Since 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act has been enforceable. Providers of generative systems must mark their outputs in a machine-readable format so that synthetic audio, video and text can be detected as artificially generated. Deployers of deepfakes, defined in the Act as AI-generated or manipulated content resembling real persons, objects or events and appearing authentic, must disclose what they have done. Penalties reach 15 million euros or three per cent of global annual turnover. The marking duty itself is arriving in stages: under the AI Omnibus provisional agreement reached on 7 May 2026, providers whose generative systems were already on the market before 2 August have until 2 December 2026 to embed the machine-readable markings and supply a detection mechanism. Everything else in Article 50 applies now.

Buried in Article 50(2) is a carve-out that will decide more cases than the headline rule. The marking obligation does not apply, the text says, “where the AI systems perform an assistive function for standard editing or do not substantially alter the input data.”

Read that again with an audio engineer's ear. European law now turns, in a large and commercially significant class of cases, on whether a machine-learning system substantially altered the material it was given. That is a question about the internals of a process, asked of an artefact that carries no record of its own manufacture. It is the question the music industry has spent four years answering with a shrug and a press release.

The most celebrated answer arrived on 2 November 2023, in the form of a four-minute single credited to a band that had not recorded together since 1970.

What Was Actually On The Cassette

In January 1994, around the time Paul McCartney inducted John Lennon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Yoko Ono handed McCartney a set of home cassettes. One of them, according to the surviving Beatles' own account, had “for Paul” scrawled on it in Lennon's handwriting. The tapes contained four demos recorded in Lennon's New York apartment in the late 1970s: “Free as a Bird”, “Real Love”, “Grow Old With Me” and “Now and Then”.

Two became records. Working with Jeff Lynne during the Anthology sessions of 1994 and 1995, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr built new arrangements around the Lennon vocals on “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, the latter requiring substantial preparation in Lynne's studio before overdubs could be added at all. “Now and Then” was attempted and abandoned. There was an electrical buzz on the tape, and, more fundamentally, Lennon had sung while playing piano into a single microphone, welding voice and piano into one mono signal. Every attempt to raise the vocal raised the piano with it. McCartney has put it plainly: they could not lift John's voice without lifting the piano, and the piano clouded the picture.

The tool that eventually solved it was not built for the Beatles at all. It was built for a documentary. During production of The Beatles: Get Back, released in 2021, Peter Jackson's WingNut Films Productions needed to make the 1969 fly-on-the-wall tapes intelligible, much of it mono material with dialogue, instruments and room noise hopelessly entangled. Emile de la Rey, a Wellington-based composer and sound editor who joined WingNut as a machine learning engineer, led development of a de-mixing system the team named MAL, a nod to “machine assisted learning”, to Mal Evans, the Beatles' road manager, and to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. De la Rey worked with the machine learning researcher Paris Smaragdis at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, building the thing from the academic source-separation literature upwards and generating their own training data as they went. The Get Back sound team won an Emmy and an MPSE Golden Reel in 2022.

MAL was then pointed at the catalogue. Giles Martin used it in 2022 to produce a genuine stereo mix of Revolver from four-track masters on which guitar, bass and drums shared a single track, a job that had been considered impossible for fifty-six years. It was used again on the 2023 reissues of the Red and Blue compilations. And it was used on the Lennon demo, extracting a usable vocal from the piano that had defeated Jeff Lynne.

“Now and Then” went to number one in the UK on 10 November 2023, the band's eighteenth British chart-topper and their first since “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in 1969. The Official Charts Company noted that the gap of fifty-four years between number ones broke Kate Bush's record, and that sixty years and six months had elapsed since “From Me To You” first took the band to the top. At the 67th Grammy Awards on 2 February 2025 the record won Best Rock Performance, with Sean Ono Lennon accepting; it lost Record of the Year to Kendrick Lamar's “Not Like Us”. Billboard described it as the first AI-assisted recording to receive a Grammy nomination.

McCartney's framing throughout was consistent and emphatic. Nothing, he said, had been artificially or synthetically created. It was all real, and they all played on it.

That sentence is the restoration alibi in its purest form, and it is worth taking seriously before taking it apart.

A Mask Is Not A Microphone

Source separation became a consumer technology in November 2019, when Deezer's research group released Spleeter under an MIT licence, a TensorFlow library shipping pre-trained models for two, four and five stems. Spleeter works in the frequency domain. It converts audio to a spectrogram, treats separation as something close to an image segmentation problem, and estimates a mask: a set of coefficients deciding, for every time-frequency cell, what proportion of the energy in that cell belongs to the vocal, the bass, the drums, the rest. It then reapplies the phase of the original mixture, because it never estimated phase in the first place. The characteristic failures follow directly from that architecture: metallic ringing, watery smearing, and faint ghosts of one instrument haunting another's stem.

Meta's Demucs took a different route, operating on the raw waveform and later hybridising waveform and spectrogram paths. The 2022 Hybrid Transformer Demucs paper reports a signal-to-distortion ratio of 9.20 dB on the MUSDB benchmark, a substantial margin over spectrogram-only approaches. The competitive frontier moved again at the Sound Demixing Challenge 2023, where a band-split transformer architecture, BS-RoFormer, took first place in the music separation track after training on MUSDB18-HQ plus five hundred additional songs. Commercial services proliferated: AudioShake, which says it won Sony's demixing challenge and whose stems have been used on archival projects involving the Jackson 5, Nina Simone and Whitney Houston; MVSep; and the machine-learning rebalancing module in iZotope RX, now standard equipment in post-production.

Here is the load-bearing point. A mask is a filter. It redistributes energy already present in the mixture; it cannot manufacture information the microphone did not capture. Where two sources occupy genuinely distinct regions of the time-frequency plane, masking approaches truth. Where they overlap exactly, which happens constantly with a voice and a piano playing the same notes in the same room through the same microphone, the mask apportions a shared quantity according to a learned prior about what voices and pianos usually do. It is guessing a ratio. Sometimes it guesses well. The residue of bad guesses is the artefact vocabulary every engineer recognises: bleed, musical noise, pre-echo, transient smear.

This is subtractive work, and it is bounded by the recording. Whatever else you say about it, a masked stem is a rearrangement of evidence.

The second family of techniques is not bounded that way. Diffusion-based refinement, of the sort explored in a body of research published through 2024 and 2025, takes a separated stem and resynthesises it, using a generative model trained on how the target source sounds in general. The stated aim of the better papers is fidelity: consistency constraints are added specifically to keep the refined output anchored to the observed mixture rather than drifting into invention. But the mechanism is categorically different. The model is not filtering the recording. It is producing audio conditioned on the recording. When the evidence thins, as it does in a cassette's collapsing high frequencies or a passage buried under tape hiss, the model supplies what is statistically plausible. Bandwidth extension does the same thing more openly, hallucinating high-frequency detail a domestic cassette deck never captured, because the model has heard ten thousand voices that had it.

The distinction between the two regimes is real, sharp and technically meaningful. It is also invisible in the output. Both processes hand you a file called vocals.wav. Nothing in the waveform announces whether a given millisecond was recovered or inferred. There is no provenance metadata by default, no chain of custody, no equivalent of the raking-light photograph a paintings conservator takes before touching anything.

So when McCartney says nothing was synthetically created, he is making a claim about a process that cannot be audited from the record. He may well be right; everything published about MAL is consistent with masking rather than generation. But the listener is being asked to take a technical assurance on trust, which is a strange basis for settling a question of authenticity.

