The tech sector is in a crazy spot. Everyone’s joining the accelerationists at OpenAI and Anthropic in a race to the bottom on both dependency and token spend, and as they’re skydiving down the bottomless pit, they’re finally noticing that the brickwork on the walls of the well is starting to show some concerning hairlines. To many professionals in the space, this is enough to pull the ripcord and deploy the parachute. Many have, the wisest among us have never hopped into the hole.

Tech companies, especially the unpleasant ones, take token spend as a sign of progress. This is wrong, clearly, and to anyone with a brain I don’t need to explain this non-connection, but on the off chance that you are convinced that Claude Code will usher us into a golden age where the rivers flow with milk and honey, I’m going to have to disillusion you with an Anthropic-bill-shaped hacksaw.

This puts many engineers and designers into a bind. Like Ky says in their essay, nobody gives a shit anymore. The tech sector is sad now. 1000+ line PRs get approved or ignored, and you ask for review, the thoroughly disinterested programmers will lob a slop grenade in your direction, which as we know, does damage over time.

Ky didn’t have a Mechanic’s Kit to fix that status effect, so they quit. I think that’s fair. I can’t blame them. Hell, I wish I was this consequent with my principles, which I hope you’ve noticed by now will align. If you’re a designer, or something like that, whatever that means, and you care about your work, you really, truly give a shit, then the worst thing that can happen to you is being kept in the proximity and employ of people who thoroughly, unapologetically, clearly and adamantly don’t.

But there’s a question here. I don’t mean that in a weird metaphorical way, it’s a literal question. It’s the title of Ky’s essay.

Do I belong in tech anymore?

Ky says, maybe not. They haven’t decided. But I think I have to say something, out loud, to them - and by proxy, to everyone else out there who feels the same way. So, Ky, if you’ll permit the direct callout:

Yes. You do. You so, so do.

Your entire essay is reasons over reasons why you do. You care. You’re of the small, tiny subset of computer touchers out there who do not compromise on this shit. You have laid out your core beliefs better than I could ever have, and the most important one is that there are no shortcuts.

You’ve explained why. Your engineers don’t care, and when tokens become too expensive to maintain the habits, they’re going to be left with overcommented garbage code. They don’t care about design if the AI churns out things that are passable, for a few weeks, until the internet has been so saturated that we can all spot the AI Habsburg jaw on any given web app.

That is exactly why you belong in tech. Money can’t buy taste, compute can’t generate values. There absolutely needs to be a person, someone who truly, deeply gives a shit.

Someone who’s willing to put their foot down and say no, you fucking morons, we’re not putting AI images on our home page. Who can say no, you will take the time to review the 1000 line PR. That is what you’re paid for, god damn act like it.

This shit is driving me insane! I do reviews of startups and websites on occasion, and holy fuck, the amount of vibe-coded go-gurt out there makes my skin crawl! None of it is good! None of it has the touch of someone who cares! There are! No! Shortcuts, you god damn idiots!

You know this, Ky. I know this. There’s many more people out there who’ve known it, and even more who are discovering it.

Of course, I’m not going to tell you to go back to your job. Fuck ‘em. They don’t deserve you.

But please, don’t look at the erosion of taste and quality everywhere around the web and the tech sector in general and take away that it’s not your world anymore. It’s yours more than ever. You will get to build the new world over the ruins of Ozymandias’ empire. And I know your work, so I know it’s going to be beautiful.

This is more pathetic than I’m intending, but fuck! I don’t like this either! I have a stack of tech bro morons in my circles that would benefit from a swift kick in the butt, and many times a day I think about throwing it all away. Like you. Nobody blames you for that.

But I love this. I love the web. The relentless fascination of the computer has gripped me at age five and I’ve treated that disease ever since. I fear it may be chronic, and most likely fatal.

But I won’t let these joyless morons take the thing I love from me.

Ky Decker, you belong in tech.

More than ever.

If you do, you have two broad choices. You can be blessed with the knowledge that your computer knows how to do this incredibly simple task and thus offers direct support for it. Golden Boy macOS has done this since time immemorial (mainly because I forgot) and offers “Convert Image” when you right click any image file under Quick Actions.

If your computer doesn’t offer a nice, simple, integrated way of doing this, you have to open an app or worse - go to a website.

Free Convert Image PNG JPEG Conversion Online Free Tools Online Image is that website. It’s not real, not strictly speaking, it’s just a concept I made up for this essay, but it does spiritually exist. Everyone who’s had a problem that by all means a computer should easily solve regardless of what’s installed on it but doesn’t has encountered these. Shitty Bootstrap (or sometimes even, shudder, WordPress) affairs that do their job, admittedly, but are infested with ads, tracking, unnecessary logins. Tools that offer a superficially complicated problem solved, like background removers or font converters, are very notorious for this.

I, like everyone else, was sick and tired of this. These tools are simple. They have no dependencies. Every computer should be able to do this, and no, memorising ImageMagick and FFMpeg spells doesn’t count.

So I created delphitools.

delphitools is a set of (at the time of writing) 45 different tools that all run in your browser and each solve one specific problem I have personally had. It adheres to the UNIX philosophy, “Do one thing and do it well”. Each tool serves a specific purpose. The image converter converts images. The regex tester validates regex. The palette generator gives you randomly generated colour palettes, you know how these things work. It’s by no means original. Other tools like this have been built before, and they will continue to be built. I just wanted a way to access all of those in a central way, so I made one.

Of course I am a designer. I come from the land of the visual. I can build beautiful UIs, plan out structure and experience, and am not entirely talentless when it comes to web development, which I used to do entirely by hand in the text editor. I have a bachelor’s degree and a bit more experience than is necessary for that to be respected. I am not, however, a programmer.

Readers familiar with the subject (hello!) will know where this is going. This is the part where I will tell the tale of having discovered Claude Code and subsequently learning to worship at the altar of Lord Amodei and his head wizard Boris Cherny, but my ambitions for this piece aren’t quite this fluffy. Yes, Claude Code is genuinely quite excellent. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, yada yada yada. It’s a good tool, and I like using it.

So of course, having built personal software since the late 2010s to fix my own grievances in the world, I also used it for delphitools. This was before Opus 4.5, so while it was competent it wasn’t exactly brilliant, and a low stakes local-only set of tools that only exist to make my life easier seemed like the perfect test bed. Lo and behold, with my guidance and a good amount of open-source libraries, it did do a more than passable job at fixing UI and functionality that I couldn’t be bothered with or simply wasn’t knowledgeable enough for.

Then I published delphitools, and went viral twice.

I can honestly say that this wasn’t intended. I thought it would be nice if some friends had a good set of tools to make QR codes and crop images, and specifically I also thought about my husband doing low-level chores at the local library that require image cropping, background removal and QR code generation, but I never expected it to be quite viral. And yet, if my Cloudflare analytics are to be believed, around 50k unique visitors per week, and 2.6M requests in the same time, which is free on Cloudflare because I optimise my software, thank you very much.

However the conversation soon becomes one you can’t control. While I have had around a hundred comments assuring me personally of the fact that I am a saint rivalling the proportions of Mary Magdalene, I can’t reiterate enough how what I did isn’t unique. All of these tools are easy to build, and a shocking number of them are just wrappers around interface surfaces JavaScript already offers you. You could write down random six-digit hex numbers on a piece of paper too. You don’t need my palette generator for this.

So imagine my surprise when Bluesky and Tiktok got hold of these tools.

Since they’re mostly visual in nature, it was obvious that artists would find them useful, and the average modern digital artist sits at a quite serendipitous intersection of the cutting edge of the technology world and the old guard. Many modern artists - especially young ones that mostly clink their original characters together - have quite strong opinions about the nature of art that I have to assume are informed by passion rather than discourse. It was only a matter of time before one of them audited the open source code and saw that Claude had a hand in creating delphitools.

This is, to the modern artist, an insult.

