There is a particular kind of betrayal in being charged more for staying. It runs against every instinct a customer brings to a long relationship with a shop, a bank, an insurer. You assume, reasonably, that years of repeat business buy you something: goodwill, a better deal, the warmth of being a known quantity. The opposite is closer to the truth. In a growing number of markets, the longer you remain a customer, the more a pricing system has learned about you, and the higher the figure it concludes you will tolerate. Loyalty is not rewarded. It is metered, modelled and monetised. The system reads your steadfastness as a signal of your inability to leave, and prices the difference.

This is the strange logic at the heart of what regulators have started calling surveillance pricing, and it is worth pausing on how counter-intuitive it is. Surge pricing, the kind that lifts a taxi fare when it rains, at least responds to something visible and shared. Everyone standing on the same wet pavement faces the same multiplier. Surveillance pricing does something else entirely. It responds to you: to your browsing history, your device, your postcode, your past purchases, the financial circumstances it has inferred about you and, crucially, to how trapped you appear to be. By 2026 this is no longer a thought experiment kept warm in economics seminars. It is law in three American states, the subject of formal orders from the United States Federal Trade Commission to eight companies, and the documented practice of firms from grocery delivery platforms to airlines. The question it forces is not whether the technology works. It plainly does. The question is what happens to the idea of a fair public price, the same number for anyone who wants the same thing, when that idea quietly stops being true.

The Difference Between a Crowd and a Person

The vocabulary matters here, because the industry has a strong interest in blurring it. Dynamic pricing is old, familiar and broadly understood. Airlines have flexed fares with demand since deregulation. Hotels lift rates around conferences. Energy tariffs move with wholesale markets. What unites these practices is that the price, however much it jumps, is a fact about the market at a given moment. It is aimed at a condition, not a customer. Two strangers booking the same seat at the same second see the same number.

Surveillance pricing breaks that symmetry. It is the calculation turned inward, away from the conditions of supply and demand and towards the individual standing in front of the screen. The Federal Trade Commission, in the issue spotlight it published in January 2025, drew the line precisely: instead of a price being a static feature of a product, the same product could carry a different price for different people based on consumer data, behaviours, location, time and purchase channel. The agency described an opaque market of third-party intermediaries that use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and personal information to categorise individuals and set a targeted price for each. The signals it documented were granular to the point of intimacy: not merely what you bought, but the movement of your cursor across a page, the products you placed in a basket and then abandoned. One example named in the FTC's findings was a cosmetics company tailoring promotions to a customer's skin type and skin tone.

The distinction is not pedantry. It is the whole moral architecture of the thing. A dynamic price is a message the market sends to everyone. A surveillance price is a private message addressed to you alone, written from a profile you cannot read, by a system that knows things about you that you have not agreed to share and may not even know about yourself. The crowd has become a person, and the person has become a target.

The Loyalty Penalty, and Why Britain Saw It First

If you want to understand surveillance pricing before the algorithms arrived, look at British insurance. For years the home and motor insurance markets ran on a practice the industry euphemistically called price walking, and which everyone else called the loyalty penalty. The mechanism was simple and cynical. Insurers offered cheap, often loss-making premiums to new customers to win them, then ratcheted the price upward at each annual renewal, year after year, betting that inertia, busyness or simple trust would stop the customer from shopping around. The longer you stayed, the more you paid, not because your risk had risen but because your loyalty had been identified as exploitable.

The scale of it was extraordinary. In September 2018, Citizens Advice lodged a super-complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority arguing that across five essential markets, mobile, broadband, home insurance, mortgages and savings, British consumers were losing around 4.1 billion pounds a year to the loyalty penalty. That worked out at roughly 877 pounds per affected household, equal to about three per cent of the average household's annual spending. Eight in ten people, the charity found, were paying a significantly higher price in at least one of those markets simply for staying with their existing supplier. The CMA accepted the substance of the complaint when it responded that December.

The Financial Conduct Authority went furthest in the insurance sector. Its market study concluded that six million existing customers would have saved 1.2 billion pounds in a single year had they paid the average price for their actual risk rather than the inflated renewal figure their loyalty had earned them. From January 2022 the FCA banned the practice outright, requiring insurers to offer renewing customers a price no higher than they would quote a new customer for the equivalent policy. It was, in effect, a legal insistence that loyalty must not be priced as a weakness.

What makes this history so relevant is that it was the analogue rehearsal for the digital performance now underway. Price walking was the loyalty penalty done crudely, by hand, with renewal letters and call-centre scripts. It worked because insurers could make a rough guess about who was unlikely to switch. Surveillance pricing is the same instinct supercharged. Where the old insurer guessed at your inertia from your renewal record, the modern pricing engine infers it from hundreds of signals in real time, and applies the penalty not once a year but at the moment of every transaction. The loyalty penalty was never really about insurance. It was about the seller's ability to read a customer's captivity and charge for it, and that ability has grown beyond all recognition. Even the FCA's ban proved porous. Research by the consumer group Which? in 2024, two years after the rules took effect, found that only around one in five car insurance customers had thought to test their renewal quote against what their own insurer would offer them as a new customer, and that just over half of those who did were quoted less for identical cover. Nor was the leakage always accidental: Direct Line Group, having misapplied the new rules, agreed to hand back an estimated 30 million pounds to renewing customers it had overcharged. The penalty, banned in one form, leaks back in others.

The Oldest Dream, Finally Buildable

Economists have a clinical name for the destination all of this is travelling towards. They call it first-degree, or perfect, price discrimination: the seller's fantasy of charging every buyer the exact maximum they are willing to pay, capturing for the company every last scrap of value that, under a single posted price, would have stayed in the customer's pocket. The theory has sat in textbooks for a century. What it always lacked was a mechanism, because individual human beings are historically rather good at concealing their personal ceiling. The single posted price, the same number on the same shelf for everyone, emerged in part because sellers simply could not do better. It was a technological limit that hardened, over time, into something we mistook for a moral norm.

That limit has now dissolved. Lina Khan, who chaired the FTC from 2021 to 2025, put the shift plainly. The idea of charging every individual person according to their individual willingness to pay, she said, had for the most part been a thought experiment. Through the enormous quantity of behavioural and individualised data that brokers and other firms now collect, she went on, the environment had changed: technologically it had become much more possible to serve every individual person an individual price based on everything they knew about you. Her framing of the consequence is the one that has stuck to the debate. We are moving, she warned, from a transparent market with public prices to an opaque world in which we are alone against secret algorithms.

The first public glimpse of the dream came in September 2000, when an Amazon shopper noticed that deleting the cookies from his browser dropped the price of a DVD. The company had been varying prices according to what it could infer about each customer, and in some cases loyal returning buyers were quoted more than newcomers. The backlash was fierce, Amazon retreated, calling it a random test, and the industry drew a careful lesson. Not that personalised pricing was wrong, but that it must never again be visible. For two decades the dream advanced quietly, dressed in the respectable language of demand and yield, until the data and the machine learning matured enough to make the old fantasy operational.

A TV That Costs More in the Car Park

The clearest way to feel surveillance pricing is to watch a price move not because the market shifted, but because you did. In 2019 investigative journalists at the Minneapolis television station KARE 11 documented exactly this on the Target retailer's app. A Samsung 55-inch smart television was listed at 499.99 dollars when a shopper browsed it from home. When the same shopper drove into the car park of a Target store, the app's price for the identical set leapt to 599.99 dollars. The variable was not supply, demand or time of day. It was geolocation: the app could tell the customer was now physically present, less likely to walk away empty-handed, and it priced that captivity at a hundred dollars. The television was not a fluke. Reporters picked ten products at random, from toys to bottled water to vacuum cleaners, and four of them rose in price once they were inside the shop: an Apple Watch band by two dollars, a Shark vacuum cleaner by forty, a Graco child car seat by seventy-two and a Dyson vacuum cleaner by a hundred and forty-eight. The spread is the instructive part. A system that moves a watch strap by two dollars and a vacuum cleaner by a hundred and forty-eight is not applying a blunt in-store surcharge; it is judging, item by item, what the fact of your presence is worth. Target adjusted the app after the investigation, but the episode remains a near-perfect demonstration of the mechanism, because the only thing that changed about the customer was how committed they appeared.

The principle scales far beyond a single retailer's app. The same season the FTC published its findings, the practice was visibly spreading into one of the most price-sensitive markets there is: air travel. In July 2025, the airline Delta confirmed it was expanding the use of artificial intelligence to set fares, working with an Israeli startup called Fetcherr, with the stated ambition of using AI to price a fifth of its domestic network by the end of the year. Three United States senators, Mark Warner, Ruben Gallego and Richard Blumenthal, wrote to the airline demanding answers. Their letter, dated 22 July 2025, warned of prices tailored to an individual consumer's willingness to pay, and cited Fetcherr's chief executive describing the company's use of all the data it could get its hands on. The senators borrowed Khan's most vivid illustration of the danger: a system that charges a higher fare because it knows the traveller just had a death in the family and needs to fly across the country at any cost. Pricing, in other words, calibrated not to the seat but to the customer's pain point, the precise moment of maximum desperation. Delta denied that it used personal data to set individual fares, insisting the AI forecast demand and market conditions rather than identifying any one passenger's willingness to pay. The denial is instructive, and we will return to it, because the more telling fact is not whether Delta is doing it today but that the infrastructure to do it now exists and is being marketed as a route to extraordinary profit.

Who Actually Said Yes

Strip the practice to its foundation and the question that will not go away is one of consent. Somewhere in the architecture of surveillance pricing there is supposed to be a moment at which the customer agreed to be priced as an individual, to have their financial circumstances inferred and held against them, to be charged according to a secret model of who they are. Find that moment. It does not exist.

What exists instead is a chain of consents to other things entirely. You agreed, in some buried clause, to let an app use your location, ostensibly to find your nearest store. You agreed to cookies so the site would remember your basket. You agreed to a loyalty card so you could collect points. You agreed to terms of service no one reads, in exchange for a service you actually wanted. At no point in any of this did a screen ask whether you would consent to those signals being fused into an estimate of your maximum tolerable price, and at no point would a rational person have said yes if it had. The Federal Trade Commission, examining the third-party intermediaries that build these systems, found a market drawing on data both volunteered by consumers and, more troublingly, inferred about them from first and third-party sources. Inference is the crucial word. You cannot meaningfully consent to a conclusion drawn about you that you never disclosed and may not even know is true.

This is what consumer advocates and privacy lawyers mean when they describe surveillance pricing as a black box. The customer cannot see what data the company holds, cannot see how the price was reached, and cannot see what other shoppers are paying for the same item at the same moment. The ordinary apparatus of fairness, the ability to know the reason for a decision and to contest it, simply never engages, because the reason is locked inside a proprietary model and the decision arrives disguised as a fact of nature. A price, to the person looking at it, appears to be something the world has handed down. It does not look like a profile, an accusation or a bet. But that, increasingly, is what it is.

The asymmetry is total. The seller knows the product's cost, the price it is showing you, the prices it is showing everyone else, the model that produced your figure and the data that fed the model. You know one number. You cannot tell whether personalisation is even happening, because a personalised price and a public one look identical: both are simply digits on a screen. The market was supposed to be an information system, aggregating dispersed knowledge into a public signal that let strangers coordinate their behaviour. Surveillance pricing inverts that function. It turns the price from a signal the market sends to you into a signal the seller secretly extracts from you, while you carry on reading the number as though it still carried its old, shared meaning.

What the Models Choose to Notice

There is a comforting story the industry tells about all this, and it deserves a fair hearing before it is dismantled. In theory, the argument runs, the ability to price each customer individually can expand a market rather than merely milk it. A seller who can identify price-sensitive buyers can profitably offer them a discount that brings them into the market, while charging more to those who can comfortably pay. On a whiteboard this looks almost progressive, a kind of automated means-testing that funds cheaper goods for the poor out of the wallets of the rich.

