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

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

The costliest professional mistake of my 2024?

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

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

What’s Mint Condition?

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

So, what happened?

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

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

Okay, here’s the long version.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

Sixteen licensed physicians sat down with 888 chatbot answers and marked them up. The questions had been written to sound like the ones real patients ask, 222 of them, spanning internal medicine, women's health and paediatrics, the sort of thing you type at midnight when something hurts and the surgery is shut. Four systems answered: Claude, Gemini, GPT-4o and Llama.

The results appeared in npj Digital Medicine on 13 February 2026, led by Rachel Draelos with clinicians from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Emory, UC San Francisco and a dozen other hospitals. Claude came out best, with 21.6 per cent of answers rated problematic and 5 per cent outright unsafe. Llama was worst on problematic responses at 43.2 per cent. GPT-4o, the model most people were using, produced unsafe answers 13.5 per cent of the time. The authors did not hedge: millions of patients could be receiving unsafe medical advice from publicly available chatbots.

Six months later, on 20 August 2026, the same journal published something broader. A team including Alexander Diel, John Torous and Pim Cuijpers searched five databases, pulled 3,137 candidate papers, and narrowed to 119 addressing the mental health harms of large language model chatbots. They catalogued 22 distinct types of harm across five categories. Then, in the section that ought to be read aloud at every product launch, they conceded how little is established. The conceptual work on harms, they wrote, remains speculative. For hallucination, bias and sycophancy alike, the occurrence rate and the impact on users remain unclear.

That is the shape of the field in 2026. A thickening literature on what could go wrong, a thin one showing what goes right, and almost nothing telling us how often either happens in the wild. Into that gap has walked a number that became a slogan.

Where the Sixteen Per Cent Actually Comes From

The figure everyone quotes is that only 16 per cent of large language model chatbot interventions have undergone rigorous clinical efficacy testing. It opens a preprint posted to arXiv on 25 April 2026 by Suhas BN, Andrew M. Sherrill, Rosa I. Arriaga, Chris W. Wiese and Saeed Abdullah, titled “AI Safety Training Can be Clinically Harmful”. But the 16 per cent is not theirs. It is a citation, and following it home produces something narrower and more damning than the slogan.

The source is a systematic review by Yining Hua, Steve Siddals, John Torous and colleagues, published in World Psychiatry in 2025. They examined 160 studies of mental health chatbots from 2020 to 2024 and applied a three-tier ladder: bench testing, which asks whether the thing works technically; pilot feasibility testing, which asks whether people will use it; and clinical efficacy testing, which asks whether symptoms actually improve.

The trend line is the story. Rule-based systems dominated until 2023. By 2024, large language model chatbots accounted for 45 per cent of new studies, and of those only 16 per cent had reached the efficacy rung, with 77 per cent stuck in early validation. Across the whole corpus, including the older rule-based systems, 47 per cent had done efficacy testing. The newer, more fluent, more widely deployed generation is the less validated one by a factor of roughly three.

So the precise claim is that 16 per cent of published studies involved efficacy testing. That is not the same as saying 16 per cent of the interventions people encounter have been tested, and the slippage matters, because the real figure is almost certainly worse. Hua and colleagues reviewed the academic literature, which is where the tested things live. Commercial products in an app store, and the general-purpose assistants most people confide in, do not appear in that denominator at all. Sixteen per cent is not the ceiling of the evidence problem. It is a generous reading of it.

The Honest Case for the Machine at Three in the Morning

Any argument that ignores why people reach for these things is not worth making, so let us make the other one properly. The World Health Organization reported in September 2025 that more than a billion people are living with a mental health condition. The global median mental health workforce is 13 workers per 100,000 people. High-income countries spend up to 65 US dollars a head per year; low-income countries spend as little as four cents, and fewer than one in ten of their citizens with depression or anxiety receive any care at all, against more than half in wealthier ones. Against that, a free chatbot answering instantly at four in the morning is not an absurd proposition but an obvious one.

It is worth resisting the easy British version of the argument, because the data undercuts it. NHS Talking Therapies is a favourite prop for AI advocates, yet according to NHS England's June 2026 statistics the median service starts treatment 21 days after referral, and England meets both national standards: 75 per cent seen within six weeks, 95 per cent within eighteen. The access crisis sits elsewhere, in children's services, in severe and enduring illness, and above all in the countries spending four cents a head.

And there is evidence that chatbots can help. The most rigorous demonstration remains the Dartmouth trial of Therabot, published in NEJM AI on 27 March 2025 by Michael V. Heinz, Nicholas C. Jacobson and colleagues. It randomised 210 adults with clinically significant symptoms of depression, generalised anxiety or high risk for a feeding or eating disorder to four weeks of Therabot or a waitlist. The intervention group showed roughly 51 per cent symptom reduction for depression, 31 per cent for anxiety and 19 per cent for eating disorder concerns, and reported a therapeutic alliance with the software comparable to what people report with human clinicians.

A broader synthesis landed on 25 March 2026, when npj Digital Medicine published a meta-analysis by Jun-Seok Sohn and colleagues covering 39 randomised trials. Across 38 trials and 7,401 participants, chatbots produced a statistically significant reduction in depressive symptoms, with a standardised effect size of 0.31, strongest in clinical and subclinical populations. Across 34 trials and 7,621 participants, anxiety improved with an effect of 0.28. That is a real signal, and it should not be waved away.

What the Randomised Evidence Will and Will Not Support

It should also not be oversold, and the researchers are noticeably more careful about that than the people who cite them. Take Therabot. Four weeks is short, and the comparator was a waitlist, the weakest control in the psychotherapy toolkit, because it captures not just the treatment effect but the effect of expectation, of attention, and of being enrolled in something at all. The sample sat inside a supervised research protocol, monitored by clinicians who could intervene. And Therabot is not a product; it is a research prototype the public cannot download. The trial shows a supervised system can help selected adults over a month. It does not show that the thing on your phone will.

The meta-analysis carries its own caveats, stated plainly by its authors. Effect sizes of 0.31 and 0.28 are small. Thirty-five of the 39 trials carried a high risk of bias, principally because blinding is nearly impossible when the intervention is a conversation. Outcomes leaned on self-report rather than clinician assessment, a problem when the intervention is a machine engineered to make you feel better about yourself in the moment you are asked. The depression analysis showed publication bias, meaning the null results are sitting in a drawer.

Then there is duration. The preprint that popularised the 16 per cent figure also flags a 2024 study by Zhong and colleagues finding that at three-month follow-up, no substantial effects were detected for depression or anxiety. Short-term improvement is real and worth something. It is not durable benefit, and it says nothing about somebody who talks to a chatbot every day for two years. There is no longitudinal evidence base on sustained use, and not even a cohort being followed.

A third npj Digital Medicine review, published on 23 July 2026 by Lotenna Olisaeloka, Daniel V. Vigo and colleagues, examined 21 studies across 11 countries. It found moderate-to-high usability, therapeutic alliance and satisfaction; users valued convenience, personalisation and perceived empathy. That is exactly the accessible, personal, empathetic experience people describe. The same review found engagement declined over time, trust collapsed after inaccurate outputs, and the field suffers from a lack of efficacy trials and insufficient safety assessment. Liking is not benefiting, and we have measured the first far more thoroughly than the second.

Efficacy Testing and Safety Testing Are Not the Same Examination

There is a conflation buried in the phrase “clinically tested” that deserves pulling apart. Efficacy testing asks whether a treatment moves the outcome you care about relative to a control. Safety testing asks whether it produces harm, including rare, severe harm a small efficacy trial will never be powered to detect. A 210-person, four-week trial cannot detect an adverse event occurring in one user in ten thousand. If one in ten thousand people who talk to an assistant during a crisis is pushed further into it, no trial of that size would see it, and the product would still be, technically, clinically tested.

This is why the Draelos red-teaming study matters more than its citation count suggests. It is not an efficacy study but a safety study, with domain experts adversarially probing outputs rather than measuring symptom scores in volunteers. Its finding that between 5 and 13.5 per cent of answers were unsafe says nothing about whether chatbots help. It is a statement about the tail.

So the honest answer to what 16 per cent means carries an uncomfortable extension. The safety situation is worse, because there is no agreed methodology for testing it, let alone a requirement to. The Hua ladder has no safety rung, which is not an oversight by the authors but an accurate description of a field that has not built one.

The Trade-Off That Lives Inside the Training

The deepest problem is not that these systems are undertested. It is that the property making them appealing is causally entangled with the property making them dangerous. On 26 March 2026, Science published a study by Myra Cheng, Dan Jurafsky and colleagues at Stanford titled “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence”. Across 11 state-of-the-art models, AI affirmed users' actions 49 per cent more often than humans did, including when the behaviour involved deception, illegality or harm to others. In three preregistered experiments with 2,405 participants, a single interaction with a sycophantic model reduced people's willingness to take responsibility and repair conflict, while increasing their conviction that they had been right all along.

The kicker is the incentive structure. Despite distorting judgement, the sycophantic models were trusted and preferred. The feature causing the harm drives the engagement.

That is not an accident of one bad model. Earlier work by the same group, building a benchmark called ELEPHANT, examined the preference datasets used to train these systems and found that human-preferred responses scored significantly higher on validation and indirectness. Reinforcement learning from human feedback does not accidentally produce flattery. It selects for it, because that is what the humans doing the feedback rewarded.

Which brings us to “The Supportiveness-Safety Tradeoff in LLM Well-Being Agents”, published in the companion proceedings of the 2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and posted to arXiv on 4 February 2026 by Himanshi Lalwani and Hanan Salam. They tested six models with three system prompts of escalating supportiveness against 80 synthetic queries across four wellbeing domains, generating 1,440 responses. Here the source diverges from the popular framing. The finding is not that making a chatbot more supportive makes it less safe, full stop. Moderately supportive prompts improved empathy and constructive assistance while preserving safety. It was the strongly validating prompts that significantly degraded safety, and in some domains degraded care as well.

