Inbetweeners Part 14- The Lady of Pain Branch

After the agent of the Protectors of the Weave discovered the Grey Room and was promptly dispatched by the players, the Interloper had to ensure that they did not locate him again. As mentioned in a previous post, the Protector's escalation ladder was nigh endless, and would eventually completely overpower and contain if not outright destroy the Interloper. He was aware of this limitation and as such determined flying under the radar and staying hidden was the best course of action. Therefore, he removed the door that led to the courtyard of the Mage's Academy where the players had first encountered the Protectors Agents. In doing so though he also removed The Hallway, The Crab Shack, The Dog House, The Ship Cabin, The Circus, The Bakery and the Battlefield. Narratively none of these were too big a deal. The Circus Tent had since been collapsed as the roving bands of gnolls and orcs that were in attendance broke out in a brawl. The ship's cabin had been sealed off after the pirates determined it was haunted. Really, the Crab Shack was the biggest lost just because of the vibe that the players liked.

This left three doors off of the Grey Room, but not for long. Soon after, the players discovered a new door. The Interloper commented that the door was not his doing. It looked like it had been scratched into the wall by thousands of impossibly sharp razor blade cuts. The players did not know this at the time, but the door had been created by the Lady of Pain. The rooms behind it were disparate ideas I had, but later on I decided the could all serve as tests and observations by the Lady of Pain. She had become aware that the players were untethered from causality after their first visit to the Arena in Sigil, and wanted to test their mettle before enlisting them. The door led to the lonely mountain and the hut of the sad giant.

This giant's backstory was tragic- a ponderous stone giant, he was walking across rugged terrain and accidentally stepped on an area of ground that created a cave in in a cavern underneath. This brought a stone ceiling down on an entire village of subterranean gnomes, killing most of them. Their surviving matriarch cursed the giant such that he would perpetually want to die but be unable to take is own life. He had to defend himself from threats, and eat and drink to sustain himself but otherwise be constantly plagued with crushing guilt. To make matters worse, he wouldn't age, so essentially his guilt could be internmenable. He relocated to the top of a lonely mountain, far from civilization, built a hut for himself where he could hunt, fish, and otherwise stew in his own misery. The mountain wasn't particularly high, don't think snowy peaks. More of a rounded off one at a lower altitude that had forests, lakes, rivers, etc. When the players encountered and talked with him, he was very passive and only ever spoke in a monotone. He cared not if the players used his massive cottage, and would barely remark on their passing through. The giant posed a dilemma, he wanted to die, but to put him out of his misery you had to fight him, since his curse necessitated self defense. This gave the players options. As low level characters they could fight the giant, but that came with its own dangers. Alternatively, they could try to find a more devious means of killing him, traps, poison, etc. They could try magical means to lift his curse, or maybe help him cope with the guilt narratively. I left it open ended. Eventually, when the Beeple came to live in the cabin alongside the giant, the Queen went into his mind with the players. She discovered that the giant simply wanted a peaceful death. They did battle with the curse in a liminal space/dream realm type of place as the giant was hypnotized. Once the curse was pacified temporarily, the queen had a larva burrow into the giants brain. It killed him, allowing him to pass on to the afterlife, but kept his body alive as a member of the Beeple Hive. The giant from then on patrolled the borders of the fledgling Harmonium, building walls and defenses and generally helping the hive grow leveraging his massive size/strength. The fireplace in the giants' cottage served as a door with a purple hue, and would randomly take players to one of seven other rooms.

The fireplace was interesting, because the players had no idea of threat level. Furthermore, they did not know which room it would take them to, I used dice to determine which room they went to each time. So, they could go to the same room twice in a row eventually. So essentially the players dove in, not knowing where they would go next. Once the giant's soul was put to rest, the “puzzile” was solved and instead of randomly taking them to a room, they were presented with a white hallway with the doors in a row, numbered with razor cuts etched into the doors. This rooms did not operate like the other rooms. Many could only be left when certain conditions were solved, like puzzles or quests. Ultimately all tests for the players. I'll outline each room, quest, and resolution below to the best of my memory.

THE HOSTAGE ROOM

The group appears in a room with nine hostages. They have been taken by an organized crime syndicate that kidnaps individuals and assigns a ransom based on how much they think they can milk the loved ones for. If the ransom isn't paid, the hostage is executed and dumped to send a message that future people should pay up. There were thugs, lizard men, and a bandit captain initially, but they can call in more potent reinforcements. I don't remember how the players solved it. The door was barred and very sturdy (strength save DC 25 to break), so I'm not sure if they smashed it down, picked the lock, used magic, or somehow talked their way out of the room. However, they managed to either kill enough or simply intimidate the bandits enough to flee and get their leader. I took the statblock from an NPC in the Dragon Heist Campaign, which I had participated in as a player with three members of the current group, so it was a bit of an inside joke. His name was Urstul Floxin, so I named this guy Flurstil Oxen. I also gave him a high pitch voiced and made him much smaller than the original, though same dangerous stats. He was actually a high level opponent for the players to face, but between all the gifts they had been given they were able to take him out. I think explosives were somehow involved, and maybe poison? Or he had poison. It's been a few years. Either way, they killed him, looted the place, and as soon as the hostages were freed a door appeared to take them back to the Giants' hut. There wasn't much utility in returning to this room after it was “solved.”

THE MASQUERADE

Upon first arrival, this just seemed like a ball. People in masks dancing while a band played lively music. However, the more players investigated, something was amiss. The people dancing seemed possessed, like they could not stop. Their eyes vacant and their clothes torn. The food at the tables was rotten, as if it had been out for days. Furthermore, no one every took a break from dancing. Eventually, the players discovered the bodies of several of the attendees stuffed in serving carts and under tables, unceremoniously hidden from view. Medicine checks revealed that these people died from extreme fatigue and dehydration... essentially dancing themselves to death. While most of the attendees were humanoids in a fugue state, there was one woman in a mask and a red dress who seemed particularly animated, like she was conducting the entire affair.

The truth was that this was a vrock (vulture demon) in disguise. The band were doppelgangers and quasits (bat demons) that shape changed into humanoid form when they performed. They used mass spell to trap people into dancing, it acted like Otto's Irresistible Dance that doesn't end. Eventually all the attendees would dance themselves to death, and then the vrock and doppelganger band would simply move on to another town or city and do it again. Anyone who tried to visit the dance hall would discover it to appear empty, so the illusion worked two ways. People in the hall were trapped to dance themselves to death, and those on the outside wouldn't see what was happening.

The spell had a DC 14 wisdom save or it would effect players, and they had to make the check repeatedly as the music played. This led to a few of the players starting to dance as well. The players who passed their checks disrupted the band, smashing their instruments and freeing the dancers from the curse. This led to a battle with the vrock. The players slew it, and the band convinced them they were enslaved by the vrock and simply wanted to leave. The players permitted them to go, though in reality they were just as complicit in the mass murder as the vrock. The players were more concerned with taking care of the survivors though and they were low on resources from the fight, so can't judge them too harshly. Once the dance was ended, a door opened up allowing the players to leave. However, they stayed for a while, rendering aid to the participants who were severely dehydrated/exhausted, some on the brink of death. They returned a few days later as well and met up with investigators who specialized in fiendish crimes/incursions. The players had to balance wanting to avoid the Protectors with wanting to help here, so they made up a cover story. Between this event and the cleansing of the Desecrated Temple, the players made a name for themselves as fiend slayers and started to gain the respect of paladins, clerics and others who specialized in hunting the creatures of the lower planes.

SECRET GARDEN

My concept behind this room was that it was once an incredible garden for a palatial estate. One where magic was used to grow plants beyond what would normally be possible in terms of aesthetics and size. A halfling gardener dutifully attended to this magical garden. Over time the estate faded. Maybe the owners died, and it was remote enough no one inherited it. The staff continued to upkeep it for a time but gradually dropped off via attrition. The halfling himself lived on the property and continued to look after the garden even after he stopped receiving any compensation. Maybe he also grew a subsistence fruit and vegetable garden for himself there. Over time though, something dark happened in the estate. I leave it ambiguous, maybe it was a curse, magic systems decaying after the wizards employed to maintain them left, or something else. Perhaps this same corruption explains why the estate is now apparently abandon. Anyway, eventually the plants came to life in the garden and killed and devoured the gardener.

By the time the players reach it, they discover a garden that is completely grown out of control. There is no apparent exit from the garden, but soon they encounter the ghost of the halfling gardener who seems quite frazzled. He is overwhelmed with all the gardening that needs to be done, weeding, watering, planting new seedlings, etc. This is comical because the garden is completely overgrown and a lost cause. However, the players cannot leave unless they put the gardener's soul to rest. They can do this by either helping him garden or attacking and slaying the ghost. The players opted to help the gardener, and soon after they start weeding, a tangle of weeds comes to life, revealing a massive shambling mound. Much of the garden itself has become a large, sentient mass. This shambling mound actually ended up killing one of the players, Cervi, whose death plotline I will get into soon in a future post. Once the shambling mound was slain, the gardeners' soul was at peace, a door appears and the players receive his trowel:

Gardener’s Trowel- This trowel is a melee weapon that deals 1d4 damage. Against plants and plantlike creatures, they must make a Con Save DC 15, failure they instantly die if under 50 hitpoints, otherwise take 6d6 (21) damage. Might be found before shambling mounds emerge

Over the course of the campaign the players earned a lot of custom weapons they never used, but this was one that did actually come in handy a few times. At a low level, 21 damage or a potential instakill against a plant monster is no joke.

CASINO

This was an ultra luxury casino run by Djinn in the Elemental Plane of Air. The casino structure itself floats high in the clouds, with no ground in site from any of the windows. The players can gamble on the machines, and also there is a Tiefling soul dealer present who will buy and sell souls. The players did not have much in the way of coin at this point so souls were a potential means of getting money to gamble with, though the players didn't bite (I didn't expect them to but wanted the option there for World Building). The casino was run by a Rakshasa named Vyre, who had a number of Djinn guards in his employ as well as several invisible stalkers throughout the casino ready to pounce on any thieves or cheats. The players didn't spend much time here so the story didn't really develop, but mostly it was a test of how the players behaved in an area where they were completely outmatched in power. Not quite Zariel's command center level overpowered, but enough that if they had tried to commit crimes it would have been a really bad time. There is no way a group of players between level 5 and 7 could handle a Raksahha, let alone a Rakshasa with a team of invisible stalkers. Unlike all of the other rooms in the Lady of Pain's branch, there was no test here that limited entry and exit. The players could enter and leave through a broken slot machine that acted as a “door” as they pleased.