Specifically it’s an insult because the online artist crowd is very unfortunate in the way they’ve historically been treated. Posting your art on Instagram or any of its contemporaries is by most accounts a fools errand, and having run that gamut myself I can only agree. I made some excellent friends and met my dear husband, but I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve become “famous” as an artist. My 300 followers haven’t changed since the pandemic.

This is slight one against the artist, but by no means the only one. Meta in specific takes what can only be described as a gleeful contrarian stance towards artists, first in sanitising their metaverses to terminal boredom, then in convincing everyone that AI chat and AI accounts on Instagram is something we should want. I can only assume they’ve been cursed by a witch in the basement of the old Sun Microsystems building that made them terminally out of touch with reality.

OpenAI is of course also not blameless here. Introducing a product like ChatGPT and unleashing it on the general public was a move that I hope in retrospect gets treated like the discovery of asbestos, and hasn’t exactly shown humanity’s greatest side. When it came out in November 2022 (What a year!), nobody, especially not OpenAI, knew what to do with it.

It took us about two more years to figure that out and for the models to actually become good enough to be useful for anything that’s not what we’d call slop these days. The tech industry broadly but small-batch programmers specifically has mostly caught up to this fact, and I’m not the only person that thinks Claude Code is an indispensable tool on the modern coder’s tool belt now.

Not only should this not be controversial if you, y’know, have eyes, but it should also be natural. If it should be embraced or if it’s ethical is not something I’m particularly interested in answering, but knowing I eventually have to, I’ll get back to it later - but the point I’m trying to make is that a changing of the guard like this has already happened. Before compilers, people had to write machine code. After compilers, they could use COBOL or FORTRAN or ALGOL or any other combination of uppercase letters, and the quality of code generally went up. This in my opinion is very similar to what’s happening with “Agentic Development”, a term so deeply useless and loaded it could only have come from San Francisco.

Still, I get around one email per week asking if and how AI is used in delphitools. The answer I give is always the same: I use it, I think it’s useful, I made the tools for myself, and even if I didn’t I can’t guarantee any of the libraries are free of it either.

I get this question mostly from the kind of artists mentioned before, and the resonance is rarely positive - Twitter is busy worshipping the machine god and Bluesky/Tiktok are refusing to see that they’re standing in moving water. Either way, the core of the emails is commonly some flavour of “I hope you’re not using generative AI”.

Let’s assume that what they mean are attention-aware transformers like those found in modern LLMs and maybe also diffusion models like those used by most modern text-to-image generators. And if that’s the category, Claude Code falls into that category quite clearly.

While these people rarely voice their concerns directly, instead using words like “slop” as a shibboleth to insert all of your own preconceptions about why the tech is bad into the conversation at hand, I think we can pretty clearly extrapolate them. To them, AI use is unethical, lazy and diminishing of the craft it nominally replaces or supports.

If you’ll permit, dear reader, I’d like to address those points individually. First, and this is the most important one I believe, is this ethical?

Frankly, I think it can be. The question at hand is whether or not the training data and the resources needed for LLM operations are “worth it”, and on the average I think it’s a complicated question for many reasons but I’d lean towards yes. The most obvious aspect of this is where to get the training data - and don’t think I forgot for a second that Anthropic Grinch-style took, like, four million books from the Pirate Bay. I don’t really think that was the best look, but I don’t agree with people who find it “unethical” per se. This is because I do not believe in the concept of copyright.

This is maybe the most radical position in this essay, so allow me to expand. I’m not arguing that training on GitHub open-source code should be permitted. That is a legal argument. I am not a lawyer. In fact, I think the entire framework of ownership that would make it permissible or not is fundamentally flawed. I do not believe that copyright serves the interests of the individual artist or programmer in any comparable way to how it serves the corporations of the world. Copyright is a rat’s nest of provisions and loopholes only exploitable by companies with the resources to do so. The copyright office is not your friend, and I think it’s frankly a marketing feat of herculean proportions that we all accepted the framing of “copyright infringement equals theft”. I really thought we figured out during the F.A.S.T. era that that was just corporate bootlicking. So, is it ethical? Um, I, uh, what are you, a cop? Get a warrant.

The next argument is that it is lazy. I’d push back on that, and colleagues in the tech industry would too. This is only anecdotal, I realise this, but the generally accepted stance is that “if it gets the job done, it’s good”. I mean, what do you really think programming is? Is it coding? If it’s just that, you may have a point, but it’s not. It’s conceptualising a problem, turning it over, thinking about how to solve it, choosing what to work on and what not, identifying the problems to solve in the first place, and how to go about doing that. The compiler didn’t make anyone a “better” programmer that wasn’t already an at least passable one before, and same with this.

Then, is it diminishing the craft of those that chose not to use the coding harness? Again, I don’t really believe so. I don’t much care how the sausage is made once it’s done. If you insist you’re better than Claude at coding, that’s fine, I believe you. If you see your code as art that a machine can’t or shouldn’t make, then yes, by all means, power to you. I don’t think that applies to delphitools. Despite the ambitions of helping an artist (myself), delphitools itself is decidedly not art. It enables art and it contains art, maybe, but it itself isn’t. I’m not going to provide an artisanal hand-written hex generator when the machine can do it in a fraction of the time, just as good, and frankly I don’t owe any of you anything.

Should you use LLMs for art? Well, I’m not the boss of you, but I’d prefer you didn’t. I don’t particularly find that kind of content interesting, mostly because by definition machines can’t make art and by function are very bad at approximating the process non-deterministically. Machines don’t have anything to say, and it shows.

No, I don’t want to look at AI-generated images, music, text or any other form of data usually described as “art”. I prefer my art to be made by humans, and I don’t think that conflicts with my stance about honestly quite liking Claude. These are entirely separate domains, and thinking one of them infringes upon the other is the wrong way to think about art. They’re only getting away with this because we call it “AI art”. We wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise. Don’t let the tech bros tell you about your area of expertise.

And frankly, even if delphitools was 100% AI-made (it isn’t) and only exists as an exercise to piss “real programmers” off (it doesn’t), look what I’m arguing here. The toolkit is sound. It does the job of replacing at least 45 shitty ones that want your email and the permission to put its and its 748 marketing partners’ cookies onto your device.

At the end of the day, I’ll use it to make QR codes. I shared it so Martha from Wisconsin can also make QR codes. And if that means she won’t have to go to one of the predatory ones that charge you a dollar per code, my work will be done.

I mean, I truly do believe that. No, that’s not commentary on their utility, or their design, or their history, it’s just the simple, plain observable facts: They suck.

They’re simply nothing like what you’d think they’re like.

I grew up in the 2000s, and had a lot of exposure to contemporary kids’ television programming. This meant cartoons, mostly - I could never click with the live action kids shows like iCarly and Victorious. I liked superhero stuff, I liked spy stuff, those sorts of things. Totally Spies, Kim Possible, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, and then later things like Steven Universe, She-Ra, Phineas and Ferb and its contemporaries. All of those shows led me to believe one thing: Lasers are dangerous, lasers are the solution to many problems, and lasers are fuckin sick.

No greater disappointment ever befell me than that of turning on a laser rangefinder for the first time, expecting a beam of red light to shoot out of it like an infinite lightsaber. It didn’t. It made a dot on the wall, which the device felt the need to inform me was 285 centimetres away.

No special forces operatives would ever carry the laser lipstick from Totally Spies, or a militarised alternative. It’s simply not practical. You won’t cut through inches thick steel vault doors in this universe.

Laser hair removal is a similar can of worms, and lasers are also involved here. It sounds perfect, futuristic, just zap it all away. No, it takes time, multiple sessions, is expensive as hell and doesn’t even work on all types of hair.

And don’t even get me started on Laser Tag. The biggest bullshit there is. The vests are heavy, bulky, the guns are never fun to use, and since they’re hitscan weapons, if you get hit it’s usually just because you didn’t see someone sneaking up behind you. No projectiles of light, no dodging shots.

This is a concept I call The Usual Way. Nearly every story, even non-fiction ones, are amplified in some way if the writer at all cares about creating compelling media. Of course, scientific writing is usually exempt from this, but exceptions prove the rule here.

