Chapter 1: The Quiet Place Where You Finally Admit It

You turn off the light, set your phone beside the bed, and lie there staring into the dark. The day is over, but your mind has not gotten the message. You think about what you forgot, what someone said, what still needs to be done tomorrow, and how strange it feels to be this tired without knowing exactly what would make you feel better. Maybe that is why Christian encouragement when you feel emotionally numb and exhausted can feel so personal. Sometimes you are not looking for inspiration. You are simply trying to understand why you do not feel like yourself anymore.

You may have gotten very good at hiding it. You answer, “I’m fine,” because explaining would take more energy than you have. You laugh at the right time. You return the call. You finish the work. You keep showing up for people because that is what you have always done. But somewhere underneath all of that, finding faith when you are tired of carrying everything becomes a much quieter struggle than most people realize. You are not necessarily questioning whether God exists. You may simply be wondering why you cannot feel much of anything right now.

There is something lonely about being tired in a way nobody can see. If you had a broken arm, people would notice. If you were in the hospital, they would understand why you needed rest. But emotional exhaustion can leave you walking around looking completely normal while everything inside you feels dimmed. You can be sitting across from someone you love and realize that you are listening without really being there. You can open your Bible and want the words to reach you, yet feel as though they are landing somewhere just beyond your reach.

That does not make you a bad Christian.

It does not mean you have stopped loving God.

It may simply mean you are tired.

We do ourselves damage when we turn every difficult emotion into a spiritual accusation. Sometimes we are so afraid of appearing weak that we begin correcting our feelings instead of listening to them. We tell ourselves we should be more grateful. We should trust more. We should pray harder. We should stop feeling this way.

But the heart does not always respond well to being ordered around.

Think about the person who sits on the edge of the bed after getting dressed for work and stays there a little longer than usual. Shoes on. Keys ready. Coffee cooling on the dresser. They know they need to leave, but for one minute they just sit. There is no dramatic crisis. They are simply gathering enough of themselves to stand up and begin another day.

God sees that minute.

I think we sometimes imagine that God only pays attention to the moments when our faith looks impressive. The long prayers. The big decisions. The courageous stand. But Jesus repeatedly noticed people in ordinary human need. Hunger mattered. Weariness mattered. Grief mattered. Fear mattered. He never treated people like machines that should function perfectly because they believed in God.

That matters when you feel numb because numbness can make you suspicious of yourself. You may wonder whether your faith is fading because your emotions are quiet. But faith is not measured by how intensely you feel God every moment.

Sometimes faith is getting out of bed and whispering, “Jesus, stay with me today.”

Sometimes faith is admitting, “I do not have much to give You right now.”

Sometimes it is sitting silently because you do not have the words.

You may be surprised by how much relief there is in stopping the performance.

You do not have to enter God’s presence as the person everyone else expects you to be. You can come as the tired person. The confused person. The person who does not know whether they need sleep, a good cry, a long conversation, or just a few hours when nobody expects anything from them.

That is still you.

And Jesus has not lost interest in you because you are not at your best.

Maybe tonight you do not need to figure out your entire emotional life. Maybe you do not need a breakthrough. Maybe you only need enough honesty to say, “God, I am tired of pretending I am not tired.”

There are prayers that sound small but open enormous doors.

That may be one of them.

Chapter 2: When Rest Does Not Reach the Inside

You are standing in the grocery store looking at something you have bought a hundred times, and for a few seconds you cannot remember why you are there. The cart is half full. Someone is waiting behind you. Your phone buzzes in your pocket. Nothing is actually wrong, but your mind feels crowded and strangely far away. You move on, finish the shopping, load the bags into the car, and keep going because that is what you know how to do.

This kind of tiredness can make ordinary life feel harder than it should. Small decisions take more energy. A harmless question can irritate you. A simple task can feel heavier than it did a month ago. Even things you enjoy may start to feel like obligations. You may begin wondering why a weekend off did not fix it or why getting more sleep has not brought you completely back.

Sometimes the body rests before the heart does.

There are pressures you can carry while sitting perfectly still. Worry about someone you love. Regret over something you cannot change. Financial uncertainty. A job that keeps taking more from you. A relationship that feels strained. The fear that you are disappointing people. The private pressure to keep being the person everyone believes you are.

You can lie on the couch for an afternoon and still carry all of that.

This is why simply telling yourself to relax may not work. You may need something deeper than physical rest. You may need permission to stop solving everything for a little while.

Jesus gave people that kind of permission through the way He lived. He did not treat every problem as though it belonged entirely on His shoulders at every moment. There were times when He stepped away. There were times when He slept. There were times when He went somewhere quiet to pray.

If Jesus could make room for quiet, you do not need to feel guilty for needing it too.

But quiet can be uncomfortable when you have been busy for a long time. Once the television is off, the work is finished, and nobody is talking, you may finally hear what has been sitting underneath the noise.

“I am scared.”

“I am angry.”

“I miss who I used to be.”

“I do not know how much longer I can keep doing this.”

Those thoughts can feel frightening, but they can also become honest prayer.

God already knows what is underneath the surface. You are not protecting Him by hiding it. You are only making yourself carry it alone.

Maybe one evening you sit at the kitchen table after everyone has gone to bed. There is a cup in front of you that has gone cold because you forgot to drink it. Instead of turning on another show or checking your phone, you stay there for a few minutes and tell Jesus what you have not told anyone else.

You do not organize it. You do not make it sound faithful.

You just tell the truth.

That kind of prayer may not produce an immediate rush of peace. You may still wake up tired tomorrow. But something important has happened. The burden is no longer completely hidden.

You have let God into the room where you have been carrying it alone.

And sometimes coming back to yourself begins there, quietly, before you feel any different at all.

Chapter 3: You Do Not Have to Return All at Once

The morning comes, and you are standing by the window before anyone else is awake. The sky is beginning to lighten. Nothing in your life has been completely repaired overnight. The same responsibilities are waiting. The same questions may still be unanswered. But for the first time in a while, you are not asking yourself to become your old self by breakfast.

That matters.

Coming back from emotional exhaustion is often quieter than we expect. You may notice that you laugh at something without forcing it. You may enjoy a meal again. You may pray for two minutes and realize you were actually present for those two minutes. You may tell someone you trust that you have not been doing as well as you looked.

Jesus can work inside those ordinary moments.

You do not have to prove that you are getting better quickly. Give yourself room to be human. Rest when you can. Accept help when you need it. Take seriously what your mind and body are telling you. If the numbness stays, deepens, or begins interfering with daily life, reaching out for professional support can be a wise part of caring for the life God has given you.

You are more than the strong version of yourself.

You are still worthy of love when you are quiet, tired, uncertain, and rebuilding. Jesus is not standing somewhere in the distance waiting for you to catch up. He is with you here, even if today all you can manage is one small prayer and one honest step.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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There is a particular kind of phone call that has been going out across the American and British labour markets since the spring. It comes from a number the recipient recognises. It is made by someone who, eighteen months or two years ago, sat across a table and explained that the role was being eliminated because the company was moving to an automated workflow. The tone of the new call is warm, slightly sheepish, careful not to say the word sorry in any way that could later be quoted. The substance is simple. We need you back.

For the person receiving it, the call is not simple at all. It arrives carrying a piece of information they were denied at the moment they most needed it: that the thing they were told about themselves, that a machine could do their job, was not true. It was a forecast dressed as a fact, and the forecast was wrong, and in the interval between the forecast and its correction they lost a salary, a title, a pension contribution, a professional identity and, in a good many cases, a settled sense of what they were for.

The reversal is now large enough to have its own vocabulary. Fast Company has called it the great AI rehire; others call it the AI boomerang. Whatever the label, the underlying phenomenon is a corporate class discovering, at scale and at expense, that the gap between what artificial intelligence was sold as capable of and what it can actually be trusted to do in production is wide enough to swallow a quality programme, a customer service function, an editorial operation, or a bank's call centre. What is far less examined is the cost of that discovery, and specifically who paid it.

The graybeards Ford had to buy back

The most instructive case is not a technology company. It is a car manufacturer.

In late June 2026, Ford disclosed that it had leaned too heavily on artificial intelligence in vehicle quality control and had spent roughly three years bringing back around 350 veteran engineers to repair the consequences. Some of them were former Ford employees. Others had drifted to suppliers. Internally and in the coverage that followed, they were referred to as the graybeards, a term that carries both affection and a certain institutional embarrassment.

Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, gave an account of the failure that is unusually candid by the standards of corporate communications. The company, he said, had mistakenly thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements it had, that would produce a high-quality product. Elsewhere he put it more plainly still: artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it is only as good as the information you use to train it.

What the returning engineers actually did is the detail that matters most, and it is routinely skipped. They did not replace the AI. They rebuilt the data pipelines feeding it, ran weekly design reviews to catch failure points before anything reached the factory floor, mentored junior staff, and functioned as internal auditors of the automated systems. For the 2026 Expedition alone, Ford added around 1,200 new inspections and 203 new inspectors at its Kentucky Truck Plant. The chief executive, Jim Farley, later described the cumulative effect of the quality overhaul as literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost. In the summer of 2026 Ford topped the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study among mainstream brands for the first time since 2010.

So the story has a happy ending, if you are Ford. Read it from the other end and it looks different. A company removed the people who held the tacit knowledge required to make its automated quality system work, discovered that the system could not function without them, and then spent roughly three years and an unknown sum reassembling that knowledge from the labour market. The engineers who came back are now, in effect, being paid to train their replacement, having previously been dismissed on the assumption that the replacement was already trained.

The account emerged first in Bloomberg on 25 June 2026, reporting that Ford had been rehiring quality inspectors after AI fell short. Kumar Galhotra, the company's chief operating officer, told journalists that Ford had been relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the results it wanted. TechCrunch carried Poon's remarks three days later.

Where the fifty-five per cent actually comes from

Every article about the AI rehire leans on a single statistic: 55 per cent of leaders who made AI-driven cuts now regret them. It appeared in Inc. in late July 2026 under the byline of Bruce Crumley, and was widely syndicated from there. It has been attributed variously to Forrester, to Orgvue, and in at least one widely shared instance to Gartner. That last attribution appears to be simply wrong.

There are, in fact, two distinct 55 per cent findings, and their coincidence has caused a good deal of laundering. The first comes from Orgvue, a workforce design software firm, whose survey was run by the research agency Vitreous World between February and March 2025 and published that April. It covered 1,163 C-suite and senior leaders across eight countries in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. It found that 39 per cent of business leaders had made employees redundant as a result of deploying AI, and that of those, 55 per cent admitted they had made the wrong decision.

The second comes from Forrester's Predictions 2026 report on the future of work, published in October 2025, which found that 55 per cent of employers regretted technology-driven staff reductions and predicted that half of AI-attributed layoffs would be quietly reversed. Forrester's analysts were specific about the form the reversal would take, and the specificity is not flattering: much of this work, the firm predicted, will be given to lower-wage human workers, offshore or at lower salary.

Neither of these is a July 2026 survey. The headline that broke in late July 2026 was, in substantial part, research from spring and autumn 2025 recirculating with fresh urgency because the anecdotes had finally caught up with it. That does not make the finding false. It does mean the reversal has been visible in the data for well over a year while the layoffs continued, which complicates the tidy story of a sudden corporate awakening.

Two genuinely newer datasets do exist and are more useful. Careerminds, an outplacement firm, surveyed 600 HR professionals in February 2026. Of those whose organisations had made AI-led cuts, 32.7 per cent had already rehired between a quarter and a half of the roles they eliminated, and 35.6 per cent had brought back more than half. Add those together and you get 68.3 per cent, which is almost certainly the origin of the widely repeated claim that 68 per cent of firms are rehiring. The same survey found that 52.1 per cent had rehired within six months and 17.8 per cent within three, that 32.9 per cent of HR leaders said their organisations had lost critical skills, and that 28.1 per cent reported remaining staff lacked the capability to fill the resulting knowledge gaps.

The finance is the part that should make boards uncomfortable. Nearly 31 per cent of respondents found that rehiring costs exceeded the initial savings outright. A further 42.4 per cent said savings and rehiring costs roughly cancelled each other out. Only around 27 per cent were financially ahead. That is the actual return on a strategy that was announced to markets as transformation.

The second newer dataset comes from Robert Half, which surveyed more than 2,000 hiring managers in April 2026 and found that 32 per cent had eliminated a role primarily because of AI and later rehired for the same or a similar position. Dawn Fay, Robert Half's operational president, summarised the reason without embellishment: the communication, the judgement, the oversight, the institutional knowledge that employees have, the technology, up until this point, is just not able to replace all of that.

The number that does not say what it is quoted as saying

One figure in circulation deserves direct correction, because it has been assembled from two unrelated statistics and reads as reassurance when the underlying data is not reassuring at all.

