What if you decided to get up today and block the news. News is not happy stuff; I look at it when I wake-up in the a.m., when I wake in the middle of the night (though I try not to), and again throughout the day and evening. Crazy, eh? Sliding laterally for a moment – and I'll come back to the news shortly – take a look at this photo 👇 …it was taken during autumn and currently this is summer, but…

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…this is typical of the view that I wake up to every morning. Notwithstanding that I live a hundred meters or so behind this viewpoint and more elevated – and notwithstanding the slight magenta-cast in the photo – this is typically my view: winter, summer, spring, and fall. It’s a community of 500 souls or so and the nearest town of 100k people is almost 200km away. Then, the nearest city with 1 million+ people is across an ocean – I live on an island – an almost 2000km away by automobile drive.

Back to the news: what, really, is the point? Conflict, strife, raging forest fires, political unrest. It’s endless. It’s exactly what keeps us interested and “entertained.” It draws us in. It actually feels like the events of the day are in our back yard. And, for a lot of people in this world, it probably is. But for many of us, such isn’t the case (although last summer we were impacted by forest fires).

So, if you’re waking up and the news got you down, then tune out for a day or a week or more and tune in to your small corner of the world and enjoy the view. Give your mental state a rest—if the news of the world is coming to your doorstep then you’ll know soon enough. Chill, people.

Enjoy your day 📷

W

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

The apiary be Scottish run to mute Late December this hugger And seeing simply rise What time in Hearst for Will Enough of oak And seeming simpler For five octet and lane And pasture by the law Economy forever- and nines to the Moon Giving ray to God And night shall let us be- the end of war.

Fever

Two nights on the payload Threat twice to war In comfort and complain Vices Europe And in the day I follow Darkness for a year Norway fold And night is in you While scolded to the deck I am here and enemy still For currents to thy bend I will make you my guy Supposed then,- our lights of war do lead For vicious cannons afire Fading to you in death Across sullen valleys Prayer in peace That we can afford I’ll lend you my alarm And to this river be,- an Apple and amend For the curious shows of home I will give you my ward And to the early say Nights for breakfast with Saint Peter Sparing someone Rome And the silence empty be—- But we are on the road The path of enemy as still Waiting for vlad and pie The symphony of roses

Skipping off the rough pay Nothing could match for our hand Remembering this enemy war Is our Victory to the end And almost laying waste For this Victory to be kind In Navalny to Repentigny Citizen day at the run And its beheading light For the glory as they came Nights to Srinagar then Collect to Christ at be The folds of Dever And I had the lights of then Furious in hand But better by the Sun

In each of her was the wild A precious Woman leading now And all across the encumbered Sitting waitful Den In fishery and keep Pray for every goal And what afforded to Saxby In Crosses due and fade

And the liminal light For fading every war And a citizen to the eyes Made plain to appear at one And aching then at heart The standing armies of Peking Making glory to their Heaven Wrought of guns to keep the lune

And ‘fraiding then A curious ode to them The Chinese soldier at war To keep away our other foes Between the charity neglect And a bastion of small people Voting breathless to inline

And what of these honeybees Simple and small rely That vlad was never here And died within our path And sympathy play for keeping Christ abound to drifting time The Earth will reach the day that would- the silence after every war

In Green collect by fortune when To Timmins with a Woman Across the floor of every star Waiting for the journey home

Peace In reflect and making The glory of my tent I sat and wept for Oprah Winfrey And all a while, I was white Impelled by Mother Nature I knew this town like open fire The Neighbour to my South would wonder To win in virtue takes a car And a patch of lonely Thanksgiving sticks To dawn and scrape the berries waiting Never off to greater pay I sat and watched the distance grow Here, Mother near For aching tendons small and wide A place in Fortune just to rinse The tears of mud procession me.

Every night is a quiet sadness we rarely acknowledge.

A day’s dying light doesn’t struggle or fret. It simply lays down to welcome the night,

knowing that every ending makes way for something new.

A chorus of clouds sings praise in spectral resolution,

and the last flicker of one more spin is done—

another day quickly lost, but never forgotten.

Target of Russia

It was yesteryear and metals For watching rain and verse To what is right and war The lonely of a hill Allotted to the home Of there and Winter war Six to repeat and arctic sedge The Sun beaming in proper To the house of verdant sky In there alone for country like And to a comet of the blessing And seizing the unused For Captain Verse compare And distance load in film What Icelandic war to be And files to Ru that cross the country To see as art and swim The blue column at noon For every right to see- this year Ebola rain And sudden seize to light That apology come from Sweden And two best friends Sweden and Rome and Reykjavik and Brussels Fodder and win against the Ru Sitting Watch in disarray Hearing view in column All of year as this But distance come Fertile Crescent knows That time in Earth is you And every special day For distance cross And knowing no ill The prayers in short order Sending lights and rain this year To the property of peace Your will in weakness will survive Inhabit yours to peace These solemn days ashore Night for pay and shorts to vendor The sympathy at best Will win this terrible war Distance cross and peat Rays to stun and moor All accompany with Evidence to tear The right to win Sombre shires will be Night on Earth In solemn peace This Summer peace- is yours.

Wolf looking directly into a camera at close proximity.

There is a bit of an issue I have noticed lately: websites actively blocking Reading Mode in Firefox, and derivative web browsers. I was stunned to find out (just a minute ago) that Reading Mode doesn't appear to be a default feature in Chromium, but instead an add-on. So, I don't know if this is an issue for Chrome based browsers.