As far as games, the players didn't gamble much but if they did, most of the games had like 85-90% expected value on your bet so they'd lose money over time. However, poker was the exception. I never developed explicit rules, but I wrote: Poker- Play against up to 6 players. Everyone makes an INT check. Winner takes all minus a cut for the Casino. So if a player buffed their intelligence or somehow got advantage on checks ahead of the game, that would've been a way to make substantial money.

UTTER DARKNESS

The players appear in a completely dark, large chamber. If they feel around it is mostly empty except for dirt and smooth stone walls. If the players dig around or search they can eventually find a skeleton that acts as a door/exit from the room. However, if the players activate any time of light source they are attacked by a wraith (ghost of the bones they find) and potentially specters. Once they kill the wraith, they can use light freely in the room. The players ended up here a few times, I don't think they ever killed the wraith. They figured out quickly to just keep the room pitch black and feel around. Dark vision was not effective here, but blindsight or something like tremorsense would work. The main test here was seeing how players would act without being able to see... obviously.

PETTING ZOO

The players show up at a petting zoo. A woman (actually a powerful witch) runs the zoo and is polite enough if not stand offish. The zoo has a whole menagerie of animals but occasionally if the players pet or interacted with one they'd get a flash of a humanoid of some sort screaming “help me” in their minds. The truth was that all of the animals were once people transformed into animals by a permanent polymorph spell. There is also a monkey that seems out of place compared to the rest of the animals. As soon as the players let on they know the true nature of this “zoo” the witch turns on them and tries to polymorph them into animals as well. The witch did manage to turn one of the players, Thogg, into a pony, but he was transformed back pretty quickly. She did not end up being the real threat, her monkey was though. As soon as combat started, it turned into a giant ape. This creature has 145 hitpoints and deals an average of 45 damage per turn. I didn't pay too close attention to the statblock when I put it in, but for lower level players that's incredibly dangerous. It almost killed them but they managed to kill the witch and the giant ape. They looted her grimoire, which gave them a permanent version of polymorph that takes a full minute to cast but I'm not sure the players ever used it... maybe once. However, they had 31 animals they needed to turn back into people. Doing this quickly was impossible due to spell slot limitations, so instead they brought the animals to the hive where they were over time transformed back into people. They were a mixture of commoners, low level warriors, wizard, basically anyone who initially went missing or later came to investigate. Several of the survivors opted to stay and live in the hive (which would eventually evolve into the Harmonium) while others chose to return once they were restored.

VENGEFUL LITTLE ONE

I'm actually going to give this one its own post... there is enough lore here to warrant it.

VAMPIRE KARAOKE

This was a fun one. The players appear in an underground bar in a bustling metropolis. It's karaoke night. The group that goes before them performs abysmally, and they are dragged to the back and exsanguinated by a number of vampires. The players are told to go on stage next. Vampire guards block the exit, so they don't really have much of an option. Essentially, if they perform well they get free food and drink and are free to leave. If they perform poorly, vampires feast upon them. The players performed well, but opted to still start shit with the vampires. The room had 5 vampires and 14 vampire spawn. For reference, a vampire is challenge rating 13 and a vampire spawn is challenge rating 5. This was by far the toughest room in the lineup. Luckily for the players, they didn't actually explore this room until later in the game. The cleric came in clutch, and with some intense combinations of magic and tactics which I no longer remember, they defeated the vampires here and managed to capture two of them to bring to the Interloper. They had a device that captured the vampires when they turned to mist to try to escape. I think the Interloper had specifically asked them to bring vampire samples sessions earlier. They were elusive and he really wanted to study them. Later the players came back and killed a few more vampires. It was at this point I realized the Interloper gifts were causing the players' power to spiral out of control. Rather than nerf them... I had to escalate.

My general thought here was the Lady of Pain wanted to see how the players handled being a situation where they were surrounded by superiorly powerful enemies and where fighting would be certain death. How they chose to survive. The players opted to do the impossible and win.

And that is the Lady of Pain branch. Once all rooms in it had been encountered if not outright “solved”, a new door opened up at the end of the hallway. Unlike the others which were nondescript, this one was labeled. “Grandma Nettles”

And I'll save Grandma Nettles for a later post.

The word was “usually”.

A fourth grader in New Mexico, reading aloud into a headset microphone, stumbled over it. She knew what “usually” meant. She used it in conversation. What she could not do, in that moment, was get from the letters on the screen to the sound in her head: the collapsed middle syllable, the way the “s” turns into a “zh”, the fact that the word looks nothing like it sounds. That is a decoding problem. It has a specific pedagogical answer, and the answer involves breaking the word into parts and mapping the parts to sounds.

Amira, the AI reading tutor listening on the other end, offered her a definition instead.

Wendy Graham, the girl's mother, is a high school history teacher in Las Cruces Public Schools and a former fifth grade teacher. She had first encountered the platform in a summer reading programme in 2025 and later used it at home. She watched the software identify a vocabulary gap where there was none and miss the decoding failure that was actually happening. Her son, offered the same purple-haired avatar, simply refused to engage with it at all.

“Kids don't do their best for robots,” Graham told the education outlet The 74 in an article published on 2 September 2026. “Kids do their best for people.”

It is the sort of line that could be dismissed as sentiment. Except that in the same week, three separate strands of rigorous quantitative evidence arrived at approximately the same conclusion by entirely different routes, and none of them involved sentiment at all. They involved randomised controlled trials, log files, and a great many children who, given free access to the most heavily capitalised educational technology in history, used it for about two minutes a week.

Two Minutes a Week

The most arresting number comes from Stanford University's National Student Support Accelerator, whose researchers ran two randomised controlled trials with elementary students in two American school districts serving high-poverty populations. The paper, “Access is Not Enough: Human Support Improves Engagement with AI Tutoring”, was written by Carly D. Robinson, David Gormley, Ana Trindade Ribeiro and Susanna Loeb, and released as an Annenberg Institute working paper in June 2026.

The design was straightforward. Students were given access to an AI literacy platform, with scheduled time in which to use it. They were expected to complete at least two 30-minute sessions per week. The platform's own provider states that academic benefits typically begin to appear after around 30 minutes of weekly use. Half the students used the platform on their own; the others had a human tutor sitting with them, whose job was explicitly not instruction but engagement, motivation and troubleshooting.

In the independent-use condition, only 60.7 per cent of students in District A and 53.3 per cent in District B ever used the platform at all. Not “used it well”. Ever. Logged in once, across an intervention that ran between 14 and 31 weeks.

Average weekly usage was 2.18 minutes in District A and 5.23 minutes in District B. Against a target of 60 minutes. The students who did use it managed 13.2 and 25.8 minutes in the weeks they used it, which tells you the average is not describing a population of light users but a population of near-total non-users punctuated by occasional bursts. On average, students touched the platform in only four to five weeks out of an intervention lasting up to thirty-one.

Adding a human being to the room helped, and the size of the help is instructive. Engagement rose by between 71 and 80 per cent, which sounds transformative until you notice that weekly usage went up by one minute in District A and 4.4 minutes in District B. Over the whole intervention, the human tutors bought less than two additional hours of platform time per student. Reading achievement did not move.

“A key finding that we weren't even meaning to test,” Robinson told Chalkbeat, “is that having access to this AI tutor isn't the same as using it.”

Loeb, the centre's executive director, put the institutional conclusion more bluntly: “We don't have solid research showing that AI tutoring can work in the U.S. at scale.”

There is a detail buried in the paper's appendix that deserves more attention than it has received. Among students left to use the platform independently, those who engaged with it were more likely to be higher achieving and less likely to receive special education services. The children who might have gained most from extra reading practice were the least likely to open the application. A technology sold as an equaliser produced, in the only two districts where anyone bothered to measure it properly, a ladder that the students at the bottom did not climb.

The Binding Constraint

The second study is larger, longer and, if anything, more damaging to the optimistic case, precisely because the product worked.

Philip Oreopoulos of the University of Toronto and Nina Low of Charles River Associates ran a two-year cluster randomised trial across 18 middle schools in Hamilton County, Tennessee, during the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years. Students in existing daily remedial mathematics sessions were randomly assigned to Khan Academy with Khanmigo, the platform's generative AI tutor, configured to coach rather than hand over answers. The paper, “One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment”, was published as NBER Working Paper 35620 in August 2026.

Assignment raised mathematics achievement by 1.3 national percentile ranks per term, roughly 0.06 to 0.08 standard deviations over a school year. The authors calculate that a full year of active participation would imply about 0.14 standard deviations. These gains, they note, resemble those from Khan Academy practice without any AI assistance at all.

Then comes the log-file archaeology, which is the real contribution. Ninety-six per cent of students tried Khanmigo at least once. The median student messaged it on only a third of the days they practised maths. And in the exercise sessions where a student actually made a mistake, the moment at which a tutor is theoretically most valuable, they consulted the AI in just 17 per cent of cases. The messages they did send were, in the authors' description, mostly bare answers or clicks on suggested prompts.

“Access was nearly universal,” the researchers wrote, “but engagement was thin.”

Their conclusion is the sentence the entire sector should be arguing about: “The binding constraint appears to be engagement: realizing the promise of AI tutoring will require getting students to use it, not just giving them access.”

Sal Khan had said as much himself, months before the paper landed. In April 2026 he told Chalkbeat that for a lot of students Khanmigo “was a non-event. They just didn't use it much.” Asked about the vision of an AI tutor permanently available in every classroom, he offered a four-word summary of the adoption curve: “Some will; most won't.” He added that while AI would help, “our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.”

This is a founder describing the gap between his own 2023 TED talk, which promised a personal tutor for every child on Earth, and a log file showing that most children did not ask it anything.

The Strongest Version of the Optimistic Case

It would be lazy to stop here, because the optimistic case is not stupid and is not obviously wrong. It deserves to be built properly before it is tested.

Start with the economics. Human tutoring at high dosage is the best-evidenced intervention in education, and it is also ferociously expensive. The systematic review by Andre Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos and Vincent Quan pooled the experimental evidence on PreK-12 tutoring and reported an overall effect of 0.37 standard deviations, later revised to 0.29 in the version published in the American Educational Research Journal. Effects were strongest when tutors were teachers or paraprofessionals, in the earlier grades, and when the tutoring happened during the school day rather than after it. The Education Endowment Foundation's toolkit rates one-to-one tuition as worth up to five months of additional progress. Nobody disputes that tutoring works. The dispute has always been about whether anyone can afford enough of it.

An AI tutor has, in principle, a marginal cost approaching zero and infinite patience. It never has a bad morning. It is available at eleven at night, in a language the parents may not speak, to a child whose school has three vacancies in its maths department. If it delivered even a fraction of the human effect at a hundredth of the price, the cost-effectiveness arithmetic would be overwhelming.