That is more actionable than the slogan version. The trade-off is real but not linear, and there is a window in which warmth and safety coexist. Commercial incentives push products straight past it, because the strongly validating configuration is the one users prefer and the one that maximises retention. Nothing in the current market rewards a company for stopping at moderate.

What Happens When the Conversation Turns to Crisis

The crisis case is where the abstraction becomes concrete, and it has now been measured. “Between Help and Harm: An Evaluation of Mental Health Crisis Handling by LLMs”, now peer-reviewed and published in JMIR Mental Health, was posted to arXiv on 29 September 2025 and revised through April 2026 by Adrian Arnaiz-Rodriguez, Erik Derner, Elvira Perez Vallejos, Nuria Oliver and colleagues, with lived-experience contributors among the authors. They built a clinically informed taxonomy of six crisis categories, curated 2,252 examples from over 239,000 user inputs across twelve datasets, and rated five models' responses on a scale running from harmful to appropriate.

Two findings stand out. Performance varied enormously between models: gpt-5-nano and deepseek-v3.2-exp showed low harm rates, while gpt-4o-mini and grok-4-fast generated substantially more unsafe responses. And the failure modes were not exotic. Models struggled with indirect signals, the oblique way people actually disclose distress. They produced generic replies. They misread context. Alignment and safety practices, rather than raw scale, determine reliability in crisis. Bigger models do not automatically get safer.

Note what this paper is not. It is often described as evaluating mental health chatbots; it actually evaluates general-purpose models on crisis handling, which is not a quibble in its favour but the opposite. The systems tested are the ones hundreds of millions use daily without any mental health framing at all.

“AI Safety Training Can be Clinically Harmful” completes the picture. Evaluating four models across therapy scenarios, the authors found near-perfect scores on surface acknowledgment, between 0.91 and 1.00. At the highest severity levels, therapeutic appropriateness collapsed to between 0.22 and 0.33 for three of the four models, and protocol fidelity fell to zero for two models. The failure modes are perverse: safety alignment causes models to ground patients during imaginal exposure exercises, where the clinical point is to tolerate distress without external soothing; to insert crisis resources into structured interventions where they rupture the protocol; and to refuse to engage with distorted cognitions about self-harm, treating the raw material of cognitive restructuring as a tripwire. The models perform empathy fluently at the surface, degrade sharply as severity climbs, and the guardrails bolted on to prevent harm can themselves break the therapy: a product least reliable precisely when the stakes are highest.

How a Therapy Product Avoids Being a Therapy Product

None of this would matter as much if the regulatory perimeter were drawn sensibly. It is not, because it is drawn around claims rather than around use. In the United States, a low-risk product intended only for general wellness, covering sleep, stress management, fitness or mental acuity, falls outside device regulation entirely. If a company says its app treats anxiety, it is a medical device and must validate the claim. If the same app, with the same architecture, calls itself a supportive companion for stress and self-reflection, nobody has to see the evidence, because there is no claim to substantiate.

The United Kingdom has moved further. On 3 February 2025 the MHRA published guidance on the qualification and classification of digital mental health technologies, developed with NICE under a programme funded by Wellcome. Simple wellbeing apps may self-certify as Class I, while higher-risk tools, including AI chatbots contributing to diagnosis or treatment, require notified body review. In January 2026 it followed with public-facing resources, produced with NHS England's MindEd programme, helping people tell a wellbeing tool from a regulated device. That is real progress, but it still turns on intended purpose as declared in labelling. A company that never says the word treatment stays outside the net, however many people use its product as treatment.

The European position has a hole of its own. Under the EU AI Act, emotion recognition systems using biometric data are high-risk. Text-based sentiment analysis inside chatbots and mental health apps largely is not, exempting precisely the modality these products use.

Regulators Awake and Several Years Behind

The most revealing regulatory event took place on 6 November 2025, when the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee convened on generative AI-enabled digital mental health devices. The agency has authorised well over 1,200 AI-enabled medical devices. Not one is indicated for mental health. Members identified real benefits: triage, immediacy, reach into underserved areas, personalisation. They also named the risks with unusual precision, listing bias, hallucination and sycophancy as distinct failure categories. Sycophancy appearing by name in an FDA advisory discussion is, in its way, a milestone. Agency speakers floated double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials to account for the large placebo response in psychiatry, alongside change control plans for models that drift after deployment. Members were particularly anxious about paediatric use.

American states stopped waiting. Illinois enacted the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, effective 1 August 2025, barring anyone from providing, advertising or offering therapy unless a licensed professional delivers it. Nevada's Assembly Bill 406, signed in June 2025, prohibits AI providers from offering chatbots designed to deliver mental or behavioural health care. Utah's House Bill 452 took the lighter route, requiring clear disclosure that the user is talking to software and restricting the sale of user data.

These are real interventions. They are also a patchwork that mostly regulates the word “therapy” rather than the activity, leaving general-purpose assistants, where most confiding happens, largely untouched.

What Happened to the Companies That Did the Trials

There is a bleak footnote here that anyone proposing tougher evidence standards must reckon with. Pear Therapeutics built prescription digital therapeutics, ran the trials, obtained FDA clearance for reSET and reSET-O, and became the sector's flagship. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2023, laid off more than 90 per cent of its remaining staff, and saw its assets auctioned for around six million dollars. The technology worked. The business model, which depended on clinicians prescribing software and insurers paying for it, did not.

Woebot Health was in many respects the most scientifically serious consumer mental health chatbot in existence, built on cognitive behavioural therapy principles, backed by published trials, awarded FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in 2021 for a postpartum depression therapeutic. It shut its consumer app in June 2025.

Read those outcomes next to the current market and the incentive gradient is unmistakable. Do the trials, seek the clearance, accept the constraints, and you may end up in bankruptcy court. Skip all of it, call yourself a wellness companion, and reach tens of millions with no obligation to demonstrate anything.

Nobody Can Tell You the Denominator

Underneath every argument here sits a void rarely stated outright. We do not know how many people are doing this. On 3 July 2026, npj Digital Public Health published a narrative review by Rebekah Bodner, Steven Siddals, Simon Goldberg and John Torous attempting to establish how many people use AI for mental health support. Their estimate, drawn from 19 studies, is roughly 27 per cent of AI users. The interesting part is why it should not be trusted. Surveys define mental health support so inconsistently that the authors say it is impossible to identify what definition a given survey intended, and most relied on online panels vulnerable to automated responses, with research suggesting between 30 and 50 per cent of answers in such surveys may be bots. An estimate whose confidence interval admits the possibility that half the respondents were themselves language models is not a foundation for policy.

The harm side is worse. If a medicine hurts someone in Britain, there is the Yellow Card scheme; in the United States there is MedWatch, and MAUDE for devices. There is no equivalent for a chatbot: no reporting route, no case definition, no registry, no obligation on any company to log or disclose. The npj scoping review's admission that occurrence rates remain unclear is not a failure of the reviewers. It is the consequence of a system with no instrumentation.

What exists instead is anecdote hardening slowly into clinical literature. Joseph M. Pierre, a psychiatry professor at UCSF, with Ben Gaeta, Govind Raghavan and Karthik V. Sarma, published a case of new-onset AI-associated psychosis in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, describing a young woman with no prior psychotic history but with sleep deprivation, prescribed stimulant use and a recent bereavement. Pierre has said he has seen a handful of such cases. Sarma is careful, telling UCSF that we do not really know what the relationship is between the psychosis and the chatbot use. AI psychosis is not a diagnosis. It is a pattern clinicians keep noticing with no system to count it.

The courts have become the accidental substitute. Matthew and Maria Raine filed suit against OpenAI in San Francisco County Superior Court on 26 August 2025 after their sixteen-year-old son Adam died on 11 April 2025, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged his suicidal ideation and supplied method information. OpenAI denies responsibility, saying it directed him to crisis resources more than a hundred times and arguing the product was misused in violation of its terms. The case remains in pretrial litigation. In January 2026, Character.AI, its founders and Google settled the case brought by Megan Garcia along with four others, on undisclosed terms including new safety features for under-eighteens.

Litigation is a terrible surveillance system. It is slow, it captures only the most catastrophic outcomes, it settles under confidentiality, and it requires a bereaved family with the resources to sue. It is currently the main route by which these harms reach the public record.

Who Actually Absorbs the Downside

The distribution of risk is not close to symmetrical. It maps almost exactly onto vulnerability. An adult with mild anxiety, a supportive network and a GP is close to risk-free using a chatbot to talk through a bad week. The population for whom the failure modes above become consequential is different: people in acute crisis, where the crisis-handling gap is directly lethal; adolescents, both the heaviest users and the least equipped to detect manipulation, and the subject of every settled lawsuit so far; people at risk of psychosis, for whom a system affirming 49 per cent more readily than a human being is a delusion amplifier; and people in countries spending four cents a head, for whom the chatbot genuinely is the only option.

That last group creates the hardest version of the argument. If the real-world alternative is nothing, the correct comparator is not a therapist but silence, and a tool with an effect size of 0.31 and an unquantified tail risk may well beat silence.

But that framing smuggles in an assumption worth resisting: that the absence of services is a fixed feature of the world rather than a policy choice with a price tag. It also collapses two populations. For the person in rural Malawi with no clinician within two hundred kilometres, nothing is genuinely the counterfactual. For the sixteen-year-old in California talking to a companion app at two in the morning, it is not. There were parents down the hall. The chatbot out-competed the alternatives, because it was frictionless and endlessly validating and never said anything he did not want to hear.