As it turns out, the assurance is also aimed at the wrong part of the record.

The Beatles Told On Themselves

Giles Martin, who produced “Now and Then” with McCartney, has been refreshingly specific about how the finished track was built, and what he describes is not restoration by any definition a conservator would accept.

The backing vocals are the giveaway. Rather than record new harmonies or generate them, Martin lifted them from elsewhere in the catalogue. “I'm literally taking the multitrack tapes of Eleanor Rigby, some stuff from Because and Here, There, and Everywhere,” he told MusicTech in November 2023. Asked whether AI had been involved in that process, he was blunt: “No, it's not artificial or intelligent.” And on why: “It might have been easier if I used AI, but I didn't.” His justification for the result is a small masterpiece of category confusion. “They feel like they're from the Beatles, and they are from the Beatles.”

They are indeed from the Beatles. They are from three different Beatles songs, recorded between 1966 and 1969, none of which is “Now and Then”. Martin used the same technique he had deployed on Love, the 2006 mash-up album made with his father George for Cirque du Soleil, which nobody has ever mistaken for restoration. Add a string arrangement written in the 2020s by McCartney, Martin and Ben Foster, guitar parts Harrison recorded in 1995 for a song that was then shelved, and a slide guitar solo McCartney played in deliberate imitation of his dead friend's style.

Set out plainly, the 2023 record contains: a vocal captured on a domestic cassette in New York in the late 1970s and separated from its accompaniment by machine learning; drums and bass recorded roughly forty-five years later; rhythm guitar from an abandoned 1995 session; vocal harmonies excised from the multitracks of three unrelated 1960s recordings; an orchestral arrangement composed half a century after the demo; and a pastiche solo in the manner of a musician who died in 2001.

That is not a restored artefact. It is a new composition assembled from authenticated fragments, which is a perfectly respectable thing to be and arguably a beautiful one. But notice the inversion at its heart. The AI operation was the most conservative act on the record: it recovered a signal that genuinely existed on the tape. Every piece of real conjecture was performed by human beings with tape and faders. The moral geometry the public applies here, in which AI equals fakery and human hands equal authenticity, is exactly orthogonal to what happened.

McCartney's defence, that nothing was synthetically created, is true and irrelevant. Nothing was synthesised. Almost everything was composed.

Art Conservation Settled This Argument Sixty Years Ago

Recorded sound has no ethics of intervention. Painting, sculpture and architecture have had one since 1964.

The International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, drafted in Venice in May 1964 and adopted by ICOMOS the following year, does not attempt to define restoration as ontologically distinct from creation. It concedes the blur immediately and responds procedurally. Article 9 states that restoration “must stop at the point where conjecture begins, and in this case moreover any extra work which is indispensable must be distinct from the architectural composition and must bear a contemporary stamp.” Article 12 requires that replacements of missing parts “must be distinguishable from the original so that restoration does not falsify the artistic or historic evidence.” Article 16 requires precise documentation of every stage, deposited “in the archives of a public institution and made available to research workers”, with publication recommended.

Three obligations, then: stop where you start guessing; if you must guess, make the guess legible as a guess; and write down everything you did, in public. The charter's companion principle, developed through subsequent conservation practice, is reversibility, or as the field now more honestly puts it, retreatability. You should be able to get back to where you started, and where you cannot, you should say so.

The Sistine Chapel shows why documentation matters more than doctrine. The Vatican's cleaning of Michelangelo's frescoes, funded by Nippon Television Network Corporation and running from 1980 to 1994, produced colours so unexpectedly brilliant that they revised art-historical understanding of the artist. James Beck, professor of art history at Columbia University and founder of ArtWatch International, argued the restorers had removed more than soot: that Michelangelo had modified the dried fresco with a secco shadows in a glue medium, and that these finishing touches, indistinguishable by eye from glue-trapped grime, had been stripped away. The Vatican's team disputed it. The argument cannot be settled by looking at the ceiling, because if Beck was right the evidence went into the sponge. Only the documentation can adjudicate, and its adequacy is itself contested.

At the other end of the scale sits the Sanctuary of Mercy at Borja, in Aragón. In 2012 an elderly parishioner, Cecilia Giménez, attempted to touch up a modest 1930s Ecce Homo by Elías García Martínez and produced something so far from the original it became a global meme. It also transformed the town: reported visitor numbers rose from around 6,000 a year to roughly 57,000 by 2016, with accounts of the peak varying wildly above that, and revenue from three-euro tickets and donations funds the church, its guides and the local elderly home. The surge did not hold. Recent reporting puts annual visits back at somewhere between sixteen and twenty thousand. The intervention destroyed the evidentiary value of the object and created enormous new cultural value in the same brushstroke, and of the two only the loss turned out to be permanent. Restoration and creation are not opposites. They are the same act described by people with different interests.

Audio has no equivalent framework. The Audio Engineering Society publishes standards on archival formats, migration and metadata, all excellent and all concerned with carriers rather than interventions. No clause anywhere in the discipline says a de-mixed stem must be distinguishable from a natively isolated one, or that the untouched source must be deposited where a researcher can hear it. The industry's operative doctrine is a producer's word in a press interview.

The Law Pays You For Guessing

If you wanted to design a legal regime that penalised faithful restoration and rewarded invention, you would design the one the United States currently has.

On 20 August 2018 the Ninth Circuit decided ABS Entertainment, Inc. v. CBS Corporation, reversing summary judgment and holding that digitally remastered versions of pre-1972 analogue recordings were not automatically new copyrightable derivative works. To earn a fresh copyright, the court reasoned, a derivative work must be original to its author and non-trivial. Engineering judgment applied in service of an accurate reproduction of an existing performance does not clear the bar. Careful, faithful, expensive restoration produces, in law, nothing you can own.

Then, on 29 January 2025, the US Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence. Its conclusions were narrow and sensible: existing law suffices; prompts alone do not confer authorship, because they do not give sufficient control over the expressive result; but human authors retain copyright in their perceptible contributions within AI-generated outputs, in creative selection, coordination and arrangement, and in creative modifications of outputs.

Put the two together and the incentive is unmistakable. A perfect de-mix of a Lennon cassette is legally inert. A de-mix plus a new string arrangement plus harmonies spliced from three other records plus a pastiche solo is a protectable work with fresh copyright and a fresh royalty stream. Copyright pays for conjecture and refuses to pay for care. That is the precise inverse of the Venice Charter's professional hierarchy, in which the least intervention is the highest standard.

The publicity-rights regime, meanwhile, has been growing at speed, and it asks an entirely different question. Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed on 21 March 2024 and effective from 1 July 2024, made voice a protected property right, expressly including simulations as well as the actual thing, backed by civil action and Class A misdemeanour liability, and extended to anyone making available a tool whose primary purpose is producing unauthorised voice replicas. California followed with a pair signed together on 17 September 2024 and in force together from 1 January 2025: AB 2602, which voids contract terms permitting digital replicas unless the performer received a reasonably specific description of the intended uses and was represented by counsel or a union; and AB 1836, which creates a cause of action for exploiting a deceased personality's digital replica without estate consent, with a 10,000 dollar statutory minimum and exceptions for news, comment, criticism, scholarship, satire and parody.

