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The instruction arrived on 7 September 2026 in the Guardian's Pass notes column, filed under Social etiquette, sandwiched between a joke about Alexander Graham Bell's preferred greeting and a gag about being cloned into a French person. “If you're called by an unidentified number, the advice is to remain silent until you are sure that a friendly human being is on the other end of the line,” it read. “Not saying hello first could save you a whole heap of trouble.”

Read once, it is a light item about manners. Read twice, it is a security advisory dressed as a lifestyle note, and what it advises is the abandonment of the single most widely performed speech act in the history of telecommunications. The column was explicit about the danger. Scammers, it said, can now replicate your voice with artificial intelligence, cloning it from your telephone greeting and using it to beg your loved ones for money, and it credited coverage of the risk to the consumer watchdog Which?, the BBC and the Guardian itself. Asked what the best defence was, the column answered with a single word. Rudeness.

There is something quietly astonishing in that. The remedy is not a change to the network, not a certificate attached to a call, not a duty placed on the firm that sold the synthesis tool or the carrier that terminated the traffic. It is a change to you. You are asked to stop speaking first to people you do not recognise, and to hold that silence until you have satisfied yourself, from breath and hiss and hold music, that something human is on the other end. The burden is free to issue and expensive to carry, which is a large part of why it was issued.

The column's other culprit, generation Z, had already done some of the work. It cited a survey finding that 40 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds consider it acceptable to answer the phone with no greeting at all, and noted that the New York Times had reported young people substituting “Hi”, “What's up?” or “Yeah?” for the full formula. Caller ID made the ritual redundant for anyone who already knew who was calling. Voice cloning is finishing it off for everyone else, including the people for whom caller ID never resolved anything, because the number on the screen has been forgeable for two decades.

Three days later, researchers published the first serious count of how much of the inbound telephone stream is now a machine talking. Until that paper landed, the argument had run almost entirely on anecdote. What the counters found is both worse and stranger than the advice implies.

What Edison Actually Proposed in August 1877

Hello is not an old word doing a new job. It is a young word recruited for a specific industrial purpose, which it has performed for almost exactly 149 years.

On 15 August 1877, Thomas Edison wrote to T. B. A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh, and proposed hello as the proper way to answer a telephone. The Hagley Museum and Library, which holds a substantial part of the American industrial archive, records the date and the recipient. Edison's suggestion displaced the greeting recommended by Bell, who had invented the instrument the year before and who favoured “Ahoy, ahoy”. Bell, by most accounts, went on using ahoy for the rest of his life and lost.

The word itself was older than the telephone but not by much, and it was not a greeting. It descended from holla, hollo, halloo and hillo, noises used in English since at least the sixteenth century to grab the attention of someone at a distance: a shout across a field, a hail to a boat, a call to a dog. Its function was acoustic rather than social.

That is precisely why it worked on a telephone. The early instrument had no ringer worth the name and no way to signal that a line had opened. Hello was a test tone with a meaning attached. It established that the channel was live and that a person was at the other end of it. For the next century and a half those two jobs travelled together so reliably that nobody noticed they were separable.

They are separable now. That is the whole of the problem in one sentence. A live channel no longer implies a person, and a human voice no longer implies a human being, so the word that used to verify both at once verifies neither. Worse, it has been turned around. The test tone has become a sample. A word designed to prove presence has been recast as evidence handed to an unknown party.

This is not the first time telephone trust has had to be rebuilt. For decades the network's trust model was a human being: the operator, who knew the subscribers and could say who was on the line. Direct dialling removed her. Caller ID, which American carriers were required to offer from the late 1980s, was the replacement, an automated identity claim presented before the greeting. Voice over internet protocol then made that claim trivially editable, and by the mid 2000s consumer services were selling spoofed caller ID openly. Each layer has failed the same way. An identity claim that was cheap to make became cheap to fake, and the cost of the failure was pushed to the person holding the handset. Hello is simply the last layer, and the oldest.

Eleven Bait Numbers and the First Hard Count

On 10 September 2026, a team led by Xingyu Shen, with Simiao Ren as senior author and colleagues working under the affiliation Scam AI, part of Reality Inc, posted a paper to arXiv titled “The Machines Are Calling: Measuring Automated and Synthetic Voices in Unwanted Inbound Calls”. Its premise is a gap in the record. In February 2024 the Federal Communications Commission placed AI-generated voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. More than two years later, the authors note, no peer-reviewed measurement said how much unwanted call traffic is placed by a machine, or how much of that machine speech is synthesised rather than replayed. The policy existed without a baseline.

Their instrument was an interactive voice honeypot: language-model personas answering real American telephone numbers, with the caller recorded on a separate track so the persona's own speech could not contaminate the analysis. The numbers were baited by submitting fabricated contact details into third-party lead-generation forms, injecting false records into the data brokerage funnels that feed outbound calling operations. Over 66 days the honeypot recorded 10,987 calls. Eleven days on which the stack answered silently were set aside, leaving 7,233 calls on which the persona actually said hello.

Three instruments read each opening. An audio fingerprint looked for the same recording appearing on other calls. A commercial synthetic-speech detector scored the caller's first ten seconds. Blinded listeners checked what it flagged.

The decomposition is the finding. Of the 7,233 greeted calls, 13.8 per cent opened with a recording the fingerprint also heard on another call. A further 13.1 per cent opened with fresh audio the detector labelled synthetic. Another 9.9 per cent opened with a caller who never spoke at all, staying on the line for a median of sixteen seconds in silence, which is what a predictive dialler produces when it has placed more calls than it has agents free. Some 54.2 per cent opened with fresh audio the detector labelled human, and 9 per cent could not be scored.

Add the two audio-evidenced machine rows and at least 26.9 per cent of answered calls opened with a machine voice, with a 95 per cent confidence interval of 24.3 to 29.8 per cent. Add the silent connections and a further tenth is almost certainly machine-placed. On a bait number in the middle of the American lead-generation economy, something between a quarter and two fifths of everything that answers your hello is not a person.

Two further results cut against intuition. Synthetic speech concentrated not in fraud but in ordinary commercial nuisance. Calls the study's classifier labelled spam, meaning unsolicited but non-fraudulent lead generation, were 33.8 per cent synthetic. Calls labelled scam were 21.1 per cent, falling to 15.9 per cent under a narrower criterion requiring a credential request. A rule argued as an anti-impersonation measure has landed, in volume, on telemarketing. The authors read the inversion as synthesis following volume economics: a fixed script benefits when the marginal cost of another call approaches zero, whereas extracting credentials from a resistant target still requires improvisation.

And almost nothing announces itself. Genuine self-disclosure of automation occurred on 8 of 1,816 detector-flagged calls, 0.44 per cent. Meanwhile 17 per cent of callers disclosed that the call was being recorded. Callers already read compliance preambles. The omission is specific to the speaker.

The Detector That Cannot Hold a Steady Line

The same paper is unusually candid about the limits of its own instrument, and those limits are the real story of synthetic speech detection in 2026.

Present the detector with the identical waveform on two different calls and it lands on opposite sides of its own threshold 13.6 per cent of the time. Eleven human listeners, auditioning what the detector flagged, confirmed 54.4 per cent of it. Agreement between those listeners was, in the authors' words, fair at best, with a mean pairwise coefficient of 0.267. The listening pool contained no known-human control audio, so a listener who answered “synthetic” to everything would have scored perfectly on the gold set. The false-negative rate was not estimable at all, which means the 54.2 per cent labelled human is a ceiling of unknown height. When the window was widened from ten seconds to twenty, both contested and control clips drifted towards “synthetic”, so even that precision figure is partly a property of the stimulus rather than of the speech.

This is not an artefact of one commercial product. AASIST, a standard academic anti-spoofing architecture, falls from an in-domain area under the curve of 1.00 to 0.43 on in-the-wild audio. The Deepfake-Eval-2024 benchmark, assembled by Nuria Alina Chandra and colleagues including Oren Etzioni from 56.5 hours of audio circulating on real platforms, found open-source audio detectors losing 48 per cent of their area under the curve relative to academic benchmarks, with the maximum across modalities reaching 0.58. Codec compression, which is what telephony does to every call, costs a mean 5.30 points of equal error rate.

