I find anxiety to be extremely fascinating. On the days where I’m riddled and my entire body and soul are suffering; I tend to be alright with the fact that I don’t do anything. The anxiety itself is the activity. I sit and I bundle up and I imagine all the possible ways that I could die in that very moment. Impending death seems to be a common thought. But sometimes I get a day all to myself. No voice in the back of mind saying nasty things. No strange inexplicable (completely explicable) feelings in my body. Yet now there’s something else to be worried about. What do I like. Before I became a trembling anxious mess I had hobbies, friends, passions. I was always out and about and happy to be. I would read from dusk till dawn and play so many games with my friends. Dating made me happy too, mostly to go out and meet new people, and the prospect of a paid dinner was an added bonus. But now I can’t help but feel very very sorry for myself. One would think that it’s a blessing to have a day off from anxiety. I used to for sure. Recently I’ve found myself making lists of things I want to do, to read, to watch. It’s as if I have to remind myself that I do actually enjoy things. Writing this was struggle enough. “Oh, come on! It’s completely normal to forget about things you like, you’re just overwhelmed.” Mmmm I wouldn’t say so. I am always and completely underwhelmed. Games aren’t fun, movies and shows are boring, and a good book doesn’t even exist on this terrestrial plane. I have been reborn into my own universe where everything, and everyone, is pointless, useless and stupid. It’s not depression or anything like that. I know that if I tried a bit harder, I could get back to myself. You know I just have to meditate, and journal, and read ‘The law of Attraction’. And keep to myself and never say anything bad for I have the power to manifest it. And I wouldn’t even have to try that hard! The power to create is real and when I think too hard about something bad it could very well happen, so being cautious is best. Anything I could ever want is right in front of me. Soooo close. I just have to get out of this slump. Be better be better, Oh! And do more as well. I think people forget about that part. Never ever ever forget that by sitting around and wallowing you are pretty much giving up on any life you may have been able to have. Speaking of which, there are 5 games on my ‘To play’ list right now. I just need to get off my ass and play them. Two of the games are The Legend of Zelda. I wonder why two of the games that I want to play are from the same series. It is not because I like that series. I only like my boyfriend and I only like sitting on my couch and I reeeaally like staring at my phone for 7 hours a day. I can read this and feel sad for myself, but what does it take to push yourself towards bigger and better things? When I talk to them about it, I feel so annoying. I’m annoying myself right now to be honest.

MMM first time. Kinda nervous

Official shop: raikou.store

Television Antihero Deathmatch Tournament- Intro

I had fun when I conducted the High Fantasy Epic Sword Fighter Tournament a few months back, so I wanted to return to a similar concept. One issue we ran into with that tournament was power scaling though. Some characters were just more magical than others, so like, Arthur Dayne for example never really had a chance against someone like Al'Lan Mandragoran. So while it was interesting, it wasn't quite as competitive as I liked. So for this tournament, we are going to focus on antiheroes from television who have no supernatural abilities whatsoever. No enhanced senses, no super strength or healing, no magic, no foresight, etc. Just regular, badass humans. This post will introduce all the contestants. But first, I'll outline the tournament format. This one is going to be more complicated. Instead of simple single-elimination, we are going to go for a GSL style, a a dual-tournament group stage structure functioning as a mini double-elimination bracket for four competitors. (So, that is Starcraft's contribution to this event).

THE TOURNAMENT STRUCTURE

The tournament consists of sixteen contestants divided into four groups of four. Each group is conducted as a compact double-elimination bracket. Every contestant is guaranteed at least two fights, but a second loss eliminates them from the tournament. Two contestants ultimately emerge from each group, producing eight survivors who advance to the next stage.

Within each group, the four contestants are initially paired into two opening matches. The winners of those matches advance to the Winners' Match, while the losers are sent to the Elimination Match. The winner of the Winners' Match has gone undefeated and immediately qualifies for the next stage as the group's first-place finisher. The loser of the Elimination Match has now lost twice and is eliminated.

The remaining two contestants then meet in the Final Decider: the loser of the Winners' Match against the winner of the Elimination Match. The winner of this final fight advances as the group's second-place finisher, while the loser is eliminated. In practical terms, a contestant can qualify either by winning both of their first two fights or by recovering from one loss and winning the subsequent two.

Every match is fought to the death.

At the beginning of a fight, each contestant receives a clear and recent photograph of the person they are hunting. They receive nothing else about that person. There are no biographies, descriptions of fighting ability, criminal records, psychological profiles, or accounts of previous matches. Contestants do not observe the other fights in their group and are not provided recordings or scouting reports afterward. Although a contestant remembers their own previous experiences, each new opponent is essentially a clean slate.

Each contestant knows that they are confined to the designated arena, that their opponent is somewhere inside it, and that their opponent has received the same information about them. They understand that the match will continue until one of them dies and that no outside rescue or intervention is coming. They do not know where their opponent begins, what strategy the opponent will adopt, or exactly what weapons and resources exist within the arena.

Contestants begin without personal weapons, phones, money, or specialized equipment. They wear ordinary clothing reasonably appropriate for the environment and must obtain anything else from within the arena itself.

Physical injuries do not carry over between matches. Each contestant begins a new match restored to their ordinary healthy condition. This prevents an early victory or defeat from becoming decisive simply because someone enters their next fight wounded. Their memories and psychological experiences remain intact, but because they are never permitted to observe opponents in advance, prior tournament experience provides only general experience rather than direct intelligence.

There is normally no formal time limit. The arenas are designed so that hiding and avoidance can be successful for meaningful periods, but indefinitely refusing contact should become increasingly difficult.

Arena One: The Empty Shopping Mall

The first arena is a large, modern enclosed shopping mall that has been completely evacuated before the contestants arrive. It is not abandoned or ruined. The electricity remains on, lighting systems function normally, elevators and escalators operate, store interiors remain stocked, and the mall's infrastructure is intact. It feels less like a post-apocalyptic building than a normal commercial space from which every customer and employee has suddenly vanished.

The contestants are dropped off at opposite exterior entrances at approximately the same time. Neither has ever visited the building and neither is given a floor plan. They know only that their opponent has entered somewhere on the far side of the complex.

The mall is large enough that the contestants are unlikely to encounter one another immediately. Multiple floors, anchor stores, service corridors, loading areas, offices, storage rooms, restaurants, utility spaces, public hallways and back-of-house passages provide numerous possible routes. A contestant therefore faces an important decision almost immediately: begin searching aggressively for the opponent or spend valuable time acquiring equipment and understanding the environment.

Somewhere inside the mall is a large sporting-goods store or Walmart-style anchor store containing firearms and ammunition. The weapons are genuinely accessible rather than being locked behind some arbitrary obstacle that neither contestant could realistically overcome, but the contestants are not told where the store is located. Reaching firearms first may provide an enormous advantage, yet racing toward a likely weapons source can also make a contestant predictable. Both participants know that if they are thinking about finding the guns, the other person probably is as well.

The mall contains far more useful material than firearms. Restaurants provide knives, kitchen tools, flammable materials and heavy equipment. Sporting-goods stores contain protective clothing, climbing equipment and other specialized gear. Hardware and maintenance areas provide tools. Clothing stores provide changes of appearance. Fire extinguishers, cleaning chemicals, furniture, glass, security shutters, alarms and electrical systems can all potentially be exploited. The mall's own architecture is itself a resource: escalators, elevators, roof access, narrow service passages, loading docks and storefront gates can become obstacles, traps or avenues of escape.

Security systems remain functional. Cameras exist throughout the mall, although accessing and effectively using them requires finding the appropriate security infrastructure. Store intercoms and public-address systems may also be available. A technically minded contestant might attempt to use these systems to locate, misdirect or intimidate an opponent, while another might simply destroy or avoid them.

Sound matters tremendously. In an empty mall, a dropped object, shattered window, alarm, closing gate or gunshot can travel a long way. A contestant who acquires a firearm has become more dangerous, but firing it may also tell the opponent approximately where they are. Conversely, deliberate noise can be used as bait or misdirection.

The mall is therefore the tournament's primary test of improvisation. It rewards contestants who can rapidly recognize useful resources, orient themselves in unfamiliar architecture and decide when preparation is worth sacrificing speed. Someone who immediately understands the environment can transform an ordinary commercial building into a weapons cache, surveillance network or maze. Someone who simply wanders the corridors looking for their opponent may discover too late that the other contestant has spent that same time becoming much more dangerous.

Arena Two: The Crowded Apartment Complex

The second arena is almost the opposite of the first. Instead of an empty commercial environment filled with resources, it is an enormous residential environment filled with people.

The arena is a sprawling brutalist housing complex in a fictional Southeast Asian country. It consists of several massive concrete buildings connected through courtyards, walkways, alleys, parking structures and improvised additions. Some sections rise vertically through apartment towers while others spread horizontally through markets, utility buildings and lower residential structures. Over decades, residents have modified parts of the complex, creating a confusing mixture of official architecture and informal construction. Staircases do not always lead where an outsider expects. Corridors bend into courtyards, rooftops connect through improvised walkways, and apparently public passages may suddenly become residential spaces.

Thousands of ordinary civilians live within the complex. They have not been warned that anything unusual is happening. They know nothing about the contestants and do not understand that a lethal competition is taking place around them. To the residents, the contestants are simply two unfamiliar foreigners behaving however those contestants choose to behave.

Neither contestant speaks the local language, and the residents generally cannot communicate fluently with either contestant. This does not make communication impossible, but it makes it crude and uncertain. A contestant can point to the opponent's photograph, gesture, draw, offer objects, imitate actions, threaten someone, or attempt to communicate through tone and body language. What they cannot easily do is walk into a crowd and begin efficiently questioning witnesses.

No police, military units or emergency services will enter the complex during the match. The civilian population, however, reacts naturally. Gunfire may produce panic. People may flee into buildings, lock doors, gather children, scream warnings to neighbors or hide. Rumors can spread through the complex even when the contestants themselves cannot understand them. One contestant's actions may therefore change the behavior of thousands of people in ways neither participant can completely predict.

Civilians are not protected by an artificial tournament rule. A contestant is physically capable of threatening, manipulating or killing them if that is consistent with the character. But civilians are not merely disposable scenery. Violence against residents can generate panic, resistance and unwanted attention. A contestant who terrorizes an apartment may suddenly find an entire hallway emptying around them, effectively broadcasting their position. Someone who behaves calmly may be able to move among residents without immediately being recognized as a threat.

The architecture provides an extraordinary number of hiding places. Apartments, stairwells, rooftops, utility rooms, shops, basements, laundry areas, narrow alleys and pedestrian bridges produce constantly shifting sightlines. A target may be visible across a courtyard from one floor and completely inaccessible from another. A contestant might know the opponent is in a particular tower without knowing which of several hundred rooms contains them.

Unlike the mall, there is no obvious central resource that everyone is likely to seek. The most important resource is information. Contestants must watch how people react, identify unusual movement, determine whether someone has recently seen another foreigner and decide how much they can infer from an environment they cannot verbally interrogate.

The population also provides concealment. A contestant can change clothing, enter an apartment, move with crowds or wait for panic to create opportunities. At the same time, being visually distinctive in a neighborhood where both contestants are outsiders can make complete anonymity difficult. Residents may remember seeing them even if they cannot communicate that information easily.

This arena rewards a different kind of intelligence from the mall. Tactical shooting ability still matters once contact occurs, but finding the opponent may be the greater challenge. Patience, observation, deception, social intuition and the ability to remain composed among civilians become enormously valuable. The best performance may come not from the contestant who controls the building, but from the contestant who understands how to disappear inside it.

Arena Three: The Forest Decider

The third arena is reserved exclusively for the Final Decider in each group. By the time contestants reach it, one has lost the Winners' Match and the other has fought back from the Elimination Match. One final death determines who advances and who leaves the tournament.

The arena is approximately one square mile of temperate wilderness enclosed on all sides by a tall electrified fence reinforced with razor wire. The perimeter is not itself a puzzle. It cannot be breached, disabled or circumvented. Escape is impossible. Every strategic decision must therefore concern what lies inside the enclosure rather than how to leave it.

The terrain is intentionally varied and rugged. Dense woodland alternates with small clearings. Streams and ponds break up movement. Rocky ridges rise above lower ground, while ravines and steep slopes create abrupt changes in elevation. Some areas are marshy or thick with vegetation, while others provide relatively open sightlines. Fallen trees, animal trails and natural bottlenecks create routes that may be easier to travel but also easier to monitor.

The forest is large enough to permit real hunting behavior. Contestants may spend substantial periods without seeing one another. At the same time, one square mile is small enough that neither can simply walk away indefinitely. Movement leaves evidence. Trails cross. Water sources attract attention. Elevated ground becomes valuable. Eventually, the choices of two people searching the same enclosed landscape begin to intersect.

Several hunting cabins and small lodges are scattered through the area. Neither contestant knows their locations beforehand. These structures provide shelter and supplies, but they also create obvious points of interest. A contestant approaching one must consider the possibility that the opponent has already reached it, is watching it, or assumes that they will eventually come there.

The lodges draw from roughly equivalent pools of supplies so that chance matters without determining the outcome outright. They may contain basic food, potable water, blankets, flashlights, matches, rope, first-aid supplies, knives, axes, binoculars and ordinary hunting equipment. If firearms are available, their distribution is standardized enough that one contestant does not win simply by discovering a dramatically superior weapon through luck.

There are no civilians and no functioning communications network. There are no security cameras to seize, crowds to disappear into or authorities whose behavior can be manipulated. Artificial lighting is limited to whatever can be found inside the cabins. If the match lasts into nighttime, darkness becomes a genuine part of the contest.

The forest therefore forces the contestants to interact with one another much more directly, even when they remain physically separated. Every footprint, disturbed branch, abandoned wrapper, extinguished fire or missing item can potentially communicate information. A contestant may deliberately conceal those signs, fabricate them, or use them to create an ambush. Water, high ground and shelter become strategic resources in the same way that weapons stores and security rooms mattered in the mall.

Physical conditioning matters more here than in the other arenas, but the match is not simply an endurance contest. Tracking, counter-tracking, patience, stealth, navigation and understanding lines of sight can all be decisive. A contestant who moves constantly may eventually expose themselves. A contestant who remains stationary for too long may surrender initiative. Using a cabin offers supplies but also creates predictability. Lighting a fire provides warmth and visibility while potentially revealing a location.

The forest is deliberately the most stripped-down arena. It removes most of the institutions and human systems contestants might otherwise exploit and leaves them with terrain, limited tools and another person who is actively trying to kill them.