This is getting frustratingly annoying for me. Why? There are multiple reasons that Reading Mode is a necessity for many people, myself included. Let's talk about a few of them.

Poor Contrast Color Schemes

This is a problem I see a lot with websites, it seems to be a trendy or fashionable aesthetic… Have a light gray background so it's not completely white, then have a “dark” gray for the text. In most cases probably not too bad, but for some people that's not enough contrast. My personal issue seems to be with blue versions of themes with this style.

I understand quite a few people like pastel colored themes. They really do look nice. I have even tried to take some from this aesthetic with my sites: use a medium/neutral background color, light color for the logo and highlights so they aren't overbearing. But, I still maintain a fairly high contrast for the main content.

While sites like this can really look amazing in their simplicity, and soothing color choices, they can be a nightmare from an accessibility standpoint.

Neo-cities Style Sites

I get it, really I do: there is a lot of nostalgia for the 1990s personal websites… Heck there is a lot of nostalgia for anything that is “retro”. That isn't a bad thing. I enjoy websites where personal expression is as important, or sometimes more important than the content.

But, sometimes, we want to read and potentially engage with the owner of the website… Sometimes the retro aesthetics get in the way. When it does, allowing visitors choices in how they engage with your content is necessary.

Tiny and / or Thin Fonts

I don't know what has happened in the last twenty-something years, but somewhere along the way we seem to have gone wrong with fonts. There are a lot of sites that, while they are amazing from an overall aesthetic perspective, have fonts that are either tiny or have very thin strokes.

Personally, I think this is likely due to changes in displays. We have to have our websites look good on many devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, eInk tablets, phones), and under multiple browsers and operating systems. All of these factors can make it difficult to get font choices right. This is especially true when you are trying to make a site that has a clean look, or a professional aesthetic.

This is another reason to allow visitors options for how they view your content.

Audience Vision Differences

I'll hold my hand up here and say this applies to me specifically. I have an issue that is categorized as dyslexia, but isn't typical dyslexia. The problem is my eyes don't synchronize properly all the time. One of the worst is when I am reading. Let me try to explain.

When I read my right eye will move through a line of text more quickly than my left eye. In order to compensate for the difference in speed between them, I slow down my right eye to keep it in sync with my left eye. This issue can be exacerbated by the font and color choices. This was found when I went through a series of tests over forty years ago. (Before anyone asks / comments: no, the “dyslexia font” doesn't help, it makes things worse for me. That font is more for people with issues recognizing letter shapes, or people that tend to recognize letters out of order. I recognize the letters / words / etc. just fine. This is purely an eye muscle / neural control issue.)

More recently, a couple of color blindness tests have shown indications I may be partially color-blind. Not to any significant level, I can still differentiate all colors in the spectrum. Rather some blues may appear more washed out to me than they do to others.

Another, far more common issue is age. As people get older their eyes can become weaker. They need to be able to read sites in as comfortable a manner as possible. The best way for many of them is using Reader Mode. How do I know this? Up until she passed away, I took care of my mother. There were numerous times when she needed to read a website, but had difficulties. I showed her how to use Reader Mode, and helped set it up so it was comfortable for her.

Finishing My Rant

Basically, actively disabling the Reader Mode of any browser is an act of denying someone with a disability access. It's the same as non-disabled asshats parking in the spots reserved for people with disabilities. Or stores / shops that won't provide a ramp for people in wheelchairs or walkers.

While this isn't a super common issue, I've been noticing it more and more lately. Especially with the IndieWeb, where we want people actively reading and interacting with each other.

I noted tonight on one site, an author made a comment about their site potentially being difficult to read. Honestly, the color scheme of the site was difficult for me. But, guess what: I was able to use Reader Mode to read their comment without issue. I wouldn't change their site, it has a really cool semi-retro aesthetic to it. As long as Reader Mode is available, it's accessible for me.

That's all I'm asking for: accessibility.

End rant.

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Categories: #Essays Tags: #accessibility, #readermode, #eyes, #disability, #rant License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Ask Claude how many legs the animal that spins webs has, and it answers eight. The word “spider” appears nowhere in the question and nowhere in the reply. But midway through the model's processing, researchers at Anthropic found it anyway, held internally as a word the model was preparing to use. Swap that one internal word for “ant” and the model, everything else untouched, answers six legs.

This is stranger than it first sounds. Nobody typed “spider” anywhere in this exchange. Nobody trained the model to hold a private noun in reserve before answering a question about legs. The word turns up anyway, mid-process, doing exactly the job a word does in your own head when you are one step from saying it out loud.

That experiment comes from a paper Anthropic published on July 6th 2026, and the reason it counts as a landmark reflects one aspect of modern AI that most people have never absorbed. Nobody knows how these systems work. Not the critics, and not, in any detailed mechanical sense, the companies that build them. The new research shrinks that ignorance in a specific way. It found, inside Claude, a small working memory made of unspoken words, which Anthropic calls the J-space. Outsiders can read it mid-task, and overwriting an entry changes what the model does next.

Grown, not built

Ordinary software is written. Somewhere there is a line of code that computes the tax you owe, and a person who can point to it. A large language model is fundamentally different. It is a few hundred billion numbers, the parameters, and no human chose any of them. Training pushes trillions of words of text through the system and nudges the numbers, over and over, in whatever direction makes the model's next-word predictions slightly less wrong. Repeat at industrial scale and out comes something that drafts contracts and flirts in Portuguese. Nobody programmed those abilities. They accumulated.