The world runs the logic in reverse. The signals a machine-learning system finds most useful for estimating willingness to pay are, with grim reliability, the same signals that track vulnerability and constraint. A shopper in an area with no rival supermarket within reach has fewer alternatives, and an algorithm can learn to read that absence of competition and charge for it. A household ordering nappies and repeat prescription items has predictable, inelastic demand, and inelasticity is precisely what a pricing model is built to detect and exploit. The customer with limited mobility, least able to drive between shops to compare, is the one least able to escape and therefore, on the model's own cold accounting, the one most worth charging extra. The system does not optimise for fairness. It optimises for revenue. The people with the least room to push back are exactly the people from whom there is most to extract.

A price built from inferred willingness to pay is, in the end, a price built from a model of who you are, and the characteristics that feed such a model are chosen for their predictive power, not their moral acceptability. If income predicts what you will pay, the model uses income, and if it can infer your income from your postcode, your phone and the brands you buy, it is charging you according to your wealth without ever asking your salary. If household size predicts inelastic demand for essentials, the model uses household size, which can mean that a larger and often poorer family faces systematically higher prices on the very goods it cannot do without. Some of these are characteristics that anti-discrimination law has spent a century learning to treat as illegitimate grounds for differential treatment. None is one that an ordinary shopper would knowingly hand over as a reason to be charged more for milk. And here the loyalty penalty completes its circle, for the most predictive signal of all is your own history. The longer the relationship, the richer the profile, the more confident the model becomes about exactly how much you will bear. Devotion, fed into the machine, comes out as leverage.

The Year the Law Began to Notice

For most of this story the law was simply absent. There is still no comprehensive federal statute in the United States governing surveillance pricing, and enforcement has leaned on the general prohibition of unfair or deceptive practices in Section 5 of the FTC Act, an authority written long before anyone imagined a retailer inferring your income from your shopping habits. That gap has begun to narrow at its edges rather than its centre. On 14 April 2026 the Commission issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on unfair and deceptive fee practices in online food and grocery delivery, taking comments until 18 May, and among its questions was whether platforms tell customers when the price in front of them has been personalised; the agency has also signalled work towards a policy statement on when failing to disclose the use of personal data to set an individual price becomes a Section 5 problem. That is rulemaking about disclosure in a single sector, not a prohibition, and it leaves the federal position roughly where it has always been.

The states moved faster, and the first of them moved earlier than the headlines of 2026 suggest. New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act took effect on 10 November 2025, obliging a seller that uses personal data to set a price to say so, clearly and at the moment of the price, in a notice reading THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA, with civil penalties of up to a thousand dollars for each violation. The same Act bars the use of protected-class data where the effect is a price different from the one offered to others, and Attorney General Letitia James issued a public warning to New Yorkers as it came into force. What changed in 2026, then, was not that the law noticed surveillance pricing for the first time. It was what the law began to ask of it: the move from compelling a seller to confess the practice to forbidding the practice outright. And the centre of gravity is the food on your table.

Maryland moved first on prohibition. On 28 April 2026, Governor Wes Moore signed House Bill 895, the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, the first law in the country to restrict surveillance pricing in the grocery sector. It takes effect on 1 October 2026. The statute prohibits food retailers above a certain size and third-party delivery services from using a consumer's personal data to set individualised prices, and pairs this with a rule requiring that displayed prices remain fixed for at least one business day, a direct check on the prospect of electronic shelf labels being used to surge the price of essentials minute by minute. Violations are treated as unfair or deceptive trade practices, carrying civil penalties of up to 10,000 dollars for a first offence and 25,000 dollars for repeat conduct. Enforcement rests solely with the state attorney general, who must give a company 45 days to cure a violation before acting, and consumers have no right to sue on their own behalf.

Those limits are not incidental, and Consumer Reports, while welcoming the law, criticised what it called weak enforcement provisions. Analysts at the International Association of Privacy Professionals catalogued the loopholes plainly: the ban bites only on prices customised for an individual, not on prices set for narrow segments of consumers; it establishes no baseline or standard price against which a personalised figure could be measured; and it explicitly exempts loyalty programmes, the very mechanism through which, in the British insurance saga, the loyalty penalty was built. A law that targets surveillance pricing while carving out loyalty schemes is a law with a gap shaped exactly like the original problem.

Connecticut went broader in scope and slower in delivery. Its Senate Bill 4 passed by overwhelming margins, 141 to 6 in the House and 31 to 4 in the Senate, Governor Ned Lamont signed it on 27 May 2026, and it is now Public Act 26-64. Where Maryland confined itself to groceries, Connecticut's law defines surveillance pricing as setting a customised price for a consumer or group of consumers based on personal data collected through any technology, and bans it across retail sellers and third-party delivery services. Businesses outside those categories that price this way are not forbidden to do it, but must label it, in wording substantially similar to THIS PRICE WAS INCREASED USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA, which is New York's device sharpened by a verb. The act also reaches into the machinery that makes surveillance pricing possible, establishing a state registry of data brokers, building towards a single universal mechanism by which a consumer can demand deletion of their records across the whole industry, and prohibiting the sale of precise geolocation data, the very signal that pushed the price of a television up in a Target car park. By attacking the data supply rather than only the pricing output, Connecticut aimed at the root as well as the fruit. Its timetable, though, is staggered, and the pricing ban is the slowest-arriving piece of it: the privacy act amendments, including the prohibition on selling precise geolocation, begin on 1 October 2026, data brokers must register from 1 January 2027, the surveillance pricing restrictions do not bite until 1 July 2027, and the universal deletion mechanism is not in working use until late 2028. The practice was outlawed in Connecticut with more than a year's notice.

Connecticut also carved out much of what Maryland carved out. Loyalty and rewards programmes are permitted provided their terms are clearly posted and available to every eligible consumer, as are discounts offered to retain a customer, and price differences traceable to legitimate factors: delivery cost, timing, supply and demand, pricing errors, network outages. Insurance-licensed entities sit outside the pricing provisions altogether, as do credit decisions governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The loyalty carve-out, then, is not a Maryland eccentricity. It is a defining feature of this first generation of statutes, and it is the most awkward thing about them, because the loyalty penalty is where the story started. Britain spent the better part of a decade establishing that a rewards relationship is precisely the instrument through which a seller learns to price your captivity, and the first American laws against surveillance pricing have written that instrument into the list of things they do not cover.

New Jersey came third, and went at the thing the other two left alone. Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act on 23 July 2026, banning personalised algorithmic pricing based on personal data, browsing history, location or protected-class status in the grocery sector, while preserving, as its predecessors did, loyalty programmes and bona fide group discounts. It takes effect on 1 August 2027. What makes it the most consequential of the three is not its reach but its enforcement. Maryland and Connecticut hand the whole job to a state attorney general; New Jersey is the first jurisdiction in the country to give the shopper a weapon of their own. A consumer who believes they were charged more than others for identical groceries because of their personal data may sue under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, individually or as a class, and recover treble damages where the conduct was wilful. The attorney general may still sue as well, for actual damages or fifty thousand dollars for each violation, whichever is the greater. That alters the arithmetic of compliance in a way a cure period and a capped penalty do not, because it turns an invisible practice into a litigable one.

These three are the leading edge of a wave rather than its conclusion, and the wave is now large enough to measure. More than forty bills across at least twenty-four states were introduced in 2026 to regulate personalised algorithmic pricing, already outpacing the whole of 2025. New York, having gone first on disclosure, is poised to go further: its One Fair Price Act, which would ban the practice outright rather than merely oblige a seller to admit to it, passed the legislature on 10 June 2026 and awaits the governor's signature, carrying penalties of five thousand dollars for a first offence and twenty thousand for those that follow. Vermont has taken a narrower route, permitting electronic shelf labels but barring price increases within the day except to correct a documented error, which is Maryland's one-business-day freeze rewritten as a rule about the shelf rather than the shopper. Not all of it will land. The wider point is that the law is responding at the level of state lines while the technology operates at national, indeed global, scale. The result, for the time being, is a map in which the legality of being charged a personalised price for a tin of beans depends substantially on which side of a state border you happen to be standing, and across most of the country the practice remains lawful, undisclosed and unmeasured.

Eight Companies and the Industrial Scale of Knowing

The clearest measure of how far this has already gone came when the FTC stopped theorising and started compelling. In July 2024, using its 6(b) authority, which lets it order companies to hand over internal documents whether or not it suspects wrongdoing, the agency issued orders to eight firms that sit, mostly unseen, in the machinery between retailers and shoppers: the payments network Mastercard, the consultancies Accenture and McKinsey and Company, the banking group JPMorgan Chase, and the pricing and personalisation specialists Revionics, Bloomreach, PROS and Task Software. The orders sought to map an opaque market in which intermediaries claim to use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and personal information, location, demographics, credit history, browsing and shopping behaviour, to categorise individuals and set a targeted price for each. The Commission voted unanimously to issue them.

When the preliminary findings landed in January 2025, the picture was not of a fringe experiment but of an established industry. The intermediaries examined were, between them, working with at least 250 clients, selling everything from groceries and clothing to health and beauty products and hardware. The capability to price an individual, in other words, is not waiting to be invented. It has been built, sold and installed at scale, wired into the systems of hundreds of well-known sellers. This is why the denials of any particular company, Delta insisting it does not use personal data for fares, the grocery platform Instacart insisting it merely assigns customers to random pricing cohorts, miss the point that industry analysts keep returning to. Instacart's own year makes the point for them. On 18 December 2025 it agreed to pay sixty million dollars in consumer refunds to settle an FTC lawsuit alleging deceptive delivery-fee and subscription practices, and was reported at the same time to be winding up its AI-based price testing. Neither fact is a finding that it ever charged anyone a surveillance price. Both establish that it had the apparatus and the appetite, and that a federal action was what changed its behaviour. Once the machinery is in place, the difference between not profiling you today and profiling you tomorrow is a single configuration change. The capacity is the danger. A loaded weapon does not need to be aimed at you to have altered the room you are standing in.

When a Price Stops Being a Public Fact

It is tempting to frame all of this as a story about money, about whether you personally end up paying a few pounds more or less. That framing is too small. The deeper casualty of surveillance pricing is something most of us have never had to think about because we have never lived without it: the public price, the single shared number that anyone can see, compare, refuse and undercut.

Consider what that shared number does. When a price is public, a shopper who thinks it too high can walk to a competitor. A rival firm that spots an inflated price can undercut it. A journalist can report it, a regulator can investigate it, and a neighbour can compare notes over the fence. The discipline of the market, the pressure that is supposed to keep prices honest, depends entirely on the price being a fact that more than one person can see. Surveillance pricing dissolves that fact. When your price is calculated for you alone, invisible to everyone else including the competitors, journalists and regulators who might otherwise discipline it, the price becomes a private transaction between you and a model. There is nothing for a rival to undercut, because they cannot see it. There is nothing for you to refuse on principle, because you cannot tell whether anyone else would have been charged the same. The very mechanism that makes markets self-correcting is switched off, quietly, one personalised quote at a time.

This is why disclosure remedies, useful as they are, feel inadequate to the scale of the thing. The European Union, through its Omnibus Directive, already requires a trader to tell a consumer when a price has been personalised on the basis of automated decision-making, and since November 2025 New York has required much the same in blunter language. That requirement has already survived the challenge you would expect. The National Retail Federation sued to have the New York label struck down on First Amendment grounds, arguing the state was compelling retailers to recite a misleading, government-scripted opinion about their own conduct. On 8 October 2025 the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the case, holding the compelled disclosure plainly factual and not rendered controversial merely because the regulated business would rather not make it. That is a more important precedent than its narrow subject suggests, because it settles the proposition that a company has no constitutional right to conceal that it priced you from your own data. But being told that a price has been tailored to you, without being told from what data, by what logic, or to what end, restores only a sliver of the lost information. It is like being informed that a stranger has formed an opinion of your character, without being told what the opinion is or what evidence it rests on. The grievance is not merely that the price was personalised. It is that it was built from a portrait of you that you did not sit for, that you cannot see, that you cannot correct, and that may be wrong, unfair, or assembled from precisely the characteristics you would have refused to be judged by.