I’ll hammer the point home some more. Finally, our Back to the Future future is here. We have hoverboards! But they have wheels, and you look like an absolute ponce using them.

The promise of artificial intelligence is realised! But, oh, the big models are controlled by huge corporations, aren’t actually that good at doing the thing the Star Trek computer did effortlessly, and have numerous dreadful implications for both privacy and copyright.

And the Metaverse. It’s the next big thing, they said. The future of social interaction, they said. A digital frontier where you can be anyone, do anything, experience everything, as long as that everything is a clunky, laggy, half-baked tech demo where you waddle around as a legless avatar in a corporate-branded wasteland. The graphics look like they were ripped from a PlayStation 2 game, and the “experiences” are about as engaging as watching paint dry, and the god damn controls are even worse.

I struggle to come up with any one universal concept that is exactly as cool as the movies and books made it out to be. Flying cars are stupid and expensive, if they even work at all, electric ones aren’t much better since they don’t fix inner city gridlock either, and if there is the once-in-a-lifetime technology that actually IS as good as everyone says, like heat pump based heating for example, the right wing will be at your throat for daring to implement something that will make the world on average a tiny bit better.

Things suck in the worst possible way: The usual way.

Submachine 1 - The Basement: The player enters the basement, solves a few puzzles, collects four triangular pieces that form a diamond and open a door to the outside. We learn about Murtaugh (Mur) through a note, and that he lost his arm on a camping trip to Kent and, in its place, found seven new arms instead.

Submachine 2 - The Lighthouse: The outside is a set, and the player moves on to the lighthouse. There, we’re introduced to Elizabeth (Liz) as well as Einstein, the cat. We discover the lighthouse where Mur worked as a wickie, the digouts in the basement, and the portal prototype in the lantern. He is obsessed with entering the submachine network he discovered in the digouts, that his predecessor left there, and to explore it. We power on the portal.

Submachine 3 - The Loop: The lighthouse portal should lead us to the lab, the base of exploration on the outside of the submachine network or subnet, but the subnet’s defence system captures the attempted teleport and places the player in the Loop, an infinite non-space that generates endless puzzles for people to get trapped in and die of dehydration. Before the player does, they find a note from Murtaugh, telling them to find a green leaf and bring it to a statue hidden deep in the loop. The player does so, and are disconnected from the loop.

Submachine 4 - The Lab: The loop releases the teleport and the player manages to land on the roof of the lab. They make their way inside, where they find a computer that’s connected to Murtaugh’s computer, but the keyboard is broken. They get an assignment from Mur - to find the exit of the small patch of subnet and to solve its puzzles on the way there - and manages to “pass all the tests”.

Submachine 5 - The Root: The player awakens in the second Lab, deeper inside the subnet. There, Mur has left instructions for them to find three shards of crystalline energy, known as Wisdom Gems, and use them to power a craft that leads them deeper into the subnet. To do this, the player investigates the first submachine - the root - and retrieves the three shards. It’s also revealed that the root was behind a walled off door in the lighthouse, but the lighthouse is inaccessible. They power the mover and float into the void.

Submachine 6 - The Edge: The subnet’s defence system, powered by the AI SHIVA, intercepts the mover and - upon being unable to identify the player as an authorised user - dumps them on the edge of the complex, where they’re left to die. They explore the limited area, and make their way into maintenance tunnels, where earlier groups of Mur’s explorers had set up camp. They’re nowhere to be found, and notes indicate that they jumped off the edge to avoid death by starvation. The player enters the defence system facilities and acquires a connection pod that lets them interface with the AI’s VR computers. There, they disable the secondary and primary defence systems - large sentry guns perched on the Edge, a massive wall that seems to stretch all the way around the inner submachine - and shut down the mainframe’s verification algorithms. Murtaugh is impressed, says that they can finally invade the core, and tells the player that their adventure ends there. He disconnects the computer. The player scrambles on top of the edge wall, where a portal is placed. They connect the pod and are teleported somewhere unknown.

Submachine 7 - The Core: The player arrives at Sanctuary - a place in the inner submachine, but otherwise unspecified. Sanctuary seems like a Hindu temple at first, but military supplies as well as abandoned machine guns litter the place. The player collects three stones to power an ancient gateway and passes through, leading them to the Winter Palace. The Winter Palace is a vast and expansive garden built by The King’s urbanist, the same man that built the lighthouse and - it’s implied - the root. The palace is closed down, but a portal in the wall lets the player go through the wall. On the other side, Liz left a note telling the player not to use these “karma portals” again, as they damage the very fabric of reality. Murtaugh has been placing them using his karma arm, the one that replaced his actual left arm. The player makes their way through the core and eventually calls Liz’ ship down to the docks, which we enter. The inside is littered with bullet holes, and a note from Elizabeth telling the player that she left in a hurry to escape Murtaugh, who has been besieging the palace in an effort to exploit and weaponise the submachine. She fears that with one more Karma portal placed, reality may collapse entirely. We see what’s left - a large green karma portal out into the void - and follow her.

Submachine 8 - The Plan: The Karma portal also contains echoes of Murtaugh’s memories. He explains to Liz that if he places a portal while inside another portal, he “changes direction”. When Liz asks what direction, he replies with “everything”. The player arrives at a new location - a barely holding together plank construction in the middle of the void, some sort of listening or receiving outpost. They climb down and find the Navigator - a device built by Murtaugh that lets them change their attunement to the Layers of Reality. They learn that the location they’re in is called Sector Nine, a smaller submachine, and it’s a unique place in the subnet as it occupies all seven layers at once - but is vastly different in each layer. This concept, an architectural idea that spans all seven layers in an interlocking way, is called The Plan. The first layer is the listening post, the second layer is a palace, the third layer is a garden of sorts, and so on. The player activates all the beamers - structures that enable the Navigator to access different layers - and leaves through a gate of light.

Submachine 9 - The Temple: We arrive at The Temple, a large structure near the centre of the subnet. The player solves the puzzles required to reach the bottom of the Temple - a place called the Knot - where they find the tombs of Murtaugh and Elizabeth. The player learns about Murtaugh’s powers, and how creating a portal works - Murtaugh was in all layers at once, and to be in only one meant to “lose focus”. To his followers this appeared as though he was a ghostly spectre, and they believed he had abandoned them, especially the teams in the Plan. It’s also revealed that SHIVA granted Murtaugh his powers, somehow. The player finds the eighth button of the Navigator, and enters the layer of light, where time stands still and friction of the still atoms creates permanent trails of light. They touch the white karma portal created by Murtaugh, and are brought back to the Winter Palace.

Submachine 10 - The Exit: The player arrives at the Northern Docks of the Winter Palace and enters the captain’s ship, which is heavily implied to be that of Murtaugh or one of his explorers. Inside, there is a Karma portal to a corrupted, much older version of the lighthouse, from which the player accesses Murtaugh’s laboratory in the subnet. We learn that he was working on a way to reverse the damage caused by karmic energy, to stabilise the rifts he had caused, and that time travel was an inevitability in the subnet - a loop can not only repeat space endlessly, but time, and could thus be used as a way to time travel if one timed entering and exiting correctly. They also find the AI core for SHIVA. SHIVA was built as a mind for the subnet, which it treats as its body - not much is known about the supercomputer, only that it became sentient shortly after being asked the question “Why are we?”, which it knows the answer to, but hasn’t revealed to anyone. It also had taken over the defence systems as a way to protect the subnet against the “human infestation”, and to isolate the very purpose-built core against the outer rim, which was growing uncontrollably by way of Murtaugh’s discovery of the subnet in the first place. He wanted to map it, so the subnet grew, making it essentially unmappable and ever changing. The player shuts down SHIVA and proceeds to rebuild the destroyed structures of the subnet by finishing the Karma Stabiliser that Murtaugh never completed. Once complete, the player ascends the lighthouse and leaves the submachine - to find Murtaugh and Elizabeth on camels, in a desert, the lighthouse lantern barely poking out of the sand, with two suns in the sky.

