waiting for exactly this.

The term is ostension. Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi imported it into folkloristics from semiotics to describe what happens when a legend stops being told and starts being done: when narrative extends into action in the physical world. Bill Ellis, who received the American Folklore Society's lifetime scholarly achievement award, expanded the framework and gave us the two categories that matter here. Pseudo-ostension is when someone fabricates evidence of a legend, staging the artefacts the story predicts. Quasi-ostension is when authorities and observers over-interpret ambiguous evidence, reading ordinary facts through the legend's lens until the legend appears confirmed.

The Cat in the Hat trend is an industrialised pseudo-ostension engine with a quasi-ostension feedback loop bolted to the output. Generative models mass-produce the evidence. Institutions, doing exactly what they are trained to do, treat the evidence as signal. The signal generates a response. The response is filmed, posted, and becomes fresh evidence that the legend is real, because look, the school went into lockdown.

Andrew Peck, whose book on the Slender Man won the Chicago Folklore Prize, spent years documenting how a character invented on an internet forum in 2009 acquired the properties of genuine belief through precisely this circulation. The end point of that case is not academic. On 31 May 2014, two twelve-year-olds in Waukesha, Wisconsin, stabbed a classmate nineteen times in a wooded park, saying they needed to appease the Slender Man. She survived. Both were found not guilty by reason of mental disease.

The precedents keep arriving at the same conclusion. In autumn 2016, creepy clown sightings that began in Greenville, South Carolina produced school lockdowns across Ohio, additional patrols in three southern states, and more than a dozen arrests, the overwhelming majority of reports being hoaxes. In February 2019 the Momo challenge reached peak intensity after the Police Service of Northern Ireland posted a public warning on Facebook and British schools relayed alerts to parents. The Samaritans said at the time that they were not aware of any verified evidence in this country or beyond linking Momo to suicide. Children's charities concluded that the warnings themselves were doing more damage than the thing they warned about, teaching children to fear something that did not exist and, in some cases, prompting them to go looking for it.

Here is what is genuinely new in 2026, and it is not the psychology. The psychology is old. What is new is the supply curve.

The Thing That Actually Changed Is the Price of Dread

To stage a clown panic in 2016 you needed a costume, a location and nerve. To make Slender Man photographs in 2010 you needed Photoshop skills and hours. Both of those are meaningful frictions. They limited the number of people who could contribute evidence, and they limited how localised that evidence could be.

Generative video removed both limits at once. By 2026 the leading systems produce high definition clips with synchronised audio from a text prompt, at per-second costs measured in cents, available through consumer subscriptions priced around twenty dollars a month. The interesting figure is not the realism benchmark. It is the marginal cost of the tenth clip, and the hundredth, each one set on a different street.

This is why the standard deepfake framing misleads. The Cat in the Hat is not trying to pass as a photograph of a real event. It is trying to pass as a plausible artefact of your neighbourhood at night, which is a much lower bar and a much more effective payload. Photorealism is not required. Sufficient ambiguity is. Grain, motion blur, a doorbell camera's fisheye distortion and a two second glimpse do most of the work that fidelity would otherwise have to do. The uncanny quality of the source material, a prosthetic cat face from a commercially unloved film, is a feature. It reads as wrong in a way that a well-rendered human would not.

And crucially, the artefact is cheap enough to be disposable. That changes the economics of participation. A child does not need to believe in the Cat to make one. They need ninety seconds and an idea about which street to use.

Retired Lexington police special operations sergeant Jason Rothermund, who now runs an AI consultancy and was interviewed about the Kentucky charges, offered the assessment most likely to age well. This is just, in my opinion, the tip of the iceberg.

Verification Takes Days and Propagation Takes Seconds

The asymmetry at the centre of this is not mysterious. It is arithmetic.

Establishing that a video is synthetic requires, at minimum, an analyst, a tool, a chain of custody and time. Grand Junction took three days between increasing patrols and making an arrest. Pawnee had to serve a request on TikTok and wait for a phone number and an IP address. Meanwhile the clip itself moves through a school's Snapchat groups in under an hour.

Worse, the people we are implicitly asking to perform the verification cannot do it. A University of Florida study published in February 2026 tested participants against synthetic face images and found their accuracy statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip, while a convolutional neural network on the same images reached ninety-seven per cent. The same research found that people did better than the machines on video, which is a genuinely interesting result and should be reported honestly, but better than a machine on video is not the same as good. A 2025 iProov study of two thousand consumers found that only one in a thousand correctly identified every synthetic and genuine item they were shown.