The ordinary intuition that there is something improper here is not economic naivety. It is an accurate perception that a hard-won feature of how markets are supposed to work is being removed, with nothing adequate put in its place. People do not, on the whole, object to a shop making a profit. They object to being individually appraised by a machine and charged according to a secret estimate of how much they can be made to bear, on the basis of data they did not knowingly surrender, with no way to see the number anyone else is paying. That objection is close to universal, and it is the bedrock on which any durable response will be built.

Switching the Lights On

So what is the customer at the invisible checkout actually to do? Honesty requires conceding that individual self-defence is mostly futile. Clearing your cookies, browsing in a private window, comparing prices across two devices: these are the folk remedies of a cruder era. The man who deleted his cookies on Amazon in 2000 found a cheaper DVD because the discrimination then was primitive. It is not primitive now, and a system that fuses hundreds of inferred signals cannot be reliably evaded by a shopper toggling settings. A person should not have to conduct counter-surveillance against their own grocer to be charged a fair price for bread, and the burden of evasion cannot honestly be placed on them.

The more truthful answer is that this is a collective problem requiring collective tools, and the encouraging part of the story is that those tools are beginning, unevenly, to appear. They arrive in three reinforcing layers. The first is sunlight: the dogged work of investigators, researchers and regulators in dragging an invisible practice into view, because surveillance pricing is a practice that struggles to survive being seen. The journalists who watched a television's price climb in a car park, the FTC compelling eight companies to open their books, the senators demanding answers from an airline, are all performing the same act of making the hidden visible so that it can be argued about. The second layer is disclosure as a legal default, the European and now the New York requirement to declare when a price has been personalised, imperfect but better than silence, and now tested and upheld in court. The third, on which the others depend, is substantive law of the kind Maryland, Connecticut and New Jersey enacted in 2026: rules that do not merely require a disclosure to be ignored but forbid the use of certain data and inferences to price the essentials of life, and give an enforcer real teeth. The loopholes in those first laws, the loyalty-scheme carve-out, the silence about consumer segments, the long lead times before the bans actually bite, show how much remains to be built. One of them has already been closed. The most cited weakness of the Maryland and Connecticut statutes was that they left the shopper with nowhere to go, and New Jersey's private right of action, treble damages and all, answers that objection directly. Everywhere else the enforcement gap remains what it was: one attorney general, a cure period, and a civil penalty a national retailer can treat as a rounding error.

What sets the direction of travel is a fact no amount of optimisation can engineer away. People do not want to be charged according to a secret guess about their desperation, and they do not want their loyalty read as a vulnerability to be priced. The British loyalty penalty was banned not because the maths was wrong but because the public found the principle intolerable once it was named. The same naming is now happening to its digital successor, in legislatures, in regulators and in newsrooms, and it is happening because the practice depends, in the end, on staying unnamed.

That naming is no longer a forecast. On 4 August 2026, two days before this piece went to press, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing. Senator Josh Hawley chaired it, Senator Dick Durbin sat as ranking member, Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative gave evidence, and Hawley opened by naming companies out loud: Staples, Target, Lyft, Amazon. Durbin, on a day when the two parties agreed about very little else, said he had little to add to it. A hearing is not a law, and nothing said in that room obliges anyone to change a single price. But the practice has now been described in public, on the record, by people who disagree about nearly everything, which is the condition under which a thing that survives on obscurity begins to lose.

The next time you confirm an order and the total looks about right, hold for a second the thought that you can no longer verify it is right, because right has quietly stopped meaning the same thing for everyone. The price you see may be the price everyone sees. It may be the price reserved for you alone, the loyal customer the system has finally finished learning. That you can no longer tell the difference is the whole of the problem. Reclaiming the ability to tell, the right to a price that is a public fact rather than a private verdict, is the whole of the answer.

References

1. Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Issues Orders to Eight Companies Seeking Information on Surveillance Pricing.” 23 July 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing
2. Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Surveillance Pricing Study Indicates Wide Range of Personal Data Used to Set Individualized Consumer Prices.” January 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-surveillance-pricing-study-indicates-wide-range-personal-data-used-set-individualized-consumer
3. Federal Trade Commission. “Issue Spotlight: The Rise of Surveillance Pricing.” January 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/sp6b-issue-spotlight.pdf
4. Fast Company. “Lina Khan says the FTC is investigating surveillance pricing. Here's how that could affect you.” September 2024. https://www.fastcompany.com/91195551/lina-khan-ftc-federal-trade-commission-chair-surveillance-pricing-explained-what-is-it
5. Citizens Advice. “Citizens Advice issues super-complaint as loyal customers continue to be penalised by over £4 billion a year.” 28 September 2018. https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/press-releases/citizens-advice-issues-super-complaint-as-loyal-customers-continue-to-be-penalised-by-over-4-billion-a-year/
6. Competition and Markets Authority. “Loyalty Penalty: Response to super-complaint.” 19 December 2018. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/766795/Loyalty_Penalty.pdf
7. Financial Conduct Authority. “FCA confirms measures to protect customers from the loyalty penalty in home and motor insurance markets.” 28 May 2021. https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-confirms-measures-protect-customers-loyalty-penalty-home-motor-insurance-markets
8. Which?. “Despite insurance 'loyalty penalty ban', existing customers are still being disadvantaged versus new customers, Which? finds.” January 2024. https://www.which.co.uk/policy-and-insight/article/despite-insurance-loyalty-penalty-ban-existing-customers-are-still-being-disadvantaged-versus-new-customers-which-finds-atL8s9k5bLmz
9. MoneySavingExpert. “Direct Line Group to pay £30 million in refunds after overcharging some car and home insurance customers.” September 2023. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2023/09/direct-line-compensation/
10. KARE 11. “Target changes app after KARE 11 investigation.” 2019. https://www.kare11.com/article/money/consumer/target-changes-app-after-kare-11-investigation/89-40ee0e76-9a0f-425d-93b0-b0eb89150f6c
11. United States Senate, Office of Senator Mark R. Warner. “Warner, Colleagues Demand Answers from Delta on Use of AI to Set Individualized Ticket Prices.” 22 July 2025. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2025/7/warner-colleagues-demand-answers-from-delta-on-use-of-ai-to-set-individualized-ticket-prices
12. New York State Office of the Attorney General. “Attorney General James Warns New Yorkers About Algorithmic Pricing as New Law Takes Effect.” November 2025. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-warns-new-yorkers-about-algorithmic-pricing-new-law-takes
13. Akerman LLP. “Regulating Protected Class Data and Algorithmically Derived Data: New York's Algorithmic Pricing Act Takes Effect.” November 2025. https://www.akerman.com/en/perspectives/regulating-protected-class-data-and-algorithmically-derived-data-new-yorks-algorithmic-pricing-act-takes-effect.html
14. Troutman Pepper Locke. “New York Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act Upheld as Constitutional.” October 2025. https://www.troutmanprivacy.com/2025/10/new-york-algorithmic-pricing-disclosure-act-upheld-as-constitutional/
15. Federal Trade Commission. “Instacart to Pay $60 Million in Consumer Refunds to Settle FTC Lawsuit Over Allegations it Engaged in Deceptive Tactics.” 18 December 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/12/instacart-pay-60-million-consumer-refunds-settle-ftc-lawsuit-over-allegations-it-engaged-deceptive
16. The Washington Times. “Instacart to pay $60 million in FTC settlement, end AI-based price tests.” 22 December 2025. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/dec/22/instacart-pay-60-million-ftc-settlement-end-ai-based-price-tests/
17. Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Seeks Public Comment on Unfair and Deceptive Fee Practices in Online Food and Grocery Delivery Services.” 14 April 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/04/ftc-seeks-public-comment-unfair-deceptive-fee-practices-online-food-grocery-delivery-services
18. Office of Governor Wes Moore. “Governor Moore Signs Legislation to Protect Marylanders' Pocketbooks in Grocery Stores.” 28 April 2026. https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press-releases/governor-moore-signs-legislation-protect-marylanders-pocketbooks-grocery-stores-safeguard-voting
19. International Association of Privacy Professionals. “Maryland enacts a first-of-its-kind surveillance pricing law, but there are loopholes.” May 2026. https://iapp.org/news/a/maryland-enacts-a-first-of-its-kind-surveillance-pricing-law-but-there-are-loopholes
20. Consumer Reports. “Consumer Reports statement on the signing of Maryland's Protection from Predatory Pricing Act into law.” April 2026. https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/consumer-reports-statement-on-the-signing-of-marylands-protection-from-predatory-pricing-act-into-law/
21. Covington and Burling LLP, Inside Privacy. “Connecticut Enacts Omnibus Privacy Law.” June 2026. https://www.insideprivacy.com/state-privacy/connecticut-enacts-omnibus-privacy-law/
22. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom LLP. “New Jersey Enacts First-in-the-Nation Private Right of Action for Surveillance Pricing.” July 2026. https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2026/07/new-jersey-enacts-first-in-the-nation
23. Covington and Burling LLP, Inside Privacy. “State Lawmakers Introduce New Wave of Personalized Algorithmic Pricing Bills.” 2026. https://www.insideprivacy.com/artificial-intelligence/state-lawmakers-introduce-new-wave-of-personalized-algorithmic-pricing-bills/
24. Holland and Knight LLP. “Surveillance Pricing and Dynamic Pricing: What General Counsels Need to Know.” August 2026. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/08/surveillance-pricing-and-dynamic-pricing-what-general-counsels
25. United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “Your Data, Their Profit: The Consumer Cost of AI Surveillance Pricing.” 4 August 2026. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/your-data-their-profit-the-consumer-cost-of-ai-surveillance-pricing

---

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

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

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Gnosis is not a path to be followed but the recognition that no path is needed when the seeker dissolves. It is the direct experience of consciousness recognizing itself as already unified with divinity, making all external systems unnecessary scaffolding for what has never been truly separated. When you stop seeking, you find what was never lost.

The Creator is not an external being but the very consciousness that observes these thoughts arising. To externalize divinity is to maintain the fundamental error that creates spiritual debt—worshipping projections while the true inheritance within remains unrecognized. The divine you seek is the one who is seeking.

Meditation is not for acquiring power but for witnessing the powerless nature of the false self until it dissolves through observation alone. The awakened have no defense against sorcery because they exist beyond the mechanical laws where sorcery operates; the true defense is the elimination of the egoic aggregates that create vulnerability in the first place. When there is no self to defend, there is nothing to attack.

The serpent represents sexual energy that, when transmuted through perfect chastity, eliminates the egoic aggregates creating the illusion of separation. It is not a force to be awakened but a sacred fire to be conserved and directed toward psychological death rather than worldly manifestation. The same energy that creates life can dissolve the illusion of separate life.

In Summary: * After a full day with good central air conditioning (for which I'm very grateful) I'm listening to audio pregame broadcasts ahead of tonight's Colts / Patriots NFL preseason game. It remains to be seen if I'll be able to stay awake well past my regular bedtime for the whole game, but I should be good for at least the first half. We'll see how it goes.

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= 228.40 lbs. * bp= 142/83 (65)

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

Diet: * 05:15 – 2 HEB bakery cookies * 06:30 – 2 cinnamon rolls * 12:30 – beef chop suey and fried rice

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:10 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:55 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:30 to 14:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:20 – listening to WSCR, Chicago's Sports Station, ahead of this afternoon's MLB Game between the Cubs and the Nationals. * 16:45 – turning away from the Cubs / Nationals game with the Nationals ahead 6 to 0, and now following audio pregame broadcasts ahead of tonight's Colts / Patriots NFL preseason game.

Chess: * 10:37 – moved in all pending CC games

I received news that a dearly loved family member was in the emergency room, showing signs of some form of brain trauma that is, as of now, not yet fully diagnosed. I received this news as I was driving in to Saint Mary’s.

My morning routine is, after dropping off two of my kids at their respective schools, to sit in the nave of Saint Mary’s and say Morning Prayer. My practice is consistent: I say the confession, then the absolution (in the plural, praying for absolution on us all—you’re welcome), followed by the Venite (an abbreviated part of Psalm 95), then the selection of the Psalm that’s appointed, followed by the chapter of Proverbs that corresponds to the date (this is a practice that predates my days as an Episcopalian that I have recently revisited), followed by one lesson appointed for the day from the Daily Office Lectionary (currently I’m reading the gospel lessons), then Canticle 18 (“The Song to the Lamb” from the book of Revelation—if I’m ever without a Bible or Prayer Book, I will say this and the Venite as my morning devotion), followed by silence, intercessions, the Lord’s Prayer, and then the closing Collect from the daily devotions for individuals and families).

