The email looked like a revenue opportunity. In early June 2026, some developers whose Android apps had been downloaded millions of times received an invitation from Google to “join a confidential content offer pilot”. The pitch was simple: “Get paid for sharing the code powering your apps, as well as your archived projects.” The reassurance came straight after: “This is non-exclusive. You keep 100% of your IP.”

The message, first reported by Jason Koebler at 404 Media and then widely picked up, never used the words artificial intelligence. It said the code would help “improve Google's developer tools and products”. A linked page was more candid, describing “partnerships to improve our AI products”. Nobody outside the pilot knows what Google was offering to pay.

Earlier in the year, a founder named Keelan Miskell had been closing down his crypto startup. According to MIT Technology Review, he netted roughly $25,000 for his codebase, with a further payment, probably around $15,000, pending for the company's workspace data from Google, Notion, Figma and Slack. “At least all that stuff we were doing for two and a half years is worth something to someone somewhere,” he told the magazine.

Then, in August, came the deal that made everyone look up. In the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines, which stopped flying in May, Google won an auction for the carrier's corporate data with a $10 million bid. TIME's Billy Perrigo reported that the cache held 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages and about 30 million lines of code. A court filing released in November put the volume far higher: about 1.9 billion internal emails, 664 million Teams items, 91 million SharePoint and OneDrive files and roughly 30 million lines of code.

Taken together, these episodes describe something new: a market in which the private working record of software (the code, but also the commit history, the pull requests, the arguments in review threads, the tickets and the design documents) is being bought and sold as AI training material. What ethical, legal and security problems arise when that record changes hands? How can a buyer prove a seller had the right to sell it, when dozens of people wrote it? And does the money now flowing into this trade create risks that existing safeguards were never designed to catch?

Why the Messy Middle of Software Became Valuable

For a decade, AI companies trained on the public internet, and code was one of its richest seams. Public repositories on GitHub and elsewhere supplied billions of lines for the first generation of coding assistants. That seam is thinning. Epoch AI, a research group that tracks the inputs to machine learning, estimated in 2024 that the effective stock of human-generated public text was around 300 trillion tokens, and gave an 80 per cent confidence interval that it would be fully used at some point between 2026 and 2032.

Private code is the obvious next reservoir. It is not one that platforms can simply tap: when GitHub updated its terms in March 2026 to let it train on Copilot interaction data from individual users who do not opt out, it stated plainly, “We do not use private repository content at rest to train AI models.” Private repositories have to be acquired from whoever controls them, and they are valuable for reasons beyond volume. A finished public library shows what working software looks like. A private repository, with its full history, shows how software actually gets made: the false starts, the reverted commits, the reviewer who points out a race condition, the ticket that explains why a strange workaround exists. That is precisely the material that the newest training methods crave.

Turing, the AI training and talent company, made the case explicitly in its AGI Advance newsletter of 24 December 2025, announcing a programme it called Project Lazarus. “We're acquiring full private repositories, design docs, testing logs, infrastructure manifests, and internal wikis from defunct startups,” it wrote, naming fintech, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and software as target sectors. Existing datasets, the newsletter argued, “fail to capture the texture of real work”. The stated aim was to “preserve the complete operational history of defunct companies”.

The appetite is driven by reinforcement learning. Rather than simply predicting the next token of text, AI agents are increasingly trained in simulated environments where they take sequences of actions and are rewarded for good outcomes. TIME reported that gains from this approach have been largest in coding, where results are easy to verify. Surge AI builds such environments, which it calls reinforcement-learning gyms, and Nick Heiner, who leads that work, told MIT Technology Review he wants archives that capture varied situations, disagreements and judgement calls. Speaking to TIME about the Spirit acquisition, he said the purchase makes sense “if you believe that your agent is going to generalize into the rest of the economy.”

There is also a quality argument. In a widely cited 2024 paper in Nature, Ilia Shumailov and colleagues showed that models trained recursively on the output of other models suffer “model collapse”, progressively losing the rarer parts of the original data distribution. They concluded that data about genuine human interactions will become increasingly valuable as AI-generated content floods the web. A repository written by humans, before coding assistants were commonplace, is that kind of data.

A Market Assembled in Under a Year

The supply side organised itself quickly. Startups fail constantly; MIT Technology Review cited estimates from Carta and AngelList showing shutdowns rising by between 26 and 56 per cent a year recently. An “end-of-life” industry has grown up around them, and part of that industry has discovered that the corpse has value.

SimpleClosure, a service that handles the legal and operational wind-down of startups, added data sales in April 2026 through a platform called Asset Hub, where closing companies can list code repositories, Slack archives, emails and internal documents. In April, Forbes reported that the company had handled nearly 100 such deals, with sellers typically receiving between $10,000 and $100,000; heise online, summarising that report, quoted chief executive Dori Yona describing “a feeling of a gold rush from these companies trying to get their hands on real-world data”. By October, MIT Technology Review reported more than 150 deals, an expectation of returning more than $10 million to startups by the end of 2026, and Yona's estimate that 47 per cent of SimpleClosure's deals now include code or data sales, once rare and “somewhat taboo”.

Competitors followed. Brendan Mahony, chief executive of Sunset, another wind-down firm, told MIT Technology Review that his company values assets by headcount, years in operation, data volume and how the team used its tools. “This operational exhaust data is like the wood shavings that everyone thought had no value, but it actually has a ton,” he said. Brokers now publish buying guides. One, run by Human Union Data, lists Project Lazarus as paying between $10,000 and $100,000 for legacy code; that figure is the broker's own claim, and Turing does not publish its prices. Dan Novaes, chief executive of the data broker Mode.Inc, told Business Insider, as reported by IBTimes UK in October, that “the demand is just astronomical.”

The buyers are foundation labs, vendors that build simulated workplaces for training, and established technology companies building their own models. What they want is completeness. The Human Union Data guide tells sellers that buyers are after “real production code, internal documentation, and development history”, listing “pull requests, design docs, incident notes” as the material that makes a package whole. The completeness that makes the data valuable is exactly what makes it legally and ethically fraught.

A Repository Is a Crowd, Not a Possession

Start with the most basic question: who owns a git history?

The instinctive answer is the company. In many cases that instinct is broadly right, but only broadly. Under section 11 of the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, “The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it,” with an exception: where a work is made by an employee in the course of employment, “his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any agreement to the contrary.” The United States reaches a similar destination through the “work made for hire” doctrine, which covers “a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment.”

Now look at who actually appears in the commit log of a typical startup. There are employees, certainly. There are also freelancers and agencies, whose work is not automatically owned by the client in either jurisdiction; in the United States, commissioned software does not fall within the nine statutory categories that can be made works for hire by written agreement, so ownership passes only through an explicit assignment. There are co-founders who wrote early code before the company was incorporated. There are interns, advisers and contributors from partner firms. A repository that has run for five years may contain the work of dozens of people under a dozen different contractual arrangements, some of which were never written down.

Then there is everyone else's code. Private repositories are full of open-source components, vendored libraries and snippets copied from elsewhere, each carrying its own licence. Black Duck's 2026 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis report, which audited 947 commercial codebases across 17 industries, found licence conflicts in 68 per cent of them, up from 56 per cent the year before; one codebase contained 2,675 distinct conflicts. The report links part of that rise to AI coding assistants reproducing material derived from copyleft code without the original licence information, a phenomenon it calls licence laundering. A seller who cannot say which open-source licences govern the files in a repository is in no position to warrant that those files can be licensed onwards for training.

Open-source projects have built some machinery for this problem. Many use contributor licence agreements or the Developer Certificate of Origin, a short statement in which a contributor certifies that “The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license”. Private companies rarely have anything comparable. The rights in their repositories are inferred from employment contracts, many of which predate the idea that internal engineering discussion could become a product.

Nor is copyright the only right at stake. Review threads and commit messages are written conversation: explanation, critique, sometimes humour or irritation. An employer may own the text, but that does not settle whether selling it is fair to the people who wrote it, or lawful under data protection law.

Possession Is Not the Same as Ownership

The Spirit Airlines auction has become the first public test of these questions. Mercor, an AI data company, was named backup bidder at $7.5 million, and another firm, micro1, later filed notice of a $12.5 million offer. The approval hearing was adjourned repeatedly through the autumn before being set for 17 November, and the objections filed in the bankruptcy court in White Plains read like a checklist of what can go wrong.

Springshot, a software company that ran operational tooling for Spirit, objected that the dataset could include its own intellectual property. Its filing cites a contract clause giving it rights to “any data or information generated by the Service or Software.” Chief executive Doug Kreuzkamp put the distinction plainly, according to an account published by The Next Web: “The distinction is between the information Spirit supplied and the proprietary outputs our platform generated.” Explaining why the company had not objected earlier, he told the Miami Herald, as quoted in the same account, “we had no reason to believe that Spirit would sell property that wasn't theirs.”

International Aero Engines, the engine manufacturer, filed its own objection arguing that its proprietary commercial, technical and financial information may have been copied into Spirit's internal communications, and that, in the words of its filing reported by ComplexDiscovery, “deidentification is insufficient to ensure that the IAE Proprietary Information has been removed.” Navitaire, Spirit's long-standing reservations platform provider, joined with Amadeus in a limited objection.