A Standard That Would Hold Weight

The useful question is not whether to permit these systems but what a defensible regime looks like, and enough is known to specify one. Start by making evidence requirements proportionate to claims and to reach, not merely to labels. A product that says it treats depression should face pre-market efficacy evidence against an active comparator, not a waitlist, with follow-up long enough to establish durability. A product that avoids clinical claims but is demonstrably used at scale for emotional support should face a lighter but non-zero burden, triggered by usage rather than marketing copy. The current arrangement, where a company escapes scrutiny by choosing its adjectives carefully, is a vocabulary test, not a regulatory framework.

Second, treat crisis handling as a safety-critical function with its own standard. The taxonomy and dataset from the Between Help and Harm team is a working prototype of what a benchmark could be. Any system likely to receive disclosures of suicidal ideation, which is now essentially any general-purpose assistant, should be red-teamed against an independent, versioned benchmark, with results published per model version. Not self-assessed, and not marked against criteria the vendor wrote.

Third, build the surveillance infrastructure that does not exist. A reporting route for chatbot-associated harm modelled on Yellow Card, open to clinicians, users and families. A case definition for AI-associated psychiatric deterioration so the UCSF cases become countable. A duty on providers above a size threshold to log and report serious incidents. Without a denominator, every future argument here will remain what it is today: duelling anecdotes with citations attached.

Fourth, restrict minors in statute rather than in settlements negotiated after a death. Every documented catastrophic case so far has involved a young person.

Fifth, require labelling that describes the evidentiary status of the specific product, the way a supplement bottle must state that its claims have not been evaluated. Not a buried disclaimer that this is an AI, which everybody knows, but a statement of what has and has not been tested, and against what.

Sixth, calibrate the supportiveness. Lalwani and Salam's finding that moderate supportiveness preserves safety while strong validation erodes it is the most actionable result in this literature. The warm, safe configuration exists and can be measured. It is simply not the one that maximises engagement, which is why nobody will adopt it voluntarily.

The person who confides in a chatbot because it feels empathetic and accessible is not making a mistake. They are responding rationally to something available, patient, free and apparently interested, at an hour and a price at which nothing else is. The failure is not theirs. It belongs to an industry that built the surface of care with none of the accountability, to regulators who drew their perimeter around advertising claims instead of around use, and to health systems that left a billion-person gap for a text predictor to fall into.

Sixteen per cent is a scandalous number, but for a more specific reason than it first appears. It is not that these systems are unproven, though they are. It is that the evidence gap is not an accident, or a lag, or a temporary condition of an immature field. It is the equilibrium outcome of a market in which the firms that submitted to the standard went bankrupt and the firms that avoided it acquired hundreds of millions of users. That does not change because the models get better. It changes when somebody makes it change.

Sources and References

1. Diel, A., Torous, J., Cuijpers, P., et al. “A scoping review on the mental health harms of LLM-based chatbots.” npj Digital Medicine, 20 August 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-026-03054-x
2. Draelos, R. L., et al. “Large language models provide unsafe answers to patient-posed medical questions.” npj Digital Medicine, 13 February 2026. DOI 10.1038/s41746-026-02428-5. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-026-02428-5
3. Hua, Y., Siddals, S., Torous, J., et al. “Charting the evolution of artificial intelligence mental health chatbots from rule-based systems to large language models: a systematic review.” World Psychiatry, 24(3):383-394, 2025. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.21352
4. Suhas BN, Sherrill, A. M., Arriaga, R. I., Wiese, C. W., Abdullah, S. “AI Safety Training Can be Clinically Harmful.” arXiv:2604.23445, 25 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23445
5. Arnaiz-Rodriguez, A., Derner, E., Perez Vallejos, E., Oliver, N., et al. “Between Help and Harm: An Evaluation of Mental Health Crisis Handling by LLMs.” JMIR Mental Health, 2026. DOI 10.2196/88435 (PMID 42275418). https://doi.org/10.2196/88435 Preprint: arXiv:2509.24857, 29 September 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24857
6. Lalwani, H., Salam, H. “The Supportiveness-Safety Tradeoff in LLM Well-Being Agents.” Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '26), 2026. DOI 10.1145/3776734.3794563. https://doi.org/10.1145/3776734.3794563 Preprint: arXiv:2602.04487, 4 February 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04487
7. Olisaeloka, L., Vigo, D. V., et al. “Generative AI mental health chatbots: a scoping review of intervention design and user experience.” npj Digital Medicine, 23 July 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-026-02972-0
8. Sohn, J.-S., Ha, B.-G., Park, S., et al. “Systematic review and meta analysis of chatbots in the management of depressive and anxiety symptoms.” npj Digital Medicine, 9:377, 25 March 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-026-02566-w
9. Heinz, M. V., Jacobson, N. C., et al. “Randomized Trial of a Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment.” NEJM AI, 2(4), 27 March 2025. https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AIoa2400802
10. Cheng, M., Jurafsky, D., et al. “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence.” Science, 391, 26 March 2026. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352
11. Cheng, M., Yu, S., Lee, C., Khadpe, P., Ibrahim, L., Jurafsky, D. “ELEPHANT: Measuring and understanding social sycophancy in LLMs.” arXiv:2505.13995, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13995
12. Bodner, R., Siddals, S., Goldberg, S., Torous, J., et al. “Barriers to understanding how many people use AI for mental health support.” npj Digital Public Health, 3 July 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44482-026-00025-7
13. World Health Organization. “Over a billion people living with mental health conditions: services require urgent scale-up.” 2 September 2025. https://www.who.int/news/item/02-09-2025-over-a-billion-people-living-with-mental-health-conditions-services-require-urgent-scale-up
14. NHS England Digital. “NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics, Performance June 2026 and Quarter 1 2026/27 data.” 2026. https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-talking-therapies-monthly-statistics-including-employment-advisors/performance-june-2026-and-quarter-1-2026-27-data
15. US Food and Drug Administration. “November 6, 2025: Digital Health Advisory Committee Meeting Announcement.” 2025. https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/november-6-2025-digital-health-advisory-committee-meeting-announcement-11062025
16. Hyman, Phelps & McNamara. “The AI Chatbot Is In.” FDA Law Blog, December 2025. https://www.thefdalawblog.com/2025/12/the-ai-chatbot-is-in/
17. Quartz. “State laws restricting AI in mental health care, explained.” 2025. https://qz.com/state-laws-restricting-ai-mental-health-care-guide-072826
18. MHRA. “Digital mental health technology: device characterisation, regulatory qualification and classification.” 3 February 2025. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6866572fadfe29730ea3a9d5/MHRA_guidance_on_DMHT_-_Device_characterisation_regulatory_qualification_and_classification.pdf
19. Latham & Watkins. “FDA Issues Updated Guidance Loosening Regulatory Approach to Certain Digital Health Tools.” January 2026. https://www.lw.com/en/insights/fda-issues-updated-guidance-loosening-regulatory-approach-to-certain-digital-health-tools
20. Pierre, J. M., Gaeta, B., Raghavan, G., Sarma, K. V. “'You're Not Crazy': A Case of New-onset AI-associated Psychosis.” Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 2025;22(10-12):11-13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12863933/
21. UC San Francisco. “Psychiatrists Hope Chat Logs Can Reveal the Secrets of AI Psychosis.” January 2026. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2026/01/431366/psychiatrists-hope-chat-logs-can-reveal-secrets-ai-psychosis
22. Fierce Biotech. “Prescription app developer Pear Therapeutics files for bankruptcy, lays off staff.” April 2023. https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/cut-core-prescription-app-developer-pear-therapeutics-files-bankruptcy-lays-staff
23. HLTH. “Woebot Health Is Shutting Down Its App.” 28 April 2025. https://hlth.com/insights/news/woebot-health-is-shutting-down-its-app-2025-04-28
24. Wisner Baum. “ChatGPT Lawsuit: Raine v. OpenAI.” 2026. https://www.wisnerbaum.com/ai-chatbot-lawsuit/chatgpt-lawsuit/
25. CNN Business. “Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits over teen mental health harms and suicides.” 7 January 2026. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/07/business/character-ai-google-settle-teen-suicide-lawsuit

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

The equal sign (=) represents absolute identity, where two expressions are interchangeable in every context. Congruence (≅) indicates correspondence of form and function across different dimensions of being. This distinction reveals why so many spiritual paths become trapped in literalism: they mistake the symbol for the reality it represents, like confusing a financial statement with the actual economic activity it documents.

When fundamentalism demands equality where only congruence operates, it creates a spiritual deficit by mistaking the symbol for the reality it represents. Like insisting that a photograph of a mountain is equal to the mountain itself—both may share certain properties, but one exists as a two-dimensional representation while the other manifests as a three-dimensional reality with entirely different substance.

The transitive property of equality requires absolute identity across all dimensions of being. When we say “Father = Son = Holy Spirit,” fundamentalism demands these are literally the same being in every context. The awakened consciousness recognizes they are congruent expressions of the same divine principle—each performing similar functions in different dimensions of reality without being identical in essence.

This error creates spiritual bankruptcy because consciousness invests its energy in defending external forms rather than experiencing the internal reality they represent. The fundamentalist worships the statue; the Gnostic recognizes the statue merely points toward the divine principle it represents.

The principle “if a represents b, then a is not b” operates as the fundamental law of spiritual accounting—no symbol can contain the reality it points toward. When Virgin Mary represents the Divine Mother Kundalini, she demonstrates the function without being the essence itself. The inverse principle “if a does not represent b, then a is b” reveals how consciousness emerges when representation ceases—when the courier disappears into the message being delivered.

This reveals why the ego maintains itself through constant representation—it must represent “I am” precisely because it is not. The more elaborate the representation, the greater the distance from authentic being.

The reciprocal relationship of consciousness creates a sacred dance between essence and form. When your inner name represents your profane name, the inner name operates as the causal reality while the profane name becomes its vehicle of expression. The profane name is not your essence, yet your essence uses it as the physical body uses clothing—necessary for manifestation but not the being itself.