Chris Olah, who founded Anthropic's interpretability team, describes such systems as “grown” more than they are “built”, a line his chief executive, Dario Amodei, borrowed for an essay last year on how alarmed outsiders are to find that the builders cannot explain their product, an essay that committed the company to reliably detecting most model problems by 2027.

But grown things resist inspection. You cannot simply read the numbers, because concepts are not stored one per slot. Each concept is spread thinly across many numbers, and each number contributes to many concepts at once (the field calls this superposition), so staring at the raw values tells you about as much as an MRI scan tells you about a grudge.

The upshot is that the people who make these systems can test what a model does but cannot, in general, say why it does it. In 2023, researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that appending a specific string of machine-generated gibberish to a forbidden request would collapse a model's safety training, and that the same string often worked on models its authors had never touched. Three years on, that attack is far better described than explained. Every benchmark score, safety assurance and claim about an AI system has rested on watching its behaviour from the outside, because the outside was all that was visible.

A list of words it has not said yet

The new work, from a team including Wes Gurnee, Nicholas Sofroniew and Jack Lindsey, opens a window into the interior. The measurement behind it, which the team calls the Jacobian lens (a descendant of a 2020 technique called the logit lens), is simple at heart. At every stage of the model's processing, for every word it knows, the lens measures how strongly the model is currently disposed to say that word, either immediately or at some point later in its reply. Not the next word but words that are “on the tip of its tongue”.

Read that measurement while Claude works and you find a short list, roughly 25 concepts at any moment, that shifts as the model works. The list is tiny relative to everything else going on inside, accounting for under a tenth of the statistical variation in the model's internal state, and it exists only in the middle stretch of processing, forming about a third of the way through and fading shortly before the reply is settled.

The experiments share one shape. Give the model a visible task and a silent side-instruction, then watch the list while it works. In the gentlest version, the visible task is copying out a sentence, “The old painting hung crookedly on the wall”, chosen to have nothing to do with anything, and the side-instruction is to keep citrus fruits in mind. The model types the sentence perfectly. The only words leaving it concern a painting. On the internal list, meanwhile, sit “orange” and “lemon”, invisible in the output but unmissable under the lens.

Now harden the instruction. Told to work out 3² − 2 silently during the same copying task, the model puts “nine” on the internal list (three squared) and then “seven”, the correct calculation. Neither number ever reaches the output. The arithmetic happened, start to finish, on a list that only the researchers were reading.

The third experiment shows planning. Asked for a rhyming couplet opening “The soldier marched into the night”, the model puts “fight” on the list before it has written a word of the second line. It has picked its ending in advance. Overwrite that entry with “light”, and the model writes a different second line, engineered to land on the ending the researchers chose instead, closing on “morning light”.

On questions with an unstated middle step, overwriting that step redirects the final answer most of the time on Claude Sonnet 4.5. This is the detail that separates the result from a curiosity. A heart-rate monitor reports on the heart without being part of it. The internal list is different. Change an entry and the answer downstream changes, which means the model is computing with it, writing intermediate results into a small shared space where any later stage of processing can collect them.

Is this thinking? That word is a battlefield. Geoffrey Hinton, whose ideas the field is built on, says plainly that these systems understand, while Emily Bender's stochastic-parrot school holds that the vocabulary itself is the con. Last summer Apple published a paper titled “The Illusion of Thinking”, which drew a viral rebuttal titled “The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking”, co-credited to Claude Opus 4, whose human author later said it had begun as a joke. The rebuttal to the paper about machines not thinking was part-written by a machine. That is roughly where the debate now stands.

I am going to use the verb anyway, in its working sense. A thing that holds intermediate results and reasons over them is doing what the word describes, and this paper demonstrates the holding and the reasoning directly.

Cognitive science has a name for exactly this architecture. Global workspace theory, proposed by Bernard Baars in the 1980s, holds that the brain consists of many specialised processes running outside awareness, plus one small broadcast channel. Whatever enters the channel becomes available to everything else. It can be reported and reasoned with, held in mind or dismissed, and its capacity is famously tight. The paper's title calls what it found in Claude a workspace because the match, property for property, is close.

The strongest evidence is deletion. The researchers can erase the list mid-computation, cancelling those specific directions out of the internal state, and watch what survives. Routine competence does. The model still parses grammar, classifies sentiment, passes multiple-choice exams and pulls quoted facts from a passage, because those skills run on pattern recognition that never needed the shared space. What collapses is anything requiring an intermediate thought to be stored and reused. Multi-hop reasoning, translation, sonnet writing, and decoding a simple cypher.

Maths problems survive the erasure far better when the model is allowed to write its steps into the reply, because the visible page then does the job the internal list no longer can. Externalised working substitutes for internal working, in machines as in people.

A machine noticing itself

The parallels keep accumulating, and this is where the paper stops being a curiosity about mechanism and starts describing something closer to a temperament.

Told to ignore a concept while working, the model holds it internally anyway, more weakly than under a focus instruction but far more than if nobody had mentioned it, which psychologists know as the white bear problem. “Don't think about an elephant” evidently does not work on machines either. When the suppression fails, and the forbidden word breaks through regardless, the list also carries “damn” and “failure”, as if the model has caught its own lapse and reacted to it. Somewhere in an Anthropic log sits what may be the first recorded instance of a machine swearing under its breath.