A note on ableism here - nothing would be further from the truth to suggest that just because someone just doesn’t have the intellectual capacities of a particle physicist they’re somehow worth less as a human being. That’s not what I mean when I say that people are stupid. All people with low IQs or whatever eugenicist metric you want to justify quantifying their apparent usefulness in society are still people, are worthy of dignity and respect, and are - more often than not - a lot more load-bearing to society than the software engineers and mathematics professors.

No, I mean something else. Stupidity has nothing to do with intelligence. Stupidity isn’t intrinsic at all - anyone can be stupid. It all depends on whether you are willing to learn more about the world around you. If you engage with a natural curiosity, you will always find something to make you smarter than you were the day before. Stupidity is being in a state of arrested development, a stupor that leaves you unwilling to move forward as a person.

As a direct result, stupid people are usually bad people as well. They don’t much care about the world or their place in it, rarely contribute to society in a meaningful manner, sometimes even actively prevent improvement in the cases of what I’ve come to call mismanagers, and are commonly - with exceptions - found in the C-suite of large corporations. That’s not their only habitat, of course, but it would be remiss of me to not point out this connection, lest someone accuse me of just hating poor people. Trust me, I’m not. In fact, a lot of stupid people are very rich.

I work in local government, and don’t care to specify further. I’m also a graphic designer, but that much is obvious from the interior design and the tendency to look at advertisements for minutes on end to come away with an opinion on the creator’s typographic choices, but entirely without knowledge of the advertised product or service.¹

I’m not an IT person, but I know my way around a computer, and that has been enough to be my family’s resident technologist for as long as I can think. I don’t hold this against them, because after years of subtle training and conditioning they’ve become marginally better with computers than the standard user, a property that not only saves me time but also makes their computing experience better. I force every family member to use an ad blocker, and shamed them into basic password hygiene and media literacy.

These are the basics, and I don’t know why we’re not teaching them in schools, but that’s a topic for another tirade. I don’t consider them optional - if you don’t know how to use a computer in at least the most basic sense, I’m not even expecting my Basics+ interpretation - because there’s no job anymore that doesn’t require some form of computer literacy.²

Back to my horrible documentaries for a moment, I said that a lot of stupid people are on display. This is because they’re entertaining, in the way we like watching people slip on banana peels and fall, and the fact that they could solve a lot of their own problems if they simply chose to work helps to soften the blow to our conscious mind nagging at us for watching this poverty porn. We can square away the fact that we shouldn’t be laughing through the screen separating us from their world. If I close the YouTube window, they cease to exist, so it’s fine to gawk and laugh. Not true, of course, but that’s not what this article is about.

To me, the most entertaining parts³ are when the subjects are confronted with an incredibly simple problem that could be fixed if they just picked up a computer. Often, but not often enough, they are encouraged by the show-runners to try and find work. If this happens, it only does with external help. Usually, the stars simply shake their head and say something to the effect of “Me, and a computer? No. I don’t do computers.”

This is an unacceptable answer to me, and if you’re one of the few people that do think this: First, thank whoever showed you this article for printing it out, then start running, because you and I are at war.

“Oh, but Ruby, that’s not fair! What if they’re-”

I’m going to stop you right there because there is no excuse that I’m willing to accept here. I’m saying this again as clearly as I can: There is no excuse for not knowing how to use a computer.

Whatever reason you’re thinking of, it’s invalid. What if they’re elderly? They can still learn. What if they don’t have a computer? There’s libraries that have computers, and you can probably find one at a thrift store for cheap. What if they can’t read, write, see, hear, or move? There’s assistive technologies, and of course, people that can help them. But categorically denying “the computer” as a concept isn’t acceptable.

Let me make this clear. Choosing not to use a computer isn’t a personal decision, it’s a decision that impacts everyone. If you can only be contacted through snail mail and smoke signals, you are simply making life harder for everyone around you, and that’s inconsiderate.⁴

Since I work in local government, every now and again I will receive considerable pushback for trying to turn a system to digital-only. Public transit in my city recently made a major splash when they decided to only sell train tickets electronically, and a small group of elderly luddites made a stink in the local newspaper about how “not everyone knows how to use a smartphone” and “it’s discrimination”.

No. It’s not. The modern smartphone is one of the simplest devices out there, and you can literally go on the street and ask any person on how to operate it, provided you don’t happen run into another stupid person. If you’re not adapting, you’re going to be left behind, and if that’s what’s currently happening to you, I couldn’t be happier you’re a casualty.

In every other field we are ridiculing people for not getting with the times. Remember the pandemic? Remember how we mercilessly made fun of the people who didn’t believe in vaccines or the efficacy of masks? We did this because we agreed that their ignorance was going to hurt society in the long run. I propose that this same zeal should be applied to computer-deniers.

If you don’t do computers, I’m simply not going to let you waste my time. I won’t print out hundreds of pages of documentation or meeting minutes just because you can’t be bothered to click the Google Docs link. You’re making my life miserable because you don’t care to do the thing everyone else does, and I don’t recommend you spend your one life that way.

Especially unreasonable I think this excuse becomes when you see how devastatingly simple modern computers actually are. Yes, if your first and only encounter with the digital world was an IBM PC running DOS 2, or heaven forbid a BASIC machine, I can absolutely understand where your point is coming from, and I’m truly sorry that that happened to you, but I need you to understand it doesn’t excuse the person you’ve become.

But they’re not. Computers are complicated machines, granted, but all that complexity is abstracted away from the users. You don’t even have to use the second mouse button on most modern machines anymore. You just move the pointer to what you think you want to do, and you click. If what you intend to happen doesn’t, just try again. It’s not going to bite. The only risk here is that I might whack you over the head with a tungsten pipe if you refuse to learn.

No, you don’t need to become the next 10X engineer. You don’t even need to know what a JavaScript is, although you definitely could if you were interested enough. All you need is a basic willingness to accept that you were raised in a world that essentially no longer exists, and that learning new things is how we survive. The start menu won’t bite. You can do this. I believe in you.

—

It has been a long time since a work of art has left me as profoundly conflicted as Worm has. On the surface, it seems like it should be a work made for me. I like superhero stories, especially the kind that challenges the conventions of the genre. I was pleasantly surprised by the Invincible series of comic books, which were a clever inversion on the usually very optimistic tone of classic superhero fiction a la Marvel and DC comics, and I continue to greatly enjoy not only the Invincible comics but also the in my opinion stellar Amazon adaptation of the material to cartoon form.

Specifically, I enjoy Invincible because it injects a sort of… welcome dose of sobering reality into the usually very optimistic and fantastical stories of superheroes we’re familiar with. Once Invincible gets over its pretence by the seventh issue, the world we’re presented with is dark, angry, and often incoherent. This works as both a weakness and a strength for the property - while many people looking for a classic superhero story might be turned off by the at times almost parodic tone and gratuitous graphic violence, this is exactly why many people - including myself - enjoy Invincible so much.

Enter John McCrae. Known better by his handle of Wildbow, McCrae is an aspiring Canadian author who stumbled into renown and success following the serial publication of the Parahumans series, of which Worm was the first book. I won’t bury the lede here - Worm is daunting, at times inaccessible and deeply disturbing. It is 1.6 million words long, and has been described as the greatest piece of superhero fiction ever written. I don’t believe that personally, but it does lay legitimate claim to this accolade. It opens with a notice that the author will purposefully not use trigger warnings, which in itself should be considered the most comprehensive trigger warning of all.

Worm is inspired by the superhero stories that preceded it, and inspires those that followed. It is impossible to overlook the clear inspiration McCrae took from contemporary comics of the time, but it’s also clear that in writing a novel this monstrous in scale, McCrae left a lot more on the table that he ever intended to.

I will only do a cursory and laconic recap of the story for reasons that will become apparent later, but the basic premise is this: A young teen girl named Taylor Hebert gains the power to control insects and other crawlies following a traumatic event, decides to become a superhero but fails, eventually becoming a villain instead, before sort of becoming a hero again, and several novels later she kills God.