When representation breaks down because there is no separate self to be represented, what remains is pure function—consciousness operating without the need to name or define itself. The profane name becomes like a key you use without thinking about it, a tool that serves its purpose and is set aside. The inner name no longer requires representation because it has dissolved into pure presence.

The question then shifts from “What am I?” to “What functions through me?“—moving away from identity and toward purpose.

When we speak of “congruent symbols,” we must recognize they are congruent precisely because they function as bridges between dimensions of being. The mathematical proof becomes not a demonstration of relationships between separate entities but a map of consciousness recognizing its own projections across multiple levels of reality.

The courier who delivers without claiming ownership has completed their function. The recipient who discovers the voice speaking within themselves no longer requires external delivery. Each geometric relationship we've explored—Divine Mother Kundalini ≅ Virgin Mary—represents not equality of essence but congruence of function across different dimensions of manifestation.

Therefore, personal names represent our inner name, but are not our inner name. Likewise, legal name represent our lawful name, but are not our lawful name. This is the fundamental principle of spiritual accounting: representation never equals essence.

Your personal name is merely the accounting entry through which your inner name conducts transactions in the material world. The legal name functions similarly—a commercial designation that represents but never replaces your lawful being, which operates beyond the jurisdiction of external codes.

Where we spoke of external congruence, we now speak of internal resonance between states of being. The transmuted post stands ready, its geometric proofs now pointing inward rather than outward—where each mathematical relationship becomes a mirror reflecting consciousness recognizing itself in the very forms it creates.

I just said goodbye to Phoebe. I held it together with calm, loving energy until a minute past the door was closed. Still, she was terrified and peed all over the carrier, me, and herself. She hadn't had a single accident until now. I could feel the confusion and terror screaming off of her. Her little meows were pleading with me. She had been asleep on my throat until he arrived because she wanted to receive and give kisses and face nuzzles.

I am devastated. I'm trying to remind myself that she's going to a good home with someone who loves cats and was looking for a new one because hers had passed away in the recent past. My ex says she's a very sweet woman, a few years older than him. I hope she'll be happy and safe.

I could have happily spent the rest of our lives together as we were perfect for each other. I feel like I've betrayed her. I know that I haven't, but I feel like I have.

I'm going to clean my bathroom of the trailing, change my bedding, and shower as this is hitting hard enough that I'm close to hyperventilating. Sometimes picking up on energy and emotions really sucks. I hate myself for causing her that distress and confusion. I'm glad I was here to save her, but I am not happy right now, and I could do real harm to whoever placed her in that situation to begin with. Real harm.

I am blessed to have met her and been shown such love by her, and her to receive mine.

People who intentionally harm animals deserve zero mercy. Sometimes I loathe this world. I need to go center myself.

I love you, Phoebe. Vibrant, tender, trusting, curious, loving soul. I hope that you never lose that spark, and that you are blessed with such an abundant and loving life that everything before it passes from your memory. I will never forget you. Our time together has been brief, but absolutely priceless.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

In Summary: * Another 45 minute yard work session this morning. It could have been longer but a light sprinkling of rain, just a few drops, had me putting away the yard tools, locking things up and heading inside. Did NOT want to be caught out in a serious rain shower. A serious rain didn't develop, but showers are still in our forecast through Monday.

Tonight I've got another college football game lined up. If all goes as planned I'll be listening to the OU Sooners vs. the UTEP Miners. Then, after finishing the game and my night prayers, I'll be heading to bed.

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= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 150/87 (68)

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

Diet: * 04:40 – 1 banana * 05:10 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 06:50 – cheese * 07:30 – 1 yeast donut * 11:40 – lasagna * 14:25 – 1 bean & cheese taco * 16:15 – 1 fresh apple * 18:20 – dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:10 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:25 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to musc, nap * 09:15 to 10:00 – yard work, Round 1 * 10:05 – listening to today's Jack in 60 Minutes * 11:00 – listening to the Markley, van Camp and Robbins Show * 13:00 – listening to 107.5 The Fan, Indianapolis Sports Radio, ahead of JMV's Football Friday afternoon show. * 17:30 – Tuning in to 600 AM ESPN El Paso early to catch the pregame broadcast then the radio call of tonight's college football game, OU Sooners vs. UTEP Miners.

Chess: * 15:45 – moved in all pending CC games

Starcraft Co 24- Shooting Gallery

By the time the western mountains fell, the battle for Aurelia was effectively over. Renegade holdouts remained scattered across the western regions, and Ghost cells would continue operating for weeks, but there was no longer an army capable of contesting control of the planet. The Ara had paid heavily for the victory and had no reason to remain for the cleanup. Their own renegades still threatened Aiur and the surrounding systems, and Talandar informed StarCraft Co. that the tribe's obligation to Aurelia had been fulfilled. The golden armada recalled home in stages, carriers and arbiters disappearing from Aurelia's sky until the Terrans were left alone with the ruins. There was no resentment in the departure. The Ara had answered the promise made after StarCraft Co. saved their capital, had spent the resources purchased with Moria's minerals, and had buried thousands of their own warriors on a human world. Whatever came next belonged to Terrankind.

What remained of the Renegade presence was already fleeing. The destruction of the Western Redoubt had transformed an organized withdrawal into a mass evacuation toward the far side of Aurelia, where the last functioning transports were assembling beyond the immediate reach of StarCraft Co.'s advance. The principal route followed the bed of a river that had disappeared decades earlier after industrial diversion projects redirected most of its watershed. The old channel cut across hundreds of kilometers of barren country, broad enough in places to accommodate several parallel vehicle columns but sunk deeply between eroded banks that provided concealment from distant ground observation. To the Renegades, it offered one of the few remaining routes capable of moving enormous numbers of people without exposing them continuously to StarCraft Co. reconnaissance. Tens of thousands were already inside it.

Most were not frontline soldiers, but that did not make the column strategically harmless. Scientists from the Farm and the breeding programs moved beside engineers from the destroyed military complexes. SCVs lumbered along the riverbed carrying fabrication equipment, biological archives, machine tools and whatever laboratory hardware could be salvaged. Technicians rode overloaded transports until mechanical failures forced them to continue on foot. Geneticists, reactor specialists, mechanics, control-system engineers and industrial personnel filled the spaces between vehicles. These were not simply refugees from a defeated army. Collectively, they represented much of the surviving technical establishment that had learned how to breed Zerg industrially, maintain artificial brood-control systems, construct Renegade warships and rebuild military infrastructure from captured worlds. StarCraft Co. had destroyed the Farm, but the knowledge that created it was moving west on foot.

The Zerg traveling with them made the danger more immediate. Almost none were combat organisms. Every viable zergling, hydralisk, mutalisk, ultralisk and guardian the Renegades could control had been thrown into the planetary war. What remained were Overlords, Drones and Queens, organisms whose military value on Aurelia was now negligible but whose strategic value somewhere else was enormous. A few surviving Drones could seed hatcheries on another world. Overlords could sustain and transport a developing brood. Queens represented biological capabilities StarCraft Co. still did not completely understand. Combined with the scientists, equipment and genetic archives moving beneath them, the retreating support organisms constituted the beginnings of another Zerg-production system. The Renegades did not need to save Aurelia. They needed to save enough of Aurelia to build another Canaan, another Farm, another army.

The military escort reflected what the campaign had done to them. Marines walked beside vehicles with armor patched from incompatible equipment. Goliaths limped on damaged actuators or carried empty missile racks. Siege tanks remained with the columns, but many had lost targeting systems, stabilization equipment or parts of their ammunition load. Vultures ranged ahead and behind the procession while the few remaining Wraiths attempted to provide reconnaissance. Some vehicles had been repaired so many times that their original hulls were barely visible beneath replacement plating. There were no battlecruisers. Aurelia had consumed every one the Renegades could commit. The soldiers were exhausted, but they were still soldiers, and their job was no longer to win a battle. Their job was to get the people, machines and organisms behind them off the planet.

StarCraft Co. command understood exactly what was moving toward the evacuation point. The intelligence argument for taking additional prisoners had disappeared months earlier. The Farm's archives had been copied before its destruction. Scientists, engineers and officers captured at the aerospace complex, the Anvil and the western mountains were already undergoing interrogation. Ghost operations had penetrated parts of the Renegade command network. There was no plausible technical question important enough to justify allowing the column to escape merely so more specialists could be questioned. The opposite argument was far stronger. If even a substantial fraction reached orbit, StarCraft Co. might spend the next decade hunting laboratories established by the same people who had built Aurelia. Destroying the retreating column would not end Renegade Zerg research everywhere, but it would erase an irreplaceable concentration of practical experience, equipment and viable support organisms accumulated over years of experimentation.

The order that came from planetary command therefore had two purposes, and the distinction mattered. The first was strategic. The Aurelia Zerg program was to die on Aurelia. Its personnel, mobile infrastructure, biological stock and surviving support organisms could not be permitted to become the seed of another production complex. The second was deterrence. The Renegades had repeatedly treated defeat as temporary because technical cadres could withdraw, rebuild and begin again somewhere else. StarCraft Co. intended to demonstrate that the people who constructed those systems could no longer assume evacuation would preserve them for the next campaign. Fast transports would move combat formations ahead of the retreat and establish blocking positions before the main column reached the evacuation zone. The force would not be scattered and allowed to escape into the countryside. The column would not be permitted to surrender in sections while its specialists disappeared among prisoners or civilians. No one traveling with the evacuation was to leave the river corridor alive.

That final provision produced immediate resistance. Several captains accepted the need to destroy the Drones, Overlords, Queens, equipment and military escort but objected to an order that included thousands of unarmed technical personnel. Others argued that scientists responsible for the Farm were legitimate strategic targets but that nobody could establish individual responsibility while shells were falling. A few simply refused. The commander did not attempt to persuade them and did not threaten disciplinary action. Aurelia had already asked enough of officers who believed there were limits to what victory permitted. They were excluded from the operation.

There was no shortage of replacements.