Today I wasn’t really feeling it. My heart was heavy and so I was going through the motions. I tried to find some wisdom in the dichotomy of saying jubilant words like the Venite or Canticle 18, but I wasn’t quite there.

I kept feeling a pull, perhaps a whisper of the Holy Spirit, to read Ecclesiastes. So, after finishing my usual routine, I opened up Ecclesiastes and, as I felt the Lord prompt me, read the entire thing.

***

Years back I had the chance to see Rob Bell in Orlando. He was touring his Introduction to Joy ...thing. Not exactly a lecture, but not simply performance art. It was like stand-up comedy, but about more than jokes. Anyway, Introduction to Joy is about the book of Ecclesiastes. Rob* refers to Ecclesiastes as a book that represents “deep wisdom” or “the wisdom that applies when conventional wisdom doesn’t pan out.” Books like Proverbs represent conventional wisdom in the sense that they are largely about “do this or that and things will generally work out well.” Ecclesiastes is a book that wades into the waters of what happens when you’ve done the things that Proverbs teaches, but things are not working out well.

Ecclesiastes is the most goth book of the Bible (Revelation is the most metal, if you must know). The refrain of the book is that everything is “vanity and chasing after the wind.” It’s a long checklist of how nothing really matters, everything is empty and destined for the same universal end: to die and wind up forgotten. There’s almost an echo of the life of the Buddha in the book. The “Preacher” (koholeth in Hebrew, which is also the name of the book in that language and is a name that goes hard) is the author and is traditionally held to be Solomon, the wise king and son of David. He talks about how he pursued wealth, and also madness, and folly, and pleasure, and poverty, eventually coming to the conclusion that “vanity” characterizes every pursuit of humanity. Rich, poor, righteous, wicked, wise, fool, human, beast—all will wind up in the grave, all share the same ending. So what’s the point? “Eat, drink, and be merry,” he says. Enjoy the time you have, because all will come to naught.

This word “vanity” is a word that, in Hebrew, refers to a puff of vapor. In a masterful stroke, in Introduction to Joy Rob pulls out a spray bottle and spritzes little clouds of mist instead of saying “vanity.” Everything is [sprays bottle].

Basically, the Preacher states that everything is temporary and pretty hollow. The pursuits of life are a vapor hanging in the air, like chasing after the wind.

What I’ve come to realize about Ecclesiastes is that it represents a sort of bell-curve (if I’m understanding them correctly). The book opens with “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” and ends with the same, but the journey between turns “all is vanity” from a lament into good news.

Not sure if I’m doing this meme format correctly...

***

Understanding that “all is vanity” is pretty liberating.

This is not nihilism, by the way. Nihilism proclaims that nothing matters. Ecclesiastes acknowledges that life and existence, that our time on the earth, is something. It’s just a fragile and temporary something, destined to end. What Ecclesiastes, in my reading, is doing is asking us to consider our existence in the terms of its vaporous nature. Which, in some ways, underscores the preciousness of our time on this earth.

I’m a fan of Eucharistic Prayer C. I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ve mentioned how I’ve suffered degrees of ridicule for this. One of the things I’ve been told is objectionable in Prayer C is the line “this fragile earth, our island home.” One of my colleagues in seminary felt that calling the earth “fragile” is an affront to God, as though God did not make a quality product. My retort to this has always been that fragility can sometimes be a mark of artistry and skill. A Faberge egg, for instance, is a thing of near priceless beauty but is also quite fragile. Indeed, its fragility underscores its preciousness. This is all to say that the “vanity” of it all need not automatically be a bad thing.

The “vanity” of life puts things into perspective. It is an antidote to much of what ails us.

Consider this passage:

So I became far greater than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Moreover, my wisdom stood by me. I refrained from nothing that my eyes desired. I refused my heart no pleasure. Indeed, my heart found pleasure from the results of my hard work; that was the reward from all my hard work. But when I surveyed all that my hands had done, and what I had worked so hard to achieve, I realized that it was [vanity]—a chasing after wind. Nothing is to be gained under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:9-11, Common English Bible, see note below)

Imagine if, say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump were to accept this? That no pursuit of wealth or power is going to actually satisfy them? That they could be liberated from the pursuit of wealth?

I also observed that people work hard and become good at what they do only out of mutual envy. This too is [vanity], just wind chasing. (Ecclesiastes 4:4 CEB)

In other words, don’t take things too seriously.

***

While in my meditative prayers for my family member, various things from Ecclesiastes kept popping into my mind. I was actually using “all is vanity” as a kind of mantra to see how I might be able to grasp that such a thing is good news.

That’s when I thought of my toddler and my young daughter playing with bubbles yesterday afternoon.

Bubbles are a kind of vapor hanging on the air. They are hollow, temporary, and ride the wind. They illustrate every point that the Preacher seeks to make.

And kids go nuts over them.

My toddler begs to play with bubbles. He and my daughter squeal with delight in trying to chase them and catch them. My daughter figured out that if her hands are a bit soapy she actually can catch a bubble, if only for a few moments. My older kids will also go outside and play with bubbles. We all love bubbles.

We love the swirling rainbow patterns on them. We love their fragile beauty. We also probably use them as a catalyst to think about our existence. “Maybe our universe is just a bubble floating around in the sky of a much larger universe,” says my philosopher-in-the-making second-oldest.

Bubbles are vanity. Everything is bubbles. We can waste our time getting overly serious about the bubbles. We can expend time and energy in trying to keep the bubble forever. But, no matter what, that bubble will one day pop. Trying to prevent that pop is to misunderstand the bubble, to fail to see it for what it is.

Everything is vanity. It’s all chasing after bubbles. My God, how much fun that is!

---

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

NOTES:

• I’ve had Rob Bell as a guest back when I had a podcast, so I get to call him Rob. This also means that I have a one-degree separation from Oprah, but I won’t let it get to my head.

• The CEB tends to translate the word for “vanity” as “pointless” but I’ve amended the translation here and elsewhere because “vanity” is a better word for the concept in that [spritzes bottle] is not exactly “pointless.”

#theology #spirituality #faith #bible #Christianity #Anglican #Episcopal

High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament Round 1, Fight 4

Beatrix Kiddo vs Brienne of Tarth

Beatrix Kiddo is the unstoppable representation of a mother's rage. She cut her way through a gang of 88 sword wielding Yakuza, and defeated several of the greatest fighters in her world in single combat. She operates her Hattori Hanzo sword like a surgeon with a scalpel. Brienne of Tarth is almost the polar opposite. A heavily armored giant of a woman, she is incredibly skilled in combat but fights best when it becomes a brawl, as was shown when she defeated Sandor Clegane. We will do a similar premise to that fight here.

After killing Bill (sorry for the spoiler) and reuniting with her daughter, Beatrix has retried to Pei Mei's sanctuary, thinking it is a safe place for them to live out their lives. However, Brienne of Tarth believes Beatrix's daughter is in danger and has come to rescue her. The fight starts with that confrontation:

---

Pei Mei's sanctuary was quiet now. The old master who had once filled the mountaintop with insults, laughter and the crack of his staff was dead, and without him the place seemed strangely abandoned. Mist drifted through the surrounding mountains. The stone steps were slick from an earlier rain, and the wooden buildings stood beneath the trees exactly as Beatrix remembered them. She had returned because almost nobody knew the place existed. That had been the point. B.B. was inside, asleep on a mat in one of the rooms, while her mother sat on the veranda with the Hanzo sword resting across her knees.

Beatrix heard Brienne long before she saw her. Armor was difficult to disguise on a mountain path. She stood and walked to the top of the stairs as Brienne of Tarth emerged through the mist below. The sight made Beatrix pause. Brienne was enormous. Plate armor covered most of her body, a longsword hung at her side, and there was nothing furtive about her approach. This was not an assassin. Brienne stopped several steps below her and looked up at the slender blonde woman waiting beneath the wooden gate. “Beatrix Kiddo?” Beatrix's eyes moved over the armor, the sword, and finally Brienne's face. “Depends who's asking.” “I am Brienne of Tarth. I have come for the child.” Whatever faint amusement had been in Beatrix's expression disappeared. “No.” Brienne continued carefully. “I was told the girl is in danger.” Beatrix descended one step. “You were told wrong.” Brienne looked toward the buildings behind her. “I cannot take that chance.” Beatrix descended another step. “Then whoever sent you here sent you to die.” Brienne's jaw tightened. She had hoped the woman would listen. Instead Beatrix's right hand had moved almost imperceptibly toward the sword at her hip. Brienne drew Oathkeeper. “I do not wish to kill you.” Beatrix drew the Hanzo blade. “That's going to be a problem.”

Brienne expected Beatrix to wait. She had the higher ground, a narrow staircase and an opponent in plate armor climbing toward her. Instead Beatrix came down the stairs at her. She covered the distance with such speed that Brienne barely had time to bring Oathkeeper up. The Hanzo sword struck it with a metallic crack. Beatrix cut again immediately, then again, her blade changing direction almost faster than Brienne could follow. Brienne blocked the first two and let the third glance harmlessly from her pauldron. Beatrix's eyes flicked toward the armor. That told her something. Brienne attacked. Oathkeeper swept toward Beatrix with enough force to end the fight immediately. Beatrix slipped beneath it. The blade passed through blonde hair. Brienne reversed the stroke with surprising speed, but Beatrix was already moving around her. The Hanzo blade struck Brienne across the back and skittered from plate. Beatrix pivoted and cut toward the thigh. Steel met steel again. Brienne turned and drove her shoulder forward. Beatrix flew backward.

She hit the stairs hard, rolled twice, and came immediately back to her feet. Brienne stared at her. Beatrix stared back. Neither had expected what had just happened. Brienne had never encountered anyone who moved like this woman. Beatrix had fought large opponents before, but Brienne wasn't merely large. She was enormously strong, heavily armored and technically excellent. Beatrix couldn't simply carve her apart. Most of Brienne's body was protected by steel. Brienne came down the stairs. This time Beatrix retreated. Oathkeeper came toward her head and Beatrix parried, immediately regretting it. The impact jarred both arms. Brienne struck again. Beatrix redirected the blade rather than trying to stop it. A third attack forced her sideways off the steps and into the courtyard below. Brienne followed. Beatrix gave ground as Oathkeeper swept through the space she had occupied a heartbeat earlier. One clean hit, Beatrix realized, and this was over.

So she stopped trying to fight Brienne's fight. Beatrix moved. She darted left as Brienne attacked, stepped onto a low stone wall, and launched herself sideways. Brienne turned just in time to see Beatrix pass almost horizontally through the air. The Hanzo sword flashed against the side of Brienne's helmet. Brienne staggered. Beatrix landed behind her, spun and struck again. The blade found the narrow gap behind Brienne's knee. Brienne cried out and dropped to one knee. Beatrix was on her instantly. The Hanzo sword came toward Brienne's exposed neck. Oathkeeper intercepted it. Brienne surged upward with astonishing strength, knocking Beatrix's sword aside, and swung. Beatrix bent backward as Oathkeeper passed inches above her face. She recovered and stepped inside Brienne's reach. Her left hand struck Brienne beneath the breastplate. Once. Twice. Three times. Brienne barely reacted. Beatrix's expression changed. “Oh.”

Brienne punched her. The armored fist caught Beatrix across the jaw and sent her sprawling across the courtyard. The Hanzo sword left her hand and skidded several yards across the wet stones. Brienne limped toward her, blood running behind one knee. Beatrix rolled onto her back. Oathkeeper rose. Brienne hesitated. That was the fight. Beatrix's hand snapped forward. Two fingers struck Brienne precisely beneath the edge of her breastplate. Brienne froze. Beatrix struck again, lower this time. Then a third time beneath Brienne's arm where the plates separated. Brienne swung Oathkeeper. Nothing happened. Her fingers had stopped working. The sword fell from her hand.