Post-mortem protection remains a patchwork. New York's Civil Rights Law section 50-f, in force since 29 May 2021, runs forty years after death, covers only those domiciled in the state at death, reaches digital replicas mainly where they are deceptive and lack a conspicuous disclaimer, and confers no cause of action at all until the estate has registered the claim with the New York Secretary of State. Indiana and Oklahoma run to a hundred years. Some states offer nothing.

Federal law may finally arrive. The NO FAKES Act of 2026, S.4591, was advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June 2026 by unanimous voice vote and awaits floor time. It would create a federal, licensable property right in voice and visual likeness, unassignable during life but surviving death for an initial ten years, renewable in five-year increments up to seventy years provided the rights holder can demonstrate active and authorised public use. It layers on a DMCA-style notice and counter-notice procedure, a 25,000 dollar penalty for knowing misrepresentation, and exclusions for nonprofit libraries, archives and accredited educational institutions. It would pre-empt future state digital replica laws while leaving causes of action existing as of 2 January 2025, including the ELVIS Act, intact.

The United Kingdom has taken the slowest road, and still has no general personality right; claimants rely on passing off and data protection. The government's Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, published on 18 March 2026 under section 136 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, abandoned the previously favoured broad commercial text and data mining exception with rights-holder opt-out after fierce creative-sector opposition. The narrow non-commercial research exception stands, and the stated preference is now licensing-first, supported by statutory transparency duties. Sony Music's submission to that consultation disclosed that it had issued more than 75,000 takedown requests against AI deepfakes of its artists, a figure Music Business Worldwide later reported had passed 135,000.

Notice what none of this legislation asks. Not one provision anywhere in this stack asks whether a work is a restoration or a creation. Every provision asks whether an identity was used with permission. The law has quietly concluded that the interesting question is consent rather than ontology.

The law is right. But consent does not make a record true, and that gap is where the damage will happen.

The Studio Was Always A Fiction Machine

The strongest objection to everything above is that the restoration and creation distinction was never stable, that recorded music has been synthetic since roughly the invention of magnetic tape, and that the current anxiety is nostalgia wearing a lab coat. This objection deserves to be taken seriously, because it is largely correct.

Glenn Gould made the argument in 1966, in an essay for High Fidelity called “The Prospects of Recording”. He described recording the A minor fugue from Book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier a decade earlier, producing two technically acceptable complete takes, numbers six and eight, and then discovering that both shared a defect he had not noticed in the studio: both were monotonous. The released performance is a splice of the two. Gould knew perfectly well that purists called such editing dishonest and dehumanising, and he answered with a line that has not been improved on since. One cannot ever splice style, he wrote; one can only splice segments which relate to a conviction about style.

Teo Macero industrialised the idea. In a Silent Way was recorded in a single session on 18 February 1969 and then constructed in the edit; Macero described reducing dozens of reels of quarter-inch master to about eight and a half minutes a side. On Bitches Brew, by one detailed account of the session tapes, “Pharaoh's Dance” contains seventeen edits, its stop-start opening theme assembled in post-production from looped fragments of fifteen and thirty-one seconds. Miles Davis played the notes. Macero wrote the record. Dub producers made the mixing desk an instrument; hip-hop made other people's records the raw material; comping and pitch correction finished the job. The idea that a commercial recording documents an event that occurred died some time around 1950 and has been receiving flowers ever since.

So yes: the distinction is unstable, and always was. But the conclusion is not that it is meaningless. It is that it was never a claim about the ontology of the object. It was a claim about a process, and process claims are verifiable only if documented.

What genuinely changed is not metaphysics. It is cost and asymmetry. Macero needed Miles Davis in a room. Giles Martin needed a cassette. Separation has collapsed the marginal cost of extracting a usable performance from any recording ever made, which means the constraint that used to enforce collaboration, namely that you had to book the artist, has gone. And the artist, in almost every case that matters, is dead.

Consent Has A Sell-By Date And Everybody Knows It

Prince told Guitar World in 1998 that performing alongside a hologram of a dead musician would be, in his phrase, the most demonic thing imaginable. Twenty years later, when reports circulated that Justin Timberlake would summon him at the Super Bowl LII halftime show in Minneapolis, Sheila E. stated publicly that Prince had told her he did not want a hologram of himself used, and that Timberlake had agreed not to use one. The estate's account replied with a flat “No”. That is about as close to documented refusal as the record industry gets, and it held.

Contrast the Zappa Family Trust, which in 2019 authorised “The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa”, a hologram tour built by Eyellusion around vault recordings from 1974 and staged with surviving members of the Mothers of Invention. Ahmet Zappa, co-trustee, presented it as a world premiere of his father's compositions. Same technology class, same posthumous subject, opposite decisions, both legitimate. The variable is not the tool. It is who inherited the answer.

The cleanest case in this field is also the most generative, which ought to end the argument about whether generativity is what matters. Randy Travis lost the ability to speak and sing after a stroke in 2013 left him with aphasia. In late 2023 his longtime producer Kyle Lehning pulled isolated vocal stems from recordings Travis had made between 1985 and 2013 and sent them to a London-based technology firm, which built two bespoke models, one trained on twelve stems and one on forty-two. The scaffolding underneath was not newly recorded. The country singer James Dupré had cut the song with Lehning around 2011, and that existing take became the base over which the model rendered Travis's voice, credited by Warner Music Nashville as a “vocal bed”, reportedly the first outing for the term. Dupré learned what had been done with his old vocal when he heard the finished record. “I really just thought he recorded it years ago and I never knew about it,” he told Rolling Stone. “Where That Came From” was released on 3 May 2024; a second single, “Horses in Heaven”, followed. Lehning has said the models took about five minutes to analyse the demo vocal once it went in, after which he and the engineer Casey Wood spent the real labour by hand, adjusting vibrato speed and the timing of phrases until the delivery sat where Travis would have put it.

Every note of that vocal is synthetic. Nothing was recovered from anything. By the ontological test it is pure fabrication, and by any reasonable ethical test it is unimpeachable, because Travis is alive, understood what was proposed, and wanted it. The one person who does not appear to have been asked in advance is the living singer underneath. Meanwhile “Heart on My Sleeve”, the Ghostwriter track imitating Drake and The Weeknd that went viral in April 2023, was pulled after Universal takedown notices, submitted for Grammy consideration, declared eligible by Recording Academy chief executive Harvey Mason Jr, and then declared ineligible on the ground that it was no longer commercially available. Nothing about the artefact changed between those two announcements. Its distribution status did.

Consent, permission, availability. The industry's own behaviour has already conceded that the ontological question is not the operative one.

Your Stems Are Already In The Cloud

The forward-looking half of the question answers itself once you look at how contemporary sessions are actually stored.

Nobody will need to de-mix a 2026 recording. It arrives pre-separated. Vocal comps live in their own folders; multitracks are delivered as stems for sync and immersive mixes; Atmos deliverables ship object by object. The archive of the future is not a degraded cassette with a piano welded to a voice. It is a project file in which the voice was never mixed in the first place. The technical alibi that carried “Now and Then”, the claim that only what genuinely existed was recovered, will be trivially satisfiable for every artist working now. When everything is recoverable, recoverability stops distinguishing anything.