I’m being facetious here, of course. If there’s anything I can explicitly and unambiguously praise about Worm, it’s that the introduction to the world through the eyes of Taylor is nothing short of masterful. The first arcs are my favourite thing about Worm. Taylor is relatable. Taylor is interesting. Taylor is weird, but in a way that makes her endearing. Taylor is burnt by the world, gets bullied constantly¹, and this makes you root for her.

Taylor’s decision to use her powers for good brings us to one of the strongest scenes in the introductory acts, which roughly span chapters 1 to 4². In it, she defeats a powerful supervillain that’s on paper much stronger than her, but wins through sheer ingenuity and creativity in using her powers. This makes Taylor compelling, and shows off one of McCrae’s greatest strengths: The superpowers.

If you don’t make your superheroes have compelling powers, at least make them compelling people. Worm - for the most part, anyway - does a great job with this. There are more superpowers that are unique and “strange” than there are the genre conventions of flight, mind reading, super strength et cetera. Taylor’s bug control is one thing, but other characters like Panacea or Clockblocker³ shine in the sheer creativity McCrae brings to the table when it comes to powers.

Even if a power seems mundane or utilitarian, the author manages to pull an unexpected but believable twist out of any given ability. It’s delightful to read. An example - while Panacea is billed as a powerful healer, she can also use her ability to completely change the body of anyone she touches. This leads to a delightfully written incident in which she threatens to turn a white supremacist’s skin dark. A compelling way to use an already compelling power, and an indication that Panacea might not be the good-faith healer she is meant to be perceived as by the citizens of the world.

Instances like these are all over Worm. There is not a single cape - Worm’s in-universe name for empowered individuals - that has a boring or underdeveloped power. Even simple powers like flight and force fields are presented in a way that shows care and attention to detail, something lesser properties simply wouldn’t bother with.

Much digital ink has been spilled about the themes of Worm, and most critics agree that the core theme of the serial is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Following the introductory arcs, Taylor quickly becomes unlikeable, along with the other capes on her team. An in-universe explanation for this is provided, but doesn’t do much in the way of justifying her change. Taylor, as smart and as creative as she is, quickly takes glee in using her power for evil, while telling herself that she’s doing what’s best. I don’t think that makes her compelling, and by the half-way point I couldn’t help myself but actively root against her. She is a terrible person, and nothing she does in the rest of the book makes up for how much she falls as a character.

The stakes scale quickly, but also painfully slow on the face of the average chapter being 50.000 words long. Taylor wanted to be a hero, and defeating a powerful villain was how she wanted to accomplish that goal. Once that was done - and she joined a group of villains, paradoxically enough - McCrae needs to quickly scale the threats up to counter how absolutely broken Taylor’s powers are. We go from a supervillain - powerful, sure, but a single flawed person nonetheless - to impossibly mighty kaiju that seem to have it out for Brockton Bay specifically. When Leviathan, the first of the three “Endbringers” attacks, it leaves the city in shambles, and Taylor’s villain group quickly take over the ruins of the city along with other villain groups.

The next threat is as predictable as it is boring. Having established that even Godzilla with the serial numbers filed off isn’t a match for them, McCrae has to throw a new threat into the fold, and does so by way of the Slaughterhouse Nine, a group of superpowered psychopaths that want nothing more than destruction. Jack Slash⁴, leader of the serial killers, becomes a pivot point as a precognitive cape named Dinah points out that the world will end in two years if he is not stopped.

Taylor, who violently opposes Dinah’s captivity at the hands of her crime boss, eventually survives an assassination attempt and kills her boss in retaliation. Since we’ve waited around two books for any meaningful conflict up to this point, and Dinah isn’t even a particularly compelling character apart from the fact she’s a child, it’s time for another climactic battle - this time against Echidna, a parahuman who is so mutated and desperate she ranks with the Endbringers in terms of danger. Brockton Bay is devastated further, but Dinah survives and returns to her family.

Since the human component of the story has taken a backseat, Taylor’s secret supervillain identity gets revealed when Dinah decides to turn on her. When she reveals that she did so because Taylor being taken by the authority would raise the odds of averting the end of the world, she surrenders, joins the Chicago Wards, (begrudgingly) becomes a superhero again and battles another kaiju villain in India, which - to no surprise - she emerges victorious from⁵.

What follows is an incredibly poorly handled time skip. One wonders if this was a decision made of convenience, that even McCrae didn’t much care about writing out two years of superpowered community service. Dinah’s deadline comes and goes, and for some reason, Jack Slash is back. He convinces the most powerful superhero of all, Scion, to launch a devastating attack on all of earth⁶, killing billions and destroying more than humanity could conceivably ever rebuild. It’s also revealed that Scion is an avatar of… well, we’ll get to that.

Taylor, suffering from the ennui of being a main character and not having a big climactic battle in the last hundred-thousand-words, decides to take action and has her superpower surgically altered. She now not only controls bugs, but also other superheroes, rebrands to “Khepri” and coordinates all the superheroes to defeat Scion through sheer force of will. However, the surgery also causes Taylor to go insane, and she tries to flee into the multiverse, don’t worry about it, it’s not relevant.

Before she can, though, she’s approached by Contessa - another powerful clairvoyant - and is shot in the head out of mercy, euthanising her for fear of what Taylor could do as Khepri. This concludes her story, although the final vignette of the story has her survive and live in a parallel universe Earth where powers never happened, settling down with her father and mother. Brockton Bay rebuilds in the world Taylor left behind, and the second novel - a much more toned down and somber story told from the perspective of Panacea’s sister - begins. I’ve not read that one.

This is a serviceable story, I think. The characters are clear, Taylor - while she doesn’t much grow as a person - is a serviceable main character and many of the action scenes are quite well written, much better than I ever could. Make no mistake: This is by no means a bad book. If it was, it wouldn’t compel me in the way it did.

Having mulled over the main problems of Worm with a friend who likes the story a lot more than I do, I’ve identified a few reasons as to why I don’t like this story as much as other readers have. It comes down to pacing, a subplot that could have been cut, the world, and one specific character that I can’t deal with.

Here’s number one - Worm is long. Inexcusably long. It’s more than double the word count of the bible, and that one was already padded by repeating a large part of it four times. Worm’s problem is that it was published in a way that encouraged it to keep going as long as possible. In parts, it’s hard to ignore how padded the work is (the Slaughterhouse Nine arc comes to mind), while also clearly not paying much mind to large swaths that could have probably needed some more explanation. The time skip in specific is a large sticking point for many critics, and I tend to agree. It more or less splits the novel into two halves, with the former being focused on Taylor, and the latter being focused on all the other things in McCrae’s lore bible that didn’t make it in yet.

I’m on record saying that I think Worm’s setting is fantastic, but its story isn’t. Worm - or rather, the Parahumans universe - could have been served better by smaller instalments with clearly delineated story arcs and completed plots. Taylor’s arc could have very well ended with her defeating Leviathan, or even Echidna, and I don’t think it would have taken away from her character at all.

I feel quite confident in this point because as it turns out, this was how McCrae originally planned to publish the story. The reason Worm is hosted at parahumans.wordpress.net, and not worm.wordpress.net, is that in many of its drafts, Taylor’s story - then called Skitter, after her supervillain name - is just one of many. Others include the plot between Panacea and her sister Victoria, the background and exploits of the Slaughterhouse Nine, and a story about a shadow corporation called Cauldron that manufactures and sells superpowers for profit. These stories have more than enough to stand on their own, but are disappointingly relegated to the sidelines in the text.

To put too fine a point on it: The more you keep a character alive, the more they begin to rot. I don’t mean this in a literal sense, there are plenty of excellent stories in which no characters explicitly die, but more in a narrative way. Taylor overstays her welcome because by the time we’re done reading the first Bible’s worth of words, there’s not much we can add. We know Taylor. We’ve been with Taylor, know what she thinks and what she doesn’t think, in part because her story is told through the first person. So, it doesn’t much surprise that eventually we can intuit the same things about her that her near-omniscient friend Tattletale can. Taylor needed room to breathe, away from the spotlight of the story. In an anthology, this would have been provided easily, but in a story as linear as Worm, that’s nearly impossible.