Philosophy of the Arenas

The tournament is designed around the idea that “dangerous” is not a single quality. These contestants come from worlds where survival may depend on intelligence, violence, deception, patience, charisma, criminal experience or technical knowledge. A tournament composed entirely of straightforward shootouts would disproportionately reward one narrow type of character and fail to capture why many of the contestants are formidable in the first place.

The three arenas therefore place the same basic problem—find and kill another human being—inside radically different environments.

The shopping mall is fundamentally a contest over resources and improvisation. Both contestants begin with very little, but they are surrounded by an enormous amount of potentially useful material. The important question is not simply whether someone can fight, but whether they can look at an unfamiliar environment and recognize possibilities before the opponent does. The mall asks what a contestant can make out of the world around them.

The apartment complex is fundamentally a contest over people and information. The physical environment matters, but it is inseparable from the civilians occupying it. Contestants must navigate not only concrete corridors but human reactions. Fear, suspicion, curiosity, panic and misunderstanding all become part of the terrain. The language barrier prevents easy social dominance and forces contestants to communicate and infer indirectly. The complex asks how effectively someone can function when other human beings are simultaneously obstacles, witnesses, camouflage and potential tools.

The forest is fundamentally a contest over the self. Most technological and social systems have disappeared. There is no population to manipulate, no large commercial infrastructure to exploit and little possibility of outsourcing risk. Contestants have terrain, whatever equipment they can find and their own ability to understand another hunter. The forest asks what remains when nearly everything external has been removed.

No arena is intended to identify the universally “best” contestant. Instead, the group stage rewards adaptability. Someone exceptionally strong in one environment may encounter a second environment that attacks precisely the weaknesses that the first concealed. A contestant who survives consistently must be capable of recognizing what kind of problem they are facing and changing their behavior accordingly.

Taken together, the arenas form a deliberate progression. The mall asks, What can you make use of? The apartment complex asks, What can you understand and influence? The forest asks, What can you do when there is almost nothing left to rely on except yourself?

That variety is central to the tournament. The goal is not merely to determine who wins a fight. It is to discover which kinds of dangerous people remain dangerous when the world around them keeps changing.

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And now, an introduction of each of the contestants. First, here is the list. I focused on media I've consumed so I know I've definitely left out important television characters:

Walter White Tony Soprano Vic Mackey Dexter Morgan Raylan Givens Omar Little Thomas Shelby Elliot Alderson Elizabeth Jennings Wendy Byrde Barry Berkman Lucas Hood Jax Teller Mike Ehrmantraut Boyd Crowder Nikki Swango

Breaking Bad and Justified each get two entrants because I felt like it. Also, Mike and Walter are incredibly different in their approach so I think the juxtaposition will be fascinating. And then Raylan and Boyd just have too much chemistry to not both compete. I'll provide a brief bio and analysis of each contestant:

WALTER WHITE

Walter White is a former chemistry teacher who transforms himself into one of the most feared methamphetamine manufacturers in the American Southwest. Before entering the criminal world, he was an exceptionally gifted chemist whose early work helped found Gray Matter Technologies, although he left the company long before it became enormously successful. After being diagnosed with cancer and facing financial insecurity, Walter begins manufacturing methamphetamine with former student Jesse Pinkman. What starts as an attempt to leave money for his family rapidly evolves into a criminal empire. Over the course of his career, Walter survives confrontations with street dealers, organized drug operations, Mexican cartel figures, professional killers, and eventually the industrial-scale organization of Gustavo Fring. He becomes increasingly comfortable with murder, intimidation, manipulation, sabotage, and elaborate planning, while repeatedly defeating opponents with considerably more conventional criminal experience than himself.

Walter's greatest strength is his ability to solve problems asymmetrically. He rarely wins because he is the strongest or fastest person in the room. He wins by identifying something his opponent has overlooked and turning it into a weapon. His chemistry background gives him unusual technical versatility, but the more important trait is the mindset behind it. He improvises explosives, poisons, incendiaries, batteries, mechanical traps, and other solutions from whatever is available. He is also an accomplished liar and manipulator, particularly when exploiting the emotions or assumptions of people who know him personally. His weaknesses are equally substantial. Walter has little formal combat training, mediocre physical conditioning, and is vulnerable in sudden close-range violence. His ego repeatedly causes him to take unnecessary risks, reject safer options, and provoke people he would have been better off leaving alone. He also has a tendency to overestimate how thoroughly he controls a situation. Given preparation time and access to useful materials, Walter can be extraordinarily dangerous. Forced into an immediate physical confrontation with a trained killer, he is much less formidable.

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of Walter at his most deadly comes in his final attack on Jack Welker's gang. Knowing he cannot defeat a room full of armed neo-Nazis in a conventional gunfight, Walter spends his remaining time constructing a remotely operated M60 machine gun inside the trunk of his car. He parks the vehicle so that the weapon is aligned with the clubhouse, deliberately provokes Jack into bringing Jesse into the room, and then triggers the mechanism while throwing himself to the floor. The machine gun sweeps automatically through the building, killing or mortally wounding most of the gang within seconds. Walter himself never needs to outdraw anyone. The encounter captures what makes him dangerous: he enters a situation in which he is physically outmatched, changes the terms of the confrontation before anyone realizes what he has done, and lets planning, engineering, and surprise do the killing for him.

TONY SOPRANO

Tony Soprano is the longtime boss, first de facto and eventually official, of the DiMeo crime family in northern New Jersey. Raised within organized crime, Tony has spent essentially his entire adult life around extortion, robbery, gambling, murder, and the constant threat of betrayal. Unlike many criminal bosses who become insulated from violence as they rise, Tony remains personally involved in it. He has killed people with firearms, strangled men with his bare hands, beaten opponents severely, survived assassination attempts, and repeatedly operated under the knowledge that friends or relatives might turn on him. He is also considerably more intelligent than his outward image suggests. Tony is excellent at reading weakness, detecting dishonesty, intimidating people without necessarily resorting to violence, and understanding the complicated social networks around him. His years managing a criminal organization have made paranoia, surveillance, and betrayal part of his normal life.

Tony's greatest strengths are a combination of physical power, criminal intuition, and psychological perception. He is a large, strong man who is capable of winning extremely violent close-range encounters, but he is not merely a brawler. He notices changes in people's behavior and frequently realizes that something is wrong before he can prove why. He is comfortable with firearms and has no hesitation about killing when he believes it necessary. Tony's biggest weakness is that he is not a trained tactical operator. He can be careless, emotional, and impulsive, particularly when insulted or betrayed. His physical conditioning is poor, and prolonged exertion would be a serious disadvantage. He is also accustomed to having an organization around him, including soldiers who gather information, obtain weapons, and carry out orders. Stripped of that network, he remains dangerous, but loses one of the defining advantages of being Tony Soprano.

One of the best demonstrations of Tony as a solitary predator occurs during a college trip with his daughter Meadow. Tony unexpectedly recognizes Fabian “Febby” Petrulio, a former mobster who entered witness protection after informing against other criminals. Rather than immediately attacking him, Tony confirms the man's identity and begins tracking him while simultaneously continuing the trip with his daughter. Febby realizes he is being hunted and briefly turns the situation around, locating Tony's motel and nearly shooting him, but abandons the opportunity because Meadow and other civilians are nearby. The following morning Tony finds Febby alone, approaches without warning, and garrotes him to death before returning to Meadow and continuing the college tour. The episode demonstrates a side of Tony that can be obscured by his role as a boss: given a target and enough time, he is perfectly capable of stalking and killing someone entirely by himself.

VIC MACKEY

Vic Mackey is a Los Angeles police detective and leader of the Farmington Division's Strike Team, an anti-gang unit that gradually becomes almost indistinguishable from the criminals it pursues. Vic spends years conducting raids, chasing armed suspects, working informants, interrogating gang members, and navigating some of the most violent neighborhoods in Los Angeles. At the same time, he runs an extensive criminal enterprise from inside the police department. His offenses include drug trafficking, robbery, evidence manipulation, torture, extortion, obstruction, and murder. This dual existence gives Vic an unusual combination of experience. He understands how criminals behave because he frequently behaves like one, but he also understands police tactics, investigations, surveillance, crime-scene reconstruction, and how authorities respond after violence occurs.

Vic is physically strong, aggressive, experienced with firearms, and extremely difficult to intimidate. More importantly, he thinks quickly when plans collapse. Much of his career consists of disasters that would destroy an ordinary criminal, followed by Vic improvising some new lie, threat, alliance, or act of violence that keeps him alive. He is excellent at identifying what another person wants and exploiting it. His greatest weakness is the same trait that often saves him: he escalates. Vic has enormous confidence in his ability to regain control and frequently creates a larger problem while solving the immediate one. Anger and loyalty can also override his judgment. In a careful stalking contest against someone more patient than he is, Vic's tendency to force events could expose him. In a chaotic environment, however, few contestants are better equipped.

Vic reveals just how dangerous he can be in the very first Strike Team operation involving Detective Terry Crowley. Vic discovers that Crowley has secretly been placed on the team to gather evidence against him. During a raid on drug dealer Two-Time, Vic and Shane Vendrell engage and kill the armed suspect. With the room still chaotic from the gunfight, Vic takes Two-Time's weapon, turns toward Crowley, and shoots the unsuspecting detective in the face. He then allows the scene to appear as though Crowley died during the raid. The murder is striking not because of its difficulty, but because of Vic's ability to integrate a premeditated killing into an unpredictable armed operation and immediately begin behaving like the investigating police officer rather than the murderer.

DEXTER MORGAN

Dexter Morgan is a Miami Metro Police Department blood-spatter analyst who secretly operates as a serial killer. Trained from childhood by his adoptive father Harry to channel his homicidal impulses toward murderers who have escaped conventional justice, Dexter develops an elaborate methodology based around identifying targets, confirming their guilt, stalking them, abducting them, killing them, and disposing of their bodies without leaving evidence. His professional access to law-enforcement information makes him particularly effective, but his success does not depend solely on databases. Dexter is an experienced surveillance operator, lockpicker, stalker, forensic analyst, boatman, and improvisational killer. Over many years he encounters other serial killers, police investigations, organized criminals, and people actively hunting him, yet repeatedly escapes detection.

Dexter may be the tournament's strongest combination of patience and predatory experience. He understands forensic evidence well enough to know what not to leave behind, is exceptionally comfortable following people without being noticed, and possesses far more experience actually hunting individual human beings than nearly anyone in the field. He is competent in close combat, especially when surprise is on his side, and normally prefers to attack only when he controls the circumstances. His weaknesses become apparent when control disappears. Dexter's standard method depends heavily on surveillance, preparation, tranquilizers, and approaching someone who does not know they are being hunted. An opponent who knows exactly what Dexter looks like removes much of that advantage. He is also not an exceptional conventional gunfighter compared with several other contestants, and his emotional attachments repeatedly interfere with his otherwise disciplined decision-making.

A revealing example of Dexter's lethality comes during his final confrontation with Oliver Saxon. Dexter enters Saxon's detention room carrying no conventional weapon and places a pen within reach. He deliberately tells Saxon that he intends to kill him with it, correctly anticipating that Saxon will seize the pen and attack first. Dexter allows himself to take a minor wound, overpowers Saxon, takes the pen from him, and drives it into his carotid artery. Because the security camera has recorded Saxon initiating the attack, Dexter has simultaneously killed his enemy and manufactured a plausible case of self-defense. It is a compact example of what makes Dexter dangerous: even while apparently unarmed and under surveillance, he is thinking several moves beyond the person he intends to kill.

RAYLAN GIVENS

Raylan Givens is a Deputy United States Marshal raised in Harlan County, Kentucky, where he grew up surrounded by poverty, criminality, and violence before leaving the region and eventually entering federal law enforcement. His career repeatedly brings him into confrontations with fugitives, organized criminals, drug traffickers, gunmen, and people from his own violent past. Raylan is an experienced investigator and tracker, but his defining ability is firearms proficiency. He has been involved in numerous lethal shootings and possesses extraordinary confidence in his ability to draw and fire accurately before an opponent can do the same. Unlike a professional assassin, Raylan normally works within the constraints of law enforcement, but he is unusually comfortable placing himself in situations where he knows an armed criminal may force a shooting.

Raylan's greatest advantage is composure under immediate lethal threat. He rarely panics when a weapon appears and seems almost unnaturally comfortable standing within conversational distance of someone who may try to kill him. He is an excellent shot and has years of experience reading the body language that precedes violence. He is also smarter and more patient than his gunslinger reputation sometimes suggests, with strong investigative instincts and an intimate understanding of criminals. His weaknesses are arrogance and provocation. Raylan often approaches dangerous people directly because he trusts himself to win if the encounter becomes violent. That approach works remarkably often, but against someone setting an ambush it can become a liability. He also has relatively little interest in elaborate deception compared with the schemers elsewhere in the tournament.

His final confrontation with Boon provides perhaps the purest example of what Raylan does better than almost anyone. Boon is himself an exceptionally fast gunman and deliberately forces Raylan into an old-fashioned draw on a Kentucky road. Both men fire almost simultaneously. Boon aims for Raylan's head and comes extraordinarily close, putting a bullet through Raylan's hat and grazing his scalp. Raylan's return shot lands decisively, leaving Boon mortally wounded. It is one of the rare moments in which Raylan meets someone capable of beating him at his own game, and he survives by the narrowest possible margin.

OMAR LITTLE

Omar Little is a professional stick-up man who makes his living robbing Baltimore drug dealers. Rather than belonging to a major organization, Omar operates with a small crew and survives by preying directly on heavily armed criminal enterprises. His targets know who he is, circulate his description, place bounties on him, and eventually devote substantial resources to killing him. Omar nevertheless remains active for years. He scouts stash houses, studies organizational routines, uses informants, conducts ambushes, and understands the geography and social rhythms of the city at an extraordinary level. He is proficient with firearms, particularly his trademark shotgun, and is comfortable moving through abandoned buildings, alleys, courtyards, and housing projects where every person he encounters may potentially inform his enemies.

Omar's greatest talent is choosing when the fight happens. He is at his best as an ambush predator rather than a conventional gunfighter. He watches people, learns routines, waits for vulnerability, and attacks from positions his opponents did not realize were dangerous. His fearsome reputation is itself a weapon, sometimes causing armed drug dealers to surrender before he even appears. Omar is also unusually disciplined about civilian casualties and follows a personal code that prohibits deliberately harming uninvolved people. Morally this distinguishes him from many contestants, but tactically it can become a limitation in environments where others are willing to exploit civilians. His other major vulnerability is that he is visually distinctive and accustomed to working within an urban culture he understands intimately. An unfamiliar environment removes some of his greatest advantages.