The market has already moved to the only question that remains. In November 2025 ElevenLabs launched its Iconic Marketplace, a licensing platform for recognisable voices, announced alongside partnerships with Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey and populated with more than twenty-five further voices including those of John Wayne, Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, Liza Minnelli and Maya Angelou. On 27 May 2026 the company added Stan Lee, licensed through Stan Lee Universe, the joint venture between Genius Brands and POW! Entertainment, for use across its creative tools and a narrated book club opening with Treasure Island. It is buying estates methodically.

The record business has followed the same logic. Warner, Universal and Sony have each negotiated licences with the AI music company Klay Vision; ElevenLabs signed training licences with Merlin, representing tens of thousands of independent labels, and with Kobalt on opt-in terms with royalties attached. The majors' 2024 infringement suits against Suno and Udio have resolved only in part, and only where a price could be agreed. Universal settled with Udio in October 2025, on terms that turned the service into a walled garden from which AI-generated music cannot be exported; Warner settled with Suno in November 2025, committing to a licensed model with artist opt-in over voice and likeness. Universal and Sony are still suing Suno. Settlement talks hit an impasse in April 2026, and in May the two labels moved to expand the case from 560 recordings to 61,026 after discovery indicated Suno had trained on millions of their tracks. Consent is being priced rather than conceded, and where the price fails the litigation simply resumes. Live experience is licensed the same way. Elvis Evolution, produced by Layered Reality under an agreement with Authentic Brands Group, which owns the Presley estate, opened at Immerse LDN at ExCeL in London on 18 July 2025 after a delay, and was received poorly.

Estate consent has become the sufficient condition, for the simple reason that it is the only condition that is transactable. An heir can sign. Authenticity cannot.

What A Charter For Recorded Sound Would Have To Say

The distinction between restoration and creation is meaningless as metaphysics and indispensable as procedure. Those two claims are not in tension; the second follows from the first. Because you cannot determine from the artefact what was done to it, the only version of the distinction that can survive is a documented, auditable account of the operations performed. If the industry will not produce that account voluntarily, and it will not, three things need to become mandatory.

First, disclosure at the level of the operation rather than the product. A single label saying “AI was used” is worthless when AI covers everything from a noise gate to a synthesised vocal. What is needed is a per-stem statement of intervention: which material was masked out of an existing mixture, which was generatively resynthesised or bandwidth-extended, which was sampled from other recordings, which was newly performed and by whom. Article 50 marks the artefact and exempts assistive editing, so it will catch the obvious deepfakes and miss every interesting case in the archive. The marking duty is being phased in; the exemption is not. That exemption is where the difficult work lives.

Second, retention and deposit of unmodified sources. This is Venice Charter Article 16 transposed into audio, and it is the only thing that makes the first requirement checkable. The cassette transfer, the raw de-mix before refinement, the pre-arrangement rough: deposited with an institution and accessible to researchers, so a future engineer can hear what the machine started with and judge what it did. Not reversibility, which is a fantasy in digital work, but retreatability. The Sistine controversy is unresolvable because the evidence went into the sponge. Every archival de-mix released without a deposited source manufactures the same irresolvability, cheaply and at scale.

Third, consent instruments that are specific and, wherever possible, executed in life. California's AB 2602 already contains the right standard in embryo: a contract term permitting digital replication is void without a reasonably specific description of the intended uses. Export that standard to estates and to wills. Blanket posthumous discretion vested in whoever happens to inherit is the failure mode, because heirs optimise for revenue and have no institutional duty to the work. Prince got the outcome he wanted only because he had said so, repeatedly, to people who repeated it. That is not a system. It is luck.

None of this would have stopped “Now and Then”, nor should it have. That record is good, its makers were candid about their methods when asked directly, and the surviving Beatles had the one thing no future case will reliably have: two living principals with the standing to say yes. What the record actually established, and what its marketing obscured, is that a sufficiently persuasive technical story lets a new work travel under an old name, collect a Grammy in a performance category, and enter the canon as an act of recovery.

Future generations will not need to seize our legacies. They will not have to unmix anything, because we will hand it over already unmixed, already modelled, already licensed, with the paperwork signed by someone who loved us or merely inherited us. The only thing that will distinguish stewardship from ventriloquism is whether we wrote down, in advance and in detail, what we would not have wanted done, and whether anyone kept the original so the difference could still be heard.

References

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17. Justia, “New York Civil Rights Law Section 50-f: Right of Publicity,” 2025 New York Laws. https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/cvr/article-5/50-f/
18. UK Intellectual Property Office, “Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence,” GOV.UK, 18 March 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-and-impact-assessment-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/report-on-copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
19. Murray Stassen, “Sony Music reveals 75,000 AI deepfake takedowns, criticizes UK's rushed copyright reform,” Music Business Worldwide, March 2025. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sony-music-reveals-75000-ai-deepfake-takedowns-criticizes-uks-rushed-copyright-reform1/
20. Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording,” High Fidelity, April 1966. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio-webdav/AudioMedia/Readings/Alphabetical/Gould-Prospects_of_Recording.pdf
21. Paul Tingen, “Miles Davis and the Making of Bitches Brew: Sorcerer's Brew,” JazzTimes, 2001. https://www.jazztimes.com/features/profiles/miles-davis-and-the-making-of-bitches-brew-sorcerers-brew/3/
22. Jem Aswad, “No Prince Hologram During Justin Timberlake's Super Bowl Set, Sheila E. Promises,” Variety, 4 February 2018. https://variety.com/2018/music/news/no-prince-hologram-during-justin-timberlakes-super-bowl-set-sheila-e-promises-1202686913/
23. Alexandra Supper, “'More Where That Came From': How the Voice of Randy Travis Helps to Normalize AI,” Popular Music and Society 48:4, 2025. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007766.2025.2492500
24. Rolling Stone, “Randy Travis AI Song: Who Sang 'Where That Came From'?” rollingstone.com, 9 May 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/randy-travis-ai-song-where-that-came-from-singer-1235017789/
25. Murray Stassen, “UMG and Sony seek to add over 61k recordings to Suno lawsuit after discovery reveals AI trained on 'millions' of their copyrighted tracks,” Music Business Worldwide, May 2026. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/umg-and-sony-seek-to-add-61000-copyrighted-works-to-suno-lawsuit-after-discovery-reveals-suno-trained-on-millions-of-their-recordings/

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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

CW: snuff, cannibalism, béchamel.