The community's own flagship evaluation agrees. In ASVspoof 5, described by Xin Wang, Hector Delgado, Hemlata Tak and colleagues, baseline countermeasures scored equal error rates above 29 per cent against crowdsourced attacks including adversarial filtering. The top five submissions got below 15 per cent, roughly a halving, which is real progress and still nowhere near a figure you would accept from a lock.

Humans are no better. Kimberly Mai, Sergi Bray, Toby Davies and Lewis Griffin, writing in PLOS One in 2023, played genuine and synthetic audio to 529 people in English and Mandarin. Listeners identified the deepfakes 73 per cent of the time. Telling them what to listen for helped only slightly. The companion survey posted to arXiv in August 2026 by Chengzhe Sun, Tianle Yang and Siwei Lyu makes the structural point: synthetic voice detection is harder than image or video deepfake detection because phonetics, prosody and auditory perception are harder to model than pixels.

So the advice to stay silent is not arbitrary. It is what is left when detection does not work, the network will not authenticate, and somebody has to be told to do something.

The Thin Evidence Under the Silence Advice

Here is where honesty costs something. The mechanism the advice guards against, a criminal harvesting your hello and building a working clone from it, is the least well evidenced link in the chain.

The tooling does not obviously support it. ElevenLabs, whose instant voice cloning is the reference product in this market, recommends one to two minutes of good audio for an instant clone and 30 to 180 minutes for professional cloning, which trains a custom model. Its documentation notes that some users get excellent results from as little as thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is not hello. It is a voicemail greeting, a podcast appearance, a wedding speech on a public feed, or a voice note forwarded to the wrong group chat.

The precedent is also unflattering. In early 2017 American outlets reported a wave of “Can you hear me?” calls, said to record the victim's “yes” for use in authorising fraudulent charges. Snopes, checking with the Better Business Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Federation of America, could find no record of anyone being defrauded that way. The scam was real as a call pattern and unproven as a theft mechanism, and the advice it generated outlived the evidence by years.

None of which makes the underlying threat imaginary. The industrial supply of cloning capability is real and lightly policed. Grace Gedye, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports, tested six voice cloning products in March 2025: Descript, ElevenLabs, Lovo, PlayHT, Resemble AI and Speechify. Four of the six asked researchers only to tick a box confirming they had the legal right to clone the voice. Four needed nothing beyond a name and an email address to open an account. Gedye's assessment was that there is a good argument some of what these companies offer runs afoul of existing consumer protection law.

So the accurate statement is narrower and more uncomfortable than the advice. Your voice is probably already available in sufficient quantity to clone, from sources you published yourself, and a stranger's telephone call is a poor way to acquire it. What answering an unknown number reliably does is confirm to an automated system that a human being holds the line, which is itself a saleable fact. The honeypot study shows what happens next: the researchers' first bait number, seeded in May, was receiving 59.4 per cent synthetic-voiced calls by July, while ten numbers seeded fresh in July ran at 18.6 per cent. Matched on how long each number had been in circulation rather than on the calendar, the gap vanished. Exposure is what drives prevalence. A number that has been answered gets called more.

Silence, then, is decent operational hygiene aimed at the list-building layer, sold to the public as a defence against voice theft. The gap matters, because a defence justified by the wrong mechanism cannot be evaluated, and cannot be retired when it stops working.

The Call That Came From the Sheriff's Own Number

On 9 September 2026, two days after the Guardian column, WEAR-TV reported the case that shows the limits of the advice most sharply. A woman in Crestview, in Okaloosa County, Florida, came close to losing nearly 25,000 dollars to a caller claiming she had missed jury duty.

The call did not present an unknown number. It appeared to come from the sheriff's department's main line. The caller identified himself using the name of a real deputy. Okaloosa County Sheriff Eric Aden described what his office is now up against in two sentences that deserve to be read as a technical summary. “They've gotten better and better to where they're using artificial intelligence using voice overrides,” he said. “They've gotten even better where they're spoofing legitimate numbers.”

She was instructed to deposit the money into what the caller described as a federally approved depository, which turned out to be a bitcoin machine inside a petrol station on Miracle Strip Parkway. She got that far. What stopped her was a printed disclaimer about jury duty scams on the machine itself. She drove to the sheriff's office instead, where the scheme was confirmed. Aden's own guidance was blunt about what the county never does: they do not ring to tell you that you have missed something, and they certainly never ask for a payment to make trouble go away.

Now apply the silence protocol to that call. It fails completely. The number was not unknown, it was the sheriff's. The name was not invented, it was a serving deputy's. Waiting for the caller to speak first would have produced exactly what the attacker wanted: an authoritative voice, identifying a real institution, from a number the recipient could verify on a website. The defence that saved 25,000 dollars was a sticker on a cash machine, placed there by somebody who had concluded the failure would happen downstream and had to be intercepted at the till.

That is the pattern worth holding on to. The honeypot data and the Florida case describe two different attacks that public discussion has merged. One is industrialised and mostly commercial: high volume, low value per call, synthetic voice used because it is cheap. The other is targeted and socially engineered, often conducted by human beings reading a script, with a cloned or merely confident voice as one prop among several and spoofed caller ID doing most of the identity work. Advice built for the first does nothing for the second, and the second is where the money goes.

UK Finance recorded 1.28 billion pounds lost to payment fraud in 2025, reported on 15 June 2026, with authorised push payment losses up 19 per cent to 576.4 million pounds across 248,070 cases, and 17 per cent of those cases originating through telecommunications channels. Ruth Ray, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance, put it without decoration: almost 1.3 billion pounds was stolen again last year, and it is clear the underlying problem is not being tackled effectively enough. In the United States, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 20.9 billion dollars in reported losses for 2025 across more than a million complaints, with 7.7 billion of that reported by people aged 60 and over, an increase of roughly 60 per cent on the previous year.

Why Nobody Asked the Network to Fix It

The FCC's declaratory ruling of 8 February 2024, adopted unanimously six days earlier as FCC 24-17, held that calls made with AI-generated voices are “artificial” within the meaning of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. It took effect immediately and it was worth doing. It was also narrower than its headlines. As the honeypot authors point out, it created no new offence and banned nothing outright. It resolved a definitional question and attached existing machinery to synthetic speech: consent, identification of the responsible entity, opt-out rights, and enforcement through forfeitures, carrier blocking and state attorneys general.

Two omissions define its reach. It did not require a caller to say that a voice is a machine, which is why the study's 0.44 per cent disclosure rate is not a compliance failure but a baseline for a rule that does not exist. The Commission proposed that duty in August 2024, in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking numbered FCC 24-84, and two years on it has not been adopted. And it did not change the unit that enforcement acts on. Blacklists, reputation scores, carrier analytics and consumer call blocking all identify the telephone number. The study found the number to be the perishable part: the typical number in a campaign places all of its calls within a single day and is never seen again, while the campaign itself, the same opening script dialled from a stream of fresh numbers, runs on for a further fortnight. One recorded compliance notice opened calls across six campaigns. One synthetic voice served nine. Blocking a number removes almost none of an operation's remaining life.

Enforcement shows the problem. Lingo Telecom, the carrier that transmitted the AI-generated Joe Biden robocalls into the New Hampshire primary in January 2024, settled with the FCC for one million dollars. The consultant who commissioned them, Steve Kramer, was hit with a six million dollar FCC forfeiture in September 2024, told the Associated Press he would not pay it, and in June 2025 was acquitted by a Belknap County jury on eleven felony voter suppression charges. The most politically salient synthetic voice call in American history produced one settlement from an intermediary and one unpaid fine.

The authentication route has fared no better on this side of the Atlantic. Ofcom consulted on calling line identification authentication, the British equivalent of the American STIR/SHAKEN framework, and in early 2024 declined to mandate it. Peter Farmer, writing for the operator Simwood in March 2024, summarised the reasoning: the costs of implementation, the complications of roaming and the intractability of calls originating abroad outweighed the benefits, since overseas operators are under no obligation to follow British verification rules. His own objection is the one that matters most here. No amount of cryptographic attestation addresses spoofing if there are no consequences for spoofers. Ofcom instead extended call blocking to international calls presenting British numbers, closing one loophole and leaving the architecture unauthenticated.