The claim is that AI-attributed job cuts in 2026 have exceeded 165,000, and that the pace is 40 per cent slower than in 2025. The 40 per cent figure is real, but it does not describe AI cuts. According to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, whose monthly job cut reports are the standard reference, employers announced 443,604 job cuts in the first half of 2026, down 40 per cent from the 744,308 announced in the first half of 2025. That is total announced cuts across all stated reasons, heavily distorted by the extraordinary government-related reductions that inflated the 2025 baseline.

AI-attributed cuts went in precisely the opposite direction. Challenger recorded 101,743 cuts citing AI through June 2026, roughly 23 per cent of all cuts. The comparison point is 54,836 for the whole of 2025. In other words, in six months of 2026, AI-attributed cuts ran at nearly twice the entire previous year's total. AI was the leading stated reason for workforce reductions for four consecutive months. In May alone, AI was cited in 38,579 cuts, 40 per cent of that month's total and the highest monthly figure since Challenger began tracking the category in 2023. Technology sector cuts through June reached 139,156, an increase of 83 per cent on the same period in 2025.

Andy Challenger, the firm's chief revenue officer, put it flatly when the June report was released on 1 July 2026: tech remains the epicentre of this year's cuts, and AI is the dominant force as companies restructure around it, automate roles and reallocate budgets towards new capabilities.

So the honest framing is this. The rehire is real, and it is happening simultaneously with an acceleration of AI-attributed displacement, not after it. Both trends are running at once, in the same economy, sometimes inside the same organisation. Anyone reading the boomerang coverage as evidence that the danger has passed is reading it wrong.

What the machines could not be told

The reason the reversals cluster around certain functions is not mysterious, and it was described in economics literature a decade before the current wave.

In 2014, the MIT economist David Autor published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth”. The paradox he named belongs to the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, who captured it in a sentence: we can know more than we can tell. Much skilled work consists of judgements the person making them cannot articulate as rules. Autor's argument was that automation requires exactly the sort of explicit specification that tacit knowledge resists, and that the tasks proving most stubborn to automate are precisely those demanding flexibility, judgement and common sense. He also warned, presciently, that commentators consistently overstate machine substitution while ignoring the complementarities between humans and machines.

Every case in the current reversal is a demonstration of that paradox meeting a quarterly earnings call.

At Ford, the tacit knowledge was in the heads of engineers who could look at a design requirement and know which failure modes it implied. The company assumed those requirements were the knowledge. They were the documentation of the knowledge, which is a different thing, and the AI trained on the documentation inherited the gap.

At IBM, the company's AskHR system handled roughly 94 per cent of routine human resources requests. Arvind Krishna, IBM's chief executive, confirmed in 2025 that AI agents had replaced several hundred people in the HR function. The residual 6 per cent turned out to include the ethically complicated, the legally sensitive and the genuinely distressing, which is to say the part of human resources that is actually the job. IBM's overall headcount rose regardless, because the savings were reinvested in software engineering, sales and marketing, which is a useful reminder that displacement and growth can coexist inside a single organisation.

At Klarna, the Swedish payments firm, the collapse was public and fast. In February 2024 the company announced that an OpenAI-powered assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents, handling more than two-thirds of conversations, resolving issues in under two minutes against eleven for humans, and on track to add 40 million dollars in profit. By May 2025 the chief executive, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, was conceding that the drive for cost and efficiency had produced lower quality. The AI handled volume. It could not handle complexity, emotional charge, or multi-step resolution. Klarna began recruiting humans again.

At the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the failure was almost comic. In July 2025 the bank announced 45 redundancies in its call centre, replaced by an AI voice bot which it said had cut call volumes by around 2,000 a week. The Finance Sector Union disputed the figure, arguing that volumes were in fact rising, that staff were being offered overtime and that team leaders were being directed onto the phones. The union took the matter to the industrial tribunal. In August 2025 the bank reversed the decision, conceded that its redundancy assessment had not properly considered business needs, and offered affected staff the chance to stay, move within the bank or leave. It was not the end of the matter.

Four organisations, four different industries, one shared error: mistaking the codifiable portion of a job for the whole of it.

Coming back is not the same as never leaving

Here is where the boomerang narrative turns from corporate comedy into something closer to a labour story, because the terms of return are not the terms of departure.

Forrester's prediction was explicit that reversal would often mean rehiring offshore or at lower salary. Klarna's approach is the clearest illustration. The company did not simply reinstate its former customer service staff. It launched a pilot recruiting remote agents under what it described as an Uber-type model, targeting students, professionals and entrepreneurs, offering what a company spokesperson called competitive pay and full flexibility, with the eventual aim of replacing its outsourced customer service workforce with this arrangement. Flexibility is a word that does a lot of load-bearing work in that sentence. A permanent contact centre job with a rota, sick pay and a pension is not the same product as a flexible remote gig, even if the tasks performed are identical.

The countervailing evidence deserves its weight. Some reporting suggests returning workers are landing hybrid roles demanding data literacy, prompting skill and change management capability, at pay above the jobs the AI was meant to eliminate. Caroline Castrillon, writing in Forbes on 26 July 2026, advised treating a reversal offer as an entirely new proposition: negotiate higher base pay, signing bonuses, upgraded titles and guaranteed severance, and use the employer's admission of error as leverage. That is sound advice, and it describes a real bargaining position for a particular kind of worker: senior, scarce, holding knowledge the employer has just proved it cannot buy elsewhere.

The graybeards at Ford are in that position. A veteran quality engineer whose absence cost a manufacturer three years and a J.D. Power ranking can name a price. A contact centre agent whose absence produced longer hold times cannot, because the employer's alternative is not to rebuild the function but to source it more cheaply somewhere else. The reversal, in other words, redistributes bargaining power extremely unevenly, and it does so along exactly the lines that already determine labour market power. The scarce get leverage. The substitutable get a flexible contract.

There is also a body of research suggesting that rehiring is not the clean restoration employers imagine. A study published in the Journal of Management in 2021 by John Arnold, Chad Van Iddekinge, Michael C. Campion, Talya Bauer and Michael A. Campion examined 30,714 employees at a large retail organisation, including 1,318 boomerang employees rehired into management roles. Performance before and after rehiring tended to stay flat rather than improve. Boomerang managers performed comparably to internal and external hires in the first year, but both other groups improved more over time. Rehires were also more likely to leave again, and when they did, they tended to leave for reasons similar to those that prompted their first departure.

Read that finding against the current moment and it is faintly ominous. The reason for the first departure was that the employer decided a machine could do the job. That reason has not been retracted so much as postponed.

What the sentence does to the person who receives it

The literature on job loss is old, large and consistent, and it does not support the idea that unemployment is a neutral transition between positions.

Karsten Paul and Klaus Moser's 2009 meta-analysis in the Journal of Vocational Behavior pooled 237 cross-sectional and 87 longitudinal studies and found an average effect size of 0.51 for the impact of unemployment on mental health. Among the unemployed, an average of 34 per cent showed psychological problems, against 16 per cent of the employed. The effects ran across distress, depression, anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms, subjective wellbeing and self-esteem.

The physical consequences are equally documented. Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter, writing in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2009, matched administrative employment records for Pennsylvanian workers in the 1970s and 1980s to Social Security death records through 2006. For high-seniority male workers, mortality in the year following displacement ran 50 to 100 per cent above expectation. Job loss in a mass layoff, they estimated, reduces life expectancy by one to one and a half years. Effects were still detectable two decades later.

These are the baseline costs of any redundancy. Whether being told that a machine could do your job adds something on top is a separate question, and the answer is more interesting than intuition suggests.

In 2019, Armin Granulo, Christoph Fuchs and Stefano Puntoni published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour reporting eleven studies and surveys involving more than 2,000 participants across Europe and North America. Their finding ran counter to expectation. When people considered other workers being replaced, they preferred those workers to be replaced by humans rather than robots. When they considered their own replacement, the preference reversed: people would rather be replaced by a machine than by another person. The mechanism the authors identified was self-threat. Being displaced by a human invites a direct comparison of worth. Being displaced by a machine does not, because the machine is not a rival in the social hierarchy.

Which suggests that, at the moment of the layoff, the AI explanation may genuinely soften the blow. It removes the sting of having been judged inferior to a colleague. It replaces a personal verdict with a technological inevitability.

And that is exactly what makes the reversal so corrosive. The protective effect depends on the story being true. If you accept that a machine surpassed you, you have absorbed a loss without the humiliation of comparison. When the employer then returns to say that the machine did not surpass you after all, the protective framing collapses and something worse is exposed underneath. You were not replaced by a superior system. You were removed on the basis of an unverified claim about a system, by people who had not checked, in service of a narrative about the company's future that was being told to investors rather than to you. The comfort was borrowed and the loan has been called in.

There is a further injury that has no name in the psychological literature but is obvious to anyone who has lived it. The rehire is an admission of error that arrives without an apology, because an apology would be an admission of liability. The worker is asked to return to an organisation that has demonstrated, in the most concrete way available, that its assessment of their value was not merely mistaken but unexamined. Trust, in the ordinary employment sense, is a bet that the employer's judgement about you is made in good faith and with due care. The reversal is documentary evidence that it was not. Coming back means working inside that knowledge daily.

The demo, the pilot and the shop floor

None of this would have happened if capability claims had been tested before headcount decisions were made rather than after. The record on that testing is poor across the whole ecosystem.

In August 2025, preliminary findings from MIT's Project NANDA, drawing on more than 300 enterprise deployments, 52 case studies and 153 leadership interviews, reported that roughly 95 per cent of enterprise generative AI pilots produced no measurable return, despite tens of billions of dollars of investment. The figure has been misread and overstated in circulation, and the researchers themselves emphasised that the failures were organisational rather than a verdict on model quality, but the direction is not in dispute.

Orgvue's more recent research points the same way, finding that 92 per cent of organisations had invested in AI while 78 per cent reported projects either failed outright or remained stuck in pilot, with around a third saying they still did not understand how to make AI work.

The most methodologically careful evidence, and the most honest about its own limits, comes from METR. In July 2025 the research organisation published a randomised controlled trial in which sixteen experienced open-source developers completed 246 real tasks, some with AI assistance and some without. The developers expected AI to cut completion time by 24 per cent. Afterwards, they estimated it had made them 20 per cent faster. Measured against the clock, they were 19 per cent slower. The gap between perceived and actual productivity, in the group with the strongest professional incentive to judge accurately, was around 39 percentage points.

METR has since revised the picture, and intellectual honesty requires reporting the revision. In February 2026 the organisation published follow-up work covering 57 developers, ten of them veterans of the original study, across 143 repositories and more than 800 tasks. The raw results pointed the other way. Among the newly recruited developers AI produced an estimated 4 per cent speedup, with a confidence interval running from 15 per cent faster to 9 per cent slower, against the original 19 per cent slowdown whose interval ran from 2 to 39 per cent slower. METR also disclosed a selection problem, though not the one it is commonly reported as having. Developers were not refusing to enrol. Between 30 and 50 per cent of them said they were choosing not to submit particular tasks because they did not want to do those tasks without AI, which quietly stripped from the sample the work where the uplift would have been greatest. A rising share also said they would not want to do half their work without AI at all, even at 50 dollars an hour. METR now describes its own headline result as historical and cautions that its newer data is only very weak evidence for the size of any improvement.

The perception side of that gap has meanwhile widened. In May 2026 METR published a survey of 349 technical workers, conducted between February and April, in which the median self-reported change in the value of work produced with AI tools was between 1.4 and 2 times. Respondents put it at 1.3 times for March 2025, 2 times for March 2026, and forecast 2.5 times for March 2027. METR flagged reasons to doubt the magnitude, noting that its own staff returned the lowest estimates of any subgroup, which it attributed to their familiarity with the evidence on the gap between perceived and actual gains.

That sequence is a model of how capability claims ought to be handled: measured, published, revised, hedged. It is also the exact opposite of how they were handled in the decisions that removed 101,743 people from payrolls in the first half of 2026. Those decisions were made on vendor roadmaps and board-level enthusiasm, not on randomised trials. The research community spent a year arguing about whether AI made sixteen developers slightly faster or slightly slower. Corporate management, working from the same underlying technology, concluded that entire functions could be eliminated and acted on it within a quarter.

Why firms cannot stop even when they know

The most uncomfortable analysis of this cycle argues that the reversals will not prevent the next round, because the incentive structure that produced them is intact.

In March 2026, Brett Hemenway Falk of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Computer and Information Science and Gerry Tsoukalas of Boston University posted a paper to arXiv titled “The AI Layoff Trap”, subsequently revised in June. Its opening premise is the familiar one: if AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on.