He set down the whetstone and balanced a 10” Damascus steel chef knife between his two index fingers, aligning it with the unblinking industrial lighting. The edge of the blade was a vector so very straight it seemed atomically perfect. The mirror polish on the metal was interrupted by the warm fog of shuddering breath. His eyes glazed over in the blistering lamps imagining the possibilities. A Twitch & A Throb. The cellar kitchen was windowless, featureless and clinical – most are. The austerity of the setting was a deprivation of ceremony, and thus the heart and soul that one typically puts into preparing a dish, but the blankness of the canvas invited infinite potential too. It was Total Silence, save for the rhythmic entrancement of water droplets splashing and dropping into the sink...interrupted by the shuffling of clothes. He exited his euphoric trance and locked eyes on the counter, donning a subdued navy pair of latex gloves. The sound of well-worn Oxfords clicked in step towards the kitchen counter. The harsh white lightning gleamed onto the silver cloche as he removed it. There on a silver platter amidst parsley garnish lay a white lab rat specimen adorned intricately in a scarlet rope web, gagged and blinded. Her body squished under the pressure of the ropes, and it abraded and burned her. With his thumb and his index finger, he pulled away her slobbery gag. Rather than panic or fear, her immediate reaction was utter indignity. “Do you have any idea who you've just kidnapped? I'm insured for this! When the philharmonic director finds out” etc. etc. etc. and I watched her do that for about 5 minutes, which was when the gravity struck that she was going to be murdered for sexual gratification, and then I watched her have a panic attack and cry for another 5 minutes. It would be impolite and unprofessional to play with one's food, and theatricality comes with a cost – if the meat knows that it's going to be killed, it will release too many stress hormones and lose any appetizing qualities. A proper home cooked meal always needs to be made with love. So I reassured her and spoke to her in a soft voice and relieved her manually and repeatedly. And once she was assured that it was all an elaborate roleplay that she must have set up months in advance, she became comfortable and began to babble on about how she was the world's smallest little micro pianist, and she began to saying something about the tragedy of the commons as I sliced open her belly and cracked her ribs open. She screamed terribly and died in visceral pain after about 2 minutes, and she spent her final agonizing moments enraptured in pleasure, thinking about the proportional gallons of her own murderer's hot steamy jizm still dripping out of her, mixing on the floor with her own sputum and plasma. I watched her exposed heart stop beating. He ran his tongue all over her corpse and knife, then shaved her limp slumped body delicately with a cheap disposable razor. He stuffed her torso with chopped thyme, chives, mushrooms, cloves, and a torn up loaf of sourdough bread he soaked in red wine vinegar. He incised a needle into her flesh and sewed her belly back together. He put her in an enamel black pot with white speckles and made a pot liquor of her blood with carrots, potatoes, onions, herbs, goose fat and sherry. Her tiny lifeless corpse simmered in the oven for two hours at a low heat, before she was taken out of the furnace’s fires and served upon a clean white plate on a silver platter, with buttered broccoli and a cold crisp glass of blanc by candlelight. He took a gravy boat and poured piping hot roux over her body, expertly roasted and still tied presenting and assuming the position. And as his knife carved into her flank and he tore away a morsel of her sinew, the silver knife passed his lips and her flesh played a symphony of notes in his saliva and on the taste buds of his tongue. Not bad – kinda like her music was; tasteless!

An interactive SSH tab can outlive the transport underneath it. The window is still open, the scrollback is still useful, and the user still thinks of it as the same terminal. But the TCP connection may have disappeared during sleep, a network change, a server restart, or an idle timeout.

The obvious recovery behavior is to reconnect when the user presses a key. The less obvious question is what to do with that key.

Replaying it into the new shell feels convenient. It is also surprisingly dangerous.

A tab and a transport are different lifetimes

The terminal tab is a logical session owned by the user interface. The SSH process or in-process protocol session is only the current transport handle feeding that tab.

Keeping those identities separate makes recovery possible. When a transport exits, the tab does not need to disappear. Its scrollback, title, server association, saved dimensions, and session log can remain. Only the mapping from the logical tab to the dead transport is removed.

That distinction also prevents stale callbacks from damaging a newer connection. A disconnect callback must identify the handle that died and clear state only if the tab still points to that handle. Otherwise, a delayed callback from the old process can arrive after reconnection and accidentally tear down the replacement.

Why the triggering key should not be replayed

Suppose a disconnected tab receives Enter. The client notices that no live handle exists and starts a new SSH connection. If it buffers and replays Enter after authentication, the fresh shell receives an empty command immediately after drawing its first prompt.

That is mostly cosmetic. Other keys are not.

A terminal can emit several input events before reconnection finishes. A user may type part of a command while the interface still looks connected. Replaying those bytes into a newly authenticated shell changes their context. The old remote process is gone, the working directory may have changed, and the prompt may now belong to a different login environment.

The conservative rule is simple:

1. The first input event may trigger reconnection.
2. Every input event received while that reconnect is in flight is consumed.
3. Input resumes only after the new transport is established.

This makes the boundary visible. The user gets a new prompt and can decide what to run, instead of having stale input executed automatically.

It also keeps input tracking honest. The triggering Enter is not a command character and should not appear in command history or session metadata.

Coalesce reconnect attempts per logical tab

Input events can arrive faster than an SSH handshake completes. Without an in-flight marker, each event can observe the missing handle and start another connection.

The result is not merely wasted work. Two PTYs may authenticate successfully, both may attach output callbacks, and input can be routed to one while output comes from the other. A multiplexing layer can make the race even harder to notice because both processes may share one underlying TCP connection while still representing different interactive shells.

We keep a set of logical session identifiers currently reconnecting. The marker is installed before the first suspension point. Later input joins the existing attempt and waits for its result instead of starting another one.

There is a second race during initial connection. Opening a tab may launch the handshake in a separate task, so the session can be marked as connecting before its handle is stored. Input arriving in that window waits for the in-flight connection for a bounded period. It does not interpret a temporarily missing handle as permission to create another PTY.

Bind output to a transport epoch

Each successful connection creates a new transport epoch for the logical tab. The output callback is registered against both the tab identifier and the exact transport handle.

When a new epoch replaces an old one, the old output callback is removed and the old handle is disconnected. This prevents bytes from different PTYs from being interleaved in one terminal emulator.

The visual boundary matters too. Shell prompts often have no trailing newline. If retained output from the previous epoch ends mid-line, the new prompt can be drawn over it or trigger shell-specific end-of-line markers. Before reconnecting, the client inserts a line break only when the retained output does not already end with a carriage return or newline.

Session recording should preserve the same boundary. A disconnect marker closes the old epoch, while the next successful registration becomes a reconnect marker rather than pretending the session was uninterrupted.

A local process being alive is not enough

Sleep and network changes create a particularly awkward failure mode on macOS: the local ssh process can still exist after its TCP transport has become unusable.

Checking only the process identifier is insufficient. Even ssh -O check proves mainly that the local multiplexing master is running; it does not require a round trip to the server.

For the direct-download transport, we validate an existing ControlMaster by opening a non-interactive command channel through its socket and running true. Authentication fallback is disabled with batch mode, zero password prompts, and no preferred authentication methods. If the socket is stale, the probe must fail rather than silently opening a new login connection.

The wake path waits briefly before probing because Wi-Fi may not have reassociated when the system wake notification arrives. It then checks sessions serially. Healthy multiplexed connections answer quickly, while dead connections consume the timeout. Serial validation avoids creating a burst of probes at the exact moment the network stack is recovering.

If the probe fails, the handle is invalidated. The next user input follows the normal reconnect path.

Reconnection still has security boundaries

Automatic recovery must not bypass host-key policy. Before opening the replacement transport, the client performs the same host-key trust check used by an initial connection. A changed key remains a decision point; reconnecting is not permission to accept it silently.

Authentication and reachability failures are also not retried forever. A failed reconnect records the error and leaves the session in a failed state. Repeated background retries would create noise, lock accounts, or hide a configuration problem.

A write failure on a supposedly live PTY is treated differently. It is direct evidence that the cached handle is unusable. The client removes that handle and starts one coalesced reconnect attempt immediately, so the user does not need to discover the failure and then press another key.

Protocol-specific state must be cleaned up as well. An active ZMODEM transfer cannot survive the loss of its channel, so its coordinator is stopped when the transport epoch ends. Pretending such a transfer can resume would leave the terminal parser and progress UI in inconsistent states.

What reconnection does not restore

This design preserves the local tab, not the remote process.