After his lover Brandon is tortured and murdered by the Barksdale organization, Omar begins systematically hunting those responsible. When Barksdale enforcers Stinkum and Wee-Bey prepare to attack another drug dealer, Omar has already anticipated their movement and positioned himself nearby. From concealment he hits them first, killing Stinkum with his shotgun and shooting Wee-Bey in the leg when he attempts to return fire. Omar then withdraws rather than remaining for a prolonged gunfight. The encounter captures his preferred style perfectly. He does not beat two heavily armed professionals because he shoots dramatically faster. He wins because he has already turned their own planned ambush into his.

THOMAS SHELBY

Thomas Shelby is a decorated British Army veteran of the First World War and the leader of Birmingham's Peaky Blinders. During the war he served as a tunneler, operating underground beneath enemy positions in conditions where explosives, sudden death, confined spaces, and extreme psychological pressure were routine. Returning to Birmingham, Tommy transforms a local street gang into an increasingly sophisticated criminal and legitimate business empire. His career involves armed gang warfare, smuggling, assassination plots, political intrigue, espionage, and repeated confrontations with organizations considerably larger than his own. He is comfortable with firearms and explosives, but his greatest successes usually come from planning, intelligence gathering, and understanding what his opponents believe he is going to do.

Tommy's greatest strength is strategic nerve. He is unusually willing to remain inside a dangerous situation while allowing an opponent to believe they are winning. He understands leverage instinctively and frequently creates plans with several possible outcomes rather than relying on a single move. His war experience makes him difficult to intimidate, and he remains composed around gunfire and imminent death. He is also capable of direct violence when necessary. His weaknesses are psychological and interpersonal. Tommy suffers from severe wartime trauma, can become self-destructive, and increasingly relies on alcohol and drugs. He also develops elaborate schemes that depend on information, allies, and organizational resources that would not exist in the tournament. Isolated and forced into a simple physical confrontation, he remains dangerous but loses much of what makes him exceptional.

The confrontation with Billy Kimber at the end of Tommy's first major gang war shows the distinction between courage and mere recklessness. Kimber arrives unexpectedly with superior numbers, ruining Tommy's original plan to attack elsewhere. During the standoff Kimber suddenly shoots Tommy and then kills Danny Whizz-Bang. Tommy, already wounded, immediately returns fire and kills Kimber with a single shot to the head. Kimber's men, having little loyalty beyond money, abandon the fight after their leader falls. Tommy wins not because the original plan succeeds, but because when it completely collapses and he is personally shot, he remains functional enough to end the confrontation himself.

ELLIOT ALDERSON

Elliot Alderson is a cybersecurity engineer and extraordinary hacker whose criminal activities eventually place him at the center of operations capable of affecting governments, corporations, financial markets, and millions of ordinary people. Elliot is not a conventional criminal combatant. His primary weapons are computers, surveillance, social engineering, and an exceptional ability to identify hidden information about other people. He routinely compromises phones, email accounts, financial records, security systems, and corporate networks, often beginning with only tiny fragments of personal information. His work with fsociety brings him into conflict with E Corp, the FBI, the Dark Army, and some extremely dangerous individuals. He survives partly because people repeatedly underestimate how much damage one technically skilled person can cause.

In an ordinary gunfight, Elliot is one of the weakest contestants in the tournament. He has little meaningful firearms training, limited close-combat experience, and neither the physicality nor the instincts of the career killers in the field. His mental health problems and drug addiction can also profoundly disrupt his ability to perceive events accurately. Given access to technology, however, the matchup changes dramatically. Elliot is arguably unmatched at turning a digital system into intelligence. Security cameras, employee terminals, wireless networks, access-control systems, phones, or connected infrastructure can potentially become extensions of his senses. He is also an excellent social engineer who understands that computer security usually fails because human beings fail first. His challenge in the tournament will always be surviving long enough to transform an environment into something he can control.

Elliot's most consequential act of destruction is the 5/9 hack against E Corp. Working through fsociety, he helps execute an attack designed to encrypt the company's financial records and destroy the infrastructure required to restore them, effectively attempting to erase enormous amounts of consumer debt. The operation succeeds on a scale far beyond ordinary cybercrime and produces cascading economic and social consequences. It is not an example of Elliot personally killing someone, which is precisely the point. At his most dangerous, Elliot does not need to physically overpower an individual. He identifies the system on which that person or institution depends and attacks the system instead.

ELIZABETH JENNINGS

Elizabeth Jennings is a Soviet KGB intelligence officer operating for decades in the United States under deep cover as an ordinary suburban wife and mother. Unlike most spies who work from diplomatic facilities, Elizabeth is an illegal, meaning that capture would leave her with essentially no official protection. Her work requires disguises, surveillance, seduction, burglary, covert communications, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, kidnapping, assassination, and the maintenance of false identities under intense pressure. She has spent most of her adult life lying professionally while simultaneously conducting operations against American intelligence and military targets. Her cover survives for years despite increasing scrutiny from the FBI.

Elizabeth is arguably one of the tournament's most complete individual operators. She combines excellent physical conditioning, extensive hand-to-hand training, proficiency with firearms, stealth, disguise, and a willingness to kill immediately when an operation requires it. She is exceptionally disciplined and can maintain a cover story while frightened, injured, or emotionally compromised. Unlike many professional killers, she is equally comfortable obtaining information through patience and personal manipulation. Her principal weakness is ideological rigidity. Elizabeth sometimes continues dangerous operations because she believes in the mission rather than because the tactical circumstances still justify them. Emotional attachments can also affect her judgment, particularly involving her family. Even so, there are remarkably few obvious holes in her skill set.

During the operation against the covert American training installation known as Martial Eagle, Elizabeth infiltrates the guarded facility alongside her husband and fellow KGB illegal, Philip Jennings. Once inside, she locates the commanders targeted by the KGB and shoots them, while Philip conducts reconnaissance elsewhere in the installation. The mission occurs in hostile territory populated by armed military personnel, yet she enters, performs the assassination, and gets back out. It is representative of Elizabeth at her most dangerous because nothing about the environment is designed in her favor. She is simply trained to enter places where she does not belong, kill the correct people, and disappear.

WENDY BYRDE

Wendy Byrde begins her criminal career almost accidentally when the money-laundering operation run by her husband Marty forces the Byrde family to relocate to the Missouri Ozarks under threat from a Mexican drug cartel. Unlike Marty, whose strengths are primarily financial and analytical, Wendy increasingly discovers that she has an aptitude for power itself. Her earlier experience in political campaigns gives her an instinctive understanding of influence, public presentation, coalition building, blackmail, and the manipulation of ambitious people. Over time she becomes directly involved in negotiating with cartel leadership, casino owners, politicians, organized criminals, and law enforcement. By the later stages of the story, Wendy is not merely surviving Marty's criminal enterprise. She is one of its principal architects.

Wendy is physically among the weakest contestants. She has no serious combat training and would be in enormous danger if a skilled killer encountered her unexpectedly at close range. Her strengths exist almost entirely before that moment occurs. Wendy is extraordinarily good at identifying what someone fears, wants, or needs to believe. She lies convincingly, changes strategies quickly, and is willing to make decisions that more conventionally moral people cannot. She is also frequently underestimated because she does not look threatening. Her weaknesses are ambition and overconfidence. Wendy sometimes creates danger because she would rather increase her power than accept a safe compromise, and she has a tendency to assume that she can eventually manipulate whatever consequences result.

The death of her brother Ben is the clearest demonstration of how lethal Wendy can become without ever holding the weapon. Ben learns too much about the Byrdes' cartel activities and repeatedly behaves in ways that expose the family. Wendy initially flees with him and desperately tries to find a solution, but eventually concludes that keeping him alive places her children in unacceptable danger. She leaves Ben alone at a restaurant and provides the information that allows cartel assassin Nelson to find him. Nelson takes Ben away and executes him. Wendy is devastated by the decision, but she still makes it. Her danger lies precisely there: when she finally concludes that someone must die, even love may not protect them.

BARRY BERKMAN

Barry Berkman is a former United States Marine who served as a highly capable marksman before returning home psychologically damaged and directionless. He is subsequently recruited by Monroe Fuches into contract killing and becomes a professional assassin. Barry possesses extensive experience with rifles, pistols, surveillance, ambushes, and rapidly killing armed opponents. Unlike assassins who depend entirely on careful preparation, Barry is also frighteningly effective when a situation becomes chaotic. He repeatedly survives encounters with criminal organizations, rival killers, police, and military-trained opponents. His attempt to abandon killing for an acting career reveals how much of his identity has been built around a skill that comes disturbingly naturally to him.

In pure combat ability, Barry belongs near the top of the field. His firearms proficiency is exceptional, his military experience gives him tactical instincts, and he can transition from hesitation to extreme violence almost instantly. He is also capable of appearing harmless or socially awkward, which can cause people to underestimate him. His major weakness is psychological instability. Barry is not the cold, disciplined professional that Mike Ehrmantraut or Elizabeth Jennings can be. Anger, panic, shame, and emotional attachment can overwhelm his judgment and turn controlled violence into reckless violence. He can also become strangely passive when not given a clear objective. Barry is therefore at his most dangerous when he has identified exactly whom he wants dead and stops caring what happens around him.

That version of Barry appears at the monastery at the end of the second season. Enraged after learning that Fuches is there, Barry enters a compound occupied by armed Burmese and Chechen gang members and begins moving through it almost mechanically, shooting people as he searches for his target. He kills Esther immediately and continues through room after room, even killing Mayrbek, a Chechen gunman Barry himself trained and who lowers his guard when he recognizes him. Fuches ultimately escapes, but the building behind Barry is filled with bodies. The scene is frightening because Barry is not executing an elegant assassination plan. He is simply demonstrating how many armed people a trained killer can overwhelm once rage removes his remaining restraint.

LUCAS HOOD

Lucas Hood is the assumed identity of an unnamed master thief who spends fifteen years in prison following a failed diamond robbery, then emerges and takes the identity of the murdered sheriff of Banshee, Pennsylvania. Before imprisonment he was already a skilled professional criminal experienced in theft, infiltration, firearms, and violence. Prison turns him into something considerably harder. As sheriff, Hood spends years confronting organized crime, armed gangs, tribal criminals, military veterans, assassins, and professional fighters while simultaneously conducting robberies and hiding his own identity. His unusual life gives him experience on both sides of criminal encounters, although unlike Vic Mackey he was never genuinely trained as a police officer.

Hood's most obvious strength is his almost absurd capacity to continue fighting after sustaining punishment that would stop most people. He is an excellent hand-to-hand fighter, comfortable with firearms, physically strong, fast, aggressive, and highly improvisational. He has extensive experience burglarizing secure locations and instinctively looks for unconventional ways into and out of structures. Hood's weakness is that he frequently accepts physical confrontations he could avoid. He is tough enough that this often works, but his willingness to trade damage becomes much more dangerous when the opponent has a firearm or when injuries accumulate. He is also more impulsive than the tournament's methodical killers. Hood frequently survives because he can win chaos, not because he prevents chaos from occurring.

His prison confrontation with the Albino explains much of what Hood eventually becomes. The Albino is a much larger inmate used to terrorize Hood on behalf of criminal boss Mr. Rabbit. Knowing that another confrontation is inevitable, Hood deliberately gets himself sent to solitary confinement and spends the time preparing physically. When the Albino eventually corners and humiliates him in front of the prison population, Hood suddenly attacks with the Albino's own razor. The fight remains brutally competitive despite the Albino's injuries, but Hood blinds him, incapacitates him, and finally kills him by crushing his neck with gym weights. Hood survives not by being stronger than the larger man, but through preparation, viciousness, and a refusal to stop once the fight begins.

JAX TELLER

Jackson “Jax” Teller grows up inside the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club and eventually becomes president of its Charming, California chapter. His adult life is shaped by gunrunning, gang warfare, organized crime, law-enforcement pressure, internal club politics, and violent conflicts involving rival motorcycle clubs, street gangs, cartels, and the True IRA. Jax begins the series questioning whether the club can move away from violence, but years of betrayal and loss gradually make him one of its most ruthless leaders. He is an experienced shooter, rider, street fighter, planner, and criminal negotiator who has personally killed numerous people and ordered many more deaths.

Jax's greatest strength is the combination of direct violence and leadership experience. Unlike a pure strategist such as Wendy Byrde, Jax can personally carry out the plan when negotiations fail. Unlike a pure killer such as Barry, he is accustomed to thinking about alliances and consequences beyond the immediate fight. He is physically capable, comfortable with guns, and difficult to frighten. His weaknesses are emotionality and recklessness. Family and club loyalty repeatedly drive Jax into decisions that a colder operator would avoid. Revenge can overwhelm strategic judgment, particularly later in his life. He is also accustomed to having SAMCRO around him. Alone, he remains dangerous, but loses the manpower and intelligence network behind many of his successes.

One of Jax's most methodical displays of lethality comes during his plan to sever SAMCRO's relationship with the True IRA. After participating in Clay Morrow's prison extraction, Jax allows Galen O'Shay to believe the arrangement is proceeding as agreed. At the hangar, Jax abruptly shoots Galen in the head while other Sons kill Galen's men. He then personally executes Clay, shooting him first in the throat and then repeatedly in the chest. The group rearranges the scene to support a story in which Clay killed Galen and was then killed in response, giving the IRA a version of events it can politically accept. The sequence combines nearly every dangerous aspect of Jax: deception, patience, organizational planning, sudden violence, and immediate manipulation of the aftermath.

MIKE EHRMANTRAUT

Mike Ehrmantraut is a former Philadelphia police officer who relocates to Albuquerque after the murder of his son and gradually becomes a fixer, investigator, bodyguard, enforcer, and assassin within the Southwest drug trade. Mike's police background gives him expertise in surveillance, investigations, evidence, weapons, and the behavior of law enforcement. His criminal work adds extensive experience with counter-surveillance, covert entry, sniper operations, assassination, body disposal, and organized-crime security. He eventually becomes one of Gustavo Fring's most trusted operatives and is repeatedly assigned problems requiring discretion rather than brute force.