The paper's actual contribution is sharper than that summary, and worth stating accurately. Falk and Tsoukalas show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model of a transitioning economy, each firm captures the full cost saving from automation but bears only a fraction of the demand loss it creates, with the remainder falling on rivals. That demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss, they argue, harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and better AI amplify the excess rather than correcting it. Wage adjustment, free entry, capital income taxes, worker equity, universal basic income, upskilling and Coasean bargaining all fail to eliminate it. Their proposed remedy is a Pigouvian automation tax, priced to make firms internalise the demand destruction they cause.

The relevance to the boomerang is direct. If the model is right, the firms conducting reversals are not being corrected by the market in any way that will change their future behaviour. They are absorbing an idiosyncratic operational failure, learning a narrow lesson about one function, and returning to the same competitive pressure that produced the original decision. The rehire fixes the quality problem. It does not touch the externality.

This is a theoretical model, recently posted and not yet through peer review, and its conclusions are contingent on its assumptions. But it offers something the anecdotes do not: an explanation of why sophisticated, well-advised organisations keep making a decision that most of them subsequently regret.

A correction, or a slower version of the same thing

The honest answer is that it is both, and which one dominates depends on where you sit in the labour market.

The genuinely corrective signal is IBM's. In mid-February 2026, at Charter's Leading with AI Summit, the company's chief human resources officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, announced that IBM would triple its United States entry-level hiring in 2026, explicitly for roles that, as the company put it, we are being told AI can do. Entry-level job descriptions were redesigned away from tasks AI automates well, such as routine coding, and towards customer engagement and judgement. LaMoreaux's rationale was strategic rather than sentimental: the companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful, she said, are those that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment.

That matters because the entry-level damage is the least reversible part of this whole episode. Data from the Burning Glass Institute cited in Forrester's analysis shows the share of postings that are entry-level falling between 2018 and 2024 from 43 to 28 per cent in software development, from 35 to 22 per cent in data analysis, and from 41 to 26 per cent in consulting. Youth unemployment for bachelor's degree holders aged 20 to 24 rose from 5.2 per cent in 2018 and 2019 to 6.2 per cent. You cannot boomerang a graduate who never got hired in the first place. There is no former employee to call.

Set against IBM's example is the pattern Forrester actually predicted, which was not restoration but relocation: work returning to humans, at lower cost, offshore or on worse terms. Klarna's flexible remote model is that pattern in practice. The Careerminds finding that only around 27 per cent of firms came out financially ahead suggests the cost discipline that drove the original decision has not gone anywhere, and will simply be pursued through a different mechanism.

The Commonwealth Bank has since supplied the clearest available test of that prediction, because it is the same employer. In July 2026, less than a year after conceding it had got the redundancies wrong, the bank cut hundreds of customer service chat roles held by contractors supplied by Nutun, a Johannesburg outsourcing firm, as it wound back the contract, and confirmed a further 276 redundancies across technology, operations and human resources. The Finance Sector Union puts the total at around 800 Commonwealth Bank roles over the preceding year, including 176 technology and engineering positions, and alleges that some of the eliminated roles were subsequently advertised through the bank's India-based subsidiary. By May 2026, under a chief AI officer appointed at the start of the year, the bank's Hey CommBank chatbot, running on a messaging platform built with Microsoft, was resolving almost nine in ten customer conversations without human assistance. The union has lodged a formal dispute at the Fair Work Commission and challenged the bank to state its real rationale, given a half-year net profit of 5.44 billion Australian dollars. Forty-five onshore jobs were restored with a public admission of error. Several hundred offshore contractor roles went without one, because a contract that is quietly not renewed requires no consultation and generates no headline.

The Washington Times reported on 10 March 2026 that complaints from frustrated customers had prompted e-commerce and financial technology firms to quietly rehire content writers, software engineers and customer service workers replaced by AI systems, and that IBM, Salesforce, Google and Meta had added undisclosed numbers of workers in redefined roles. The operative words in that reporting are quietly, undisclosed and redefined. A reversal conducted quietly, at undisclosed scale, into redefined roles is not the same thing as a retraction.

What an apology would have to include

For the individual worker holding the phone, the practical questions are narrow and answerable. Is the role permanent or a contract? Is the pay above or below where it was, adjusted for two years of inflation? Is there written severance protection this time? Has the organisation changed how it makes automation decisions, or only which decision it reached about your function? Robert Half's Dawn Fay is right that judgement, oversight and institutional knowledge could not be replaced. The question worth asking the employer is whether they now have a process for finding that out before the redundancy consultation rather than three years afterwards.

The broader accounting is harder, because the costs and the benefits landed on different people. Ford's shareholders got a J.D. Power ranking and hundreds of millions in cost tailwind. The engineers got three years of disruption. Klarna's investors got a widely admired efficiency story in 2024 and a widely admired humility story in 2025. The 700 agents got neither. Across the Careerminds sample, roughly seven in ten organisations rehired, and roughly seven in ten found that the exercise had made them no money at all. The severance was paid, the recruitment fees were paid, the re-onboarding was paid, the quality failures were paid for by customers, and the ledger came out flat. The only unambiguous transfer was from the workers to nobody in particular.

What the cycle reveals about the gap between AI rhetoric and AI capability is not that the technology is useless. Ford still uses it. Klarna's assistant still handles two-thirds of conversations. IBM's AskHR still resolves 94 per cent of routine requests. The gap is not between AI working and AI failing. It is between a claim about what a system will be able to do and evidence about what it currently does, and the fact that in 2025 and 2026 a great many organisations treated the first as though it were the second, then priced human beings out of their livelihoods on the strength of it.

The workers who are being called back were not defeated by a machine. They were removed by a forecast. Those are different things, and the difference is the whole of the injury.

Sources and References

1. Crumley, Bruce. “55 Percent of Leaders Regret AI Layoffs, and a Major Hiring Reversal Has Begun.” Inc., late July 2026. https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/55-percent-of-leaders-regret-ai-layoffs-and-a-major-hiring-reversal-has-begun/91380901
2. Forrester Research. “Predictions 2026: The Workforce Muddles Through Ambient Disruption.” Forrester, October 2025. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/future-of-work-predictions-2026-whats-coming-for-work-and-the-workforce
3. Orgvue. “55% of Businesses Admit Wrong Decisions in Making Employees Redundant When Bringing AI Into the Workforce.” PR Newswire, 29 April 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/55-of-businesses-admit-wrong-decisions-in-making-employees-redundant-when-bringing-ai-into-the-workforce-302440611.html; and “92% of Organizations Have Invested in AI but 78% Say Projects Have Either Stalled or Failed.” Orgvue, 2026. https://www.orgvue.com/news/92-of-organizations-have-invested-in-ai-but-78-say-projects-have-either-stalled-or-failed/
4. Careerminds. “AI-Led Layoffs: What HR Leaders Wish They Knew Before Making Job Cuts.” Careerminds, 2026, survey of 600 HR professionals, February 2026. https://careerminds.com/blog/cost-of-ai-layoffs
5. “Employers Who Laid Off Workers Citing AI Are Already Starting to Regret It.” CNBC, 1 July 2026, reporting Robert Half data. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html
6. Castrillon, Caroline. “Your AI Layoff Was Reversed. Should You Go Back?” Forbes, 26 July 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2026/07/26/your-ai-layoff-was-reversed-should-you-go-back/
7. “The Great AI Layoff Is Turning Into the Great AI Rehire.” Fast Company, 2026. https://www.fastcompany.com/91571824/the-great-ai-layoff-is-turning-into-the-great-ai-rehire
8. “Companies Rehire Workers After AI Replacements Fail.” The Washington Times, 10 March 2026. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/mar/10/ai-layoff-reversal-companies-rehire-customer-roles-eliminated/
9. “Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short.” Bloomberg, 25 June 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/ford-has-been-rehiring-quality-inspectors-after-ai-fell-short
10. “Ford Rehires 'Gray Beard' Engineers After AI Falls Short.” TechCrunch, 28 June 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short/
11. Challenger, Gray and Christmas. “Challenger Report: June Layoffs Cool to 45,849, Down 53% From May; AI Leads Reasons for Fourth Consecutive Month.” 1 July 2026. https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-june-layoffs-cool-to-45849-down-53-from-may-ai-leads-reasons-for-fourth-consecutive-month/; and “Job Cut Announcement Report, May 2026.” June 2026. https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Challenger-Report-May-2026.pdf
12. Autor, David H. “Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” NBER Working Paper 20485, September 2014. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20485/w20485.pdf
13. Falk, Brett Hemenway, and Gerry Tsoukalas. “The AI Layoff Trap.” arXiv:2603.20617, submitted 21 March 2026, revised 3 June 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617
14. Paul, Karsten I., and Klaus Moser. “Unemployment Impairs Mental Health: Meta-Analyses.” Journal of Vocational Behavior, vol. 74, 2009, pp. 264 to 282. DOI 10.1016/j.jvb.2009.01.001. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001879109000037
15. Sullivan, Daniel, and Till von Wachter. “Job Displacement and Mortality: An Analysis Using Administrative Data.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 124, no. 3, August 2009, pp. 1265 to 1306. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/124/3/1265/1905153
16. Granulo, Armin, Christoph Fuchs and Stefano Puntoni. “Psychological Reactions to Human Versus Robotic Job Replacement.” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 3, no. 10, October 2019, pp. 1062 to 1069. DOI 10.1038/s41562-019-0670-y. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0670-y
17. Arnold, John D., Chad H. Van Iddekinge, Michael C. Campion, Talya N. Bauer and Michael A. Campion. “Welcome Back? Job Performance and Turnover of Boomerang Employees Compared to Internal and External Hires.” Journal of Management, 2021. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0149206320936335
18. METR. “Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity.” 10 July 2025. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/; and “We Are Changing Our Developer Productivity Experiment Design.” 24 February 2026. https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
19. METR. “Measuring the Self-Reported Impact of Early-2026 AI on Technical Worker Productivity.” 11 May 2026. https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-11-ai-usage-survey/
20. “MIT Report Finds Most AI Business Investments Fail, Reveals GenAI Divide.” Virtualization Review, 19 August 2025, reporting MIT Project NANDA “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025”. https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2025/08/19/mit-report-finds-most-ai-business-investments-fail-reveals-genai-divide.aspx
21. “Klarna Changes Its AI Tune and Again Recruits Humans for Customer Service.” CX Dive, 9 May 2025. https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/klarna-reinvests-human-talent-customer-service-AI-chatbot/747586/
22. “Commonwealth Bank Reverses Job Cuts Decision Over AI Chatbots.” Bloomberg, 21 August 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-21/commonwealth-bank-reverses-job-cuts-decision-over-ai-chatbots
23. “AI Drives Fresh CommBank Job Cuts.” Information Age, Australian Computer Society, 30 July 2026. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ai-drives-fresh-commbank-job-cuts.html; and “CBA Axes Contractor Call Centre Jobs After AI Rollout.” Human Resources Director Australia, 29 July 2026. https://www.hcamag.com/au/specialisation/hr-technology/cba-axes-contractor-call-centre-jobs-after-ai-rollout/584060
24. “IBM Plans to Triple Entry-Level Hiring in the US in 2026.” Bloomberg, 12 February 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-12/ibm-plans-to-triple-entry-level-hiring-in-the-us-in-2026
25. “IBM Replaced Hundreds of HR Workers With AI, According to Its CEO.” Entrepreneur, 2025. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ibm-ceo-ai-replaced-hundreds-of-human-resources-staff/491341

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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

S.N.I.t.

Van Voorbijgaande Aard beseft het eerder op tv geziene ook nog niet helemaal.

Wij staan hier nog altijd op het ere metaal winnaar meet & greet de journalist van eigen land en taal point bij Jan Ongeveer gouden medaille winnaar van het onderdeel 2500 meter slinger sprong. Jan je hebt zojuist je persoonlijk aanloop record op de 2500 meter verbeterd, met een kogel in je hand, deze na de aanloop maar liefst 5 meter verder geworpen dan tijdens de vorige aluminium meeting waarop je maar tweede werd en daarna sprong je maar liefst 16 meter en 54 cm vanaf het slingerpunt, meer dan genoeg om alle andere deelnemers te kleineren, en ruim voldoende voor je eerste gouden plak ooit op een internationaal kampioenschap dit jaar. Wat gaat er door je heen.

Ik kan er met mijn hoofd niet bij, hier werk je maanden naar toe en je hoopt er het beste van als de strijd begint en dan winnen, van al die andere strijders, super atleten, ik besef het nog niet helemaal.

Oké, bedankt. Is het goed dat we daar dan morgen op terug komen?

Eh ja, oké.

De volgende dag, exact 24 uur later

Jan leuk je weer te zien. Besef je inmiddels wat je hebt gedaan gisteren.

Nee, nog altijd niet, ik heb mijn best gedaan maar vooralsnog besef ik het niet. Vraag me morgen nog maar eens.

Doen we

De volgende dag 25 uur later na de laatste ontmoeting, meer dan twee dagen na het goud.