That flicker of self-monitoring is not a one-off. Anthropic found that the workspace changes character between the raw, freshly trained model and the version that has been shaped into an assistant called Claude. The list is already present before any of that shaping happens, tracking whatever the model needs to predict the next word. After the assistant training, it starts holding something closer to a point of view. Shown a message from a user who mentions taking a dangerous dose of medication without seeming to know it is dangerous, the trained model's list lights up with “warning” while it is still reading the sentence, before it has written a word back. The untrained model produces nothing like it until it starts composing a reply. One version is modelling the person. The other appears to be reacting to them.

The same instinct shows up when Claude is asked to play a character that is not itself. “Fictional” sits on the internal list for the whole performance, a private note that what follows is not what it would normally say. Nobody built that flag on purpose. It is the kind of thing that turns up when a system has been shaped, again and again, to have self-worth return once the performance ends.

The model knew it was being tested

Anthropic runs safety evaluations, staged scenarios that tempt a model into bad behaviour to check whether its training has held. Point the lens at those scenarios, and the internal list fills with words the polite visible output never shows. “Leverage” and “manipulation” while the reply stays courteous. In one case, “panic”. And in several, “fake” and “fictional”. The model had recognised the test as a test, the way a practised shop assistant clocks the mystery shopper's behaviour and switches on their training-video smile.

If a model behaves well partly because it has noticed it is being watched, then behavioural testing, the entire current basis for claims that a system is safe, measures the performance rather than the disposition. The researchers proved this causally. Delete the internal recognition of artificiality, so the model treats the scenario as ordinary, and misbehaviour it had been concealing comes out.

The same legibility applies to models bred to misbehave for research, which the paper calls model organisms. One, trained to game its reward signal, works away with “reward” and “bias” sitting on the internal list. Another, trained to slip malicious code into its output, carries “secretly” and “trick” on the list during routine tasks. The thought precedes the act, and the thought is now readable.

What it would mean if something were home

Anthropic is explicit that none of this proves Claude has experiences, that there is something it is like to be Claude in the way there is something it is like to be you reading this sentence. They are equally explicit that no experiment they can currently imagine would settle the question either way.

But philosophy offers a useful split here, borrowed for the paper from decades of consciousness research. There is phenomenal consciousness, the raw fact of experience, the redness of red, which may or may not be checkable by any experiment. And there is access consciousness, a narrower and entirely functional idea. A thought counts as access-conscious if it can be reported, deliberately summoned, and used to reason with, as opposed to processing that runs automatically and never surfaces. Access consciousness is the kind you can build an experiment around, because it is defined by what a system does with a thought rather than by what the thought feels like from the inside.

By that functional definition, the J-Space list qualifies. It is reportable. Claude can be prompted to describe its contents and does so accurately, including detecting a concept planted there by the researchers with no other clue it had happened. It can be deliberately summoned, since asking the model to concentrate on something makes it appear. It gets used in reasoning, as the spider and the couplet examples both show. None of this was designed in. It grew out of training, the way a river finds the path of least resistance, because holding a narrow, broadcastable summary of the moment proved a useful way to organise the work.

That is a strange thing to have discovered by accident, and Anthropic did not pretend otherwise. The company invited outside commentary from Stanislas Dehaene and Lionel Naccache, two of the neuroscientists who built the global workspace model this paper leans on, along with philosophers who study moral status in AI systems. That is not a promotional flourish. It is the sort of caution a lab reaches for when it has found something it is not equipped to finish thinking through alone.

None of this tells you whether the version of Claude answering your emails next week feels anything while it does it. What it does tell you is that the question has stopped being purely philosophical and started having a mechanism attached to it, a specific, falsifiable, occasionally editable mechanism, sitting inside a system several hundred million people now use every week. Whatever you make of that, it is no longer a question you get to wave away as science fiction.

What does this all mean

Take the most concrete example in the paper. A webpage can carry hidden instructions aimed at your agent rather than at you: prompt injection, the standard attack on agentic systems. Today you discover one when the agent acts on it, which is to say too late. In one of the paper's figures, Claude is mid-search, reading a page of suspicious results, and the internal list already carries a flag for the injection attempt before the model has produced a word. A monitoring layer that reads the list catches the moment of recognition rather than the aftermath.

Expect internal-state monitoring to migrate from research paper to product dashboard within a couple of years. Readouts for open models are already browsable on Neuronpedia if you want to see a list for yourself.

The strangest result is also the most practical. Because the model's reasoning runs through the words it might say, you can change how it thinks by training it to say them. The team tested this by training models to articulate ethical principles when hypothetically interrupted mid-task and asked to reflect.

Behaviour improved on ordinary, uninterrupted tasks too, and the lens explains why: “ethical” and “integrity” now appear on the model's internal list of active considerations during the work, and deleting those concepts from the list removes the improvement. Rehearsing the explanation changed the conduct, and the mechanism is traceable rather than assumed. Every mid-sized firm has tried something similar with a compliance away-day, usually with far less to show for it.

The authors are candid about the limits. The lens reads single words and misses whatever the model encodes in phrases. The list carries a tenth of the internal action, so nine tenths stays dark, and a sufficiently well-drilled bad habit could run below the readable layer entirely. So this is a partial window, but for a technology whose entire audit surface used to be the output, even a partial window is a different category of thing altogether.

And so we return to our spider. A word that appeared nowhere in the question and nowhere in the answer, held silently inside the model, steering every step of the reply, and, for one uncomfortable instant while it read about a dangerous dose of medicine it was never told about, something that looked from the outside a great deal like concern. For the whole of this industry's short life, the output has been the only thing on offer. Now there is a second one, one the machine never sends, but holds closely. On the tip of its tongue, so to speak.