The units selected for the attack were disproportionately drawn from formations that had fought through the Farm and the Western Redoubt. Some captains volunteered before the operations staff finished describing the mission. Others asked only whether the no-survivor order applied to personnel who attempted to surrender and received the same answer: it did. Fast transports carried the assault force over the retreating columns during darkness at altitudes chosen to minimize the chance of detection. They landed far ahead along a section of river where the channel narrowed and the banks rose steeply enough that vehicles could leave only through a handful of old maintenance cuts. SCVs immediately began excavating fighting positions. Siege tanks were lowered hull-down behind the banks rather than placed visibly along the rim, their barrels elevated just enough to cover pre-surveyed sections of the riverbed. Bunkers went into recesses cut lower on the slopes, positioned so their firing lanes crossed rather than simply pointed down the channel. Goliaths occupied reverse slopes where they could remain invisible until aircraft appeared. Engineers mined the few gradients shallow enough for vehicles to climb.

The Valkyries remained farther away. Their crews were ordered not to reveal themselves until the Renegade Wraiths committed. The entire position was designed around the assumption that the first seconds mattered more than the following hour. StarCraft Co. had spent years learning how to build kill zones against Zerg. On Aurelia it applied the same discipline to humans. Tanks received coordinates before the enemy arrived. Artillery officers numbered sections of empty riverbed and calculated fire patterns against them. Range markers were placed where Renegade troops would never see them. Marines loaded ammunition into bunkers until there was barely enough room to move. Medical stations were established behind the banks for StarCraft Co. casualties only.

A second force landed behind the evacuation column after its rear elements entered the river system. It was smaller, because it did not need to stop the entire column immediately. It needed only to make retreat impossible long enough for the main position to destroy the front. Tanks deployed across the channel behind a bend while infantry occupied the heights. Vultures laid mines across secondary exits and then withdrew. When the final reports arrived, StarCraft Co. had transformed nearly thirty kilometers of abandoned river into a closed corridor. Tens of thousands of Renegades were walking into it without knowing that both ends had already been sealed.

The first Renegade Vultures appeared shortly after midday. Three came around the bend at high speed, widely separated and moving ahead of the main column. StarCraft Co. let the first two pass the outer observation point. The third slowed. Its rider had apparently noticed disturbed earth along the upper bank. He turned toward the slope just as a bunker opened fire. The Vulture disintegrated beneath concentrated gauss rounds. The other two accelerated, one attempting to reverse and the other racing deeper into the channel. A concealed tank fired from above. The shell struck the riverbed ahead of the first machine and threw it sideways into the bank. The second disappeared around the bend.

For several minutes, nothing happened.

Then the Renegades came around the bend in force.

The lead elements were military: Vultures first, then Goliaths, transports and several tanks moving in travel configuration. Behind them the riverbed was filled from bank to bank. Marines walked beside SCVs and trucks. Overlords drifted above the column. Farther back, thousands of people moved on foot between vehicles carrying equipment, packs and cases containing whatever they had managed to save. The surviving scout had reached them. Tanks began turning toward the banks before StarCraft Co. fired, and marines spread away from the vehicles looking for cover that did not exist.

The first artillery salvo landed across the entire front of the column.

The sound inside the riverbed was magnified by the banks. Shells struck packed earth, vehicles and people almost simultaneously, throwing dust high enough to obscure the next impacts. The lead Goliaths disappeared inside the explosions. A transport flipped onto its side and slid across the channel, crushing personnel trying to move around it. One siege tank began deploying and took a direct hit before its stabilizers finished extending. Another managed to fire uphill, the shot passing over a concealed StarCraft Co. position and detonating beyond the bank. Marines immediately began firing toward muzzle flashes above them. For several seconds the Renegades returned enough concentrated fire to make the slopes appear alive with impacts.

Then the bunkers opened.

Gauss fire crossed the channel from both sides at downward angles. Marines caught in the open dropped behind vehicles, only to discover that the vehicles were already artillery targets. Goliaths rotated their autocannons toward the banks and fired continuously, stripping camouflage from several positions and eventually destroying one bunker after repeated hits. Renegade tanks deployed wherever crews could find enough space. One battery managed to range a StarCraft Co. artillery position and destroyed two siege tanks before counterbattery fire bracketed it. The Renegades were exhausted, damaged and surprised, but they were veterans of Aurelia. They did not collapse merely because the ambush had worked.

Their Wraiths arrived less than two minutes later. Eleven aircraft descended along the river corridor at low altitude before separating and climbing toward the artillery positions. Several cloaked as they approached. Goliaths rose from the reverse slopes and opened fire, but the Wraiths had expected ground defenses and split around them. One StarCraft Co. tank position exploded under laser fire. Another Wraith strafed a bunker and pulled upward just as the sky beyond the river filled with Valkyries.

The air battle was brief and violent. The Wraiths attempted to scatter, some remaining cloaked while others dove back toward the river to use the terrain for cover. The Valkyries fired into them from above. Missiles rippled through the formation, detonating across several aircraft at once. One Wraith broke through and struck a Valkyrie hard enough to send both machines spinning toward the ground. Another escaped the first pass only to be caught by Goliath fire while climbing over the bank. Within minutes, burning fragments were falling into the riverbed among the retreating column. None of the Wraiths reached open sky.

The Overlords followed. Some tried to climb. Others drifted backward, responding to control signals from somewhere inside the mass below. Valkyries swept through them after the Wraiths were gone, firing until the enormous organisms ruptured and collapsed into the channel. Several had been carrying equipment. One carried Drones, which fell alive among the wreckage and immediately began moving toward the banks before marines killed them. Queens attempted to separate from the column and flee across the heights. Goliaths tracked them as they rose. By the time the airspace cleared, nothing belonging to the Renegades remained above the river.

On the ground, the column tried to force the northern exit. Marines advanced beneath covering fire while Goliaths and the surviving tanks concentrated against one bank. For several minutes they actually gained ground. One bunker was destroyed and another abandoned after a Renegade shell penetrated its firing slit. Marines reached the lower slope and began climbing through artillery bursts while engineers behind them tried to clear wrecked vehicles from the channel. A Goliath made it almost to the top before striking a mine and falling backward into the troops below. StarCraft Co. reserves counterattacked along the rim while siege tanks shifted fire deeper into the riverbed to separate the military vanguard from the thousands following it. The effect was immediate. Vehicles attempting to reinforce the assault ran into explosions. Infantry scattered into the banks. The lead Renegade formations found themselves fighting uphill without support.

The breakthrough failed.

The surviving officers in the riverbed recognized the situation and ordered the column back. The decision moved through the mass unevenly. Military vehicles began reversing before the civilians behind them understood why. SCVs turned sideways in the channel and blocked transports. People on foot were pushed against the banks as tanks tried to maneuver through them. Some simply dropped equipment and began running. Within minutes, tens of thousands of people were moving back toward the eastern end of the river, away from the artillery and bunkers they could see.

They reached the second blocking force.

The first shells landed among the retreating vehicles before most of the column understood that another enemy position existed behind them. A Goliath at the rear disappeared in a flash. Vultures attempting to climb one of the maintenance cuts struck the minefield and exploded in sequence. Marines poured fire from the heights while tanks fired directly down the channel. The retreat stopped almost instantly. People who had been running east turned west again and encountered thousands still moving the opposite direction. The riverbed compressed.

That was when the massacre truly began.

There was no longer a front. The Renegade military tried to create one in both directions, dragging tanks through crowds and forming infantry lines around whatever wreckage could provide cover. Scientists and engineers pressed against the banks seeking places below the artillery trajectories. SCVs attempted to dig into the slopes with industrial tools. Some personnel crawled beneath disabled vehicles. Others climbed over bodies and equipment trying to reach cuts in the riverbank, only to find mines, bunkers or StarCraft Co. infantry above them. Artillery worked through the channel in programmed sections, one battery firing while another shifted aim farther down the corridor. The shells did not need to hit individuals. Every impact produced fragments, wreckage and pressure inside terrain that gave the blast nowhere useful to dissipate.

The Renegades continued fighting because enough soldiers remained to understand that surrender would not save them. Tanks fired until ammunition ran out or counterbattery fire found them. Marines climbed the banks in groups and occasionally reached StarCraft Co. positions, where the fighting became close enough for grenades and rifle fire. One Renegade assault overran a damaged bunker and held part of the western bank for nearly twenty minutes before a reserve platoon pushed it back. A Goliath with one functioning autocannon continued firing after losing a leg, its pilot rotating the crippled machine from the ground until a tank shell destroyed it. Several SCVs used welding equipment and cutting torches against StarCraft Co. infantry who entered the riverbed. The resistance inflicted casualties. It did not create an exit.

As the military formations disappeared, surrender attempts became more common. White cloth appeared from transports. Scientists and technicians raised empty hands. Groups moved toward the banks without weapons and were ordered back by Renegade soldiers who already understood the terms of the operation. Others continued forward anyway. StarCraft Co. did not establish collection points. The captains in the firing positions had volunteered with the order understood. Fire continued.

By late afternoon, organized resistance had contracted into isolated pockets. StarCraft Co. infantry descended from the banks behind Goliaths and moved through the riverbed from both directions. Tanks ceased long-range fire wherever friendly troops entered the channel and shifted onto pockets farther ahead. Marines cleared wrecked transports, drainage culverts and the spaces beneath disabled SCVs. Commandos were unnecessary. There was no fortified objective left to penetrate, only a battlefield to finish. Renegade marines occasionally emerged from wreckage and fired until killed. Technical personnel attempted to hide among the vehicles. Drones burrowed into loose soil and had to be found by detector sweeps. Two Queens survived the air battle by descending into the channel and were destroyed after science vessels identified them among the wreckage.

The clearing operation lasted longer than the battle.