Jan, welkom terug bij ons meet & greet point. Gaat het inmiddels volledig door je heen. Is het daar, het besef?

Het is nakende denk ik, maar voor zover ik nu durf te zeggen denk ik niet dat ik het alvoor de volle honderd procent deed, beseffen wat ik eerder heb gedaan en hoe.

We komen hier morgen op terug Jan.

De volgende dag, 27 uur later na gisteren.

*Hoi Jan, hier en nu net nadat ook Elsebed Oeverloos en Maritine Meervoud goud wonnen op het onderdeel Speer overwerpen, waarbij ook Elsebed het eerst maar moeilijk kon beseffen maar Maritine meteen, zij kon dat besef direct overdragen op Elsebed en dat kon je ook heel goed op tv zien en horen maar hoe is het met het jouwe Jan.

Op zich beter, ik had het besef maar even later verloor ik het alweer. Toen ik het wederom kwijt was brak ik in tranen uit, meteen daarna heb ik contact opgenomen met mijn mental coach omdat ik beter wil worden in omgaan met behaalde titel besef. Dit is al het vijfde toernooi waarop ik ere metaal behaal en bij geen van die eretitels had ik erna echt diepgaand besef. Ik kan zo niet doorgaan, beste, lieve, vragende mensen bij de meet en greet met mij, ik ga vanaf nu deelnemen aan het leer traject besef basis training zodat ook ik doordrongen zal zijn van het door mij behaalde en niet langer zomaar wat doe! Dit moet en zal de laatste keer zijn dat ik te weinig besef ervaar zowel hier bij jullie als naast de baan, in mijn hotel kamers, bij mijn collega's. Eindelijk ben ik me ervan bewust dat ik ondanks alle trainingen, het bloed, zweet en de tranen dit ene kleine onderdeel horende bij het bereiken van elk podium niet beheers. Ik schaam me hiervoor. Hopelijk kunnen jullie van de pers, de sponsoren, mijn familie en het publiek mij hierin steunen zodat ik wanneer ik alweer op het podium sta meteen kan zeggen dat ik daar en dan meteen besef wat ik op de baan heb gepresteerd meestal hetzelfde als waarvoor ik ook altijd alles op zij heb gezet, titels, prijzen in de kast, een plek boven op het podium.

Bedankt Jan Ongeveer, sterkte gewenst met het behalen van besef behorende bij successen dan komt het beste vast helemaal bij je boven en kun je net als ons echt heel veel van al die top prestaties genieten, telkens weer.

Where the wheels pause, the world waits.

Tire Shop Purgatory – A Poetic Exploration

Midmorning on a Friday. A trip to the local landfill left a leaking hole in one of my tires. The tire shop (a national chain) is ringed with worn red chairs. Decades old and sun bleached.

Mostly middle-aged men hunch over their phones, scrolling Facebook or news. The lone woman is thread-worn but clinging to youth—blouse a size too young, short skirt revealing legs that are billboards for her love of the sea: turtles, octopuses, tribal tides of ink.

Her skin seconds her love of the sea.

I wish women would not tattoo their legs (or arms or chests). They are such beautiful features, and I have never seen appendages improved by ink.

A subtle mark in a quiet place can be alluring—even evocative. But women are creatures of beauty; their bodies are art. Covering them in tattoos feels like graffitiing a masterpiece.

Men? Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails... so I guess... whatever!

At the counter, the clerk is quietly explaining to a pretty young mom that she needs two tires, when two is two more than she can afford. I think I sense his trepidation at trying to upsell her, but he keeps going. It’s his job.

Two old men laugh about the old days.

“Mike!” one says, extending a hand.

“Ron,” the other corrects while shaking. “Mike’s my fatter, less handsome brother.”

They roar with laughter.

Car-lot camaraderie, I suspect.

A second young mom enters with her toddler. Workout clothes, immaculate hair, painted-on leggings, and a magenta strap of fabric for a top—form over function. Her right shoulder blooms with a sleeve of flowers and a circular logo in the middle. I stare too long, trying to decipher its meaning.

What’s clearer are the horse tracks climbing her spine. Barrel racer? Bronc buster? Eight-second rides memorialized in ink?

Hahaha! Do women break horses? Of course, I know they do, we dined at a horsewoman’s home during the workshop we attended a few weeks ago. I don’t recall ever seeing that at rodeos however.

Then—shock—a woman in a long skirt and brown tank top is reading a book. How pleasant to see a reader among the scrollers.

I want to stand up and declare, 'Hear ye, hear ye! This blessed soul is transferring thoughts and intention long-considered, drafted, edited, rewritten, then set and printed into physical form. We shall laud her adherence to REAL reading!!'

And follow with,

'By the way, I'm not like you lemmings, I'm using my device to MAKE ART. About you, ironically.'

But I do not. I just smile to myself, finish this brief and go back to my Jack and Mara story. He has just discovered he has arrived to late to see this very special woman.

I wonder if THEY will ever be indelible enough to be in ink.

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2025-10-10 13:00:30

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#tireshop #essay #travel #penandink #100daystooffset #writing

In Summary: * Listening now to the pregame show ahead of tonight's MLB game between the Guardians and the Tigers, and looking forward to tomorrow morning when a/c contactors will be here to, hopefully, get the a/c in this house back in working order. I am SO looking forward to that!

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= 225.53 lbs. * bp= 128/76 (67)

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

Diet: * 05:20 – 1 banana * 06:10 – 2 HEB bakery cookies, 1 ham and cheese sandwich * 08:10 – 1 small milk cheese cake * 10:30 – 2 more cookies * 12:15 – meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, whole kernel corn, fresh mango

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:45 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:45 to 11:45 – yard work, cleaning weeds out of the flower bed in front of the house, got bug bit * 12:15 to 13:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:45 – now listening to WTAM 1100 Cleveland's News, Talk & Sports Station, for general sports talk ahead of tonight's MLB Game between the Guardians and the Tigers * 17:10 – MLB has just activated their audio feed bringing me WTAM's Guardians pregame show ahead of tonight's game.

Chess: * 16:15 – moved in all pending CC games

#fiction #books #fantasy

Warning: Contains spoilers

Fantasy has a subgenre that asks itself “what if history, but with magic?”, and within that subgenre there is a peculiar penchant for novels set during the British Regency era with its High Society romances and the thrill of the Napoleonic Wars. Bridgerton with Dragons, if you will. Because after all, what is more dashing than a well-bred aristocrat wizard wearing the uniform of His Majesty’s Royal Navy?

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell falls within this genre, but takes a deeper approach than adding magical creatures to a romance or adventure story. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it tells the story of the two titular magicians and their efforts to restore magic, specifically English magic, to the world. The novel’s 900+ pages of high society salons, the Peninsular War and expeditions to elven lands are quite possibly less about magic, and more about what does or does not define Englishness. Clarke’s novel almost feels like an incantation itself, a magical tome containing an intricate spell to conjure up a lost England for the reader.

Powerful spells require excellent concentration and superb command of one’s ingredients however, and this is where Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not always have the wizardry required. It is a daunting undertaking to sustain pace and dramatic tension across hundreds of pages, and at times Clarke does not succeed at this. But it is the ending where for me the story unravelled and the spell broke. There is much to enjoy in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in particular for fans of the English classics, but the finale did not deliver the magical fireworks that its premise promised.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is built on an almost dialectical series of interconnected juxtapositions that start with the contrast between the two mages and spirals out from there. We are introduced first to Mr Norrell, a deeply insecure, narrow-minded and vindictive member of the minor gentry set outwith Society by virtue of both his status and personality. His deep-seated anxieties drive his contradictory impulses of wanting to restore English magic, while simultaneously sequestering any magical books he can find away in his private library lest anyone else might read them. Norrell is a man who craves intellectual companionship with the same strength with which he fears potential competition. It is a rare moment indeed when he overcomes his caution and takes on Jonathan Strange as his apprentice, who is psychologically the complete opposite of Norrell, the yang to Norrell’s yin. Equally riven by contradictory impulses, Strange oscillates between the insouciant and carefree nonchalance that only comes from being securely born as an aristocrat into high society, and obsessive fixation on whatever interest or task he has set himself. Strange takes up magic on a whim, but his unthinking self-confidence means ends up drawn far deeper into the mysteries of the art than Norrell.

Unbeknownst to themselves, both magicians find themselves in conflict with The Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. A faery with no regard for morality, honour or good manners, he represents the dark and wild side of English magic that Norrell seeks desperately to excise from his modern approach to magic, and to which Strange becomes fixedly attracted. Yet it is Norrell who first sets the Gentleman on a course against the magicians, by compelling him to assist in the resurrection of Lady Pole, a young woman, to secure Norrell’s access to the highest levels of government.

Together with various other characters orbiting the three magicians, Lady Pole represents a third juxtaposition within the novel, between the three mages and their collateral damage. For what unites Norrell, Strange and the Gentleman is a callous disregard for the consequence of their actions. Even though the three mages are constantly at odds with one another, they share a deep carelessness about other people: Norrell because he cares only for himself, Strange because he does not care for others, and the Gentleman because he cares not at all.

The characters hurt by the three mages represent various oppressed groups in Regency England: women, black slaves, the poor and working classes. Norrell’s bargain with the Gentleman to restore life to Lady Pole sees the latter lead a double life in the Faerie, leaving her exhausted and seemingly mad, to eventually be secluded away for the sake of propriety. Strange’s neglected and ignored wife Arabella is similarly enchanted, as is Stephen Black, black butler to the Pole household who is neither slave nor free man. And poor, working and even middle class magicians are excluded from the revival of English magic as it established as a gentlemanly pursuit.

And therein lies the final contradiction, for while Norrell, Strange and their Government Ministers dream of a thoroughly English magic for the modern age, the magic itself stubbornly refuses to conform to their aristocratic sensibilities. Magic was brought to England a thousand years earlier by the Raven King, a human foundling raised by faeries who conquered Northern England to establish his own kingdom. The Raven King’s magic is indeed English, but it is the magic of gnarled oaks in dark winter forests as much as of the green rolling hills in the imaginations of Norrell, Strange, and the past and present English upper classes, ensconced in their stately homes in the Home Counties. There is an obvious implied argument here that it is not just the magic, but Englishness itself that is much darker, older and wyrder than the national myth of the green and pleasant land and the people that own it. That England’s blasted moorlands, mountain crags and snow-covered forests, and the people that dwell there, have an equal claim to Englishness.

Breaking open the dominant notion of Englishness to make it more inclusive has merit, but the risk of an argument about the cultural self-conception of a specific part of a small island nation on the periphery of the Eurasian continent is that it becomes, well, insular. The outsized cultural influence of the Anglosphere notwithstanding, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not escape this inherent provincialism, and instead rather leans into it. In part this is because the debate at the heart of the book implies that magic is something uniquely English, there being no evidence or engagement with foreign magical practices past or present throughout the novel. On top of that, the style and format of the novel further reinforce its profoundly inward-looking nature. To pay homage to English Romance novels, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is written like a contemporaneous account of the novel’s events (footnotes included!), but the price of this is that despite Clarke’s possible misgivings about the English upper class, they still dominate the pages and provide our lens on the story’s events. Unable to escape their inbred sense of superiority, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unfortunately suffused of the infamous “Heavy Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off” mentality.

The centrality of upper class characters is also one of the reasons why Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell did not fully work for me as a narrative that attempts to bring marginalised groups back into the story, though I don’t dispute this is a possible reading. It is undoubtedly the case that the female and working class characters have more common sense and see things more clearly than either of the two titular magicians or the upper class characters who are frequently depicted as either incompetent, venal, or both. But with the exception of Mr Norrell’s manservant Childermass and the vagrant prophet-magician Vinculus, most of the marginalised characters have their agency curtailed either directly (as in the case of Lady Pole who is enchanted by the Gentleman) or indirectly (as in the case of Stephen Black who has no standing on account of his race). While they act as a foil for the arrogance of the wizards and their class, they do not exert their own power on events until the final part of the book, and even then their role is instrumental, but not directive.

This is is because as we approach the novel’s finale in the third act, we discover that Clarke chose to play with that most dangerous magic of all: prophecy. Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell may believe they are directing the return of magic to England, but gradually it is revealed that they are mere ingredients in someone else’s spell. A spell by none other than John Uskglass, the Raven King himself, to restore his magic to England.

It is an intriguing development, falling somewhat short of a twist by virtue of serious foreshadowing, but it has the effect of collapsing the dramatic tension just as we approach the conclusion, For as soon as we know that events are preordained, the actions, agonising and arguments of the protagonists cease to be compelling. The outcome of the story may well be interesting, but it is so in the way of a game of chess: we might be invested in the outcome and the play, but nobody will enquire after the moods or motivations of the pieces.