These objections expose the central weakness of the market: a company's systems hold far more than the company owns. Repositories routinely contain material supplied under non-disclosure agreements, vendor documentation pasted into tickets, customer configurations and code written under licence. In a working company, contractual confidentiality keeps that material in place. In a sale, it travels with everything else unless someone takes it out.

That matters to buyers, not just sellers. The EU's Trade Secrets Directive of 2016 makes the acquisition or use of a trade secret unlawful when the person “knew or ought, under the circumstances, to have known that the trade secret had been obtained directly or indirectly” from someone using or disclosing it unlawfully. A buyer who acquires a repository full of third-party confidential material without asking reasonable questions may not be able to claim innocence later.

There is now a striking precedent on the cost of careless acquisition. In Bartz v Anthropic, Judge William Alsup held in 2025 that training on lawfully acquired books could be fair use, but sent the claims over pirated library copies towards trial. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, covering roughly 480,000 works, and the settlement received final approval in July 2026, according to Jurist. The lesson for the code market is not that training is unlawful. It is that how training data was obtained can matter enormously, and that a court may look past the model to the provenance of the inputs.

The People Who Live Inside the Diff

Every commit in git carries an author name, an email address and a timestamp. Under Article 4(1) of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, personal data means “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person”, and an identifiable person is one who can be identified “directly or indirectly”, including by a name or an online identifier. A git history is therefore, among other things, a structured personal data set: a record of when named individuals worked, what they worked on and, in review threads, what their colleagues thought of their work.

That last part deserves attention. Code review is one of the most socially charged activities in software engineering. A 2020 study by Carolyn Egelman, Emerson Murphy-Hill and colleagues at Google, presented at the International Conference on Software Engineering, surveyed 1,317 developers about negative experiences in review, which the authors called “pushback”. They found such experiences relatively rare but harmful when they occurred. A sold repository carries all of that: the blunt rejection, the apologetic reply, the thread in which someone was told they were wrong. These people wrote for colleagues, not for a model.

European regulators have started to address the training side. In Opinion 28/2024, adopted in December 2024, the European Data Protection Board said that whether an AI model can be considered anonymous must be assessed case by case, set out a three-step test for relying on legitimate interests, and indicated that unlawful processing at the development stage may affect the lawfulness of later deployment, with remedies that could in serious cases include deletion of the data or the model. The opinion did not contemplate a secondary market in staff conversations, but its logic applies.

American law offers less. Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University and author of The Quantified Worker, told MIT Technology Review that “Employers should have express consent before selling workers' data,” noting that no federal law bans such sales. She described the proceeds, which typically flow to creditors and investors rather than to the workers whose words are sold, as “captured capital”. Greg Ewing, an attorney who advises AI startups, called such data “legally radioactive” and described “a Wild West of AI training”.

Sellers and brokers insist that personal information is scrubbed. SimpleClosure says it removes personal data before sale. The Spirit deal shows what a serious attempt at scrubbing looks like: according to chapter11cases.com, the parties adopted the California Consumer Privacy Act's de-identification standard, appointed Tonic.ai as an independent de-identification agent for unstructured data such as email, made certified de-identification a condition of closing, required re-identification testing before each transfer, and obliged the buyer to commit publicly not to attempt re-identification. Those protections originally covered customers rather than staff. After unions led by the Association of Flight Attendants objected, Skift reported in November that revised terms require Google, still paying $10 million, to cover the cost of de-identification as well and to commit publicly not to knowingly re-identify the data, while employee medical examinations, payroll records, drug testing, crew pairings, biometrics and union grievance filings are excluded from the sale altogether. “Without our union, there would have been no one to speak for workers in this fire sale of their private information,” said Sara Nelson, the union's president.

Even that may not be enough. In a letter dated 8 October 2026, more than a hundred members of Congress led by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Steven Horsford warned that “Removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous.” The point applies with special force to code. Writing style, working hours, the modules a person owned and the distinctive way they phrase a review comment can identify them as surely as a name. And a git history without its authorship is a much less useful training asset, which creates a quiet commercial pressure against thorough scrubbing.

Secrets That Travel With the Code

The security problem is more concrete still. Developers routinely commit things they should not: API keys, database passwords, cloud credentials, private certificates. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report, published in March, counted about 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets added to public GitHub commits in 2025, a 34 per cent increase on the year before. Internal repositories, the kind now being sold, were roughly six times more likely than public ones to contain hardcoded secrets. More than 64 per cent of secrets that GitGuardian confirmed as valid in 2022 were still valid when retested in January 2026. And about 28 per cent of incidents originated entirely outside repositories, in collaboration tools such as Slack, Jira and Confluence, precisely the systems now sold alongside code.

Deleting a secret from the current version of a file does not remove it from git. It persists in history unless that history is rewritten. A buyer who values complete history is therefore buying, by design, every credential anyone ever committed and later regretted. Some will have been rotated. Many, on GitGuardian's evidence, will not.

The risk does not end at transfer. Language models can memorise and regurgitate their training data. In a 2021 paper presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, Nicholas Carlini and colleagues extracted hundreds of verbatim sequences from GPT-2's training data, including personally identifiable information and code, and found that larger models were more vulnerable. A credential that survives into a training corpus could, in principle, resurface in a model's output. A dead startup's cloud account may be closed; its partners' shared keys may not be.

Provenance Tools Built for a Different Problem

If the market is to function legitimately, buyers need something like a chain of title for code: evidence of who wrote what, under which agreement, and with whose permission it is being sold. Some of the tools exist. None was designed for this job.

The most rigorous work on dataset provenance comes from the Data Provenance Initiative, a collaboration led by researchers including Shayne Longpre at MIT. Its audit of more than 1,800 text datasets, published in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2024, found licence omission rates above 70 per cent and error rates above 50 per cent on popular dataset hosting sites. If carefully curated public datasets are that poorly documented, the documentation that comes with a hastily sold startup repository is unlikely to be better. Industry groups have tried to standardise the metadata: the Data & Trust Alliance, a consortium of large companies, published data provenance standards covering source, legal rights, lineage and intended use. Such standards help only if someone fills them in truthfully.

Git itself offers little assurance. Its documentation is candid: the author name “has no effect on authentication”, and options such as —author and —date allow anyone to set the claimed author and timestamp of a commit to whatever they like. A git history is a record of what someone typed into a configuration file, not a verified log of who did what and when.

Cryptographic signing can change that. Sigstore's gitsign tool lets developers sign commits using an OpenID Connect identity rather than long-lived keys, recording the signing event in Rekor, a public transparency log, so that the signature can later be checked with git verify-commit. The Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts framework, known as SLSA and part of the Open Source Security Foundation, describes how to generate verifiable provenance for build artefacts. Software bills of materials, which the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency describes as “a nested inventory, a list of ingredients that make up software components”, can document which third-party components a codebase contains.

The trouble is timing. These tools establish provenance going forward. They work when commits are signed at the moment of creation and builds are attested as they run. Almost none of the repositories now being sold were built that way. A five-year-old startup history consists overwhelmingly of unsigned commits, and no amount of tooling applied at the point of sale can retroactively prove that a commit dated 2021 was really written in 2021 by the person named on it. SBOMs describe components, not the employment status of the people who wrote the glue code. Even the media world's answer, the content credentials standardised by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, attaches provenance to finished objects rather than to an evolving, many-authored record.

What Brussels Now Asks to See

Regulation is starting to demand some of this documentation. Article 53(1)(d) of the EU AI Act requires providers of general-purpose AI models to publish a summary of the content used to train them. In July 2025, the European Commission's AI Office published a mandatory template for that summary. According to the Commission's own guidance, it requires providers to list their data sources, including private datasets licensed from third parties, and to describe relevant processing aspects such as respect for copyright. The obligation has applied since 2 August 2025 for new models; models already on the market before that date have until 2 August 2027. The AI Office's enforcement powers began on 2 August 2026, with fines of up to 3 per cent of worldwide annual turnover or 15 million euros, whichever is higher.

That is real pressure: a lab that buys a startup's codebase must at least acknowledge publicly that it trained on licensed private data. But the template has limits. The Commission has said it will not audit content at the level of individual datasets, acting instead on complaints or qualified alerts from its scientific panel. And a summary of sources is not a chain of title. A provider can accurately state that it used “private datasets licensed from third parties” while knowing nothing about whether the third party had the right to license them.

Incentives That Reward Forgery

The most troubling feature of this market is not any single legal gap but the way money changes behaviour around them.

Begin with what buyers prize. Sunset values assets partly by headcount and years in operation; broker guidance stresses development history and pull requests; Turing wants the “complete operational history” of a company. Buyers want long, busy, human histories because those are what make a codebase useful for training agents. Those are exactly the properties that git makes trivially easy to fake. Dates can be backdated with an environment variable. Author names can be set at will. Language models can generate plausible commit messages, review comments and tickets in volume. A fabricated five-year history, populated with synthetic engineers who argue convincingly in pull requests, is now a technically modest undertaking.