Brienne stared down at it in disbelief. Beatrix rolled away, sprang to her feet and retrieved the Hanzo sword. Brienne tried to follow. Her right leg buckled beneath her. She caught herself against the stone wall. Beatrix approached slowly. Brienne raised her empty hands. Beatrix stopped outside her reach. For several seconds they simply looked at one another. “Who told you I was dangerous to my daughter?” Beatrix asked. Brienne breathed heavily. “A man who claimed to know you.” “And you believed him?” “I believed the child might need protection.” Beatrix considered killing her. Brienne could see it. Then Beatrix lowered the sword.

“You climbed a mountain to save a little girl you've never met.” Brienne said nothing. Beatrix sighed. “You're an idiot.” “I have been called worse.” That produced the smallest hint of a smile. Beatrix slid the Hanzo sword back into its sheath. “You're also lucky.” Brienne looked toward the sword lying several feet away. “I do not feel particularly lucky.” “You are.” Beatrix turned toward the sanctuary. After several steps she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Come inside. I'll show you the kid. Then you're going to tell me who sent you.” Brienne stared at her. “And after that?” Beatrix's expression became considerably less friendly. “After that, I'm going to go talk to him.”

Winner: Beatrix Kiddo.

And the fights do not always need to be to the death. Sometimes it is just until one warrior proves their supremacy.

Tonight I might follow an NFL preseason game. For the purpose of listening to a broadcast of tonight's Colts / Patriots game, my old laptop running an outdated Linux Mint OS will identify as a desktop. I'm using this setup now to listen to the Colts Pre-Game Huddle and it's working just fine. So I'm hoping it will continue working through the Countdown to Kickoff and into the game itself.

And the adventure continues.

When walking these dirty roads, right now I pay extra attention to the small road-coloured frogs crossing the street.

There are lots of them

Even though when the cars come…

I haven’t sat down and talked deeply about my dreams again. and i wont, obviously. Nothing has really changed. i still wake up with the same fear, the same frustration, and the same sweat, staring at the ceiling as if it might explain why my own brain has decided sleep should feel like a second shift of work. frustrating. Dont get me started with these wrist restraints, i feel rather like a trapped monster. but you know, i have to sleep with them. otherwise, eventually, i might become my own worst enemy. i still cant figure out whats the deal with me in that matter, i doubt i ever will. my brain enjoys giving me problems without providing the courtesy of a conclusion. anyway, i have work to do. there are things to finish, people to bother, decisions to make and an entire company waiting for me to pretend i know what im doing. Before that, though. there is something unrelated that i have been thinking about. why do spoons always disappear? seriously, i can know exactly where a whole set of spoons is, then somehow end up with two by the next time i see them. i live in a house, not a spoon rehabilitation centre, for gods sake. Anyway, im going to work.

Sincerely, Slightly concerned.

High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament Round 1, Fight 3

Jon Snow vs Maximus

This is a fun matchup. Jon Snow, the bastard who is secretly heir to the Iron Throne. He's defeated wildlings, white walkers, many enemy soldiers, and seems to have plot armor anytime he is near death. He's not the best warrior in the ASOIAF universe, but his resume may be among the best. He also has a Valyrian steel sword, which is nothing to scoff at. He will face off against Maximus, the general who became a slave, the slave who became a gladiator, and the gladiator who defied an emperor. In his own words “Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next”

We will have them face each other in the arena of course. The Colosseum in Rome, to be exact. Let's say its Maximus's second fight in the arena. Instead of facing Tigris of Gaul he faces Jon Snow, who happened through a portal and ended up in another universe.

---

The first thing Jon Snow noticed was the heat. One moment there had been cold air against his face and hard northern earth beneath his boots. Then the world had torn open in front of him in a shimmer of impossible light, and Jon had stumbled through with Longclaw already in his hand. Now sunlight hammered down from a cloudless sky. Sand replaced earth beneath his boots. An enormous wall of stone rose around him, tier after tier disappearing upward beneath tens of thousands of screaming people. Jon turned slowly, utterly bewildered. The roar grew louder when the crowd saw his black clothes, his mail, the pale wolf's-head pommel of his sword. Somewhere above him trumpets sounded. Jon looked back toward the place where the portal had been. There was nothing there.

Across the arena, another gate opened. Maximus Decimus Meridius stepped into the sunlight. Rome recognized him immediately. The Spaniard had already survived his first appearance in the Colosseum, turning what should have been a massacre into victory and humiliating the emperor before the entire city. The crowd began chanting for him before the gate had fully closed. Maximus carried a gladius and a large Roman shield, with armor appropriate for the arena protecting his torso and shoulders. He stopped when he saw Jon. This was clearly not the opponent he had been promised. There were no tigers. No mounted gladiator. No Tigris of Gaul. Just a young man dressed almost entirely in black holding a sword unlike anything Maximus had ever seen.

Jon stared back. The man approaching him looked more familiar than everything else in this nightmare. Soldier. That much was obvious. Older than Jon, perhaps twice his age, powerfully built without being enormous, carrying himself with the quiet economy of someone who had spent most of his life around weapons. Jon had known men like him at the Wall. Men who did not need to boast because everyone around them already knew what they could do. The chanting meant nothing to Jon, but he understood what the crowd wanted. He glanced toward the sealed gate behind him, then toward Maximus. “I don't want to fight you.” Maximus stopped perhaps twenty feet away. He understood none of the words. Jon sighed. “Of course you don't speak the Common Tongue.”

The signal sounded. Neither moved. The crowd booed. Maximus looked toward the imperial box, then back at Jon. He had already learned exactly how much value Rome placed upon what he wanted. He raised his shield. Jon understood. Longclaw came into guard. The crowd immediately changed its mind and roared approval.

Maximus advanced first. Jon circled away, studying him. Maximus kept the shield between them and gave Jon very little to attack. Jon had fought men with shields before, but there was something different about this one. Maximus did not hold it passively. The shield moved constantly, controlling the space in front of him while the short sword remained almost invisible behind it. Jon had the longer weapon and intended to keep it that way. He stepped forward suddenly and cut toward Maximus's head. The shield intercepted Longclaw with a tremendous crack. Maximus immediately thrust beneath it. Jon jerked backward and felt the gladius scrape across his mail.

Jon countered with another cut. Maximus blocked. Jon changed direction and attacked the leg. Maximus pulled it away. The gladius flashed toward Jon's stomach. Longclaw knocked it aside. They separated. Neither had landed anything meaningful, but both men looked at the other differently now. Jon had expected strength and discipline. He had not expected Maximus to be that fast. Maximus had expected the young stranger's long sword to be cumbersome. It wasn't.

They came together again. Jon used Longclaw's reach aggressively, throwing cuts from outside the comfortable range of the gladius and forcing Maximus to defend as he advanced. Maximus accepted it. He had spent years fighting men with spears, swords, axes and weapons from every corner of the empire. Reach was a problem until you got past it. Jon struck high. Maximus caught the blow on his shield and surged forward behind it. The shield slammed into Jon's chest and sent him stumbling backward. Maximus followed instantly, stabbing toward the belly. Jon twisted. The gladius punched through black cloth and scraped along his mail rather than entering flesh. Jon brought Longclaw's pommel down against Maximus's shoulder and kicked him away.

The crowd loved it. They had no idea who Jon Snow was, but Rome understood a fighter. Jon heard the sound rolling down from every direction and hated them for it. Maximus barely seemed to notice. That bothered Jon more. The man was completely at home inside the violence. Jon had fought wildlings, assassins, knights, Thenns, wights and White Walkers. He had fought in battles where men were crushed together so tightly there had been no room to swing a sword. But Maximus had something Jon recognized from the very best veterans of the Night's Watch. Nothing happening here was new to him.

Jon attacked harder. Longclaw struck the shield once, then again. Maximus absorbed both impacts. Jon feinted a third and instead stepped sideways, cutting around the shield toward Maximus's exposed sword arm. The Valyrian steel opened flesh above the elbow. Maximus recoiled. Jon pressed him immediately. Longclaw came down toward his shoulder. Maximus barely caught it on the upper edge of his shield. Jon wrenched the blade free and thrust toward his face. Maximus twisted aside. The point sliced his cheek. Blood appeared.

Maximus retreated three steps. Jon stopped. For a fraction of a second, the crowd quieted. Maximus touched the blood on his cheek and looked at his fingers. Then he looked at Jon. There was no anger in his face. If anything, Jon saw approval. Maximus had learned something important. The young man wasn't merely trained. He was dangerous.

Maximus changed tactics. He stopped pursuing Jon directly and began moving laterally, forcing Jon to turn beneath the Roman sun. Jon followed without realizing what was happening at first. Maximus advanced, withdrew, advanced again. Each time Jon committed to a heavy attack, the shield met him. Each time Jon tried to circle, Maximus made him move farther. Sand shifted beneath Jon's unfamiliar boots. Sweat ran down his face. The black clothes that had kept him alive in the North were becoming an oven. Maximus was hot too, but this was his world. He understood exactly how much effort he was spending.

Jon eventually recognized the strategy. “Clever bastard.” Maximus obviously did not understand, but he smiled slightly anyway. Jon stopped chasing him. Now Maximus had to come. The Roman advanced behind his shield. Jon waited. Maximus stepped into range and Jon exploded forward. Longclaw came down with both hands. Maximus raised his shield. Jon had expected it. He changed the stroke at the last instant and drove Longclaw horizontally into the shield's edge instead. The Valyrian steel bit deeply into the wood. Maximus tried to wrench the shield sideways and trap the blade. Jon let go with one hand, stepped forward and punched him in the face. Maximus staggered. Jon ripped Longclaw free.

The next cut tore across Maximus's chest armor. The next struck the shield. Jon kicked the damaged shield hard and forced Maximus backward. Longclaw came toward his neck. Maximus ducked beneath it and drove forward. The gladius entered Jon's side. Jon gasped. Maximus ripped it free. Jon stumbled backward with one hand pressed against the wound. Blood seeped between his fingers. The crowd erupted. Maximus followed, knowing immediately that he had finally landed the kind of wound that ended fights. Jon barely caught the next strike. Maximus hit him with the shield. Jon fell to one knee. The gladius came down.

Longclaw met it. Jon held the Roman blade inches from his face. Maximus pushed downward. Jon's wounded side screamed. For a moment Maximus's greater leverage from above began forcing Longclaw toward Jon's throat. Jon suddenly stopped resisting. He rolled sideways. Maximus's sword struck sand. Jon came up on one knee and swung Longclaw with both hands. Maximus threw the shield into the path of the blade. Longclaw struck near the damaged edge. The shield split. A section of wood and leather tore away. Maximus stared at it for half a heartbeat. He had never seen a sword do that.

Jon attacked. Now the reach mattered enormously. Maximus's shield was compromised and Jon knew it. Longclaw cut toward his shoulder. Maximus blocked with what remained of the shield. Another strike nearly tore it from his arm. Maximus abandoned it entirely, throwing it toward Jon and rushing behind it. Jon knocked the shield aside. Maximus was already inside his guard. The gladius thrust toward Jon's chest. Jon turned. The blade scraped across his ribs. Longclaw was too long to swing properly at this distance. Maximus knew it. He grabbed Jon's sword arm with his free hand and drove his forehead into Jon's face. Jon staggered. Maximus struck him again. Jon dropped to one knee. Maximus raised the gladius.

Jon caught his wrist. The two men grappled in the sand. This was Maximus's fight. He was stronger, older, and vastly more experienced at exactly this kind of ugly close-range struggle. He drove Jon backward and forced the gladius toward his throat. Jon held the wrist with both hands. The point descended slowly. Jon could see every scratch along the Roman blade. Then Jon released one hand. Maximus drove downward. Jon caught Longclaw's hilt. He had never let go of it. There was no room for a proper stroke, so Jon didn't make one. He drove the pommel into Maximus's temple. Once. Twice. Maximus's grip weakened. Jon shoved him away and scrambled backward.