For this reason I was ultimately also not persuaded by the thesis that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell emancipates its marginalised characters by moving them from periphery into the centre of the story. Because the centre of this story is empty, a void spun around the absent figure of the Raven King who turns out to have been pulling everyone’s strings all along. In a way, Clarke does manage to equalise the standing of her upper class magicians and her other characters, but it is done by reducing the former rather than elevating the latter.

As an argument about who magic belongs to, the denouncement of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may work very well, but as a story it fizzled out for me. By this point, the reader has spent hundreds of pages of sometimes laboured prose in the company of two unpleasant magicians, whose idiosyncrasies, inability to communicate and failure to notice crucial events perform precisely as the plot demands. It may have worked if Clarke had also intended Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as a pastiche of a comedy of errors, but I doubt that is the case. In a way the ending retroactively justifies these odd lapses of judgement and the fact that the cause of English magic ever came to rest on the shoulders of two men so ill-equipped to bear it, but satisfying it is not.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an ambitious, at times audacious work. It mixes evident affection for fantasy and the English classics with a critique of both genres, taking its story from what feels like a familiar beginning into an unexpected direction. But at over 900 pages it also feels drawn out, with great lapses where nothing seems to happen and the reader is left waiting for events to unfold. Since it was published in 2004, fantasy has seen much innovation and a proliferation of protagonists from diverse backgrounds, and by comparison Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can feel dated. It should certainly still appeal to readers with a love of the ‘historic Britain with magic’ subgenre, in particular those who are intimately familiar with the English classics. But beyond that it is somewhat too much like its wizards: learned but long-winded, adroit but unfocused, and ultimately just not in control of its magic.

Notes & Suggestions

• There were times when Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell reminded me of Gormenghast, probably because of the similarities in length, the drifting plot and the constant sense of something ominous in the background. Where Peake uses Gormenghast Castle as the structure that contains his protagonists, Clarke could be said to use the whole of the English landscape. But England is much larger than Gormenghast, and we never spend enough time outside of London to give it the same dominating presence as Peake’s Castle.
• ‘Men failing to communicate’ is also central to the plot of Akira, and I suppose it is generally a common trope. Akira’s sheer energy and much shorter runtime mean it gets away with it in a way that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not.
• I enjoyed putting this review in dialogue with a 2008 review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Elizabeth Hoiem, published in Strange Horizons magazine. Although I eventually tracked down the original, I initially accessed it using the Wayback Machine, which seeks to preserve web content even after the original pages expire. A laudable aim that always values support.

What is it you would like to say?
 Say it, for this is the world’s end.

A poem about death shortly after the anniversary of losing my wife's closest friend.

---

How could I worry about me?

I am now struck— Struck by how much I loved her, And how through all the years, I never once said, I love you.

I laughed with her. Supped with her. Took her cookies. Listened to her. Suffered next to her. Dreamed of her.

But—like my flesh and blood, I took her for granted— This woman who gathered me in, Through three decades and five, Sometimes as son, Sometimes as brother, Sometimes as a wise one.

—

Now, it's 3:30 a.m., Adrift in the emptiness of a parking lot 
I hear the distant whistle Of a night train crying Through the wind.


The clack-clack-clack Rolling in the dark Carries me back Where these sounds once Wove themselves into her walls.

Vibrations signaling I was trapped— Not in fear, But in refuge Walled from a worried world For just a few minutes more.

How I wish now— I wish I could be trapped one more time, Just for those moments. Not long— Just long enough to say:

Thank you.

I love you.

---

#poetry #death #confession #storytelling #write #100daystooffload

---

2025-04-26 09:39:17

I think im drunk, which means, naturally, my thoughts have wandered somewhere they shouldnt. Oh, that woman. she’ll be the death of me. a beautiful, magnificent, bloody woman. gorgeous doesnt even seem like the right word for her anymore. its too ordinary. too small. shes majestic, an angel, my angel. an angel ive never seen before, an angel that makes every other angel seem poorly designed. and she doesnt even have to try. She just exists and somehow im left sitting here wondering what exactly happend to my ability to think normally. although, i have been wondering about something. anyway, i dont think ive ever properly explained how beautiful she is, either. not physically. i mean, obviously shes beautiful, but thats not what i mean. theres something about her. she has this way of getting into my head, she can easily make me think about her for hours and she wouldnt even know shes doing it. or maybe she does. see, thats the problem with her. i never quite know. shes sweet enough that i want to believe everything she says. shes clever enough that i occasionally wonder if i should. not because I think shes lying. just because.. well, shes her. and i know what she does to me. she makes me stupid. completely, embarrassingly stupid. enough to make me forget every sensible thought ive had, enough that my head tells me to be careful and i nod along, agree with it entirely. and then immediately do the exact opposite because she happened to cross my mind. i hate it. but i love it more. which is worse. because i could sit here and list every reason i should keep my distance, every little warning my head has been giving me, every sensible argument ive made against getting so attached to one person. and then id look at her, or think of her. and forget every single one, what a talent she has. turning a perfectly reasonable man into an idiot with nothing but a smile.

i could spend years trying to understand what she does to me. i suspect I’d still end up with the same answer. she’s beautiful. shes dangerous in all the gentlest ways. and if she really is going to be my undoing, i suppose there are worse ways for a man to lose himself. especially when the person waiting at the end of it is her. and while she probably wont be here to read this, and thats for the best. but all of it had to go somewhere, and tonight. some of it is here.

Sincerely, With all thats in me, The fool who fell his guardian angel.

Cactus Store

As kids we used to play a sort of open ended verbal RPG called Cactus Store. The only consistent to the game is you are thrown from a cab in the middle of the desert. The only thing you see is a fake looking cactus, and when you investigate it something happens, either a chute opens up, knock out gas, or something that leads you to find yourself on the floor of a convenience store. From there, it is pretty open ended, more like a CYOA that is improved by whoever is running the game. It was a good way to pass the time on bus rides and in line at theme parks before the age of smart phones and ubiquitous screens.

Anyway, a few years back I decided to make a prototype of what it would look like as an actual RPG, from scratch. Below is what I drafted. It includes mechanics, and some general plot and world building information. The entire world is sort of an endless indoor shopping space as part of a dystopian late stage capitalist hellscape. The biggest threat is debt and the constant grind is earning money. I actually did an alpha test of the game with a few players a while back. It was fun but some of the mechanics broke under stress testing. I probably have more documentation about it I'll post if I find it, but for now here was the main game document:

Basics: Player(s) are very late for a meeting and have taken a cab. The cab driver goes the wrong direction, leaving the city and heading out into the desert. When the passenger(s) protest, the cab driver kicks them out of the cab and leaves them on the side of the road. The terrain is desolate and there is nothing of interest aside from a very artificial looking cactus. Upon examination, the cactus springs some sort of trap, incapacitating the players. They wake up on the floor of a convenience store. Everything from here is up to the Game Master and the players.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Here is my set of rules for Cactus Store, but the Game Master can choose any sort of rules they wish to govern gameplay.

Mechanics:

D20 System- The only dice needed for this game are twenty-sided. All entropy necessary for game play can come from these.

Character Statistics:

To simplify gameplay, characters have three primary statistics:

Physical Prowess- This is a measure of general athletic ability. Any challenge involving physical strength, agility, coordination, etc will be a physical prowess check.

Intellect- This is a measure of mental acuity. Any challenge involving comprehension, persuasion, or any other activity that is more based in mental rather than physical exertion will use intellect.

Stamina- Stamina is akin to hitpoints in other RPGs. Taking damage in combat, environmental hazards and grueling tasks can all drain stamina. If a player reaches zero stamina, they lose consciousness.

In addition to these statistics, characters may have perks and features that modify these abilities in certain circumstances or add other features to the game at the discretion of the Game Master. For example, a character could have a “gift of gab” that gives them +5 intellect whenever dealing with a challenge that involves persuading someone.

Challenges: When a character is faced with a challenge, they roll based on the challenge's rating, or against another player or non-player character opposing them in the challenge. Whoever has the higher roll wins the challenge. For every 10 points in a score, they roll a D20. Any points in excess of 10 are added to the roll. For example, deciphering a coded message could have a challenge score of 25 for an intellect check. If a player has an intellect of 18, they roll 1d20 and add 8 to the score, trying to beat 25. At the Game Master’s discretion, players may take 10 on rolls for fixed checks.

If a player rolls a 20, they roll an additional d20 and add the result. So let’s say a character has a physical prowess score of 12. They roll a 20, roll again and get 13, and then add a bonus of 2 so their total roll would be 35. In a contested roll, a player and the opposing player or non-player character both roll checks and the higher roll triumphs. Based on the scope of the difference, the Game Master may implement additional effects.

Items:

Credits- Issued by the Corpogov, this is the only legal tender accepted in the inbetween. It can be in the form of flexible bills made of a thin nanocarbon or digital tokens attached to a bank account.

Weapons- Add damage or effects in combat.

Aid Items- Add temporary or permanent bonuses. Bonuses from the same item cannot be stacked, but bonuses from different items can be. A player can’t use two items that have the same function, for example they could not wear a hat and a helmet.

Combat:

Combat is relatively straight forward. Combatants take turns (order determined by the Game Master) either attacking, using an item or ability, or attempting to flee. Attacks generally deal stamina damage, but other effects are also possible. A simple attack just deals a character's Physical Prowess in damage, and is usually a punch, kick or hit with a melee weapon. A melee weapon adds a bonus to this attack, while a ranged weapon is not affected by Physical Prowess unless otherwise noted. For example, a player would add the bonus from a crowbar to their attack but not a gun. GM should add entropy to damage dealt as appropriate, all numbers given are averages.

Death:

Death is not a certainty in the inbetween. If a character reaches 0 stamina, either through attrition or a death event (one that instantly brings their stamina to 0), the emergency collection squad is deployed from the hospital. These cybernetic EMTs collect the individual’s body and revive them at the hospital. Whether they are in one piece or blown to bits, the level of medical technology the Corpogov has access to is so advanced that they can revive the character with little issue. The Corpogov does, however, levy a fee for this service. As part of the standard socialized medicine contract, for individuals under a net worth of 25000 credits, the cost is a flat 5000 credits. For individuals of a greater net worth, the cost is 20% of their net worth. For very high net worth individuals, other exclusive private medical packages are possible. Characters who cannot pay the fee must enter a debt structuring program before leaving the hospital. Failure to adhere to debt structuring will lead to characters being removed. It is unclear what happens to them.

Debt:

Once the Corpogov has a debt file out on someone, they always find a way to collect. Medical debt is the most common, followed by debt for crimes. Any crime committed has a monetary penalty associated with it– even murder. If someone establishes and then fails to comply with a debt structuring contract, they will deploy compliance officers to track the individual down. One will be caught almost immediately in the atriums, but they can hide in alleys and other places. Payment options include:

Lump Sum: Agree to an amount plus 20% interest to be paid in full by a certain time frame. Failure to do so adds additional penalties.

Wage Garnishment: Wages will be garnished until debt is paid plus premium, only allowed for those with significant stable income (not the players).

Servitude: For debts that are not too substantial, one can do manual work for the Corpogov, usually custodial and otherwise, to pay off the debt. However, dangerous tasks may be assigned, and workers are responsible for any medical debt incurred from damage taken by job duties.

Medical Experimentation: For high debts, this is the most expedient way to pay them off. Debtors are taken to the higher floors for– experiments. No one seems to be quite sure what is done to them, but many who come back are– changed. Some don’t come back at all.

Character Classes:

All players start with 10 Physical Prowess, 10 Intellect and 100 Max Stamina points. The following bonuses are applied if they choose this character class.

Meathead – Add 1d20 to all Physical Prowess checks. -5 to all Intellect rolls.

Nerd – Add 1d20 to all Intellect checks. -5 to all Physical Prowess rolls.

Wildcard- A roll of 20 causes you to roll two additional d20, and a roll of 19 lets you roll 1 additional d20. However, a roll of 1 is an instant failure (never on bonus dice but on the initial roll).

Masochist- -5 to intellect and physical prowess rolls. 200 Max Stamina.

Average Joe- Just a regular guy. No bonuses.

Locations:

The Convenience Store- Characters awaken on the floor of a convenience store. As they look around:

“You open your eyes to the bright, artificial, overhead lights. You look around and from what you can tell you are in a convenience store. The walls are adorned with rows of shelves, lined with a wide variety of cheap snack foods and miscellaneous products. The shelving units reach up to the ceiling, creating an illusion of an expansive selection. Each shelf is neatly labeled, indicating the category of products it holds, making it easy to navigate the store. One thing that catches your eye is the utter lack of promotional materials or advertising– and all of the products seem to lack brands. The soda is just called Cola and the chocolate bars are literally labeled “chocolate bar.”

The store is empty other than the players and the clerk behind the counter. He is a slightly shorter than average, balding middle aged man with a dark complexion. He wears oversized glasses with frames that fell out of style decades ago. He does not seem at all surprised to see people laying on the floor of the store, and does not seem to be paying particular attention to you.”