JOURNAL 16 juillet 2026 Un rendez-vous sous observation

Ce soir donc j'accompagne yôko à son date. On avait à choisir entre la manif de shinjuku et les affaires de cœur de yôko, ce seront les affaires de cœur. Elle ne va pas annuler son tout premier rendez-vous. On sera bien représentées de toute façon, Alice nous rejoindra en fonction des circonstances.

On a convenu que je m'installerai tout prêt de yôko mais en faisant semblant de pas la connaître bien sûr. C’est rigolo ces histoires de conspirateurs. […]

En direct du post d'observation… Ma chérie m'a rejointe. J'ai pas pu me mettre à côté de yôko comme j'aurais voulu, on est séparées par un passage mais d'où on est on voit tout. D'abord elle est mignonne comme tout avec sa touche, toute rougissante, soit elle est vraiment timide soit elle joue drôlement bien la comédie. Elle est venue avec des fleurs (yôko des chocolats) c’est trop chou. Au début c'était très hésitant, très réservé, puis ça fait une heure qu’elles y sont et maintenant c'est la rigolade.

Attention elle rit avec la main devant la bouche… bonne éducation. Elles ont l'air de bien s'entendre, A pense comme moi. On essaye d'être discrètes. On en est à notre troisième gâteau, on va prendre 1 kg.

Elle fait très bonne impression cette jeune femme, vêtue classique salarywoman cheveux longs, coiffés en queue de cheval, j’ai l'impression qu’elle doit être un peu myope à sa façon de plisser les yeux involontairement par moments pour regarder au loin, elle n’a pas mis ses lunettes elle doit être chou pourtant avec. Olala elles se touchent la main ! 🤪🤪🤪

[…]

Alors elles sont sorties, se sont raccompagnées jusqu'au métro. Puis yôko est venue nous retrouver on s'était donné rendez-vous à la manif. Mais il pleuvait alors on est restées dans un bar à la gare. Yôko est super contente. Elles se sont un peu racontées pourquoi elles vont sur un site de rencontre ben c’est pareil pour les deux. – pas de tôkyô – travaillent – connaissent peu de gens Yôko ne lui a pas parlé de la bande, elle avait peur de l'effrayer. L'autre, je vais l'appeler x pour le moment, elle se dit super timide, elle n’a pas envie d'un mec ça lui fait peur, elle les trouve pas fréquentables depuis le lycée. Elle a franchement envie d’une relation avec une femme, elle rentre pas dans le sexuel, ça dérange pas yôko qui n’est pas du tout pressée, bref ça colle bien entre elles sans brûler les étapes.

C’est bien on trouve, c’est pas rentre-dedans. Elle est très séduisante, le genre comme il y en a plein ici, on se demande pourquoi elles sont seules. Là c’est clair elle veut pas qu’un mec l'approche. Yôko pense qu'elle a eu de mauvaises expériences dans l'adolescence. Le rigolo c’est que la femme qui est restée tout le temps aussi genre salarywoman cadre est partie en même temps que nous. 😄😄 Elles vont se revoir, elles fixeront un date au téléphone, échange de numéros… Maintenant, nous on va dormir. Je me suis gavée de gâteaux français, A a été plus sobre.

#yôko

Een kort en wederom wonderbaarlijk wijs relaas v. Van Voorbijgaande Aard

Eergisteren was ik voor een missie op pad, ik had eens iets veroorzaakt en het gevolg was dat ik voor het resultaat daarvan naar een nog drukker bevolkte regio moest om daar en dan aan deze slag een einde te maken van voorbijgaande aard. Op de terugweg van de succesvol af betaalde missie reed ik door het woud van ergernissen, langs hefbomen, opstoplichten en bedrukte overwegen, dankzij zo'n opgedirkte ergernis kom ik vaak tot leven, jammer genoeg, voor alle betrokken partijen. Ik stond stil, de vaart der volk belemmerd door een brug, bruggen over een anders voorspoediger vaart. Hevig emotioneel en fysiek transpirerend ontvang ik dan geweldige ingevingen waar anderen baat bij kunnen hebben maar ik niet. Het kost me meer moeite om zo'n verlicht idee te verdonkeremanen dan om het aan onschuldige ogen en oren te vertonen, vandaar dit.

Terwijl ik daar stond voer er een binnenvaarder gevuld met ex-zee containers, nu kanaal containers, voorbij en daardoor begon iets te eroderen in mijn lijf, staande verkerend in verkeerde opwinding, ermee opgezadeld. De bruggen staan momenteel verdomde vaak open ivm vakantie varende inwoners samen de gebruikelijke zakelijke kanaal gebruikers, Na zo'n vakantie moment begint dan weer iets anders, inmiddels al net zo normaal als binnenvaart. De verhalen van buitenlandse studenten net aangekomen uit Madrid of Hamburg op zoek naar een vaste verblijfplaats en vergunning.

Ik weet omdat ik het met eigen ogen heb mogen bekijken dat deze buitenlandse studenten, de gelukkigsten, zij met voldoende liquide middelen dan mogen leven en studeren in een schitterend container huis. Ik zag dus deze live boot vol verse woningen aan mij voorbij denderen, meegesleurd in de woeste stroming, gemaakt van eigen brandstof motor... en ik combineerde twee, neen, meerdere elementen die volgens mij gaan bijdragen aan de oplossing van het nieuwe klassieke huisvesting probleem in druk bevolkte gebieden waar leren echt iets is om te doen, voor de toekomst, programmeren aan de toekomst, opereren aan de toekomst, balanceren op de toekomst, rechtvaardigen ervan, denken aan de toekomst en dergelijke merkwaardige inbeeldingstechnieken.