Children are, if anything, worse positioned than adults, and the specific shape of the problem is confidence rather than gullibility. Ofcom's 2026 report on children and parents found that fifty-six per cent of thirteen to fifteen year olds said they were confident they could spot AI-generated content, and forty-seven per cent of sixteen and seventeen year olds said the same. When those confident children were tested, a quarter could not correctly identify the AI-generated image in front of them. Forty per cent of thirteen to seventeen year olds said they would trust an AI-generated news article as much as, or more than, one written by a human journalist.

Layer developmental psychology on top. Joanne Cantor spent her career at Wisconsin-Madison studying how films and television frighten children, and one of her most robust findings is that the reassurance adults instinctively reach for, the phrase tell yourself it is not real, only becomes an effective coping strategy as children get older. Below roughly seven or eight, telling a frightened child that something is fictional does comparatively little to reduce the fear. Older children fear real and abstract dangers more; younger children fear the thing that looks and sounds scary, regardless of its ontological status.

Which means the primary institutional response to this entire episode, saying clearly and repeatedly that the Cat in the Hat is not real, is a strategy whose effectiveness is inversely correlated with how young and frightened the audience is. The Gardaí were right. It was also, for the youngest children in Wexford, not the intervention they needed.

Credible Threat Is the Wrong Question Now

Every school safety protocol in the English-speaking world is organised around an assessment of credibility. Is this a real threat from a person with intent, means and opportunity? It is a good question. It was designed by serious people to prevent both massacres and the over-punishment of children, and it works.

The problem is that it is now answering a question nobody is asking.

Consider what happened at West Middle School. The threat was not credible. Police said so in writing. And yet a school district deployed additional officers, hundreds of children spent a day under visibly heightened security, a fourteen-year-old was arrested and charged, and parents across Mesa County spent a weekend frightened. Every one of those outcomes occurred on the correct side of the credibility determination. The determination did not prevent a single one of them.

This is the asymmetry that ought to reorganise how we think about the problem. The institutional response is not a defence against the payload. The institutional response is the payload. A lockdown is a spectacle, generated at no cost to the person who triggered it, that converts an ambiguous clip into a community-wide event with photographic evidence. The cheaper it becomes to trigger, the more attractive it becomes to trigger. Any system in which a nine-second video reliably produces a police deployment has, whatever its intentions, published a price list.

None of which means the institutions should stop responding. That is the trap, and it is worth naming, because it is the argument that ends with a school failing to act on the one post in five hundred that mattered. The Pawnee post named thirty-five children. That is not folklore. That is a target list, and the correct response to a target list is a police investigation, regardless of whether the accompanying image was rendered by a diffusion model or drawn in crayon.

The question is not whether to respond. It is whether the response can be made proportionate and quiet enough that it stops functioning as a reward.

Threat Assessment Already Knows How to Do This

There is an unexpectedly hopeful piece of this, and it lives in the least glamorous corner of school safety research.

The Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines, developed by the forensic clinical psychologist Dewey Cornell and colleagues at the University of Virginia in 2001 and recognised as an evidence-based programme in 2013, were built around a distinction that turns out to be exactly the right tool for 2026. CSTAG asks teams to classify a threat as transient or substantive. A transient threat is an expression of anger, a joke, a piece of bravado with no sustained intent to harm. A substantive threat involves a genuine intent to act. The classification drives the response, and the response for a transient threat is explanation, apology and resolution rather than exclusion.

Controlled studies in Virginia found that schools using the model markedly reduced their use of exclusionary discipline, and, notably, showed little or no racial disparity in outcomes, in a domain where disparities are otherwise routine.

Read that framework against the Cat in the Hat and something clarifies. Threat assessment never actually depended on the authenticity of the artefact. It depended on the intent and capability of the person behind it. A synthetic image does not break the model. It only breaks the shortcut that many schools and departments substituted for the model, which is: scary content equals serious threat equals maximum response.

The trend is, in that sense, a stress test that reveals which institutions were doing threat assessment and which were doing threat reaction.

What the Response Costs the Children It Protects

There is a strong temptation to treat institutional overreaction as costless caution. It is not.

Research conducted by Georgia Tech's Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab in partnership with the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund analysed nearly twenty-eight million social media posts from communities in the ninety days before and after school active shooter drills, across 114 schools in 33 states. In the aftermath, the analysis found a forty-two per cent increase in language associated with anxiety and stress, a thirty-nine per cent increase in indicators of depression, a twenty-three per cent rise in health concerns and a twenty-two per cent increase in expressions of fear of death. The effects persisted for at least ninety days. Everytown's own recommendation, notably, is to prioritise threat assessment programmes over student-involved simulations.

That study concerns drills rather than lockdowns triggered by hoaxes, and the difference matters: a drill is announced and a lockdown is not, which if anything suggests the hoax case is worse rather than better. But it establishes the principle that the security response has its own psychological cost, borne by the same children it protects.