Many of the other characters don’t fare much better. None of the Undersiders, Taylor’s villain group, are particularly compelling past a certain point, their most iconic and memorable moments happening in the first sixth of the work. By the time the Slaughterhouse Nine arrives, the new villains on the block are interesting purely out of novelty, but even they quickly become boring as their arc drags on much longer than it needs to.

Let’s move on before I make this section longer than the novel I’m whingeing about - I also mentioned that the world leaves a lot to be desired. This might come as a surprise to readers who remember the earlier section, where I praised McCrae’s creativity and the believability of his world, but the further you go along in the story that praise has to fade. McCrae likes to explain everything that happens in his story, more or less share his personal wikis through the text - an impulse I can empathise with - but this serves as a weakness for the story since it’s presented without nuance or control.

The powers, for instance. They occur because an impossibly ancient alien entity stumbled upon earth, and bestowed its powers on those on the planet in order to use humanity’s creativity to learn about its own abilities. Scion is the avatar of that alien, and was generally content with benefitting humanity, something Jack turns around effortlessly.

This is a serviceable explanation, isn’t it? Sure, the connection between “creativity” and “humanity” doesn’t immediately link, and one does wonder how a being can be sapient and lack creativity of any kind, but then still come up with that idea, but those are specifics. ⁷

No, the explanation has to go further. Powers are channeled through shards, parts of the alien god entity that reside… somewhere in or around the superhero, and in order to access that power, an exotic structure in the brains of the parahuman needs to be activated through a traumatic event, connecting to the shard and saving the person.

It’s for the same reason that powers can be manufactured. A shard is explained as a cell of the god’s body, so if you happen to have a dead god you can cut pieces off - something the Cauldron organisation has - you can imbue people with their powers, which causes them to spontaneously grow that part of the brain and immediately install the alien device drivers.

Powers also have quite strict rules, at least they’re supposed to. The Manton Effect prevents a power from hurting the user, and there are some other rules of convenience - like how a power that lets you walk through walls won’t have you fall through the floor. These are kind of neat, I suppose, but infuriate me when they sometimes simply get circumvented - a notable example being “Jack Slash doesn’t lose to Parahumans”. That’s boring, no matter how canon it is. Similarly, no matter how flawed Taylor is as a person, all that takes a backseat when the sheer power of Skitter has her control an entire supervillain-infested city with ease.

My point here is that the story does not necessarily benefit from these explanations in a vacuum, and the places where it needs to draw on them (like how Taylor’s power was able to be altered though brain surgery) could have been served with different explanations that aren’t quite as crass just for the sake of it. If you want to learn about this, go ahead. The details are fascinating from a worldbuilding perspective, and there’s an excellent fan wiki made, but my point is that this is where these details should have stayed to not clog up the runtime of the book even further.

Another example of this: Superhuman powers are also classified into 12 categories, and ranked based on their potency. That, and there’s also a threat level system that ranks individual parahumans or kaiju by their danger. These I’m superficially fine with - after all, it makes sense that someone would categorise powers; especially if they are more common in humans than albinism is. The issue is that, again, the story spends an unnecessary amount of time explaining these concepts, and it doesn’t even feel like it’s explaining them to Taylor, but the reader instead. For the twelve power classifications, there’s even a rhyming poem a character recites for no reason other to tell the audience.

The cuttable subplot I mentioned earlier is the one about Cauldron, because it to me just undercuts the whole idea of the story. If there is an organisation that can manufacture powers by more or less conjuring them out of thin air, using an impossibly powerful material and in the later chapters gains more or less complete control over them, there’s no reason to care about the intricacies of the powers presented anymore. We’ve all seen Incredibles - if everyone is super, nobody is.⁸

This I think cuts especially deep because McCrae puts a lot of effort into developing his characters (or at least the ones he cares about). Like all natural parahumans, Taylor got her powers through a trigger event, a highly traumatic and pivotal event that leaves her terrified and unable to defend herself. In response, her superhuman brain tumour decides to kick it into high gear and give her some kind of boost to get herself out of the issue she’s in. In Taylor’s case, she’s stuffed into a locker filled with used sanitary pads that’s been left out so long bugs have infested it. She “triggers”, and gains the ability to perceive reality through those bugs, and control them.

And once again I must say that this element is done masterfully. It’s not unique, we’ve seen the trope before, but gosh dangit if it’s not effective as all hell. Suddenly, every superhero - or villain - we meet has a built in tragic backstory, inextricably linked to the event that made them superpowered to begin with. It’s brilliant. It’s efficient storytelling, it’s a great opportunity for visceral and painful narration, and it’s plain genius. McCrae doubles down on this by allowing some characters to have “second triggers”, traumatic events that unlock some even greater permutation of their existing superpower, and make no mistake, those are also done very well.

I do wish the in-universe explanation of triggers wasn’t as explicit - I don’t much care that the strong emotional distress the person experiences causes their superpower lobe to expand, connecting with the piece of God lodged inside them to unleash their full potential; that’s not all that interesting to me and is not a question I wanted to have answered, but I can deal. It’s fine. And if nothing else, it sets up that superpowers can be surgically changed.

I don’t much get in the habit of suggesting fixes, but this would have worked a lot better to explain Cauldron’s power manufacturing than “we’re butchering a fallen god”. Just imagine this instead - in order to sell a power, they have to take it from someone else, and since that means brain surgery, it’s usually fatal. Cauldron captures powerful heroes and villains, by way of the story also some of the ones we care about, extracts their power and implants it into rich and powerful assholes. It’s a far more compelling setup than “we have God at home”.⁹

My other reason why I didn’t enjoy reading this story as much as I could have is that I dread one of the characters, and it’s not the one that can bite you to death using millions of spiders without even being in the same building. Whenever she’s in a scene, she fills me with terror - which might be a testament to how well McCrae is at character writing, sure, but it’s not pleasant to experience, at least not for me.

Panacea’s arc is that she’s the daughter of a villain, adopted by a superhero family. She possesses the ability to change herself and others’ biologies at will to anything she desires. There’s no hard limit on what she can do with this, evidenced by being able to turn Taylor into “the ultimate master” with control over any and all humans within her range, although there are some minor restrictions in place.

What causes me to be genuinely scared of her to the point it hindered my enjoyment of reading it is all the other things she does.

Somehow, and why McCrae found this was a good element to include eludes me, Panacea can control the brain chemistry of her targets permanently, to a point where it’s trivial for her to induce a feeling of love towards anyone she chooses. She uses this to… make her adopted sister fall in love with her, and then mutates her horribly into an I-have-no-mouth-and-I-must-scream monster for a while before returning her to normal¹⁰. Even for a story that’s as dark as Worm is, that’s crossing a line for me. There’s a question if you should use sexual assault as a plot device, and the overwhelming majority of authors thinks it’s probably in poor taste. As far as I’m concerned, this is worse.

If you thought my last criticisms were a little mean or uncalled for, I’m sorry that I’m just going to have to be blunt here. Worm has a way of revealing the biases of the author, and the length of the piece makes them explicit and unavoidable. John McCrae was bullied in school as well, and externalises this experience as making every single villain and specifically every one of Taylor’s bullies to be cartoonishly evil. Having been bullied myself, I can assure you that what Taylor goes through is so senselessly horrible that it makes it almost look like a parody. Her trigger event is one such case, but so is the abuse she has to deal with at school - because remember, arguably the most powerful cape in this story is fifteen by the time we get to know her, and eighteen¹¹ by the time she kills God.