Mike's defining strength is disciplined competence. He rarely enters a dangerous situation without first observing it. He notices cameras, escape routes, lines of fire, suspicious vehicles, and behavioral anomalies that other people overlook. He is an excellent marksman and remains calm under gunfire, but he prefers to arrange confrontations so that shooting skill is almost beside the point. Mike also understands how criminals think without sharing their need to prove themselves. His weaknesses are age and attachment. He remains physically capable, but younger contestants have advantages in speed and endurance. His concern for his family can be exploited, and his personal code occasionally causes him to spare people who later become problems. More than almost anyone else in the tournament, Mike benefits from even a few minutes in which to study his surroundings.

His assault on the cartel gunmen holding Duane Chow demonstrates his style nearly perfectly. Mike arrives at the chemical warehouse carrying Mylar balloons, releases them into the electrical lines, and shorts out the building's power, disabling its security systems. He then uses darkness, noise, and improvised distractions to isolate the armed men inside. When one gunman hides behind a wall with Chow, Mike watches Chow's raised hands to estimate the unseen man's position and shoots through the wall. Four armed captors are eliminated with Mike remaining almost completely in control of the encounter. It is not merely marksmanship. Mike systematically removes every advantage his opponents possessed before giving them the opportunity to fight him.

BOYD CROWDER

Boyd Crowder is a career criminal from Harlan County, Kentucky, whose life moves through a remarkable series of identities without ever straying very far from violence. He begins as a white-supremacist criminal using explosives, experiences an apparent religious conversion, becomes a preacher, and eventually builds his own criminal organization involved in robbery, narcotics, extortion, and murder. A former coal miner with substantial knowledge of explosives, Boyd is also a capable gunman. His defining talent, however, is language. Boyd can preach, threaten, flatter, rationalize, manipulate, and recruit with equal enthusiasm. Even people who know he is dangerous often continue listening to him.

Boyd's greatest strength is his ability to change the emotional logic of a situation while it is happening. He can turn enemies into temporary allies, convince frightened people to take enormous risks, and talk long enough to discover what another person actually wants. He also has practical criminal skills, particularly with explosives and firearms, that prevent him from being merely a con man. His biggest weakness is that he sometimes believes his own rhetoric. Pride, resentment, and his fixation on Ava and Raylan repeatedly distort his judgment. Boyd also has a tendency to create unstable alliances with people who eventually betray him. In a tournament where contestants begin knowing virtually nothing about one another, however, his ability to understand someone during the encounter itself could be extraordinarily valuable.

Late in his criminal career, Boyd finds himself wounded, handcuffed to a hospital bed, guarded by law enforcement, and targeted for assassination. Carl is sent into the room with a gun to kill him. Boyd does not physically overpower Carl. Instead, while staring at the weapon pointed at him, he talks. He reminds Carl of their history and convinces him that they still have a future together. Carl knocks out the crooked officer involved in the plot and frees Boyd. Moments later, once Carl has served his purpose, Boyd shoots him, takes a law-enforcement uniform, and creates enough confusion to escape the hospital. Few scenes better capture the risk of giving Boyd Crowder time to speak. The person entering the room to execute him becomes the instrument of his escape.

NIKKI SWANGO

Nikki Swango enters the criminal world at a far lower level than most of the tournament's contestants. A parolee in Minnesota, she begins a relationship with her parole officer Ray Stussy and becomes his partner in increasingly serious schemes, initially centered on obtaining a valuable stamp from Ray's wealthy brother Emmit. Nikki has no military background, police training, criminal empire, or long career as a professional killer. What she does have is an extraordinary talent for games, deception, improvisation, and survival. A highly skilled competitive bridge player, Nikki naturally thinks in terms of incomplete information, probabilities, partnerships, and what another person is likely to infer from the evidence in front of them. Once she becomes entangled with V.M. Varga's organization, those instincts are applied to circumstances in which losing means death rather than losing a hand of cards.

Nikki's greatest strength is adaptability. She is repeatedly placed in situations where she begins at an enormous disadvantage and nevertheless identifies some path forward. She is intelligent, stubborn, deceptive, observant, and much tougher physically than she initially appears. She can withstand serious injury and continue thinking strategically. Her weaknesses are substantial. Nikki has no formal combat training and comparatively little experience with firearms or deliberate killing. Emotion, particularly her love for Ray and desire for revenge after his death, can push her toward confrontations she would be wiser to avoid. Against a trained assassin in a straight fight she is badly outmatched. Her best chance is almost always to make sure the encounter stops being a straight fight.

Her ordeal after the prison-bus attack is the clearest demonstration of why she belongs in the tournament at all. Varga's men engineer a crash while Nikki is being transported to prison, intending to murder her. She escapes into a frozen forest while chained to fellow prisoner Mr. Wrench, with armed pursuers following them. Both are eventually struck by crossbow bolts. When one attacker closes in, Nikki and Wrench use the chain connecting them as a weapon, catching the man between them and ultimately killing him with it. They then continue escaping through the wilderness despite their injuries. Nikki is not the superior fighter in the encounter and does not suddenly become one. She survives because she recognizes that the very restraint limiting her movement can be turned into an advantage. That capacity to improvise under extreme pressure is what makes her dangerous.

---

And that's our roster. I'll admit, there are some who most certainly won't make it to the end. Others that are strong favorites. Still, I think this will be more competitive than the High Fantasy Swordfighter Tournament, especially with the muliple arenas. We will do 4 posts for the first 4 groups. 8 will come out of that. I'll probably do the same for those 8, so two more posts, but different locations. Once it gets down to 4, we will move back to single elimination.

I wanted to try audio books again this month, and I ended up finishing two of them. And I read the two Hench series books by Natalie Zina Walschots because my local bookclub wanted to discuss them as an extra meetup. The main book was The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum.

1. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown, Audio 8h29m: This book was recommended in the Bullet Journal community and I was curious about it. It is like a guide to identifying and naming emotions. The author groups emotions into different categories and explores all the nuances we can experience as human beings. The audio was narrated by the author in a very conversational tone. I would say it’s a light, casual read about emotions.

2. The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum, 320p: Interesting speculative sci-fi in a world where people can have multiple bodies sharing the same mind. But more interestingly, it’s a society very unlike ours where gender and sexual organs are completely dissociated. People are assigned at birth by the Midwives with either of these two genders: Vails or Staids (which having nothing to do with biological sexual organs). It’s a weird book, with rich world-building, set in a complex society with mass surveillance and social media gig economy. Also, it’s about parenting. And a clear criticism of the binary gender status quo. Lots going on here.

3. Hench (Hench #1) by Natalie Zina Walschots, 385p: This is the same premise as the graphic novel (and TV series) “The Boys”, exploring the darker side of superhero culture, focusing on the consequences of superhero actions and their impact on ordinary people. The main character (Anna) starts calculating the collateral damage caused by superheroes and starts a revenge journey with a supervillain. There is office politics and satire. There is also body horror at the end, which threw me off a bit.

4. Villain (Hench #2) by Natalie Zina Walschots, 436p: In this second book it becomes even more clear how morally grey all the villains and superheroes truly are. Nobody is to be trusted, and we also have an unreliable narrator (Anna aka The Auditor). It deepens the toxic relationship between Leviathan and The Auditor, but since everything exists in shades of grey, it is not entirely clear who the victim is here (they are all villains in the end?). It was actually a challenging book for me, because the author challenged me by refusing to offer a clean line between good and evil, forcing me to sit with the uncomfortable reality of Anna’s descent into worse and worse choices. I thought the pacing was a bit off and the book could have been shorter if a lot of the office team-management shenanigans were reduced. The best character was Decoherence, and I loved all the quantum physics related names.

5. Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, Audio 6h: A conversation about women in the workplace filled with personal anecdotes from the author herself. She lays out all the issues with standard office environments, including biases and sometimes even a lack of proper women’s restrooms. She provides advice on how women can take more leadership positions, overcome the imposter syndrome and basically “sitting at the table”. She also emphasizes the importance of domestic equality, where both partners share the work of raising children and manage the home. It has an optimistic view of the future and a great message, but I found the author has some blind spots because she speaks from a unique position as a high level Silicon Valley Executive.

#readinglist #books #reading

On the morning of Wednesday 2 September 2026, a document was carried into the Tasmanian House of Assembly and laid on the table. It was an electronic petition, closed two days earlier, bearing 10,035 signatures. It asked the Parliament of Tasmania to impose a moratorium on any AI and data facility not already complete, and to keep that moratorium in place until five specific things existed: planning legislation written for these facilities rather than adapted to them, a public register of their energy and water consumption, a mechanism giving Parliament oversight of anything drawing more than fifty megawatts, a guarantee of permanent local employment, and a protection for Tasmanian households against utility price rises caused by connecting them.

Ten thousand and thirty-five is not a large number in absolute terms. In a state whose estimated resident population sat at roughly 579,000 at the end of 2025, it is a shade under two per cent of everybody, including infants. But Tasmanian parliamentary petitions do not usually reach four figures. This one closed on 31 August as one of the largest ever presented to the state's lower house.

What makes the petition worth reading closely is not its size but its specificity. It does not object to artificial intelligence, or to computing, or to industry. It is a procurement complaint. It says that decisions with multi-decade consequences for a small island grid and a small island water system have been taken in rooms the petitioners were not in, on the basis of information they have not seen, and that the machinery supposed to let them find out has not worked. It asks for the sequence to be reversed: rules first, then facilities.

That sequence has not been reversed. In the six months before the petition was tabled, one Firmus facility went into construction at St Leonards outside Launceston, a second was approved by the George Town Council at Bell Bay on 25 August by six votes to one, and a third was lodged with Latrobe Council for Wesley Vale. Together the three sites add up to something over 400 megawatts, all of it sought by a single Singapore-headquartered company. A week after the petition was tabled, the government listed six more proposals without saying whose they were.

What Ten Thousand People Were Actually Asking For

The petition was posted to the Tasmanian Parliament's e-petitions portal on 22 June 2026 and sponsored by Cecily Rosol, the Greens member for Bass, a former registered nurse who ran a counselling practice in Launceston before her election in March 2024. Its preamble states that Tasmanians have not been adequately consulted on the future of resource-intensive AI and data facilities before public resources were committed to large technology companies. That is the load-bearing sentence. Everything else follows from it.

Under the standing orders governing House of Assembly petitions, a tabled petition triggers one obligation: the government must table a response within fifteen sitting days of receipt by the Premier. That is the entire formal consequence. There is no threshold above which a petition compels a debate, no count that converts it into a binding instruction, no mechanism by which ten thousand names outrank ten. What the petitioners bought, with three months of organising, was a letter.

Tabatha Badger, the Greens member for Lyons and the party's spokesperson for science and information technology, put it plainly when the petition was tabled. More than ten thousand signatures was no surprise, she said, because Tasmanians were deeply concerned and being kept in the dark. She then identified the specific darkness: the latest AI factory proposed for Wesley Vale was about to go to planning assessment, and the Office of the Coordinator General was speaking to other proponents behind closed doors. Rosol framed it as a consent problem, saying the community had made clear how concerned it was about AI data factories proceeding without the government consulting them or putting guardrails in place.

The Office of the Coordinator General sits inside the state government as an investment attraction and facilitation body. On the government's own account, it has supported data centre proponents with site identification and stakeholder engagement. Its function is to make deals happen, and commercial negotiation of that kind is by nature confidential. The complaint is not that the office exists. It is that the office is the only part of the system holding a complete picture, and that picture is unavailable to anyone else, including the Parliament. When the House ordered the information tabled, the names still did not appear, and the Premier defended keeping them confidential.

An Island That Already Imports Its Own Electricity

Tasmania's pitch to the AI industry is hydroelectricity. The state has more than 2,600 megawatts of hydro capacity across roughly thirty power stations and more than fifty major dams, it reached a legislated one hundred per cent renewable generation target early, and it has a strategy branded the Battery of the Nation, underwritten by the proposed 1,500 megawatt Marinus Link interconnector to Victoria, whose first 750 megawatt stage is targeted for around 2030. Premier Jeremy Rockliff, announcing a world-first AI Factory Zone in northern Tasmania in June 2025 alongside Firmus co-chief executives Tim Rosenfield and Oliver Curtis, said Tasmania was set to lead the world in sustainable artificial intelligence. Rosenfield described the output as a new kind of green AI token.

The official numbers complicate the pitch. The Tasmanian Economic Regulator's Energy in Tasmania report for 2024-25, published in February 2026, records generation of 8,704 gigawatt hours against consumption of 10,671. Hydroelectricity contributed 6,343 gigawatt hours of that, down from 8,232 two years earlier. Basslink imports were 2,509 gigawatt hours; exports were 542. The regulator notes that Tasmanian consumption was met by on-island generation only during parts of September and October 2024.

That is the fact structuring everything else. In the most recent full year for which official figures exist, Tasmania consumed roughly 1,967 gigawatt hours more electricity than it generated and made up the difference by importing from the mainland over a cable. The battery of the nation was, that year, a net drain on the nation.

Now apply the arithmetic. Firmus has asked Hydro Tasmania for 450 megawatts across its three sites, equivalent to roughly 30 per cent of the state's current energy use, with a decision expected by the end of 2026. Take the slightly lower figure of 440 megawatts of continuous load: at a plausible high utilisation for AI training and inference, that works out at somewhere between three thousand and three and a half thousand gigawatt hours a year. Against 8,704 gigawatt hours of state generation, that is between roughly 35 and 40 per cent. Hydro Tasmania has gone to market seeking offtake for up to 1,500 gigawatt hours a year of new wind and solar, targeted to begin operating within five to six years: roughly half the load in question, arriving at best at the end of the decade. Firmus has said it will match its initial power use with renewable energy credits and finance suppliers to build double the renewable capacity it consumes. Badger's response to that has been consistent and difficult to argue with: the discussions, the applications and the processes for those renewable projects need to be under way as well, and they are not.

What Is Actually Being Built, And Where

Project Southgate, the flagship, is under construction at St Leonards outside Launceston. The company describes an initial 44 megawatt stage by 2026, doubling to 90, with a further 300 megawatt stage subject to approval, and investment of up to 2.1 billion Australian dollars over twelve months for the first tranche. Firmus secured a 104 megawatt power arrangement with Aurora Energy, the state-owned retailer. The design is fully liquid-cooled, which the company says uses up to sixty per cent less energy than conventional approaches.

Bell Bay is the big one. The 288 megawatt facility sits on the old Gunns pulp mill site at Long Reach. It attracted 349 public submissions and a separate electronic petition of nearly six thousand signatures, and around eighty protesters gathered outside the council building on the day of the vote. Councillors approved it six to one, with Winston Archer the sole dissenter, and attached thirteen pages of conditions: a noise survey within sixty days of operations commencing, an air quality assessment within twelve months, an updated bushfire and emergency plan covering the site's 276 diesel backup generators, and a twenty-four-hour annual cap on simultaneous multi-generator operation.