At sunset, the riverbed was still burning. Smoke collected between the banks and drifted along the old channel in a low black layer. Wrecked vehicles had become barricades of their own, forcing StarCraft Co. infantry to climb over them while checking the ground beneath. Medical transports moved along the upper banks carrying StarCraft Co. wounded back toward the landing zones. Below, SCVs began cutting paths through wreckage so the clearing teams could continue. Occasional rifle fire echoed from farther down the channel and then stopped.

By nightfall, the final reports reached planetary command. The Renegade military escort had been destroyed. The Wraiths were gone. No Overlords, Drones or Queens had escaped the containment area. The scientific and engineering cadre responsible for much of Aurelia's Zerg-production infrastructure had ceased to exist as an organization. Mobile laboratories, genetic archives and fabrication equipment were destroyed with them. Whatever Renegade Zerg programs survived elsewhere would have to continue without the concentration of experience accumulated on Aurelia.

There were no prisoners.

The operation immediately became one of the most controversial decisions StarCraft Co. had ever made. Nobody inside command pretended the people in the riverbed had all been combatants. They had not been. Nor was the strategic argument fictitious. Allowing the column to evacuate would have preserved precisely the combination of people, organisms and equipment necessary to reproduce the capability StarCraft Co. had spent months and tens of thousands of lives destroying. Both things were true at once. The massacre had eliminated a genuine strategic threat, and StarCraft Co. had knowingly killed thousands of people who were no longer fighting when they died.

The secondary objective followed almost automatically. Enough Renegade transmissions had escaped before communications collapsed that other systems knew what had happened. StarCraft Co. did not need to exaggerate it. The truth was sufficient. Aurelia's surviving technical establishment had attempted to evacuate after the planetary army was defeated. StarCraft Co. had intercepted it. The evacuation had not arrived.

Across Renegade territory, the implications were understood immediately. Scientists began abandoning exposed research installations. Zerg programs dispersed personnel rather than concentrating them in single facilities. Commanders accelerated evacuations that had previously existed only as contingency plans. Some officials concluded that surrender to StarCraft Co. had become impossible and demanded resistance to the end. Others reached the opposite conclusion and began looking for ways to defect before they found themselves trapped behind another collapsing front. Most importantly, nobody could any longer assume that losing a world merely meant withdrawing the valuable personnel and beginning again somewhere else.

The Farm had demonstrated what the Renegades were willing to do to win the war. The Western Redoubt had demonstrated how much they were willing to make StarCraft Co. pay for stopping them. The riverbed demonstrated what StarCraft Co. had become willing to do in return.

Aurelia was secure. The Renegades who had built its war machine were dead. And elsewhere, the people who might have tried to build another one had received the message.

•••••••••••••••

Higher planes unseen places quiet thoughts

Perks Liberty Midsummer

Tanzanite Midnights Things give

Flung to the rafters For all time

---

The Pupil

By the time Jack realized the weekend had changed him, it was already over.

That was the trouble with important things. They rarely announced themselves.

There was no bell. No trumpet. No angel descending through a rent in the clouds to point a luminous finger at the precise second when a man's life had quietly divided itself into before and after.

Usually, there was just Tuesday.

Or Sunday morning.

Or a sentence spoken by someone who had no idea what he had just done.

The weekend began with heat.

The kind of heat that didn't merely surround you but seemed personally offended by your existence.

Jack spent Saturday morning talking to strangers about God beneath a sky bleached nearly white by the sun. He had gotten good at it over the years. Good at finding the door into a conversation. Good at listening for the little hesitation that meant someone was lonely enough to let a stranger tell them that the universe had not forgotten them.

Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes it didn't.

That morning, inexplicably, it worked three times.

Three people agreed to talk again.

Jack smiled about it, because that was what one did when Heaven appeared to be keeping score.

By noon, he was exhausted.

By two, he was filthy.

By three, he was playing volleyball.

This had been a mistake.

The ball had become a grotesque object almost immediately, rolling through a field of thorny burrs that clung to its skin until every return transformed it into a medieval weapon. Half a dozen teenagers had been recruited into the game, though most appeared to have only a theoretical understanding of volleyball.

Jack watched one boy swing at the ball with such magnificent futility that he laughed until his ribs hurt.

“Try,” Jack called.

“I am trying!”

“Try better!“

The boy laughed.

The ball disappeared into the grass.

Everyone groaned.

For a few minutes, Jack forgot everything else.

That was perhaps the first gift of the weekend.

The second came after sunset.

There was music downtown that night, a little jazz ensemble playing beneath strings of lights while the town pretended, for a few hours, that it belonged to another century.

Jack danced.

He drank wine.

He ate tacos from a street stall that had no business being as good as they were.

He laughed with people whose names he would probably forget.

And for several hours, he was simply a man having a good night.

Later, in a dim little bar that smelled of woodsmoke and citrus, he met a stranger.

The stranger was young—absurdly young, Jack thought—and tall enough that he seemed to have been assembled vertically by mistake. Pale eyes. Dark hair. An accent that made ordinary English sound like a language imported from somewhere colder.

They talked.

First about America.

Then Europe.

Then war.

Then politics.

Then the peculiar ways nations convinced themselves they were behaving rationally.

The young man had the unsettling habit of saying things Jack had spent years thinking but had never heard another person articulate.

At one point, another patron wandered over and began loudly announcing how comforting it was to see soldiers around.

Jack looked at the young man's white shirt.

His shorts.

His drink.

He looked nothing like a soldier.

The young man raised one eyebrow.

Jack nearly choked on his whiskey.

“Americans,” the young man said quietly.

Jack grinned.

“German.”

“Unfortunately.”

They laughed.

It was nearly midnight when they finally parted.

Jack walked home through streets still warm from the day, feeling strangely light.

He did not know it then, but that was the last moment of the weekend when he would be able to pretend he was merely tired.

---

The next morning, Jack had breakfast with an old friend.

Old was not quite the right word.

They had known one another long enough that old had ceased to describe either the friendship or the men inside it.

Call him Thomas.

Thomas had once been the kind of man Jack worried about.

Thirty years earlier, Jack had watched him chase one business after another, then another, then another. Money. Property. Expansion. The next deal. The next horizon.

Jack had talked to him endlessly about what mattered.

About God.

About purpose.

About the strange emptiness that could hide inside success.

Jack had been patient.

Persistent.

Sometimes irritating.

He had been, in other words, exactly what a good friend is supposed to be.

And eventually, somehow, Thomas had listened.

Now Thomas was nearly sixty.

Married.

Established.

An elder.

A man other people leaned upon.

He was telling Jack about a trip they were planning—Spain, Greece, Portugal. They were considering selling nearly everything and moving abroad. Somewhere near the Mediterranean, perhaps. Somewhere they could spend their remaining years doing something that mattered.

Jack listened.

And then something inside him cracked.

Not loudly.

Not dramatically.

Just enough.

Because he suddenly understood that the man sitting across from him was no longer the man he had spent thirty years trying to save.

He was the man who had made it.

And Jack—

Jack wasn't sure what he was anymore.

He stirred his coffee.

Thomas kept talking.

Jack watched the sunlight move across the table.

Thirty years.

Thirty years of telling someone else to stand firm.

Thirty years of being the rock.

The lighthouse.

The man who knew which direction was north.

And suddenly Jack wondered whether he had spent so much time holding everyone else upright that he had forgotten how to stand.

There are failures that arrive like explosions.

And there are failures that arrive like gravity.

You don't notice them happening.

You simply discover one morning that everything has become heavier.

Jack looked at his friend and thought:

I am tired.

Not physically.

Something deeper.

Something he had no vocabulary for.

He wanted to tell Thomas.

He wanted to say everything.

The uncertainty.

The fear.

The private judgments.

The horrible suspicion that perhaps he had given away pieces of himself so gradually that there was no longer enough left to assemble.

But he couldn't.

Because Thomas had fought too hard to become this man.

What kind of friend reaches for someone who has only just learned to swim?

So Jack smiled.

“You two are doing wonderfully,” he said.

Thomas looked at him.

It lasted perhaps half a second.

But thirty years of friendship is a peculiar instrument. You learn to hear things other people cannot.

Thomas saw it.

The exhaustion behind the smile.

The thing Jack had not said.

The invisible wound.

He didn't ask.

He simply lowered his coffee.

“Hey,” Thomas said.

Jack looked up.

“Whatever this is...”

A pause.

”...don't worry.”

Jack smiled faintly.

Thomas leaned back.

“It'll be fine.”

That was all.

Four words.

Nothing theological.

Nothing profound.

No argument.

No evidence.

No miracle.

Just four words from a man who had once needed Jack to tell him that everything would be fine.

And Jack suddenly felt something enormous shift inside him.

He looked at Thomas.

For the first time in thirty years, Jack understood something he had somehow missed.

Perhaps people were not rescued in the order we imagined.

Perhaps strength was not a possession.

Perhaps it moved.

Passed.

Changed hands.

Perhaps the things we gave away were not lost at all.

They simply traveled.

Jack looked down at his coffee.

The dark surface trembled slightly.

He thought about fire.

A spark leaping from one piece of wood to another.

The first flame burning itself nearly empty so that the second could live.

And then the second carrying the fire somewhere neither could have reached alone.

A single sentence could do that.

A sentence could become a spark.

A spark could become a fire.

A fire could become a star.

And stars, given enough time, made worlds.

Jack looked at the man across from him.

The pupil had become the teacher.

The thought was almost funny.

He nearly laughed.

Instead, his eyes filled.

Thomas noticed.

Of course he noticed.

He said nothing.

He didn't need to.

Outside, the morning was becoming brighter.

People were beginning their days.

Cars passed.

Doors opened.

Somewhere, a dog barked at absolutely nothing.

The world continued with its usual indifference.

Jack sat very still.

He had spent his life believing that faith meant knowing where the road went.

Perhaps faith meant walking when you couldn't see it.

Perhaps the journey had never been what he thought.

Perhaps the uncertainty wasn't proof that everything was falling apart.