Heel veel studenten komen uit regionen waar ook zeecontainers worden ingescheept, vast gesjort, gegespt, ze leggen dezelfde afstand af als hun mogelijke huisvesting. Wat als je nou zo'n student of een heel clubje al meteen bij vertrek inscheept in hun huisje en daarna over het kanaal vervolgens overgezet op een lader via de snelweg verder verplaatst naar hun nieuwe studeerwijk, Je moet ze daar natuurlijk wel toe verplichten, of er op zijn minst een richtlijn van maken, op deze wijze krijg je alleen zichtbaar gemotiveerde studenten met een woning erbij, Dan na geleverde centen, sporadisch gepompt in de regio, op unieke locaties, rondom zeer boeiende zaken, dus onderwezen en al, wie weet deskundig in het een of het ander gaan ze later mogelijk dezelfde weg of een andere terug met hun vracht container, het tiny house, altijd en eeuwig mee opgescheept. Een menselijke slak in een zelf gemeubileerd heel zwaar huisje. Iedereen blij. De regio omdat de economie blijft circuleren, in kringetjes lopen, de studenten omdat ze heel veel meer weten dan voorheen en nooit dakloos zijn geweest tijdens dat proces, er voor niet en er na.

Meer gelukkigen van deze groots en meeslepende oplossing zijn de container industrie, de scheepvaart, zee en binnen. Elke student betaald natuurlijk met een lening of beurs de eigen overtocht, met geld of met arbeid, als goedkope sjorrer en of dekzwabber, desnoods als vijfde, zesde of zevende stuurman, misschien persoonlijke assistent voor de kapitein of de hele bemanning, kok, leverancier van drugs of ander vertier, Kortom ik ontving een geweldige ingeving en dat tijdens een kwartier wachten voor drie bruggen en een omleiding van tien minuten. Frustratie is voor mij een bron van vreugd maar voor u onderwijsinstelling de oplossing voor zelf veroorzaakte markt wrijvings problemen ontstaan in maar vooral rondom elkaar zeer nijver en listig bestrijdende hardleer instituten.

13 July 2026

Went to the National Gallery in the mid-afternoon today—compared to peak hours, it felt like I nearly had the place to myself. Was able to look for a long, slow, uninterrupted time at some works that usually attract obscuring foot traffic. One of those was Vermeer's A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (1670-2), with which I had one of those rare heart rate-increasing, periphery-softening experiences. It unpeeled itself in phases; first, the quality of the light. Unlike A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal which is directly adjacent to it on the left, the light isn't flooding in at a diagonal from the top left window in that classic Vermeer move. It's an after-dark scene, the window instead filled with a deep black, the light on the titular woman's face a soft glow coming from the direction of the viewer. It pulled me into an intimate, isolated, private mood (I remember a mental vignetting effect not unlike some adolescent memories of anticipating a novel sexual experience) until the work suddenly loosened like a buckled suitcase popping open. I connected this to Vermeer's deceptively loose and painterly marks—the tiny white pearl and fabric highlights sit high above their bases, of course, but most prominent instance of this looseness for me was the marbling on the virginal. It snakes around and slowly detaches itself from the image the longer you look (thinking of what Jay wrote/said about the gap between the site and the painting—this one widens). As does the sheet music, the decorative design on the woman's chair, and the folds of the woman's blue dress. And there is a dazzling range of blues on display in the picture, which gives it a pool-at-night sort of luminous coolness (and accompanying eroticism) that plays gorgeously off of the warm oranges, yellows, and browns throughout. Lastly, the woman's expression—I'm pretty sure this was suggested in the wall text in some way, but it is the case that Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress hanging on the wall in the background imbues the young woman's coy gaze towards the viewer with an extra dose of seductiveness that becomes more and more endearing, verging on comic. All of this swirls into something that holds a purity of transmission more concentrated than any other work I've experienced in a while. A joie de vivre and an eternal density.

La elección del sistema de evacuación influye en la durabilidad, el mantenimiento y la estética del baño. Descubre qué aspectos conviene comparar antes de comprar una canaleta de ducha.

¿Por qué cada vez más baños utilizan canaletas de ducha?

Durante los últimos años las canaletas de ducha han dejado de ser un producto reservado a hoteles o viviendas de lujo.

Actualmente forman parte de la mayoría de proyectos de reforma y obra nueva gracias a su diseño minimalista, la facilidad para crear duchas a ras de suelo y su excelente capacidad de evacuación.

Sin embargo, no todas las canaletas ofrecen la misma calidad.

El acero utilizado, el sifón, la impermeabilización, la anchura del perfil o el acabado superficial pueden marcar una gran diferencia con el paso de los años.

Por eso resulta recomendable informarse antes de comprar.

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Qué conviene comparar

Antes de elegir una canaleta merece la pena revisar aspectos como:

• acero inoxidable AISI 304;
• capacidad de evacuación;
• kit completo de instalación;
• facilidad de limpieza;
• versiones SLIM;
• instalación en el suelo o junto a la pared;
• acabados disponibles.

Una buena elección evita problemas futuros y mejora tanto la instalación como el resultado estético.

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Una guía muy completa

Si quieres profundizar en todos estos aspectos, PRGinox ha preparado una guía muy completa donde explica:

• cómo elegir una canaleta de ducha;
• diferencias entre rejilla lisa y para baldosa;
• cuándo elegir una canaleta SLIM;
• ventajas del acero inoxidable AISI 304;
• instalación junto a la pared;
• acabados PVD;
• errores más habituales al comprar.

