A zine chronicling the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis D&D campaign.

This issue details sessions 114, 115, and 116.

Adventurers head into the deep jungle. Unprepared.

You can download the issue here.

Overlord's Annals zine is available as part of the Ever & Anon APA, issue 13:

#Zine

- after Robert Desnos

Borges came to see me. He was in sepia and had on round morning glasses.

I told him to meet me here to talk about blindness, because my walls were blue and he had said once that that is what he sees when he can’t see.

How amazing, I said, to look into the sky all day,

must get boring.

Looking out from his binding he seemed to say no, no, it’s a way of being.

I said, I still don’t understand your writing.

O tender balances

to live dreams with less distraction as sound re-covers

Desire is through the eyes – yet why is love aural

yet,

How do you write on the sky, the colors banking off the cathedrals, the alps, making words by blowing forms

I saw a cumulus shadow in his spectacle

The indigo looked so bright

#poetry

Design Options for Modern Modular Homes: Creating a Home That Fits Your Lifestyle

Modern homebuyers are looking for more than just a place to live. They want homes that match their lifestyle, provide comfort, and offer flexible design options. This is one reason why modular housing has become an increasingly popular choice for families who want quality construction with personalized features.

Unlike older perceptions of factory-built homes, today’s modular homes offer a wide range of styles, layouts, and customization options. Buyers can select designs that fit their needs, whether they are looking for a small, efficient home or a larger space for a growing family.

Flexible Floor Plans for Every Family

One of the biggest advantages of modular homes is the ability to choose from different floor plans. Homeowners can customize the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, living areas, and storage spaces based on their requirements.

Families searching for custom prefab homes Texas options can explore layouts that combine functionality with modern design features. These homes can be adapted to different property sizes and personal preferences.

https://sparkhomestexas.com/custom-prefab-homes/

Modern Interior Design Features

Today’s modular homes include many of the same design elements found in traditionally built houses. Popular features include open-concept kitchens, spacious living areas, energy-efficient windows, modern flooring, and upgraded finishes.

Homeowners can also personalize details such as cabinet styles, lighting options, countertops, and bathroom designs to create a space that feels unique.

Outdoor Living and Additional Features

Outdoor features have become an important part of modern home design. Many homeowners choose additions such as covered porches, patios, decks, and garages to improve comfort and increase usable living space.

These options allow families to enjoy both indoor and outdoor areas while adding value to their property.

Energy Efficiency and Smart Home Features

Modern modular homes are designed with efficiency in mind. Improved insulation, energy-saving appliances, and advanced building techniques can help reduce maintenance costs and improve everyday comfort.

Some homeowners also include smart home technology, such as automated lighting, security systems, and climate controls, to create a more convenient living environment.

Choosing the Right Modular Home Design

Selecting the right design depends on your budget, lifestyle, location, and future plans. Working with experienced home professionals can help buyers understand available options and create a home that meets their long-term needs.

With flexible layouts, modern features, and customization possibilities, modular homes provide an excellent solution for people who want a high-quality home designed around their lifestyle.

Design Options for Modern Modular Homes: Creating a Home That Fits Your Lifestyle

Modern homebuyers are looking for more than just a place to live. They want homes that match their lifestyle, provide comfort, and offer flexible design options. This is one reason why modular housing has become an increasingly popular choice for families who want quality construction with personalized features.

Unlike older perceptions of factory-built homes, today’s modular homes offer a wide range of styles, layouts, and customization options. Buyers can select designs that fit their needs, whether they are looking for a small, efficient home or a larger space for a growing family.

Flexible Floor Plans for Every Family

One of the biggest advantages of modular homes is the ability to choose from different floor plans. Homeowners can customize the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, living areas, and storage spaces based on their requirements.

Families searching for custom prefab homes Texas options can explore layouts that combine functionality with modern design features. These homes can be adapted to different property sizes and personal preferences.

Modern Interior Design Features

Today’s modular homes include many of the same design elements found in traditionally built houses. Popular features include open-concept kitchens, spacious living areas, energy-efficient windows, modern flooring, and upgraded finishes.

Homeowners can also personalize details such as cabinet styles, lighting options, countertops, and bathroom designs to create a space that feels unique.

Outdoor Living and Additional Features

Outdoor features have become an important part of modern home design. Many homeowners choose additions such as covered porches, patios, decks, and garages to improve comfort and increase usable living space.

These options allow families to enjoy both indoor and outdoor areas while adding value to their property.

Energy Efficiency and Smart Home Features

Modern modular homes are designed with efficiency in mind. Improved insulation, energy-saving appliances, and advanced building techniques can help reduce maintenance costs and improve everyday comfort.

Some homeowners also include smart home technology, such as automated lighting, security systems, and climate controls, to create a more convenient living environment.

Choosing the Right Modular Home Design

Selecting the right design depends on your budget, lifestyle, location, and future plans. Working with experienced home professionals can help buyers understand available options and create a home that meets their long-term needs.

With flexible layouts, modern features, and customization possibilities, modular homes provide an excellent solution for people who want a high-quality home designed around their lifestyle.

Angels vs Rangers.

My MLB Game of choice today has the Los Angeles Angels playing my Texas Rangers in a game scheduled to start at 7:05 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score 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.

Image of a checklist with circle with a slash over the top.

I feel fairly certain in saying the author of the post 5 Albums meant no harm. Even the prompt: Introduce yourself with five albums that have shaped you seemed quite innocuous. And I thought: “Cool. I can write a response to this with one hand tied behind my back, and three of my fingers broken”. Part way in, I decided to throw a curveball: I was going to list ten albums. Actually more than ten because my list had multi-volume sets in it. I reject your rules and substitute my own! Take that!

As I worked on my masterpiece, I inserted a couple of snarky little comments between the first and second half that were intended to be humorous about me breaking the rules. Those comments used words like “reductive” and “de minimis”. That's when I realized I was falling into a trap: the clickbait trap. Then I had a further realization: this wasn't just a list, it wasn't just clickbait, it was worse.

So now, after defending writing and blogging metas, I run the risk of being labeled a hypocrite in order to explain why these types of articles are not the silly puff pieces they appear to be. But rather, they are precisely the kind of thing that should be avoided. And, I even have a some potential fixes for what I see as the biggest (but not only) issue.

The Problems

Personally, I see three problems with these kinds of posts:

First: they don't say anything about the author. At least they don't say anything useful, other than being a list of objects. But there is no context to those objects. The author hasn't given the reader any insight into why those objects have meaning. You might think they are objects the author likes or loves, but is that necessarily the case? Aren't you just as “shaped” by the things that you don't like, the things that repulse you, or you are indifferent to?

Second: The author of such a post is opening themselves up to be judged, and conversely putting their audience in the position of being judgmental. What does this accomplish? Nothing useful as far as I can tell. A larger portion of the social issues we have today are based around people being judgmental without having any real knowledge of the people they are judging.