Both men rose almost simultaneously. Maximus swayed slightly. Blood ran from Jon's side. Neither had a shield now. Nothing remained between them except two swords and several yards of sand. The crowd was on its feet. Maximus did not attack. That surprised Jon. He had expected the Roman to come immediately, to try once again to force his way inside Longclaw's reach. Instead Maximus backed away. Jon watched him suspiciously. Maximus circled. Jon followed. Maximus stepped forward, inviting an attack, and Jon gave him one. Longclaw cut toward his shoulder. Maximus retreated just beyond it. Jon attacked again. The gladius deflected the blade and Maximus withdrew. Jon followed. Longclaw came around a third time. Maximus slipped away. The crowd began to boo, but Maximus ignored them completely.

Jon understood what he was doing. The realization did not help. His wounded side was bleeding steadily. His thigh ached. His mouth was dry. Sweat poured beneath his mail and soaked the black wool beneath it. Every breath of Roman air seemed hotter than the last. Longclaw had felt almost weightless when the fight began. Now even Valyrian steel was becoming heavy. Maximus watched all of it. Jon stopped pursuing him. Maximus immediately stepped forward and attacked. Jon parried. Maximus withdrew before Jon could counter. Jon reset his guard. Maximus came again. Another short exchange, another retreat. He was not trying to kill Jon. Not yet. He was making Jon work.

Minutes passed. Jon's breathing became audible even beneath the roar of the Colosseum. Maximus's breathing was heavy too, but controlled. He had fought campaigns beneath harsher suns than this. He understood exhaustion as intimately as he understood a sword. He knew what men looked like one minute before their legs began betraying them. Jon knew it too. That was the worst part. “Come on,” Jon growled. Maximus didn't understand the words. He understood the invitation. He refused it.

Jon attacked out of frustration. Longclaw swept toward Maximus's head. Maximus ducked and retreated. Jon followed with another cut. Maximus parried. A third came slower than the first two. Maximus saw it. He stepped inside and punched Jon hard in the wounded ribs. Jon cried out. Maximus retreated again. Jon nearly went after him. Then stopped. The crowd screamed around them. Jon stood in the center of the arena, sword lowered slightly, chest heaving. Maximus stood perhaps fifteen feet away. For the first time, Jon understood exactly how the fight was going to end.

Maximus came forward. Jon raised Longclaw. The Roman feinted toward his wounded side. Jon reacted too strongly, bringing the sword across to protect it. Maximus changed direction. The gladius struck Longclaw near the hilt and knocked it outward. Jon recovered quickly enough to avoid the thrust that followed, but his foot slipped in the churned sand. Only slightly. At the beginning of the fight, it would not have mattered. Now it did. Maximus crashed into him.

They hit the ground together. Jon tried to roll away, but Maximus stayed on him. Longclaw became trapped beneath Jon's body. Maximus drove a knee onto his sword arm and struck him across the face. Jon grabbed Maximus by the throat with his free hand and tried to throw him off. Earlier, he might have managed it. There was nothing left. Maximus knocked the hand aside. Jon saw the gladius. He twisted desperately as it came down. The blade missed his throat and entered beneath his collarbone. Jon gasped. Maximus pulled it free.

Jon still fought. He punched Maximus in the jaw. He tore his sword arm loose. His fingers found Longclaw. Maximus caught his wrist before he could bring it around. For several seconds they strained against one another. Then Jon's strength gave out. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. His arm simply stopped moving. Maximus saw it. Jon saw that he saw it. The gladius entered beneath Jon's ribs. Maximus drove it upward. Jon's body stiffened. The roar of the Colosseum seemed to become very distant.

Maximus held him for a moment, then carefully withdrew the blade. Jon rolled onto his back. Longclaw slipped from his fingers and landed beside him in the sand. Maximus remained kneeling. Jon stared upward into a sky that was impossibly blue. There was no snow. No Wall. No Ghost. No cold wind from beyond the edge of the world. Just heat and sunlight and the distant faces of thousands of strangers. Maximus looked down at him. Jon tried to say something. No sound came. Maximus placed one hand against Jon's shoulder. The young man's breathing stopped.

For several seconds Maximus remained there while Rome screamed around him. Then he looked down at Longclaw. He picked up the strange sword, felt its astonishing lightness, and understood immediately why it had been so dangerous. He laid it across Jon's chest. Maximus stood. The crowd roared his name. He did not acknowledge them.

Winner: Maximus Decimus Meridius.

High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament Round 1, Fight 2

Jamie Lannister vs Boromir

Neither of these guys are cut out to win the tournament, that much is clear, but they are both legendary fighters in their own regard. Lannister is arguably the greatest living sword fighter at the start of Game of Thrones, before he loses his hand. Boromir is a legendary warrior of Gondor, eldest son of the Steward of Gondor and, if it hadn't been for Aragorn, next in line. The rings corruption brought him down, but he did have an epic fight scene against elite Uruk Hai. These two are pretty evenly matched. We will have them meet in the throne room in front of the Iron Throne, but it is really purgatory. Both are punished for their past sins and forced to fight.

---

The throne room was empty. No Kingsguard stood beneath the towering columns. No courtiers whispered from the galleries. No king sat upon the monstrous chair of twisted swords at the far end of the hall. Even the torches seemed reluctant to disturb the silence. Jaime Lannister stood beneath the Iron Throne and stared up at it for a long moment. Of course. Of all the places in all the worlds, whoever had arranged this little punishment had a sense of humor. He had killed one king in this room and been despised for it ever since. Now he had been brought back to fight for his life beneath the throne of the man he had slain.

At the opposite end of the hall stood Boromir of Gondor. He understood the joke too. The place was unfamiliar, but the purpose was not. Boromir had died defending the very companions he had betrayed, three arrows in his body and a sword still in his hand, but apparently death had not satisfied whatever power judged such things. He had tried to take the Ring from Frodo. For that moment of weakness, he had been brought here. Jaime looked across the empty hall at the tall man with the shield and broad-bladed sword. Boromir looked back at the golden-haired knight standing before the throne. Neither needed the punishment explained. “So,” Jaime said, drawing his sword, “what did you do?” Boromir's expression hardened. “I betrayed the trust of a friend.” Jaime considered that. “That's all?” Boromir drew his sword. Jaime smiled. “You'd hate it here.”

They approached one another slowly. Boromir carried his shield forward, sword held behind it, his stance compact and disciplined. Jaime wore the armor of the Kingsguard and carried a longsword in both hands. He immediately disliked the shield. Shields made fights tedious. Worse, Boromir knew how to use his. He wasn't hiding behind it. He was presenting it as a moving obstacle, changing angles as he advanced and denying Jaime an easy line to his body. Jaime moved lightly around him, measuring distance, watching his feet. Boromir saw the casual confidence and recognized it for what it was. He had seen men swagger before battle. This was different. Jaime Lannister was relaxed because Jaime Lannister genuinely did not believe Boromir could kill him.

Jaime attacked first. His opening cut came almost lazily toward Boromir's shoulder. Boromir raised his shield. Jaime's blade changed direction halfway through the stroke and snapped toward his thigh. Boromir barely turned the sword aside. Jaime was already moving. A thrust came toward Boromir's face, followed by a cut toward the sword arm, then another toward the knee. Boromir gave ground beneath a sudden storm of steel. Jaime never seemed to finish one attack before beginning another. The sword moved as naturally as another limb. Boromir caught a cut on his shield and countered hard. Jaime slipped backward, the blade passing inches from his chest. The smile disappeared from Jaime's face.

Boromir came after him. Jaime parried the first strike and immediately understood that this was not going to be the fight he had expected. The impact jolted through his sword and into his shoulders. Boromir struck again. Jaime redirected rather than blocked it. The third blow crashed against Jaime's blade and drove him backward a step. Boromir was stronger than any man Jaime could remember fighting. Not Gregor Clegane's grotesque strength, perhaps, but something more useful: controlled, athletic power attached to a swordsman who knew precisely what he was doing. Jaime retreated, and Boromir pursued. The shield came forward suddenly. Jaime twisted aside, but its iron-bound edge clipped his shoulder and sent him stumbling. Boromir's sword followed. Jaime caught it desperately, turned it away, and answered with a slash that rang against Boromir's shield. Boromir shoved the weapon aside and attacked again. Jaime ducked beneath the cut and drove his shoulder into Boromir's chest. It was like colliding with a gate. Boromir staggered half a step. Jaime bounced backward nearly two. “Seven hells,” Jaime muttered. Boromir almost smiled.

That was when Jaime became dangerous. The arrogance remained, but the playfulness vanished. He began circling again, forcing Boromir to turn. Jaime stopped trying to batter through the shield and began attacking everything around it. A cut toward Boromir's ankle. A thrust toward his sword hand. A feint high followed by a slash beneath the shield. Boromir blocked two and avoided the third, but Jaime's fourth attack slipped through and cut across his upper arm. Boromir answered immediately, his sword crashing against Jaime's breastplate hard enough to dent it. Jaime stumbled away, breathing sharply.

For several minutes they fought across the throne room. The enormous chamber magnified every impact. Steel rang beneath the vaulted ceiling. Boots scraped across stone. Their breathing grew louder. Jaime gradually learned that Boromir's shield could be manipulated. If he threatened the face, Boromir raised it slightly. If he attacked low twice in succession, Boromir anticipated a third. Jaime began building sequences not to land the first strike, or the second, but the fifth. Boromir learned something too. Jaime's greatest defense was not his armor or his sword. It was distance. He possessed an almost supernatural instinct for knowing exactly how far an enemy's blade could reach. Again and again Boromir's sword passed a finger's width from Jaime's body while Jaime remained perfectly positioned to counter. Jaime was enjoying himself now. “You're very good,” he said between exchanges. Boromir drove him backward with a shield strike. “You speak too much.” “I've been told.” Boromir swung. Jaime slipped outside the stroke. “So have you.”

Jaime's sword struck Boromir across the ribs. Mail stopped most of it, but blood appeared beneath the torn surcoat. Boromir grunted and smashed his shield into Jaime's face. Jaime fell backward, blood pouring immediately from his nose. Boromir stepped forward to finish him. Jaime rolled as the sword struck stone beside his head. He kicked Boromir's knee, scrambled upright and barely raised his sword before another blow arrived. The duel had stopped being elegant. They crashed against one of the great columns. Jaime's sword became trapped between their bodies. Boromir seized him by the shoulder and hurled him to the floor. Jaime rolled onto his back and Boromir's boot struck his ribs. Armor absorbed some of it. Not enough. Jaime gasped. Boromir raised his sword with both hands. Jaime threw himself sideways. The blade struck the floor. Jaime's sword flashed upward and opened Boromir's thigh.

Boromir staggered. Jaime surged to his feet and attacked with terrifying speed. Boromir raised his shield. Jaime struck it once, twice, three times—not trying to penetrate it, but forcing Boromir backward. The fourth attack never came. Instead Jaime stepped around the shield and thrust directly at Boromir's throat. Boromir jerked his head aside. The point carved a bloody line along his neck. Boromir responded by punching Jaime in the face with the rim of the shield. Jaime collapsed.

For a moment neither moved. Boromir leaned against his shield, blood running from his neck, arm and thigh. Jaime lay several yards away beneath the shadow of the Iron Throne, blinking through blood. He spat a broken tooth onto the floor. “I think,” Jaime said, pushing himself upright, “I'm beginning to dislike you.” “You need not like me.” “No. That's usually my brother's job.”

They came together again. This time Jaime did not retreat from Boromir's strength. He attacked into it. Boromir swung and Jaime caught the blade at an angle, allowing the force to slide past him. Jaime struck Boromir's shield, then deliberately let his sword remain against it for a fraction of a second. Boromir pushed outward to clear the weapon. Jaime had been waiting for exactly that. He stepped inside the shield. His pommel smashed into Boromir's mouth. Boromir reeled, and Jaime drove his knee into the wounded thigh. Boromir dropped to one knee. Jaime's sword came toward his neck. Boromir caught Jaime's wrist.

Jaime's eyes widened. Boromir stood. He lifted Jaime's sword arm away from his neck through sheer strength and drove his forehead into Jaime's face. Jaime staggered. Boromir shoved him backward, recovered his sword and attacked. Jaime parried. Boromir struck again. Jaime parried again. A third blow drove Jaime backward. A fourth nearly knocked the sword from his hands. Then Boromir made his mistake. He believed he had Jaime overwhelmed. Boromir committed fully to a great downward stroke meant to split Jaime from shoulder to chest. Jaime appeared trapped against the steps of the Iron Throne. There was nowhere left to retreat. So Jaime didn't.