There is evidence that metadata on code platforms is already gamed when it has value. A study by Hao He, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University and the security firm Socket identified around 4.5 million suspected fake stars on GitHub, with fake-star campaigns increasing by two orders of magnitude in 2024, largely to promote short-lived malicious repositories. Stars are a crude signal. Commit histories are a far richer one, and they now carry a price tag. If buyers pay more for histories that look human and long, some sellers will manufacture them, producing exactly the synthetic contamination that real-world data was supposed to avoid. MIT Technology Review noted that no company has published tests comparing training on real archives with the alternatives, so buyers may struggle to tell the difference.

The second incentive is laundering. A repository containing third-party code, an ex-employer's proprietary modules or material taken under NDA becomes harder to trace once it passes through a broker, is scrubbed of identifying metadata, and is merged into a training corpus with thousands of others. De-identification, presented as a privacy safeguard, also strips away the authorship information that might reveal where code came from. No such case has yet been documented, but the structure of the market rewards anyone who can present tainted material as clean.

The third incentive is insider exfiltration. Developers routinely have access to code they do not own. Until recently, the main buyers for a stolen codebase were competitors and foreign rivals, and the cases that reached court were dramatic. In January 2026, a federal jury in San Francisco convicted Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, in a case in which prosecutors said he had stolen more than 2,000 pages of confidential material about Google's AI infrastructure. That was a case about geopolitics. The new market creates a far more mundane temptation: a departing engineer, a disgruntled contractor or a founder in a dispute with co-founders may now find a ready, apparently respectable buyer for a private repository.

That is not hypothetical. According to IBTimes UK, citing Business Insider, Surge AI's Nick Heiner said someone had approached him offering a large company's codebase for millions of dollars, and he concluded that the seller did not have the rights to sell it. A less careful buyer, or one under competitive pressure to acquire data faster than its rivals, might not have asked.

The final incentive concerns who gets paid. In the startup wind-downs described by MIT Technology Review, proceeds typically go to senior creditors and investors. The engineers whose judgement, arguments and late-night fixes make the data valuable receive nothing and are usually not asked. Ryan Lock, co-founder of Polyshares, compared the offers to those of early oil prospectors buying land from unaware farmers. People with no stake in a transaction also have no channel through which to object, so the safeguard most likely to catch a bad sale, the knowledge of those who were actually there, is switched off.

Building a Chain of Title for Code

None of this means the trade must stop. A failing company has legitimate reasons to recover value from its work, and AI developers have genuine reasons to want realistic engineering data. The question is what a legitimate transaction would look like. The Spirit proceedings, existing law and the tools described above suggest a working standard.

Sellers should map every author in the history to an employment contract, a contractor agreement with an assignment clause or a documented licence, and remove whatever cannot be matched. The labour of that mapping is the provenance. Former employees and contributors should be notified and given time to object; the Spirit case surfaced vendors, unions and lawmakers only because a bankruptcy court made the sale public, and private startup deals have no equivalent forum. Vendored code, NDA material and partner data should be found through software composition analysis and contract review, then stripped out or separately licensed.

De-identification should follow the Spirit model of an independent agent, certification and re-identification testing before transfer, and should address the stylistic signals that identify developers even without their names. Every commit and every attached collaboration archive should be scanned for credentials, with live secrets revoked rather than merely redacted. Buyers should demand warranties of title backed by indemnities and escrow, so that the cost of a bad sale falls on whoever was best placed to prevent it. And companies that want their engineering record to be worth something later should sign commits and attest builds now, which would also make fabricated histories easier to detect.

The Record Belongs to More Than One Person

Return to that email from Google: “You keep 100% of your IP.” For a solo developer who wrote every line of an app, that may be close to true. For almost everyone else, it is a simplification that the new market quietly depends on. A codebase with a real history is a crowd of authors, a web of contracts, a store of other companies' secrets and a diary of working lives. It can be sold as a single asset only by ignoring most of what makes it valuable.

The AI industry has discovered that the most useful training data is not polished output but the visible process of people working things out together. That process was never created with a buyer in mind. If the market is allowed to treat possession as ownership, and a git log as proof of anything, it will reward forgers, launderers and insiders. At least one buyer has already recognised an offer that looked too good to be legitimate. A market cannot rely on its buyers happening to be careful.

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28. SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), Open Source Security Foundation. https://slsa.dev/
29. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “Software Bill of Materials (SBOM).” https://www.cisa.gov/sbom
30. Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. “About C2PA.” https://c2pa.org/about/
31. European Commission. “Template for General-Purpose AI model providers to summarise their training content” (FAQ). https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/template-general-purpose-ai-model-providers-summarise-their-training-content
32. He, Hao; Yang, Haoqin; Burckhardt, Philipp; Kapravelos, Alexandros; Vasilescu, Bogdan; Kästner, Christian. “4.5 Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Scams, and Malware.” arXiv preprint 2412.13459, December 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13459
33. CBS News Bay Area. “Former Google engineer Linwei Ding found guilty of stealing AI secrets for Chinese firms.” 30 January 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/former-google-engineer-linwei-ding-found-guilty-stealing-ai-secrets-chinese-firms/
34. GitHub. “Updates to our Privacy Statement and Terms of Service: How we use your data.” GitHub Changelog, 25 March 2026. https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-privacy-statement-and-terms-of-service-how-we-use-your-data/
35. Maharishi, Meghna. “Spirit's $10 Million Data Sale to Google Clears Hurdle as Unions Win Privacy Protections.” Skift, 10 November 2026. https://skift.com/2026/11/10/spirits-10-million-dollar-data-sale-clears-hurdle-as-unions-win-privacy-protections

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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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I’ve been accused twice this year of being too “black and white” with my thinking. The last time was while discussing my stance on being a non-voter. I was attempting to convince some people of the idea that it is better to not consent to the political system by voting especially if voting for the “lesser of two evils” or even voting third party. You can read my last post here if you want more details on some of my viewpoints on all of that.

Well since then I’ve been thinking a little bit more on the idea of black and white thinking. In my view I have a wide spectrum of ideas in my thinking. I don’t express them all because I enjoy talking about the extremes which I believe is where many solid truths are found. I used to dwell on the gray thinking for about two decades of my life. In hindsight that is fairly boring to me now. It seems to be avoiding convictions and beliefs sitting around in the gray zone. Now I feel like I’m full of a wide range of color, not just black and white. Black and white, red and yellow, and more.

Perhaps it’s not a problem at all to have some black and white thinking. I think we all do and it is likely unavoidable. Where are your convictions? Many of those things are somewhat binary. The people I was discussing the political voting system were fairly black and white with their convictions that it is an overall benefit for all of us to go out and vote. My arguments against it looked like black and their positive beliefs for voting looked like white to them. In my view it was the opposite, they are upholding corrupt systems that subjugate us all with violence and coercion – which would be black in my view. I support disengaging from that and laboring on alternative voluntary systems and if you believe in the Messiah, have Him as your King. If not at least promote good and non-violent things in place of violent extremists, aka governments.

As I’ve been lightly thinking of this idea, I think anyone with strong beliefs and convictions would have some black and white thinking in their mind, for example those who believe climate change is the biggest threat to mankind versus those who believe climate change is a hoax agenda created by the round table groups to manipulate and control mankind. There are many in the gray zone with climate change, but many have solid convictions on it. Those who believed that the COVID-19 thing was a legitimate pandemic and that those who didn’t “believe in the science” were threatening us all versus those who did not is another example. There are countless examples of this. Belief in the government (and political parties) and belief in some sect of religion are some of the most intense black and white thinking areas but most people have some black and white thinking. Playstation vs Xbox, Apple vs Microsoft or Google, Ford vs Chevy, Israel vs Gaza. Lots of it is just opinions that don’t matter much, but some are life and death type of situations.

I took a long break from politics and religion and it was very helpful. I had to deprogram my mind and clear it up from the constructs that were programmed into me from birth. I’m sure some of that remains but as I’ve come back at reconstructing my reality with a somewhat blank slate it has been pretty amazing. Reading scriptures without holding onto what I was told to think about it has given me a very different perspective on it all. Now it looks like a bunch of people showing what not to do with God patiently giving advice on a better way while watching everyone reject that. Politics are just comedy to me now, I don’t see how people can keep being pulled into whatever party they latch onto. All these systems of control are corrupt; organized government and organized religion are pretty repulsive overall – full of error. And the good, honest, sincere people trying to live according to truth are scattered and divided. Divide and conquer, the elitists are well practiced at this and seem to be winning.

Don’t really have a major point here. Just expressing some thoughts. I’d suggest we all try our best to stay open minded. Yet as you come to find amazing information that you feel and understand through your entire being – stand up for those principles and convictions. But please don’t force them on others with coercion and violence. Realize that is what governments do. So if you press your views through the government system it will more likely than not become a matter forced on everyone.

made with my own game engine. still <4k lines of code. i learned quaternions this time.

keep dreaming. 🤍🩷🩵💚

see video

The tram to Stephansplatz broke down in the December slush, which seemed to surprise no one except me.

We filed into the wet cold, a procession of puffy coats shuffling toward the cathedral spire that punctured the gray sky. My socks were already damp. The tourist ahead of me dragged a suitcase through black puddles, spraying my shins with grime.

I wanted to kick it.

Then the bells began their evening choir as I entered the square—that ancient conversation between bronze and air that has marked Vienna's evenings for eight centuries. The Christmas market spread before the cathedral like a medieval fair reimagined. From Stephansdom's tower, a cascade of bronze notes fell through the sleet, each one finding its place in a melody older than anything my country had built. The tourist with the suitcase stopped dragging it. Stood there. Just listened. We all did, this sudden congregation of strangers, while Vienna's medieval heart beat above us in D minor.