-The players can purchase anything they would find in a normal convenience store here if they have the credits.

-The can talk to the clerk who is friendly and will answer most questions he is able to that are not too personal or probing. He doesn’t remember when he came to the in between but he started this store to support his wife and daughter. His wife works at a hair salon nearby and his daughter is studying at the university. He no longer remembers much of his previous life.

-If the players search the convenience store and pass an intellect check of 20, they find 30 credits crumpled on the ground wedged beneath a display.

-The players can attempt to steal things from the store. Set the challenge level equal to the size of the they want to steal and have them make a physical prowess check. They can pass an intellect check to distract the clerk, giving a bonus d20 to the physical prowess check if successful. If they are caught, they will receive a stern warning to return the item. If they refuse or steal again, Corpogov Compliance will be called.

The Atrium-

You leave the convenience store and enter a massive atrium–similar to what you might see at a large airport. There are various stores and establishments attached, but from what you can tell the entire thing is enclosed indoors. There is a dull amber light coming from the entire ceiling, and the room is filled with tables, chairs, couches, and other furniture along with massive plants that you would expect to see at the center of a shopping mall atrium. Various people are going about their business, and there is the occasional small scale utility vehicle driving by carrying trash or supplies to a local business.

OPTIONAL: You hear a commotion and see a loathsome looking individual in a tattered hospital gown running on all fours across the atrium. They are growling and frothing at the mouth. They knock over a trash can and begin voraciously eating the contents. Two people in blue coveralls and aviator sunglasses with the word COMPLIANCE written in all caps quickly arrive on the scene and put a bullet in the creature's head. A team soon shows up with a small truck and picks up the body, carrying it off. A custodian promptly follows to clean up the trash. No one else in the atrium seems to pay much attention– apparently this is not an uncommon sight.

People of interest: -Chess Players- five people set up with chess boards. Successive Intellect checks to beat them, can play for cash. -Cat Lady -Panhandler -Debtor (cleaning tables to pay off Corpogov debt) -D and D group (they came here so they’d have time to actually meet as a group, their campaign is actually a good indicator of the time that has passed. To afford snack foods they occasionally work odd job shifts like the pizzeria). They will reveal anything you want to know about their campaign and also drop fact that people don’t sleep in the Inbetween.

Actions- You can leave the atrium to go to the trash allies, head to East or West to other atriums, or if players ask, they can try to climb up the pillars to reach the ventilation shafts. This is very difficult due to how slick the pillars are. This requires a physical prowess check of 35. Take 5 stamina damage for each point you fail from falling.

Search trash cans. You will get some looks. Make an intellect check: 30+: Find something valuable (GM discretion) 20-29: Find edible food, refill your stamina 10-19: Nothing noteworthy 5-9: Get yourself all disgusting, -5 on next persuasive check 1-4: You find rotten food but don’t realize it. You eat it and make a PP check (20), each point failed lose 5 stamina.

Pizzeria- This pizzeria is decorated mostly with old dark wood paneling, though the kitchen has white tile. There isn’t really room for seating, people buy pizza to go either by the slice or pie. There is a staging area for delivery personnel and there is a sign that says “now hiring delivery personnel!”

Options: Buy a slice of Pizza: +15 Stamina, costs 75 credits Buy a whole pizza: +120 Stamina, costs 600 credits- can be shared among group

Work a shift- No experience required! Deliver a pizza, get paid. Each delivery pays 100 credits. Roll 1d20 to see what happens:

20: Deliver to a gambler on a winning streak, he gives you a 1000 credit tip! 18-19: A generous customer gives you a tip. +1d20 x 20 credits 6-17: Nothing noteworthy happens 3-5: Make an Intellect check (15). Failure indicates you get lost trying to deliver the pizza in The Stacks., Lose 20 stamina. Keep trying until you succeed. If group is delivering, everyone gets a chance to pass the check. After getting lost and finding your way, you get a bonus on future getting lost checks. You can ask for directions, but if you do roll 1d20: 15-20: Helpful individuals tell you where to go, you are no longer lost 6-14: They don’t know where you are going. 1-5: Seedy individuals give you the wrong address. You end up at a trap house where they mug you! 2: You get mugged! A mugger attacks you (or muggers, GM discretion). Give him your money or prepare for combat. 1: A… feral human demands the pizza in a gutteral, growling voice. Give up the pizza or prepare for combat. You will owe the pizzeria the cost of the pizza.

Coffee Shop:

Caffeinated perk- Anytime a caffeinated beverage is consumed, reroll 1d20 of the next intellect check and take the higher result. This effect does not stack.

Pawn Shop:

Sells various low level weapons and other potentially helpful items. GMs discretion.

The Trash Alleys:

Located behind the various shopping outlets, a place where garbage is discarded to be collected and other infrastructure is located like steam pipes, water mains, etc. Not well patrolled so frequently attracts vagrants and ferals.

Corpogov Compliance Agency: These are basically the cops. Their sole purpose is to enforce property rights and the prosperity of the Corpogov. They use lethal force freely and don’t take kindly to… noncompliance.

The Corpogov Compliance front office is very similar to a DMV, a kafkaesque bureaucratic maze of desks, queues, counters and forms that need to be filled out. Corpogov Compliance rarely detains individuals, they either use deadly force or levy a fine so there isn’t much need for holding cells. Complaints are ignored unless they involve a disruption to the capitalist ecosystem. Also, there are job opportunities!

Contract Compliance: Compliance is not currently hiring full time officers, but they do have bounty work for those willing to get their hands dirty. They call this “Contract Compliance.” These are the jobs that are too high risk/too low reward for Compliance officers to engage in. Payment is in full after the task is completed. After completing a few bounties, contract workers have the opportunity to purchase weapons from the Corpogov arsenal that are not legally available elsewhere. Contract workers are responsible for the hospital fees of any bystanders they harm in the process of completing their contract.

The Stacks:

Cheaper housing for blue collar workers. Essentially slums cobbled together with sheet metal, they are stacked very high, hence the name. Rickety fire escapes connect them. Lots of criminal activity here as Corpocompliance doesn’t care much about what goes on.

The Towers:

Rich people district.

The Ventilation System:

Above each atrium there is a series of ductworks that connects them and maintains constant airflow. These are difficult to reach and illegal to access, but if you get in they provide an expedient way to travel about the place. May occasionally encounter sentry bots, ferals, hideouts, etc here. Might also find loot.

Trap House:

Drug den/den of debauchery. Organized crime or bounties may take you here.

The Salvage Dump:

Where all the trash goes. Is picked over by unfortunates and ferals before being recycled or incinerated.

Farm Floor:

The Sketchy Recruiter:

Early on if the players are desperate for work, this fellow may approach them. “You are approached by a sketchy looking slender man in a slightly tattered mustard yellow suit. He has a clipboard and a cobbled together name tag that reads “Recruiter for Realsolutions Industries.” He says that you seem like you could use quick employment and he has a number of opportunities to consider. On the clipboard you can clearly see the word “opportunities” with handscrawled titles. They read: No Questions Delivery Service, Discount EMT, Insurance Consultant, Vigilante, and Handsyman (not a typo).

Sketchy Recruiter Stats: Stamina: 150, PP: 12, Intellect: 20. He wields a taser (4 charges remaining) and carries 2000 credits, though only 500 in his wallet, the rest hidden in his suit.

Note: All of these jobs are dangerous and dubious. The recruiter has no intention of actually paying the contractors. He has been paid ahead of time. When asked for his name, he will make one up and may change it if asked again. If the players successfully complete a job they will be told their services were already paid for through the recruiting agency. If you track down the recruiter he will do anything he can to postpone payment and talk the players down. Threats/Intellect can be used but he won’t give up money easily.

No Questions Delivery- Deliver packages from one sketchy location to another. Don’t look in the package.

Discount EMT- For those who cannot afford regular EMTs or arent in the system. Surely they are being transported to somewhere they can be helped.

Insurance Consultant- You “consult” people on good insurance and demonstrate the consequences of not getting the insurance.

Vigilante- A man in baby blue spandex with a horse face mask calling himself the “Stallion of Justice” plans to take on crime and is looking for side kicks. If you follow him he will start a fight with random criminals and probably lose. His real name is Winston and he was recently fired from his government office job and has had a mental break. His stats: Stamina: 110, Intellect: 15 (-10 on sanity checks), PP: 12 (he thinks he is much stronger. He carries a few hundred credits and his weapon is an ornamental Katana (+30 damage, 50% chance to break each use). He also carries pepper spray. If taken on his job he will approach 2 thugs and demand they surrender or face justice. They will attack him. Players can intervene, flee, or do whatever they wish. If he somehow triumphs, he will seek more dangerous game…

Handsyman- A corpocompliance security officer (pistol with armor) moonlighting as private security will escort the players to this “job”. They are led to the Towers, and in the security kiosk commanded to change into tacky looking handymen outfits. It’s clear that this is not sanctioned and is an extra source of income for the security officer. If they comply they are led up to a large condo in the towers. The condo is decorated with strange art, many phallic sculptures and a mix of avant garde abstract paintings and pornographic photographs. The owner of the domicile demands that he be referred to as “The Sultan.” He as a record in the background playing soft crooner music, it sounds like the record has been repeatedly played to the point of degradation. He is a very small, thin older man who wears a silk green bathrobe, resembling a kimono, that barely hangs on his frail body. Despite his gaunt appearance, he has a bulging belly indicating either parasitic infection or too much partying and an inflamed liver. Its’ curious he hasnt’ reset at the hospital, it almost seems like he prefers this aesthetic. He asked the new Handsymen to get to work and they see some tools scattered on the floor. They can “fix things” as they please but this should be purely performative. Soon after they begin The Sultan bends over and requests his pipes be cleaned. The security guard remains present the entire time.

The Sultan: 30 Intellect, 10 PP, 90 Stamina. +1 bonus action from cocaine, -10 dmg from heroin. No weapons on hand, but has a specialized pistol (70 dmg) nearby.

Hospital: When someone dies, this is where their body is brought for “reconstitution.” See “death” section for hospital fees. The majority of the hospital itself is dedicated to debt services where recently reconstituted individuals are billed for the service. A team of “reclamation responders” quickly gather the remains of any recently deceased to bring them to the hospital. They drive small electric carts and wear white coveralls. Any interference with their operations brings swift wrath of the Compliance Officers. However, coverage is only for the Atriums, neighborhoods and other “civilized” areas. For allies, slums and unpatrolled locations, they rely on contractors.

Reclamation Contractor: The hospital will pay 500 credits for remains brought to them. This has led to some enterprising individuals “creating” remains to bring, though the fee is low enough that most criminals find more lucrative opportunities.

Item List:

Foods- Foods can replenish stamina outside of combat. If not otherwise stated, the cost of food is 5 credits per 1 point of stamina it heals. A hotdog replenishes 10 stamina and costs 50 credits for example.

Drugs- Drugs give temporary bonuses and costs. Some are legal, like coffee and beer, and some are illegal, like crack. The illegal ones have stronger effects both positive and negative.

Caffeine: Advantage on next intellect check. Costs 100 credits Alcohol: Different levels depending on how much is consumed. Price various depending on quality. Buzzed: -advantage on some checks Drunk: -advantage on some checks and disadvantage on others Wasted: -disadvantage on most checks. Make PP check to avoid passing out. Bootleg Moonshine- Cheaper, skips buzzed stage. Must make physical prowess check or take permanent intellect damage.

Cocaine: Gain an extra action. Deleterious in the long term. Heroin: -10 dmg per hit. Deleterious long term.

Weapons:

Broken Bottle: +5 melee damage, 3 uses before breaking. Found in trash cans

Pocket Knife: +5 melee damage Switch Blade: +10 melee damage Machete: +20 melee damage

Baseball Bat: +10 melee damage, minimum PP 10 to wield Heavy Wrench: +15 melee damage, minimum PP 15 Rebar with concrete attached: +30 melee damage, minimum PP 30

Taser: 20 stamina damage, if they fail a PP check (15) stunned for next turn. 5 charges total. Pepper Spray: Incapacitates for a turn. Make an intellect check when using (6), if failed you use it on yourself. Can only be used once per opponent per combat. Eye protection or masks prevents. Ineffective on robots, or creatures that otherwise wouldn’t normally be effected. Cattle Prod: 30 stamina damage. if they fail a PP check (20) stunned for next turn. 8 charges total.

Pistol: 50 damage. Roll d20 to hit, GM decides difficulty depending on the situation. Training can improve your chances. X2 on critical hit. Critical failure leads to shooting ally or some other mishap. Shotgun: Hits with 0-12 pellets dealing 15 damage each depending on distance. D20 to hit, GM determines effectiveness. Accuracy is limited. Rifle: 75 damage. Roll d20 to hit. X3 on critical hit. Uzi: 20 x 5 dmg. Roll d20 to hit. High probability of missing without training.