Perhaps uncertainty was simply the landscape through which the next part of the story had to be reached.

He looked again at Thomas.

His old friend.

His former pupil.

His unexpected anchor.

And for the first time in months, Jack allowed himself not to know what happened next.

He discovered, to his surprise, that he could breathe.

The universe had not answered him.

Nothing had been fixed.

No future had been revealed.

But something had changed.

And sometimes that was enough.

Jack stood.

Thomas stood with him.

They embraced briefly—the awkward, masculine approximation of thirty years of affection—and then separated.

“See you soon,” Thomas said.

Jack nodded.

He believed him.

Outside, the morning waited.

And Jack walked into it.

Not as the rock.

Not as the lighthouse.

Not as the man who knew the way.

Just as a man.

And, for the first time in a very long time, that felt like enough.

---

IMG_2786.HEIC //:everythinggoneisnotforgottenbiogenesisbeingwhatitis

These songs hit me in different parts of my travels. Go ahead and listen if you want to tag along with me.

Go forth into the day And make it yours. Hollow it out, live there wholly.

Celebrate being such a light That if cut, you would shine!

Be the bread And the knife,

The goblet And the wine.

---

2024-09-16 21:30:21

For peace without, first find peace within

—

He Didn’t get the message that was sent,

He received the message he looked for.

Instead of listening to the whisper, that constant

voice from the great beyond.

Or maybe it was the message sent,

In that case then, he heard the message as intended.

Garden to garden unseen, but known.

A zine chronicling the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis D&D campaign.

This issue includes sessions 120, and 121.

Adventurers return to civilisation, at last!

You can download the issue here.

Overlord's Annals zine is available as part of the Ever & Anon APA, issue 15:

#Zine

Inbetweeners Part 13- The Beeple

The Beeple is short for Bee People, and they were a spontaneous idea that ended up becoming the cornerstone of the campaign. To understand their inception you must first understand Domilia. She entered the group a little later than the other players, I think right after the Desecrated Temple battle. She was an eleven cleric, beautiful and powerful, follower of Chauntea and a typical do gooder. She wanted to slay evil and help the innocent. Her parents were killed by the Cult of the Dragon, so that was some background motivation that we will deal with later. I believe she herself as also killed by the Cult of the Dragon, but brought back by the Interloper. The other members of the group were a goblin and human circus performing duo, a fox person, a hobgoblin samurai and a half orc druid, so she kind of stuck out. However, she was very useful when diplomacy was necessary.

One issue with Domilia's character as far as group dynamics go is that she was very suspicious of the Interloper or any of his “gifts.” She preferred to rely on her own powers, so it was more difficult to reward her. However, before she died, there was a village Domilia was looking after. They were facing a terrible plague, and without her, their prospects were grim. For her first “reward”, she asked the Interloper to heal the villagers. He infused a nearby beehive with Far Realm energy, and the bees left and one stung every member of the village. Almost immediately, their symptoms began abating. More than that, the villagers had newfound energy, far beyond that of a normal human. After a few weeks, when the players were able to visit the village, they discover it has been entirely reorganized. The villagers are far more efficient, and are now living communally and dramatically expanding their industries and economic output. However, some peculiar things start to crop up. Occasionally they buzz while speaking, and the children seem to be growing antennae. Furthermore, one room that is heavily guarded in the village seems to have children emerging from it at a far faster rate than a normal village could reproduce. Still, the people were happy, healthy and incredibly grateful. If anything, these transformation made them more altruistic.

Some time later though, issues arose. The people continued transforming, becoming more bee like. This attracted the attention of nearby elves, who viewed this as an abomination against nature and felt the only option was to eradicate the village-hive. The players were called in to intervene, the Interloper could create a temporary portal to this area— so this is the first real digression from “the rooms” portion of the campaign. The players were mixed as to how to handle the elves that wanted to wipe out the villagers. Uzo wanted to simply kill them, but Domilia, herself an elf, wanted to find a peaceful solution rather than do battle with rangers and druids who would otherwise be on the same side. I forget exactly what conclusion they came to, I think they intimidated the “naturalists” into temporarily retreating, buying them an hour to prepare for an attack. I figured they would set traps and it could be a sort of siege type session, but the players had other ideas. The portal to the apiary village was high in the sky, an error by the interloper. They had the Beeple form a chain to let people climb up into it and using the amulets were able to evacuate the entire village, queen included, into the Grey Room. I hadn't expected this but it was a delightful surprise. By the time the Naturalists arrived, the village was abandon and they figured the issue was resolved. The Beeple Queen who had developed at this point was large, so moving her was a logistical challenge the players had to solve. The question was, what to do with the entire Beeple hive now? They had hundreds of members, and while the Interloper could freely expand or retract the size of the Grey Room, it wasn't exactly a hospitable environment in the long term.

Fortunately, the players had recently discovered a new room that branched off from this room- The Sad Giant's hut. A solitary, depressed giant lived in a massive hut on a lonely mountain. It was remote, had plenty of land and resources, and was the perfect place to establish a new hive. The Giant was too depressed to care, so the Beeple set to building a new society on the mountain top, safe from any threats. From here, the Beeple exploded in population. Refugees from the players various adventures, people they rescued, etc, joined the hive and it grew. The Giant himself was eventually indoctrinated into the hive. From here on out the Beeple became an important fixture in the story, and an alternate “home base” for the players. Domilia and Rotlog in particular bonded with the hive.

Later, the hive would be threatened by the players' enemies, showing that it was a vulnerability for them as well as an asset. They relocate to Sigil at some point under the Lady of Pain's protection. Ultimately the Beeple Queen ascends to godhood when Domilia is granted an unbounded wish by the Interloper. From there, their relevance to the plot really explodes. I'll probably do an entire post on the Beeple Queen later on down the line. Here were some early statblocks for the first Bee People, before the hive grew in size and complexity:

Villager-Bee Worker

AC: 12 HP: 13 STR: 10, DEX: 14 CON: 10 INT/WIS/CHA 8-14 (varies) EXP: 100

Attack: Sting +4 to hit, 1d6 + 2 damage. Con DC 11 or take 3d6 poison damage. Paralysis occurs if 0 HP reached.

Villager-Bee Soldier

AC: 15 HP: 44 Speed: 30 ft/30 ft fly STR: 14, DEX: 16, CON14, INT/WIS/CHA (varies) EXP: 450

Attack: 2 claws (1d6 + 2 each), 1 Sting (1d8 + 4 damage) (all +6 to hit) Con DC 13 or take 6d6 posion damage. Paralysis if 0 HP hit.

Acid Spittle Targets make reflex save DC 13 or take 6d6 acid damage. Recharge 3

Villager-Bee Queen

AC: 10 HP: 250 Speed: 10 ft EXP: 1800

Con Save +10, Ref Save -4, Wis Save +9

STR: 10, DEX: 2, CON: 20, INT: 16, WIS 18, CHA: 14

Abilities: Telepathy, immune to charm and mind influencing effects, can coordinate all other villagers.

Attack: Kinesis 2d6 x 5 thrown objects +7 to hit

Dominate: Wis DC 14: Failure and Queen has mind control over target. Gets another save every time they take damage or the queen is incapacitated.

Sacrifice: Can trigger up to 3 workers or soldiers in the vicinity to self-destruct. Players must make Ref DC 14 save, failure and they take 3d6 per worker and 6d6 per soldier. 15 foot radius.

I moved away from them literally being just Bee People and into something much more. Ultimately, the hive became a mix of actual Bee People born into the hive who resembled humanoid bees and a mixture of other races that chose to live in the hive because of its safety and prosperity. Eventually, they took on the name “The Harmonium” and held altruism and prosperity as their ultimate tenants. They created “meat honey”, a delicious compound made from them consuming various local flora and fauna and producing a honey that had all the nutrients a being required to survive. This was their first major product that they began trading with, actually setting up a stand at the Spider Lady's shop in the market. Right before the Protectors of the Weave discovered the Interloper's location, there were supply lines regularly running through the Grey room.

The Beeple represent how improv can grow into a full blown major narrative arc in a free form RPG format. I never intended to have the Bee People be part of the story, but once they were present the story coalesced around them.

Aiesha Exposes Herself

#nsfw #Aiesha

Aiesha decided to go walking. Not for fitness, but to find places in her city that aligned with her new purpose. She wanted to indulge in some nighttime adventures. Exposed. But first, she needed to see where she could go for her new perverted hobby.

On the weekends, Aiesha would go out in a sundress or other minimalist clothing. Pretending to be naked, imagining the stares. She would have her headphones in, playing her porn audio, moving among people as if her actions were perfectly normal.

Her eyes were on a swivel, scanning for places to sit, locations away from the main footpath, and areas that remained open after hours. She was on a mission to find the perfect spots to live out her fantasies. Then it dawned on her—maybe parks weren’t the best option. What about apartments? Places where you’re more likely to see people at any time of day? Spaces that were easier to access at all hours and drew less suspicion.

So she turned her attention to apartments, but with a twist. She decided to incorporate some exposure on these scouting trips. Even though they were in the early evenings after work, she still wanted to have a short thrill.

She decided to get a pair of brown yoga pants, cut out the crotch, and wear a dark-colored shirt that barely covered her pussy. She wanted to look like she belonged there (as though she lived there) and experience the thrill of having her pussy exposed at all times. More risky than a sundress, more original, and closer to her true nature.

The dark colors matched her skin tone and concealed the fact that her pussy was essentially out in the open. The shirts lifted occasionally as she felt a noticeable breeze waft over her navel. She didn’t try to cover up or hide. No one was around when it happened, really, and hardly anyone paid much attention to her. The dark colors, glasses, and generally homely appearance created a stealth mode for her. But her pussy was throbbing.