The resource drain is measurable too. The K-12 School Shooting Database recorded 853 swatting incidents in American schools between January 2023 and June 2024. Researchers working on the costs of hoax threats have estimated the emergency response to a single school incident at upwards of a hundred thousand dollars once policing, investigation and lost instructional time are counted. Those are officers not attending actual emergencies, and hours of teaching that do not come back.

And then the cost that should trouble us most. In this episode, the people arrested were twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen years old. Some of them wrote target lists. Others reposted a scary cat. The charges range from harassment to felony terroristic threats. Criminal records attach to children at the age at which the capacity to anticipate consequence is, developmentally, still under construction. A system that cannot distinguish the child who threatened thirty-five named classmates from the child who shared a clip to a group chat is not a safety system. It is a lottery with a custodial prize.

The Honest Complication Nobody Wants to Write

The clean version of this article says: it was all fake, the institutions panicked, the children were criminalised for a meme. That version is false in an important way.

A costumed figure really did follow a teenage girl in West Kelowna. Posts really did name individual pupils. The Pawnee list really did exist. Whatever share of the trend was ambient folklore, some non-trivial share was targeted intimidation, and a viral aesthetic provided it with both a delivery mechanism and a deniability script. I was only doing the trend is a remarkably efficient defence.

This is the oldest dynamic in moral panic literature working in reverse. Usually the panic manufactures threats that do not exist. Here the panic manufactured cover for threats that did. Any policy proposal that treats the entire phenomenon as harmless will, sooner or later, wave through the post that was not.

It is also worth being honest about the evidential thinness of parts of this story. Much of the reporting on origins traces to a handful of viral accounts and cannot be independently verified. Claims that the character was linked to violent incidents circulated widely and were, as far as any police force has confirmed, baseless. Gardaí in Wexford stated that no reports of a costumed individual had been recorded on their system at all. We do not have a reliable count of how many schools altered operations, how many lockdowns occurred, or what the aggregate cost has been. We have a fortnight of local news reports, which is not a dataset.

What Does Not Work, and What Might

Three responses are already being proposed and are not going to work.

Banning the platform. The content moved between TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram Reels and Facebook within days, and it was generated by tools that are neither hosted nor moderated by any of them. A ban relocates the trend and adds the glamour of prohibition.

Media literacy as a standalone intervention. It is necessary and it is not sufficient, and the Ofcom data explains why with unusual clarity: the children most confident in their ability to detect synthetic content were meaningfully often wrong. Teaching detection to an audience that cannot detect, against generators improving faster than curricula are revised, produces false confidence, which is worse than calibrated uncertainty. Cantor's work adds the developmental caveat: for the youngest children, it is not real does not do the work adults think it does.

Maximum charges as deterrent. Deterrence assumes a calculating actor. The evidence from the clown panic, from Momo and from every school hoax wave since suggests the population involved is mostly children with poor consequence modelling and an audience.

What might work is less satisfying and more boring.

Proportionate and deliberately undramatic response protocols. If the institutional response is the payload, then reducing the spectacle reduces the incentive. Investigating quietly, notifying parents by letter rather than emergency alert, and declining to lock down where a threat assessment team has classified content as transient are all available today and cost nothing. Several departments effectively did this, determining no credible threat while increasing routine patrols.

Decoupling threat assessment from content authenticity. Whether an image was generated should inform the investigation of who made it, not the classification of how dangerous the author is. CSTAG already models this. It needs to be the default rather than the exception.

Provenance infrastructure, with realistic expectations. Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which applies from 2 August 2026, requires that synthetic content be machine-readable as such and that deepfakes be disclosed, with penalties reaching fifteen million euros or three per cent of worldwide turnover. The AI Omnibus agreement, however, gives systems already on the market before 2 August 2026, which is every tool that produced this material, until 2 December 2026 to meet the marking obligation; the disclosure duties are unaffected. The C2PA Content Credentials standard and Google's SynthID watermarking have converged into a dual-layer approach now adopted by OpenAI and others, with more than a hundred billion files watermarked since 2023. The limitations are well documented and should be stated plainly: C2PA metadata is destroyed by a screenshot, SynthID survives compression but carries almost no contextual information, and neither resists a determined adversary. Provenance will not tell a frightened fourteen-year-old at midnight whether the cat outside her window is real. What it can do is shorten the verification loop for the school and the police force from days to minutes, which is the loop that actually matters.

Platform duties with teeth. The UK's Protection of Children Codes came into force on 25 July 2025 under the Online Safety Act, carrying fines of up to eighteen million pounds or ten per cent of global revenue, and require services to assess and mitigate risks to children by age group. A trend that demonstrably frightened children across two jurisdictions is a reasonable early test of whether those duties mean anything operationally.