Meanwhile the honeypot's own traffic shows why authentication is not a side issue. The rise in synthetic calls to its numbers lived almost entirely in traffic presenting caller ID in the bait numbers' own 484 area code, so that each call looked local. The identity layer is not merely weak. It is actively used as an attack surface.

The People Who Cannot Afford to Screen Their Calls

Silence is not free. It is a luxury good, and the market has sorted who can buy it.

Hiya, which surveyed more than 12,000 consumers across six countries for its State of the Call report in 2026, found that 86 per cent of calls from unknown numbers now go unanswered, that one in three respondents report receiving deepfake calls, and that average losses to phone scams run above 800 dollars. Consumers in that survey expected mobile network operators to carry the financial responsibility for scam losses. The screened telephone is not a proposal. It is already the default behaviour of the overwhelming majority.

Now consider who cannot join in. Police Scotland's guidance on voice cloning scams advises people to avoid answering calls from unfamiliar numbers, to ask their provider to block anonymous calls, to ring back on a known number, to agree code words with family and to keep audio off public feeds. Every item is sensible. Every item assumes a life in which unexpected calls are threats rather than logistics, which is not most lives.

That assumption breaks immediately in British healthcare. Portland Road Practice, an English GP surgery, publishes a did-not-answer policy which asks patients to ensure their phone accepts calls from unknown numbers, because clinicians may ring with no caller ID or from a non-surgery line. Miss the call and you get one text and one further attempt. Miss both and you must rebook the slot yourself, and the missed call is recorded in your clinical record as a failed appointment. Persist and the practice will require future appointments to be face to face. Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust moved off withheld numbers in February 2023 precisely because, as it explained, some patients' phones block withheld numbers to stop cold calling, and many people do not feel comfortable answering calls when they do not know the number.

So a patient on a waiting list is instructed by one arm of the state to answer unknown numbers and by another to avoid them. The conflict is resolved nowhere. It is devolved to the individual, along with the consequences of guessing wrong.

The same devolution lands on anyone whose income arrives from strangers. A self-employed electrician, a supply teacher, a locum, a courier, a carer covering shifts: for these people an unknown number is a job, and a policy of silence is a policy of lost work. It lands on people in insecure housing waiting for a landlord, a council officer or a hostel place, and on people inside immigration processes, where an unreturned call can carry procedural weight. It lands hardest on the isolated, for whom an unexpected call is contact rather than threat, and for whom answering in wary silence rewrites the one remaining pleasure of a ringing telephone.

The advice is free to give. It is expensive to follow, and the bill is itemised by class, health and employment status.

A Biometric That Nobody Volunteered

Underneath all of this sits a category error that the industry made a decade and more ago and is only now unwinding.

The voice became an authentication factor without anybody consenting to make it one. HSBC launched Voice ID for telephone banking and had roughly half a million customers enrolled by 2017, when the BBC's Click programme tested it. The reporter Dan Simmons enrolled, and his non-identical twin Joe then talked his way into the account, failing seven times before being admitted on the eighth. A Click researcher found the system permitting more than twenty attempts across twelve minutes. HSBC said it would review the system's sensitivity and noted that twins share a similar voiceprint.

That was a decade before consumer-grade synthesis became a subscription product. What has happened since is demotion rather than abandonment. A voiceprint that can be approximated by a sibling was always a weak factor. A voiceprint that can be approximated by a subscription service is not a factor at all, and the detection literature explains why nothing can currently be bolted on to rescue it. If the best systems in an open evaluation still miss more than one attack in seven, a voice cannot carry an account on its own.

The epistemics should worry people more than the banking. A biometric is supposed to be a property you cannot help having and cannot easily surrender. Voice fails that test in an unusual direction. It is not a poor identifier. It is a broadcast identifier. You emit it constantly, in public, as the price of ordinary life, and every emission is a sample. Fingerprints require contact. Irises require proximity. Voice requires only that you speak within range of a microphone, and the entire built environment is now a microphone.

The Federal Trade Commission understood the shape of the problem early and tried to buy a way out. Its Voice Cloning Challenge, announced in late 2023, named four winners in April 2024: OmniSpeech's AI Detect, DeFake from Ning Zhang, which adds distortions to voice samples to frustrate cloning, OriginStory, which authenticates a voice as human by measuring biosignals in the throat and mouth at the point of capture, and a recognition award for Pindrop Security's real-time clone detection. Two of the four abandon detection entirely, authenticating the human at the source or poisoning the sample before it can be taken. The prize was an admission that catching a fake after the fact is the harder bet.

Who Profits From a Telephone Nobody Answers

There are places where this could be interdicted, and they are all upstream of the person holding the phone.

Authentication at the network layer is the obvious one, and the honest assessment is that it is necessary and insufficient. Cryptographic attestation of calling numbers would end casual spoofing of a sheriff's main line, the mechanism that nearly cost a woman in Crestview 25,000 dollars. It would not touch a lawfully originated call carrying a synthetic voice, and Ofcom's cost analysis was not obviously wrong. Provenance and watermarking sit in the same position. They mark the output of cooperating tools and are worthless against a model that has been fine-tuned, run locally or stripped of its markings by the codec on the way through the network.

Out-of-band verification is the most robust thing available and it is deliberately low technology. A callback on a number you already hold. A family phrase agreed in advance. In Britain, the 159 short code run by Stop Scams UK, which routes a caller directly to their own bank and has passed a million calls with coverage of more than 99 per cent of current accounts. None of these authenticate a voice. All of them stop treating the voice as the thing that authenticates, which is the actual fix.

Liability is the lever nobody wants to pull. British banks now reimburse most authorised push payment losses, and payment fraud still rose. The telecommunications channel carried 17 per cent of those cases and the telecommunications industry carried none of the cost. Voice synthesis firms that accept a ticked box as proof of consent carry none either. The finding that campaigns outlive their numbers by a fortnight means per-number enforcement is aimed, with real precision, at the cheapest component of the attacker's stack.

So who benefits from the current arrangement? Carriers, who continue to terminate and be paid for traffic that a quarter of the time is a machine reading a script, while the regulator declines to mandate the authentication that would make them prove otherwise. The lead-generation industry, whose synthetic calls are the most automated segment of the entire stream and which almost never discloses automation, because no rule requires it to. The synthesis vendors, who sell cloning for the price of a streaming subscription and an unverified attestation. Detection vendors, who sell to banks and enterprises rather than households, and whose products, by the measurement of the only field study we have, flip on identical audio more than one time in eight.

And the cost? It sits with a woman in Florida reading a warning label on a bitcoin machine. With a patient whose missed call has been logged as a failed appointment. With a tradesman who cannot afford not to answer. With everybody now expected to conduct the opening seconds of every call with a stranger in defensive silence, listening for the tell, performing an authentication task that no detector in the published literature can perform reliably, and absorbing the loss personally when they get it wrong.

Hello lasted 149 years. It was retired not by a vote, or a rule, or a standard, but by a lifestyle column recommending rudeness, because rudeness was the only remedy anybody was willing to make free.