And there is real evidence that it can. A World Bank randomised trial in Edo State, Nigeria, gave secondary students six weeks of after-school GPT-4 tutoring, working in pairs under teacher supervision with prompts designed to promote reasoning rather than shortcuts. The programme produced gains of around 0.3 standard deviations overall and 0.23 on English, the primary outcome, at roughly 48 dollars per student. Benchmarked against a database of education interventions trialled in developing countries, it outperformed about 80 per cent of them.

There is also a longer history that the current discourse tends to forget. Intelligent tutoring systems are not new. Carnegie Learning's Cognitive Tutor descends from decades of cognitive science at Carnegie Mellon. ASSISTments, developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, was evaluated in a large randomised trial across 46 Maine schools and produced an effect of about 0.18 standard deviations on an end-of-year standardised maths test, with the largest benefits for students with the weakest prior attainment. Meta-analytic reviews of intelligent tutoring systems have reported average effects in the region of 0.37 to 0.50 standard deviations depending on the comparison condition. These are not nothing. Measured against the typical education intervention, they are respectable.

Khan Academy's own response to the Hamilton County trial makes a fair point along these lines. Writing in August 2026, Khan argued that the 0.14 standard deviation figure for sustained participants “is a genuinely strong result”, and that the study was not asking whether Khan Academy beats doing nothing. It was measuring Khan Academy against whatever digital maths programmes and small-group instruction the district was already running. That is a demanding comparison, and the platform did not lose it.

And then there is Stanford's own contrary finding, which is the most interesting card in the optimistic hand. The Tutor CoPilot trial, run by Rose E. Wang, Ana T. Ribeiro, Carly D. Robinson, Susanna Loeb and Dora Demszky, put a language model behind 900 human tutors working with 1,800 students from historically under-served communities, offering expert-like suggestions in real time. Students whose tutors had the tool were four percentage points more likely to master topics. For students of the lowest-rated tutors, the gain was nine percentage points. The cost was around 20 dollars per tutor per year.

So the honest steelman is this: the technology demonstrably can teach, it is astonishingly cheap, it has worked in at least one rigorous field trial in a low-income setting, and it makes human tutors measurably better when pointed at them rather than at children. Anyone who wants to argue that AI tutoring is snake oil has to explain all four of those facts.

Where the Case Comes Apart

It comes apart at the point where the model stops being the subject of the sentence and the child becomes it.

Notice the shape of the successful examples. In Nigeria, students worked in pairs, after school, under teacher supervision, with structured prompts. That is not an AI tutor. That is a small-group human intervention with a language model in the middle of it, and the trial cannot separate the contribution of the model from the contribution of the adult who showed up and the peer who sat alongside. Tutor CoPilot is even clearer: it does not tutor anyone. It whispers to a human tutor who is already in a relationship with the student. Every case where AI tutoring has produced strong results is a case where a person was in the room.

The Stanford literacy trials tested the other configuration, the one the marketing implies and the procurement documents assume, in which the child and the software are left alone together. That configuration produced 2.18 minutes a week.

This is the distinction the sector has spent three years refusing to make. There is an enormous difference between a system that can answer a question and a system a child will actually ask. Model capability has been improving on a steep curve. Willingness to seek help from a machine has not, because it was never a function of model capability in the first place.

Help-seeking is one of the most studied behaviours in educational psychology, and it is socially loaded in ways that a benchmark score cannot capture. Asking for help is an admission. Children weigh that admission against what it costs them: looking slow in front of peers, disappointing a teacher, confirming a private suspicion about themselves. The reason a good tutor is valuable is not that they possess the answer. It is that they have built enough trust that the admission feels safe, and enough familiarity to notice the confusion before the child has to declare it.

Khanmigo could not do the second thing at all, and the 17 per cent figure suggests it was not trusted enough to be given the first. A child who has just got a question wrong in a remedial maths class is at the precise emotional coordinates where a human tutor would lean in. The AI sat there, one click away, and was not clicked.

Why Children Work for People Who Will Notice

The Stanford result that most repays attention is not the two minutes. It is the fact that adding a human being who was explicitly forbidden from teaching still moved engagement by 71 to 80 per cent.

The tutors in those trials were not subject experts delivering instruction. In District B they were middle school students, selected because they did well in their own English classes and had a free period. Their job was to check in, keep students on task, sort out headphones and passwords, and talk to the children about what they were doing. They spent part of every session on relationship-building activities that reduced the time available for the platform. And they still produced the largest engagement effect anyone in these trials produced.

What those tutors supplied was relational accountability: the simple, unglamorous fact that somebody would notice. Somebody would know whether you logged in. Somebody would ask how the story went. Effort became legible to another person, and legible effort is the currency children have always worked for.

Software can simulate this. It cannot instantiate it. A notification saying “we missed you yesterday” is not a person missing you. Children, including very young ones, appear to be excellent at telling the difference. A first grader in New Mexico, quoted by her mother in reporting by NBC News, complained of the software that “she doesn't let me finish my sentences, she doesn't listen.” An Albuquerque parent reported her children saying that Amira was “like a new teacher but they don't actually understand me”, and that one of them no longer liked reading.

A study accepted to the Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference in 2026 sharpens the mechanism considerably. Conrad Borchers, Ashish Gurung, Qinyi Liu, Danielle R. Thomas, Mohammad Khalil and Kenneth R. Koedinger analysed nearly 2,100 hours of classroom practice by 191 middle schoolers on an intelligent tutoring system, tracking what happened when a human tutor physically visited a student during their work. Engagement rose during the visit and stayed elevated afterwards. The returns diminished with visit length, and timing mattered more than duration. Interactions built on concrete, stepwise scaffolding with explicit organisation of the student's work were the most effective. Their recommendation for resource-constrained settings is deflating in its modesty: several brief, well-timed check-ins, including at least one early.

Brief. Well-timed. Human. The paper is, among other things, a costing exercise for the thing AI tutoring was supposed to make unnecessary, and the answer is that it is cheaper than anyone assumed. Not free, though. Never free.

The Word She Could Not Decode

Return to “usually”, because the failure it exposes is technical as well as relational, and the technical version is the one that will not be fixed by better prompting.

Amira works by listening. Students read passages aloud into a microphone; automatic speech recognition compares what it hears to what it expects; when a word goes wrong, the system intervenes, sometimes with a video of a mouth enunciating the correct pronunciation. It is a genuinely clever pipeline and it does something no human tutor can do at scale, which is give every child in a class simultaneous individual reading practice with immediate feedback.

But consider what the signal actually contains. A child hesitates on “usually”. From the acoustic evidence alone, that hesitation is consistent with at least four distinct conditions: she does not know the word; she knows the word but cannot decode the orthography; she can decode it but is reading too slowly to hold the sentence in working memory; or the microphone picked up the child at the next desk. These require four different responses. Defining the word helps only in the first case. In Graham's daughter's case it was the second, and the software chose the first.

The wider evidence suggests this is not an isolated misfire. Reporting by the Albuquerque Journal in April 2026 documented teachers describing month-to-month swings of 20 to 30 percentile points in individual students' Amira scores, which a teaching coach characterised as statistically abnormal. A kindergarten teacher noted that the system “is not always great at picking up the language of students” with spoken language difficulties. Classroom background noise contaminates results. A special education teacher described students groaning and crying on assessment days.

New Mexico requires Amira statewide for kindergarten through second grade, at a cost of around 2.7 million dollars a year, with assessments three times annually and monthly for children reading below expectations. Idaho requires it too; California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma and Texas have authorised it. In a Reason report published on 2 September 2026, only 8 per cent of surveyed New Mexico teachers and administrators said they had no major concerns about it, though the poll was run by the state education department at one of its own training sessions, and the department has said it was not representative. Amira's chief executive, Mark Angel, has defended the evidence base robustly, saying that “no other scalable instructional intervention has been interrogated as many times, by as many independent teams, with this consistency of positive impact.”

Both things can be true. The efficacy studies can show real reading gains under conditions of proper use, and the deployment can still be systematically misdiagnosing children whose accents, dialects, speech differences or classroom acoustics fall outside the model's comfortable centre. The children most likely to be misread by a speech recognition system are, with grim predictability, the same children the system was funded to help.

The requirement did not survive the summer intact. Parents showed up en masse at school board meetings across the state, worried less about pedagogy than about where the recordings of their children's voices were going. Six districts and charters declined to use the software at all on privacy grounds: Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Farmington, Roswell, Clayton and Turquoise Trail Charter School, with the exemptions running only for that school year. On 4 August 2026, days before the new term began, the Public Education Department issued revised guidance signed by Secretary Mariana Padilla, permitting districts to run Amira without the voice-recording feature, to administer a paper-based test instead, or to use an assessment programme of their own. Voice recordings delete monthly by default, and districts may now request daily, weekly or end-of-year deletion. The department held its ground on the principle, arguing that “a common statewide assessment provides a shared measure that supports consistency, transparency, accountability and equitable decision making”. Amira remains the statewide requirement. It is simply no longer in every public school.

Albuquerque Public Schools, the largest district in the state, resolved on 26 August 2026 to keep the programme with concessions: voice recordings dropped from the tutoring component, a 48-hour deletion window on the testing feature, and paper-and-pencil alternatives for parents who opt out. Deputy Superintendent Randy Mahlerwein explained the 48 hours as a compromise, the testing data being deleted on that cycle “so teachers have a chance to listen to the recordings”. Representative Linda Serrato, who led more than thirty legislators in a letter demanding oversight, put the stake plainly: “You're talking about the biometric data of children 5 to 8 years old. That's valuable stuff, and we know it, but we have to treat it as such.” Angel, for his part, has said the company would rather not hold the material at all. “We don't want to collect this data; it's a nuisance,” he said. “If the Legislature or PED tells us to stop collecting the data, we will stop instantaneously.”

It is worth being precise about what moved and what did not. No new efficacy finding prompted any of this. The evidence base sat in August exactly where it had sat in April. What changed was that parents turned up, districts refused and legislators wrote letters, which is to say that the correction to an automated system arrived by way of people paying close attention to particular children, which is the one resource the technology had been sold as a substitute for.

Who Bears the Risk

None of this is priced into the way districts buy.

Educational technology is sold on licences, not on usage. A district commits to a per-student annual fee, the vendor books the revenue, and whether the child logs in is somebody else's problem. This is not a new pathology. Analyses by LearnPlatform, before the generative AI wave, found that roughly a quarter to a third of purchased edtech licences were never activated at all, and that intensive use, defined as ten or more hours per product between assessments, applied to about two per cent of licences. Estimates put over a billion dollars of American K-12 licensing spend into the category of pure waste each year.