Graduated legal responses for minors. Ireland's Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020, commenced in February 2021, criminalises a single threatening or grossly offensive communication sent with intent to cause harm, with a maximum of two years on indictment. The tools exist on both sides of the Atlantic. The gap is not legislative. It is the absence of a settled institutional practice for the child who shared rather than authored.

The Cat Was Never the Point

Return to the question underneath all of this. What happens to a child's ability to know what is real?

The honest answer is that it degrades in a specific and slightly counter-intuitive way. Children are not becoming credulous. Ofcom's data suggests something odder: they are becoming confidently unreliable, which is the epistemic state most resistant to correction. And they are learning, from direct experience, that the reality of a thing and the consequences of a thing have come apart. The Cat was not real. The lockdown was real. The arrest was real. The fourteen-year-old released to his parents in Grand Junction now has a lived understanding that a fiction produced a police record.

That is the lesson the episode actually teaches, and no media literacy module can unteach it, because it is true.

For institutions, the implication is narrower than the anxiety around it suggests. Schools and police forces cannot adjudicate what is real at the speed the content moves, and they should stop organising their response around the pretence that they can. What they can do is assess persons rather than artefacts, respond in proportion rather than in spectacle, and refuse to treat every child holding a phone as either a victim or a suspect.

The Gardaí in Wexford, in their odd little Facebook post, got closer to this than most of what followed. They did not lock anything down. They named the mechanism, said the cat was not in the driveway, and went back to work. It did not stop the trend. Nothing was going to stop the trend. But it treated the public as people who could be told how the trick worked, which remains, on the evidence, the most durable defence anyone has.

Sources and References

1. Alex Cunningham, “'Cat in the Hat' stalking Wexford residents is AI-generated, gardaí say”, Irish Examiner, 20 August 2026. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41898904.html
2. Amber Louise Bryce, “The Cat in the Hat is terrorising TikTok, but how did this horror trend get so out of hand?”, Euronews Culture, 24 August 2026. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/08/24/the-cat-in-the-hat-is-terrorising-tiktok-but-how-did-this-horror-trend-get-so-out-of-hand
3. Matt Growcoot, “Photos of 'Cat in the Hat Serial Killer' Are AI-Generated, Police Say”, PetaPixel, 24 August 2026. https://petapixel.com/2026/08/24/photos-of-cat-in-the-hat-serial-killer-are-ai-generated-police-say/
4. Areeba Hashmi, “46 million views and a police statement: TikTok turned Dr Seuss into a horror story”, Gulf News, 24 August 2026. https://gulfnews.com/world/46-million-views-and-a-police-statement-tiktok-turned-dr-seuss-into-a-horror-story-1.500650533
5. The Guardian, “US schools and police warn about viral 'Cat in the Hat' trend after teens' arrests”, 13 September 2026, syndicated copy accessed via UA.NEWS. https://ua.news/en/world/shkoli-ta-politsiia-ssha-poperedili-pro-trend-kit-u-kapeliusi-pislia-areshtiv-pidlitkiv
6. Stepheny Price, “Creepy 'Cat in the Hat' trend targets schools as costumed figure allegedly chases teen girl”, Fox News, 13 September 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/us/creepy-cat-hat-trend-targets-schools-costumed-figure-allegedly-chases-teen-girl
7. Sarah Roebuck, “Breaking down the 'Cat in the Hat' trend: AI threats, police responses and juvenile arrests”, Police1, 10 September 2026. https://www.police1.com/social-media/breaking-down-the-cat-in-the-hat-trend-ai-threats-police-responses-and-juvenile-arrests
8. KWCH 12, “Hutchinson teenager charged in connection with 'Cat in the Hat' trend”, 1 September 2026. https://www.kwch.com/2026/09/01/hutchinson-teenager-charged-connection-with-cat-hat-trend/
9. City of Grand Junction, Colorado, “No Credible Threat Found in Social Media Incident; Arrest Made”, Grand Junction Police Department news release, 31 August 2026. https://www.gjcity.org/m/NewsFlash/home/detail/2244
10. WALB News 10, “2 Worth County students facing charges over viral 'Cat in the Hat' social media hoax”, 2 September 2026. https://www.walb.com/2026/09/02/2-worth-county-students-facing-charges-over-viral-cat-hat-social-media-hoax/
11. WBRZ, “Four juveniles arrested in Berwick following investigation into Cat in the Hat trend”, 1 September 2026. https://www.wbrz.com/news/four-juveniles-arrested-in-berwick-following-investigation-into-cat-in-the-hat-trend
12. Bethany Braun-Silva, “What parents should know about the 'Cat in the Hat' social media trend”, ABC News / Good Morning America, 1 September 2026. https://abcnews.com/GMA/Family/parents-cat-hat-social-media-trend-prompting-school/story?id=136120706
13. Joshua Rhett Miller, “How 'Cat in the Hat' Social Media Trend Has Led to School Lockdowns, Arrests”, Newsweek, 1 September 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/schools-issue-warning-about-viral-cat-in-the-hat-trend-as-teen-arrested-12391002
14. WKYT, “AI expert says 'Cat in the Hat' school threat trend is 'tip of the iceberg'”, 7 September 2026. https://www.wkyt.com/2026/09/07/ai-expert-says-cat-hat-school-threat-trend-is-tip-iceberg/
15. KOKH Fox 25, “Pawnee police arrest juvenile connected to 'Cat in the Hat' threat”, September 2026. https://okcfox.com/news/local/pawnee-police-arrest-juvenile-connected-to-cat-in-the-hat-threat
16. Ineqe Safeguarding Group, “Still Not Safe Enough: What Ofcom's Report Tells Us About Growing Up Digital in 2026”, 22 May 2026, summarising Ofcom, “Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report”, published 21 May 2026. https://ineqe.com/2026/05/22/childrens-online-experiences-ofcom-2026/
17. University of Florida Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, “Machines spot deepfake pictures better than humans, but people outperform AI in detecting deepfake videos”, February 2026. https://www.eng.ufl.edu/news/stories/machines-spot-deepfake-pictures-better-than-humans-but-people-outperform-ai-in-detecting-deepfake-videos/
18. Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and Georgia Institute of Technology Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab, “The Impact of Active Shooter Drills in Schools”, research report, updated February 2023. https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-shooter-drills-in-schools/
19. University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, “The Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines”, Youth Violence Project, Dewey G. Cornell and colleagues. https://education.virginia.edu/research-initiatives/research-centers-labs/research-labs/youth-violence-project/school-threat-assessment/comprehensive-school-threat-assessment-guidelines
20. Andrew Peck, “Digital Legend and Belief: The Slender Man, Folklore, and the Media”, University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5998.htm
21. Bill Ellis, “Satanic Ritual Abuse and Legend Ostension”, Journal of Psychology and Theology, volume 20, 1992. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009164719202000324
22. Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, “How 'Momo', a global social media hoax about a paranormal threat to kids, morphed into a U.S. viral phenomenon”, NBC News, 28 February 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-momo-global-social-media-hoax-about-paranormal-threat-kids-n977961
23. Emma Brown and others, “Scary clown rumors, threats feed hysteria, leading to school lockdowns, arrests”, The Washington Post, 5 October 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/scary-clown-rumors-threats-feed-hysteria-leading-to-school-lockdowns-arrests/2016/10/05/1adf27c4-8b0b-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html
24. European Commission, “Guidelines on transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems”, Shaping Europe's Digital Future, 8 May 2026, concerning Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/guidelines-ai-transparency-obligations
25. Ofcom, “Statement: Protecting children from harms online”, Protection of Children Codes of Practice, in force 25 July 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/statement-protecting-children-from-harms-online