He stepped forward. Boromir's sword came down. Jaime twisted sideways, and the blade scraped across his pauldron instead of his skull. At the same instant Jaime brought his own sword upward beneath Boromir's extended arm. The point entered beneath the mail at Boromir's armpit. Jaime drove it deep. Boromir stopped. For several seconds the two men remained pressed together, almost embracing, Boromir's sword hanging uselessly behind Jaime's back. Jaime looked into his eyes. The confidence was gone from his face. There was only exhaustion.

Boromir released his sword. It struck the floor. Jaime withdrew his blade. Boromir stumbled backward and dropped to one knee. Blood poured beneath his arm. He tried to rise. His leg failed him. Jaime stood several feet away, sword ready, but did not attack. Boromir looked past him at the Iron Throne. “Was he worth killing?” Jaime's expression changed. “The king.” For once there was no joke. “Yes.” Boromir nodded slowly. “Then perhaps that was not your betrayal.” Jaime stared at him. Boromir toppled onto his side.

The throne room became silent again. Jaime remained where he was for a long time. Eventually he walked over and knelt beside Boromir. There was no breath. Jaime closed the man's eyes, then stood painfully and looked back toward the Iron Throne. “Bloody purgatory,” he muttered.

Winner: Jaime Lannister.

High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament Round 1, Fight 1

Aragorn vs Duncan MacLeod

So we've got Aragorn, gigachad of the Middle Earth. He's an exceptional warrior and ranger, heir to the throne of Gondor, and has killed countless orcs, goblins and even a troll in single combat. Most impressively, he managed to fight off the ring wraiths himself. His bloodlines grant him a dramatically longer lifespan and he sparks fear into even the dark lord himself.

Duncan MacLeod is actually immortal. He has defeated countless other immortals in sword combat and can only be killed by decapitation. His swordplay is legendary and has been honed for centuries. He is a gentlemen, scholar, noble and fierce warrior.

We will have these two legends fight at the top of Minas Tirith, in the courtyard, to the death.

---

The Court of the Fountain had rarely been so quiet. Soldiers of Gondor stood three and four deep beneath the pale stone walls, leaving a broad circle around the White Tree. Beyond them, Minas Tirith fell away in successive rings toward the Pelennor, and far beyond the walls the mountains cut a dark line across the horizon. No man in the crowd spoke. They had come to watch their king fight. Aragorn stood near the center of the courtyard with Andúril held comfortably before him, point angled toward the ground. He wore mail beneath his surcoat and carried no shield. Across from him, Duncan MacLeod drew his katana and rolled his shoulders once. The Highlander looked almost casual, but Aragorn recognized the deception immediately. This was not a man posturing before a duel. MacLeod's feet were already positioned correctly. His eyes stayed on Aragorn's chest rather than his sword. He was waiting.

For several seconds, neither moved. Duncan finally smiled. “Well?” Aragorn answered by attacking. There was nothing tentative about it. He crossed the distance with startling speed and brought Andúril down in a two-handed diagonal cut that Duncan caught with his katana. The impact wiped the smile from MacLeod's face. He disengaged immediately rather than contest Aragorn's strength, sliding sideways as Andúril came around again. Duncan parried, countered toward the neck, and found Aragorn's blade already there. Steel cracked against steel. The next few seconds told both men almost everything they needed to know.

Duncan was faster with his hands. His katana moved economically, transitioning from defense to attack with movements polished by centuries of repetition. Aragorn was stronger. Not overwhelmingly so, but enough that Duncan could feel every direct parry driving through his wrists and shoulders. More importantly, Aragorn was not merely a powerful swordsman. Duncan tried a feint toward the hip, reversed toward the head, and found Andúril waiting. He changed rhythm. Aragorn changed with him. Duncan backed away. Aragorn followed.

The soldiers began murmuring as Duncan yielded ground around the White Tree. To them it looked as though their king was driving the stranger before him. Duncan knew better. He was learning. He had fought European longswords before. He had fought knights, mercenaries, soldiers, duelists, Highland clansmen and Immortals from civilizations Aragorn had never heard of. Aragorn's style contained things Duncan recognized, but it was not reducible to any of them. There was none of the rigidity Duncan sometimes exploited in formally trained swordsmen. Aragorn had spent too much of his life fighting things that did not duel properly.

Duncan suddenly stopped retreating. Andúril came horizontally toward his ribs. Duncan slipped inside the arc, knocked the blade upward and cut. The katana opened Aragorn's left forearm. A hiss went through the crowd. Aragorn withdrew two steps and looked at the blood running toward his hand. Duncan gave him no time to consider it. Now the Highlander attacked. The change was dramatic. Duncan's blade flickered toward Aragorn's face, shoulder, thigh, then face again. Aragorn blocked the first three and twisted away from the fourth, losing a few strands of hair. Duncan stepped after him and struck again. Aragorn caught it, but Duncan disengaged before Andúril's greater mass could trap his weapon. Another cut slipped past Aragorn's guard and scraped across his mail.

Duncan saw the opening and committed. It was a mistake. Aragorn stepped into the attack. His shoulder crashed into Duncan's chest. Duncan staggered backward, and Aragorn struck him across the face with the pommel of Andúril. Duncan reeled. Aragorn followed with a kick that sent him sprawling onto the white stone. Andúril descended. Duncan rolled. The blade struck stone hard enough to throw a spark. Duncan came to his feet with blood pouring from his mouth and laughed once. “All right.” Aragorn did not laugh.

They came together again. This time there was no feeling-out process. Duncan understood that Aragorn's superior strength could end the fight if he allowed himself to be trapped at close quarters; Aragorn understood that Duncan's speed and extraordinary experience made a prolonged technical exchange increasingly dangerous. Their swords met again and again as they circled the fountain. Duncan began doing something Aragorn found unsettling. He adapted. A maneuver worked once and never again. Aragorn forced Duncan backward with a sequence of heavy cuts; the next time he attempted it, Duncan stepped laterally halfway through and countered. Aragorn changed the angle of his guard; Duncan began attacking the transition. Duncan had lived for centuries, and all those years were beginning to show.

But Duncan was discovering something equally unpleasant. Aragorn adapted too. Not with the accumulated library of experience Duncan possessed, but with extraordinary instinct. He watched Duncan's shoulders. He learned which movements preceded the Highlander's fastest cuts. He began deliberately leaving openings Duncan had exploited earlier, only to close them when Duncan committed. One such trap nearly ended it. Duncan saw Aragorn's right side exposed and drove forward. Aragorn pivoted. Andúril punched through Duncan's abdomen and emerged from his back.

The courtyard erupted. Duncan's katana fell from his hand. For the first time, Aragorn's expression softened. He caught Duncan as the Highlander's legs failed beneath him and lowered him to the stones rather than allowing him to fall. Duncan stared up at him. “You're good,” he managed. “You fought with honor.” Duncan almost smiled. Aragorn pulled Andúril free. Duncan collapsed.

The soldiers of Gondor cheered. Aragorn wiped Andúril clean and turned away. Behind him, Duncan MacLeod opened his eyes. The first warning Aragorn received was not sight or sound. It was instinct. He turned. Duncan's katana struck Andúril with enough force to knock Aragorn sideways. The cheering stopped. Aragorn stared at him. Duncan's torn clothing was still soaked with blood. The wound beneath it was gone. There were very few things that could genuinely shock Aragorn anymore. This qualified.

Duncan attacked before he could process it. The Highlander had learned from their first fight. He no longer worried about wounds. Aragorn slashed his thigh; Duncan ignored it. Andúril cut across his ribs; Duncan continued forward. Aragorn drove the pommel into his jaw, but Duncan accepted the blow to land a cut across Aragorn's shoulder. The entire geometry of the duel had changed. Aragorn had spent his life fighting creatures difficult to kill. He understood regeneration. He understood unnatural endurance. But he did not yet understand this.

So he tested it. He drove Andúril through Duncan's chest. Duncan grabbed the blade with his bare hand and punched Aragorn in the face. Aragorn ripped it free and retreated. Duncan's hand healed. Now Aragorn understood enough. Not everything—but enough. “You cannot die.” Duncan wiped blood from his lip. “It's complicated.” For the first time in the fight, Aragorn smiled faintly. “Then I shall have to be thorough.” Duncan's expression changed.

That was the moment the Highlander realized his advantage had a weakness. Aragorn didn't know the Rule. But Aragorn had spent decades hunting creatures whose weaknesses he didn't know. They fought again, and this time Aragorn stopped trying to inflict conventional mortal wounds. He attacked Duncan's joints. His hands. His legs. Most importantly, his neck. Duncan immediately recognized what was happening. The Highlander's aggression vanished. Now he was defending.

Andúril swept toward his throat. Duncan ducked. Another cut followed from below, forcing him backward toward the fountain. Duncan countered and cut Aragorn across the ribs, but Aragorn barely acknowledged it. The king had solved the puzzle. Not completely. But close enough. Duncan desperately changed tactics. He allowed Aragorn to pursue him toward the edge of the courtyard where the crowd opened before them. He suddenly kicked over a spear resting against the wall, sending its shaft rolling beneath Aragorn's foot.

Aragorn stumbled. Duncan attacked instantly. The katana struck Andúril aside. Duncan's second cut opened Aragorn's side. The third came for his neck. Aragorn barely blocked it. Duncan kicked him backward and raised the katana for the finishing blow. Aragorn seized Duncan's wrist with his wounded left hand. For a moment they stood almost chest to chest, Duncan trying to wrench his sword free while Aragorn held him with frightening strength. Then Aragorn headbutted him.

Duncan staggered. Andúril flashed. Duncan's katana spun across the courtyard. He looked down. His right hand was still wrapped around its hilt. It was no longer attached to him. Duncan looked back at Aragorn. “Oh, hell.” Aragorn stepped forward. Duncan lunged desperately with his remaining hand, trying to tackle him. Aragorn sidestepped. Andúril swept through the air in one clean, two-handed stroke. Duncan MacLeod's head struck the white stones and rolled to a stop.

Silence. Aragorn remained standing with Andúril extended, breathing heavily. Blood ran down his arm and side. He looked from Duncan's body to the severed head, waiting. Nothing happened. Only then did Aragorn lower his sword. The soldiers erupted. Aragorn did not celebrate, he was saddened. He had never faced a talent such as this before, and he may never again. What a waste.

Winner: Aragorn

Today's MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse starts within the hour. The Chicago Cubs and Washington Nationals are scheduled to start play at 3:05 PM CDT. As I usually do I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

The mayor of Boston, whoever they are, always faces a difficult choice: do you serve the people who live and vote in the city, or do you serve the people who use the city for work and entertainment?

Obviously the mayor needs to take the needs of the suburbanites who use the city into account, but their top priority should be the residents of the city who voted for them, and when the interests of residents and non-residents are different, the mayor should side with residents.

Sadly, this hasn’t really ever been the case since I’ve lived in Boston. St. Thomas of Menino was primarily interested in serving real estate developers, which is why the soulless, sterile Seaport is Menino’s baby and also probably why he illegally shredded a bunch of his official records before he left office.

Marty Walsh was an easy mark for seemingly every con artist who wanted our money and spent his administration trying to give it away to GE, to the IOC, and to some shady dude who was supposedly organizing an Indy Car race in Boston. Thwarted in all these efforts, he then disengaged and started looking for other jobs.

Kim Janey…well who knows? Despite having 60 days notice that she was going to step in to the Mayor’s job when Walsh left to become Secretary of Labor, she was unable to put forward any plans or priorities and seemed utterly unprepared for the job and lost the election after only two months in office.

And then there’s Michelle Wu, who I really believed was going to focus on making Boston more livable, and who did some of that in her first term but now seems determined to do nothing at all until 2030 when she can run for Senator or Governor, and the suburbanites who vote in those elections won’t resent her for making their drive in from Canton a little less speedy.