I've read or heard numerous accounts from people that have found their way out of cults or hate groups that are surprised when they realize that whatever they hated was just not worth it. They often don't realize or understand the people or things they hate because they judged them solely on the few things they thought they knew. Things that were regularly misrepresented, or twisted to cause them judge people hatefully.

I'm not saying that judging someone based on a silly list of five albums is on the same level as someone in a cult or hate group. But they do share a small similarity in that they invite judgment based on what is, at best, superficiality, or at worst a potential misunderstanding.

Third: These lists play to some of the trickiest and most difficult aspects of our personalities to navigate. They play to our ego, pride, superiority, or inferiority. This was what happened to me, I realized, when I was writing my snarky comments. I take pride in the fact that I have a wildly varied taste in music, and my ego wouldn't let me just produce a list of five pop/rock albums when there is so much more music out there. That's why I expanded my list (and, in reality, ten entries still weren't enough to encapsulate my listening, and all the recordings that have shaped me.)

The Fixes

So, having talked about the problems, what are the fixes?

First: don't make it a call to action. “Introduce yourself…” is a call for responses. This puts the reader automatically in the role of judging the list and the person that wrote it. If there isn't a call to action, it removes some pressure to judge. There is still some likelihood the reader will judge the list. But it's less likely they will have to navigate their ego or pride while reading it.

Second: The more obvious option: provide context. Tells us a bit more about yourself by telling your reader why these particular items are significant to you. Was it a recording you bought with your first paycheck? Was it playing when you proposed to your spouse? By doing this you invite your readers to relate to you on some level. Their responses can focus more on similarities or differences. This, in turn, may evolve into a sort of blogging based dialog between you and your readers.

Third: Don't write a list. Okay, this sounds like I'm being pedantic. But, really, I have a better idea: take your list and turn it into a series of essays. Write 300–600 words about each of the list entries. Recall stories about them. Explain where they fit into your life. Talk about the things that you like about the item, and even the things that you would change about it if you could.

This is the kind of exercise that can be beneficial in so many ways. You may find new ways of expressing yourself. It can allow you to explore your relationship with the subject. Your readers may see the item in a new light. As with the second entry, responses to your post might be about the similarities or differences between you and your audience. Or, your audience might write about things that hold a similar place in their lives.

Conclusion

When I started writing my response list for the 5 Albums post, I thought it was just a little silly toss off article. But then I quickly threw out the original rules, and having done that, discovered there were bigger issues with this kind of post. The issues are they don't provide any context, and therefore no real insight into the author. The second is that they are a call to judgment. The author is judged, while the audience is being judgmental. Finally, they play to some complicated aspects of our personality (such as ego and pride). Indulging in these complex aspects of our personalities isn't always healthy.

So, I set about suggesting some fixes. The first is to not have a call to action. That will somewhat minimize the judgment aspect. The second is to provide context. Let your audience in on your relationship with these items. Third suggestion would be to write a series of articles instead. Explore more of your writing skills, and let your audience focus more on what's important t to you, instead of the object.

So am I a hypocrite? Maybe partially. But, I am calling this out because I think we can do better. I think understanding when something is a bad idea, and why it is a bad idea can lead to us finding better ways to accomplish the same objective. I have little doubt that the original author of the post intended to make a positive contribution.

We see these kinds of articles all the time. I've even participated in one myself (see: The Shellsharks Music Quiz Challenge). But, I can say at the time I was just trying to get myself writing again. And, this was actually a quiz that was more extensive and open-ended than the “5 Albums” post. Looking back on it, if I were to take it again, a lot of my answers would change.

In the end, this is all just my opinion. Hopefully it has been food for thought, and it may do some good.

Now, if you'll please excuse me, I have a series of articles to start writing… ;)

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Categories: #Writing Tags: #blogging, #lists, #context, #judgment, #clickbait, #meta, #metas License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

ברוך השם Its not much...but its my little place in the world and I am grateful.

Follow-up Notes from Torah Class

I questioned again whether—assuming the Bible’s story about Avraham and Sarah is true—the higher power (G-d and the angels mentioned) could intervene in non-human intelligence. If we are to believe that Elohim/Adonai is all-powerful, we can look at the verse in Genesis 14:19, where Melchizedek blesses Abram with these words: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth.” (Hebrew: qoneh shamayim va’aretz). Melchizedek was the king of Salem and a priest of God Most High. According to Jewish tradition, he was Shem, the son of Noah, who was still alive in Avraham’s time. “And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was a priest of God Most High.” (Genesis 14:18) What we do know about Melchizedek is that he was not Jewish. Archaeologists associate the region with ancient Near Eastern civilizations, including the Sumerians and Canaanites. Jewish texts identify him with Shem. Side note: If Melchizedek was a Sumerian (or pre-Israelite) religious figure, this would suggest there is not only one path or religion that leads to G-d. It would raise a series of questions: What was their faith, and how did they practice it, did they have a holy text like the bible? Here is another thought: Assuming these events actually happened, I am not sure this type of intelligence perceives itself as “alive” in the sense that we do. Nonetheless, it clearly has influence and can alter the biological and physical world we experience. So I would argue it is very much “alive”—perhaps just in a form we are only beginning to understand. It exists. It has the ability to influence and change the physical, material world. This, in theory, could be done through humans. It could also be done through machines. So it is a reasonable question to ask: What if the same entity that appears in the Torah, that enters and controls Avraham and Sarah’s thoughts and physical actions, could also control or influence machines? Today.

In a sky with no singular centre The dream of unity is an illusion I will move beyond this radiant mirage In a full moon night with stars concealed

L’immaturité psychique n’est pas une maladie. Ce n’est pas non plus un diagnostic reconnu dans les classifications psychiatriques. C’est un concept utilisé en psychologie pour décrire un fonctionnement dans lequel certaines capacités émotionnelles, relationnelles et cognitives n’ont pas atteint un niveau de développement permettant une véritable autonomie intérieure.

Autrement dit, il ne s’agit pas d’une question d’âge. Il s’agit d’une question d’intégration.

On peut avoir vingt ans et faire preuve d’une grande maturité psychique. À l’inverse, certaines personnes de soixante ans continuent de réagir face aux difficultés avec les mêmes mécanismes de défense qu’un enfant confronté à la frustration.

La maturité psychique ne consiste pas à tout contrôler. Elle consiste à pouvoir habiter pleinement la réalité. Supporter l’incertitude. Tolérer la frustration. Différer une gratification. Reconnaître sa responsabilité. Réguler ses émotions. Rester en lien malgré les désaccords. Plus ces capacités se développent, moins notre équilibre dépend des circonstances extérieures.