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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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Closing out this Tuesday with quiet music playing in the background, and the night prayers and meditations ahead. Peaceful. I like this.

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

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.40 lbs. * bp= 144/85 (66)

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

Diet: * 03:20 – 1 Reese's pb cup, * 06:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 11:45 – pancit, white bread and butter, beef chop suey, fried rice * 16:20 – 1 Reese's pb cup, 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:10 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 03:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 12:00 – watch old TV Shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:00 – called one of my banks, taking care of business * 17:00 – listening to relaxing music, evening and night prayers and meditations

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

it’s cold outside, it’s black, and it’s raining

I’m having cough some asthma allergy attack no doubt, and I’m inside on the bed with the dogs

And all is well

A few days ago, on the road we saw a toad big as a soccer ball. We had to swerve to avoid running it over,

But it made it

I don’t think I’ll ever see such a big toad in my life again

Isn’t life strange?

Where's Wordo? Level 1- Apartment Party

I was a big fan of the Where's Waldo books when I was a kid. And this gave me an idea, what if there was a literary version of Where's Waldo? Essentially, a large, chaotic scene is described, and you must locate “Wordo” within it. But I can't put Wordo's name, because you could just control-F to find him. So instead, you must infer where Wordo is from what's going on. So, here is the first Wordo Challenge. He is located somewhere at a busy party in an apartment in NYC, and doesn't quite fit in. Let's see if you can find him:

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Just inside the double front doors, where a row of winter coats and denim jackets has been heaped onto a standing rack that looks too elegant for the abuse it is enduring, three people have made a kind of annex out of the entryway, one woman in a silver slip dress balancing a coupe glass in one hand while she retells, for the second time and with greater confidence than accuracy, the story of how she once got stuck in a freight elevator in Tribeca with an avant-garde cellist, one bearded man in tortoiseshell glasses nodding solemnly even though he is clearly watching the room beyond her shoulder, and another guest in a cropped leather jacket crouching to retie the lace on a tall boot while still somehow managing to keep up her side of the conversation; beyond them the loft opens suddenly and theatrically into the main living area, where exposed brick, black-framed factory windows, and a ceiling webbed with pipes and pendant lights make everything look self-consciously raw and expensive at once, and about fifteen people have distributed themselves across the space, seven sunk or perched along a deep sectional couch whose cushions are being shared by a pair of women debating whether a certain downtown gallery has become too commercial, a man in a moss-green suit explaining the difference between natural wine and ordinary bad wine to a listener who regrets asking, two friends passing a phone back and forth to examine photographs from somebody’s Fire Island weekend, a person sitting cross-legged at the corner of the sectional and laughing too loudly at stories they are only half hearing, and a compact man in a rugby shirt leaning over the back of the couch to contribute occasional opinions nobody seems particularly invited to receive, while around them another eight guests remain standing in loose knots beneath the blue flicker of a wall-mounted television that is silently cycling through a playlist of glossy music videos, one cluster of three near the credenza discussing a startup that may or may not involve AI, one pair by the windows arguing about whether Bushwick is over, two more by a tall rubber plant comparing mutual acquaintances from Pratt, and a lone guest near the speaker stack swaying half a beat behind the song and staring, as if in private thought, at the editing cuts in a video where sequined dancers keep appearing and disappearing inside a mirrored tunnel; past the couch and the orbit of the television, the dining area has been transformed from anything remotely domestic into a standing-room buffet zone, its long table stripped of all ordinary function, the chairs dragged back and leaned against the walls at uneven angles as if the room itself had shrugged them off, the tabletop crowded with platters of skewered vegetables, little toasts crowned with whipped spreads, a bowl of citrus segments glistening under the track lighting, trays of dumplings under linen napkins, and an aggressively curated arrangement of olives nobody is touching, while a separate folding table has been dressed up as a bar with bottles of mezcal, gin, vermouth, tonic, soda, sliced limes, sweating buckets of ice, and a hand-lettered sign attempting to dignify the situation by calling it a spritz station; nine people are hanging out in this zone, including two women in sharply cut black outfits who are talking with the intensity of old friends who have just remembered they dislike one another, a broad-shouldered man with a chain necklace reaching over the hummus to steal a cube of cheese while pretending he is only looking for a napkin, a guest in a vintage band tee carefully constructing a drink with the concentration of a chemist, a couple who keep drifting apart and back together again as each is intercepted by different conversations, a flushed young man insisting that the playlist was better an hour ago, a narrow-faced man in a pale short-sleeved shirt tucked neatly into tan trousers who is holding a paper plate with a single carrot stick on it while listening to two people discuss a club in Greenpoint, and two strangers near the bar who have entered that immediate overfamiliar stage of party conversation where they are already discussing childhood pets; the kitchen remains visually part of both the dining room and the living room, as open as a theater set, and the large elbow-shaped island at its center is burdened with even more food, stacks of small plates, bowls of chips, half-cut lemons, serving spoons, and a leaning arrangement of flowers that seems to lose petals every time somebody brushes past, while a couple of caterers occupy the practical heart of the space, one sliding fresh crostini onto a tray and the other with sleeves rolled up assembling something involving smoked salmon and cucumber with relentless speed, and among them hover five guests who either genuinely want to help or want to perform the idea of helping: a woman in a crimson blouse refilling her water directly from the sink, a lanky man in a knit polo asking where the trash goes while holding nothing that needs to be thrown away, a guest with slicked-back hair pilfering one shrimp at a time each time he thinks nobody is looking, a woman perched on a counter stool explaining in great detail why she never cooks, and another guest opening the fridge, apparently on a mission for more ice, and then pausing long enough to scan its contents with the anthropological curiosity of a museum visitor; down the hall, Guest Bedroom 1 has become an accidental side lounge where three people have made themselves comfortable amid a neatly made bed, a chair draped with somebody else’s blazer, and a dresser topped with framed photographs turned anonymous by distance, one person seated on the edge of the mattress and speaking in a low confidential tone to a second who lies on one elbow as if receiving state secrets, while a third stands by the lamp with arms folded and periodically glancing toward the balcony door, and just beyond that sliding door the small balcony holds three more people in the bright pinprick atmosphere of the smokers’ enclave, one exhaling toward the street, one shivering in a sleeveless top but refusing to go back in, and one using the party below as raw material for instant character judgments; by Full Bath 1, with its white subway tile and overstretched pocket door, one person is inside, audible but unseen as cabinet doors open and close and water runs for longer than anyone in line thinks necessary, while two guests wait outside, one checking his reflection in the dark screen of a phone and smoothing his eyebrows with a thumb, the other leaning against the wall with shoes already off and held by their heels in one hand, looking like they have either had the best night or the longest week; a large storage room that doubles as a laundry room has somehow attracted its own tiny salon of two people chatting among shelves of detergent, spare paper towels, a vacuum cleaner, and boxes whose labels have long since become inaccurate, one of them perched on an overturned crate and talking earnestly about moving to Los Angeles while the other, standing near the washer with a plastic cup hooked through two fingers, keeps asking practical questions that make the whole dream sound less glamorous and more expensive; the master bedroom, larger and softer than the rest of the loft and made faintly golden by a pair of bedside lamps, contains five people hanging out on the bed itself in varying states of collapse, two sitting upright against the headboard comparing tattoos, one lying flat and waving a hand now and then to emphasize a story, one kneeling near the foot of the bed to rummage through a tote bag for a charger, and another sitting on the floor with back against the mattress, absently peeling the label from a beer bottle, while in the attached bath two more guests have claimed the mirror, one blotting lipstick with a square of tissue and the other attempting to resecure an earring while squinting at her own reflection; through the master’s glass doors stretches the large balcony, where seven people are strung along the railing and outdoor chairs in the cooler air above the city, somebody pointing downtown as if the skyline belongs to them personally, somebody else telling a story that requires repeated reenactments of a disastrous first kiss, one guest alone at the far corner scrolling through messages, a pair discussing whether to leave for another party in Brooklyn, another pair sharing a cigarette despite neither seeming to smoke regularly, and a final figure resting forearms on the rail and watching the traffic below with the fixed concentration of a person who may actually prefer the anonymity of streets to the effort of rooms; Guest Bedroom 2, much smaller and dimmer than the rest, has become a refuge from the party’s performed brightness, and it contains only one person seated cross-legged on the rug petting both a dog and a cat who have apparently elected this room as neutral territory, the dog stretched long and content beneath a hand scratching behind its ears, the cat tucked partly under a chair but pushing its head into the offered palm, while the solitary guest, still in a velvet blazer too formal for the task, murmurs to them with the patient seriousness usually reserved for children or diplomats; the office door at the end of the hall remains locked and untouched except for a couple of coats that have slid from the entryway overflow and been draped over the knob, everyone having accepted that whatever work life or secrets are inside have been temporarily exiled from the evening.