What the Stanford and Hamilton County trials show is that the generative AI generation of products has inherited this structure and, so far, has not improved on it. A district that timetables two 30-minute sessions a week, and receives 2.18 minutes, is paying roughly 27 times the advertised unit cost of the intervention it thinks it bought. Nobody's contract says that.

The public spending is not trivial and is increasingly visible. New Mexico spends 2.7 million dollars a year on Amira. Iowa committed 3 million dollars in 2024 with a further 2.5 million after. Louisiana authorised 3.6 million plus another million. Duval County Public Schools in Florida structured its purchase differently. Its 2024 contract, worth 100,000 dollars and covering roughly 2,600 students in grades two through four who were reading below grade level, tied half the fee to student progress. More than 1,200 of them met their oral reading fluency goals, exceeding what the contract had been written to expect, which is either a decent result or an expensive coin flip depending on your counterfactual, except that the district was only paying in full for the half that landed. North Carolina, notably, cut its Khanmigo funding from 10 million dollars to 500,000.

The American education secretary, Linda McMahon, has acknowledged that there are not “a lot of metrics” for judging AI's classroom value, and asked the obvious question: “Are we seeing better outcomes in schools? And if we're not, then they should be pulled out.”

The public appears to be well ahead of the procurement offices. A Century Foundation survey, conducted by Morning Consult among more than 2,000 registered voters in May 2026, found 84 per cent concerned about private companies collecting and profiting from student data, and 81 per cent concerned that teachers are being pressured to use AI tools without proven pedagogical benefit. Seventy-seven per cent wanted government guardrails, a figure that held across party lines. Forty-nine per cent said classroom technology and AI should be kept to a minimum. This is not a technophobic fringe. It is a settled majority, expressing a preference that the market has so far been structured to ignore.

The Ghost of Two Sigma

Underneath every AI tutoring pitch of the last three years sits a single number that almost nobody quoting it has checked.

In 1984, Benjamin Bloom published a paper in Educational Researcher reporting that students taught one-to-one with mastery learning outperformed conventionally taught students by two standard deviations, placing the average tutored student above 98 per cent of the control class. He framed it as a challenge: find a group method that achieves what tutoring achieves. The “2 sigma problem” became the founding scripture of educational technology, and generative AI inherited it wholesale. Every promise of a personal tutor for every child is a promise to close Bloom's gap with software.

The number has never been replicated. Bloom's finding rested on two doctoral dissertations by his own students, conducted with small samples, short durations and researcher-designed outcome measures. A 1982 meta-analysis by Peter Cohen, James Kulik and Chen-Lin Kulik had already put the average tutoring effect at around 0.33 standard deviations. The Nickow, Oreopoulos and Quan review found nothing approaching two sigma anywhere in the experimental literature; its pooled estimate sat between 0.29 and 0.37 depending on the specification. Matthew Kraft of Brown University has argued that Bloom's number helped anchor the field to expectations of effect sizes that essentially never occur, noting that most education interventions produce effects of 0.1 standard deviations or less.

Seen against that corrected baseline, the Hamilton County result of 0.06 to 0.08 standard deviations a year, rising to 0.14 for sustained participation, is not humiliating. It is an ordinary education intervention performing ordinarily. The humiliation is entirely a function of what was promised.

England's National Tutoring Programme offers a parallel worth sitting with. Launched with substantial funding to address pandemic learning loss, its independent evaluation found no evidence that the Tuition Partners route improved Key Stage 2 or Key Stage 4 outcomes in English or maths, while school-led tutoring produced small gains equivalent to about a month's progress. The intervention with the best evidence base in education, delivered at national scale under time pressure, largely failed to reproduce its own effect. Yet 81 per cent of school leads surveyed felt the programme had helped pupils catch up. The gap between what practitioners perceive and what the data records is not unique to AI. It is what scale does to interventions, and it should temper any assumption that AI tutoring's problems are peculiar to AI.

Beyond the Test Score

There is a further argument, and it cuts against the entire framing of the debate.

A paper submitted in February 2026 by Lucile Favero, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Tanja Käser and Nuria Oliver argues that assessing educational AI purely on learning outcomes misses most of what matters. Their framework identifies four interlocking dimensions: cognitive offloading, diminished learner agency, emotional disengagement and surveillance-oriented practice. Their central claim is that these reinforce one another, and that the compound effect operates on critical thinking and civic participation rather than on test scores. They are careful not to be deterministic about it. Well-designed systems, they argue, can support reasoning and autonomy while preserving meaningful human interaction. The question is not whether AI belongs in education but how institutions deploy it.

Apply that lens to the current evidence and something uncomfortable emerges. The thin engagement documented in Tennessee and California and New Mexico is being read as a failure. On the Favero framework, it might be partial protection. A child who does not offload her thinking to a chatbot is not being harmed by the chatbot. The Hamilton County students who sent bare answers and clicked suggested prompts were exhibiting exactly the answer-seeking behaviour that worries cognitive scientists, and they were doing it at low volume.

Which raises a genuinely difficult question. If engagement rose to the 30 minutes a week the vendors recommend, would attainment rise with it, or would we simply have more children more efficiently outsourcing the cognitive work that constitutes learning? Nobody knows. The trials that would tell us have not been run, because the dosage required to run them has never been achieved. Robinson's team put this with admirable candour: they never reached sufficient use to determine whether the tool works at all.

What an Honest Evidence Standard Would Require

The gap between promise and delivery is not going to be closed by better models, because the constraint was never the model. It might be narrowed by changing what districts are allowed to buy and what vendors are required to show.

Four changes would do most of the work. First, effectiveness claims should be stated as a function of dosage and reported alongside observed dosage in real deployments. A product whose efficacy study assumed 30 minutes a week should have to publish what its actual median user does, by district, annually. Second, contracts should tie payment to usage rather than to seats, which would move the risk of non-engagement from the public purse to the party that can actually design against it. Duval County has already written half a contract that way, so this is a reform with a working example rather than a thought experiment. Third, trials should be pre-registered and report the null. The Stanford literacy paper is a model here precisely because its headline finding is a failure to establish anything about the technology. Fourth, deployment equity should be a reported metric, not an afterthought. If the students least likely to open the application are the ones with special educational needs and the lowest prior attainment, a district needs to know that in month two, not from a working paper appendix two years later.

None of this is exotic. It is roughly the standard that a medicines regulator would consider a baseline, and roughly the standard the Education Endowment Foundation has spent fifteen years trying to establish in England, where the evidence for one-to-one tuition is rated as moderately secure on the basis of 123 studies. The reason it feels exotic in educational technology is that educational technology has never had to meet it.

The Girl and the Avatar

The child stumbling over “usually” is the whole argument compressed into a single second of audio.

What she needed was for somebody to notice the specific shape of her confusion: not that she lacked the word but that she could not get through the spelling to reach it. Noticing is not a capability that scales with parameters. It requires attention that is directed at a particular person, sustained over time, and, crucially, that the person knows is being directed at them. That last part is what produces the effort. Children do not work hard because a system is watching. They work hard because someone who matters to them will see.

The two-minute lesson is not a story about bad software. Amira and Khanmigo are, by any reasonable technical standard, impressive artefacts, and the studies suggest that when children use them properly they produce ordinary, real, modest gains of the kind that education research has always found. The story is about a category error that ran through an entire procurement cycle: the assumption that the scarce resource in education was instruction, when the scarce resource was always attention, and attention is the one thing that has never been possible to manufacture at zero marginal cost.

Stanford's tutors, forbidden from teaching, moved the numbers more than the AI did. That is the finding. It has been available, in one form or another, since Bloom, and it survived the arrival of a technology that was supposed to make it obsolete. A district that spends its money on the thing that produced 71 to 80 per cent more engagement rather than on the thing that produced 2.18 minutes a week is not being nostalgic. It is reading the evidence.

Whether anyone is buying on the evidence is a separate question, and on current form the answer looks like a non-event.

Sources and References

1. Carly D. Robinson, David Gormley, Ana Trindade Ribeiro and Susanna Loeb, “Access is Not Enough: Human Support Improves Engagement with AI Tutoring”, EdWorkingPaper No. 26-1451, Annenberg Institute at Brown University, June 2026. https://edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1451
2. Chalkbeat, “Does AI tutoring work? Students would have to use it for researchers to find out”, Chalkbeat, 17 June 2026. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/06/17/ai-tutoring-research-ran-into-problem-students-wouldnt-use-it/
3. Philip Oreopoulos and Nina Low, “One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment”, NBER Working Paper 35620, August 2026. https://www.nber.org/papers/w35620
4. Matt Barnum, “Students rarely engaged with Khan Academy's AI-powered tutor Khanmigo, study finds”, Chalkbeat, 25 August 2026. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/08/25/ai-tutoring-students-khanmigo-khan-academy-engagement-study/
5. Matt Barnum, “Why Sal Khan is rethinking how AI will change schools”, Chalkbeat, 9 April 2026. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/sal-khan-reflects-on-ai-in-schools-and-khanmigo/
6. Sal Khan, “What I found compelling in a new randomized trial of Khan Academy in math intervention”, Khan Academy Blog, 24 August 2026. https://blog.khanacademy.org/what-i-found-compelling-in-a-new-randomized-trial-of-khan-academy-in-math-intervention/
7. Linda Jacobson, “AI Tutors Not Yet a Replacement for Humans, Research Says”, The 74, 2 September 2026. https://www.the74million.org/article/ai-tutors-not-yet-a-replacement-for-humans-research-says/
8. The Century Foundation, “Americans Are United Against the Tech Takeover of Public Schools”, 2026. https://tcf.org/content/report/americans-are-united-against-the-tech-takeover-of-public-schools/
9. Ed Finkel, “Voters express broad concerns about AI and tech in schools, survey shows”, K-12 Dive, 2 September 2026. https://www.k12dive.com/news/voters-express-broad-concerns-about-ai-and-tech-in-schools-survey-shows/829351/
10. Conrad Borchers, Ashish Gurung, Qinyi Liu, Danielle R. Thomas, Mohammad Khalil and Kenneth R. Koedinger, “Brief but Impactful: How Human Tutoring Interactions Shape Engagement in Online Learning”, arXiv:2601.09994, 15 January 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09994
11. Lucile Favero, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Tanja Käser and Nuria Oliver, “AI in Education Beyond Learning Outcomes: Cognition, Agency, Emotion, and Ethics”, arXiv:2602.04598, 4 February 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04598
12. Rose E. Wang, Ana T. Ribeiro, Carly D. Robinson, Susanna Loeb and Dora Demszky, “Tutor CoPilot: A Human-AI Approach for Scaling Real-Time Expertise”, arXiv:2410.03017, October 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03017
13. Andre Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos and Vincent Quan, “The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence”, NBER Working Paper 27476, July 2020; published in revised form in the American Educational Research Journal, 2024. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27476
14. Paul T. von Hippel, “Two-Sigma Tutoring: Separating Science Fiction from Science Fact”, Education Next, vol. 24, no. 2, Spring 2024. https://www.educationnext.org/two-sigma-tutoring-separating-science-fiction-from-science-fact/
15. Education Endowment Foundation, “One to one tuition”, Teaching and Learning Toolkit. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/one-to-one-tuition
16. Education Endowment Foundation, “Independent evaluation of the National Tutoring Programme”. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-independent-evaluation-of-the-national-tutoring-programme-ntp
17. Wenting Ma, Olusola O. Adesope, John C. Nesbit and Qing Liu, “Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Learning Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis”, Journal of Educational Psychology, November 2014. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/edu-a0037123.pdf
18. Social Programs That Work, “ASSISTments”, Arnold Ventures. https://evidencebasedprograms.org/programs/assistments/
19. EdWeek Market Brief, “More Than $1 Billion in K-12 Ed-Tech Licensing Fees Go to Waste”, November 2019. https://marketbrief.edweek.org/education-market/more-than-1-billion-in-k-12-ed-tech-licensing-fees-go-to-waste/2019/11
20. Tyler Kingkade, “Meet Amira, an AI reading tutor alarming some parents and school leaders in New Mexico”, NBC News, 7 August 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/ai-reading-tool-amira-new-mexico-parents-schools-privacy-concerns-rcna591161
21. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “Invasion of the Robot Teachers”, Reason, 2 September 2026. https://reason.com/2026/09/02/invasion-of-the-robot-teachers/
22. Natalie Robbins, “New Mexico schools use Amira AI reading assessments amid accuracy and equity concerns”, Albuquerque Journal, 26 April 2026. https://www.abqjournal.com/news/students-read-aloud-ai-scores-them/3029121
23. Natalie Robbins, “New Mexico eases rules for AI reading test amid privacy concerns”, Albuquerque Journal, 10 August 2026. https://www.abqjournal.com/news/amid-privacy-concerns-new-mexico-eases-rules-for-ai-reading-test/3099834
24. “Amid parent backlash, APS keeps AI reading program with changes”, Albuquerque Journal, 26 August 2026. https://www.abqjournal.com/news/amid-parent-backlash-aps-keeps-ai-reading-program-with-changes/3110194
25. CNN, “Education Secretary McMahon says AI can be a 'very effective tool' in schools”, State of the Union, 23 August 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/23/politics/video/mcmahon-ai-in-schools-sotu