That generator condition, Condition 13, is the one Firmus has chosen to fight. It confines the diesel sets to unscheduled outages, routine maintenance between 8am and 6pm on weekdays, and genuine emergencies. On 10 September the company lodged its own appeal with the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, calling the condition unreasonable and asking to run the generators for limited augmentation of mains supply, to offset curtailment, manage energy security and maintain reliability during periods of energy market stress. Asked how often it expected to do so, Firmus declined to comment. A company selling green hydro AI is seeking permission to burn diesel when the grid runs short, which is the energy arithmetic above, conceded in a planning appeal.

Wesley Vale is the smallest and the most revealing. Fifty-two megawatts on the site of the former Wesley Vale pulp mill, with a 2,689 square metre data hall and forty diesel generators. Its cooling plan, as lodged, is rainwater capture supplemented by water delivered by truck during dry periods. Firmus had intended to draw from Tasmanian Irrigation, but that arrangement turned out not to be legally available for data centre use. The company says cooling is only required above 26 degrees Celsius, that trucking should be needed only in extreme dry periods, and has elsewhere said its facilities use less water than one restaurant. In early September Latrobe Council deferred its decision and asked Planning Minister Kerry Vincent to declare the proposal a major project, so that the state would assess it. The State Planning Office has said it is considering the request.

The one-restaurant claim is exactly the kind of statement a public transparency register, of the sort the petition asks for, exists to test. Nobody in Tasmania can currently verify or falsify it, because no standardised, published, audited figure for the water consumption of these sites exists. Which brings us to the research.

Measuring The Heat Nobody Priced In

In March 2026 a group of researchers led by Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, working with colleagues at Nanyang Technological University, Grenoble, INRIA, the University of Genoa and City University of Hong Kong, posted a paper to arXiv with an unshowy title and a genuinely startling result. They called the phenomenon the data heat island effect.

The method is simple to explain and hard to dismiss. The team took a reconstructed NASA MODIS land surface temperature dataset covering the whole world from 2004 to 2024 at 500 metre resolution, aggregated it to monthly values, stripped out seasonality and outliers, and overlaid the locations of data centres drawn from a commercial database of more than eleven thousand sites. Crucially, they discarded everything inside dense urban areas, whose surface temperatures are contaminated by roads, manufacturing and domestic heating. That left 8,472 locations and, after cleaning, 6,733 usable data points. For each site they calculated the difference between monthly temperature and the preceding average, then aligned every site on a common timeline whose zero point was the month that facility began operations.

The result is a step function. Averaged across the sites, land surface temperature rises by 2.07 degrees Celsius after operations begin, with a minimum of 0.3 and a maximum of 9.1. The finding is robust to the baseline window, holding between 2.03 and 2.12 degrees whether the comparison period is twelve months or ten years. For context, the classic urban heat island effect, the accumulated thermal signature of an entire city, has been estimated at between four and six degrees. A single category of industrial facility is producing between a third and a half of that.

It does not stay on site. The researchers ran the same calculation in expanding rings and found the signal reaching up to ten kilometres out, with a full degree still measurable at 4.5 kilometres. Overlaying gridded population data, they estimate up to 343 million people worldwide live within ten kilometres of a facility producing some level of this effect, and they identify three regions where previously unexplained warming trends line up with data centre clustering: the Bajío region of Mexico, Aragón in Spain, and Ceará and Piauí in north-eastern Brazil.

Now put Anne-Marie Bastian and Nicholla Thompson on that map. They are the president and secretary of the newly formed Environmental Awareness Association, and they live at Rowella, about two kilometres from the Bell Bay site: well inside the radius at which the Cambridge-led study measures a full degree of sustained warming. None of this appeared in the planning assessment, because there is no head of consideration in Tasmanian planning law under which it could have.

Trucked Water And A Number Called WCI

The second paper, posted to arXiv in June 2026 by Basit Akinade, Amobichukwu Amanambu and Jonathan Frame with Shaolei Ren, does something structurally similar for water. Its central move is to reject the framing in which data centre water use is a national volumetric question. Nationally, the United States aggregate looks modest. The authors argue that aggregation is precisely what conceals the problem, because burden is local and varies enormously.

They formalise what they call the Water and AI Feedback Loop, in which cooling demand consumes water, water scarcity constrains where facilities can go, and AI tools are simultaneously sold as a way to improve water system efficiency. Then they introduce a single diagnostic number, the Water Consumption Impact index, defined as a facility's peak-day consumptive water use divided by the maximum deliverable capacity of the public water system hosting it. A value above one means that on its worst day, one facility's cooling demand would exceed everything the utility can physically deliver to everybody.

Applied to ten United States sites where utility and facility data can be assembled from environmental reports, permit filings and public records, the index spans nearly three orders of magnitude. Henderson, Nevada, served by the vast Southern Nevada system, registers 0.002. Lebanon, Indiana, registers 1.34, meaning peak-day consumptive demand already exceeds the host utility's entire 17.4 megalitre per day capacity. Expressed in household terms, Council Bluffs in Iowa carries the largest absolute footprint at around 9,220 household equivalents.

The elegant part is the decomposition. The index factorises into three components: demand scale relative to the host system, the consumptive ratio set by cooling technology, and a peaking factor reflecting how spiky demand is. Each maps to a different policy lever, and the binding constraint differs by site. At Lebanon and Council Bluffs the peaking factor dominates, so workload scheduling and thermal storage would move the number. At Mayes County and The Dalles it is sheer demand scale, fixed at the moment of siting. Dry cooling can eliminate consumptive use almost entirely, but at a power penalty of 25 to 35 per cent, which is the trade the Wesley Vale application is implicitly making by proposing rainwater and trucks. Projecting forward at a conservative thirteen per cent annual growth rate, the authors find Council Bluffs and Mayes County crossing the hundred per cent threshold by 2029.

There is a counterexample Tasmanian readers should sit with. The Potomac basin hosts the densest concentration of data centres on earth, roughly 5,400 megawatts across more than 290 facilities, and American Rivers named it the most endangered river in the United States in 2026 citing that build-out. Yet its community-scale index comes out at around 1.9 per cent, below the small-town sites, because the metropolitan utilities serving it are enormous. Burden is a ratio, not a volume.

Tasmania is a small system. The honest caveat is that nobody can currently compute this index for Bell Bay or Wesley Vale, because neither the denominator, the host utility's peak-day deliverable capacity, nor the numerator, the facility's peak consumptive demand, is published. That absence is not a gap in the research. It is the thing the petition asks to be fixed.

Why Concentration Is The Variable That Matters

The third paper, from Danbo Chen and colleagues including Yongyang Cai and Ani Katchova, takes the question up a level. It builds what the authors call an AI-energy coupling framework, combining large language model analysis of corporate disclosures, policy documents and media reporting with conventional energy-system modelling, to forecast data centre electricity demand from 2025 to 2030.

Its headline findings get quoted: more than ninety per cent of projected compute capacity concentrated in North America, Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific; the six leading firms' combined electricity consumption rising from roughly 118 terawatt hours in 2024 to between 239 and 295 by 2030. But the useful instrument is the Power Stress Index, projected data centre demand divided by total projected regional generation capacity, with thresholds at 0.10, 0.25 and 0.40. Ireland approaches 0.5, implying AI-related consumption could absorb nearly half of local generation. Oregon exceeds 0.25. Virginia, Nebraska and Washington sit between 0.20 and 0.30.

And then there is this: the paper lists Australia, along with Texas and Japan, among the diversified systems maintaining an index below 0.10, absorbing new load comfortably.

That number is correct at the national scale and misleading at the scale that matters. Australia's National Electricity Market is a continental system. Tasmania is a small, hydrologically constrained region connected to it by a single cable, which in 2024-25 it used to import nearly a fifth of what it consumed. Run the same index on Tasmania alone using the regulator's own figures, and 440 megawatts against 8,704 gigawatt hours of state generation produces a ratio north of 0.35, between the paper's moderate and high stress thresholds and in the same territory as Oregon. The framework does not fail here. It succeeds, in that its central argument, that concentration produces regional disparities invisible in national averages, applies recursively. Tasmania is the sub-national case hiding inside the national case that was hiding inside the global one.

The Machinery That Keeps The Decision Out Of Sight

None of the three research findings, on heat, on water, or on regional grid stress, is a legally relevant consideration in the assessment of a Tasmanian data centre application. This is not an oversight by any official. It is a structural feature of the instrument being used.

The Land Use Planning and Approvals Act 1993 is the framework under which George Town Council assessed a 288 megawatt AI facility. Bastian put it neatly when explaining why her association was preparing an appeal, saying that using a 33-year-old ruler to measure something as futuristic as a data centre was inappropriate. Mayor Greg Kieser, who voted for approval, was equally direct from the other side, saying the council could not see any grounds to do anything more than approve it in terms of the local planning scheme. Latrobe's mayor, Peter Freshney, considering Wesley Vale, observed that the legislation was written when data centres would not even have been considered feasible.

What a council can assess is land-use compatibility. What it cannot assess is the cumulative impact of three facilities on one grid, the state-level consequences for electricity supply and price, the water system effects beyond the immediate connection, or anything resembling social licence. The 349 submissions on Bell Bay were, in the great majority, about matters the decision-maker had no lawful power to weigh. That is not conspiracy; it is jurisdiction. And it works everywhere.

Opacity is reinforced upstream by the commercial layer. Internationally the instrument of choice is the non-disclosure agreement. Researchers at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia found that of thirty-one localities with an existing, approved or proposed data centre, twenty-five had NDAs making it difficult or impossible for residents to obtain information, and a review of more than thirty proposals across fourteen states found officials routinely signing NDAs and negotiating with what appeared to be shell companies. The agreements typically prohibit disclosure that any discussions are occurring at all, and treat the existence of the NDA as itself confidential. Developers offer a genuine defence: for a publicly traded company, a prospective campus is material non-public information, and an NDA protects local officials from inadvertently breaching insider trading rules. That explains why a confidentiality regime exists. It does not explain why it survives the deal.

There is no public evidence that Tasmania's Office of the Coordinator General uses NDAs in the American manner, and it would be wrong to assert otherwise. What is documented is similar in effect: an investment facilitation body in confidential discussions with proponents whose identities stayed confidential even after the House ordered the information produced.

What Communities Elsewhere Have And Have Not Won

The Tasmanian petitioners are late arrivals to a fight that has been running for the better part of a decade, and the international record is instructive precisely because it is mixed.

Ireland is furthest along and least encouraging. Data centres account for roughly half of electricity demand in the Dublin region, and the transmission operator effectively stopped offering new connections there, a position understood to extend to at least 2028. But when the Commission for Regulation of Utilities came to formalise policy, it explicitly declined to impose a moratorium, calling it neither appropriate nor proportionate, and instead adopted connection measures under which data centres must meet at least eighty per cent of annual demand with additional renewable generation built in Ireland, for applications lodged after 12 December 2025. A de facto freeze became a conditional yes.

The Netherlands went further and got more. A nine-month national moratorium on new hyperscale construction was imposed while planning rules were rewritten, and the rewritten rules took licensing away from local authorities and gave it to national government. Facilities above seventy megawatts of IT capacity or ten hectares are now banned across most of the country, with limited northern exceptions. Meta's 200 megawatt Zeewolde campus, which already had planning permission, died when the Senate refused to sell the state-owned land it needed, and the site has since been rezoned so it cannot be used for data centres at all.

Chile shows what litigation can achieve and what it cannot. Residents of Cerrillos in Santiago formed a group called MOSACAT after learning of Google's proposed 200 million dollar project in 2019, protested through to 2023, and in early 2024 an environmental court partially reversed the permit, requiring the application to be revised to account for climate change. The design as originally lodged would have drawn 7.6 million litres of potable water a day from a drought-stressed aquifer. Google paused and redesigned to air cooling. The community changed the machine. It did not stop the building.

Tucson is the sharpest lesson. In August 2025 the city council voted unanimously to reject Project Blue, a 290-acre development linked to Amazon that would have become the largest customer of both the local electricity and water utilities. It was an unambiguous democratic victory. The developer then obtained the zoning it needed from Pima County instead, announced an air-cooled design, and proceeded. The venue changed; the project did not.

And outside Memphis, where xAI's Colossus 2 data centre draws power from a gas turbine plant just across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, the NAACP sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech in April 2026 over twenty-seven gas turbines running without an air permit. In June the United States Department of Justice moved to intervene, seeking dismissal on national security grounds, with a Defense Department official arguing that Grok was one of only four frontier models able to support national security applications.

The Tools In The Box And What Each One Does

The instruments available to a community in the path of this build-out form a ladder, and every rung has a known failure mode.

Petitions generate a mandatory written response and nothing else. Their real function is evidentiary: they establish, in a form a parliament cannot ignore, that opposition is broad rather than the work of a handful of activists. Ten thousand signatures did not stop Bell Bay. They did make the claim that the community is relaxed about this much harder to sustain, and Kieser's remark that there was no formal polling but the overwhelming message received was supportive with caveats sits awkwardly beside them.

Planning objections are the most concrete tool and the most narrowly bounded. The 349 Bell Bay submissions produced thirteen pages of conditions, which is a real outcome. What they could not produce was refusal, because the grounds that would justify refusal are not grounds the scheme recognises.

Merits appeals sit one rung up and cost money. Bastian and Thompson faced an estimated twenty to fifty thousand dollars to challenge the approval at the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, within a fourteen-day window, and lodged anyway: Thompson and five neighbours, Bastian among them, brought one of five community appeals, citing light and noise pollution, quality of life, tourism and air quality. A tribunal reviews the decision against the same planning scheme that produced it, so unless the council erred in applying that scheme the appeal fails, however strong the underlying case about water or heat or grid capacity. Right to information requests hit the commercial-in-confidence exemption exactly where the interesting material lives. Judicial review polices process, not substance. Local elections can change a council but not its statutory powers, and in Tucson the county simply approved what the city had refused.

Which leaves the two instruments that actually bind: legislation, and a moratorium imposed by whoever holds the pen. The Netherlands demonstrates that both work, and demonstrates the precondition, which is a national government willing to strip the decision away from the local level and take the political cost of doing so.