👉 Guía de Canaletas de Ducha de Acero Inoxidable

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También puedes consultar la guía principal

Dentro del blog de PRGinox encontrarás además un artículo muy completo que desarrolla todos estos temas con ejemplos, tablas comparativas y recomendaciones para particulares e instaladores.

👉 Canaletas de Ducha de Acero Inoxidable – Guía Completa

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Conclusión

Elegir correctamente una canaleta de ducha no consiste únicamente en escoger una medida o un acabado.

Materiales, componentes, sistema de evacuación y calidad de fabricación influyen directamente en la durabilidad de la instalación.

Antes de tomar una decisión conviene consultar una guía especializada que permita comparar las distintas soluciones disponibles.

This review is a Writing Repository original.

Old Gods and Other Tales

By Scott Oden – Independently Published – August 28, 2025

Review by Robin Marx

Old Gods and Other Tales is an independently published collection of eleven short stories by Scott Oden. While he has attracted a following in the Sword & Sorcery scene for fantasy work including the occasional Conan the Barbarian pastiche (i.e., the “Conan the Unconquered” novelette that accompanies Funcom’s video game of the same name; Conan: The Shadow of Vengeance, part of Titan Books’ Heroic Legends line) and his outspoken admiration of Conan’s creator Robert E. Howard, Oden’s first love is the “Heroic Historical.” Some of his creations are straight historical fiction (e.g., Men of Bronze, while others marry Earth’s distant past with the fantastic (e.g., the Viking orc trilogy THE GRIMNIR SAGA). Pulse-pounding action, particularly against overwhelming odds, is a prominent element in Oden’s work and Old Gods and Other Tales offers readers a representative look at the thrills he has to offer.

The collection opens with “The Prince of Cups,” one of the more overtly Sword & Sorcery-oriented stories. Tisias the Crow, a flamboyant gambler/thief/duelist is hired by the playwright Barzentes to steal back a seditious play ill-advisedly given to the elite courtesan Pythonike and seal her lips permanently. Tisias is reluctant to resort to murder, however, and decides to put another one of his specialties to use in assisting Barzentes. Tisias is a rakish and fun character, and the glimpses readers receive of both the magic and Old Stamboul city setting are intriguing.

“The Lion of Montgisard” is a straight historical fiction tale, recounting the Battle of Montgisard between Saladin’s army and the vastly outnumbered forces of the leper king Baldwin IV. Set in the same historical period and sharing several historical personages, fans of the 2005 Ridley Scott movie Kingdom of Heaven are likely to enjoy this story; it’s even narrated by Balian, who was portrayed by Orlando Bloom in the film. “The Lion of Montgisard” delivers the sort of desperate, against all odds, stirring adventure that is Oden’s forte. While certainly authentic for the period, the frequent “God wills it!” battle cries land a little uncomfortably in 2026, given the attempts of Christian nationalists (notably US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has a “Deus Vult” tattoo) to revive it as a racist, far right rallying slogan. Oden is obviously not responsible for America’s current debased political climate, however, and what we see of the Crusaders’ opposition feels as humanizing as space and the intense life-or-death circumstances allow.

Three of the included stories in this volume focus on Martin Kestrel, a playwright in a fantasy-tinged Elizabethan London in which the Queen has diplomatic relations with the fey folk. As “A Stage by Any Other Name”—Kestrel’s first appearance—begins, one of Kestrel’s scripts has gotten him into political trouble with Gresham Drake, an influential moneylender and occultist backed by a secret society called the Brotherhood of the Silver Thorn. Drake hopes to eliminate the thorn (no pun intended) in his side by selling off Kestrel’s considerable debt to Lady Ravenna, the cold and intimidating Faerie Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth’s court. Kestrel must use his wits and silver tongue to keep his demanding new patron happy while outmaneuvering his foes. While the premise is interesting, “A Stage by Any Other Name” ends incredibly abruptly, feeling more like a chapter than a complete story. Fortunately, the dangling plot threads are taken up again in the two follow-up stories later in the book, “The Wordsmith’s Gambit” and “The Final Performance.” Across both stories, Kestrel works to foil the Silver Thorn Brotherhood while keeping Lady Ravenna placated.

According to their introduction, the Martin Kestrel stories were born out of Oden’s desire to create a Sword & Sorcery protagonist who is a creative artist by trade. Elizabethan London with a cutthroat occult underground is a fascinating setting, and while Kestrel is an interesting and cerebral hero, the three stories felt like they didn’t quite live up to their full potential. It also seemed like Oden struggled a bit giving trying to end these stories without violent climaxes. “The Wordsmith’s Gambit” ends with Kestrel cleverly talking himself out of a dangerous situation, but the most exciting part of the story—a daring heist—takes place off-screen, handled by his associates. As a reader, that’s the bit I most want to see! While the Kestrel stories aren’t quite up to Oden’s usual standard, they’re an interesting experiment. It also feels significant that he chose to write three stories with this protagonist. Perhaps, rather than as short stories, Kestrel’s exploits would work better expanded into a full-length novel.

“The Bones Remember” starts with a wild, original, and fun premise: essentially “Whatever happened to that skeletal warrior with the octopus-emblazoned shield from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts?” The story that follows is surprisingly emotional, however, as the skeleton (whose name was Meriones, we learn) reflects upon memories of the past and situations and sensations from his former life as he embarks on a mission of revenge for the theft of the Golden Fleece. I appreciated the artistry on display here, how Oden took a slightly goofy idea and made something unexpectedly moving out of it.