Les neurosciences montrent que les régions cérébrales impliquées dans la régulation émotionnelle, le contrôle des impulsions, la prise de perspective et la planification poursuivent leur maturation jusqu’au début de l’âge adulte. Mais le cerveau n’explique pas tout. Le développement psychique dépend aussi des relations d’attachement, des expériences vécues, de la qualité des liens, de la sécurité affective et de l’environnement dans lequel une personne grandit.

L’enfant découvre progressivement que tous ses désirs ne peuvent pas être satisfaits immédiatement. Il apprend que les autres existent avec leurs propres besoins. Il expérimente les limites, les erreurs, les réparations et les frustrations. Lorsque ces expériences sont suffisamment sécurisées, elles permettent la construction d’une autonomie intérieure.

Cette autonomie ne signifie pas ne plus avoir besoin des autres. Elle signifie que les autres cessent d’être responsables de notre équilibre psychique.

Lorsque certaines étapes du développement restent incomplètes, une partie de cette sécurité intérieure ne se construit pas pleinement.

C’est alors qu’apparaît un phénomène souvent méconnu.

La personne continue naturellement à rechercher la sécurité, mais elle la cherche presque exclusivement à l’extérieur d’elle-même.

Elle croit que le prochain partenaire la rassurera définitivement. Que le prochain salaire apportera enfin la paix. Que la prochaine maison, le prochain diplôme, la prochaine réussite, le prochain enfant, la prochaine reconnaissance ou le prochain statut feront enfin disparaître cette sensation diffuse d’insécurité.

Ces éléments sont évidemment importants. Ils améliorent la qualité de vie. Ils réduisent certains risques réels. Mais ils ne peuvent pas accomplir une mission qui appartient au développement psychique.

Une maison protège de la pluie. Elle ne répare pas un attachement insécure.

L’argent réduit l’incertitude économique. Il n’apaise pas durablement un système nerveux qui vit encore comme si le danger était permanent.

Un partenaire aimant peut offrir un environnement sécurisant. Il ne peut pas devenir le système nerveux de l’autre.

Lorsque la sécurité intérieure manque, chaque nouvelle sécurité extérieure procure un soulagement réel, mais provisoire. Très vite, une nouvelle inquiétude apparaît. Il faut davantage de garanties. Davantage de contrôle. Davantage de certitudes. Le problème n’est pas que la personne recherche la sécurité. Le problème est qu’elle demande au monde extérieur de produire un état intérieur qu’il ne peut jamais fabriquer à lui seul.

C’est pourquoi certaines personnes semblent ne jamais être rassurées, même lorsque tout semble objectivement aller bien.

L’immaturité psychique peut ensuite s’exprimer de nombreuses façons.

Une faible tolérance à la frustration.

Des émotions qui prennent rapidement toute la place.

Une difficulté à reconnaître sa responsabilité sans vivre cela comme une humiliation.

Une pensée polarisée où les personnes deviennent entièrement bonnes ou entièrement mauvaises.

Une tendance à attendre des autres qu’ils devinent nos besoins, réparent nos blessures ou portent nos émotions.

Un besoin important de validation.

Une difficulté à différer les gratifications.

Ces manifestations existent ponctuellement chez chacun d’entre nous. Elles deviennent problématiques lorsqu’elles sont rigides et envahissent plusieurs domaines de la vie.

Les approches intégratives permettent aujourd’hui de mieux comprendre ce fonctionnement.

Le corps réagit avant la pensée.

Les émotions orientent l’attention.

Les croyances donnent un sens aux événements.

Les comportements entretiennent les habitudes.

Les relations modèlent l’ensemble du système.

L’immaturité psychique n’est donc pas un défaut moral. C’est un équilibre devenu inadapté. Un système qui tente encore de protéger l’individu avec des stratégies qui étaient peut-être efficaces autrefois, mais qui limitent désormais sa liberté.

Le monde moderne renforce parfois cette dynamique. Les réseaux sociaux, les achats immédiats, la disponibilité permanente des services et la recherche continue de validation entretiennent l’illusion qu’il existe toujours une réponse extérieure capable d’apaiser un inconfort intérieur.

Pourtant, le cerveau reste profondément plastique. À tout âge, il peut apprendre de nouvelles façons de réguler les émotions, de traverser les frustrations et d’habiter les relations.

Grandir psychiquement ne signifie pas devenir froid, sérieux ou parfaitement rationnel.

Cela signifie que la sécurité commence progressivement à venir de l’intérieur.

On continue d’apprécier une maison, un couple, une réussite professionnelle, des amis, une stabilité financière ou une reconnaissance sociale. Mais on cesse peu à peu de leur demander de réparer ce qu’ils n’ont jamais eu le pouvoir de réparer.

La maturité psychique apparaît lorsque la sécurité extérieure cesse d’être une béquille et devient simplement un soutien.

Alors, les possessions ne servent plus à calmer la peur. Les relations ne servent plus à combler le vide. La réussite ne sert plus à prouver sa valeur.

Elles deviennent enfin ce qu’elles auraient toujours dû être. Des richesses qui enrichissent une vie déjà habitée, plutôt que des tentatives de remplir une maison restée vide.

I think I’ve just come to accept the fact that my standards have raised, at least in the sense that I am not just interested in someone who is interested in me anymore, or at least that doesn’t affect me as much as it did in the past. And I think that’s for the best. This way I’m a little bit more intentional with who I get into a relationship with, and I think a lot of it is because the fact that I would like to marry someone in the coming years ideally, and I feel like I have done enough experimenting and developing to end up where I am, a spot where I feel like I have a good idea of what I want and that what I actually want is good for me.

Dear Pink

As I was getting ready for work this morning, putting on my makeup, I randomly remembered something I've been trying to shove to the back of my mind for years because it's honestly so embarrassing.

Like any other Mexican girl, I grew up dreaming about my quinceañera. And as it gets closer, of course everyone starts asking what you're going to do for your big day.

Well, one day my cousin asked if my dress was going to be pink. I turned to her so fast, looked her dead in the eye, and said, “No. Never. That's a disgusting color, and you will never catch me wearing it.”

Which is hilarious considering that three years later, there I was celebrating my quinceañera in a giant pink ballgown.

The funny thing is, when I was little, I loved pink. It was everywhere. My clothes, my shoes, my nails, my room. Literally everywhere. I used to fight my cousin over who got to be the Pink Power Ranger because, in my mind, that was my color.

So... what happened?

As you get older, you start getting influenced by the world around you. And when I say “the world,” I don't mean outside your house. I mean outside your own head. You start picking up other people's opinions, values, and beliefs. For me, those people were my family.

Growing up as the youngest of four, you look up to your siblings. You watch everything they do and think, “I want to do that too.”

Well, little Jo, there was one tiny problem.

You weren't just the youngest.

You were also the only girl in a traditional Mexican household.

What did that mean?

You want to hang out with friends? Nope.