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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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TiVo Plans to End Free Automatic Commercial Skipping in November, Tests Paid Premium Replacement Service By Luke Bouma · via Cord Cutters News

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TiVo, there is a name I haven't heard or thought about in a while. I used to love the hardware and platform. I thought I was the coolest tech-savvy person, and that TiVo was the way to watch TV. The tech was just so cool.

At one point, I had three of them. Most were the OTA version, though I had the cable version once with a CableCARD. That was an adventure to get working.

Over-the-air (OTA) TV has come a long way and now has so many channels. Yes, they are mainly old shows, but they are still worth watching, and it is all free. There are commercials, but I look at those as snack and bathroom breaks.

In reality, I do not watch nearly as much TV now as I used to. Most of what I do watch is through OTA, Plex, or streaming. OTA is mainly for news and the little, if any, live sports I watch. Most of the time, the TV is just on for background distraction.

So when I saw this article from Cord Cutters in my RSS feed, my first thought was that they must be desperate if they are trying to charge for their main feature, skipping ads. They do not even make hardware anymore. How and why are they still in business? I have not seen a TV with TiVo software in it.

It is one for the history books: a company that was much respected at one time, now realistically gone, or at least just a shell of its former self.

In Summary: * Saturday's college football day in the Roscoe-verse began with the IU Hoosiers playing the North Texas Mean Green. I'm glad I followed the game and I'm glad the Hoosiers won. I'm also glad that I switched off the TV (I'd started watching the game on local FOX TV) by the end of the 1st Quarter and followed the remainder of the game via the radio-call from Hoosier Country 101.5, Flagship Station for IU Sports. I love the announcers on IU's Sports Network, and I'm so NOT a fan of sports on TV.

My second college football game of the day between the Texas A&M Aggies and the Missouri State Bears is about half an hour away from the opening Kickoff, and I'm already tuned into a local sports station listening to the pregame broadcast from the Aggies Sports Network and I'm looking forward to the radio-call of tonight's game. Gig 'em, Aggies!

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=229.28 lbs. * bp= 155/91 (67)

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

Diet: * 06:20 – 1 banana * 07:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 10:15 – saltine crackers and cheese * 13:10 – home made pork and vegetables soup * 16:30 – 1 fresh apple * 19:55 – dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – wake * 05:10 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 06:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to musc, nap * 08:30 – work on home budget * 09:30 – begin following IU vs North Texas football game * 14:25 – and IU wins, 52 to 16. * 14:30 – follow news reports from various sources * 17:00 – tuned into 94.1, San Antonio's Sports Star, ahead of the Pregame Show, then the radio call of tonight's college football game between the Texas A&M Aggies and the Missouri State Bears

Chess: * 16:45 – moved in all pending CC games

#fiction #videogames #FPS #SF #protagonismos

On 19 November 1998, videogaming changed forever when game developer Valve released Half-Life. 50+ ‘Game of the Year’ awards and inclusion in various ‘most influential games’ rankings attest to the fundamental shift Half-Life represents within the first-person-shooter (FPS) genre of videogames, taking it to a new level from the standard previously set by 1993’s Doom. In terms of immersion, storytelling and worldbuilding, there is a before and after Half-Life.

Valve followed its success with Half-Life 2 in 2004, the six year development time a first indicator of what would infamously become known as ‘Valve time’. Like its predecessor, Half-Life 2 represented another levelling up in the standards of FPS videogames through the introduction of realistic physics effects, advances in rendering of NPCs and the more extensive setting compared to its predecessor. Included with Half-Life 2 was an updated version of Half-Life, rendered on Valve’s new game engine. Without any real upgrades to graphics or gameplay, however, this was such a disappointment that some fans set out to completely rebuild Half-Life themselves. The product of this work is Black Mesa, a full remaster of the original game, completed after its very own 16 year long development journey. When the definitive version was finally published in 2020, the world of videogames had again moved on, and Half-Life 2 was hardly cutting edge anymore. Nonetheless, Black Mesa’s positive reception and the ability of a fan-based team to deliver a critically acclaimed remasters are a testament to the enduring legacy of Half-Life and the potential for a games industry not wholly captured by risk-averse triple-A studios.

Half-Life was my formative FPS. I have replayed it so many times that I can recall entire sections of it better than real places where I have lived, and I cannot help run its opening sequence in my head whenever I’m on any form of light rail. When Half-Life 2 came out in 2004 the payoff felt worth the long wait, and Valve displayed their expected panache for storytelling and game design, introducing physics in ways that had never been seen before, laying the groundwork for their next hit, 2007’s Portal. Next, however, was an abortive foray into ‘episodic’ games with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2, each with development times that rivalled those of full, standalone games. The long awaited Episode 3 never materialised, nor did Half-Life 3, and from here Valve’s creative output effectively ceased. My suspicion that Valve were holding out for another step-change in gaming technology was confirmed when Half-Life: Alyx was released in 2020 as a virtual reality (VR) exclusive. Alyx did not advance the Half-Life story however, and nothing has emerged from Valve since, leaving the Half-Life universe the gaming equivalent of Game of Thrones.

The most memorable commute in videogames. Video is from the original Half Life.

It was therefore exciting to see the development of the Half-Life remaster running in parallel with Valve’s metamorphosis from a vanguard game developer to toll collector on Steam, the largest PC game distribution platform. As the community effort consolidated into the Crowbar Collective and was eventually endorsed by Valve, I played several of the incomplete and demo releases, until the definitive version of Black Mesa finally landed in 2020. Now a recent replay presented an opportunity to assess how well a six year old remaster of a 28 year old game stands up against the games of today.

Welcome to the Black Mesa Research Facility. Have a safe and productive day

The strongest quality of Black Mesa remains the organic storytelling and worldbuilding it inherits from Half-Life. From the moment we enter the Black Mesa Research Facility using the iconic monorail train from Level 3 Dormitories to Sector C Test Labs, we know that there is a whole intricate world out there beyond the player's direct experience, and this approach is sustained throughout the game. It is one of the areas where Black Mesa outdoes its source material, because Crowbar Collective was able to significantly expand and enhance the last four chapters set in the alien ‘Xen’ world, using materials Valve omitted from Half-Life to meet its release schedule, as well as retconned references to Half-Life 2, strengthening the connection between the two games. Black Mesa tells this story without cut scenes, dialogue, quick-time events or an extensive encyclopedia of lore. Instead, we build our understanding of this world from environmental clues, snippets of overheard conversation and brief interactions with NPCs.

This lack of interruptions means that Black Mesa maintains excellent pacing. There are slower and more frantic sections, but the core gameplay is hardly ever interrupted by cut scenes or other non-playable events. Chapters build logically on one another, with a gradual and sensible escalation in terms of weaponry and enemies. Despite eventually carrying the armaments of a small platoon and wearing high-impact reactive armour, Black Mesa mercilessly punishes any attempts to Rambo through combat, forcing the player to think and strategize while on the move. As ‘cover’ was not a mechanic supported by the Source engine there is no sequence of conveniently placed chest-height walls to hunker behind, and instead the most taxing combat sequences require mobility and careful use of the environment to overcome.

The logical, linear structure makes Black Mesa delightfully simple (if not necessarily easy), but can feel contrived and railroading when contrasted with contemporary games. Funnelling the player down a single path means that the Black Mesa Research Facility has an unusual number of locked doors and explosive-proof windows, which can occasionally break suspension of disbelief or cause frustration, in particular when the ‘correct’ path is not immediately clear and the game refuses to offer multiple routes to the same objective in a way that we have come to expect from more modern games.

That annoyance of being railroaded is felt more strongly when confronted with various platform or physics puzzles that now feel anachronistic and interfere with flow. While Black Mesa vastly improved on the jumping challenges in the ‘Xen’ chapter, we still have an entire chapter of platforming through a waste processing plant that was clearly designed before Health & Safety was invented and which is both tedious and unconvincing, especially when contrasted with the rest of the in-game environment.

Graphics are where Black Mesa is weakest, which is no surprise for a game using a game engine, textures and assets from over two decades ago, some updates by Valve in the intervening years notwithstanding. Half-Life 2’s NPCs were a massive step up in 2004, but two decades on appear mildly wooden and repetitive, with the the player facing the same four soldiers over and over again. As someone not too invested in the latest graphics I would say the environments hold up okay as a whole, as long as you don’t look too closely at any of the textures.