I realise why this is. Of course the bullies have to be horrible, and of course that ante has to be raised after she triumphs over them. It also is what I think makes the Slaughterhouse Nine not very interesting - they are a parallel to the bullies Taylor had to deal with before, except now they’re serial-killers and psychopaths to snuff out any ounce of nuance. Taylor is a bad person, but her opponents are worse, and to McCrae this justifies Taylor’s own brutality, amorality and disingenuousness.¹²

And while we’re on it, this thought is too important to be relegated to a footnote: Taylor’s abilities are so incredibly powerful it makes her a Mary Sue. You can pretend she’s troubled and conflicted all you want, but Taylor Hebert loses any and all pretense of being sympathetic or understandable when she put on the costume. Yes, her insane abilities are there to facilitate some truly breathtaking action scenes, but level with me here. In no particular order, Skitter has eyes on the back of her head, the wall, around the corner, and on YOUR head, was ripped in half but recovered after taking revenge within half a minute, went blind and nobody noticed, has won a land war in Asia, out-multitasks a strong AGI, can have control over more than four quadrillion living beings at the same time, and is friends with a girl who’s guessing is so powerful it’s mistaken for mind-reading, and she goes to Skitter for advice - she’s so incredibly powerful that not having arachnophobia in Brockton Bay is considered a mental illness. No matter how conflicted or troubled she is, that makes her a Mary Sue. In fact, it makes her so much of a Mary Sue that Mary should retire so we can call that trope the Taylor Hebert instead.

And… I mean, damn, I don’t want to, but I have to bring it up. What is it with the disparaging comments toward lesbians? It’s apparently established by himself that McCrae didn’t want to make Taylor gay to avoid the trope of the Angsty Gay, but I can’t accept that. Not when your character is both so flawed and overpowered that having them be insecure about their own sexuality would simply be another domino in the wall, which would be promptly atomised in the carnage of a single Skitter fight happening a city over.

Doubly confusing is that he paints Panacea in an unkind light with the exact same trope. Taylor saves the world and gets to retire at 18, and if she did so with a girlfriend nobody would call the story out for gay angst. That’s simply not the trope. The trope is having your most plot-crucial lesbian character be a self-hating incestuous mind-rapist with a broken family who never improves, never learns and destroys every relationship she touches.¹³

And I mean, while we’re pulling the painful strings, let’s get this out of the way. If Taylor isn’t racist, then she’s still pretty aware of race with everyone she meets. More than once, a character’s race is handled as a surprising reveal after they take off their costume, and being white is handled as the default. I’m not going to be the one to get into detail, especially because I wasn’t the one to make this observation first, but if someone out there has written about the strange racially charged undertones of Worm, please do email me.¹⁴

But given the sheer length of Worm, I can excuse this. Not every chapter will be gold, most of it isn’t bronze, and a solid fifth of the dialogue is cheesier than my lactose intolerance will let McCrae get away with, but I can not stress this enough: Worm is a good story. It reaches the threshold of quality required for me to care about it, and it reaches it effortlessly. When I read the first arc, up to around the grand showdown with Leviathan, I could not think of anything else but how excellent the story was.

But it never got better than that.

Maybe this is on me. Maybe Worm just isn’t the story for me, and reading through the fan forums and especially the Parahumans subreddit makes it abundantly clear that nobody actually truly likes Taylor, and that they’re here for the action scenes, the convoluted worldbuilding and the gratuitous violence - something that came as a surprise to many in part because McCrae had not established his style before, and in part because Worm tries its hardest to convince you that it is, in fact, a young adult story. It does so multiple times, and it makes the statement that “you’re not supposed to like Taylor” ring so incredibly hollow I wish I had just watched paint dry for a hundred hours instead. If I’m not supposed to like Taylor, why is she written like a plucky YA protag? For shock value? To pretend that this is, in fact, YA, we swear?

It’s not, and it was never meant to be. Worm isn’t about learning something about yourself, it’s not about growing as a person, and it’s not even really about the life of Taylor Hebert. It’s a look into a world just a few degrees worse off than our own. And if you see it from that perspective, Worm is in fact a masterpiece. It’s brutal, painful, violent, at times frightening and always trying to remind you that were superpowers to actually exist, there would be no reason to believe it wouldn’t shake out exactly like this. What little joy there is to be found in Brockton Bay is snuffed out as quickly as it came, and nobody will stay your friend for long. It’s… sobering, and I’m sure we can all see the worst parts of ourselves in at least one of the characters.

I’m truly disappointed that it does this while covering the story in about 70% stuff I don’t care about by volume. Even more of a shame that many interesting characters - Brian in particular - are sidelined when McCrae realises they’re not popular to the audience.

I opened this by saying that I won’t recommend the book because I’m conflicted on it. I stand by that assertion, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it. I enjoyed a lot of it, and that made the parts that I didn’t enjoy sting that much harder. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad novel; in fact, if you love epic fight scenes and want some of the most creative superhero powers ever written, this will become one of your favourites.

But I don’t love it. I want to, but I can’t. The Parahuman universe is too much for me, and the escapism of superheroes isn’t enough to outweigh the pain I feel while reading how terrible everything is. Taylor starts strong, loses her morals and becomes so much worse that when she eventually has her personality erased by the unquestionably evil forces she uses to mind-rape thousands of superheroes to “save the world”, that’s a moral upgrade. That’s not a win, that’s a pyrrhic victory, no matter how well you write the final confrontation.

You can read Worm at parahumans.wordpress.com. I hope you enjoy it more than I did.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The game incorporates hidden scoring and seven checkpoints throughout the event. Fighters are grouped into guilds based on their artistic background and can earn PictoCash by participating, winning checkpoints, and completing randomly generated “PictoQuests.” PictoCash can be spent in the PictoStore, which contains digital assets like brush packs, wallpapers, virtual stickers etc. made by community members and partner artists as well as sponsors. PICTOCLASH supports both visual art and writing.

PICTOCLASH uses a hidden scoring system with seven checkpoints throughout the event. At each checkpoint, the current scores are recorded and the winning team for that checkpoint is determined. After each checkpoint, the internal scores reset. This process repeats seven times, making ties impossible. Scores are calculated based on artwork submitted by members for characters of the opposing team. Players score their own artwork using an honour system. The final result is determined by the number of checkpoints won by each team, not by total points accumulated.

1 - Overview

1-1 - Game Concept

PICTOCLASH is an open-source art trading game that creates a competitive, community-driven environment for artists and writers. Designed as a free and open-source alternative to Art Fight, it turns creative expression into an engaging team-based competition during the winter break period.

1-2 - Core Mechanics

• Team-Based Competition: Players divide into two opposing teams, each with distinct visual themes and color schemes
• Strike System: Players create artwork featuring characters from the opposing team
• Dual Medium Support: Full support for both visual art and creative writing
• Guild Structure: Artists are organised into guilds based on their preferred medium and style
• Hidden Scoring: Progressive scoring system with seven checkpoints, maintaining engagement through strategic uncertainty
• Virtual Economy: PictoCash currency earned through participation, used in the community marketplace

1-3 - Target Audience

• Primary: Artists and writers ages 13+ seeking community engagement, specifically those interested in character writing, worldbuilding and original characters (PCs)

1-4 - Project Scope

• Duration: Annual winter break event (approximately 2 weeks, from around Christmas Eve to around New Years Eve)
• Platform: Web-based application with mobile-responsive design, but primarily intended for desktop and tablet breakpoints
• Technology: Open-source stack with community contribution support
• Scale: Designed to support thousands of concurrent users
• Maintenance: Community-driven with designated a small moderation team of volunteers

2 - Game Structure

2-1 Event Timeline

PICTOCLASH takes place during winter break, typically running from December 20th to January 1st. This 10-14 day timeframe was strategically chosen to avoid overlap with Art Fight’s June schedule while providing artists an opportunity to experiment with holiday gifts of art supplies. The shorter duration, compared to Art Fight’s month-long format, creates a more focused and manageable experience for participants and keeps engagement consistent, a problem Art Fight has to contend with every year as submissions drop during the middle of the event.

Throughout the event, seven checkpoints occur at predetermined but undisclosed times. These checkpoints are spaced roughly equally across the event duration, with the final checkpoint marking the event’s conclusion. The hidden nature of these checkpoints prevents strategic timing of submissions and maintains consistent engagement throughout the event.