Duty over Love... For love Sometimes you are The princess and sometimes You must play The girl

Sometimes you are The prince and at others Just the Pauper

Truth Beauty Freedom Love

Most of all... LOVE

As Wesley said To his Buttercup

As You Wish

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A life lived in fear is a life half lived

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Please give me the gift of the spirit in my heart and the spirit Of dance in my feet.

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#poetry #osxs #sketchbook

2024-11-10 00:54:10

wrinkled pages

Finished on Sunday: Three Moments of an Explosion, a collection of short stories by China Miéville. I had found a hardback copy in a charity shop which cost me a pound. Given my literary tastes, Miéville's work should very much be my cup of tea — but it hasn’t worked out that way. I was put off by my first taste of his work, when I read Kraken about fifteen years ago (which, to this day, remains the only book I’ve read on a Kindle). I actively disliked it: there was something about his authorial voice that I couldn’t warm to. The inexpensiveness of this copy of Three Moments seemed like the ideal opportunity to give his writing a second chance.

While I got along better with it than with Kraken, reservations remain. The title story, for instance, is one of several very short pieces in the book, none of which impressed me. To my mind, the volume would have been better had they been omitted. Elsewhere, Miéville's ‘voice’, as it sat & ‘sounded’ in my mind again often had something about it I found off-putting. There were a some exceptions: the slick satire of ‘Dreaded Outcomes’ delighted me; and I relished the old-school style of ‘The Design’, the tale which closes the book. Of the other stories I enjoyed, a couple (‘The Dowager of Bees’ and ‘The Bastard Prompt’) could have been the basis for intriguing X-Files plot-lines. The horror stories in the collection generally failed to fully connect, with ‘The Rabbet’ the only one of them to properly get under my skin. Miéville’s imagination is undeniably fertile, though some of its productions teetered awkwardly past the furthest points to which I could suspend my disbelief. These were cases less fit for Mulder & Scully than perhaps for Professor Quatermass, or even Doctor Who.

Miéville’s new novel The Rouse was purportedly twenty years in the making and runs to 1,264 pages. I shan’t be rushing to buy it, but if a cheap copy should turn up in a charity shop in years to come, I may take a look.

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My latest music acquisitions were likewise very inexpensive ones. Seeing a CD copy of Manu Chao’s Próxima Estación: Esperanza reminded me I used to like his song ‘Me Gustas Tu’. Picking up the disc, I saw the song was on there so decided to buy it. It’s a pretty good record — a warmly uplifting Bob Marley-influenced feel suffuses much of it — just perhaps a little too much of it for my taste: a tad more variation of mood would have suited me better.