What A Non-Binding Motion Changes

The Tasmanian Parliament has produced two things that are more than gestures. The first is the inquiry. The House of Assembly's Standing Committee on Government Administration A commenced an inquiry into AI data centres on 5 August 2026, and submissions closed on 21 September. Its terms of reference are broad in exactly the way the planning system is narrow: to recommend legislation or regulation needed to protect public resources and the environment, improve planning arrangements, increase parliamentary oversight and transparency, provide for community consultation, and ensure the state receives tangible benefits. Its recommendations will be non-binding. Federally, the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee is running a parallel inquiry referred on 13 May 2026, reporting on 16 November, and the Australian government has signalled national AI legislation in early 2027.

The second is the motion. On 20 May 2026 a Greens motion ordering the government to reveal its funding and resourcing commitments to Firmus, the advice it had received about the AI factory, and the details of water consumption arrangements, passed the House of Assembly unanimously. A later Greens motion required the government to table, by 8 September, details of every AI data proponent working with the Office of the Coordinator General, with their locations and estimated power and water needs. The government complied, in form. Its document disclosed six confidential proposals beyond Firmus's three: two at feasibility stage with a preferred site selected and four at concept stage, including one at each stage estimated at 200 to 300 megawatts and a 50 megawatt concept that had expressed interest in the closed Liberty Bell Bay manganese smelter site, together at least 500 megawatts. It named none of the proponents. Omitted information, the document explained, was either not yet available, not sufficiently settled, not capable of reliable estimation, or had been provided to the office in confidence. Firmus said it was behind none of the six.

What did the May motion change? Less than its unanimity suggests. It passed in May. In June, Firmus lodged for Wesley Vale. In August, Bell Bay was approved. In September, the government answered the second motion with a document that counted the other proponents and withheld their names. An order of the House to produce documents is not self-executing, and compliance can be complete in form and empty in substance. It is a political question, and a government that judges the cost of non-compliance lower than the cost of disclosure will simply absorb it.

The government's own answer has arrived in the same register. Felix Ellis, the minister responsible for the digital economy, had told Parliament in August that the government would not consider a moratorium. What it offers instead is a draft Statement of Expectations for Data Centres and AI Infrastructure, issued by Ellis and Energy Minister Nick Duigan, covering community engagement, responsible water use, support for the energy system and renewable generation, network cost sharing, energy security and compliance with existing approvals. It is non-statutory, and public feedback closes on 12 October. Set beside the petition's five asks, it answers each with an expectation rather than a rule. Badger called it an absolute joke.

This is the uncomfortable finding. Two parliamentary orders for transparency, a ten-thousand-signature petition, a standing committee inquiry, a federal inquiry and three studies quantifying heat, water and grid impacts have collectively not altered the sequence in which anything is happening. The construction schedule is the only clock keeping time.

Ten Thousand Signatures Against A Construction Schedule

What the Tasmanian case exposes is a mismatch between the speed of the tools and the speed of the build. A parliamentary inquiry takes months to report and its recommendations are advisory. National legislation is flagged for 2027. Marinus Link's first stage arrives around 2030. Hydro Tasmania's new wind and solar offtake begins in five to six years. Every governance response is measured in years. The facilities are measured in months: Firmus described Project Southgate's first 2.1 billion dollar tranche as a twelve-month build.

At Wesley Vale the build did not wait for the paperwork. Less than three weeks after Latrobe Council asked the state to take over the assessment, the ABC reported excavation beyond the scope of the approved forest practices plan, transportable buildings, and piles of dirt and blue metal on a site with no planning permit. Firmus said the activities did not require planning approval and would take about four weeks. Freshney, pointing to a written commitment from the company, said undertaking work without permits was not consistent with it. Firmus agreed to stop while the council assesses.

That asymmetry is not accidental and not unique to Tasmania. It is the operating logic of the global build-out, visible in Ireland's connection queue, in Zeewolde, in Cerrillos, in Tucson's county rezoning, in the unpermitted turbines at Southaven. Infrastructure gets built inside the window during which the rules governing it are still being drafted, and once built, the rules are written around it rather than applied to it. The warning that AI infrastructure has stopped being a marginal digital service and become a structural component of power system dynamics is a statement about planning horizons as much as about electricity.

There is a version of this story in which the petitioners are wrong about the substance. Firmus may be right that liquid cooling makes its facilities dramatically more efficient, that rainwater capture is adequate at Wesley Vale, that renewable credits and financed generation will more than cover the load. The 115 permanent positions at Bell Bay and the 380 construction jobs are real jobs in a region that lost the pulp mill those sites once hosted. Nothing in the three studies proves that any specific Tasmanian facility will produce a two-degree heat island or breach a water utility's peak capacity, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise.

But that is the petition's point, and it is procedural rather than technical. Every one of those propositions is testable. None has been tested by anyone independent of the proponent, because the register that would allow testing does not exist, the legislation that would require it has not been written, and the oversight mechanism the petitioners asked for over anything above fifty megawatts is not on any government's timetable. The community is being asked to accept, on the word of a company and a facilitation office it cannot see inside, claims that a published number would settle in an afternoon.

Ten thousand and thirty-five people worked out that this was the actual question and put their names to it. The formal reward is a government response within fifteen sitting days, whose headline a minister had already delivered on the floor. The informal reward is that the argument has moved, permanently, from whether Tasmanians care to what the government is prepared to disclose. That is smaller than the petitioners wanted and larger than the mechanism was designed to deliver. Whether it arrives before the concrete does is a different question, and on current evidence the concrete is winning. At Wesley Vale, the blue metal arrived before the permit.

References

1. Parliament of Tasmania. “AI Data Facilities in Tasmania, e-petition 147-26.” Posted 22 June 2026, closed 31 August 2026. https://haepetitions.parliament.tas.gov.au/haepet/Home/PetitionDetails/147
2. Tasmanian Greens MPs. “Greens Table Massive AI Data Centre Moratorium Petition.” 2 September 2026. https://tasgreensmps.org/media-releases/greens-table-massive-ai-data-centre-moratorium-petition/
3. Tasmanian Greens MPs. “Greens' Motion for AI Answers Passes Parliament.” 20 May 2026. https://tasgreensmps.org/media-releases/greens-motion-for-ai-answers-passes-parliament/
4. Parliament of Tasmania. “E-Petitions, House of Assembly.” https://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/petitions/hoa/e-petitions
5. Parliament of Tasmania, Standing Committee on Government Administration A. “Inquiry into AI Data Centres in Tasmania.” 2026. https://parliament.tas.gov.au/committees/house-of-assembly/standing-committees/government-administration-committee-a/inquiries/inquiry-into-ai-data-centres-in-tasmania
6. ABC News. “Firmus 288-megawatt AI data centre at Bell Bay, Tasmania gets approval after 6-1 council vote.” 25 August 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/firmus-ai-bell-bay-receives-george-town-council-approval/107074336
7. ABC News. “Northern Tasmanians prepare to fight George Town Council AI data centre approval.” 30 August 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-30/ai-data-centre-tasmania-firmus-technology-george-town/107089468
8. ABC News. “Firmus plans to truck water in and use rainwater to cool proposed Wesley Vale AI data centre.” 27 August 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-27/firmus-truck-water-rainwater-cool-wesley-vale-ai-data-centre/107083230
9. ABC News. “Firmus wants to build three AI data centres in Tasmania, but can the state handle them?” 3 July 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-03/firmus-ai-data-centres-is-tasmania-ready/106869862
10. ABC News. “Six new AI data centres proposed for Tasmania, but companies behind them are being kept secret.” 9 September 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-09/six-new-confidential-data-centre-proposals-tasmania-revealed/107131974
11. ABC News. “AI data centre company Firmus lodges TASCAT appeal against restrictions on generator use.” 15 September 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-15/firmus-technologies-lodge-tascat-appeal-for-generator-use/107144572
12. ABC News. “AI data centre company Firmus starts development work at Wesley Vale without permit.” 26 September 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-26/firmus-starts-development-work-without-permit-wesley-vale/107198264
13. Pulse Tasmania. “Greens call Tasmania's new data centre expectations 'an absolute joke'.” 7 September 2026. https://pulsetasmania.com.au/news/greens-call-tasmanias-new-data-centre-expectations-an-absolute-joke/
14. Firmus. “Tasmanian world-first AI Factory Zone clears path for Firmus' Project Southgate.” June 2025. https://firmus.co/newsroom/tasmanian-world-first-ai-factory-zone-clears-path-for-firmus-project-southgate
15. Tasmanian Economic Regulator. “Energy in Tasmania Report 2024-25.” February 2026. https://www.economicregulator.tas.gov.au/Documents/26%201689%20CORRECTED%20Energy%20in%20Tasmania%20Report%202024-25.PDF
16. Hydro Tasmania. “Marinus Link is key to unlocking Battery of the Nation.” https://www.hydro.com.au/articles/media-releases/marinus-link-key-unlocking-battery-nation
17. Andrea Marinoni, Erik Cambria, Weisi Lin, Mauro Dalla Mura, Jocelyn Chanussot, Edoardo Ragusa, Chi Yan Tso, Yihao Zhu and Benjamin Horton. “The data heat island effect: quantifying the impact of AI data centers in a warming world.” arXiv:2603.20897, 21 March 2026, revised 21 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20897
18. Basit A. Akinade, Amobichukwu C. Amanambu, Jonathan M. Frame and Shaolei Ren. “AI Data Centers and the Water Use Feedback Loop.” arXiv:2606.21760, 19 June 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21760
19. Danbo Chen, Zijun Zhou, Yongyang Cai, Jiahong Qin, Ani Katchova and Lei Chen. “Concentrated siting of AI data centers drives regional power-system stress under rising global compute demand.” arXiv:2604.06198, 13 March 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06198
20. Commission for Regulation of Utilities, Ireland. “Large Energy User Connection Policy, decision paper.” December 2025. https://www.cru.ie/about-us/news/the-cru-publishes-its-decision-on-new-electricity-connection-policy-for-data-centres/
21. Data Center Dynamics. “The ongoing impact of Amsterdam's data center moratorium.” https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/the-ongoing-impact-of-amsterdams-data-center-moratorium/
22. Data Center Dynamics. “Chile partially reverses Google data center permit over water use concerns.” 28 February 2024. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/chile-partially-reverses-google-data-center-permit-over-water-use-concerns/
23. NPR. “NDAs are hiding data center deals, drawing ire from locals and attention from lawmakers.” 27 August 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5879528/data-center-nda-disclosure-louisiana
24. AZ Luminaria. “Tucson City Council rejects Project Blue data center amid intense community pressure.” 6 August 2025. https://azluminaria.org/2025/08/06/tucson-city-council-rejects-project-blue-amid-intense-community-pressure/
25. Utility Dive. “DOJ intervenes on behalf of xAI in data center gas turbine lawsuit.” 18 June 2026. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doj-intervenes-xai-data-center-gas-turbine-lawsuit/823267/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * S1, D5 was very productive, and very tiring. More about that in the morning. Now I need to get to my night prayers, take my night meds, and roll these old bones into bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 219.14 lbs. * bp= 131/76 (67)

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

Diet: * 06:00 – 1 banana * 07:00 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich, cottage cheese * 13:00 – pizza, steak, green beans, mashed potatoes, asparagas

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 06:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music * 09:00 – phone convo. with landlord * 09:30 – update profile settings at new community website * 10:00 – move prep chores at old house * 11:30 – update mailing address at Post Office, my bank, etc. * 13:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home w. the wife * 15:00 – listen to the Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – listening now to relaxing music on KAHL, San Antonio * 17:45 – load car with more furniture and boxes to make another run * 19:25 – home again, drinking cool water, thinking about bedtime

Chess: * 16:10 – moved in all pending chess games, winning one game, losing another. In general I'm disappointed in the quality of my play during the few days of this move so far.

The Moment You Thought You Failed, Jesus Was Not Finished With You

Can I sit with you for a minute? There may be something you have been carrying quietly—a mistake you cannot undo, a promise you did not keep, or a moment when fear got the better of you. Maybe nobody else knows how often you replay it. If that sounds familiar, watch this companion message about finding courage after failure when you have a quiet moment.

Failure has a way of changing the way you see yourself. One painful decision can make you forget every difficult day you survived, every time you kept going, and every act of courage that brought you this far. If you have been questioning your worth because of something in your past, read this related reflection on rebuilding faith when confidence is low and remember that your worst moment is not the complete story of your life.

Peter understood that kind of regret.

He told Jesus he would remain loyal, even if everyone else walked away. Peter meant it when he said it. Yet when pressure arrived and fear took over, he denied knowing Jesus three times.

Imagine how that must have felt afterward. Peter had not failed a stranger. He had failed someone he loved. He could not return to that courtyard, pull those words back into his mouth, and make the night happen differently.

You may know that feeling. You may wish you could return to a conversation, a relationship, or a decision and choose again. Since you cannot change it, you may have decided that the mistake changed you permanently.

But that is not how Jesus treated Peter.

After the resurrection, Jesus met Peter beside the water. He did not arrive with a list of accusations. He made breakfast. There is something deeply comforting about that scene. Peter was probably expecting to face his shame, but Jesus created a place where restoration could begin.

Then, in John 21:15, Jesus asked him, “Do you love me?”

Jesus knew the answer. He was not trying to embarrass Peter or trap him in his past. He was helping Peter see that failure had not erased his love, his calling, or his future. Peter had fallen, but Jesus had not thrown him away.

That may be what you need to hear today.

You are not disqualified simply because you became afraid. You are not beyond God’s reach because you made a poor choice. You are not weak because you reached a breaking point. You are human, and Jesus has always known how to meet human beings in the places where they feel most ashamed.

Courage is not a spotless record. Sometimes courage is returning to Jesus after you are convinced you have disappointed him. Sometimes it is whispering a prayer when you do not feel worthy to pray. Sometimes it is taking responsibility for what happened without allowing it to become your identity.

The enemy wants you to believe that regret is a locked door. Jesus shows us that regret can become a doorway to humility, wisdom, and a stronger life.

Peter did not continue because he had never failed. He continued because Jesus restored him. The man who once denied Jesus later became someone who spoke with remarkable courage. His failure did not vanish from his story, but it no longer controlled the ending.

Your painful chapter does not have to control your ending either.

You have already lived through moments you once thought would crush you. There were mornings when getting out of bed required more bravery than anyone realized. There were days when you answered people kindly while fighting a battle inside your own mind. There were nights when your faith felt small, yet you still reached toward God.

That counts.

You may not call it bravery because it did not feel impressive. It felt like survival. But courage often looks ordinary while we are living it. It looks like trying again, telling the truth, asking for help, setting a boundary, offering an apology, or choosing not to give up.