Sources and References

  1. The Guardian, “The death of 'hello': how gen Z and scammers put paid to the greeting”, Pass notes, Social etiquette, 7 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/07/death-of-hello-gen-z-a= nd-scammers
  2. Xingyu Shen, Tommy Duong, Muduo Xu, Xiaodong An, Jiaqi Gan, Haoyuan Tang, Jamey Z. Liang, Siyu Zhang, Yan Zhang and Simiao Ren, “The Machines Are Calling: Measuring Automated and Synthetic Voices in Unwanted Inbound Calls”, arXiv:2609.11137v1, 10 September 2026, full text including Appendix A, Threats to validity, and Appendix B, Ethics. https://arxiv.org/html/2609.11137v1
  3. Chengzhe Sun, Tianle Yang and Siwei Lyu, “A survey of AI-generated voices and their detection”, arXiv:2608.15411, 15 August 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15411
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  5. Federal Communications Commission, “In the Matter of Implications of Artificial Intelligence Technologies on Protecting Consumers from Unwanted Robocalls and Robotexts: Declaratory Ruling”, FCC 24-17, CG Docket No. 23-362, adopted 2 February 2024, released 8 February 2024. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-17A1.pdf
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  15. Stop Scams UK, “159 passes one million calls”. https://stopscamsuk.org.uk/159-one-million-calls-stop-scams-uk-virgin-money= /
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  18. ElevenLabs, “Voice cloning” product guide, audio requirements for Instant Voice Cloning and Professional Voice Cloning. https://elevenlabs.io/docs/product-guides/voices/voice-cloning
  19. Kimberly T. Mai, Sergi Bray, Toby Davies and Lewis D. Griffin, “Warning: Humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes”, PLOS One, 18(8):e0285333, 2 August 2023. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=3D10.1371/journal.pone.0285333
  20. Xin Wang, H=C3=A9ctor Delgado, Hemlata Tak, Jee-weon Jung, Junichi Yamagishi, Nicholas Evans and colleagues, “ASVspoof 5: Crowdsourced Speech Data, Deepfakes, and Adversarial Attacks at Scale”, arXiv:2408.08739, 16 August 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08739
  21. Nuria Alina Chandra, Ryan Murtfeldt, Oren Etzioni and colleagues, “Deepfake-Eval-2024: A Multi-Modal In-the-Wild Benchmark of Deepfakes Circulated in 2024”, arXiv:2503.02857, 4 March 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02857
  22. Snopes, “'Can You Hear Me?' Scam Warning”, fact check, 2017. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/can-you-hear-me-scam/
  23. Biometric Update, “BBC reporter and his twin dupe HSBC voice ID recognition system”, May 2017. https://www.biometricupdate.com/201705/bbc-reporter-and-his-twin-dupe-hsbc-= voice-id-recognition-system
  24. Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, “New number when we call you, to replace any withheld numbers”, 4 January 2023. https://www.derbyshirehealthcareft.nhs.uk/about-us/latest-news/new-number-w= hen-we-call-you-replace-any-withheld-numbers
  25. Portland Road Practice, “Did Not Answer Policy”, NHS general practice patient guidance. https://www.portlandroadsurgery.nhs.uk/did-not-answer-policy
  26. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Announces Winners of Voice Cloning Challenge”, press release, 8 April 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-w= inners-voice-cloning-challenge

Tim Green

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

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from esoterical

I dreamt of torrential rain in the twilight of evening, and I was standing outside very willingly drenched. The air felt thick and warm, therefore being soaking wet felt like a non issue. When was the last time anyone simply stood in the rain and felt it envelope their entire being? Are we so opposed to feeling primal in nature? I am sure there is an evolutionary explanation for this, so I shall continue. As I stood there I felt deep within my body a rumble I did not realize was thunder until a flash of light caught the corner of my eye. The vibration stayed with me until it settled into my heart. I became frightened then, worried I may have been struck by lightning and this was all a damp in-between state of consciousness (which it very well was as it is a dream to begin with), so I calmly walked inside my home that did not look like my home, but it must have been because my loved ones were looking at me with concern. I closed the door behind me and looked through the window to a scene I was not expecting. Off in the distance, three violent swirling pillars of gray carrying with them dust and debris were dancing around one another. My body suddenly felt cold. I glanced down at my hands that now felt stiff and numb. I raised them in front of me, level with my eyes to get a better look as I could not believe it. The tips of my fingers were purple almost to the point of total blackness. I had not realized how long I was standing outside in the rain, nor how piercingly cold it turned in an instant. When I was outside life seemed so peaceful and soft. I wanted to go back, but the danger was too real for me to risk changing things back to how they were. Here is where the dream becomes too hazy to remember. I only remember feeling dread and thinking to myself how quickly things could change from serene to apocalyptic. When I finally woke I was confused to see a bright day shining through my bedroom window, the azure sky radiant without a single cloud obscuring it. No rain had come here, clearly. No tornados. My confusion turned to relief, yet there was a minuscule fear creeping into my mind that perhaps the dream was a premonition. How could my dream and waking life be so intensely dichotomized if not to show me something?

 
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from Ceci n’est pas un blog.

This week, a conversation with a client inspired my latest spiral of thinking. A lot of people I work with, and a lot of people I know in general, have a deep belief that they are not “deserving” of positive things in life, like joy, safety, relationship security, and so on. I’ve felt this way myself plenty of times. What does it mean, though, to deserve something, especially something that is positive and helpful? Can we deserve the bad things that happen to us? Who is it, exactly, that’s dishing out these rewards and punishments, anyway? I’m not sure these questions are even meaningful in the first place. But let’s chase this rabbit. 

Ok, here goes a most trite cliche: the dictionary (Merriam-Webster, in this case) defines deserve  as “to be worthy of; merit; to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital.” Given that, who then deserves to be happy or safe or loved? And who doesn’t? Who deserves a small rock to always be in their shoe and to never be able to find the cool side of the pillow? Now, I’m certainly not the first person to ever consider these sorts of ideas, and finer philosophers and theologians than me have thought about reward and punishment for centuries. I’d like to skip the theology altogether, and honestly I doubt what I’m writing rises to the level of philosophy as such. But here it is: how does the average rando understand sweeping ideas like the deserving of goodness or ill, reward and punishment? 

My instinct here is that human beings deserve a certain level of happiness or contentedness simply for the fact that we are human. I don’t mean that everything in life will be perfect or that there will be no suffering because that’s simply not reality. And after all, some adversity can push us to do more, learn more, reach a different level. I think everyone deserves to have moments of enjoyment, creativity, and safety, as much as is possible. Yes, even that guy. And her. And them. I don’t think there is anyone inherently unworthy of positive experiences, though I often sit with people who feel this way about themselves. 

Less often do I sit with people who feel that there are others who don’t deserve positivity. However, there is certainly a lot of discussion about this in our broader culture. From all sides, there are people blathering about why this certain individual or group of folks are The Problem. And being The Problem, these people deserve any awful thing that comes their way. It’s a bit simplistic, and it brings up simplistic solutions. If The Problem is eliminated, we will all be happy again. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work this way. I also wonder if The Problem gets to experience contentedness, perhaps they will be less, well, problematic. 

Who deals out all this contentedness and suffering, anyway? God? Great. (I said I was going to veer away from theology. This was a lie.) Humans can also reward and punish other humans, and this can happen intentionally or not. Is there some other mechanism at play? Maybe karma, which doesn’t work the way most Western people think it does, but it provides a mechanism for determining who deserves what. All of these ideas about cosmological reward and punishment assume that if we all just behave ourselves, good things will happen, but everyone I know has pondered why bad things happen to good people. I also frequently ask the opposite: why do good things happen to bad people? There is no simple formula for this. 

I’m therefore back to my original premise, which is that everyone deserves and should be able to experience joy, safety, love, simply because they are human. No behavioral requirements, no gifts from the universe or a deity. No need to earn good experiences. There are other reasons to be a good person and act the right way, but the idea that you might be rewarded with the feeling of joy or peace shouldn’t be one of them. It’s enough to be human. Being human is hard enough, anyway, so why not embrace the idea that all of us should have a baseline of security and at least some measure of happiness? 

Can we want this for ourselves and for others, even for the people we really can’t stand? What makes any individual happy will vary, of course. Still, what would it be like to start from the assumption that people can seek the things that bring them joy, and that that can be the foundation of life rather than its end goal? I’m not even sure that I allow myself to feel deserving of happiness. I wonder if I can embrace the idea of happiness as a baseline. I wonder what might be different in my life if I did.

 
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from The Solar Ledger

Modeling the Standalone Value of Plug-In Solar in Northern Virginia

When Virginia passed House Bill 395, allowing plug-in solar systems up to 1,200 W starting January 1, 2027, it created a distinct class of distributed generation. Unlike traditional rooftop net-metered arrays, plug-in solar operates under strict physical and regulatory guardrails: it connects directly to a standard household branch circuit, bypasses utility interconnection review, and is explicitly excluded from net metering.