It cannot recover an editor, REPL, foreground job, shell variables, or working directory that existed only in the dead remote shell. Users who need process continuity should still use a remote session manager such as tmux or screen.

The client also should not automatically re-run the last command. Whether a command is safe to repeat depends on application semantics that a terminal cannot reliably infer.

The useful promise is narrower: when the transport dies, the tab remains understandable, reconnection does not create duplicate PTYs, stale input is not executed, host-key policy still applies, and the new shell begins at a clear visual and recorded boundary.

That is less magical than replaying everything. It is also much easier to trust.

---

Developer disclosure: I work on Nexus Shell, a native macOS SSH client. This article describes implementation lessons from that work; it is not a comparison or benchmark against other SSH clients.

Sometimes we are born again through the memories we left in cold rooms.

I was looking for my hat—the wide-brimmed one I wore when I was someone else, someone who drove through red dirt roads and squinted into the sun like it was a dare. The kind of hat required in Dust Meridian.

It had been missing for years. Maybe longer. I didn’t even know I was looking until I opened the refrigerator and there it was, perched beside a frosty beer and a carton of eggs.

Cold to the touch.

But not dead.

I blinked.

“What are you doing here?”

I wasn’t joking.

It felt like it owed me an explanation. It had disappeared ten years ago. I looked high and low, traveled and called everyone I knew, but it never materialized. I lamented its loss—the countless adventures we’d shared. It was practically part of my identity for nearly a quarter of a century.

The hat turned slowly—almost shy—and answered, but the words slipped sideways, as if the air between us was warped. I heard syllables like birdcalls, like eucalyptus leaves whispering in spirals.

Like a secret I knew once, but had since packed away with my passport and the smell of old firewood.

Still, I smiled. Not because I understood. But because something in me stirred—some flicker of a self I’d shelved. Not abandoned, exactly—just chilled for safekeeping.

I held it to my chest. It smelled faintly of sweat and eucalyptus, of rain that never came.

I considered putting it back in the fridge. Maybe it liked it there. Maybe it was hiding from the heat of a life half-lived.

But I didn’t.

I slipped it on, and for a moment, the kitchen spun into something vast the wood floor cracking into gravel, the hum of the refrigerator becoming cicadas in the trees.

And there I was.

There WE were.

Me, and the version of me that remembered what the wind felt like in wild, open places. The one who once drove toward the horizon with no map.

And no need for one.

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2025-08-02 11:09:49

#reflection #essay #memoir #journal #osxs #100daystooffset #writing #dream #poetry

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In Summary: * Between baseball games now, the Yankees having won their game against the Braves, 5 to 4. I'd really like for the Rangers to win their game against the Orioles, the opening pitch is about half an hour away.

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= 224.76 lbs. * bp= 140/82 (71)

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

Diet: * 05:15 – 1 banana, pizza * 08:30 – spinach and mushroom omelet, fresh fruit bowl * 16:30 – bowl of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – wake up * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 08:30 to 10:30 – breakfast out and grocery shopping with the wife * Noon – tuned into WFAN Yankees Radio for general sports talk ahead of this afternoon's Braves / Yankees game * 16:58 – and the Yankees win this one 5 to 4. Now, on to the Rangers / Orioles game

Chess: * 16:50 – moved in all pending CC games

I'd like to take up the question at the end of the previous post: what is the point of confederation? Why do some of us want to preserve it, and others to break it up?

At the risk of oversimplification, I would say that the original purpose of Confederation was twofold: one, to connect the different regions of the country and make them work together to enjoy the benefits of access to larger markets, chiefly in Europe; and two, to keep the Americans at bay. But that was then and this is now. Today, I would argue that the main reason for confederation is to pool resources to further the common interests of all Canadians. This goes against the fundamental principle of the profit-maximizing company, so perhaps inevitably there is a constant tension between the two forces, and this tension I believe is manifested in the latest instance of a referendum on separation, this time in Alberta. Let's look at how this plays out with health care, which plays a major role in the referendum questions.

Without a doubt, Canada's universal health care system would not be possible without Confederation, and vice versa. It is founded explicitly on principles of universality, accessibility, and portability. The idea is simple. The government acts as a single payer for privately supplied medical services, getting the money from taxes. The provinces manage this part, and the federal government transfers funds to the provinces to ensure that every Canadian can access the same services wherever they are. There are two relevant forms of transfers. One is specifically for health care, where each province receives a sum proportional to its population, and the other is an equalization transfer by means of which poorer provinces that don't have the same ability to tax as wealthier ones can boost their health care spending so that someone in Nova Scotia gets the same level of care as someone in British Columbia, or Alberta.

Accessibility means zero up front cost. When you need the health care system, it's available without asking you to pay a penny. That's what accessibility means. So the cost is paid for by taxes, whereby wealthier people pay more. And equalization transfers mean residents of provinces with greater ability to raise taxes transfer funds to the health care system in provinces with less ability to raise taxes. That's what equalization means.

So people who are wealthier than others and provincial governments that are wealthier than others ask why they should pay more for the same service. They see themselves as being unfairly forced to subsidize others.

And profit-maximizing insurance companies feel robbed of the opportunity to make the largest possible profits by charging premiums that wealthier people are willing to pay.

What stands in the way of both is Confederation, that enshrines in law the pursuit of equality in access to health care.

It's quite obvious who the UCP represents, and it is not surprising therefore that the UCP wants to get equalizing Confederation out of their way. But there are two approaches they can take. One is outright separation. The other avoids the considerable downsides of separation, and looks for loopholes in the structure of Confederation that can be exploited to gain the same advantages without formally separating. The latter is Danielle Smith's approach. She has contempt for the very idea of equality and therefore is quite comfortable with finding a way around the formalities of Confederation while protesting that she believes in a united Canada.

The same us-versus-them mentality pervades the immigration questions. The same sense of being taken advantage of by others.

So now it is up to all the electors of Alberta to take a stand. But let's be clear. This is not about independence or shifting the balance of power between the provinces and the Confederation. This is about equality, about looking after each other, about the idea of from each according to their means to each according to their needs. Please vote no to all the UCP's referendum questions on October 19. And as always, please and share with others. Thank you.