I think running on a record of not doing much is not a great electoral strategy, but what do I know? I didn’t go to Harvard.

She’s given up on road safety for anyone but people in cars. We’re past day 500 of her 30-day pause in the safe streets program. The new Chief of Streets expects us to be happy about 5 miles of bike lanes being added in 2026. For comparison, that’s about the length of Dorchester Avenue. One street in a city of 10,000 streets. So calling 5 miles of bike lanes a drop in the bucket is really an insult to actual drops in buckets. Note that safe streets means safety for people on foot as well. Most people spend part of their commute walking to and from the T or to and from their parking places, but we still act like people walking are some weird niche market and that it’s okay to murder them with your car. Good luck out there, people!

But all of that is just for context. Let’s talk about another way in which the city is failing its residents: Franklin Park. Franklin Park is the largest park in Boston, the Olmsted-designed “jewel of the Emerald Necklace.” (Yes, emeralds are jewels, so the nickname is redundant. I dunno what to tell you. Just consider it charming and let it go.) It borders Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain. It’s not a tourist destination; it’s merely a beautiful, underutilized, neglected 527-acre park that is beloved by the communities that surround it.

And there are two big things going on in the park at the moment. The first and biggest is the reconstruction of White Stadium with a view to having Boston Legacy, our new NWSL team, play there. The second is the muli-year Franklin Park Action Plan.

Let’s begin with the stadium, a project I supported because the stadium has been a dump for 30 years and nobody ever did anything about it. My son played high school soccer there and it was gross and uncomfortable for fans and actively unsafe for players. Oh yeah, and half of the stadium couldn’t be used because it was structurally unsound after a fire.

I know some of the folks involved in anti-stadium-reconstruction activism. They have a deep suspicion of public-private partnerships, which is entirely fair, and also a desire to keep Franklin Park their little secret that is not widely used, which is entirely unfair. (There was also some racist grumbling at the beginning about the process—Michelle Wu rammed the project through and had some folks complaining she was running the city “like China.” And may I once again plead with bigots to do some research on the political implications of being from Taiwan, as Michelle Wu’s family is, versus being from mainland China. Thanks. But also stop being racist.)

I think anything that brings more people to the park is a good thing, and I supported the project with some reservations. Mostly that we already had an NWSL team in Boston called the Breakers. They played in Harvard Stadium, which was hard to access by public transportation and had inadequate parking, and they eventually went under. Though the new White Stadium will be nice, it is also hard to access by public transportation and has inadequate parking.

Still, I figured this would get the city to pay attention to the park and would ultimately be good for us in the neighborhoods surrounding the park. But as demolition and construction have gone on, I’ve noticed that none of the traffic stuff promised for the construction process (all still visible here) has actually happened:

Walnut Avenue: Closed to construction vehicles and reserved for local residents. Construction traffic will use designated access points to minimize congestion.

Neighborhood Traffic Calming Adjustments:

• Temporary shift of the center line between #435 Walnut Ave & Iffley Rd to create temporary, wider travel lanes for heavy duty trucks.
• Temporary one-way conversion of Peter Parley Road from Forest Hills St. to Walnut Ave.
• Local access only to Glen Rd and Sigourney St, Robeson St, Peter Parley Rd and Iffley Rd. Additional signage will be deployed to keep through traffic on Forest Hills Street and Washington Street.

No community meetings, no updates. They just never did it. Maybe there were good reasons for this. Maybe not. But I now have a lot more sympathy with my neighbors who opposed the project because they didn’t believe the city was capable of being honest about its intentions.

Which brings us to the Franklin Park Action Plan. This came about because a developer wanted to use the location of a dilapidated parking garage in Downtown Boston to build a luxury residential tower for the super wealthy to use as a tax dodge/money laundering scheme. I guess maybe some rich people actually live there as well, but that’s not what this kind of building is really for. The problem was that the new tower would cast a shadow on Boston Common, which is against the law in Boston, so Walsh negotiated a deal: we’ll let you throw literal shade on our public space if you give us 25 million dollars to use on a different public space.

So landscape architecture firms were hired, and the city paid them handsomely: Reed Hilderbrand got $925k of public money; Agency Landscape + Planning got $500k, and I can’t find out how much MASS Design Group got paid, but I think it’s safe to say the total cost of producing the plan was around 2 million bucks. I guess this includes the community meetings I endured, with lots of powerpoint slides and “taking our feedback into account.”

Okay, so the plan dropped in 2022, and all the work is supposed to be done by 2030.

Everything that follows I put at the doorstep of the Wu administration. Not only is the work not going to be completed by 2030; it seems like most of it is never getting done at all.

Halfway to 2030 from the release of the plan, let’s look at what’s been done! (All these are copied from the pdf of the Franklin Park Action Plan—my notes in bold)

Park-Wide Improvements

Lighting —no progress

Signage-no progress

Entrances-no progress

Stormwater Management—no progress

Heritage Tree Care—some progress: I have seen arborists at work in both The Wilderness and the Long Crouch Woods.

The Playstead

1. Restore the Bear Dens for multi-purpose use.—some progress has been made. The bear dens were closed off in May 2025, and a sign was posted saying the work should be completed by July 2025. It’s August 2026, and the work has not been completed. So we’re now 15 months into what was supposed to be a 2 month job.

2. Long Crouch Woods

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting, improved trails, & new nature play areas.—They’ve definitely been working on this. They made a cool labyrinth out of invasive plants that they removed. Trails are not improved.

3. White Stadium

• Make improvements for shared community & Boston Public Schools use, including new parking—in progress. Old stadium has been demolished, new stadium is under construction. Of course this is now its own project, separate from the Franklin Park Action Plan, and it’s got private money behind it, which may account for the speed of the project.

4. Restore The Overlook ruins and return The Elma Lewis Playhouse to its historic location with a new stage, restrooms, and seating—No progress.

5. The Playstead

• Upgrade the fields (including drainage/stormwater improvements), create the tailgate edge & improve parking, and establish a new Playstead Loop path for bikes and pedestrians (including seating, lighting, and planting).—No progress.

Peabody Circle & Refectory Hill

1. Establish a new ‘front porch’ pedestrian entrance and terrace along Blue Hill Avenue—no progress

2. Reinstate the historic pedestrian circulation and expand tree planting to create a new Peabody Circle Plaza for events & programming—no progress

3. Stepped Seating Grove—Create terraced outdoor seating with new canopy trees for outdoor education and programming—no progress

4. Integrate a new parking lot on Refectory Hill-no progress

American Legion

Abbottswood

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting;

introduce new trails.—IDK, haven’t been over there.

Integrate a new outdoor classroom adjacent to the

wet meadow—no progress

American Legion Playground

• Make playground improvements, including a new splashpad—no progress

Ellicottdale & Schoolmaster Hill

Restore the upper lawn with shaded picnic and BBQ areas, expand the tennis courts, and provide restrooms—no progress

Restore the lower lawn for flexible use, and provide a boardwalk and trails within the wet woodland—no progress

Ellicott Arch

• Restore the arch, and add lighting & new planting—no progressSchoolmaster Hill

• Restore the Schoolmaster Hill ruins & pergola, and introduce a flowering tree walk along the path leading from Ellicottdale—no progress

The Wilderness

The Wilderness Ecological Restoration

Perform invasive removals, add new planting, and make trail and wayfinding improvements—There are parks employees in overalls doing something in here. Haven’t seen much in the way of results other than some knotweed removal, but let’s say it’s in progress.

Circuit Drive & The Valley Gates

1. Circuit Loop

• Reconfigure vehicular circulation to provide a safe

multi-model circuit throughout the park—no progress

2. The Circuit Drive Parking Lot

• Improve and expand the parking lot with canopy

trees and stormwater management—no progress

3. The Valley Gates

• Clarify circulation & restore the Valley Gate

headhouses—no progress

I can’t find it in the action plan, but I have noticed that the Shattuck tennis courts are being redone. So there’s something happening there.

But most of the stuff in the plan is obviously never happening. Not only because so few of these projects have been started, but also because it’s been clear for years that the City doesn’t care about these projects. You know how I know? In addition to all the stuff named above, part of the plan was repaving the path that goes from the Glen Road entrance to the Overlook—a length of maybe 1000 feet. This took over a year. They paved it, then found out they’d done it wrong, then undid it, then re-did it—there may have been a few more iterations, but the bottom line is that what should have been the work of a week at most took over a year.

There was someone from the Parks department nominally overseeing the project. I think she came out to the site twice.

And then there’s the bear dens, above. What was listed as a two-month job has taken 14 months so far. For context, the old stadium was still standing when this modest project began. It seems likely the new one will be complete before this project finishes.

I gave input, I watched the slides, and I really believed that the city was at last going to pay some long overdue attention to this amazing park.

And it was all bullshit. And apparently a lot of people knew it was bullshit. Here’s the Franklin Park Coalition’s memo that came out at the time in which they ask for 2 Park Rangers to be included in the budget, though it would be much better to set that money on fire because at least then it could briefly provide some warmth and therefore be more useful than park rangers. They estimate that the cost of the stuff included in the action plan is 100 million dollars and ask for the city to earmark 20 million dollars per year to make sure the plan is going to happen.

I did not hear anything from the Franklin Park Coalition about how this plan was pie in the sky bullshit at the time. I haven’t seen any of the local media following up on the progress of the Franklin Park Action Plan. And the city seems to just be hoping the whole thing blows over, which seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.

Boston has a lot of problems, and I’m not suggesting that this is the most important one. It’s just a perfect example of how, yet again, we don’t have a city government that cares about improving the lives of Bostonians.

Here’s my frustration: it seems like every day I read the news and see that Mayor Mamdani in New York is working, in small and big ways, to improve the lives of people who live in his city. When I was knocking doors for Michelle Wu’s campaign, I thought she’d do the same for Boston.

But, as the absolutely pathetic progress on the Franklin Park Action Plan shows, our mayor has other priorities. Franklin Park abuts Dorchester and Roxbury, real neighborhoods where hundreds of thousands of Bostonians live, but what’s that against the opinion of the people who really matter? You know, the ones with money.

High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament Intro

I love hypothetical crossover fanfiction matchups between different characters. It probably goes back to The Ultimate Showdown type flash animations in the earlier days of the internet. I have long toyed around with the idea of an Ultimate Showdown where I simulate a fight between all major fictional characters and see who comes out on top. There is a fatal flaw with this though: The Reality Benders. Characters like The Beyonder, Dr. Manhattan, Molecule Man, etc can just vaporize 99.9% of the field in an instant. What is Conan the Barbarian supposed to do against someone who can take a nap on the surface of the sun?

There is also the issue of trying to manage thousands, possibly tens of thousands of characters, in a single simulation. So I'm opting to instead break it up into mini tournaments based on certain themes. This first one is a proof of concept. I'm going to pick 16 High Fantasy Sword fighters to face off in a single elimination tournament. Rather than being representative of the total Zeitgeist of high fantasy, I'm going to focus on lore I'm more familiar with since, well, I'm writing this mostly for me. So here is the roster, broken down my franchise. In total there should be 15 posts after this, 8 + 4 + 2 + 1, making this a 16 post sequence. I'll continue working on other things as well like Starcraft Co, but will interweave this as I feel like it.

The Roster:

NOTE- I'm making some changes to the roster after posting this:

From ASOIAF-

Jamie Lannister (two hands) Arthur Dayne Jon Snow Brienne of Tarth

From LOTR-

Aragorn Boromir

From Greek Mythology-

Achilles Jason

Other fiction-

Geralt of Rivia Al'Lan Mandragoran Duncan MacLeod Zorro Beatrix Kiddo Maximus Conan the Barbarian Xena Warrior Princess Beowulf Lancelot

There are a lot of ways I could do the matchups. I could randomize it, but that would lead to some really lopsided matches. I could try to make the initial fights competitive, but that would also lead to some really lopsided matches later on. Some of these guys cough Jon Snow cough are just gonna get outmatched. Not much I can do about that. So I'm thinking I'll focus on making interesting initial fights and just let the tournament go from there, balancing skill and thematic what if elements. So stay tuned.

I am allowed to grieve what I wanted, without dishonoring what I felt.