In Virginia, plug-in solar is strictly “use-it-or-lose-it.” Any generation not consumed behind your electric meter at the exact instant of production flows back into the distribution grid without credit.

This raises an immediate practical question for Northern Virginia homeowners and renters: Does an unbuffered 1,200 W plug-in system deliver enough real-world bill reduction to justify its upfront cost?

To answer this, I modeled a year of generation using historical weather and insolation data from Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia (August 1, 2025 – July 31, 2026), paired against my actual split-phase residential load data downloaded from Dominion Electric Virginia.

The Fallacy of the “Average Day”

Financial models for solar often rely on annual averages. Over the modeled 12-month period, Bailey’s Crossroads received 1,568.57 kWh/m² of total daily solar insolation, translating to a daily mean of 4.30 kWh/m².

Note: This is the maximum possible energy that could be captured by a system, however solar system efficiency results in only being able to capture about ~15-20% of the solar energy.

A daily average of 4.30 kWh/m² might suggest a steady, predictable stream of energy (kWh). The real distribution tells a different story.

Metric Insolation (kWh/m²)
Maximum 8.58
95th Percentile 7.73
75th Percentile (Q3) 6.07
50th Percentile (Median) 4.09
25th Percentile (Q1) 2.64
5th Percentile 1.12
Minimum 0.30

Daily insolation value for Bailey's Crossroads, VA August 1, 2025 through July 31, 2026

(Note: Visualizing the daily swing from 0.30 to 8.58 kWh/m² makes it obvious why designing around a simple mean fails.)

Sunlight arrives in feast-or-famine cycles, driven by seasonal changes and weather impacts to useful daylight, as well as changes in ambient temperatures impacting the silicon photovoltaic panels efficiency converting the irradiance into usable electricity.

Three Days, Three Realities

To evaluate how a standard 1,200 W array (plugged into Leg 1 of a standard 120/240V split-phase service) performs against household demand, consider three specific days from the model.

Daily generation vs power usage example trigraph

1. The Winter Floor: January 10, 2026

Heavy cloud cover, short daylight window, low ambient temperature.

On heavily overcast winter days, available irradiance collapses. On January 10, the array produced just 0.357 kWh DC, resulting in 0.339 kWh AC delivered to the household after inverter conversion losses.

  • Household Context: Total household demand was 22.13 kWh (11.07 kWh on Leg 1).
  • Grid Export: 0.00 kWh (0%).
  • Demand Offset: The system offset 3.1% of Leg 1 demand, or 1.5% of total household energy.

There is zero waste here—every watt generated is consumed instantly by baseline appliances—but the raw offset is negligible.

2. The Spring Surplus Paradox: March 28, 2026

High irradiance, cool air temperatures 50-60°F (10-16°C), low household load.

March 28 represents prime operating conditions: high insolation paired with cool ambient temperatures that keep panels operating near peak electrical efficiency. The 1,200 W system produced 8.956 kWh AC, losing only 0.037 kWh to inverter clipping.

  • Household Context: Mild weather meant no heating or cooling; total household consumption was just 10.05 kWh (5.03 kWh on Leg 1).
  • Demand Offset: The array provided 2.704 kWh toward Leg 1 demand, covering 53.8% of that circuit's daily energy.
  • Grid Export: 6.252 kWh (69.8%) flowed backward out of the home.

Under HB 395, this 6.25 kWh export earned exactly $0.00. It served neighboring loads on the local transformer while providing zero financial return to the system owner.

3. The Midsummer Thermal Penalty: July 4, 2025

Clear skies, high peak sun, ambient high temperature of 103°F.

July 4 delivered strong insolation (7.47 kWh/m²), well above the annual average. Under Standard Test Conditions (77°F / 25°C), a 1,200 W array would run near capacity for several hours. Instead, the system generated 6.699 kWh AC.

Why didn't generation peak at 1,200 W? Thermal derating.

Photovoltaic silicon exhibits a negative temperature coefficient of maximum power, typically degrading output by -0.35% to -0.45% per degree Celsius above 25°C. On a 103°F / 39.4°C summer afternoon, roof-level or balcony panel cell temperatures would routinely surpass 65°C (149°F), shedding 15% to 20% of rated nameplate capacity.

  • Household Context: Air conditioning and continuous charging of the EV drove total household demand to 64.03 kWh (32.02 kWh on Leg 1).
  • Grid Export: 0.00 kWh (0%).
  • Demand Offset: The system covered 20.9% of Leg 1 demand (10.5% of total household demand).

EV charging was 1,440 W continuous throughout the day until after sunset, meaning that every kilowatt-hour generated by the 1,200 W array was consumed behind the meter. Note: EV charging is really only on one household leg but for this analysis it was split evenly between the two legs.

The Annual Economics: Does Standalone Plug-In Solar Pay Off?

A single day in March might make plug-in solar look inefficient, but energy economics depend on the entire 365-day balance sheet.

When modeling the full year against actual 30-minute interval smart meter data:

  • Total Annual AC Generation (1,200 W system): 1,958 kWh
  • Direct Self-Consumed Energy: 1,015 kWh (51.5%)
  • Uncredited Grid Export: 943 kWh (48.20%)

Payback Calculation

In Northern Virginia, Dominion Energy’s residential Schedule 1 all-in rate sits at roughly $0.172 per kWh (including base generation, distribution, and fuel adjustments).

  1. Annual Retail Savings: 1,015 kWh * $0.172 / kWh = $174.58

  2. Capital Expenditure (CapEx): A quality, compliant UL 3700-certified 1,200 W balcony kit (three ~400 W panels, integrated microinverter, mounting hardware, and outdoor-rated disconnect cord) retails for roughly $1,000.

  3. Simple Payback Period: $1,000 (system cost) / $174.58 (savings per year) = 5.73 years

Even without net metering credits and discarding more nearly 50% of production, the standalone 1,200 W system pays for itself well within the standard 20-to-25-year lifespan of standard solar hardware. For renters and homeowners alike, it serves as a viable, low-friction tool to reduce electric bills.

The total electricity consumption over the analytical period was 6,737 kWh. The 1,015 kWh self-consumed energy represents approximately 15% of total electricity used. If all of the generated electricity could have been self-consumed this would have represented approximately 29% of total energy usage, a not-insignificant increase in value.

The Unresolved Dilemma

While the baseline economics work, the data exposes an obvious structural inefficiency:

  1. Summer and winter production are suppressed—winter by short, overcast days, and summer by thermal derating right when air conditioners demand peak power.

  2. Spring production is heavily wasted, with roughly 70% of generation dumped back into the grid uncredited because midday baseloads on a single leg are too small to absorb it.

The standalone system works, but it leaves substantial energy on the table. In the next post, I examine what happens when you introduce behind-the-meter storage: Can a small, modular battery capture that 70% spring surplus and shift it into evening peak hours—and does the added hardware justify its cost?

 
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from Juanma escribe

¿Y si la historia más interesante no la contara quien la vive, sino quien la mira?

Hay novelas que no podrían existir con otro narrador. El gran Gatsby contado por Gatsby sería la confesión de un hombre obsesionado. Contado por Nick Carraway, su vecino, es un mito. Sherlock Holmes narrando sus propios casos sería un manual de deducción; narrado por Watson, es un enigma que nunca terminamos de descifrar.

Eso es lo que hace el narrador testigo: coloca una cámara con voz propia junto al protagonista. Y esa decisión cambia por completo lo que el lector siente.

Narrador testigo

Qué es el narrador testigo

Es un personaje que cuenta la historia de otro. Participa en ella, o la conoce de cerca, pero no es su centro. Suele narrar en primera persona, pero su «yo» está al servicio de un «él» o un «ella».

Su regla de oro es sencilla: solo puede contar lo que ve, lo que oye o lo que le cuentan. No tiene acceso a la mente del protagonista. Puede suponer, interpretar o equivocarse, pero no saber.

Tres tipos de testigo

El testigo presencial. Está dentro de las escenas y las vive junto al protagonista. Nick Carraway asiste a las fiestas de Gatsby; Watson acompaña a Holmes en cada caso. Su fuerza está en la cercanía física y en la distancia emocional.