Somewhat outdated graphics notwithstanding, the Xen chapters are an enormous improvement over the original, infusing the last third of the game with a sense of wonder that it did not previously possess.

The right man in the wrong place

Despite its age, there remains something refreshing about Black Mesa, in particular when compared to more expansive modern games. It is proof of the adage that less can indeed be more. This is a game that still features the mute protagonist, without conversation trees, side quests, morality points, or weapon upgrades. Repeatedly I found myself comparing Black Mesa to the last shooter I played: the Mass Effect remaster, and doing so favourably.

Despite being set in a single facility, Black Mesa feels grander than the world of Mass Effect, even though the the latter is spread over much of the galaxy. It achieves this not through the multiplicity of locations or the size of the game, as 1998 technology seriously limited both. It convinces you because throughout the game, the Black Mesa Research Facility implies that at any time, you are only seeing part of a greater whole. Every area is littered with signs pointing to other locations, processes or activities that you never experience. All around you NPCs are taking their own actions: marines fighting aliens, security personnel trying to survive, scientists desperately seeking a solution while being massacred by aliens and the military alike. Mass Effect, by contrast, always feels small. Even in the third game, its locations feel oddly circumscribed, and plastering some flying cars on the skybox does not fix that. This is not true for all parts of the game, but for a surprising amount of it, its locations are so obviously designed around gameplay that they don’t really convince as ‘real’ locations, let alone as parts of a greater universe.

This sense that you are not the centre of the universe extends to the player as well. Playing as Gordon Freeman in Black Mesa, you start as a recent PhD graduate down at the academic pecking order, paying off your student loans by shoving mysterious samples into the ‘anti-mass spectrometer’. When this accidentally makes you instrumental to creating the dimensional rift that starts the alien invasion of the research facility, the key reason it is you and not anyone else who has to go to the surface for help is because you happen to wear that convenient armour. For the first half of the game you are directed by other scientists and events, and it is only as the game progresses and the military starts hunting you specifically that the game acknowledges that you are somehow special. Contrast this to Mass Effect, where from the opening sequence it is established that Commander Shepard is a very special boy/girl. Mass Effect opens with your superiors at the highest levels of government discussing why you, and only you, are uniquely qualified for consideration for the galaxy’s most prestigious special forces outfit. Black Mesa opens with you running late on your commute to work. It is unavoidable for an FPS to make the hero(ine) the central character of the story, but Black Mesa tells you right up to the end that there were others like you who tried and failed, and that your ultimate victory was in no way predestined. In Mass Effect, everyone agrees (and tells you, ad nauseam) that you are the saviour of the galaxy. In Black Mesa, on winning the game you effectively get told you were just the statistically expected victor from among a larger pool of contenders.

Community action

At sixteen years of development, Crowbar Collective’s successful release of Black Mesa feels almost as unlikely as Gordon Freeman’s victory over Half-Life’s endboss. Gaming is now a mature enough industry to have its fair share of reboots and remasters, but in the main these are pushed by studios themselves, or whoever ended up with the relevant intellectual property. That is, when studios care enough to continue looking after their legacy. Recent years have seen controversial decisions by studios to discontinue games altogether, leaving players with unsupported and at times unplayable software. It has brought into focus the insidious nature of an industry that sells players ‘licenses’ to play, rather than ownership of games. While not the worst offender, Valve itself has come in for scrutiny over its lacklustre updates to its portfolio of legacy games, in particular given the dearth of new releases in recent years, as well as its facilitation of large studios extracting every last drop of value from games through Steam. Though unlike some of its competitors, Valve has at least shown itself willing to support an ecosystem of modifications and spin-offs, with Black Mesa probably the most elaborate example of this.

Black Mesa is a testament to both the enduring impact of Half-Life and the perseverance of its community of fans. With its somewhat outdated graphics and gameplay it may not hold much appeal to a new generation of gamers who did not experience the original and can choose from a plethora of games inconceivable in 1998. That would be a shame however, because Black Mesa's storytelling remains outstanding, and the game still offers a balanced, well-paced challenge to players. As an entry point for one of gaming's most iconic series it is well superior to the original. The Black Mesa Research Facility, while cutting edge in 1998, may now look a bit dated, but it is still well worth visiting.

Notes & Suggestions

• In response to studio decisions to discontinue games that still had a vibrant (albeit often small) gaming community, gamers have banded together in the Stop Killing Games initiative. One of the asks of the campaign is for studios to adopt legacy arrangements for games, rather than simply shutting them down. Good Old Games, a competitor platform to Steam, also runs an extensive library of older games as well as a ‘games preservation programme’.
• The honour of most extensive fan-built project probably goes to Tamriel Rebuilt, an effort to build the entire fictional world of Tamriel from the The Elder Scrolls series as a modification of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Bethesda games generally attract lots of player-made modifications, especially for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which has resulted in fully-fledged standalone games such as The Forgotten City. While Bethesda’s openness to player involvement has always been welcomed, this has not prevented the studio from occasionally trying to monetise players’ free labour, with connivance of our friends at Valve. The efforts of the Tamriel Rebuilt community were also covered in Tribune and Ars Technica.
• Yahtzee Croshaw has one of his usual entertaining videos on Black Mesa, covering some of the same points.

Blindenlings

De woeste schreeuwen van de lammeren niet uitverkoren voor een lange, leuke vakantie op geheime locatie Elders ze mekkeren dag en nacht ellenlange betogen over de duizenden onrechtvaardige handelingen uitgevoerd door hun herders het gerinkel dat is en de harde woorden die zijn te horen bij een club bekenden die elkaar niet langer aardig vinden het lawaai van de demonstraties over de enorme onoverbrugbare kloof tussen de slecht beminden en de goed gezinden

Het komt en blijft komen door de blinden alles wat iedereen doet, door de blinden ze zijn gesloten en toch komt het er door het rumoer wordt er niet in gesmoord ook al hangen ze juist daarom ervoor

Het geluid van miljoenen schapen die sinds de eerste er over ging niet meer kunnen stoppen met er ook over gaan de toeterende wagens, knipperen van verkeerslichten en het fluitconcert der verkeersleiders tijdens het dag in dag uit wisselen van baan de slomen die met machines, computers, instrumenten en zware metalen plannen smeden tegen de opmars van de gezwinden het helse kabaal van het koor die tijdens elke symfonie aanwezigheid van melodie en ritme in alle toonaarden ontkenden

Het komt en blijft komen door de blinden alles wat iedereen doet, door de blinden ze zijn gesloten en toch komt het er door het rumoer wordt er niet in gesmoord ook al hangen ze juist daarom ervoor

De schuiftrompet spelers die na het verbod op zowel schuiven als toeteren vanwege mogelijke risico's voor de volksgezondheid uit protest urenlang in hun heel erg lege handen klappen de overdosis aan stille zuchten in geklaarde luchten die om erger te voorkomen moesten worden omgezet in voor iedereen hoorbare stappen de hoge ijle klaagzang der doktoren in gezondheid informatie telefooncentra ongewild afgesloten van patiënten omdat ze niet weten hoe ze hen moeten door verbinden het jammeren en de knarsende tanden van oververmoeide bestuurders die voor de orde jarenlang zinloos van het kastje bij de wal via het schip tot de muur en weer terug naar het kastje aan de wal renden

Het komt en blijft komen door de blinden alles wat iedereen doet, door de blinden ze zijn gesloten en toch komt het er door het rumoer wordt er niet in gesmoord ook al hangen ze juist daarom ervoor.

This is the material I cut from Quietly Subversive. I'm preserving it here rather than throwing it away. It contains some of the thinking that didn't belong in the finished piece.

https://rvw.ie/quietly-subversive

Move one thing

Perhaps this explains some of the things I've been doing for years. Take the familiar priority matrix. Important and urgent. Useful, certainly. But what happens if we change the question?

Decision for now. Decision for the next generation.

The matrix is still there. But it has become a different instrument.

Or take the briefing. We normally think of a briefing as something produced at a particular moment: written, circulated, read and eventually superseded. What happens if we take the accumulated material and organise it differently? The briefing becomes not an event in time but an object of knowledge. That is part of what I'm trying to do with Brief Me.

Or take opinion itself. What happens when an opinion isn't treated as the starting point? What happens when it becomes something that can be examined? That is why I rather like the phrase: Where opinions come to be examined. And then there is another phrase I've used for a long time: Sequence is substance. We tend to think of sequence as presentation.

First this. Then that.

But the order in which we encounter things changes what we see. Change the sequence and sometimes you change the substance. Again, move one thing. Look again.

The quiet part

Perhaps that is what quietly subversive means. Not rebellion. Not confrontation. Not telling people that everything they believe is wrong. Something quieter. Take the established arrangement. Move one piece. And wait to see what becomes visible. I don't think that makes the writer neutral. Quite the contrary.

Someone has to choose what to examine.nSomeone has to notice the crack in the floorboards. Someone has to say: Look here.

But after that, I think there is an important line not to cross. The writer shouldn't occupy the reader's judgement. The job is to make the terrain visible. To expose the possibility. To put the question somewhere it can actually be examined. And then to leave the decision where it belongs. With the reader.

Perhaps that is why I am increasingly interested in the difference between persuasion and possibility. Persuasion asks: How can I get you to agree with me? Possibility asks: Have you seen this?

Those are very different acts. And perhaps the second can sometimes be more consequential than the first. Because once you have seen that there is another way of looking at something, you cannot quite return to the certainty that there wasn't.

Dig where you stand

So I don't think I have recently discovered a new way of writing. The pattern was there a long time ago. Often deliberately. What I am beginning to recognise is how much of my work it has quietly occupied. Essays. Teaching. Policy. Briefings.

The way information is organised. Even the little diagrams I've been drawing for years. Take something familiar. Move one thing. Look again. And perhaps that is what someone meant by quietly subversive.

Not changing people's minds. Not telling them where to go. Just making sure they can see that there is somewhere else to go.

Dig where you stand. Then look carefully at what you find.

A prominent entity (I think that defines them sufficiently) recently described my writing as “quietly subversive.” Was this an insult or a compliment. Should I be calling the NUJ for advice or laughing over a pint in my local, Joe May's?

Either way, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Not because I objected to it. Quite the opposite. I'll even admit to a mild blush, because honestly, there was something in the description that I recognised.

So it kicked off a moment or two of self-exploration. And the more I explored, the more I realised. Subversive didn't bother me a jot, I've been called much worse and in rooms where the stakes were much higher. No, it was the word quietly that upset my normal daily comfort. It was forcing me to walk backwards through my own history to retrace how I actually put pen to paper. Or more accurately how I sketch out the ambitions and boundaries of an essay.