You wanted to stay after school and try out for the soccer team? No. “Porque uno nunca sabe.” One never knows.

Your friends invited you to the mall? No. “Porque las niñas siempre deben estar con sus papás. ¿Qué va a pensar la gente?” No because girls should always be with their parents. What are people going to think.

Little Jo didn't realize that being a girl meant she wasn't going to have the same freedoms her older brothers did.

And who ended up taking the blame for all of it?

Poor pink.

I started hating the color. What it represented. I hated being a girl. I hated God for making me one. I hated everyone who kept reminding me what I was “supposed” to be.

So I did what I thought was easier, I changed everything about myself.

I became a tomboy. I wore nothing but dark colors, of course mostly my brothers' old clothes. I stopped wearing nail polish. I stopped caring about earrings. I barely brushed my hair. Anything that felt feminine, I wanted nothing to do with.

I became the complete opposite of the little girl who used to wear bright colors and spend forever deciding which pair of sparkly earrings to buy at the dollar store.

Honestly, I don't even know what changed.

Maybe I got tired of constantly being told I wasn't feminine enough. Or maybe I got tired of being the only girl in my class who didn't know how to be one.

Whatever it was, when I turned fifteen, I decided to give femininity another chance.

Funny enough, pink still wasn't my first choice.

I was actually planning on getting a blue dress instead. But at the very last minute, I changed my mind.

I decided to give little Jo the pink princess quinceañera she'd always dreamed of.

And I don't regret it for a second.

I'm still learning how to embrace that feminine side of myself. My mom never really wore makeup or dressed up. We're from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and as the oldest daughter of nine siblings, she never really had the chance to go through that girly-girl phase either.

The closest thing I had to older sisters were my cousins, and most of them got married by the time I was twelve or thirteen.

So yeah, I'm still figuring it out.

But at least now I can proudly say that my favorite color is still pink.

Years after he vanished and was presumed dead, Addasha Risea has found her long-lost brother. But where has he been all these years? Why didn’t he come home?

~ ~ ~ Written by Rafe Langston ~ ~ ~ “Gods, it really is you!” Addasha Risea said, as she looked at the haggard man standing before her. “We all thought you were dead, Oryn! Why didn’t you come home?!” They stood in a small clearing far deeper in the Bramblemire Jungle than the halflings of Coral Haven were permitted to travel, but Addasha had never let rules limit her curiosity before and, as usual, it paid off. As for her long-lost brother, he had been bent over a stream trying to catch a frog when she found him. “I… got lost.” he finally said, pausing oddly as if struggling to remember the words. “Fell… hit my… head… couldn’t… find the way back… tried… wanted… to be home…” Tears welled up in his eyes. “Missed you.” Addasha hugged him. He felt frail, like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. She dug into her pack and pulled out some salted meat that she had been saving. Oryn took it and ripped off a bite. “Drueda…” he said with his mouth full. “What?” Addasha didn’t recognize the word. Oryn shook his head. “Sorry… difficult… to speak… since…” and he mimicked a hit to his head. “That’s okay.” Addasha said as she put her hand on his thin bicep. “Let’s get you home.” Oryn chewed at the salted meat, his eyes full of uncertainty. “No… first… need to go… back… drueda! The word… name…” Addasha looked at him, worried. He patted her pack and pointed at himself. “A pack? You have things you want to get before we go?” “No… show… drueda!” The last word was like a curse of frustration. “What’s that mean?” “Na… nothing… come… then we go…” ~ ~ ~ Twenty minutes later, the pair stood in front of a rickety hut built between several large trees. It reminded Addasha of the stories they told little kids back in the village about the Bramblemire Hag who lived in the jungle and ate children who wandered too far. She lived in a scary hut with a conical roof and strange, twisted, gnarled edges – just like this one. “Did you build this?” Addasha asked. “No.” Oryn answered as he opened the door and gestured for her to enter. “Found.” Addasha stepped into the hut, which was lit by a single candle. Strange trinkets lined the shelves, and the hundreds of furs that covered the floor and furniture gave it a thick, musty smell. Sitting in the singular chair next to the table that held the candle was an old woman. She sipped from a steaming mug then turned her head to look at Addasha. Her mouth curled into a malicious smile under her long, crooked nose, and her eyes flashed. “Welcome home, Addasha.” she and Oryn said in unison. Then something heavy hit Addasha on the back of the head. She spun and landed on her back, seeing her brother holding an iron pan and looking down at her with tears streaming down his face, then the blackness took her. ~ ~ ~ “Rise and shine, pretty girl!” The old crone’s voice felt like claws tearing into Addasha’s throbbing skull. She was tied to the chair in the hut, which now glowed with an orange light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Oryn stood in the corner, his head bowed but his shoulders shaking as he quietly sobbed. “What do you want?” Addasha asked, trying to blink away the pain in her head. “You, deary!” she said, cheerily, as she grabbed Addasha’s face in her cold, bony hands. She turned Addasha’s head as if she were inspecting a piece of meat. “Poor Oryn here has been so lonely. I can’t have my pets sulking around all day. That’s just cruel!” Suddenly, a realization dawned. “Let him go.” Addasha demanded. “And what would be in that for little old me?” the hag asked. “I won’t tell anyone your name.” The woman laughed, her voice tinged with nervousness. “My name?” “Yeah, every kid knows of the Bramblemire Hag, and that the only way to control her is with her name. Release him now, Drueda.” The woman’s eyes grew wide, violent, but she stood as if she were glued to the floor, and screamed in rage. “Good to know the stories are true. Now, Drueda,” Addasha said her name with more force, and the crone sneered at her. Addasha continued, “You will untie me and leave this place forever. Go find yourself a miserable spit of land somewhere in the ocean, far from people, and never leave it again. And be happy I’m merciful, hag.” Drueda seethed as she struggled to resist the commands, but stepped forward and began untying the knots…. ~ ~ ~ The party celebrating Oryn’s return lasted until dawn. There was song and dance, a feast, and wine that flowed endlessly. It was the happiest time that Addasha could remember. Later, while they stood in the cemetery looking down at the smashed bits that had been Oryn’s headstone, across the ocean an old woman sat in a hut on a tiny island, humming cheerily to herself as she finished sewing a tiny halfling doll, sealing a lock of hair inside…. ~ ~ ~ CREDIT ~ ~ ~ The character art was created using HeroForge and public domain imagery. The resulting composite image was created with GIMP. No GenAI was used in the creation of this story, and no part of this story may be used to train or enhance machine learning models of any kind. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. For more info, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

In a federal courthouse in Santa Fe, on the afternoon of 24 March 2026, twelve New Mexicans did something that no jury in the United States had ever done. After a six-week trial, they returned a verdict finding that Meta Platforms, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, had built products that harmed children, that the company's own executives understood this, and that they had deployed those products anyway. The penalty was 375 million dollars, calculated at the statutory maximum of 5,000 dollars per violation under New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, multiplied across tens of thousands of breaches. The number itself was almost beside the point. What mattered was the finding underneath it: a body of ordinary citizens had looked at the internal machinery of a social media company and concluded that the harm was not an accident. It was the design.