But.

The moment passed, and we resumed our march toward what Instagram had promised us—the authentic Austrian Christmas experience, now with contactless payment and QR codes for mulled wine. The market sprawled before Stephansdom like a fever dream of capitalism dressed in pine boughs. Hundreds of wooden huts lined the square, their peaked roofs heavy with artificial snow that would never melt. Strings of lights crisscrossed overhead—warm white bulbs that turned the falling sleet into ten thousand tiny stars. The smell of cinnamon and diesel exhaust. Of roasting almonds and wet wool. Of Lebkuchen and strangers' perfume.

Everything was ten euros.

“Traditional handmade ornaments,” said the girl behind the stall, holding up something clearly stamped in Guangdong. Her German accent was Russian. Her smile was professional. She'd already identified my ethnicity from fifty meters away—something about the face and the shoes—and switched to English. “Very special price for you.“

Three accordion players worked the corner where Graben meets the square. They weren't together—just landed in the same lucrative spot by the invisible economics of busking. Romanian, probably. Maybe Bulgarian. They played “Silent Night” in competing keys while their cup-bearers worked the crowd. One accordionist had rigged LED lights to his instrument. It pulsed red and green with each squeeze. Tacky.

And yet so brilliant.

I wanted my mulled wine in those ceramic mugs everyone clutched like prayer books. The deposit was two euros. The wine was five. The vendor poured it from a vat that could have supplied a battalion. Steam rose. Cloves floated. It tasted a bit like sweetened cough syrup.

I drank it anyway, needing the heat more than the authenticity.

The market's lights created a peculiar democracy of beauty. Under their glow, the cathedral's Gothic severity softened, and the faces of strangers took on the warmth usually reserved for paintings of saints. A group of Syrian refugees had set up an informal gathering near the Graben entrance—I recognized the cadence of Damascus Arabic. They shared a single order of sausage, cutting it carefully with a pocket knife, making it last. One of them caught me looking and raised his paper cup of wine in a toast that needed no common language.

The food stalls celebrated every German-Austrian cliché imaginable. Bratwurst thick as a baby's arm. Sauerkraut that could strip paint. Potato pancakes crisp as currency, served on paper plates that wilted from the grease. A Turkish man at the potato pancake stand had developed a rhythm—spread, flip, drain, serve—that matched exactly the time needed for each customer to find their money. His economy of motion spoke of years perfecting this dance. “Twenty-three years in this city,” he said. “My children speak better German than they do Turkish. This is how it goes.”

From the cathedral steps, I watched the choreography of commerce. Sellers called out in four languages. Tour groups followed umbrellas held high like battle standards. A pickpocket worked the crowd with moves so smooth they seemed rehearsed. Everyone photographed the same wooden angel. The lights above turned every face golden, forgiving, like a Baroque painter's trick for making peasants look holy.

Still.

In the hut selling wooden toys, an old man carved a nutcracker with hands that shook from cold or age or both. Real shavings curled from real wood. His granddaughter translated prices into currencies that didn't exist when he'd learned his trade. He wasn't performing craft for tourists. He was just carving, the way his father had taught him, before the EU, before the euro, before any of us had decided Vienna needed to be preserved in amber.

I bought nothing from him. Too expensive. But I stood there watching until my fingers went numb around the ceramic mug I'd eventually have to return.

The Pakistani man selling roasted chestnuts had been here for fifteen years. “Every December,” he said, working his coal fire with practiced indifference. “Same spot. Same chestnuts.” His children were in university now. Medicine and engineering. They'd never work a market stall. “This is good,” he said, wrapping my chestnuts in yesterday's newspaper. “But also sad, yes?“

Yes.

By evening, the sleet had turned to snow—the kind that makes everything postcard-perfect and twice as slippery. The market lights blurred into halos. A brass quartet had set up near the Plague Column, their cheeks red with cold and effort, playing Strauss waltzes that nobody danced to. Their open trumpet case collected euros and snow in equal measure. Tourists posed with giant pretzels they'd never finish. The bells rang again, marking time that meant nothing to anyone except a photo opportunity.

The crowd had thickened into something organic. Friends met friends at predetermined huts—”by the one with the giant wooden spoon”—and performed reunion scenes for each other. Air kisses. How long has it been? You look wonderful. They congregated in circles and claimed those standing tables, their ties loosened, their hair down, their laughter too loud. Their third round of Glühwein had turned the cold December evening into a slightly intoxicated reverie of spontaneity. Tomorrow they'd be hierarchical again. Tonight, they shared Käsespätzle from a cardboard boat, sharing pretzels and gossip, their breath making clouds that rose and vanished like conversations that would be forgotten by morning.

I found myself by the Glühwein stand again. Different vendor, same vat. She was maybe nineteen, nose ring catching the Christmas lights, pouring wine with one hand while texting with the other. Her grandmother had probably stood in this same spot, selling something else to other outsiders, back when the cathedral's shadow was more sanctuary than selfie backdrop.

“Another?” she asked without looking up.

I held out my mug. She filled it. Neither of us pretended this was about Christmas. It was about warmth and mild intoxication and the peculiar comfort of transactional relationships that asked nothing beyond exact change.

A violinist—conservatory-trained by the sound of it—played Bach near the tourist information booth. His case contained more coins than bills. Talent doesn't always translate to tips. Behind him, a man spray-painted silver stood motionless on a box, being Mozart for photos. He made twice as much by doing nothing perfectly. The violinist kept playing anyway, each note precise and ignored, while the human statue blinked for five-euro bills.

The market would close at ten. The stall owners would count their euros. The tourists would upload their photos. Tomorrow would bring new crowds, same chestnuts, same wooden angels, same bells marking hours in a city that had learned to perform its own history. The lights would blaze again, turning commerce into magic if you squinted hard enough and had enough Glühwein.

But what the market truly sold was not ornaments or sausages or mulled wine. It sold the ancient comfort of gathering, of voices mixing in the cold air, of light shared against darkness. Vienna had been doing this for a thousand years, adapting her essence, turning strangers, locals, and passersby into a tradition that could warm Syrian refugees, Japanese tourists, and Tyrolean woodcarvers alike.

I returned my mug, got my deposit back, and walked toward the U-Bahn, the smell of cinnamon and woodsmoke in my coat. Behind me, Stephansdom disappeared into the snow, and Vienna continued her ancient tradition of remaining heartbreakingly beautiful. The accordions played on, three different versions of “Jingle Bells” bleeding into each other like currencies in a border town.

The tram was running again. Of course it was

In Summary: * I've just taken the first round of my night meds, and am listening to the IU / UCLA game, with IU leading 20 to 13 early in the 4th Quarter. It's been a gray, rainy day here, with off and on showers all day long. But no big, scary thunderstorms. Yet. They're still threatening those for later tonight and tomorrow.

As has been my pattern for the last few nights, I'll take the final round of night meds later, finish the night prayers after the game, and head to bed early.

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= 217.38 lbs. * bp= 158/71 (62)

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

Diet: * 07:30 – 1 banana * 08:10 – fried rice * 10:00 – snack on little cookies * 11:15 – 1 and ½ pb&j sandwiches * 14:00 – fried chicken * 17:20 – 4 little cookies

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 06:00 – wake * 07:15 – bank accounts activity monitored * 07:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 11:18 – tuned into the Northwestern Wilcats College Football Team playong the Ohio St. Buckeyes, broadcast live by the Ohio State Athletics Network, early in the 1st Quarter of the game, no score yet * 13:30 – while continuing to follow the score of the Ohio St. game, I've now tuned to the pregame broadcast of this afternoon's IU /UCLA game * 14:29 – Ohio St. wins over Northwestern, 28-19 * 14:30 – now listening to IU Hoosiers Football vs USC Trojans

Chess: * 10:30 – moved in all pending CC games

I adore Moneyball—both the film and the concept itself. I relish delving into data and pondering visualisations. The prospect of analysing data to uncover talent that meets specific criteria at a lower cost for a higher return?

Sign me up and take my money.

But does it lead to a dilution of essence?

Let's begin with the game where it all started: baseball.

Undoubtedly, Moneyball has led to more efficient team-building and game strategies. Teams can now optimise their resources to maximise wins, much like corporations streamline operations to boost profits.

But at what cost?

The essence of the game—its unpredictability and moments of inexplicable magic—is eroding. We're witnessing longer games with less action, more strikeouts, and fewer balls in play. Between 1981 and 2021, the average MLB game stretched from 2 hours and 33 minutes to 3 hours and 10 minutes (a 24% increase), while strikeouts per team jumped 53%, from 5.8 to 8.9.

Games haven't become more “interesting”; they've become more similar, pattern-oriented, and tactical. Small players, indie outfits, and sudden upstarts are becoming irrelevant—a cultural inequality mirroring the economic inequality outside the stadium.

As ideas percolate, the commoditisation of entertainment spreads.

What can work for baseball surely can work for music?

Mixtapes and Sunday RJs are gone. Algorithms now shape our playlists. Listening habits are dissected at a chord-structure level, serving up compositions built on the exact same skeleton ad nauseam.