It has always been hard, but you have always been brave. That is one reason you have gotten this far.

Please do not misunderstand me. You did not make it here by your strength alone. Jesus was present in ways you may not have recognized. He was in the unexpected moment of peace. He was in the person who called at the right time. He was in the quiet inner nudge that told you to wait one more day before making a permanent decision.

And he is still here.

In John 21:17, Jesus told Peter, “Feed my sheep.” Jesus gave responsibility and purpose to the very man who probably wondered whether he could ever be trusted again. That is grace. Jesus did not pretend the failure had never happened. He proved that it did not have the final word.

Perhaps your next step is not to become fearless. Perhaps it is simply to believe that Jesus can still do something beautiful with your life.

You do not have to solve everything tonight. You do not need a perfect plan before morning. Just take one honest step toward Christ. Tell him where you hurt. Admit what you regret. Ask him to help you see yourself through his mercy instead of through your shame.

Then take the next step he places in front of you.

Your past may explain some of your pain, but it does not own your future. The same Jesus who restored Peter is not intimidated by your history. He knows every detail, and he has not stopped calling you forward.

You are still here. You are still learning. You are still loved. Jesus is still working.

And your story is not finished.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore more faith-based encouragement in the Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch more motivational messages on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Rent went up because of course it has. Manager got in my face because I commented on how sad that is in this economy. He also made a snarky comment about all Republicans being rude when I told him that he was being rude. More was said before. I responded, telling him that was both a stupid and ignorant thing to say, and I walked out the door. He hates Independents and Democrats.

It could be said that such a response as mine was also stupid. I don't respond well to aggressive male posturing. I understand that it's meant to intimidate, but it just makes me want to step into it and smile in dare. I don't, but I did probably smirk. It's also probably not smart to tell your residence manager that you don't like him. Oh, well. He shouldn't have been an ass.

It is sad that they keep raising the rent each year. Where I live, 31% of the workforce's wages are so low that a two bedroom apartment takes anywhere from 43% (You don't want to live there.) to 60.1% of their net income. This is before utilities and food, etc. It's just so ridiculous. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I don't think so. My shithole apartment costs more than the mortgage on my house had cost. That included multiple acres of land. It disgusts me.

I should probably eat. I thought I found a nice alternative, but it did not have central air, and that is so not happening voluntarily. I have many more thoughts on the subject of real-estate, but I would probably piss off a lot of people. Not that I mind that on this topic. I have found most landlords I've had contact with to be extremely oblivious and more than a little bit racist in varying directions. Don't get me started on my state's laws concerning the subject.

Also don't get me started on asshole judges who have zero compassion for the immigrant children coming before them. How dare you? How fucking dare you? I am so disgusted. If I did not dislike reading law books so much, the immigration situation would push me back to school. I am very annoyed. Food it is.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Who wants to be a missionair?

No love lost that sheep is accounted for there it goes as always money under and over the bridge under cover plugged in something arranging, checking in logging out whoop, there it is waving, signing, orchestrating pretending to be here sweetens up the bad, the ugly to make it taste great while you rot in hell digesting whatever it was you just swallowed there it is in print to make sure it is seen & heard rocked and rolled at the same time wait wait just in time smile for a dime now everyone needs a camera to q r on it all a microphone and the big screen for its protection not yours its to attack, trace and keep you contained hee, hoo, there it is as always active, stand by your mandate its not in the data it is the data for it to dot com about changing the earth into the workfloor arranged from the old rubbish going in the renewal sewer there's the real object of desired design the need for speed, again and again fibre vs cable and with it a wireless transfer in the head yes no 0 or 1 never both it is open or it is closed always in denial safety last its in my brain but I can't find it has anybody out there seen my brain i just had it rearranged better informed re educated mated 't was highly graded double checked on personal safety, enhanced with the best of the best required for thinking roundabout other brains output like wall constructs and frame formats it could do all kinds of things and me getting along with it tagging and so on ignore all others as a bonus plus a real must have not it was there before I went out just there on top of the pile it kept me around it within, it pushed everything around, relentless joined all made me the master of all dots, connecter of my universe, if you need a subscription account personal avatar and also triggers for tricks and tunes 't will lure you away from everything that is not but would be if not for, money on parade, street furniture, speed bumpin', traffic lights up, money in the eye of the share holder does naye share just holds if it needs regular updates jobs a marker for the market an appointment, steady pace, race presentation auditions volunteers a pet on the back public support sponsoring a good new show and a bad new agent items, channels, padded cellebrity, weapons, bulletheads, transportation, weather with reports, daily coverage and full reach in range of you and your mind to manipulate the rest it is and always will be money loose change to keep it pursed as lips of the bitter, angry, bloody shamed and extra insulted if it comes in a container, carries a name to re-remember, can easily be attained, has no value in it self has percentages written all over warning signs nonetheless a cheerfull disposition big name, calculated worth reaches out to your eyes only, semengly for a direct blow in the feelings of a possible gut, great balls to hire if it has a many ingredients but a small dose if it is wrapped surrounded by an ominous presence as if some wholy round spot light pointed it out to you smiles all over, teethering if it has no other reason to be just to be capable of transportation before consumption and after that target reached ends up in that mobile stuffin morgue you and I, we fase the first face of the real golden shower so hard on you, the abundance it claims importance urgency, be factual and fun brews leaderships to stay a float in stale ponds or drifts in water made wild by engines new waves made by thrusts to be, never not be there but to be everywhere at all time by all means necessary here it is to enter a world made to look alive to keep money breathing, respirating, aspiring airs with plastic lungs speak balloon speak or be spoken for on the current that moves mouth on straws only under glass it remains under surveillance we, us, are born in it graded by estimated promoted relegated put on hold and lied to, to eat shit everyone here has to be diagnosed with compulsive money disorder the urgency to spend, collect, count, tax another man to the bone, for poorer not richer to keep normal up to date spoonfed sugarmoney uses science not for knowledge but for protection, resisting self contempt, escapism, turning long before the grave it is a very thick layer of chemical grease publications transportation armour gps tracker power to poison and kill mesmerize in abundance billiards of salty pillars in small doses building fresh symbols tempel templates for good old modern sized worship high in air, broad on shoulders now lost forever, so big in wordly worlth, so spoken out, the wheel bends that wheel that only turns if pulled pushed, driven to the complete extinction of silence, peace, genuin calm replaced by an artificial form based on a time and place long gone we can not be zenzible anymore to much at stake silent a moment to long, 2 minutes, and they bury you alive place you under care under glass unreliable, insane, dangerous most likely to become a sniper of christmas shoppers fuck calm men and women not always active, untrackable, what do you mean there wasn't any reason for activity after the sun went down who does that.. fuck nature, you are not natural, you must watch the show of greater expectations, economy is begging hear its call see the guide watch the trailer and join the free trial sleep in? danger danger low voltage advertised, pictured, talked to turn to lookalive, thats money dancing, legs up, its miller time we are only in it for the senses the golden circus will not show truth for that is not in it it has no role did not play well with actors that is not what its developed for has nothing to do with reality reality didnt show up in its own show modern man does not want to be seen in its company truth has no place in our community, our homes they just want to bury it alive and never be able to pop up like it pops up for itself like messages calls buzzer buttons and beeps sirens and bells reality is bad for money it will crumble up in it be removed undone forgotten whole this stuff creates big big craters of fear in the club of fervent followers, the crowd, the noddin' heads and so it just shines, glitters, fights, raises its voice, turns around its own axes, relegates and regulates perception, dancing around its opponent, pokes, speaks freely about its own fantasy world, combines arms, triggers, guns and drugs, bridges self made gaps over and over over, paints, pokes, medicates, screws, rotates, entitles, unsubscribes, subscribes, rewrites its own laws if they fall, bend no longer to its will, a will filled with danger, paints some more, cans stuff and people in it, moves them daily, hour after hour hooked on time, contracted in it, it is the machine that needs machines and turns everyone in its own making, dotted lives from spot to spot to see all what it offers never see whatsnot on spot tracking into our devices just in there it lies not a monument but moments of spectacular abuse of battery power shrines are vaults that contain hidden air graves investments walls obligations closets demands influence streams motion pictures and subtitles translation and reproduction penetrating each moment to keep focus to build in our application ever present essence of means to the end look it moves if pushed it yelps if struck it rings if pulled tinkle tinkle little bar give my job a star it needs always every second is a battery bought a coalmine mined a war in the build up, agitatingly close, glasses half full empty in beholder, money is in the eye of the vault the brains behind the network and its pushed up hill to stream up to the top our efforts to earn its respect and need the urge for a continious entertainment mix can you feeeel it! in the royal house mission not free market visible everywhere keep the chains, i'll get buy forsaling around reality in 80 plus years stalled, the parking lots life lottery ticket sellers broke down life is like a box of boxes over and over eaten by electric current mouthing talk is cheap about ex expenses hearin aid, has any one seen my hearin aid commercial lately glasses crutches pipelines and modern fabrications to keep them moving about little big monsters, for lab. coating running stumbling barking enter prizing around greater wider higher sunweb if you have a bit of spare time could you would you google me much oblige, generated perhaps see me perform on nevermind the pop up wiki asking for donations to be free yeay its me digit_aly put a finger on it, you feel it, i don't not any more other moors already present the presentators cut still on? something broken, something new and something blue tooth same bundle different arrangement in nvrthere the after live event experience an after party political meeting for something poly more voices voice in the same timbre in a padded cell more to gain from the drain and sprain high lower waveforms way beneath those multi towered expectations operating in graphic scale calculating how much stuff every man for it self needs to fail in the eyes of the allround world class population classificated as used for the greater gold ration of language to claim the nation and or reclaimin' to b'hold and to cherry with a bigger blacker unripe berry ones worthless presence for a much needed glossy front shine please, rub us so it rubs back, look a genie, tell it your my wish list it will dot com true, it is there so it can be to behave for all overdressed needs wear it on feet not over head, sock it to 'm big full belly to belief, big phoney power resources is it a new version of warcraft or is it the tv news emitter battle of words, word war 7 now, speak no evil just shoot, why even bother you saw the show you heard um pulsating in your numbness made by the producers of everybodies bored domain if it needs a list automated memory multi lingual instructions if its in a box is operating to efficiënt to control has many options to do the same thing again and over if it comes with a menu a FAQ has a distinct form is made for upscale denial isn't there for any reason besides itself has a lot to offer that is not there but is somewhere indistinct usefull at a certain level on a certain degree with low pressure no wind and only after the pigs flew out (for migration to the breeding grounds in Piglatvia) has no value besides the prized value moves invisible like a ghost trader the shipment of the soon to be relieved taking hold of a new body straight from head to head dealing in cravings in need in highlights in luck listed bigger higher faster better more this with that and less that with this within moments it is all days only a look away from impact and ages away from truth whatever that is for we can not know with all that stuff here, there, everywhere the shrines, walls, the mine fields, the laser guided and needle pushed, buildings made from the lies to feed them locked in it, the million miles and all doors inbetween, a distance that we can't travel, because everydoor opens with a secret code changing every second, instigated by a computer no one knows how to shut down, out of reach because of its defenses, the wreckage of it, after it was plugged in out too often after that it somehow started to mine its own business look old ink in a fine minty jacket same things over and over same brain in a container claiming wisdom with a smart suit accounting accounting o what a biggloss its a commuter computer consumer in conflict contemplating how novel never seen that before is it a bird, is it a plain, a drone, a warhead no its an adaptation for rewriting the installation program just a moment before their treatment look new leadership ready for take off office official reports a new person at old desk top making a sound to be heard and seen as a vessel for commotion do the commotion please, one more time, for craft funks sake beat it just beat it that big hit machine never stops clobbering unless the power source runs out gonna jump and shout deliver containers to transport and hide the truth of lives lived very ordinary silent unnoticed not on show in alfabetical order surrounded by objects each container contains plastic, cardboard, branded cans, thin tin tintin tins, different solutions, wrappings, stuffings, strings, reserves and spares or the solid excrement of that juicy greasy money machine kept alive with fuel, battery power, solar pannels, wind turbines, and gunpowder, is also later day container content re placed by some more of same branding all I label the apples of my tree aapplllless, because they are mine to chop, sell, with aa easy to find on the interim internet aa stands for automated animosity, pp, people pleaser, llll, liberty loser, low liability, e, electric and ss, i'd rather not say... I got it I planted it I put it in my sun and it drank my rain so it must be mine and mind alone constant reloading the message good well lovely honest to gold the importance of being important a world of reason build for its own reasons a dust maker that sucks it own dust it needs an army, weapons, building structures, fueled tanks, rocket science equipment, media, a circus, high air offices, many computer interfaces, and rerereliable counters at counters, also has to be in reach, fast, reliable, simple will to kill switch and engage with whom ever the way way before installed bell chose to toll for at that time of ill bought days, kept in formed, effortless after all early efforts with its costs buried in the deep of water or sky look again, is real big, rest kept small shaded in darkness unbeknown unavailable diminished chopped abused kept on a leash rated graded intimidated repulsed denied overlooked judged overwhelmed buried in trash money shit flows in an always open sewer seen it all, as you have too solid door, keys, contacts, meters, isolation material, door bell, curtain and a many potted plans, for future live lost reality can only be contained for a short while before money shows its many, many short dot dot dot commin's breaks the body in mind, candy colored dream production for the heart of hearing, it has to be realalike, that it looks a lot like something that might be there if all looked just like this and this is the advertisement, them get sucked into a promo, stuff crammed porno, ocean of high surfing craves, we suffer, suffocate, all in all out in advertised space, and yet it is not, never will, it is not reality far from it so remote there isn't even an activation button to press its AI and has always been money, and like minded, mind you

written and directed by the same demanding people that brought Religion (with it endless war, competition, make believe, culture, information, nations, television, aircraft, pollution, chain store and story) its the web spin off

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naschrift

Ik tip toets veel tussendoortjes. Na een poosje worden die meestal stomvervelend en dan gooi ik ze weg, bespaar iedereen (allebei, ik en u) de moeite. Meestal weet ik na een paar minuten al dat het niks is en nooit iets zal worden of ik sla ergens op af en verkloot een goed begin, te vaak meegesleurd door een kudde op hol geslagen stokpaardjes. Dit begon als zo'n niks om de hakken stukje, het is niet gebaseerd op een ingeving maar vrije stijl, hoop van zegen stukje noem ik dit, die zegen is extreem zeldzaam, Het is meestal alleen wijsvinger gymnastiek. Maar op een zeker moment had ik plezier in het afmaken van dit hortende vehikel, Het veranderde in een lekker stukje, in elk geval voor het geestesoog van mijn toch inmiddels aardig zelf kritische brein. Ik gooi meer weg dan ik publiceer, en ik stel het één en ander uit omdat ik het moment voor openbaren me nog niet bevalt, wat er wel of niet in de lucht zit me niet aan staat, dat deed ik eerder dus niet, al heb ik geen idee of dit beter is en of dat uberhaupt iets uitmaakt.