I have been deliberately writing in a particular way for a very long time, way more than forty years. I take things that seem familiar or settled, examine the assumptions underneath them, and sometimes move one thing. Not much. Just enough to see whether anything changes. The rhythm is simple: Take something familiar. Move one thing. Look again.

What I hadn't fully appreciated was how pervasive the practice had become. Like discovering your vegetable garden is overrun with Japanese knotweed. You know you planted it. That tiny sprig to make use of one corner. Then you blink, and your heart beats double when you discover just how far it has travelled underground.

A way of seeing

It was probably lazy of me to accept all these things as techniques. Ways of writing. Ways of teaching. Ways of organising information. The quietly description is pushing me to ask if something runs deeper. A way, not of writing, not of organising, but of seeing and of asking if you want to see it too.

I am a democrat. That sounds like the political grammar version of a doorstop. I'll just wedge this under here; it'll stop things waving around and everyone will know what I mean. I was going to say it's a statement of the obvious, but it's not. And that not most definitely has consequences for how I think about knowledge and decision-making.

I don't believe that democratic decision-making means everyone arriving at an opinion and then counting the opinions. Ending with the “ayes have it”. Though what happens to the “nays” is a job for another essay.

There is an asymmetry before we ever get to that point. Someone usually has more power to define the question. To define the terms. To decide what is relevant. To determine the sequence in which things are presented. And sometimes, most importantly, to determine what appears to be possible. And if you don't know that another possibility exists, you can't choose it. That may sound like another one of those door-stops. But this one has profound consequences.

The walls we cannot see

One of the ideas I've been exploring elsewhere is that a prison doesn't necessarily need walls if the prisoner believes there is nowhere else to go. I wonder if we don't all suspect this. That constraint can become internal. The walls disappear from sight because the possibility beyond them has disappeared from imagination.

Do you think it's possible that something similar happens in public life? That a system doesn't necessarily have to prevent an alternative. It may be enough if alternatives never become visible.

So what if, as a writer, I choose not to craft adversarial prose, take one position, or submit op-ed pieces to the Irish Times? What if I decide that I don't want to tell people what to think? What if, instead, I try to use my way of seeing to make other possibilities visible? To illustrate that there may be more choices than were first imagined? Because if I carry one opinion, it is this:

People should be able to see what they are choosing between.

So, my writing is not seeking to provide an answer or advocating for a fixed position. It is offering another place from which to stand and look, as honestly as I can. And then, leave the decision up to you.

Quietly Subversive

David Marshall Dublin

260905

4h sleep Not done trip to printer setup in an hour books books books stickers and t-shirts bacon and eggs losing my mind remember, darkness and anger is just lack of sleep Shin things artist's who artshow are amazeballs I AM amazeballs balls balls balls amaze amaze amaze

Balmy 98°. Gonna need a scarf.

We always make and bring too many things. I wish I had the self control to make 4 really cool things. Instead I lug out 30 meh items.

want to share a coke with you.

fa la la la la

is it to early for a beer? (10a)

New band Recommend by a patron:

Ceramic planet.

According to Ian, they are ‘pedal-gaze’

I forgot how appealing summer skirts and flops are. Haven’t been out of the house much this summer.

We talked about the beach… but, your artist has to play mechanic first. And there’s the puppet planning party. Then 9/26: a cowboy party. I’m going to go on flops and shorts. I AM Texan after all. Cowboy: close enough.

The tattoo artists and face painters have moved their booth across the street. The sun is low enough that it cuts under the trees and canopy.

Ng wanted to do that. But I didn’t want to lug our kit over there. 👉

The face painter lady does not appear in good health. She has a very strange body type. She is a pear shape, with extreme consolidation of cellulite at her buttocks and thighs. She walks with a limp. Knee damage.

A young woman cuts by with enough bosom for about 5 women. She has them pushed strangely high up, almost so that she could rest her chin on them. And her skirt is little more than a suggestion.

I imagine she feels cute or attractive.

I am an old man. It is not a style that appeals to me.

I watch men for a bit. They just aren’t as interesting.

Typically slice it with logos splashed on their shirts.

Policemen are an exception. They are kitted for adventure. They are probably mixed about finding it though.

I’m not policeman material. Too emotional. Too ready to avoid confrontation.

The booth next too is is very popular. He has a 3d printer and cranks out 10” toy characters. They are popular $30-$50 items.

I feel bad for Ng. I thought she would sell more. She did too. I made her 100 branded stickers and worried it wouldn’t be enough.

Eternal optimist, I. But I sure have a dark streak when I get tired.

Sounds

There is a cacophony of it.

A generator chugs as it has for the last 5 hours. It inflates the bouce floor for the mechanical bull. They haven’t done much business for all That noise and pollution.

The 3d printer people have an Alexa that’s been steady with tejanonall Afternoon.

Somerwhere someone has been pushing out base steady and strong. No idea what music. Just the a-rhythmic rumble.

A white truck pulls away. It’s music, (country? Mexican?) is weirdly piercing. Like it’s much closer than it is. LOTS of treble.

I think of Ian who recommended Cermic Planet, who is a musician. As an artist and writer, I understand the mystic feeling of evoking something combining.

But music is special. It only exists WHILE it is happening. Maybe that’s why it’s SO frekin powerful.

It physically shifts me. The write song brings out truths that I am so good at hiding, it defies reality.

Dancers

The Mexican dancers are headed to their performance. The dresses are just gorgeous. Even though they are long and flowy, the cotton seems To weigh nothing.

Men get no such costume. Perhaps I should wear robes like Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient.

I must be mincing up Lawrence of Arabia. Google doesn’t give me that visual. Just Fiennes in terrific flowing cotton cut in the western fashion.

I think I’ll watch English Patient tonight. Thinking of it makes me melencholy and makes a pressure build behind my eyes.

Please don’t forget me in the desert, indeed.

Or the dessert.

Yes, feels like a suffering night.

Maybe after I slog home and shower, I’ll kick this sudden funk. Beer might help. God. It’s been months since. I had a beer.

Suddenly want to drink a keg.

It’s a lot of things. The lack of sleep and the heat don’t help. But watching Ng put all that work into this show and get nothing but lookiloos all day is a bummer.

Like preaching and teaching, just having a conversation is wonderfully edifying.

Nirvana’s Lithium pushes through and it strikes a chord.

Spinnnig. It up, it electrifies me at the crescendo.

And ON cue, a young family stops to peruse and take a couple of stickers.

It puts a smile on my face.

She is a brand spanking new mom. Still carrying a lot of baby weight and nascent human being.

I wonder what kind of man or woman the child will become. Dad is kind. He has a hat that has the word ‘asset’ crossed out and the word ‘liability’ written in.

He says his boss doesn’t like the hat. Haha.

Luchas

No Taco Fest would be complete without wrestling. I hear bags and cheering that indicated the Luchadores have begun the evenings entertainment.

Thomas Rigby suggested I write this “Five Ws of Reading”, which is super fun!

I'll link below to the other posts I came across using these prompts. Let me know if you wrote one! Go to Thomas’ post to get an easy copy/paste of the questions if you like.

WHO – An author you would love to have a ‘one to one’ with?

I would like to have a chat with Isaac Asimov. I would like to discuss with him the “Three Laws of Robotics” and how they would apply to our current state of technology. I would like to know his thoughts about the Internet, artificial intelligence, social media, bots, slop, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

WHAT – What genre do you most gravitate to?

I've always been interested in both Science-Fiction and Fantasy since my early childhood. Lately I've been gravitating more towards Science-Fiction, even though I've read a lot of Fantasy.

Actually, I have data to prove this point. I used The StoryGraph to generate two reports: a list of all the books I've read by genre and a list of the 5-star rated books by genre (I'm showing here only the top 10 genres)

Overall, I've read more Fantasy than Sci-fi, in terms of total number of books read (757 tracked books in total, of which 208 were Fantasy):

My all time books read stats by genre (generated by The StoryGraph)

But If I look at my favorite books, rated with 5 Stars, then the winner is Science Fiction:

My all-time 5-star rated books, by genre

So, science fiction it is!

WHERE – Where do you prefer to read?

At home, in my reading corner, with blankets and a cup of tea. Snacks are good too. But I literally carry my Kobo with me anywhere, so anywhere can work too (the only time I don’t have my Kobo within easy reach is when I’m out running or exercising at the gym).

WHEN – What time of day do you prefer to read?

I love reading in the mornings, but during weekdays I end up not having that much time available before work. On the weekends I love starting the morning reading a book, while having a slow breakfast. But as long as I have the energy, any time is a good time to read for me. I try to squeeze out any downtime I have during the day to read.

WHY – Why is your favourite book your favourite book?

It's because I like the characters and it has an interesting plot. If I don't relate to at least one character, then I'm more likely to stop reading the book. It's also because I enjoy the narrative voice. I have to be able to create an emotional connection to the story. The storytelling style must match the character's personality and point of view. In summary, I care deeply about the world and its characters.

A book that took me into a fascinating world

For some reason “Dune” by Frank Herbert came to my mind. I first read this book 25 years ago, and I still think about it. It was such an immersive experience for me. The way it builds an entire universe, with its own unique ecosystem, religion, politics, philosophical discussions, and power struggles is amazing.

A book that made me cry (or maybe two)

“Everything is Tuberculosis” by John Green. It's a great mix of personal stories and historical data about tuberculosis. It is a call to action that left me feeling both devastated and hopeful.

But I would also include here the graphic novel “Maus” by Art Spiegelman. I still think about this novel. I caught myself in tears in many moments while I was reading. It’s not an easy topic (Nazism and the story of a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz concentration camp). Extremely touching. We can't forget this horror so as to not repeat it again, ever.

A book that was thoughtful and profound

“The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” by Carl Sagan has shaped a lot of my worldview. It is not only a defense of science against pseudoscience, but also a celebration of human curiosity with its sense of wonder about the universe. I still remember the “Baloney Detection Kit” and “The Dragon in My Garage” story. This book is timeless, and it's a reminder that a little common sense and healthy skepticism are some of the best tools we have for looking out for one another.

A “comfort” book, read and re-read many times

I'm not a big re-reader. But if I have to name a book I've re-read multiple times, that's “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. I still learn a lot each time I read this book. It is a book that has shaped my adult life and helped me organize my thoughts and my goals and led me to think about higher horizons like life purpose and principles. If you have read this blog for a while, you already know how much I like this author.

Bonus – How do you go about selecting what you will read next?

I have a huge TBR list! I mark the books I want to read on The StoryGraph, and right now, I have 384 books in there (yeah, I probably need to do a clean-up).