The verdict landed in a strange and revealing month. In the same weeks that the Santa Fe jury was deliberating, two other documents were circulating that, taken together with the trial, sketch the outline of a problem the law has only just begun to name. One was a clinical analysis in Psychiatric Times describing what its authors called an empathy crisis. The other was a piece of reporting from Outlook India, dated 11 March 2026, about psychologists who had begun to describe something they were observing in their consulting rooms and in the wider population as compassion fatigue operating at the scale of an entire society. Read in isolation, each is a story about a different thing: a lawsuit, a neurological phenomenon, a cultural mood. Read together, they describe a single mechanism and its consequences, and they raise a question that is at once technical, clinical, legal, and moral. If the systems through which hundreds of millions of people now experience the world are measurably eroding their ability to feel for one another, what would it mean to build those systems differently, and who, exactly, has the standing to demand it?

The Mechanics of the Feed

To understand why the question is so difficult to dismiss, you have to start with the engineering, because the engineering is where the harm is located.

A recommendation algorithm is, at its core, a prediction engine. Its job is to guess which piece of content, from among the effectively infinite supply available, will keep a given user engaged for the longest possible time. The system does not have opinions. It does not know what cruelty is, or grief, or war. It has a metric, usually some composite of watch time, clicks, shares, comments, and re-engagement, and it relentlessly optimises for that metric by serving up whatever the data suggests will move it upward. This is not a caricature of how these systems work. It is a description of their explicit objective function.

The trouble begins with what the data reveals about human attention. Content that provokes strong negative affect, outrage, fear, disgust, the sight of suffering, tends to generate more engagement than content that provokes calm or contentment. This is not a flaw in the algorithm; it is a feature of the species. Our nervous systems evolved to prioritise threat. We attend to the snarling face in the crowd before we notice the smiling ones, and a feed that learns this will, with perfect mechanical indifference, escalate. It will serve a user a progressively more extreme diet, because the extreme is what holds the gaze.

The Psychiatric Times analysis published in early 2026, titled in part around how social media algorithms drive emotional numbing, frames this with clinical precision. Desensitisation to violent, high-arousal content, its authors argue, is now a measurable phenomenon, one that reshapes how people experience empathy, form moral judgements, and understand the suffering of others. The crucial claim, and the one that turns a familiar complaint about social media into a genuine indictment, is that the amplification of violent and distressing content is not an unintended side effect of optimising for engagement. It is a predictable consequence of optimising for engagement without any constraint on emotional valence. If you build a machine to maximise attention, and you place no governor on the emotional cost of the content it surfaces, the machine will discover, on its own, that human distress is reliable fuel. The harm is structurally embedded in the design rather than incidentally produced by it.

This distinction is everything. An unintended side effect can be patched. A structural consequence has to be designed out, and designing it out means accepting a lower number in the column the entire business is built to maximise.

A Skill, Not a Trait

The reason any of this should alarm us, rather than merely irritate us, rests on a body of research from developmental and social psychology that has been accumulating for decades and that runs counter to a comfortable intuition. The intuition is that empathy is a fixed quantity, something you either have or lack, a fact of temperament settled at birth. The research says otherwise.

Jamil Zaki, a psychologist at Stanford University and the author of a 2019 book on the subject, has spent years assembling the evidence that empathy behaves less like an inborn trait and more like a trainable capacity. “Empathy isn't doled out to us in a fixed quantity at birth,” he has written. “It's a skill that improves each time we use it.” His preferred metaphor is muscular. “Empathy is something like a muscle: left unused, it atrophies; put to work, it grows.” Through deliberate practice, he argues, through compassion meditation, diverse friendships, even the reading of fiction, people can cultivate their capacity to feel with others. And, strikingly, the mere belief that empathy is a skill rather than a fixed quantity inspires people to try harder at it, and to succeed.

The flip side of a trainable capacity is a degradable one. If empathy grows with use, it shrinks with disuse, and it can be actively damaged by sustained exposure to conditions that reward emotional shutdown. This is not speculation. It is one of the more robust findings in the literature on media violence. In a 2009 study with the deliberately chilling title “Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others,” the researchers Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson demonstrated that people exposed to violent media were measurably slower to help an injured stranger, and reported the emergency as less serious, than people who had not been so exposed. Their conclusion was that exposure to violence in media leaves people, in their phrase, “comfortably numb” to the pain and suffering of others.

The numbness is not merely behavioural. It registers in the brain. Neuroimaging work published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, under the equally evocative heading “Emotionally anesthetized,” found that even brief exposure to film violence produced changes in the neural signatures associated with processing emotional faces. Participants who had just watched a violent film showed altered electrical responses to images of happy and fearful faces, a pattern the researchers interpreted as desensitisation: the emotional content was registering with less force, and required fewer cognitive resources to manage. The machinery of feeling was, quite literally, turning its volume down.

Put the two bodies of evidence side by side and the implication is hard to escape. Empathy is a skill that atrophies without practice and is damaged by repeated exposure to distress that one is powerless to act upon. Recommendation algorithms, optimised for engagement without constraint on emotional valence, deliver precisely that exposure, in unlimited supply, to hundreds of millions of people, several hours a day. The systems are, in effect, running a vast uncontrolled experiment in the de-conditioning of human compassion.

The Crisis at Population Scale

What does that experiment look like from the inside of a clinic? This is the territory the Outlook India reporting maps, and it is worth dwelling on because it moves the discussion from the laboratory to the lived.

The article, published in March 2026 under a headline drawn from the words of a distressed person, “I Am Not Well,” set out to document how constant exposure to war and atrocity, mediated through screens, was reshaping the way ordinary people processed suffering. It gathered the observations of clinicians and scholars who deal with this professionally, and their testimony is consistent and unsettling.

Zoya Mir, a clinical psychologist who has worked with people affected by the long conflict in Kashmir, offered perhaps the most precise framing of the mechanism. “It is not that empathy disappears,” she observed, “but when the brain is repeatedly exposed to trauma it begins to dull emotional intensity as a way of protecting itself.” This is a vital point, and it complicates any simple moralising about a hard-hearted public. The numbing is not a character flaw. It is a defence mechanism, the mind throwing up a wall because the alternative, feeling the full weight of every catastrophe scrolling past, is unsustainable.

Yaqeen Sikandar, a Turkey-based psychologist specialising in trauma and cognitive behavioural techniques, described the cognitive sleight of hand by which the mind manages the unmanageable. “When the scale of loss becomes too large to emotionally process,” Sikandar said, “the brain turns tragedy into something countable.” A death becomes a number; a massacre becomes a statistic; the human reality is filed away into a form the mind can hold without breaking. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, psychic numbing, and a related one, compassion fade, describing the counter-intuitive finding that our concern can actually diminish as the number of victims rises.