70% of today's “hit” songs share the same 4-chord structure. That means you basically never listen to anything fundamentally new.

The same predictive models have conquered cinema: a laundry list of Marvel and DC Comics sequels, prequels, and pre-prequels, surging from 17% in 2000 to 80% in 2019, while studio appetite for mid-budget films ($20–100 million) are down from 64% to just 32%.

Even runtimes have converged: a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study of over 30,000 films showed major-studio lengths clustering tightly around a “safe” window—a sanitised, dry-cleaned version of creativity.

The result is a monoculture: efficient, predictable, boring, and lacking vibrancy.

In economics, short-term thinking breeds bubbles and crashes. In culture, quick hits and easy wins sacrifice enduring art and timeless sporting moments. We're all being TikTok-ed into the challenge of the week.

Even globally popular games like football are becoming tired and jaded in their search for predictability.

In 2008, an unknown coach named Pep Guardiola took over FC Barcelona and created the greatest symphony of art in world football. It was so good that everyone tried to copy it. Over the last decade, virtually every major club has become a carbon copy of the others—employing inverted wingers, false 9s, and patient build-up play.

In the Premier League, average possession for the top six clubs has climbed from 53.7% in 2010/11 to 59.2% in 2020/21. According to Opta, long passes over 35 yards have dropped 17%, while short passes have jumped 22%—trading unpredictable, end-to-end chaos for methodical control.

Player profiles have converged around ball-playing geometry over raw physicality, and expected-goals (xG) analysis has taught strikers to abandon audacious long-range strikes for high-probability tap-ins. Average shot distance has shrunk from 18.4 yards to 16.8 yards, goal-scoring variance has fallen 15%, and the points gap between the Premier League champions and 10th place has widened from 40 points to 52.

The game is becoming robotic.

Guardiola's approach has been templatised to the T, but the players who painted that symphony cannot be replicated. What it has left behind is a sanitised, geometrical, and homogenised landscape of football tactics eulogised by tactical experts on Twitter, yet bereft of the magic that gave us the Pelés and the Maradonas.

Try watching Arsenal play for 90 minutes.

It has become the age of the average—a monoculture of rectangles and infinite scrolls. A world where everything is optimised, yet nothing is truly excellent.

Resistance is emerging at the margins. Baseball teams are rediscovering human scouting. Analog photographs are back in vogue. Independent musicians are bypassing algorithms to reach fans directly. Filmmakers are betting on new formats over predictable returns.

We need to nurture this resistance to stop our decay.

This is what will create that something magical we desperately need. Templatised uniformity is not what got us here. It was intuition, creativity, and serendipity.

Moneyball is great—needed, even.

But not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts

Went to a book event earlier. or whatever they’re called. a place where people gather to buy books i guess. my housemate wanted to go, and i wasnt interested in leaving the house, but i figured that maybe ill find a book ive been looking for. spoiler, i didnt find anything interesting if im being honest. there were people walking around with flowers, a lot of people actually, handing them to writers. i found that odd. flowers? really? what are we celebrating here? just read the damn book and fuck off. what difference does it make who wrote it? unless they’re writing for the attention, in which cas, by all means, bring them a whole garden, im sure they’lll apreciate that. anyway, i wasnt in a good mood to begin with, nor am i still. i slept rather late, had a headache most of the day, and with my injury i can hardly walk or move. my housemate and i decied to go to a thai restaurant afterwards. thought some food might improve the night. it didnt. there was a man sitting a couple of chairs in front of me, towards the back of the restaurant. it was practically empty. just him, my housemate, me and two waitresses. lovely. now, this man. what a character. i dont know how else to describe him except that he looked like a white american man who wouldnt need to pull an id to prove it. and i mean that in the most unfortunate sense possible. he kept loking at the waitresses in a rather peculiar way. not ordering anything, not asking for anything, just looking. every time one of them walked past, he’d turn his head and follow her with his eyes. a man so desperately committed to being noticed that hed forgotten he was in a restaurant. the waitresses looked uncomfortable. i noticed them smiling awkwardly at me whenever they walked back past my table, which was unfortunate for them because i wasnt interested in being part of whatever was happening there. eventually, i had enough. i got up and walked over to him and asked if he was planning on staying much longer. i wont get you bored with how it went but he didnt seem pleased. he paid and left afterwards. alright, problem solved. or so i thought. while i was busy paying attention to this mans pathetic existence, my housemate had been talking to me. quite a lot, actually. i hadnt heard most of it. didnt even realise they’d finished eating until afterwards. we argued on the way home. something about me not listening, being distracted and blah blahs whatever else. i dont remember every word of it. i was still annoyed, and probably wasnt making things any easier.

Maybe shes right, though. maybe i do argue a lot maybe i have a habit of turning every little disagreement into something bigger than it needs to be. i dont know. its not as tohugh i go out of my way to aruge with people. ir at least, id like to think i dont. i shouldve listenend. anyway, nothing seem to get any better.

Sincerely, Socially exhausted and unnecessarily argumentative.

A Visit: Remere & Alexis

The below passage contains light descriptions of blood and sickeningly flirtatious tomfoolery. Do take care.

Remere had spent the better part of a week preparing this ritual. Guests were not something they had frequently, save for The Groundskeeper, so conjuring lodging as they had originally planned was out of the question. It was much easier to attune their newfound guest to their dwelling instead, and allow them to come and go as they pleased. Not only was it more efficient, but it was less draining.

They had opted to meet with Alexis the same place they had run into one another prior, by the ruins that surrounded them when they had a scythe to their neck. Their only demand was that Alexis take their hand.

When they find Alexis again, he is restlessly pacing about the immediate area near the ruins, brows knit in deep contemplation. This time, he does not sport his usual armor and leathers, and instead wears a white shirt and black gilet, rosary framing the sharp planes of his chest. His signature scythe is likewise not present; then again, hunters are known to be able to summon their weapons at will, so perhaps he is not as vulnerable as he appears.

He consents readily to Rem’s offer to take their hand—not without a snide comment of “this relationship is moving rather fast, isn't it?” But then his fingers, skin warm to the touch, interlace with Remere’s. Once they appear near the glowing crystal, Alexis slips his hand free of Rem’s to step forward and casually examine the area.

In a blink of an eye they surfaced beside a towering red crystal, levitating above a golden basin containing a red liquid. The contents were left no mystery—the renowned Witch practiced dark magic, here.

Remere turns to Alexis, gloves having been discarded prior to their trip to reveal vein-like scars upon their person. They extend a clawed hand, the one unoccupied by a rose that was much an accessory as it was a comfort object, and wearily exhale. “Apologies. I was unable to arrange lodging, but this should suffice, instead. Will a pin-prick bother you?”

“Darling, I’ve been attacked by all manners of creatures,” he answers, finally glancing back toward Rem, practiced charm in his smile. “I hardly think such a thing would bother me at all.”

Remere says nothing in response to Alexis’ blatant flirtation. At least, not aloud. There’s something in their expression that shifts, a softness in their eyes and a raising of brows that is swiftly concealed by a clearing of their throat. Their mind ponders the warmth that lingers on their slightly cool skin, waiting for Alexis to orient themselves before they proceed.

“Lovely. You are about to be attacked by another.” They reach clinically for the hand that had just slipped away, pressing a pointed nail into Alexis' index finger to puncture the skin, and hold it above the pool. A drop was all they needed, and it glistened as it landed within.

Remere pauses for a moment, in contemplation.

What was the harm in sampling the goods, as it were?

They brush their hand along the wound, closing it with some manner of sorcery... and allowing the contents to smear upon their own finger, before they bring it to their lips to clean it. A pleased hum, musical and somewhat decadent. Definitely part of the ritual, and nothing more.

“Ground yourself and think of me, and you may come and go as you please. Think of leaving, and you shall return where you last were. Are you ready for the tour? Questions, concerns?”

Rem’s warning lands on ears connected to a skull devoid of rational thought on the best of days. Alexis does not perceive the remark—you are about to be attacked by another—as anything more than some manner of strange humor. There is only wordless obedience as Alexis permits Remere to claim his hand, his own comfortably and willingly relaxed in his companion's grasp.

Such cold hands, he thinks, but gives the observation no more consideration than that.

The sound that escapes him as claw pierces flesh is interesting, to put it simply. It’s something like an inhaled gasp, sharp and shaky, and it exhales into something like a muted whimper. Blue eyes avert from the sight, cheeks flush with color, and Alexis feels his heart thump insistently against his ribs for a moment. He shifts his gaze back just in time to catch his own essence ripple into the pool surrounding the crystal, and finds himself too transfixed by the morbid sight to notice Rem lick their own finger clean.

He feels his heart finally slow back to a languid pulse when Remere speaks. “Concerns? Well, you’ve already taken my blood for ritualistic witchcraft, so I don’t see what worse you could do.” The smirk that punctuates is reassurance that he's merely teasing. “Please, lead the way.”

“Ritualistic witchcraft? You make me sound so... gauche.” A frown, subtle though it may be. They don’t seem to notice any shift in Alexis’ heartbeat or otherwise, mind occupied as it was. “I merely invited you into my home, and gave you access to bypass the enchantments that prevent others from entering. The only blood in this pool is my own, and a drop of yours.”