On a neighbouring shelf to the Manu Chao album, an early ‘90s CD issue of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk. The music here is wonderful; the recording and/or mastering, regrettably less so. The bass — played by the curiously-named Spanky DeBrest — is often all-but inaudible, undermining my enjoyment of the performances. The absent bass is apparently a known flaw in the original stereo recording, so I’ll have to try to get my hands on one of the more recent mono remasters. For an example track from the record (with audible bass) try ‘In Walked Bud’.

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During the same visit to Chepstow when I bought the CDs (which were £1 each), I also found a dainty-looking ornamental glass vase (Fig. 40) which set me back another £4.

As if to offset these relatively thrifty acquisitions, I squandered (via ebay) a rather larger sum on yet another box of old stationery: some ‘Milano’ paper and matching envelopes from Pineider. The set is second-hand, but unused (Fig. 41). The Florentine retailer seem like an Italian equivalent to the likes of Smythson or Cassegrain, with a historic focus on providing personalised stationery to a wealthy clientele. The box contains only 24 sheets of A4 paper with as many envelopes. The paper is laid, watermarked and straight-cut; and the envelopes are lined with white tissue & discreetly embossed with a Pineider logo. There’s no claim of the paper being rag-based or hand-made: one might hope that, given the asking price, it might at least be one or the other, but who knows.

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Cheese of the week: Bluemin White from Shepherds Purse Artisan Cheeses in Yorkshire. This mould-ripened offering is encased in blue-grey penicillium roqueforti rather than white p. camemberti, yet it isn’t a properly blue cheese, as the small truckles are left unpierced so that the mould can’t readily infiltrate the paste. The hint of blue provided by the rind does however add a certain extra tang to what is otherwise a subtly delicious brie-like number.

Tomatoes are next. I've picked the second crop, and it's tomato: the most-grown, most-photographed, most-argued-about plant in the garden and the field. Starting now, I'm building tomato diagnosis the same way I built the first one.

The problems between here and a tomato model

The lookalike exam. Early blight, septoria, and late blight read almost alike at the stage where catching them matters most – a pinhead spot on an oldest leaf. Telling them apart from a photo, early, is the whole job. Everything else is plumbing.

Real photos, not textbook photos. Field tomatoes grow in crowded, backlit canopies with dirt-splashed lower leaves. Textbook single-leaf shots are easy. The photos growers actually take are the ones that have to work.

Trust is per-crop. Whatever the lab proved on its first crop, tomato doesn't inherit it. The model earns trust in the field, against the hard cases, or it doesn't earn it at all. Starting from zero is the price of doing it right.

It ships when it clears the same bar the live crop cleared, and I'll post the real numbers as they come.

Watch it happen at plantlab.ai/platform, or get notified there when tomato's status changes.

PlantLab had its name from day one, and the name was the plan: a diagnosis lab for plants, all of them, eventually. One crop is live today. Tomato, apple, grape, and leafy greens sit on the public roadmap. The long game is a lab that carries what it learns from one crop into the next.

A lab, not an app

I built the first model because I needed the answer myself. A general-purpose chatbot looked at my plant and said calcium deficiency. It was light burn. The opinion arrived instantly and was wrong in the way that matters: confident and useless.

That failure set the bar for everything since. The problems worth catching are lookalikes – deficiencies that impersonate each other, pests that impersonate deficiencies, stress that impersonates both. Trust gets earned on the hard cases, not the easy ones. An app can answer for one plant. A lab keeps a discipline that has to hold for every plant after it.

The long game: crops that teach the lab

Each crop the lab takes on teaches it something the next one needs. Reading leaves at the pinhead stage on one crop is exactly the skill the next crop needs on day one. Calibrated confidence is a habit, not a feature: a result that says “I'm 40% sure, watch it” instead of guessing. Habits travel. So do reading each plant on its own and the honesty about uncertainty.

What the lab learns on tomato will make the grape work faster. What it learns on grape will make the leafy-greens work faster. That is the compounding bet: not one model, one crop, one market, but a lab whose judgment gets broader with everything it reads.

What doesn't carry

Each crop's lookalikes are their own exam. The answers don't transfer, and neither does the reputation. A grower's trust in what the lab does for one crop is not a blank check for the next. Every crop earns its own track record, from zero, in the field, against the hard cases. The second crop doesn't get the first crop's reputation for free.

The roadmap, plainly

The crop roadmap is public at plantlab.ai/platform: one crop live today, four more on the roadmap. The labels mean exactly what they say. Live means a deployed model doing the work. In development means work has genuinely started. Planned means intended, not started. No dates, because a date is easy to publish and impossible to keep honest.

The name was the plan. The lab grows into it.