Sanjeev Jain, a senior psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru, situated all of this in a longer historical frame. The idea that societies can grow numb to large-scale violence, he noted, is not new. Societies have always been capable of growing indifferent to mass death when, as he put it, killing becomes detached from its human context, “just another procedure to be followed.” What is new is the delivery mechanism. The numbing that once required the bureaucratic distance of a war machine or the propaganda of a state can now be manufactured, at retail, by a feed that has learned what holds attention and serves it without pause.

The digital-rights expert Apar Gupta, also quoted in the Outlook India piece, drew the connection explicitly, noting that social media algorithms amplify emotionally charged content and so contribute to the compassion fade that leaves users emotionally exhausted and disengaged. Here the two stories, the clinical and the technological, meet. The algorithm is not merely a neutral pipe through which the world's suffering happens to flow. It is an active selector, an amplifier, choosing the most arousing material precisely because arousal is what it has been built to harvest.

The result, the clinicians suggest, is a kind of mass-scale compassion fatigue: not the burnout of a single overworked nurse or aid worker, the context in which the term was first developed, but a diffuse, population-level dulling of the capacity to respond to distress. And it does not make people better informed. That is the cruel irony at the heart of the matter. The constant exposure does not produce a more engaged, more compassionate, more globally conscious citizenry. It produces the opposite: people who have seen so much suffering that they have stopped being able to feel it, who are saturated rather than mobilised, anaesthetised rather than activated.

What the Jury Saw

This is the context into which the New Mexico verdict must be placed, because the trial was, in a sense, the first time a legal system was asked to render judgement on the design itself rather than on any single piece of content.

The case was brought by the New Mexico Department of Justice, which had filed suit alleging that Meta's platforms exposed children to harm and that the company had misrepresented their safety. Over six weeks, the jury heard testimony that went to the heart of the company's knowledge and intent. Witnesses described internal warnings disregarded, public assurances that diverged from private understanding, and design choices that prioritised engagement over the welfare of young users. Representatives of law enforcement and of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children testified that Meta's reporting of crimes against children on its apps had been deficient, with the company, in the testimony, generating high volumes of low-quality reports by over-relying on automated moderation.

The jury found Meta liable on the claims brought under the state's Unfair Practices Act. It concluded that the company had concealed what it knew about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms, that it had made false or misleading statements about the safety of those platforms, and that it had engaged in trade practices the jury was willing to label “unconscionable,” unfairly exploiting the vulnerabilities and inexperience of children. The prosecuting attorney Donald Migliori captured the theory of the case in a single sentence, describing Meta as “choosing to engineer its algorithms to keep young people online while knowing that children are at risk.”

That word, “choosing,” is the hinge. The verdict did not rest on the claim that bad things sometimes happen on Meta's platforms, which no one disputes and which would not, on its own, establish liability. It rested on the finding that the company had made deliberate engineering choices to maximise engagement, that it understood the harms those choices produced, and that it proceeded regardless. Fortune, reporting on the verdict the following day under a headline confirming the finding in the plainest terms, summarised the conclusion that Mark Zuckerberg's social media products were harmful for children and that the jury believed the company knew it.

Meta, for its part, said it respectfully disagreed with the verdict and would appeal, maintaining that it works hard to keep people safe and is candid about the difficulty of identifying and removing harmful content and bad actors. The appeal is a near certainty, and the legal fight is far from settled.

But the significance of the verdict does not depend on whether the specific 375-million-dollar penalty survives. New Mexico's case was selected from a consolidated group of hundreds of similar lawsuits precisely to test whether a product-design theory of liability, the argument that the harm lives in the architecture rather than in any individual post, could survive a jury trial. It could. Within the same period, a separate jury found Meta and Google's YouTube negligent in a related social media harms trial, and analysts noted that a wave of further litigation, including cases brought by hundreds of school districts under public-nuisance theories, was advancing through the courts. If the damages established in these early cases are even partially scaled across the thousands of pending claims, the financial exposure for the platforms moves from hundreds of millions into the billions. The bellwether has rung. For every plaintiff's attorney and state attorney general watching, the message is that this legal pathway is now viable. For the platforms, the message is that the courtroom is no longer a safe harbour.

The Engagement Trap

Why, then, do the platforms not simply build the better system? Why persist with an architecture that produces harms a jury is now willing to call knowing and deliberate? The answer is not that the engineers are cruel. It is that the incentive structure is, in a precise sense, captured.

A social media company makes money by selling attention to advertisers. Attention is the inventory. Every additional minute a user spends in the feed is another increment of inventory to sell, another opportunity to learn more about that user and so to target them more precisely. The recommendation algorithm exists to manufacture that attention, and it is judged, internally, by how much of it it can produce. An engineer who proposes to alter the algorithm in a way that reduces engagement, even for the most defensible reasons, is proposing to reduce the company's revenue. That is a difficult conversation to win, because the metric that would improve, some measure of user emotional health, is diffuse, hard to quantify, and shows up nowhere on the balance sheet, while the metric that would suffer, engagement, is measured to four decimal places and is reported to investors every quarter.

This is what it means to say the harm is structural. It is not that anyone in the building wishes to numb the public's capacity for compassion. It is that the system has an objective function, and the objective function does not include compassion, and so the system optimises it away as surely as water finds the lowest point. The Psychiatric Times analysis makes this case in clinical language, but the logic is the logic of any optimisation process: what you do not constrain, you sacrifice.

It follows that exhortation will not fix this. Asking the platforms to be more responsible, to consider the wellbeing of their users, to think about the long-term consequences, is asking them to act against the gradient of their own incentives, which is to say, asking them to do something companies almost never do absent external pressure. The history of every industry that has produced diffuse public harms while generating private profit, from tobacco to leaded petrol to industrial pollution, suggests that the gradient does not bend on its own. It is bent, if at all, by some combination of liability, regulation, and the slow shift of public expectation. Which is precisely why the New Mexico verdict matters beyond its dollar figure: it introduces, for the first time at real scale, a cost on the other side of the ledger.

Designing for the Feeling, Not the Click

So what would it actually mean to redesign these systems for human emotional health rather than for engagement? The question is not rhetorical, and there are concrete, if difficult, answers.

At the level of the individual clinician, the Psychiatric Times authors propose a set of interventions that are modest but real. They suggest that clinicians be given standardised guidance on how to screen for and discuss a patient's algorithmic exposure during routine appointments, treating the feed as a health variable in the way that diet or sleep already are. They recommend behavioural strategies that patients can adopt: limiting use of these platforms when tired or emotionally dysregulated, when defences are lowest; creating defined viewing windows rather than scrolling intermittently across the whole of the waking day; and, intriguingly, deliberately engaging with neutral or prosocial content so that the recommendation system itself recalibrates, learning to serve a gentler diet. There is something almost subversive in that last suggestion: a recognition that the user can, with effort, partially retrain the very machine that is training them.