They start walking out of the overgrown cemetery, slipping between the crystal, Alexis, and any headstones present. As they round a corner a silhouette can be seen maintaining the fuchsia bushes at the base of the house, clad in a hat that obstructed their features. They seemed more focused on making sure what bloomed there overtook the property more than trimming it in any capacity.

“Good day, Groundskeeper. Thank you for helping me with my composition last evening. Please rest soon, yes?” Remere’s words fall upon deaf ears, a disgruntled huff the only response they are granted. A soft laugh follows from the Witch’s lips.

“He came with the home, you see. Maintained it before I came here. Anything you might need, The Groundskeeper can help with.”

Patiently, Alexis waits for Rem to step forward first, and then he maneuvers carefully alongside headstones with many curious, unspoken questions of who slumbers beneath. Those don’t seem like the things one ought to ask about on a second meeting.

As they pass The Groundskeeper, Alexis offers a polite wave, acknowledging the figure with no indication of unease; whatever chill of death hangs around him falls just short of Alexis’ awareness. Perhaps getting subtly aroused by Rem drawing his blood a moment ago has dulled his senses. Besides that, something seems to suddenly draw his gaze as they begin to ascend the steps to Rem’s house.

Alexis pauses finally, squinting through the trees ahead. His head tilts as he closely analyzes the sight, and then he relaxes with a laugh. “Well, isn’t that something? It seems we’ve been neighbors all this time.” He nods toward the trees, lining the perimeters of their properties. “You see, just there ahead, there's a path cutting between the trees? That’s my cottage.”

Remere pauses, taking a moment to peek towards the trees separating his home from the neighboring cottage. Their expression shifts, and the rose they were holding flitters to the ground. They bring their hand to their forehead in exasperation.

“One week... of preparation, and you were my neighbor. I think I might like to die.” Nearby, The Groundskeeper barks a laugh before resuming their examination of the blooms surrounding the home.

There’s a small delay before Alexis follows. He idles with a raised brow and amused smirk at Remere’s theatrics, not to mention the laughter that resounds from The Groundskeeper just nearby. Alexis may not notice that he’s literally dead, but he can detect the subdued mockery toward Rem’s suffering. There’s something almost familial about it. Curious.

He promptly crouches to seize the forgotten rose before half-jogging up the steps behind Remere to enter the house.

Remere sighs, not unlike a tired maiden, before ascending the uneven stone stairs. The welcome mat at the foot of the door was certainly welcoming—‘something rotten lives here’ written in some manner of blackletter—as were the scratches upon the wood of the front door.

Upon entering, it became apparent the taste in attire certainly extended to their decor. To their left was a small ritual station, with candles and cauldron alike, and further within was ample space to lounge. Remere points towards the cabinet in the far left of something that resembles a kitchen table, without a designated area for meal preparation.

“I’ve all volumes of Encyclopedia Necromancia, should you need to access them, from Alchemy to Ancients through Zealotry to Zombies. Black to Blood Magic might be the most helpful for our shared quarry, but if you are seeking anything else... it is likely on my shelves. My study is currently being renovated, but I’ve plenty of resources here for your perusal. I’ve ample seating, a fire... The Groundskeeper sometimes lends his hand to play the harp nearby, if silence bothers you, but I also have a music box for when he is occupied.”

They do not at all mention the skull upon a pile of books behind them.

He gently pushes the door shut behind him as he steps forward and examines its casual extravagance; the eccentric ones dabbling in taboo magics always seem to secure the most lavish adornments, he notes with a touch of private bitterness.

Interesting how being tasked with slaying literal monsters leaves one moonlighting as a bard to get by.

For now, he shoves his idle jealousy aside and turns toward Rem, stepping a touch closer. His free hand seeks one of Rem’s to gently lift, and the rose is returned to its grasp. Alexis’ hands cup lightly around Rem’s for a brief moment before he moves to examine the books nearby. “You’re rather accommodating,” he comments, dragging a finger along the spine of one of the books. He glances back to Rem. “I have to wonder, Witch, what led you to such peculiar areas of study?”

Remere stills as the rose is returned to them, the warmth of Alexis’ hands upon their own. Their mind is frazzled once more by the contact, and they still in a manner not unlike that of a frightened deer.

They can’t help but smile as Alexis releases their hand, gazing upon the rose and fiddling with the petals momentarily. After a moment they move to place the rose on the nearby table, and then return to Alexis’ side. “I don't often have guests, but I am glad to be accommodating.”

The question is met with a moment of silence. “I... do not recall.” They answer, honestly for the first time. “Last I remember I was at a memorial, the next I was here. I imagine a ritual must have gone awry. The furniture seemed lived in, and it was all placed as I myself would have placed it, so I imagine I lived here prior. The Groundskeeper was more than willing to answer all my questions. He might be able to answer yours better than I.”

Remere does not delve further on the topic. “Do you need anything to drink while you browse? I’ve a well nearby. The water is clean and comes from a fresh source, I am told. Should it not be, I can purify it for you.”

“I see,” Alexis says simply in response to Rem’s lack of cohesive memory; it’s the first remark stated without any dryness to it. The understanding is genuine. No snide comment follows as he turns to face Remere, seemingly finished with his inspection of the books in their collection.

“Must be very delicate magic you work with, that you’d forget so much. Must leave you wondering to what end you were taking such a great risk?” Alexis is unsure if his own question is rhetorical; there’s curiosity, but he knows Rem likely has no answer to provide. “If The Groundskeeper has already answered all of your questions, then how might he tell me anything you have not already explained?”

The question of water is met with a small, dismissive wave, and blue eyes remain fixed on Remere. Clearly, Alexis is more interested in the topic at hand than any of his human needs.

The shrug that Remere offers in response is uncomfortable in its resignation.

“Perhaps, but I have learned to take precautions in the years that followed. I would not have become... famed, as you so aptly put it, if I did not learn from my mistakes.”

They move to seat themselves on the chair nearby, and blue phantom butterflies take the veil away and drape it over the couch nearby as if beckoned by an unseen command. “There are certain things he withholds, as per my instructions. I am sure he would be more than willing to accommodate a guest. I am not one to question my own judgement, even if I do not remember.”

Their hand drifts restlessly past the golden candelabra towards a half-finished composition. “Oh, I had almost forgotten. There is a volume on undead, as well as a separate volume containing information on the unholy. Should you abide by faith of any kind…” They drift off, not willing to comment again on how the rosary upon Alexis’ person proved to be decorative at best.

“It might be useful to you.”

There’s something almost naturally magnetic in the way Alexis casually turns to follow just behind Remere's steps. With a few short steps, he leans himself against the same chair, half seating himself against the back of it.

That look of deep thought settles into his features again, drawing an intensity to them that seems out of place given his sarcastic, almost indifferent demeanor. It seems, briefly, as though he might press Rem with more questions, but he finally shifts his attention at the mention of books of undead, and holy things, and whatever else they had said—oh, yes, another passive comment on his superficial expression of faith.

“I don't believe in anything,” he says very plainly, not apparently offended, but the flatness of the statement suggests there is nothing to elaborate, or perhaps he does not wish to be questioned further. There’s something about the topic that’s obviously sour to Alexis. A small smile follows, and his voice softens. “But it's beneficial to me that my colleagues think I do—and the things I’m meant to kill, besides.”

Remere does not shift as Alexis settles in closer to lean against their chair. There is a certain comfort in the proximity of another person, one that the Witch is not willing to take the time to analyze. The one thing they elect to is the steady beating of Alexis' heart, content and gentle in the way that it thrummed in his ears.

There is no judgment in the words that follow. It has no place to.

“We are of similar mind, then. As far as belief, or the lack thereof. I draw power from within. From my heart. Sometimes I take from others, but only as is necessary. Consent and autonomy are very important when it comes to practices like these.”

Their expressions shifts, brows furrowing in something akin to sadness. “Yes. I had almost forgotten. You folk feel you are ‘meant’ to kill. No matter. I hope what I have to offer here is... useful to you.”

Alexis frowns at Rem’s comment; in fact, he’s certain he actually feels mildly offended—not enough to warrant anger, or bitterness, or a sharp retort. If any feeling echoes in his words, it’s a faint sense of remorse.

“I don’t feel I’m ‘meant’ to kill. I never particularly asked for any of this.” He distracts himself with the rosary hanging from his neck, lifting a hand to restlessly fidget with it. Aside from that small detail, he’s otherwise calm as ever. “Change is... kind of a strange thing. I could just give up what I do entirely, but there’s a whole code to it. I’d be killed for treachery. I can’t do any good if I’m dead.”

There’s a pause as he lifts a finger to punctuate his next words. “But! Sometimes change for the better means willingness to compromise one’s own values here and there. I mean, you can find a fucked-up way to justify it to yourself.” He shrugs a shoulder and glances toward Rem. “If I tell myself I only kill the ‘bad’ monsters, then I can pretend I’m not just a murderer with a fancy title, yeah?”

Remere had anticipated disappointment, only to be meant with a profound sense of self-awareness. There’s a warmth that blossoms in their chest, a tingling in their fingers. They shift in their chair, turning to face Alexis with those doe-like eyes of theirs.

They cannot conceal their smile, enamored as they were by the answer. “How succinctly put. Your flexibility in your craft is admirable. I... regret that I doubted you. Pardon my judgment.” A carefully worded apology—habit given their regular visitation of the realms of the fae-folk.