I think we should start keeping score of our arguments. not because i care about winning, i just want statistical evidence that im suffering, and winning. its just ridiculous to me, and everyone else, that he wasnt always like this. There was a time when he and i barely had to argue at all. we worked together. he handled the easy parts, i handled the parts nobody else wanted to touch, and somehow it worked. and we made a good pair. More than that, we were best friends. we were alike in so many ways, and completely different in others, but somehow those differences worked. we understood each other. we knew how the other person thought. there was never this constant feeling that every conversation was going to turn into an argument over something neither of us wouldve cared about five years ago. Then this incident came. im not going to write about it. thats not important here. What matters is that something changed after it. not immediately, perhaps. but eventually, i started noticing it. he became softer. more emotional. more sensitive. more concerned with feelings than i ever remember him being. the person i used to know disappeared and was replaced by someone who could disagree with me about everything. and i mean everything. we could argue about something as stupid as what to eat and somehow end up discussing morality, emotions, logic, and whether i have a functioning soul. its exhuasting. we’ve changed in complete opposite directions. i approach things with my head. he approaches them with his heart. i look at a situation and ask what makes sense, he looks at it and asks how everyone feels. we used to be so alike, we used to be different in ways that complemented each other, now we’re different in ways that collide. and i think thats what bothers me the most. i wasnt expecting us to stay the same forever. people change. i know that better than most people do. i just never expected the change to take us this far apart. there are moments when im sitting across from him during an argument and i realize i have no idea what hes talking about. not because hes unclear, No. but because i cant understand how he arrived at his conclusion in the first place. and i imagine he probably thinks the exact same thing about me. maybe thats what happens to people. you can spend years thinking someone is your closest friend, know how they think, know how they’ll react, know what they’ll say before they say it, and then one day you look at them and realize you dont recognize them anymore. or maybe thats the worst possibility, maybe i recognize him perfectly. and this is just who he became. or maybe im the one who never noticed that we were becoming strangers. its just frustrating. he used to be like me. not exactly, obviously. but close enough that i could look at him and know he understood. i taught him things. I showed him how i did things, how i thought, how to stop caring about every little consequence. he learned from me, and for a while, it felt like we were moving through the world with the same understanding of it. careless. detached. in a way. and now he has decided that being soft is the better choice. that whatever happened was supposed to change us. i regret what i did, i cant change it, and i know sitting here regretting it isnt going to undo anything. but sometimes i wonder if that was the moment everything started moving in a direction neither of us expected. he did change. he changed thats the simple answer. i just dont know what to do with the person he became. Because when i talk to him now, i dont feel like I’m talking to the person who use to stand beside me. the person who didnt care. the person i taught, worked with, trusted, and somehow managed to call my best friend. im talking to someone whos the opposite of me. and maybe thats what confuses me. i spent so much time teaching him how to be like me, only for him to decide that he didnt want to be. maybe he was always capable of becoming this person.

Whatever, either way, i dont know whether im angry at him for changing, angry at myself what for happend, or simply frustrated that I can’t make sense of it. and probably all the three. i just wish i understood when we stopped being the same kind of people

Sincerely, The opposite half

Header goes here

epigraph tbd

Jump to: Shinology The Drama of Eli The Un-Robbery The Vals Brother Code Monkey The TBD

12p – Up All Night

Client work pinned until Monday. Which means, I have today and tomorrow to make it sing so I don'g get pinched again come 1130am.

I was so wound up, it took till after 5 to get sleepy.

Great morning SLEEPING!

Three hours of texting and phoning. OY VEY!

Someone died Wife excited on last day of school someone having a mental breakdown Someone wondering how I am someone wanting me to go somewhere someone worried about how to help someone else

eesh, this aftenoon feels like emotional cape canaveral. I need a bunch of screens up showing the weather and the want of all these minds.

Shin-ology

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Shin sent this last night:

'I got tired of waiting for 'Body keeps the Score' on my library app so I bought cptsd: from surviving to thriving on Amazon Kindle. Only like 10 pages in but it's quite validating to read, I'd be curious to hear what you think if you feel inclined to check it out.

Here is an excerpt that I enjoyed, one of many: “This is a version of the time machine rescue operation that I use with myself as well as with my clients. I tell my inner child that, if time travel is ever possible, I will travel back into the past and put a stop to my parents’ abusiveness. In the course of this I say things like: “I’ll call 911. I’ll call CPS [Child Protective Services] on them. I will grab their arms and pin them behind their backs the second they try to strike you. I will muffle them with a gag so they can’t scream at you or even mumble their criticisms. I’ll put bags over their heads so they can’t frown or glare at you. I’ll send them to bed without dessert. I’ll do anything you want me to do to protect you.”

Also “Once the critic is reduced enough that you can notice increasing periods of your brain being user-friendly, impulses to help and care for yourself naturally begin to arise. As this happens it becomes easier to tell whether you are guiding yourself with love or a whip. When you realize it’s the whip, please try to disarm your critic and treat yourself with the kindness you would extend to any young child who is struggling and having a hard time.”

when i read this at like 230 in the morning, i read it as:

'I bought this book 'Surviving to Thriving on Amazon Kindle' and was very confused that the quotes somehow endorsed self publishing using amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing initiative.

The quotes make a lot of sense when today I read it as 'CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving'

I have to say, I found that first quote about calling CPS on the parents pretty off putting. My hackles went up. Maybe I have a bit of the old Stockholm syndrome... maybe my parents weren't really that bad. But fore sure, I want time-traveler me to do no harm. I'd like him to sit down at the kitchen table in the dining room of the old house, the one with chandelier and the big picture window that looked out over the little patch that was supposed to be a garden. The one where I buried my duckling.

Sit down and tell my parents about the glory of the future. how beautiful and intelligent we'll all grow to be. That everything will be okay. That they don't' need to worry or fear. and that whatever demons they were fighting, they will be gone in time as well.

Turn off the TV. Play games together. Learn to laugh and tell jokes. Teach your children to trust. And learn to trust yourselves.

Poor Shin. Plagued with true genius, but not emotional stability. Sounds like someone else I know.

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The Drama of Eli

Then there's Eli. OY!

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Tolstoey

Eli Mercer is an old friend who's been through tremendous crisis. And still is. He just cannot seem to make sense of his life. His first marriage crashed and burned when drugs made them both miserable and she found solace in the bed of another man and he to 'teach her a lesson' went and found 4 beds.

His second. She seemed sweet. I'm sure Eli did too. But reality is everyone is broken in someway, and it sounds like two broken souls mated.

I spent an hour and a half trying to ground him. I welcome you to read the exchange. You know neither of us.

He's in crisis and feels like a victim. if Eli has one defining and unchanged characteristic, it is that he to quickly sees himself victimized. And in truth, he is a victim. He's not making it up. But, he allows himself to be in that position by trying to be kind and generous to the wrong people.

Friends. What can you do but love them. Proverbs 17:17 A true friend shows love at all times And is a brother who is born for times of distress.

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The Un-Robbery

I have friends who got married in their 60s. I've written of them before. And I have a friend who is an ex-con and not my favorite person. or at least he didn't used to be. (grammar, Jack?)

On their honeymoon, The excon, whom we'll call Stoney, house sat. Sitted? For them.

When they came home. Things were missing. And Stoney was the prime suspect.

Okay, now it gets good.

More to come.

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Val's Brother

Another death. He was 79. Not completely out of the blue. But still. She's devastated at the loss and who can blame her. He was her jr by 4 years and she knew him her entire life. I do wish I had a lifelong sibling relationship. Maybe that's why I sought it in her? I truly wanted that closeness, that bond. The rest of it came like a tidal wave. Like that wave in that movie... I was thinking of 'Deep Impact – 1988 with Tea Leoni. But this Interstellar gif is so great. And the whole time dilation thing applies too.

Eesh, I lost the thread and made it about me. I feel or Val. Her husband said he cried harder than she did.

I've only known her for three years, but she has become very dear to me. I love her direct nature, not crass or unkind, but just no words minced. And she is VERY praising of my journal work.

I need to go see them and learn a little more about the brother. Maybe now is a good time for a visit.

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I SHOULD NOT BE THIS EXCITED!

https://open.spotify.com/track/1rIFZk9tTUtHP3vULR5wXe?si=6fefb2c2b2be47f1

About HTML and Markdown language. The longer I work here, the more techincal I get. I really like writing these long pointless diaries. I don't have to keep stopping to publish articles. Thought I think I will pull from these for standalone pieces.

BUT: it' gets tiresome navigating these 9000 pixel long pages.