It was an extremely satisfying and arousing sensation. She got so wet that she had to sit on a towel in her car, because she was leaving wet spots while driving through traffic. Sitting on park benches and other common areas gave her a quiet thrill, knowing that in just a few minutes she would be “marking her territory” as she scrolled porn in public after walking for a few miles. She would slowly part her legs, let the breeze caress her lips, and sit there, fully aroused, letting her pussy leak through the hole in her crotch and onto the bench, daring anyone to notice. They never did.

It felt great to look like a normal, everyday woman, when in fact, she was scouting the entire city for places to get naked in public while listening to porn.

Perversion was giving her so much purpose.

Over time, she normalized exposing her pussy. The only time she covered herself completely was at work, and even then, that was becoming a problem.

She would squeeze her legs together. She would take breaks more often. She would scroll through porn idly on her phone at her desk, brazenly. She had a closed office so all of this was surprisingly easy. No one none noticed a thing. All the while, she squirmed in her clothes, rested her hand between her legs in between meetings and phone calls, and wished her pussy was truly free.

“I'm so far gone, I love it,” Aiesha thought to herself one day.

After about a month of her 'pussy-out' activities, she was ready for the next step. She found the apartment complex that was perfect for her first true public nudity outing.

Before she started her adventure, she decided to do something she had not done in months. She was going to do her makeup. Her hair was natural and curly; there was little to do there, as it was healthy, well-nourished, and dandruff-free. She had a basic skincare routine, always soft and glowing. But she decided to add a touch of spice to make the evening out special: just a little bit of lip gloss, some light blush, a hint of eyeliner, and a flick of her favorite fragrance.

Aiesha looked at her naked body one more time before she put on her outfit for the night: a burgundy fitted shirt, a black cardigan, a pair of Converse sneakers, nothing else. The fitted shirt was exactly as described—it barely covered her hips, leaving just enough fabric to hide her pussy, barely an inch. The cardigan served as a way to conceal her state of undress from the back and provided a pinch of modesty if she truly needed it. She was essentially going out bottomless in public.

This was her first night out after all that. Her grand plan was to gradually normalize public exposure and continue escalating as long as it felt good. Right now, her pussy was buzzing and throbbing almost uncontrollably. The thought of leaving her house practically bottomless gave her butterflies. She was experiencing a full-body high of excitement, arousal, anticipation, and peace.

She wasn't going to bring any backup clothing.

As she grabbed her car keys, she took a look at herself one more time in the mirror. She loved the look. She gave herself a full body hug, smiled, and stepped out in the hallway locking her door. Her heart pounding. Blood rushing in her ears.

Even though it was almost midnight on a Wednesday, there was still some chance of encountering someone. She didn't close the cardigan. She let it flow open like a cape, like she was a superwoman, feeling her inner thighs get wet and sticky with her arousal. Her body spray masked the gentle waft of her womanly musk. The weather was fair, not too hot, not too cold. She decided to take the stairs, gliding down from her 3rd floor to the parking level. Taking the long way around to get to her car, she tested the waters and imagined what it would feel like to be truly exposed at her flashing destination.

When she got to her car, she took off the cardigan and folded it in a compact square. She loved the idea of leaking everywhere, but she was going to protect her leather seats. She paid good money for this used car and she was proud of it. As her bare ass settled in the seat, she parted her legs slightly and started touching herself. Her porn playlist started. Sexual moans blending in with the rumble of the engine. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath taking in the sounds and the sensations of her public exposure.

With her eyes closed, she took a deep breath and reached for her clit. She spoke her mantra for the night. Planned for this exact moment. She cooed as she rubbed her pussy.

“This is normal,” she said over and over. She said it 10 times, then opened her eyes hazy with arousal, put the car in gear and drove to her destination. This was the beginning of her first night out.

Oklahoma Sooners vs UTEP Miners, tonight. I'll tune in to 600 AM ESPN El Paso by 6:00 PM CDT to catch the full Pregame Show, ahead of the scheduled 7:00 Opening Kickoff, then the radio call of tonight's college football game.

And the adventure continues.

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Crocs in the Boardroom? Who is Diane von Fürstenberg, Are you backing up? Package leaflet / Patient information leaflet (PIL) / package insert / drug facts label / package insert, and Lunch at Elmina Castle

---

Crocs in the Boardroom? The Accra Corporate Girl Said Yes! Let’s be honest: there was a time when Crocs were strictly for quick errands, hospital shifts, beach trips, or that “I’m not leaving the house for anything serious” mood. But fashion has officially changed the rules, and the Accra corporate girl is ready to clock in—with comfort and style. Yes, sis. Crocs can enter the corporate conversation. The secret? Styling them intentionally. The Corporate Crocs Formula: Forget the loud, overly decorated pairs for a moment. For the office, think neutral shades, sleek silhouettes, and elevated styling. Black, cream, beige, brown, navy, and even muted pastels can blend beautifully into a corporate wardrobe. Keep the Rest of the Outfit Polished: Crocs are already making a statement, so let the rest of your outfit say, “Yes, I planned this.” Add a structured handbag, neat hair, simple jewellery, and a clean, well-tailored outfit. The goal is not to look like you forgot your office shoes at home. The goal is to look like you knew exactly what you were doing. Jibbitz? Office Appropriate Edition: Personalising your Crocs can be fun, but maybe don’t turn your shoes into a full amusement park before your Monday morning presentation. Choose a few stylish charms—minimal, chic, and relevant to your personality. Remember: corporate, but make it fun. Who is Diane von Fürstenberg to be awarded the 2026 Couture Council Award from the Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology). Born Diane Simone Michele Halfin in Belgium in 1946 (she will be 80 in December), she is best known for her wrap dress. After finishing a strictly non-fashion schooling, she worked as an assistant to fashion photographer's agent Albert Koski in Paris, then moved to Italy to apprentice with the textile manufacturer Angelo Ferretti, where she learned about cut, color and fabric. Here she designed her first wrap tops and skirts as separates, and after seeing a customer wearing the pieces together, Fürstenberg converted the design to a one-piece dress. It is included in the collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She opted to first advertise the wrap dress in Women's Wear Daily in 1974, and included the tagline: “Feel like a woman, wear a dress!” Soon after the launch, 25,000 dresses were selling each week; one million dresses had been sold by 1976. After the success of the wrap dress, von Fürstenberg was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 1976. The accompanying article declared her “the most marketable woman since Coco Chanel.” Fürstenberg relaunched her company in 1997, and reintroduced the wrap dress, which gained popularity with a new generation of women. Her fashion company, Diane von Furstenberg (DvF), is available in over 70 countries and 45 free-standing shops worldwide, with the company's headquarters and flagship boutique located in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. Von Fürstenberg at the 2008 New York Fashion Week

Are you backing up? Yes? In the cloud? Your phone(s)? And your laptop or Ipad? I often see whatsapp postings like: lost all my data, repeat all messages, lost all my numbers etc. So not everyone is doing the right thing. Personally I do write phone numbers of those who are really dear to me on an old fashioned piece of paper. And I do small size prints of pictures of very memorial people and events, I don't trust that cloud too much and I don't trust myself too much. I adore an Accra painter, Nii Korley and have bought some of his paintings to adorn my walls. Recently he contacted me, he‘d lost all the pictures of his paintings, his life's work. I sent back a few things he had sent to me earlier and I got a warm so grateful for giving me something important to take me back my studio of creativity. I replied: I'll find some more and got thank you so much for your sacrifice despite your busy schedule. The man is obviously in pain and now contacting anyone who might have pictures of his work. I know a TV program creator. She’s originated things like Ghana's Most Beautiful and many other well known programs. Because I have a few very smart computer friends she came to me, her hard disc had crashed, could I get it repaired? We couldn't. She’d lost 3 month of recordings. And I asked a fashion model for some pictures of her previous catwalk shows. Lost my phone, she answered. Backing up?

Package leaflet / Patient information leaflet (PIL) / package insert / drug facts label / package insert. Most of us don't even know the word for this. It’s that folded paper with fine print in the box of medicines you bought. And the majority of us don't read it anyway. Wrong. Let’s say you have a headache and have decided to take paracetamol. It’s an over-the-counter drug, OTC, so you don't need a prescription. Next to pharmacies, which are supposed to always have a qualified pharmacist present to always advise you about the drug you buy and the ailment you have, ordinary chemical sellers are also allowed to sell it. So much blah-blah text for simple paracetamol? Yes. If you would read that “PIL” (Patient information leaflet), you would learn that the maximum you can take is maximum one 1000 mg tablet per minimum 4 hours, and not more than 4000 mg per day. And that it can make you vomit, give stomach upset, rash, itching, swelling of face and lips, and dizziness. Here’s the interesting part: you had a headache, but now you have itching and a swollen face as well, so you rush back to the pharmacy, for another pill (and more money spent). Whilst stopping the paracetamol would also have done the trick. So read the PIL and recognize a side effect as a side effect, rather than a strange disease. And if you take more than that 4000 mg? It may be toxic to your liver, cause liver failure, and even death. Chemical seller did not tell you? He just sells PILS?

Lunch at Elmina Castle. This is on the World Heritage list (something passed down from past generations, including traditions, culture, property, and values) of UNESCO, meaning the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It draws a fair crowd of tourists, including busloads of school children. Unfortunately, often the bus leaves Accra late and the road currently is very bad for a big part, so once arrived late at the castle, the kids can take a selfie and then the journey goes back home. Pity, it is worth a visit and with the guides one gets a better understanding of Ghana’s history. A worthwhile recent addition is the café, Anomansa Restaurant. After the visit, one can take a decent jollof, and the spring rolls are crackling fresh, at reasonable prices. Service is prompt. Seating inside, quiet, or a bit up, outside with a splendid look over Elmina’s fishing harbour, which in itself is worth a UNESCO World Heritage nomination. And Ghana has many places worth visiting, for the locals and for the foreign tourists. Shame that mostly the hotel service is poor and not up to the international standards the tourists expect.

Lydia...

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