They clasp their hands in their lap. “I would spare you of my curiosity, but…”

A golden plated fang, or the mimicry of one, bites at their lower lip. Its voice lowers in cadence, just a smidge. It was perhaps the first time Remere had decided to return Alexis’ flirtations since their meeting.

“...What do you consider ‘bad’?” Something glistens in their eyes. Witch, indeed.

Alexis smiles promptly at the question, the expression natural and honest; in fact, it’s evident he’s quite flustered, given the way color blossoms across his face to match him perfectly to Remere’s elegant scarlet decor.

He continues to fidget with his rosary, idly tapping the cross against his bottom lip. His position shifts a bit closer to his companion then, body turning more toward Rem as though that innocent, wide-eyed stare had enchanted him to draw nearer to his inevitable doom. His voice echoes to match the same cadence when he speaks.

“You wanna know the truth?” His next words follow with a purr, no pause left to let Rem answer. “We’re all bad. The problem isn’t being bad, just how many consider themselves above their nature. I, for one, am at peace with what I am.”

Remere looks up wordlessly at Alexis and blinks, equally in infatuation and admiration. They are just about to open their mouth to speak when the bell at the door rings, cutting through whatever words happened to be formulating inside of that pretty head of theirs.

Their crimson gazes fell upon the door, then back upon Alexis. An apologetic smile crosses their features before they speak. “Yes?”

The door opens, and The Groundskeeper invites themselves in with the tip of a hat towards their shared guest. “I believe I should take you up on your offer to rest. I do not see a crisis befalling the fuchsia for the foreseeable future.”

A pause, and then the tall figure’s lips curl upward into something of a lopsided smile. “That is, unless you were... engrossed in discussion?”

Remere, now flustered, stands upright, brushing invisible dirt from their skirt. “No, um. No. If you need the space to rest, you need the space to rest. It is quite alright.” They look up to Alexis. “Do you need me to see you off? I know you don’t live far from here.”

Such mesmerizing eyes they have, Alexis thinks as he and Rem seem to incline closer yet into one another's proximity. But then he jolts just the same when the doorbell resounds. The pleasant, heart-fluttering moment deflates with The Groundskeeper’s presence, but Alexis manages to find amusement in the idle misfortune. Soft laughter escapes him, and he presses knuckles lightly against his lips in a half-assed effort to smother the sound.

“No, no, I think I can manage the brief trip in one piece,” he says to Rem. It finally occurs to him to stand upright, that he was still leaning casually against the chair, inclined into Remere’s space rather intimately. He lightly clears his throat. “You’re likewise welcome by any time. Until then... sweet dreams, my dear Witch.” A wink follows before he turns to take his leave.

As he passes The Groundskeeper, there’s a fleeting pause. There it is finally; a chill ripples over him as Alexis brushes by. He stills too quickly for the hesitation to be readily apparent, playing it off with a polite nod of acknowledgement. “Rest well, Groundskeeper,” he says politely, before he pushes the door open and promptly departs, wandering on the path toward his cottage.

---

The above was conjured at my home in Lunamere, a realm of enchantment and mystery. Thank you for indulging us in a safe haven for queer and neurospicy writing shenanigans!

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Si une décision importante ne fait pas naître chez nous une envie évidente de prendre cette direction, alors il faut en prendre une différente.

Au départ, j’étais plutôt d’accord avec cette idée. Aujourd’hui, beaucoup moins.

Est-ce qu’on a toujours le choix ? Est-ce que l’évidence ne vient pas avec l’effort et la constance ?

Est-ce que l’amour vient avant la relation ou c’est la relation et les efforts que l’on met dans notre couple qui engendre l’amour.

Aujourd’hui, j’ai plutôt tendance à me dire que la vie ne me fera pas de cadeaux. Que j’ai fait le tour de beaucoup de choses, que ce soit au niveau des relations ou du côté pro. Et j’ai la presque la conviction aujourd’hui, que le bonheur au travail et dans une relation, cela se crée. Tous les jours. C’est faire le choix, conscient, de marcher sur la bonne voie malgré les difficultés, et les déceptions. Avec pour phare, mes convictions et mes valeurs.

Je pense que l’on se trompe tous.

Quelle génération errante... à la recherche d’on ne sait pas vraiment quoi, et d’on ne sait pas vraiment qui. Probablement parce que l’on a été biberonné, d’images, de concepts, qui ne n’auront nous nourrissent pas.

J’ai tendance à me dire aujourd’hui que c’est l’effort qui crée le beau en tout. L’effort sur soi d’abord, et l’effort dans notre capacité à faire ce qui est juste.

TOUT LE TEMPS.

Effort Is Schrödinger’s Cat

Before the box is opened, Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead; it exists in a suspended state of pure, unbearable potential.

Every meaningful human effort inhabits that exact dark room.

Consider the novelist at three in the morning, staring at a third revision that may never find a publisher; the founder wiring the last of her savings to cover Friday’s payroll; the composer scoring a movement no orchestra has agreed to play. While the work is underway, their labor is simultaneously a masterpiece and a ruin, a triumph and a waste. Nothing has collapsed into fact. There is no applause yet, no verdict, no autopsy—only the unverified act of pushing forward in the dark.

Society has no patience for the closed box. It wants the lid lifted; it wants to know if the cat is breathing so it knows whether to clap or walk away.

We build monuments to the finished artifact and burn the scaffolding that held it up.

Watch a glassblower at the furnace. His cheeks are hollowed, his forearms corded with strain, sweat evaporating before it can reach his jaw as he turns the blowpipe. The chandelier that will eventually hang in a quiet gallery will command a fortune, and critics will speak of its frozen grace.

Yet the true miracle happened in the violent, fragile seconds between breath and fire, when shapeless matter was forced to obey a human will—when the box was still shut, and the glass could just as easily have shattered on the stone floor.

Greatness does not live solely in the museum. It lives in the calloused palms of the quarrymen who hauled the marble for the Parthenon and died centuries before the roof was laid. It lives in the hundreds of canvases scraped raw and painted over before a single brushstroke of the Mona Lisa survived. It lives in the ships rotting at the bottom of the Atlantic that never found the coastline, yet proved to the ships that followed that the ocean could be crossed.

There is a weaver inside each of us, working a loom in the dark. From where we sit, tangled in the bobbins and the knots, we see only the frayed ends and the maddening slowness of the thread. Yet there is a quiet nobility in the tension on that thread—in showing up before the lid is lifted, when the pattern is invisible and there is no guarantee the fabric will hold.

It is not the artifact that defines us, after all, but the sum of our striving—one choice, one pass of the shuttle, one faithful hour inside the dark room at a time. When we finally step back from the loom, we may find that the tapestry was never the point.

We were the ones being woven.

There's a freedom in admitting we don't know. A liberation that comes with surrendering to ignorance. Far from being a void, this darkness of uncertainty is like a door, opening a dirt road into an unimagined forest. We're explorers again, our maps uncharted. To wake each morning not as experts, but as novices, our eyes wide, ready to be astonished by the world and our place in it.

We spin elaborate webs worrying about people’s perception, but truth is, most people are too entangled in their own lives. The banker's thoughts are a ledger of profit and loss; the nurse's mind, a triage of urgencies. Self-absorption isn't a flaw in human design, it is its very foundation. Once we truly embrace our insignificance to others, life becomes raw, real, and endlessly liberating.

Embracing our insignificance in others' lives frees us to say “yes.” It allows us to take a few blind leaps without risking everything. True, trust is a delicate balance, with the shadow of disappointment always hovering overhead. Yet rolling the dice on “yes” and occasionally stumbling still beats the safety of perpetual refusal. One moment of true magic over a lifetime of the mundane.

Uncertainty sparks our deepest passions. We're captivated by the enigmatic. That's why people lose sleep over love, and yawn at periodic tables. The allure of the unknown drives us to make art, chart space, and ponder existence in ways settled facts never will. It is where artists find their muse, and adventurers hear their siren call.

When we join forces, possibilities compound. Ideas collide, weaknesses are braced by another's strengths, and friction breeds invention. We don't just add notes together; we weave a symphony that’s greater than its parts. It breaks us out of the echo chamber of our own heads—and the quiet isolation that lives there.

Rushing through downtown to squeeze out another drop of productivity often means missing the texture that makes a day worth remembering. Giving ourselves permission to pause creates space for serendipity. Waiting often brings clearer skies, both literally and figuratively. A mouthful of sky and some sunshine on our shoulders. Sometimes, the wisest thing we can say is, “Just Do It... Tomorrow.”

Happiness is a ripple effect. When we are genuinely content, it spills over. Our smile becomes contagious, our energy quiet but unmistakable. We find we have more patience, deeper empathy, more to give. Tending to our own emotional life isn't selfish; it's the only way to sustain anyone else. Our joy becomes a gift we can actually afford to share.

The reasons we're given for rejection are usually polite fiction, invented to avoid confrontation. Beneath the excuse, rejection almost always comes down to someone else's insecurity or simple incompatibility—one person's view of what works for them, shaped by their own history and blind spots. Thankfully, we don't need universal approval. We only need one “yes” at a time: one employer to see our potential, one partner to love our quirks, one friend to value our company. Rejection isn't a verdict; it's just a mismatch of timing, circumstance, and taste.