El testigo investigador o de oídas. Llega después y reconstruye los hechos a partir de testimonios, documentos y recuerdos. Es el narrador de Crónica de una muerte anunciada, que años más tarde recompone el asesinato de Santiago Nasar. Aquí la historia es también la búsqueda de la verdad.

El testigo impersonal. Apenas tiene personalidad y funciona casi como una cámara. Observa y registra con poca opinión. Es el más discreto y el más difícil de hacer interesante.

Por qué usarlo: cuatro ventajas

1. Te obliga a mostrar. Como el testigo no puede leer mentes, las emociones del protagonista tienen que aparecer en gestos, silencios, objetos y acciones. Es el mejor entrenamiento para dejar de explicar sentimientos.

2. Crea misterio. El lector sabe exactamente lo mismo que el testigo. Si el narrador no entiende por qué el protagonista actúa así, el lector tampoco, y seguirá leyendo para averiguarlo.

3. Engrandece al protagonista. Un personaje visto desde fuera resulta más enigmático, más admirable o más inquietante. La distancia genera aura.

4. Añade un segundo arco. El testigo también cambia. Nick Carraway termina la novela desencantado de todo un mundo. Mientras cuenta la historia de otro, sin darse cuenta, cuenta la suya.

Mostrar desde fuera: un ejemplo

❌ Marta estaba destrozada por la carta, aunque intentaba disimularlo delante de mí.

✅ Marta dobló la carta en cuatro, luego en ocho, y siguió doblándola hasta que no pudo más. Me preguntó si quería café. Ya me lo había preguntado dos veces.

En la primera versión, el narrador sabe lo que siente Marta; eso es trampa, porque un testigo no puede saberlo. En la segunda, solo cuenta lo que ve. El lector deduce el dolor por sí mismo, y por eso lo siente más.

Errores frecuentes

El testigo que lo sabe todo. Es el error más común: sin darte cuenta, el narrador empieza a contar pensamientos ajenos. Pregúntate en cada frase: «¿Cómo sabe esto mi narrador?». Si no hay respuesta, hay que reescribir.

El testigo sin voz. Si el narrador no tiene mirada propia, opiniones o prejuicios, se convierte en un simple transmisor. Dale una forma particular de ver el mundo; eso tiñe todo lo que cuenta.

El testigo que roba el foco. Lo contrario: tanto protagonismo que la historia del otro queda en segundo plano. Su vida debe aparecer, pero siempre en relación con lo que observa.

La escena imposible. Si tu testigo no está presente en un momento clave, necesitas justificar cómo lo sabe: una carta, un chisme, una confesión posterior. Ese hueco puede ser incluso una oportunidad narrativa.

Ejercicio para esta semana

Elige una escena que hayas escrito con narrador protagonista. Ahora reescríbela desde otro personaje que esté en la misma habitación: un camarero, una hermana pequeña, un vecino que pasa por la escalera.

Una sola norma: solo puede contar lo que percibe. Ni un pensamiento ajeno.

Después compara las dos versiones. ¿Qué se ha perdido? ¿Qué ha aparecido que antes no estaba? Casi siempre descubrirás que la escena gana tensión, y que el testigo tiene algo que decir que ni siquiera habías planeado.

Y ahora te pregunto: ¿qué historia tuya ganaría si la contara otro?

Créditos

© 2026 Juanma Menéndez

Esta obra está licenciada bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0).

Esto significa que puede ser compartida, copiada, adaptada y distribuida en cualquier medio o formato, incluso con fines comerciales, siempre que se dé el crédito adecuado al autor.

 
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from Unvarnished diary of a lill Japanese mouse

JOURNAL 27 septembre 2026

LE PACTE DES SŒURS

Aujourd'hui on s'est réunies à kabukichô, toutes les 8. C'était grave et un moment intense pourtant.

Nous avons conscience qu’à travers la disparition de #shieko et la volonté de nous cacher le plus de choses y compris même le corps de notre amie, c'est nous toutes qui sommes visées, comme m’a dit le frère de shieko, c’est notre faute avec nos idées de merde. Une vengeance ? Nous le pensons.

Mais nous avons décidé de nous unir définitivement comme une bande de yakuzas, exactement. Quand une sera atteinte les 7 autres seront là. Nous avons décidé après réflexion et d’un accord commun et volontaire (celle qui refuserait avait le droit de se retirer) et unanime que nous étions sœurs.

La disparition de shieko est notre fondement et c’est son esprit qui reste avec nous qui est le témoin de notre engagement, pour toujours. Seule elle pourrait nous relever de notre serment.

A. la cosaque venue de la lointaine Crimée Asu la reine de comédie Midori la douce Yôko la timide Izumi la rougissante Hayame aux larges épaules Ka chan la sérieuse et moi la petite souris nous nous tenons debout ensemble

Le patron a offert un saké de Fukushima qui ne sera plus jamais brassé Nous l'avons bu chacune le dédiant à shie qui était là aussi. Une bougie désormais brûlera pour elle ici chaque jour. Le patron pleurait. Nous aussi pleurions, mais droites. Ensemble nous ne nous laisserons pas abattre, jamais.

 
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from Kelly Kintner - Blog

We’re talking mentally ill

In the hospital, in school, at work, at shows, in the military, everywhere, even online, mentor-type personalities have told me, “You’d do better if you weren’t mentally ill.” My answer to that is, “No shit, Sherlock.”

You’d be better at what you are trying to do if you weren’t mentally ill..

Not long ago, a friend online and a mixer I worked with told me, “You’d be a lot better at music without mental health issues.” He was trying to be nice. But engineer-types have a hard time there. It stuck in my craw. I am wrong for that. But he also should not have said it. I doubt I will get as much from him. He doesn’t care. I’m crazy, or whatever.

I have a dream

It’s important to me because I dream about being taken seriously as a person and patient. When tech-types or capitalist-types dismiss me for being nuts, they are the ones actually being nuts. But good luck telling them that.

One of many important timelines

If you can’t see how the world has been propelled forward by the study of psychology and psychiatry (and set back too), allow me to elucidate; here is just one timeline of early institutions and asylums. If folks got out of line, they got put away. What do you think the technician is saying when he says, “if it wasn’t for his mental illness…” He’s saying, “he will never be a serious part of the music scene.” Thanks, tech. I got enough diagnoses. I can do without that one too.

Meanwhile, at the house.

“I’d like it better if it wasn’t so busy,” what I found myself saying to artwork I was attempting. Busy can be good. But I was going for simple. So I wasn’t saying the art was bad, I was stating my preference. That’s okay, with art. People, it’s different. People change, know things they don’t say, don’t know things they do say. They are malleable in a way a work of art is not. People often grow. They can get better or worse since you last saw them. They can learn, they can forget. To write a whole human off because they act weird, especially for their music, is called bias.

When you are hospitalized as a mental patient, it’s easy to experience bias against other patients. No one gets out alive.

I overreacted, sure. However, I am not dealing with a mental health bias today. So, I’ll take the overreacting. As a mental health patient, it is especially painful when I notice my own bias. I try not to do it, but I am a human.

The betrayal of it all.

To be honest, it feels like betrayal as a mental health patient. It never comes from folks I thought of as enemies. Only friends and coworkers show their bias. Maybe they feel safe and let their guard down. What they do is reveal how wrongly I thought they thought of me. I feel like a fool. That hurts my feelings. Conflict ensues. Relationship toast. This cycle here is my social life in a nutshell.

But Keri, she does it perfectly.

Why it works with Keri is respect. I do not get that from the world. Keri wraps me in it. I act dumb around Keri. I even experience dysphoric anger and hypomania. I probably say the dumbest shit. She doesn’t care. She just loves. Keri is the singularly most non-biased person for the mentally ill I have ever met. This includes over ten years of psychiatric treatment. She sees the person under the crazy and talks to that. She’s always completely safe around me. Also, a goddess..