But these are coping strategies, and the authors are candid that the long-term solution lies elsewhere, in changes to how the platforms design and regulate their recommendation systems in the first place. This is where the harder, more consequential redesign would have to happen, and it is possible to sketch its outlines.

A system designed for emotional health rather than raw engagement would, at minimum, place a constraint on emotional valence into its objective function, the very constraint the current systems conspicuously lack. It would treat the relentless escalation toward more extreme content not as a success to be reinforced but as a failure mode to be detected and damped. It would build in friction, the deliberate introduction of pauses, of off-ramps, of moments that interrupt the frictionless scroll that the clinicians identify as a driver of compassion fade. It might weight its recommendations toward content that leaves users feeling more capable of action rather than more saturated with helpless distress, distinguishing, in effect, between exposure that informs and exposure that merely numbs. None of this is technically impossible. The same machine-learning sophistication that can predict, with eerie accuracy, which video will hold a user for another forty seconds could in principle be turned toward predicting which content leaves them better rather than worse. The obstacle is not capability. The obstacle is that the better system makes less money, and nothing in the current structure rewards building it.

There is also a deeper design question lurking here, one that goes beyond tweaking a model's weights. The current architecture treats the human being as a quantity of attention to be maximised, an extraction target. A genuinely different architecture would have to treat the human being as an end rather than a resource, which is less an engineering problem than a reorientation of purpose. That reorientation is unlikely to come from within a company whose every incentive points the other way. It is more likely to be imposed from without.

Who Has the Standing to Demand It?

Which returns us, finally, to the question of standing, in both its legal and its broader sense. If these systems are degrading a capacity that developmental psychology tells us is essential to moral life, and if a jury has now found the companies building them liable for knowing harm, who is positioned to demand that they be built differently?

The New Mexico verdict supplies one answer, and it is a significant one. State attorneys general, suing under consumer-protection statutes, have demonstrated that they can establish in court the very thing the platforms have long denied: that the harm is real, that the company knew, and that the design was a choice. This is standing in the most literal legal sense, and the wave of consolidated litigation now moving through the courts suggests that this answer will be tested many more times in the coming years. Litigation is a blunt and slow instrument, but it has one decisive virtue: it forces the production of evidence under oath, dragging into the daylight the internal knowledge that public-relations statements are designed to obscure.

Legislators and regulators supply a second answer, and a potentially more comprehensive one, because they can address the structure rather than the individual case. A liability regime decides who pays after the harm is done; a regulatory regime can, in principle, require that the harm not be done in the first place, by mandating constraints on the optimisation itself, by requiring transparency into how the systems work, by establishing standards for what a feed served to a child may and may not do. The political will for this has historically lagged the evidence, but the evidence, after a verdict like New Mexico's, is harder to ignore.

Clinicians supply a third kind of standing, quieter but indispensable. They are the ones who see the consequences arrive in the consulting room, who can document the desensitisation and the irritability and the dulled capacity to care, and who can translate a population-level phenomenon into the specific, undeniable language of a patient who is not well. Their authority is epistemic rather than coercive, but it is the authority on which any eventual reckoning will rest, because it supplies the proof that the harm is not a metaphor.

And then there is the rest of us, the hundreds of millions whose attention is the inventory, whose nervous systems are the experiment, and whose capacity for compassion is the thing being slowly drawn down. Our standing is the most diffuse and the hardest to organise, but it is also, in the end, the foundational one, because the entire edifice of attention extraction rests on our continued participation. The clinicians' advice about viewing windows and deliberate prosocial engagement is, at bottom, a recognition that the muscle Jamil Zaki describes can be exercised as well as atrophied, that the same plasticity that allows empathy to be eroded allows it to be rebuilt, and that this is not entirely outside individual control.

But it would be a mistake, and a convenient one for the platforms, to leave the whole weight of the problem on individual willpower. The asymmetry is too great. On one side stands a single person trying to ration their own scrolling; on the other, some of the most sophisticated predictive systems ever built, designed by thousands of engineers and refined on the behaviour of billions, dedicated to the single purpose of capturing precisely the attention that person is trying to withhold. To tell that person simply to try harder is to misunderstand the contest. The New Mexico jury, in its way, understood this. It declined to treat the harm as the fault of the children who used the products and located it instead in the design of the products and the choices of the people who built them.

The Wager on Empathy

There is a temptation, in writing about all of this, to reach for despair, to conclude that the machine has won, that the numbing is irreversible, that a generation raised inside the feed will simply feel less than its predecessors and that nothing can be done. The evidence does not actually support that conclusion, and the despair, conveniently, serves the interests of those who would prefer that nothing change.

The single most important finding in the developmental literature, the finding that runs through Zaki's work and through the clinical observations gathered in the Outlook India reporting, is that empathy is not fixed. It is a capacity, a skill, a muscle. It can be damaged, yes, by exactly the conditions the recommendation algorithms create, the relentless exposure to suffering one is powerless to relieve, the reward for emotional shutdown, the dulling of intensity as a defence. But a capacity that can be damaged can also be restored, and a system that was designed one way can be designed another. The plasticity cuts both ways. That is the whole of the hope.

What the events of early 2026 establish, taken together, is that the problem has finally become legible. The clinical analysis named the mechanism. The reporting documented its consequences in the lives of real people. And the jury, in a courthouse in Santa Fe, did the thing that had never been done: it looked at the design and assigned responsibility for it. None of this fixes anything by itself. The verdict will be appealed, the litigation will grind on for years, the platforms will resist every constraint on the optimisation that makes them rich. But the question the whole episode poses is no longer abstract or speculative. It is a practical question with practical answers, about objective functions and friction and valence constraints, about liability and regulation and the standing to demand better.

The deepest stake is the one that is hardest to put on a balance sheet. Empathy, the developmental psychologists insist, is not a private virtue or a personal temperament. It is the foundation of moral reasoning, of the recognition that another person's suffering makes a claim on us. A society that loses the capacity to feel that claim does not become more rational or better informed. It becomes, in Bushman and Anderson's exact and terrible phrase, comfortably numb, which is the precondition for permitting almost anything. The systems through which hundreds of millions of people now experience the world were not built to produce that outcome. But they were built without a constraint that would prevent it, and so they produce it anyway, with the same indifference that any optimisation process brings to whatever it has not been told to protect. The work ahead, legal and clinical and technical and personal all at once, is to tell it. The New Mexico jury has shown that the telling can begin in a courtroom. Whether it ends in a better machine, or merely in a long record of damages paid after the fact, is the wager now being placed.