In a world that idolises expertise, there's a quiet rebellion in accepting naiveté. When we silence our inner critic and step into things we have no talent for, we earn permission to fail spectacularly—and the rare thrill of trying something new without the weight of expectation. It unlocks a creativity unburdened by the need for excellence, and a sense of humour you simply can't survive life without.

We romanticise travel, curating picturesque cafes and cultural epiphanies while editing out the diarrhoea, lost luggage, endless queues, and pickpockets. That airbrushed version, fed by social pressure, hides what actually matters. The real joy of travel lives in the shared moments, not the destination itself. When we get honest about what we truly value in an experience, our choices finally start to feel like our own.

In the middle of a café, where the constant hum of traffic mingles with the chatter of countless lives, I sit hunched. The coffee is scalding, the chair wobbly when I shift my weight. My fingers curl in that hawkish pose over my keyboard, searching for words.

Do they fit, sound nice, or do they feel forced in their usage, bereft of any identity?

It is Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday. The days always kind of blur together, unless I need to remember something specific.

A pigeon lands on the windowsill, its feathers missing in patches. It cocks its head, fixing one dark, beady eye on me, my own reflection caught inside the pupil. For a long second, neither of us moves. In that moment we are kindred.

The pigeon’s dream wasn’t the windowsill, but here we are. Me, stalled mid-sentence; the bird stalled mid-flight.

Imperfect me, watching an imperfect pigeon on an imperfect windowsill in an imperfect café.

And yet, taken as a whole—it’s perfect. The wobbly chair, the scarred sill, the ragged bird, the hot coffee steam misting my lips. Change a single detail, polish a single edge, and you undo the quiet alchemy of imperfect things conspiring into perfection.

This is the secret.

Creation does not happen when every piece arrives pre-polished, symmetrical, and certain. You cannot sit paralyzed, waiting for the flawless opening line before you dare to touch the keys. To make something real, you have to abandon that illusion and enter the mess.

So I let the words tumble—clumsy, rhythmic, wrong. They gnash against each other on the screen, half-formed thoughts colliding with a blinking cursor while lukewarm coffee addles the brain to draft a jumbled mess.

An unedited collision of instinct.

And then, inside that asymmetry, something clicks.

One word lands beside another, and suddenly they belong together, as if they had been waiting all along to meet on that line. A single phrase locks into place inside a sprawling, messy draft—one true pulse inside twenty lines of noise.

It isn’t sterile perfection; it is electricity.

Unlearning perfection is cathartic, though never easy. It is a slow return to your own inner voice—and once you recognize that pulse, you have to cherish it. You have to embrace the flawed attempt, because when you sand away every rough edge, you sand away yourself.

Perfection is uniform, interchangeable, and forgettable.

It is in the false starts, the awkward phrasing, and the unguarded revisions that a writer’s real voice finally breaks through—the jagged, unmistakable mangle of humanity that readers actually want to hear.

Outside the window, the pigeon shifts its weight, spreads its patchy wings, and lifts effortlessly into the city sky. Its wings may be imperfect, but its flight is majestic.

I look back at my screen—at the crossed-out lines, the surviving phrases, the glorious mess—and keep typing.

I work from home now. Whenever I see the talkative collaborators getting enthusiastic about working (on a Saturday no less) and figuring things out for a corporation that only cares about profits, I have a visceral reaction and recoil from embarrassment. That may sound dramatic and don’t worry, it definitely is, but what’s more dramatic to me is how hard they willingly go above and beyond their pay grade. That used to be me from my early to mid twenties. That mentality I held is long gone now that I’m in my late twenties, and trust me when I say there is no going back.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with liking your job and wanting to do the best you can; to each their own, it doesn’t affect me how you want to go about your workdays. I think it more-so has to do with the fact that I’ve experienced this all when I was much younger, trying to find where my place was in all of this. I realized the agenda does not serve me, the employed, it serves the small percent at the very top trying to make as much profit as possible while supplying the workers with the absolute bare minimum. Anything more than the minimum most certainly deems that the employee costs more than they’re worth to keep. And we all know how much companies love to jump at the opportunity to hire anyone they can pay less and offer even less benefits to.

I’m the disillusioned Zillenial the Boomers warned you about; be wary and stay vigilant if you choose to continue reading. You might get triggered by the laziness practically oozing out of my words. You may be thinking: “Young people don’t want to work anymore! Get a job, get a life, and stop complaining. That’s how life is, deal with it.”

Did you know there are actually a plethora of possibilities in life, all of which are accessible to anyone at anytime, if only they open their hearts and minds to more than what was sold to them since birth? I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but in the United States, if you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you’re immediately fucked. It makes crawling your way out of corporate or blue collar infinitely more difficult. You have to know someone that knows someone that can hopefully get you into the right rooms with the right people. While this certainly works and is the entire basis of successful networking, this isn’t exactly easy for everyone, especially for someone that’s neurodivergent. Again, this is not to say neurodivergent people are not capable of networking and masking successfully their whole lives to push through a job for money, but that’s not a way to live for anyone, any human being, regardless of neurodivergency.

When I was younger my father always told me to try my best to work for myself, that I don’t want to work for other people forever, the goal is to have them work for you. I understood what he was saying, and I carried that with me through all of my jobs. I agreed with him; I hated the idea of working for someone the rest of my life. I worked fast food, I worked retail, I even joined and served the military for 6 years in the field of healthcare. Now I work from home helping the healthcare field, which I genuinely enjoyed at first, but that went downhill as quickly as I expected.

I am capable of a lot of things. I have gone through adversity after adversity, pushing through it all with blood sweat and tears to come out the other side stronger than I was before. That’s normal for me. I was built to withstand immense amounts of pressure, to alchemize and integrate my lessons so I don’t make the same mistakes that keep leading me down a path of no return from a corporate hellscape and a negative attitude toward life. I’m not the only one built for this: you are too! Everyone has it within them to face adversity and have it change them for the better. It’s allowing the change, and allowing the adversity to work through you without losing yourself that takes effort. It’s effort well spent if you ask me, and truly priceless when it comes to growing as a human with the best intentions for themselves, their family, and their community.

It’s time for everyone to think outside of the box. Stay in corporate, stay in blue collar, because whatever is working for you is working and I would never tell anyone to do something different in their lives because that’s simply not my place. What I am saying, however, is there is more to this life than working day in and day out. “We need money to enjoy our lives, to take vacations so we can rest and return ready to work again.”

Have you ever thought of doing what you love instead? Seriously, forget about a normal job for just two seconds. What would you be doing right now if you didn’t have to work a job? Would you pour into yourself, your hobbies, your talents? While doing that, don’t you think life is on your side rooting for you? Don’t you think if you focus on following your joy and passions that opportunities for money for your talents will find you? How would you know if you never tried? How would you know if you gave up too soon?

I’m just a disillusioned Zillenial. No one needs to listen to me, I’m full of it. But… what if we lived for ourselves? For each other and our community? All food for thought, and honestly, I feed on it every single day. I’ll be making it big because I believe in myself when no one else does, or maybe ever will. Prove them wrong, too. Everyone can live a life without the normal 9 to 5. It sounds scary and impossible but it’s only impossible if you don’t even try. It’s my life to live and I’m doing whatever it takes to shine as brightly as I can for myself, for my family, for my friends and my community. I want others to see that they can do the same for themselves. We are all one and the same, we are human beings on this planet meant for greatness in life, not a dull rut in the ground doing the same thing over and over and over again just to make money. We are the money, we are the assets. We are more valuable doing what we love and are passionate about than wasting our time on corporations that don’t care for us in the slightest.

Una giornata allo sportello AMT può rivelarsi un interessante esercizio di antropologia urbana. Si entra per chiedere un’informazione e si esce con un’identità collettiva che nessuno aveva richiesto. Tra un “neger” e un “maranza”, il miracolo della classificazione è compiuto, siamo una comunità MSNA. Non importa che si abbiano storie, provenienze, lingue e vite differenti, basta non assomigliare abbastanza a chi sta dall’altra parte del vetro. La gentilezza è quella arcigna di chi considera ogni domanda un’invasione di campo, la pazienza, invece, quella di Giobbe, da parte di chi aspetta.

Perché “questi qui” vengono qui a chiedere.

Un comportamento sospetto, soprattutto se praticato in uno sportello informazioni, dove si suppone che qualcuno venga pagato proprio per ascoltare, spiegare e, nei casi più fortunati, perfino informare. È il modus dei “burocrati del disprezzo” cui non occorre nemmeno negare un diritto per far sentire qualcuno fuori posto. Basta un tono, uno sguardo, una parola pronunciata con sufficiente fastidio. Siamo a Genova. La città di porto, degli incontri, delle contaminazioni. Quella che ama raccontarsi aperta al mondo, abituata da secoli a vedere arrivare persone da ogni dove. La città che abbraccia come le sue montagne, ma dimentica di raccontare quanta salita ci sia prima di raggiungere quell’abbraccio. Una salita che si fa particolarmente ripida quando il nome sul documento non è facile da leggere. Perché il problema, alla fine, non è la difficoltà di pronunciare un nome straniero. È la facilità con cui si decide che non valga nemmeno la pena provarci.