I’ve never been much of a fan of horror, but occasionally I can be tempted by content with a Lovecraftian vibe. Boardgames like Arkham Horror, or stories where the entities from the Dungeon Dimensions lurk just beneath the surface. Dredge, a videogame about fishing with a demonic undercurrent, fitted very neatly into this mould. It sets the familiar mechanics of a resource gathering and adventure game in a world of quaint fishing villages that are clearly haunted by a dreadful event from their past. It is up you, an amnesiac fisherman, to piece the puzzle together and uncover what dreaded horror plagues this world. At about 10 hours of gameplay Dredge is a neat little game built on a solid gameplay loop and an intriguing setting. Nonetheless, as I progressed, I found it became more tedious than I had expected given its setup, the charm of its mystery rather diminished by its unwillingness to let me engage with the central mystery in any meaningful way.

The core gameplay loop of Dredge is that of a typical gathering game: you collect resources to survive and improve, so that you can collect more resources to get even better at collecting resources, so you can… well, you get the picture. For a game of this type, and a horror themed one at that, Dredge is actually fairly forgiving. While you have to fish to earn the money to upgrade and repair your boat, you don’t need it to simply survive. There is no timed mechanic that means that it’s game over once you run out of money. This means that if you are in a tight spot, you can always return to safer grounds, make enough money for the repairs or upgrades you need, before venturing forth to more treacherous but profitable waters.

As you start the game, you wash up in Greater Marrow, a small fishing village on one of a small cluster of islands. You quickly find out that the village has seen better days, but since a mysterious fog rolled in 20 years ago, things have been going downhill. Your sense that there is something profoundly amiss intensifies when you catch your first aberration: a grotesquely mutated variant of the fish species commonly found around the islands. The villagers are also taciturn or outright strange, and there is much that is hinted at but not spoken of. Not to mention the mysterious guy in the ruined mansion who wants you to collect some obviously occult artefacts for him. In short, it is a veritable parade of Lovecraftian tropes.

Working with the creepy and clearly deeply suspect occult resident of the ruined mansion is however the only way to move the game forward, and he will send you to collect five artefacts from each of the game’s main areas. Each small archipelago is its own biome with its own fish species, and one specific ‘boss’ enemy standing in the way of retrieving your quest item. Dredge does not involve combat, and you will have to avoid or outrun the monsters that might kill you, with each area set up as a small puzzle to deal with the main monster residing in it. In this Dredge is not unlike Subnautica: there is clearly something going on with nautically themed games that eschew violence.

Exploring each area for the first time is interesting and exciting, and creates a useful impetus to purchase the necessary upgrades for your vessel. Yet I found that the more I played, the less Dredge managed to captivate me. The fishing itself becomes increasingly monotonous, and while catching a new type of fish is initially exciting, the novelty wears off rather quickly as the game doesn’t do anything with its piscine variety. Barring some largely irrelevant sidequests, all you do is simply sell the fish to merchants, and nobody is really curious about why your latest flounder has seventeen eyes and a suppurating dorsal fin. In this, like so many other games, Dredge is haunted by the inescapable spectre of capitalism. Yes, there are 150 unique fish to catch, each with a detailed page in your fishing handbook, but in the end all that really matters is how much you can sell them for. The real devourer is the market that converts even eldritch fish into money.

It also didn’t help that for the most part, it becomes trivially easy to avoid fishing at night, allowing you to circumvent the game’s panic mechanic that makes you see things that may or may not be there, but will definitely imperil your vessel. Players with a more completionist bend may well be invested in the hunt for every last species of fish, but for me the interchangeable and repetitive nature of the fishing held little appeal and eventually got in the way of the story.

At the heart of Dredge there is indeed a typical Lovecraftian story about human hubris and the horrors it can bring forth from the Other Side. The game tells you that there is a Mystery with a capital M with about as much subtlety as a Kraken tearing a ship in two. You easily find enough clues to piece together that Something Bad happened twenty years ago because someone made some Poor Life Choices, and this may well have something to do with this creepy occult dude who keeps getting you to dredge up eldritch artefacts for him. But having that insight doesn’t really help you, as the game doesn’t let you do anything with that information except go out and fish some more. I kept expecting that by exploring the world further, I would find some way to avoid Creepy Occult Guy from inviting Cthulhu over, but there are no options but to keep on fishing. The characters you meet in the game aren’t much help either in unravelling the mystery, as most of them only have a handful of dialogue options limited to their specific sidequests, which you quickly exhaust.

Games are not obliged to hand you all the lore or exposition you want, and often a lack of knowledge is what builds the sense that there is something eerily wrong with a place that you cannot put your finger on. In Dredge however you can very quickly put an entire tentacle on the source of the wrongness. The game misunderstands what the appeal of a good mystery is. It is the ability to gradually piece together clues to uncover something that is hidden, and in a horror setting that might involve both the realisation that not all is as it seems and the occasional confrontation with an eldritch entity. Dredge, on the other hand, confuses this lack of information with giving the player a lack of options, turning what could have been an intriguing puzzle into an exercise in futility. Several times I left the game languishing for a while as it really wasn’t clear to me what the point was of proceeding further, given that the only course available to me was to sail straight off the proverbial cliff. There is a superficial similarity here with Universal Paperclips, which also asks the player to continue playing along a very dubious trajectory. But in Universal Paperclips the questionable goal and the gameplay are mutually reinforcing so as to make the game compelling. In Dredge the disconnect between the gameplay and the story diminishes both.

Misgivings notwithstanding, I did complete Dredge in the end. It even offered a reasonably neat ending, though I could not shake the feeling that I only avoided a worse fate because I found a fork in the plot through sheer luck. On reflection, I expect that players who derive more pleasure from the fishing, exploring and upgrading will quite enjoy the game, and not mind so much how they are driven forward by the suspect orders of Creepy Occult Guy. Or maybe there is actually a meta-story here, a self-referential critique about the need to let go rather than persisting in a harmful course of action. For me though, that irony was lost on me, and the lesson I learned from Dredge was that the real horror was drudgery all along.

Notes & Suggestions

• Letting go is also one of the core themes in Citizen Sleeper, but its strong focus on player agency and the greater presence of in-game characters mean it engages it with greater sensitivity and effect. It is not an entirely fair comparison as Citizen Sleeper is not set up as a mystery, but unlike Dredge, making choices is at the heart of the game, which means that by the time you reach any of the possible endings, you are invested both in how you got there, and how you might proceed.

Inbetweeners 27- Mobius, Celeste, and Nimbus Torrent

Not sure where to put this because it is a background side quest that the players would intermittently make progress in over the course of the game, so I figured now is as good a place as any to stick it.

Mobius Torrent is a cloud giant—one of the wealthiest cloud giants, and among wealthiest non deific individuals overall in the multiverse. He started his business in transportation and trade. Specifically, flying ships that could move between planes which I will refer to as interplanar carracks. Mobius quickly learned that the profit margins were greater on insuring such missions rather than simply funding the expeditions himself. Mobius had quite a mind for numbers and finding ways out of paying out if a trade expedition failed. His contracts were full of numerous clauses and stipulations that could void the terms and negate the payout. He focused on high risk expeditions that he could charge exorbitant rates for, and constantly balanced the risk of payout vs the cost and the potential blowback if he didn't pay out. Many times, hiring mercenaries to fight off angry customers was cheaper than paying out the terms of the contract. Mobius was also very skilled at using leverage to boost his holdings, so over the course of decades and centuries he became fabulously wealthy. He diversified into the construction of astral carracks, automatons, advanced technology and real estate, further compounding his wealth. However, in doing so he alienated himself from his fellow cloud giants.

The richer Mobius became, the more he surrounding himself with sycophants and yes men who never challenged his ideas and positions. He grew to believe everything was a numbers game, and any problem could be solved by investing enough resources into solving the problem. His wife, Celeste, hated this transformation. She hated their new style of life, the fabulous wealth, and being alienated from their people. Mobius could not understand her discontent, and believed it to be some sort of malady inflicted upon his family by a jealous rival. He used various magics, charms and medicines to try to “fix” her, but Celeste became more withdrawn and despondent. They had a young child, Nimbus, who Mobius spoiled. He believed that by giving Nimbus everything he could possibly ever want, showering him material gifts, would bind Nimbus to him and ensure he didn't lose him like he was losing Celeste. This led to Celeste resenting not only her husband but her son, Nimbus, who became quite the spoiled little monster. Worse than that, by having any obstacles in his path removed, Nimbus's development became delayed.

Celeste reached her tipping point and considered taking her own life. However, her husband would simply resurrect her. Even if she tried to traffic her soul to some far away lord or land, he'd have the resources to track it down and buy it, bringing her back. She realized the only option was to disappear, to find a place that not even Mobius could track her down. She had distant Titan ancestry, and knew that some still survived to this day, and they existed in a place so hidden no one, not even Mobius with all his resources, could find it. So she planned everything out and vanished without a trace. She waited until Mobius had a series of business meetings and trips chained together, and created an alibi to buy her enough time to disappear. By the time he was wise to it, she was gone.

Mobius spent insane resources trying to track her down. He hired every investigator, bounty hunter, mages to scry, devils, angels, etc. Even tapped into divine resources. But no one could find her. He assumed malfeasance, some enemy in the shadows had taken his wife from him. Mobius never got her hands dirty directly, but one could imagine many of his rivals were tortured for information they didn't have at the hands of those he hired. Losing Celeste only led to Mobius further doting on Nimbus, further guarding him and insulating him and making sure he never grew up so he wouldn't leave.

Now enter the players who have no context for any of this...

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The players fall through a door and appear in a massive nursey, 40 feet above a giant toy pile which they fall into harmlessly. This is the room of Nimbus Torrent, and it is chock full of every possible toy one could imagine. Several are automatons, many are hiding from Nimbus as he tends to be destructive. Nimbus believes the players to be toys, and wants to play with them. He has a wyrmling silver dragon that is contractually obligated to serve him. It's humiliating for the silver dragon Tyfin Elderson XIV, a creature of wisdom and intelligence to be treated like a pet for a mere dimwitted giant child. However, his pay is handsome enough that he will get a far greater jump start on this treasure hoard than he could ever do otherwise, so he serves the role of companion and protector for Nimbus. Technically, Tyfin must defer to Nimbus so he cannot alert Mobius if Nimbus commands him not to.

The players' minigame here is to try to keep Nimbus from calling his father. Mobius will certainly bring an overwhelming house guard to bare down upon them, and due to his business connections will also have strong ties to Mechanus and therefore the Protectors of the Weave. The players started off by acting as toys, I believe Nimbus made Uzo fight some of the automatons (like tridrones). To emphasize the absurd wealth here, highly advanced constructs that would be too expensive for most kings to procure are mere toys to this child to be tossed aside. Nimbus, despite being a child, was much larger than the players. He and the wyrmling would have been a tough fight alone for the players at their level, but with Mobius and his guard it would be impossible. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but eventually Mobius did come and meet the players. Fortunately, they passed their checks and convinced him to spare their life.

Once Mobius realizes how the characters are able to move between space-time, he seeks to enlist him to find Celeste. He has tried every other avenue, so perhaps entities that break the rules of physics will have better luck. He immediately has his staff relocate Nimbus's room to another room that the players can't access, and turns this room into a sort of meeting ground. Mobius is highly suspicious of other beings, so most of his servants are automatons and elementals, but he does have Djinn and other high level entites in his employ as well. They question the players, and when they are satisified that the players are telling the truth give them a piece of jewlery that belonged to Celeste. They will pay handsomely for any information about her whereabouts, but even more handsomely if they can bring her back. This initial meeting happened very early on in the campaign. The dramatic irony here is at the time, the players believe Celeste has been kidnapped and they are basically saving a rich dudes wife. It's an opportunity for an incredible payday, and Mobius has access to resources beyond most other mortals so a really good friend to have in their back pocket.

Some sessions later, the players got ahold of a crystal ball so they could scry at will. Domilia rolled a natural 20 so I actually had her hone in on a location for Celeste. She had a vision of Mithardir, a dead plane, the third layer of Arborea. It has been uninhabited and uninhabitable for as long as anyone can remember. her message reaches a tall, obsidian black tower there and an urn on the top level of that tower. When the message goes to enter the urn, some force slaps it away and it falls to the floor as every other message sent that way has before.

It was a long time until the players pursued this quest further, but Mobius, Nimbus and Celeste all become somewhat important NPCs so I thought I'd layout the start of this now. I'm going to do a separate post about Mithardir since I tweaked its history for my specific cosmology, but I'll wrap it up there.

Milestone achieved: I have a placeholder outline of each chapter. The whole shape of the game is coming into focus! Now I'm working on the text of the remaining chapters.

This is shaping up to be a bigger game than I'd thought when I started working on it, and I'm definitely at the stage where I hate it and just want it to be done with—but I get like that about every project and it doesn't have any bearing on the quality of the finished work so I just have to push through.

Right now I'm writing a chapter I'm internally calling “Action Hero”. Once you get onto Vorak's dreadnought half way through the story, you have three possible approaches to getting around. Two of them are different kinds of clever stealthy option. “Action Hero” is where you charge at problems head on with your ray gun and fight your way increasing larger and more ridiculous hordes of enemies.

You can, of course, acquire a bigger gun:

I'm trying to strike a balance with this chapter. On the one hand, I want to let you live the fantasy of being a badass action hero who takes on a whole room full of evil cyborgs by yourself. On the other hand, this isn't a story about being an invulnerable superhero, so I need to think of ways to make a single hero defeating an entire room full of evil cyborgs plausible, and require you to at least sometimes pick smarter tactical options than just charging in.

And, if you make it past the hordes of minions, there will of course be a boss fight...

Can our hero finish this chapter, even though it sometimes feels like the writing equivalent of defeating a room full of evil cyborgs using only a ray gun? And what chapter will he work on next? Find out in next month's developer diary!

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary

In the darkness I see the stars up there. How could they make me feel insignificant, when they’re all so very small?