References

1. New Mexico Department of Justice. “New Mexico Department of Justice Wins Landmark Verdict Against Meta.” Press release, March 2026. https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/new-mexico-department-of-justice-wins-landmark-verdict-against-meta/

2. Psychiatric Times. “The Empathy Crisis: How Social Media Algorithms Drive Emotional Numbing.” Psychiatric Times, 2026. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-empathy-crisis-how-social-media-algorithms-drive-emotional-numbing

3. Outlook India. “'I Am Not Well': How Constant Exposure to War Is Reshaping Global Empathy.” Outlook India, 11 March 2026. https://www.outlookindia.com/international/compassion-fatigue-or-comfortably-numb-how-constant-exposure-to-war-is-reshaping-global-empathy

4. Fortune. “Yes, Mark Zuckerberg's social media products are harmful for children, New Mexico jury finds.” Fortune, 25 March 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/meta-mark-zuckerberg-social-media-harmful-for-children-new-mexico-verdict/

5. CNBC. “Meta must pay $375 million for violating New Mexico law in child exploitation case, jury rules.” CNBC, 24 March 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/24/jury-reaches-verdict-in-meta-child-safety-trial-in-new-mexico.html

6. NPR. “New Mexico jury says Meta harms children's mental health and safety, violating state law.” NPR, 24 March 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/24/g-s1-115019/new-mexico-meta-children-mental-health

7. NPR. “Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial.” NPR, 25 March 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-social-media-trial-verdict

8. CNN Business. “Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms.” CNN, 24 March 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/tech/meta-new-mexico-trial-jury-deliberation

9. Al Jazeera. “US jury orders Meta to pay $375m for endangering children.” Al Jazeera, 25 March 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/3/25/us-jury-orders-meta-to-pay-375m-for-endangering-children

10. Fortune. “Meta, YouTube face thousands of cases on whether they harmed children after bellwether cases go against them.” Fortune, 26 March 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/03/26/meta-youtube-lawsuit-verdict-what-happens-next/

11. The Conversation. “Two verdicts in two days: How American courts are rewriting the rules for Big Tech and children.” The Conversation, 2026. https://theconversation.com/two-verdicts-in-two-days-how-american-courts-are-rewriting-the-rules-for-big-tech-and-children-279401

12. Crowell & Moring LLP. “Landmark Verdicts Against Meta and YouTube Signal New Era of Social Media Platform Liability.” Client Alert, 2026. https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/landmark-verdicts-against-meta-and-youtube-signal-new-era-of-social-media-platform-liability

13. CNBC. “Meta's public nuisance case in New Mexico has billion-dollar consequences.” CNBC, 4 May 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/04/meta-new-mexico-child-safety-facebook-instagram.html

14. Stanford Medicine. “Empathy is a skill that improves with practice, Stanford psychologist-author says.” Scope, Stanford Medicine, 11 June 2019. https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2019/06/empathy-is-a-skill-that-improves-with-practice-stanford-psychologist-author-says.html

15. Zaki, Jamil. The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Crown, 2019.

16. Bushman, Brad J., and Craig A. Anderson. “Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others.” Psychological Science, 2009.

17. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. “Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing.” Oxford Academic, vol. 10, no. 10, 2015. https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/10/10/1373/1648617

18. American Psychological Association. “Cultivating empathy.” Monitor on Psychology, November 2021. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/11/feature-cultivating-empathy

19. Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. “A Psychiatrist's Perspective on Social Media Algorithms and Mental Health.” Stanford HAI, 2026. https://hai.stanford.edu/news/psychiatrists-perspective-social-media-algorithms-and-mental-health

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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

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In Summary: * Have turned off the baseball I was following and busied myself with all those little chores to take care of in the process of shutting down this joint for the night. Working through the night prayers now, and looking forward to an early bedtime.

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= 226.86 lbs. * bp= 131/79 (70)

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

Diet: * 06:30 – 1 peanutbutter sandwich * 07:15 – 1 banana, 3 little cookies, * 08:45 – pizza * 11:20 – 3 boiled eggs * 13:00 – beef chop suey & fried rice * 16:50 – garden salad * 17:50 – 3 little cookies

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:10 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 11:00 – listen to relaxing music * 13:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:30 – follow news reports from various sources * 15:00 – listening to Chicago sports talk on 104.3 The Score ahead of tonight's MLB Gamewith the Chicago Cubs playing the Baltimore Orioles * 16:55 – and the Cubs / Orioles Pregame Show has just started * 17:18 – hejust learned the Orioles / Cubs game will start under rain delay because of storms moving into BNaltimore. So I've found another game. Will now be listening to the New York Yankees vs Tampa Bay Rays. Opening pitch is only minutes away.

Chess: * 14:55 – moved in all pending CC games

And here i go again, writing at three in the morning and pretending thats when my soul suddenly develops the ability to form coherent thoughts. it sounds more poetic than saying i ruined my sleep schedule years ago and never bothered fixing it. nothing happened thats worth writing about. things did happen. they were annoying enough that if i started talking about them, ill spend time writing a long paragraph, sounding like a grumpy old man complaining about absolutely everything. which now that i think about it, is less of a possibility and more of a permanent feature. so instead, ill complain about something else. She showed up in my dream again (literally every day), but she looked well, she looked happy. she smiled at me like nothing had ever happened. my brain, i guess decided to become a film director now, getting very talented these days, expensive production, id like to file a complaint. then i woke up. i hate waking up after dreams like that. it feels like someone handed me something luxurious just to snatch it away five seconds later. i would’ve preferred staying unconscious for another few minutes. Maybe a few hours, maybe a few days, alright, you got the idea. indefinitely. Ive noticed something, when i care about someone, really care about them, i stop thinking of myself the way i usually do, for a while, all the things I’ve done, all the things i was. they stay quiet, and thats just weird, loving someone doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t make a murderer less of one. it doesn’t rewrite history or magically fix whatever is wrong inside someone’s head, but somehow.. it makes me want to be better anyway. not because i suddenly believe i deserve it. just because I’d rather be someone they wouldn’t be afraid of, i like that version of myself, where i look presentable, act normal, speak politely and smile at strangers, pay for coffee and don’t immediately assume the worst in everyone. Overall, a very convincing performance. now im starting to wonder how long that version survives when it’s got nothing left to hold on to. every day feels a little heavier than the last. every day it gets a little easier to stop caring. i dont want that, id rather stay manageable, i would say, someone who can keep himself under control, because if im busy trying to become someone she’d recognize, then i don’t have to become someone i recognize.

anyway, enough with the sentimental nonsense, it’s three in the morning i have exactly four hours before life reminds me why sleeping is considered important. and honestly, i should start writing at eight in the evening instead of three in the morning. might save me from sounding this sentimental.

Sincerely, Ahmed