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

I think this respect is applicable to more than just how we treat the mentally ill. We could do with a refresher course of respect online, in person, and for ourselves. I can look at a work, or listen to a song, or thumb through one of my catalogs and feel proud. I have garnered myself some respect. It doesn’t matter if anyone bought it. I am listening to it now. It works for me. I respect the artist, even if it is me.

Online I basically quit because of this issue. I need a certain amount of respect as a human or it feels like hostile territory. I do not venture into hostile territory for fun. Missions only. Some teenager calls me old fat white boomer or whatever and it bothers me. I can act like it doesn’t, but it still does. If I respect myself that day, I avoid it altogether.

How to respect someone going through a hard time.

When you look eye to eye with someone and it is obvious they are struggling, I’d advise offering assistance or staying clear. Putting their tirades and breakdowns on social media sets the whole human race back. Respect them. Respect yourself. Respect us. People do not earn respect to deserve it. They are people. They get it anyway. Waiting for the world to respect you before you respect the world is futile, verified.

Kelly Kintner

Just a bipolar patient today.

 
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from Roscoe's Quick Notes

Trying to keep my thoughts organized, I'm looking at our big move taking place in three stages: Stage 1 (or S1) began yesterday when we picked up the keys to our double-wide, to our mailbox, and brought the first small load over; Stage 2 (S2) will take place next Saturday when the movers take our furniture out of this small house and move it into the double wide; and Stage 3 (S3) will be settling into the new place, doing what cleanup we can to this old property, and turning the house keys back to the landlord.

Yesterday was S1, D1, or Day 1 of the First Stage, briefly described above. Today, S1, D2, will find us making at least two runs over to the new place, bringing what we can fit into the wife's small car.

And the adventure continues.

 
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from Rippple's Blog

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

Anticipated Shows

Returing Favorites

Most Watched Movies this Week

Most Watched Shows this Week

Hi, I’m Kevin 👋. Product Manager at Trakt and creator of Rippple. If you’d like to support what I'm building, you can download Rippple for Trakt, explore the open source project, or go Trakt VIP.

 
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from Midus

Publicat la 10 septembrie 2016

![](https://i.snap.as/XVYoZ2Cs.jpeg)

Uneori (abia dacă) îți dai seama cât de mult fac alții pentru tine. Alteori, când asta se întâmplă, realizezi (poate) cât rău le-ai provocat (voit sau nu). Numai că atunci când îți dai seama de toate astea, ei bine, este prea târziu. Ceilalți (sau unii cel puțin, și în special cei care contează cel mai mult) nu vor privi cu ochi buni atitudinea ta, acțiunile tale, iar iertarea lor nu va veni. Iar dacă va veni, este pentru că tu însemni prea mult pentru ei. Oricum, acea iertare nu va fi deplină. Deplinătatea ar însemna ștergerea amintirilor, iar asta nu se poate întâmpla!

Flames. Flăcări.

Flăcările. Astea marchează diverse etape ale vieții; ale vieții de acum și ale vieții de apoi. La început ele sunt pasiuni, apoi ele reprezintă chiar focul creației. La un moment dat, aceasta din urmă se transformă în focul pârjolitor, mistuitor, ce lasă în urmă doar cenușa. Și mai sunt două, dar nu sunt sigur care-i ordinea, însă gândesc că Phoenix-ul ar trebui să preceadă focurilor iadului. Așadar urmează, să spunem în mod mitologic, flăcările ce urzesc uimitorul Phoenix. Să fie oare flăcările iadului singurele flăcări perpetue? Singurele ce lasă în urmă pasiunea, creația, ba chiar și cenușa arderii pământene, inclusiv memoriile și mitologia? Așa se pare. Nimeni nu s-a-ntors de acolo să ne spună. Sau această noțiune temporală este legată de o religie temporară?

 
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from Midus

Publicat la 7 septembrie 2016

![](https://i.snap.as/aPC2FOnP.jpeg)

Să fi fost zi, să fi fost seară?! Să fi fost aievea, să fi fost vis?! Să fi fost albul, sau poate cenușiul?!

A fost și zi, a fost și seară… A fost aievea, a fost și vis… A fost și alb, a fost și cenușiu…

Va mai fi o zi, va mai fi o seară. Va fi aievea, va fi și vis. Va fi alb, va fi și cenușiu.

A fost și va mai fi! La fel sau altfel… Va mai fi…

 
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from An Open Letter

today at the gym, I was doing my deadlifts for first week, and it was programed as an RP five triple. There was a guy next to me that was pretty built, and like the kind of guy that would honestly intimidate me or scare me because I would feel like they would dislike me for being kind of feminine. Like a frat guy almost, but he asked me if I was going for a PR when I loaded up the weight, and I was honestly taking it back because this was an RPE five triple, and it was like 350 pounds. I have become very desensitized to incredibly strong people whether it’s through my Instagram where I get a lot of powerlifting content, or the incredibly strong people that frequent the gym. I forget that if you compare me to an average gym goer or a non-power lifter, I will likely be stronger. Part of me is honestly so surprised that he asked if I was going for a PR, that it feels like it might even be an insult. But he was lifting a little bit under that weight, and he asked me if I competed in any bodybuilding shows when we were talking a little bit. I choose to take this as a compliment.

 
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from Midus

Publicat la 20 iulie 2016

Cu ceva timp în urmă, am întâlnit o dilemă-provocare interesantă, legată de curaj:

Spune-mi de poţi, ce e curajul. — Platon

Primul gând-cuvânt a fost Madness, apoi, imediat, m-am gândit la „curaj nebun”.

Și apoi a urmat muzica; mai exact, piesa Courage a celor de la ManOwaR. Iar versurile melodiei includ cuvinte precum bătălii, încredere, inimă, suflet, victorie!

Battles are fought by those with the courage to believe They are won by those who find the heart Find a heart to share This heart that fills the soul will point the way to victory

Ăsta ar fi un sens dat curajului. Ar mai fi sensul în care, la un moment dat, ești nevoit să îți înfrunți durerea fizică sau sufletească, curajul reprezentând tăria, puterea de a acționa în acest sens… Dar până să alunec cu muzica în direcția asta, tot o piesă ManOwaR își croiește drum către această postare: I Believe.

All stand together for the world to see Now the time is right to live out all our dreams Say the words forever, your strength will never leave If you want to win the fight, say “I believe“

Totuși, nu voi lăsa sunetele să alunece spre piese triste și voi asocia acestui din urmă sens două dintre fotografiile mele mai vechi (sau relativ recente — căci perspectiva timpului este cel puțin relativă). Prima simbolizează durerea, iar a doua speranța.

![](https://i.snap.as/5T4sZhLy.jpeg)

„Durerea”, așa cum am denumit-o acum, am folosit-o prima dată sub numele „Death Is Up Above”, cu gândul că asta este o perspectivă a realității înconjurătoare, a realității cotidiene… Am fost surprins de acest efect Google obținut din două dintre fotografiile mele luminoase. Norii (ce apar în fotografiile originale) sunt oricum o sursă perpetuă pentru dezlănțuirea imaginației noastre, dar mașinăriile, cu modul lor binar de lucru, ne surprind uneori prin rezultatul succesiunii în care își aranjează cele două elemente (aparent) neutre, unul dintre ele la adunare (0), iar altul la înmulțire (1).

![](https://i.snap.as/WRar8nfr.jpeg)

Această din urmă fotografie nu este rezultatul mașinăriilor, ci al unor efecte optice, intitulând-o „There Must Be Light!”. Având în vedere locul în care am surprins razele soarelui, mintea face asocieri din nou cu muzica: jucării în pod. Toys in the Attic este un album al trupei americane de rock Aerosmith, album apărut în 1975. Aș zice că cea mai faimoasă piesă de pe acest album este Walk This Way, dar nu vreau să vă spun eu cum și pe unde să mergeți! Dar versurile piesei care dă numele albumului se potrivesc de minune fotografiei de mai sus:

In the attic lights Voices scream Nothing's seen Real's a dream

Dar de la curaj am ajuns la vise, așa că e cazul să mă opresc. Și cum acesta nu este un blog care provoacă la discuții, eu nu vă voi provoca așa cum a făcut-o Platon! Asta rămâne la latitudinea fiecăruia dintre cei ce vor ajunge să citească până în acest punct.