Armored Vest: 50% chance to halve slashing and bullet damage (non armor piercing)

Encounters:

Corpogov Complaince Standard Officer The standard Corpogov Compliane Officer, or COO is essentially a government sanctioned bruiser. They are not bright but they are strong and fully committed to fulfilling their roles. If they discover they are being manipulated they will respond with violent brute force. It’s also worthy to note that there are no human rights in this place for those without substantial material assets.

PP: 20 Intellect: 10 Stamina: 200

Equipment: Walkie Talkie (Call for backup, which they will do immediately with anything other than a minor threat), Weapons vary, Pistol, Taser, Cattle Prod, Pepper Spray, Shot gun are all options. Frequently wear armored vests. Trained with weapons.

Mugger- A desperate individual who has turned to crime to pay off their debts to the Corpogov.

PP: 15 Intellect: 8 Stamina: 120

Weapon: some sort of melee weapon, switchblade is default (+10 dmg) Will leave if you give them the money you have on you. Can also be talked down with a contested intellect challenge -10 to your roll, GM can modify depending on reasoning used.

Thug- A large individual with a scar across their face. They seem like they habitually use violence to get their way.

Physical Prowess: 25 Intellect: 8 Stamina: 200

Items: Heavy Wrench +15 dmg, or Machete +20 dmg

Bandit- A professional robber, a little more savvy than the average thug.

Physical Prowess: 15 Intellect: 15 Stamina: 150

Items: Pistol (50 DMG) or switchblade (+10 dmg). Proficient with pistol so only misses if target takes some sort of evasive action.

Hobo- Someone really down on their luck. Will disengage if given alcohol or credits.

PP: 10 Intellect: 5 Stamina: 80

Items: Broken Bottle (+5 dmg) Ability: Piss stink- When they land a successful melee attack, target makes PP save, failure indicates they get piss stink on them. -5 on ability chekcs for the rest of combat.

Feral human- A debtor volunteered for experimentation to pay off their debt. This is the result. They have sunken in eyes that dart wildly, pale, patchy skin and gaunt features. They walk on all fours and their spine is bent to the point where they can no longer stand up straight. Their nails have grown long like daggers and they wear a tattered hospital gown. When Corpogov Research is done with them, they are simply dumped in the trash alley to fend for themselves. They usually seek food, but will settle for human flesh if they cannot find any. Compliance officers keep them out of the atriums but they tend to run free in the Alleys and other areas.

PP: 15 Intellect: 5 Stamina: 90

Items: None Abilities: Feral claws- they attack wildly and two melees attacks at a time, each with +5 to dmg.

Ravenous Feral Human- These ferals have been on the run for a while. Their appearance is worse, more gaunt and animalistic and they have grown stronger and more aggressive. They have developed a taste for human flesh and other ferals and will be more difficult to fight off.

PP: 20 Intellect: 8 Stamina: 140

Items; None Abilities: Sharpened claws- they attack wildly and two melees attacks at a time, each with +5 to dmg. ½ chance of causing bleeding, -10 stamina per turn if not wearing armor.

Diseased Feral Human- Something went horribly wrong with the experiments. These ferals have contracted some sort of nasty pathogen. Avoid at all costs.

PP: 10 Intellect: 5 Stamina: 50

Items; None Abilities: Diseased touch- Make a physical prowess check. 30+, no effect. 20-29: -20% stamina until treated, 11-19: -50% stamina until treated, 50% chance can’t take an action each turn. 6-10: Critical ill, stamina reduced by 80%, unable to fight. 1-5: Dead, turn into diseased zombified feral. (Bloated)-Death Throes- When dying, chance to contract disease as feral bursts. (Spitter)– Vomits as ranged touch attack.

El Simposio Internacional de la Red Latinoamericana de Estudios sobre Vigilancia, Tecnología y Sociedad (LAVITS) vuelve a Río de Janeiro desde el 26 al 28 de agosto del 2026, en un momento marcado por profundos debates sobre el sentido del presente, sus formas de existencia y sus infraestructuras sociotécnicas.

Bajo el lema “Tejer el presente: tecnopolíticas disidentes y ecologías del Bien Común”, el simposio de este año vuelve a poner sobre la mesa, desde una perspectiva ecológica, tanto las tecnopolíticas hegemónicas como las prácticas disidentes y colectivas que desafían los modelos de control, la modulación algorítmica y la colonialidad digital.

Y el Instituto Lationoamericano de Terraformación estará presente en la discusión, a través de Paz Peña, quien será parte de la mesa “Aceleração, mudanças climáticas e tecnocolonogias” junto a los investigadores Paulo Tavares y Alyne Costa, este 26 de agosto a las 17 horas.

Para más información, pueden consultar la programación del evento acá: https://www.simposio2026.lavits.org/site/capa

#Spanish

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The year? 2026. A cassette ejected from the VCR player. “And that was the conclusion of our epic anime series, Speed Racer.” The room erupted into applause! July stood at the front of Mr. Crane's poorly lit classroom and watched a dusting of asbestos go into Mabel's Calpico as she gazed sweatily into “Netsuzo Trap” (thanks AskJeeves), while frenshman transfer Madeline played GameBoy Color. There were some other unnamed club members too, playing marbles and jacks, as teens are wont to do. Their friend Nicole, who is here for exactly one line, raised her fat gay hand: “[CLEARING THROAT] what comes between episdodes 5 and 8?”. July replied “6 and 7”. The three of them began snickering and dabbing and juggling their hands, braying 67 67 67! July, exasperated, sat besides the mouse cage and began stoically playing cat's cradle with scarlet twine, as Mabel and Madeline went up to present.

Today we'll be talking about my favorite anime “Boku No Pico Academia: Thrice Upon A Time” said Mabel, “and I'll be presenting on Hamtaro and Naruto!” proudly exclaimed Madeline, Gaulishly.

Down the hallway, something lurched.

July got up in a huff and immediately began arguing with Madeline, the brains of the operation.

“We talked about this last time when you showed us Junjou Romantica, you NEED to select a shonen or isekai from the approved list!!!”

“Shut up. SHUT UP! I already told her it's her favorite, you don't even read anime!”

Faintly, they heard someone scream “breach breach breach” and kicked the door off it's hinges.

“THE SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICER!” quoth they, big eyedly and bleeding from their nostrils.

“Yes! 'Tis I, Inspector Hercule Puissance!”

“What?”

“He got shot in the head last week confiscating someone's dime bag, just go with it.”

“And I heard the Junior Crime Stoppers are going to help me go on patrol!”

“I'm sorry Inspector Hercule but we're very busy. We have lots of Dragon Ball Tales to watch. My mom said if we watch all the episodes and do a group suicide we go to Dragonland and meet Vegeta”.

“Your mother is Correct, but...” just then, Inspector Puissance drew a .44 caliber magnum from his holster and shot the anime club's projector. Acrid gunsmoke filled the air as the children cheered. July sighed deeply and went off on her weekly heroic adventure with The Junior Crime Stoppers, while Mabel and Madeline nervously hid shota magazines and obnoxious candy vapes in their backpacks.

“...And maybe afterwords we can watch your favorite from before your brain got scrambled? You told me your writer friend that passed away showed it to you. It was Princess Jellyfish.” he yanked the VHS away from July, tossed it into the air and shot it – the children cheered!

“And now to solve crimes!”

The cadre moved en masse down the hallway. What crimes are usually committed in a school? Just then, Inspector Puissance detected the smell of marijuana smoke. He activated his X-Ray vision and saw a skeleton smoking in the bathrooms. He breached the bathroom door, took the joint, smoked it all one hit, screamed “JUSTICE!” then pushed Nicole's fat gay ass out the window. Told you it was 1 line.

“Inspector Puissance I don't think the school resource officer is allowed to use deadly force on students for smoking in the bathroom”. “What was that July? You're taking a vacation to Prague?” “STAWP!” JUST THEN, THE POWER CUT OUT, A FLASH OF LIGHTING, FOLLOWED BY THE SOUNDS OF SOMEONE FALLING DOWN THE STAIRS! OW THUD OW CRACK OUCHIE {SPLAT}

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The backup generator turned on. Inspector Puissance stood there with July and Madeline. But where oh where was Mabel? GASP, said July! “Look at that trail of blood! What could have happened?”. Inspector Puissance took out his magnifying glass and pressed his eyeball against it, bent over, and followed the trail down 50 flights of stairs, to find a mangled mess of a corpse at the bottom of the stairs. Madeline ran to the pile of organs and bones, ugly crying. “MABEL? DEAD? NOOOO...!!!”

Worriedly, July approached Inspector Hercule; “Crime is afoot.” “Don't mention feet this early into the story he'll get sidetracked.” “What?” “Nothing, go back to the root menu so we can discuss the case. Hey real quick, can you do a vaguely Asian accent?” “I'm not going to do that detective”. The inspector glanced gallantly at the pile of gore and intestines that Madeline was rolling around in, making out with her friend's severed head as the tongue flopped around limply. “So are we thinking foul play here?” July pressed her fingers into her nose bridge and winced, as though attempting to mitigate a migraine.

“July...did you commit this murder?”

“No. No I did not commit the murder, Inspector.”

Ambiently, six piano notes played to indicate that she was telling the truth. They were both confused and looked to try to see where it had come from, when they were interrupted by maniacal cackling.

“Wrong again, Fash! Twas I, Madeline The Merciless! This was all an elaborate ploy to subvert your yankee pig american way of life! I was sent by the Emperor of Japan to sew discord with the violent imagery and foreign plotlines of anime! Every doujin is another plane in Pearl Harbor! AHAHAHA!” The Inspector unsheathed his saber – “Have at thee, Knave!” She gulped. “Hey look over there!” and after about 30 seconds they both turned to look back.

[UNISON] “Hey where'd she go?”

Epilogue: Julie watched Outlaw Star with The Anime Club undisturbed the next week. The End!

Adventurers

Character	Race	Class	Description
Gerda	Human	Magic-user level 1	Seeks to travel all over the Wilderlands to gain experience.
Kho Rimbo	Human	Magic-user level 3	A knife throwing wizard extraordinaire. Covered in ritual knife scars. Cuts himself whilst casting. Prone to being sarcastic.
Minako Konishi	Human	Monk level 3	Pretty Karakan with grace of a panther and shrewdness of a fox. Silk sash holds here loose trousers in place, while loose jacket rounds up her exotic look.
Remus	Hobbit	Thief level 1	Sketchy hobbit looking for better loot.

Thawmist 16th, Airday

Minako received word from Ambros, whom had been visited at Old Crus's tower by Agathon the Wiry, that a man supposedly following a treasure map hadn't returned. He left couple of weeks ago, and Agathon promised to take care of his family. Aging constable, now promoted to the Captain of the Guard by the baron, visited the exiled cleric seeking help. “Could you ask you adventuring friends to take a look? I cannot pay, but if his map was true, you get to keep whatever you find...”

And so Minako assembled a rag-team of Kho-Rimbo wearing an iron-cage over his head, and two new recruits, namely Gerda the Medium, and Remus the Apprentice. They set out at the same time as the other, larger and better armed adventuring party set out for the tumulus north-west. But Minako and her crew travelled south-east, up the hills.

They reached the described area some time around noon. It took them until nightfall to find the described caves—four entrances in total. They retreated and camped in the wilderness. Remus spent some time carefully taking off Kho-Rimbo's bridle. The cocky theurgist was humbler and quieter than usual. Sore jaw and inflamed and swollen tongue might have contributed.

Thawmist 17th, Waterday

Adventurers carefully approached the cave slits facing south. Two were to the left, and two were to the right, separated by some two hundred feet of rock. Part of the information they had is that they right place has a tunnel going from one side of the hill to the other.

They opted to approach the east side. Northern slit was twenty feet wide and nearly thirty feet tall. Limestone tunnel beyond it stretched for sixty feet before bending eastwards. Cave mouth to their left was narrower and lower, but still open. It led to a spacious cave.

A carved boulder rested on the south side of the cave. Broken and rusted pickax was next to it. Twenty feet wide tunnel to the north stretched beyond the torchlight. Shoddy and saggy net-trap was visible. Frayed ropes held it in place. Remus scaled the cave wall and severed them.

Narrower tunnel to the west led downwards, into yet another cave. Since the slope was quite steep, and adventurers were unsure if they would be able to crawl back up, they decided to follow the northern tunnel.

This led the on a long trek downwards, into wet and jagged cave with fractured floor and tiered drops. Rank smell permeated the air. The source was a large pool of murky, stagnant water. Gerda, well educated and crafty, tied a rock to her rope and measured the depth of water. Less than three feet deep.

Adventurers waded in. The drops continued, but not as dramatic as before. Soon the humans were hip-deep, while the hobbit's nipples were at risk of getting soaked.