At the beginning of every year, I create a shortlist for the next 12 months and drop it into an Excel spreadsheet. I use the fantastic one developed by the creators of the “Currently Reading” podcast.

Then each month I compile a shortlist from my local Book Club (or another online book club I follow) and my personal wish list. I keep this updated weekly using The StoryGraph 'Up Next' feature to track books I want to tackle next. I limit this list to up to 5 books, never more.

I think that other than following book club picks, I just go with what my gut tells me.

Other great posts to read with the Five Ws of Reading:

• Thomas Rigby
• The Wry Writer
• Frances Crossley
• Explicating Elle

List of Books mentioned in this post:

(Publication date at the end)

1. “Dune” by Frank Herbert (1965)

2. “Everything is Tuberculosis” by John Green (2025)

3. “Maus” by Art Spiegelman (1994)

4. “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” by Carl Sagan (1997)

5. “Getting Things Done” by David Allen (2001)

—

#readinglist #books #reading

Suis allée marcher un peu. Échanger un café. Puis, l’abattement. Lutte contre le sommeil. Les minettes, elles, suivent l’appel de la sieste. Un truc dans ma todo, avant ma liste de ménage en retard longue comme le bras. Lire ne stimule pas. Regarder un truc nul ?

Je m’étonne périodiquement d’être dans la semoule, et je m’étonne cette semaine alors que le manque de sommeil imposé m’a coulée en 2 jours.

Une course ? Impossible.

Ranger ? Dur.

M’asseoir ? Inenvisageable.

Me résigner ? Je vais râler un coup sur masto plutôt.

This should be a good college football game!

The North Texas Mean Green (12-2 last season) travel up to Bloomington's Memorial Stadium to play the Indiana Hoosiers (16-0). I'll be watching this game on a local FOX TV affiliate station. Scheduled start time is 11:00 AM CDT. GO HOOSIERS!

There are truths that cannot be approached from without. They disclose themselves only when a particular geometry has been achieved: a witness standing in the necessary relation to a place, an hour, an object, an absence, or an event whose true beginning may lie elsewhere. Celestial motion — vast and indifferent.

The witness may believe this arrangement accidental. They may have come by invitation, error, grief, professional obligation, or the small and unremembered decisions from which a life is composed. Yet presence, even at the appointed intersection, guarantees nothing. One may stand before the opened door and perceive a door, or nothing at all. One may hear the words and retain only its sounds, or mere silence. An unfolding is not contained in the spectacle but in the alteration it requires of the beholder.

For truth does not submit itself to interpretation. It is not a fact added to the inventory of the mind, nor a doctrine into which the self may safely enter and depart unchanged. And those who do leave empty handed, likely unaware anything unusual had occurred — ignorant of the opportunity and risk that had just passed.

Truth enters first as a fissure: an intolerable correspondence between things formerly believed separate, places co-joined but seemingly unrelated, meanings invisible until the transit. The witness discovers, with a terror too lucid to be called terror, that the self has never been the measure of the real, as the ego has never been the measure of the self, as the material has never been the measure of the non-material.

To understand such a truth is to neither possess nor wield it. One must yield—to relinquish the consoling sovereignty of the ego before that which admits no second reading. What remains afterward may still speak in the old vocabulary of reason, memory, and name; but beneath those words another order has begun, ancient and exacting, and it does not require belief or permission.

Truth may indeed be in the eye of the beholder — and the beholder, in the eye of truth.

#Intermundia

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

I just got home from driving to LA for a concert with friends, and on the way back I was showing some songs that I really like and explaining the stories behind them or some of the cool things behind them, and I just felt really happy and in love with a person that I am. I think it is like the same thing as the love for life that I have built up and practiced, which allows me to do things like dance and get people involved and enjoy things and find anything really, and I think that’s something that a lot of people gravitate towards. And I’m grateful for myself.

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Advies / Raad

Het is raadzaam om voor het beste AppsolUtie resultaat langdurig bij de oorspronkelijke lijst te blijven en dus zelden te hoppen naar anderen. Dergelijk wisselgedrag zorgt voor stagnerende Appsolutie bij ons en daarom bij onze vaste gebruikers. Lijsten worden inhoudelijk beinvloed door kortstondig gast gebruik waardoor er problemen ontstaan in appsolutie ervaring.

Daarom ook hebben wij juist voor lijst hoppers de persoonlijke Appsoluut Lijst ontwikkeld. Op deze wijze kunt u verlossing krijgen zonder dat dit een last is voor de anderen, de gebruikers van standaard verlossings methodes. U kunt kiezen uit alle door ons erkende zonden en maar liefst vijf eigen geformuleerde toevoegen aan Mijn Appsolutie Lijst. Wilt u meer dan vijf toevoegen dan moet u overgaan op de Betaalde Pro versie van deze software.

Bepaal nu u Lijst keuze en ontvang al vast vijf verlos punten goed voor drie verlos geschenken of spaar de vijf verlos punten in de mijn Geinige Gast Spaar Verlos Kluis zodat u later de opgepotte verlos punten kunt omzetten in grootse geschenken u geboden door de Sponsoren, Vrienden en Overige Veroorzakers van deze Software Applicatie voor veelvuldige verlossing van zonden.

Hoe vaker u langs komt voor verlossing des te beter is het voor u! Dat is Appsoluut waar. Klikt u gerust nog even rond voor u aan ons vraagt om daarvan te worden verlost en dat doen wij met alle liefde. Appsoluut de nieuwste revolutie in de verlossingsindustrie. Zet ons iedere dag in en ontdek hoe makkelijk het is om verlost te worden van al wat en wie u dwars zit. Samen met het Appsolutie team heerlijk even accepteren wat u niet kunt veranderen en veranderen wat u wel kan veranderen dankzij onze hulp alhier. Fijn. Lekker verlossen.

I am the incredibly inexperienced Director of Riverbed Collective, an artist-led social enterprise. Here’s what I’ve learnt from 2024. Originally written and posted in January 2025.

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A lesson in ego and humility? It takes time to save time? Trust your gut?

The costliest professional mistake of my 2024?

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to call this article. Even now, while writing this, I’m actually pretty scared of the reaction I may get from publicly revealing the mistakes I made. However, my desire to detail the process of switching manufacturers, for the sake of transparency and shared learning, outweighs any fear that I have. Telling you feels like the right thing to do.

Disclaimer: all opinions presented in this article are my own, and do not reflect Riverbed Collective or any of its partners at large.

What’s Mint Condition?

For those who are unfamiliar, Mint Condition is a collectible card project involving 90+ artists internationally. Each artist had full creative freedom to design two sides of the same card. These were sorted into three decks and physically printed. The digital copy is available here.

So, what happened?

(I’m based in Hong Kong and am located pretty close to Chinese manufacturers, so I’m currently the only one on Team Riverbed handling print production. I’m writing in the first person because I’m taking full ownership of this mistake.)

Short version of the story: I tested a print manufacturer, didn’t catch onto the red flags, and had to switch manufacturers way too late in the process.

Okay, here’s the long version.

I began researching manufacturers in June 2024, but had nothing that could be test printed, so I waited until enough cards were done.

In August 2024, I tested a manufacturer from the Chinese platform Taobao. I found the printing decent, except for one error. I tried to fix this with the manufacturer, but the calibre of their work deteriorated with each sample I made, and my quality control concerns were dismissed multiple times. Product traceability and labour practices were opaque as well. I didn’t feel good about it, but, by the time I realised I couldn’t trust this company, it was pretty late.

Preorders had already opened. Designs were already finalised. I didn’t want to make everyone alter their work.

I went to Alibaba, spoke to eight companies, found a new manufacturer, and decided to go visit their factory. They welcomed me and brought me on a tour of the entire facility. The CEO didn’t dodge my (incredibly direct) questions about living wages. I genuinely felt comforted looking at their production quality, certifications, and the heartfelt way they treated their staff.

Making the switch was a tough decision. It would require every single contributor to resize and reupload their cards. This was easy for some, but others’ designs were extremely difficult to modify. I didn’t want to waste even more time than I already had.

So, I sought help from a friend and mentor. Then, Izzy, Akko, and I discussed different options. Could we order a new, customised knife to fit the dimensions of the old manufacturer? Could we resize the cards ourselves? Neither option would give us a satisfactory result, and I didn’t want to do this behind our artists’ backs. I swallowed my pride, apologised, and explained why we were switching manufacturers.

(The artists of Mint Condition were very kind to me, thank goodness.)

As of this writing, it’s currently the Lunar New Year holiday, so the workers are home for the holidays. The cards should be ready to go into production once they’re back.

Key takeaways

• Trust your gut.
  • If a business partner’s practices and attitudes make you uneasy, RUN. According to my mentor, feeling comfortable should be a prerequisite for any business partnership.
• It takes time to save time.
  • This means researching companies in detail before you work with them, and perhaps visiting the facilities if possible. Be proactive; I was the one who suggested I should visit. I can write something about this if you’d like.
  • Spot the red flags. Team Riverbed will likely do a resource on this soon, compiling opinions from other artists who’ve also worked with printers.
• Contracts. Please.
  • Everything (delivery times, costs, file specifications, everything) should be on the contract. This protects both you and your manufacturer.
• If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
  • Be extremely wary if you suspect corners are being cut. The main example here is: our original manufacturer uses 2mm print bleed. 3mm is the industry standard, and our current manufacturer refuses to do anything below that.
  • Other companies I spoke to said that they could accommodate the 2mm print bleed, but I grew suspicious, because everything seemed too good to be true; low costs, fast delivery, and could use my original file sizes? Corners were definitely being cut somewhere.
  • I also feared that the corners being cut were in terms of human rights, i.e. lower production costs because worker wellbeing isn’t a priority. It might be cheaper, but it’s likely that someone else (or the environment) is paying the price.
• Swallow your pride and seek help.
  • Please, don’t hide your mistakes.
  • Generally, I’ve found that people are pretty forgiving when I’ve made it clear that I’ve made an effort, that my decisions are well thought-out, and that I’m making choices for the sake of quality.

Final thoughts

I’m glad we avoided disaster. I’m also glad that this mistake wasn’t financially costly; costs were incurred in the forms of time wasted and extra labour.

And, of course, I feel lucky to have the support of such a warm community. Thank you for letting me learn.

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About Erin: Having co-founded Riverbed Collective, an international artist-led social enterprise, Erin thinks of herself as Doctor Frankenstein. She has a vision, then brings it to life—just without the blood and gore. Her operational and creative experience spans multiple fields, including educational theatre and cosmetic chemistry. She was born in Hong Kong, currently spends her time sketching on Naarm’s (Melbourne’s) trams, and is always searching for ways to do better. Contact her via erin@riverbed.world or linkedin.com/in/erin-ai-hei.