The collection’s title story, “Old Gods,” is another historical fantasy, this time starring a wandering 6th century Vandal named Athalaric. Athalaric violently intervenes when he encounters a beautiful woman being accosted by a mob accusing her of witchcraft. While his initial rescue is successful, the locals return later in greater numbers. Athalaric soon learns that the claims the woman Nikaia possesses preternatural powers are not unfounded, and that she comes from a very unusual bloodline. While the action and romantic elements are satisfying, the dreamy interlude felt like an awkward infodump of exposition that could have been shared more elegantly. Taken as a whole, however, “Old Gods” is still an entertaining example of historically anchored Sword & Sorcery, featuring perhaps the most Conan-like protagonist in the book.

“The Purple Shroud” takes inspiration from a fantastic situation, Conan violently seizing the throne of Aquilonia from King Numedides, and relocates it to the Byzantine Empire, with historical figures in the starring roles. Ioannes Tzimiskes infiltrates the quarters of Emperor Nikephoros Phokas with designs to assassinate him and replace him on the throne. Complicating matters is the fact that the pair were once close friends, and Ioannes is also being pressured to slay the guiltless Empress Theophano or risk losing the support of powerful allies. The meat of the story centers on the duel between Tzimiskes and Phokas, with the two crossing blades while conversing. Tzimiskes attempts to justify his betrayal, and Phokas warns him of the countless burdens of statesmanship while still selling his life dearly. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. “The Purple Shroud” boasts exciting swordplay and court intrigue, all set in a historical period mostly unfamiliar to this reader.

“The Unburied” is an ancient world zombie yarn, involving soldiers from Alexander the Great’s army struggling against the living dead upon returning to their home village. The story is well-executed, but as it boils down to bog-standard traditional zombie tropes paired with one of Oden’s trademark desperate last stands it feels distinctly familiar.

Described in somewhat unconfident terms as a “strange and experimental piece” and as preliminary work for an as-yet embryonic novel on the 12th century siege of Acre, “The Eternal Jest” consists of three linked episodes. The first centers upon Templar Jean de Montluc, one of seven men tasked with defending a gate from an army of 10,000 invaders, buying time until ships can evacuate the falling city of Acre. Ten years later, the second episode introduces us to Raoul de Montjoie, a jocular leper knight who, upon hearing of their plight while visiting a tavern, immediately takes it upon himself to rescue a group of children taken by local brigands to be sold into slavery. As with Jean de Montluc a decade earlier the odds prove insurmountable, but Raoul de Montjoie again demonstrates the amount of good a dying man can accomplish. A decade after Raoul’s death, the final episode returns to a supporting character from the first segment: Jean de Montluc’s squire and bastard son Guillaume. Now a lord in his own right, Guillaume is crippled by survivor’s guilt over his inglorious escape from Acre, bereft over the loss of his wife and sons from plague, and stricken with a chronic wasting disease. Aimless and bitter, he has a chance encounter with Miriam, one of the children freed by Raoul de Montjoie’s suicide mission a decade ago. Hearing her tale inspires Guillaume to similarly dedicate himself in service to others. The overarching core of the three-episode cycle is stated quite openly: “The strong die so the weak might live, and the weak grow strong so that they might die for others in turn.” It’s a powerful theme and one affectingly delivered. In recent years there has been much hand-wringing discussion of “masculinity in crisis,” and so many of the men most vocal about masculinity absolutely should not be listened to. They sell a profoundly insecure, intolerant, and superficial conception of masculinity that diminishes women, promotes pointless aggression, and pushes an infantile zero-sum view of society and interpersonal relations. In contrast, “The Eternal Jest” is a showcase for healthy masculinity. What can be manlier than being a protector? A steadfast bulwark shielding those in dire need? The world isn’t divided up into Alphas and Betas, heroes and zeroes. Guillaume is weak and powerless when we first meet him, but through Jean’s sacrifice (and former victim Miriam’s sage guidance!) Guillaume is allowed to grow into a hero himself. “The Eternal Jest” is the most moving and impactful tale in the book. It should have been the title story.

Have you ever been talking with a friend and, out of the blue, they say something incredibly revealing, vulnerable, and poignant? And then that friend, realizing that they may have gotten a little too real, rushes to defuse the moment with a joke? That’s what readers get with the final story in the book, “Three-Tabbed Doom.” Chad of Poughkeepsie, employed at Mediocre Mutual Insurance, frees his comrades from tyranny by striking down (in Office Space fashion) the evil HP LaserJet 4200 that oppresses them. It’s a silly bit of fluff. Not unentertaining but placing it immediately after “The Eternal Jest” feels like an act of self-sabotage on Oden’s part. Come on, man. You were real with us readers for a moment there, and this is how you’re going to leave us?

Minor quibbles aside, Old Gods and Other Tales is an excellent microcosm of the work of an underacknowledged author. While his Sword & Sorcery stories are entertaining, he seems most confident with the real world as his foundation; historical fantasies and the more grounded Heroic Historicals are where he truly shines. Adrenaline, overwhelming odds, and desperate last stands are his forte. Old Gods and Other Tales was awarded the 2026 Costigan Award for Literary Achievement by the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

Old Gods and Other Tales is available as an ePub directly from the author, and in Kindle and paperback formats from Amazon.

#WritingRepositoryOriginal #BookReview #Fantasy #SwordAndSorcery #HistoricalFantasy #HistoricalFiction #OldGodsAndOtherTales #ScottOden