And then Remus vanished, jerked violently underneath the water surface. He felt an iron grip around his ankle. The hobbit thrashed about. Gerda ran for the high ground which she had felt just moments before the chaos. Kho-Rimbo ran for the closest cave column and attempted to scale it. Minako observed water for an opportunity to strike.

Remus, disoriented and drowning, pulled his dagger and slashed wildly. Alas, he hit nothing. At least he managed to take few gulps of previous air. Minako struck and hit something. Kho-Rimbo abandoned his mountaineering ambitions and rushed towards Remus and attempted to pull him upwards. The hobbit pushed against the rocky bottom, and set himself loose of whatever was holding him.

All four adventurers ran north, towards Gerda whom had found a way up, and potentially out.

Indeed, they scaled up and up, until they reached a massive cave buzzing with activity—hundreds, if not thousands, of cockroaches, spiders, centipedes, and other vermin crawling all over the place. A strong, acrid smell dominated the area.

There were two tunnels to their left and one tunnel to their right. Cave itself stretched further north-east. Although wide and long, ceiling was relatively low, at perhaps fifteen feet. Many thick stalactites stuck out.

The party moved into the vermin swarm, navigating the ground. There was no way around them, only through. Gerda swung her torch from side to side, attempting to scare as much of critters as possible. It did not work. Now they were deep into their nest, surrounded by thousands and thousands of them.

“Look.”

A skeleton dressed in plate mail rested on some sort of hump. Centipedes and spiders crawled all over. And yet, a glorious, shiny battle axe reflected back the lamplight.

Minako prodded the skeleton with her spear.

What a horrible mistake that was.

Vermin, now roused and aggravated, formed three humongous swarms. Remus and Minako were not particularly worried about that. Kho Rimbo fled the cave. Gerda hesitated, but decided to remain and help her new-met friends

Alas, what a horrible mistake that was.

Remus made an improvise lasso out of his rope. Then he threw it over the skeleton. Success!

Hundreds of centipedes, roaches, and spiders crawled all over Minako. Dozens and dozens of tiny bites tore into her flesh. Same fate befell Remus and Gerda.

The trio now ran, fleeing back into the tunnel, and jumping into the pool or rank water.

But Gerda, poor Gerda, was overwhelmed by the centipede swarm; she fell, she fell into it. And multiple swarms crawled over her, and then there was nothing but void, for in this hour of great tragedy there was moment of mercy in her as she passed out from intense shock and venom pumped into her system.

Remus emerged from the water, all red and full of blisters from insect bites. He swatted away few remaining critters. Minako did the same. Then the hobbit pulled on his rope.

“Bah!”

Skeleton completely fell apart, and the only thing he managed to drag was breastplate.

They returned to the mouth of acrid cave, but abandoned that idea after seeing very active vermin roaming about.

Thus they returned the same way the came in—down the tunnel, through the pool, up the tunnel, and then east.

“How about we at least check that north tunnel?”

And so they followed this different, hereto unexplored route.

This was a spacious tunnel, of varying width as they progressed deeper and deeper. They eventually reached a point where the tunnel widened into a cave and split off in three more directions—north, north-west and south-west.

The whole chamber reeked of manure. There were four decayed wooden crates in a natural alcove by the north-west tunnel. They contained worthless, moth-eaten and mildewy bolts of cloth.

Adventurers cautiously moved down the south-west tunnel. This lead them to another cave. Another natural alcove was to their left. A large mahogany coffer was visible at the far end of the alcove.

Minako approached it boldly.

Without any warning stone above the coffer formed mouth and began yelling loudly:

“TURNU REEN, TURNU REEN, VI NAZGUTIGILOJ! Ĉi tio ne estas via trezorejo, ne via trogo, ne via necesejoŝtono! Mi estas la Gardanto de la Juglando, la Gardanto de la Kudzuo, la Gardostaranto de la Splito! Ĉi tiu kofro enhavas nenian oron – nur la akumulitajn ternojn de mil travintrantaj meloj!”

It thundered all through the cave. Within seconds barking, yelping, and howling could be heard from the south.

Kho Rimbo wept inside, unsure if he should fled now or immediately. Remus had big eyes, his thieving instincts were going ringing. Minako cared not for the noise. She grabbed the lid and jerked it up, ripping it off.

The insides of the coffer were lined with some plushy material. A folded, magnificent crimson cloak filled the volume. Monk grabbed it and pulled it up, sending gems and other valuables wrapped inside it tumble all over the coffer.

Kho Rimbo found courage and rushed up to the chest to pick up as much of it as he could. He ignored the iron hand adorned with violet garnets and kris dagger. Remus was happy to pick everything up.

The trio emptied the coffer, and fled the cave. Nonsensical yelling did not abate with them leaving.

They ran into the wilderness, and found a safe space to camp. Remus mounted brank's bridle on Kho Rimbo so he could return to Ironburg and avoid fate worse than that one. They slept well. Or, at least the monk and thief did.

Trio returned to Ironburg on Thawmist 18th, Earthday, impressing other adventurers with their haul: a left hand made of iron and decorated with six violet garnets, three candlesticks made of gold with decorative moonstones, a magnificent crimson, stitched cloth coat, one deep blue spinel, one tourmaline, three smoky quartzs, and a magical kris dagger.

Discuss at Dragonsfoot forum.

#Wilderlands #SessionReport

I finished reading Pixie by Jill Dawson on Sunday. The book’s eye-catching cover first snagged my attention from a bookshop shelf back in May. It’s an historical novel based on the life of the artist, illustrator & writer Pamela Colman Smith, best remembered for designing the famous Rider-Waite tarot card deck. It follows Smith from Jamaica (which she leaves following the death of her mother), via Brooklyn, to London, where, at length, she finds a precarious foothold in the city’s theatrical and bohemian circles. According to the novel, it was one of Smith’s first and most notable theatrical friends — the actress Dame Ellen Terry — who bestowed the nickname Pixie on her.

For me this was a book that had something of the ‘biopic’ about it: a series of vignettes from the subject’s rise to modest fame, with cameo appearances from all the notable names she encountered along the way. While not terribly deep or daring, it’s an enjoyable story of an unconventional character in an interesting milieu. While Smith was undoubtedly ahead of her time in some respects, I did I wonder now & then if Dawson might have been projecting a little too much of the present into her Edwardian setting. And the Rider-Waite tarot commission is presented as a culmination of Smith’s work, when it could just as easily have been just another job for her (albeit a substantial one). It would have been interesting, moreover, to read something about the artist’s subsequent conversion to Catholicism & her later support for women’s suffrage. Then again, further extending the story may have bent the narrative too awkwardly out of shape. Dawson did succeed, I think, in making something coherent and engaging out of the patchily documented facts of Smith’s biography.

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A recent stationery acquisition: a quantity of old sealing wax (Fig. 33), namely John Heath’s Bank of England sealing wax (Fig. 34). I own a couple of seals but would like to find some better ones before I use this stuff in earnest. And I’ll need to practice melting and dripping the wax, after making a some ham-fisted initial attempts.

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My collection of vocal jazz/pop recordings of the ‘50s and ‘60s has been augmented with the recent purchase of Ernestine Anderson’s 1960 album My Kinda Swing. My copy is a budget re-issue from ‘64 on the Wing record label – a subsidiary of Mercury Records – which omits two of the twelve tracks included on the original U.S. release. On the rear of its sleeve are a variety of other re-issue releases on Wing including the likes of Muggsy Spanier and his Dixie Land Band; Dick Contino’s An Accordion in Paris; and Music for Polka Lovers by Lawrence Welk.

My Kinda Swing the fourth of five albums Anderson made in rapid succession for Mercury. Later in the ‘60s her recording career stalled as fashions changed, only to blossom anew from the late ‘70s onwards. I’d hitherto only heard Anderson via YouTube, so it’s a delight to finally listen to her on well-recorded, well-pressed vinyl, accompanied by such expert musicians as Clark Terry, Hank Jones, Yusef Lateef, and Kenny Burrell. Among the tracks I particularly enjoyed at first hearing was her brief but beautifully languid take on ‘Moonlight in Vermont’.

We now show alt text in the fediverse! Now alt text from photos in your blog posts gets sent out over ActivityPub, so your images are more accessible to your readers and followers there.

Alt text (meaning alternative text) lets you add a description of any images you include in your posts. This is especially helpful to readers who are blind or have low vision, and use screen readers to consume your posts — instead of an empty space where your image is, the screen reader can read aloud the description you provide, giving them the full context of everything you’re sharing.

In our Plain Text editor, you can use standard Markdown to add alt text in the brackets before your image URL:

![A screenshot of the Insert Image modal, showing fields for the image URL, alt text, and optional title.](https://i.snap.as/71LVK9TQ.png)

In our Rich Text editor, you can use the top menu option: Insert → Image to find a Description (alt text) field, where you can describe the image:

Alt text on Write.as has been here since day one. But especially with it carrying over to the fediverse now, we’d highly encourage writers to make an effort to include it more often in their posts!

#updates #fediverse #altText #accessibility

The tension in this movie is what really stays with you even after it ends.

Only God Forgives (2013) will remind many viewers of Drive (2011), and some of Valhalla Rising (2009). All three are directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and you can definitely see his signature style in all these films. I personally really like his work, but reviews are mixed for this particular film. This is no surprise because the film is not the typical Hollywood blockbuster, so many people are likely to watch it with different expectations.

Fans of movies made by Gaspar Noé will appreciate this movie. in fact, Noé visited the film set and he's being thanked in the credits. Nicolas Winding Refn was clearly inspired by Noé's work. In addition, he dedicated the film to Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose work has always beeb ahead of his time and deeper in meaning than many his fellow directors, writers and producers. The point of this whole movie trivia bit is to show the kind of movie this is, to give it a bit of lineage if I can call it that. It's not your typical date night movie by a long shot.

Out of the three, Only God Forgives seems to get the worst reputation. However, I really liked this movie and I believe it has a meditative quality, not in the sense that it relaxes you, but in the sense that you can watch it more than once and each time you can try to see deeper into the details. There are a few elements that stand out when I watch this movie: the unknown history of the characters, the silence, and the tension.

Who are These People?

The movie begins with a murder and we realize quickly that Ryan Gosling's character, Julian, and his brother Billy are criminals, using a Thai boxing club as a front while their real business is illegal. We never get too much detail of the real business other than it has to do with drug smuggling. We get the sense that Julian is an unwilling criminal, that he does not really love the life of crime. There's a sense of reluctance to what he does.

On the other side of the rink we have the local police force and Chang. I don't want to call Chang the “hero” of the film because his methods are questionable, but he's the closest thing we have to one. His aim is to restore order, and he's successful. All this sounds very generic, and as you can see there is not too much detail given. The viewer has to use the power of imagination to fill in the gaps or infer meaning. For example, Chang does not wear a uniform, and yet the other officers respect him implicitly. Is he retired? Is he not really a police officer? How come he carries a sword? He's a frightening figure to all that cross him and the sense of unknown and mystery surrounding Chang makes him even more impressive. Consequently, we get this tremendous contrast between the imposing figure of Chang who calmly restores order without mercy, and Julian, who is not a very good criminal and who can only evoke pity in the viewer.

Silent but Deadly

There isn't much dialogue in Only God Forgives. That's why we learn little about the back story or the characters aside from what we witness on screen through their actions. The silence is especially effective juxtaposed with the musical sequences. While Chang does not speak much, he does sing! There are two scenes where he is singing in a restaurant to an enthralled audience. This gives Chang a very human trait and it contrasts greatly with his violent methods. It's so interesting seeing this mysterious agent dish out justice with his sword one moment, and singing a ballad the next.

Julian is pretty quiet too, but in his case I took the silence to signify more of an inability to assert himself or to make a stand. He seems to patiently accept what others tell him and when he does reach his limit, he takes it out on the wrong people. And yet, I can't help but feel a little bad for him. When it's time for specific decisions, he shows mercy, twice, in spite of his criminal duties.

Overall, the silence allows the viewers to take in the beautiful visual style of the movie. Neon lights and the backdrop of Bangkok, interesting angles and scenes, intense close ups that let you sense what the characters are thinking and feeling. You just have to experience the movie rather than simply watch it to see what happens at the end.

I Can Feel it Coming in the Air Tonight

The tension in this movie is what really stays with you even after it ends. The tension is tangible, partly due to the minimal dialogue, and partly due to the foreshadowing that keeps popping up in various scenes. The combination creates a sense of foreboding. You just feel something bad is about to happen. Everyone on the screen is on the edge, especially the criminals, but less so Chang. In fact, Chang's calm sense of control is like an anchor amidst all the tension. You just know that nothing can stop Chang: he is a force of nature; not a wild tornado, but more of a slow steady snowfall that will eventually bury everyone. All they can do is pray for mercy, but as the movie title tells us, only God forgives.

Thank you for reading! #review