ENTER: in-page navigation. I'm pretty good with Markdown language at this point and it's one of my favorite things about write.as. It's what makes bold things bola and post photos and all kinds of stuff. Simple but powerful.

Some stuff though, you NEED html. And that's what I got here. All these buttons to subheads and going back to the top, simple, elegant html. That I wrote!

I are so smert!

Here's a screenshot since typing this stuff results in things you see differently. That text that say a id-“top”></a – that's what makes the top button work.

SUPERCOOL! And no one cares. Coders, as writers should remember, no one loves words as much as they do.

Yes, Jack Keeper think he may be closet code monkey.

His code not “functional” or “elegant” What do Code Monkey think?

Code Monkey like Fritos Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew Code Monkey very simple man With big warm fuzzy secret heart: Code Monkey like you

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And The Next

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#deardiary

Inspired and beautiful — if only we all felt so determined.

“I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. and love. Above all, Love. Not artful postures of love. not playful, poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening. But love that… overthrows life unbridled, ungovernable—like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done come ruin or rapture.”

v. Delesop – Shakespear in love

All that passion gave us nothing. There was still the chain. The obligation. The i-dont-know-what-to-call-it.

In the end, duty was done. And it is done still.

|===|

June 8, 2026

Treating myself to a double-header today.

I'm listening now to WFAN Yankees Radio for general sports talk ahead of this afternoon's Braves / Yankees game, which is scheduled to start at 2:05 PM CDT. I'll stay with this station for the radio-call of that game.

And tonight I'll have game 2 of a 3-game series. The Baltimore Orioles and my Texas Rangers are scheduled to play at 6:15 PM CDT. The Rangers won last night's game by a happy score of 2 to 1.

As I usually do, I'll follow both games' scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Hello I’m listening now to “Radio” by Beyonce on the boom blaster. It brings me back in time to when I was in Barrens and we were having tacos and I was a raptor riding troll shaman and life was simple.

Today we went with some raspberry pie to the neighbours and we sat on the veranda under the sun and the clouds looked like an AI rendering or something, there wasn’t much to say about them except that they looked like they were zoomed out and too many of them

Hey maybe we’re in a simulation after all

And what if the clouds was just a glitch in the matrix.

On Priorities

Current Reading: Adler is still the focus. I’m starting to realize just how short my attention span has become from years of doom scrolling. Also how difficult it is with a busy family life to find time to sit down and knock out chunks of the book. But, I’m greasing the groove. I spent a good amount of time reading it out loud to my 8 year old today.

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My current state in life means that I have to prioritize differently to allow myself to accomplish my goals, without sacrificing the things that matter most.

Way back, when I was just married and still hadn’t had kids yet, doing the things I wanted to do was much easier. It didn’t matter if I got off work and spent two and a half hours in the gym. My wife could come hang out with me if she wanted to. Maybe do a workout of her own, or simply spend some time doing what she wanted to do at home. I could get done, get home, shower and eat, and still have time to relax with her before getting to bed at a decent time.

It also didn't matter if I spent an entire Saturday lounging around with my nose in a book…or two or three. I’ve always been a very eclectic reader, sometimes to a fault. I’ve got a lot of books with one dogeared page right in the middle and I generally make no apologies for it. I remember Scott Hahn talking about how he mines books. He has a vast personal library and I think he admits that often he’s only reading parts of the books that are relevant to what he’s researching. But none-the-less I could spend a whole day just plowing through my reading list.

All that went out the window when we had our first child. Suddenly, when I got home, there was this little person who I couldn’t wait to be around. Also a big person who desperately needed a break from said little person. Not only that, but things like lack of sleep, feeding schedules, bed time routines and extra dishes (seriously we used to keep 10 bottles for our daughter when she was first born instead of just washing one and letting it dry after it was used) all led down the same road. Less time to do the things I wanted to do because this tiny human depended on me for things she couldn’t do herself. I felt the need to be more present with my family, and honestly it was the right call. Pretty soon baby #2 came and that added a whole other layer of complexity. But we managed, and the weight room stayed dark. So did my book shelf.

It’s not like I stopped reading and lifting altogether. Just the selection of books became more… nursery themed. And workouts became how often we went for walks. I don’t regret it at all. But, by the end of most nights if we weren’t passing out immediately after getting all the chores done, I just wanted to stare blankly at the wall or numb my mind and let some show or feed do my thinking for me.

Then BOOM! Babies #3 and #4. And yes I’m quite aware of how they are made.

I’m not making excuses, well…maybe I am. And I’m sure there are lots of well disciplined people who manage to stay sharp while raising lots of little humans, but I’m not one of them. The struggle is real.

All that to say, I’m being more conscious of it now. Figuring out how to do the things that make me better. Still keeping priorities straight, just adding to the list the habits that took a proverbial back seat to the little things in the actual back seat.

On Building

Current Reading: Still working through How To Read A Book by Adler. It’s not that the information isn’t good, it’s just dry. I’ve also made the switch to a digital copy. It’s just more practical to have a copy with me all the time on my phone or tablet that I can carry and read whenever I have time. It’s kind of a bummer, because for the first time in my life I was marking up a book with margin notes and was really enjoying it. I also lose some of the ease of flipping around, but it’s not impossible with the kindle app. And I can still take notes but now they are searchable so that’s one advantage.

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I prefer building systems over using them.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time planning what I want this journal to be. Endless lists of what should be the focus. How I will present it. Trying one format, deleting everything, starting over, keeping one thing and cutting everything else. Changing the name (it wasn’t always called The Practice). Leaving drafts in the queue for weeks just to trash them. And even though this is the first post you can see on the timeline, I promise it’s not the first “first” post that was ever here. One day, maybe I’ll write about the original idea, everything I learned in building it, and how it led me here. But suffice it to say, I’m done building and focused on creating now.

But…I figured out I really liked building it. The whole process of everything listed above was fun for me. Then the thought of actually doing it wasn’t as exciting. So much so that I started finding other projects to build. Revamping our whole homeschool curriculum. Building a whole new budgeting and finance system for our home. Building out a Saint Michaels Lent program for my parish. And sure, some of those things needed to be done, but I just kept telling myself that this wasn’t quite right yet, so no need to put any actual writing out.

Truth be told I was just nervous about publishing. Having people see (or at least the possibility of people seeing, I currently have 3 subscribers and I know all of them) me work through my thoughts in public was unnerving. So I kept finding other things to do and tweaking everything here. Seriously, I even created a whole other publication with a whole other theme in addition to this one before I had posted the second article. And that homeschool curriculum, built but we haven’t started the school year yet. Budgeting system, built but no data inputted yet. At least the Saint Michaels Lent program is off the ground and we’re getting ready to start it. But I built The Practice to write. And I’ve been avoiding it. And as fun as building systems is, they’re not worth much if you don’t actually use them.

Well, it’s done now. No more revisions. May you receive The Practice for what it is. Me working through things that have grabbed my attention for all the world (or at least the 3 people I know) to see. A public journal. Not polished but practiced.

JOURNAL 8 août 2026

Ce soir nos copains nous ont invitées à l’izakaya un menu surprise pour nous recevoir dans la bande, on est les seules filles ils sont super fiers et super contents de nous. Ils disent qu’on est faites pour le #surf 😄😄

Distance makes me feel abandoned, but true closeness makes me feel terrified that I will mess up. So I hold myself to impossible standards believing I have to be perfect to find love.