 
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from AnOublietteofThought

With noodling neck, romancers raze the living. Slipping. Sliding. Seductively slithering. A curve towards the masses. A bend where tongues fork sway. Plate not the bowled defendant. Shout “Spaghetti!” and twist delay.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

 
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from Attronarch's Athenaeum

Adventurers

Character Race Class Description
Ainsley Human Ranger level 1 An older gentleman with a groomed moustache and a wooden pipe in his mouth, covered in dark green cloak.
Ambros Human Cleric level 7 Follower of Aniu, Lord of Time.
Balarus Human Fighter level 4 An ex-woodsman, quite a crack shot with his bow.
Hedwig Hogwarts Elf Fighter / magic-user An always alert owl masquerading as an elf.
Ivor Human Cleric level 1 A young, soft-spoken worshipper of Umannah with thick black beard.
Tam o' Shanter Human Cleric level 4 A boisterous wine-lover of Losborst on a Great Crusade of the Grape.
Tarkus the Promising Human Cleric level 5 Follower of Bachontoi, God of Red Wisdom.
Thorinda Bung Human Monk level 4 She has blonde hair done up in a tight pony tail and wears light, loose suit.
Volkard Human Ranger level 1 Bushy hobo from the wilderness.
Wilbalt Abendeurer Human Fighter level 3 A burly blonde barbarian; Warmund's younger brother and a better swordsman of the two.

Flowerbloom 17th, Waterday

“Come, touch me some more...” brass door face beckoned Ivor.

But Ivor was busy—busy staying alive!

Balarus, Ainsley, Thorinda Bung, Aurella, Tam, and Ivor had just finished fighting five muscular green brutes. The beasts had no head, eyes instead of nipples, and wide mouth crossing their chest.

Bright light flashed before them, blinding them. Ambros, Wilbalt, and an unknown bushy man appeared in the chamber ahead of them. The trio was flanked by four pits filled with content most foul: excrement, bile, and something yellow.

“Watch out!”

Another headless brute approached from the east.

“Oh no!” Thorinda gulped as she ran around the corner only to illuminate two more. But with her lantern they got a feeling for the whole chamber. It was seventy feet long and sixty feet wide. A total of five potential egresses: three framed stone slabs with a musical note on them, two on the north wall, one on the west wall, and one framed waterfall to the south, east from the corridor they came through. And a dozen of iron-ringed pits filled with dizzying contents.

Three brutes were present in total, two walking towards them between the pits, and one standing in a semi-circular alcove to the far east. The last one held a crossbow.

Adventurers fanned out. Balarus, Volkard, and Ainsley ran to the shit-pits, and shot at the crossbow wielding monster. They noticed it looked slightly different, wearing broad nipple-goggles.

“THROW THEM INTO THE BILE!” the goggly brute yelled. Two other brutes complied and began grappling with their opponents. Thorinda, an experienced martial artist, contorted and dodged the clumsy beast, tripping and stunning it in the process. Drunkard Tam, on the other hand, got manhandled, like he is used to.

The brute lifted Tam like a little child; it carried him as others slashed and smashed it; and it chucked the cleric into a vat full of concentrated bile. Dressed in chainshirt, Tam sank like a rock.

It burned. It burned a lot. And it hurt. It hurt a lot.

“EAT SHIT!” goggly brute yelled and shot back at Balarus. The man was hurt, but the monster was soon put down, looking like a dead porcupine. Ivor the Brave smashed the chest-mouthed beast that chucked Tam. He hit it just bellow the mouth, where a normal man's solar plexus would be, caving its chest in. Thorinda glaived the stunned one through its nipple-eye, exiting through the ribcage.

Wilbalt threw his axe to the side, grabbed a polearm, and ran to the pit containing half dissolved Tam. In panic, and cursed by soberness of pain, Tam attempted to doff his chainmail. But his eyes burned, and his fingers were clumsy. When he felt something hitting him on the head he grabbed on that in desperation.

This was a fine decision, for it was the blunt side of the polearm. Ambros, Ivor, and Ainsley jumped in to help Wilbalt, and dragged the cleric out.

A flash or red light blinded everyone. Tarkus the Promising and Hedwig of Hogwarts materialised in the centre of the chamber.

Victorious but battered, the clerics cast healing spells, while others bound their wounds, counted the dead, and took a breather. They organised into two groups, one led by Bily Tam and another by Ranger Ainsley.

Tam was joined by Wilbalt, Balarus, Thorinda, and Hedwig.

Ivor, Volkard, Ambros, and Tarkus joined Ainsley.

The teams spread out and began investigating the chamber.

There were twelve pits in total, organised into four columns and three rows. All had an elevated iron ring around them. In the first row, from left to right, pits were filled with: a grey and foetid, soupy mix of bone chips and necrotic flesh; a sticky, yellowish-orange liquid that quivers; a pale, slimy, milky-white liquid; and what looked and smelled like stomach acid. In the second row: two pits with liquid excrement with floating chunky bits; a misty, silvery, see-through substance; and another bile pit. Third row, same order: a bile pit that Tam took a dive in; another yellow-orange pit; another bile pit; and one more silvery, wispy pit.

Arrow-filled brute laid dead in what could, at best, be described as some sort of magical circle. Nobody dared stepped into it, so they dragged the corpse out of it instead. They took its goggles and attempted to convince Thorinda to wear them. Alas, she was way too lithe.

Stone slabs looked pretty much like the slabs on the lower level; the ones they had to blow in order for them to open. Yellowish, sticky substance was baked into the floor right in front the north-east slab. Finally, a corridor was visible beyond the framed waterfall.

Tam and his men investigated the yellowed doors. Once at safe distance, Ivor passed the blood-caked, filthy, flute to Ambros. Cleric blew on it. Barbs tore into his lips and tongue, injuring him. No divine words will be spoken coherently for some time.

Slab slid upward, and yellowish fumes billowed out, dissipating in the chamber. Thirty foot corridor led into a circular chamber with four skeletons stirring something in a pit below them. The skeletons wore thick goggles, aprons, and gloves. They used long pitchforks to stir a mass of something.

Tam gang rolled in, while Ainsley crew investigated beyond the waterfall. A wondrous sight, down a corridor leading into a pool of clear water, filled with colourful corals. Natural light shining through two horizontal slits illuminated the whole chamber. An opaque membrane was in each slit, softening and diffusing the sunlight.

“Hold me back, I am going for a swim!” Hedwig was eager.

“No, let's see if there is anything inside first!”

“Good idea. Let's chop up some of those guys!”

And it was indeed a good idea. A swarm of long, slimy, crimson tentacles tore the severed arm to pieces. They retracted to the sides. Serene blue has been violated with frothy red.

Drawing by Anthony.

Balarus shot at the membranes, shattered each like they were glass.

“I still wanna go for a swim!”

“No, come on, let's go.”

Once back into the pit chamber, Ainsley team quickly realised that the stone slab had shut behind Tam's gang. One of the clerics banged on it. Ambros blew Ivor's flute once more, and the doors opened.

Four skeleton-chefs were destroyed; the mass they stirred bas a smouldering, brewing concoction of fungi, large, shrimp-like insects, and some herbs and lichen. Doors to the north east led into another circular chamber. This one was filled with barrels containing highly flammable military oil.

“Let's burn the vats.”

“Let's burn octopus!”

“No, let's burn EVERYTHING!”

“Guys, this place seems very organic. It might collapse.”

“LET'S BURN EVERYTHING!”

Whilst discussing, nearly two dozen giant flying krills invaded the chamber, causing confusion and mayhem. Stone slab shut behind them. Many got stabbed and nibbled upon. Ivor succumbed to his wounds. But ultimately, adventurers prevailed, adding the the unholy paella brewing in the chamber.

Doors were shut. Toxic fumes were filling the chamber. An barrels of oil beckoned some more than others.

Will they fulfil their burning desire?

Or will it be quenched by others?

Only one way to find out.

Meme by Lord Jubalon Flux.

Discuss at Dragonsfoot forum.

#Wilderlands #SessionReport

 
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