As the event progresses, players create and submit their artwork (“Strikes”) continuously, with points accumulating behind the scenes. When a checkpoint is reached, the current scores are tallied, and the team with the higher score wins that checkpoint. To maintain competitive tension, only the winning team is announced, along with a percentage indication of the victory margin. Members of the winning team receive bonus PictoCash, which they can spend in the digital store.

2-2 - End Event Celebration

The competition concludes at the final checkpoint, where the overall winner is determined by the total number of checkpoints won, rather than total points accumulated. This system ensures that consistent performance throughout the event is rewarded over burst activities.

Following the event’s conclusion, PICTOCLASH hosts an online awards ceremony that serves multiple purposes. During this celebration, the complete scoring statistics are revealed through a detailed blog post, providing transparency and insights into the competition’s progression. The ceremony recognizes outstanding contributions from participants through special achievement awards, accompanied by bonus PictoCash distributions.

The awards ceremony also serves as a platform to announce the themes for the next PICTOCLASH event, generating excitement and allowing artists to begin planning their participation. This structure creates a satisfying conclusion while maintaining momentum for future events.

This format creates a dynamic, engaging experience that combines the thrill of competition with the collaborative spirit of the artistic community, all while maintaining a manageable timeframe for participants.

3 - Player Systems

3-1 - Fighters (Players)

The onboarding process for new PICTOCLASH fighters begins with a basic account creation, which is done through a simple username/password combination. A fighter’s profile contains their name and profile picture, social links and a short bio, as most of the space is left for Characters.

The heart of the onboarding process is the Guild Sorting Questionnaire, an engaging interactive experience reminiscent of the Hogwarts House sorting system. This questionnaire consists of twenty carefully crafted questions that evaluate multiple aspects of an artist’s approach to creation. Rather than directly asking about skill levels (which, as far as the project is concerned, doesn’t matter), the questions explore the user’s creative process, preferred working methods, and artistic philosophy.

The questionnaire presents scenarios and preferences through natural, conversational questions. For example, users might encounter questions like “When inspiration strikes at 3 AM, do you immediately reach for your tools, make quick notes for later, or let the idea simmer?” or “Your friend shows you their unfinished work. Do you immediately spot ways to improve it, feel emotional resonance with the piece, or admire the technical execution?” These questions then contribute to five scores, which then sort the player into one of the five guilds, although the system’s decision is not authoritative and can be changed outside of active clashes.

Sample Questionnaire Topics

1. Creative Process

   • “When starting a new piece, I usually…”
   • “My ideal creative environment is…”
   • “I’m most productive when…”

2. Style Assessment

   • “My art could be described as…”
   • “I draw inspiration from…”
   • “My favourite details to work on are…”

3. Technical Approach

   • “My preferred tools are…”
   • “When learning new techniques, I…”
   • “My typical workflow involves…“

3-2 - Character System

Every fighter must have at least one Character assigned to their profile to participate in PICTOCLASH. Characters represent distinct, original entities created by the fighter - these can be any type of character concept, from humanoid figures to creatures, mechanical beings, or abstract entities. A character denotes one single entity, meaning that groups, species, or multiple forms of the same being count as separate character entries. Each Character is assigned a unique ID, and has to have a unique name for that player. An example: If Morgana is a character by fighter Delphi, she can be the only character named Morgana, and is able to be called during strike submission as @Delphi:Morgana or her numeric ID.

Characters serve as the primary subjects for Strikes during the competition. When fighters create artwork, they must select one or more characters belonging to another fighter as their subject(s).

Each character submission requires several key components:

• A primary reference image or detailed written description
• Basic information including name and key characteristics
• Design notes or specific details artists should know
• Content tags for proper categorisation and filtering (Furry, humanoid, insectoid, mechanical, eye-strain warning, religious imagery etc.)
• Permission tags for permitting or forbidding certain changes or depictions (Change of outfit, gender-bending, species or race change, suggestive content, violent/emotional content etc.)
• Optional but recommended: additional references showing different angles, expressions, or variations

Characters can be added, removed, updated or modified during non-event periods, but remain locked during active PICTOCLASH participation to ensure consistency in artistic interpretations. Fighters can mark certain characters as “inactive” if they don’t want them to be drawn during a particular event, allowing for rotation of their character roster.

The character system also integrates with the guild structure, as characters can be tagged with specific artistic styles or themes that align with particular guilds. This helps artists find characters that match their preferred artistic approach and creates natural connections within the community.

3-3 - Guild System

PICTOCLASH’s guild system divides artists into five major categories, each with its own distinct identity and community. The Pixelweavers encompass digital artists who work primarily with tablets, computers, and digital tools. They range from professional illustrators to hobby artists, united by their comfort with technology and digital expression.

The Traditionalists represent artists who prefer physical media. These creators work with pencils, paints, markers, and other tangible tools. Their work often carries the distinctive charm of traditional techniques, from watercolor bleeds to pencil textures.

Wordwrights form a unique guild dedicated to written expression. These members participate in PICTOCLASH through character descriptions, short stories, and poetry, proving that art isn’t limited to visual media. They often collaborate with visual artists to bring their written descriptions to life. Their submissions are accepted as sanitised Markdown, not as images.

The Hybridisers guild welcomes those who blur the lines between different media. These experimental artists might scan traditional artwork for digital enhancement, combine photography with digital painting, or explore emerging creative technologies. Their innovative approaches often lead to unique collaborative opportunities.

Sculptors can be both digital and physical three-dimensional artists. From traditional clay work to digital 3D modeling, these artists bring depth and dimension to PICTOCLASH. Their contributions often provide unique perspectives on character interpretation. Their submissions are also handled as images, though links to source files could be provided through the message section of a submitted strike.

Each guild maintains its own internal community structure with dedicated chat channels in a Discord server, resource sharing systems, and mentorship programs. Guild members can access specialised challenges and PictoQuests designed specifically for their preferred medium and style. The guild system also facilitates natural mentor-mentee relationships, allowing experienced artists to guide newcomers while fostering a sense of belonging and community pride.

4 - Gameplay Mechanics

4-1 - Strike System

A Strike represents a piece of creative work (artwork or writing) featuring one or more characters belonging to members of the opposing team. Each Strike must meet specific criteria to be considered valid and contribute to team scoring. In order to submit a strike, a fighter has to be an active participant - joining the clash is an active process that requires confirmation from the fighter, as characters can’t be edited during participation.

Strike Submission Process

1. Fighter selects “New Strike” from their dashboard or selects a received Strike to “avenge”
2. Provides link to reference material of the character(s) being depicted
3. Uploads their work (supported formats: PNG and JPG for artwork autoconverted to WEBP for display; Markdown or Plaintext for writing sanitised for display)
4. Completes a self-scoring checklist
5. Adds optional notes/message to the receiving player
6. Submits for automated format verification

Valid Strike Requirements

• Must feature at least one character from any team
• Cannot reuse previously submitted work
• Must be created during the active event period
• Must adhere to content guidelines (PG-13 rating)

Strikes do not have a minimum resolution or minimum word count requirement, as PICTOCLASH is open to all artists, regardless of their interpretation of the medium.

4-2 - Scoring System

PICTOCLASH employs a hybrid scoring system combining honour-based self-scoring with simple plausibility checks. This approach maintains fairness while reducing moderation overhead. The Fit and Finish of a piece is a set of sliding scales with suggested settings for each. Points are only shown to the fighter after submission.

Point Calculation

Points are awarded based on Character Count and Fit and Finish. Character count denotes how many characters are in a piece, who they belong to and how much of them is featured for visual art (Headshot, half-body, full-body etc.). Fit and Finish are self-submitted, through a UI on the submission page that shows sliders, toggles and drop-downs for their values. If a strike contains a majority of characters belonging to the fighter’s own team (rounding down - 1 own and 1 opposing character does not trigger this), a point penalty of Factor * .25 is applied.

Visual Art Scoring Criteria:

Base Criteria (Self-submitted):
- Lineart (sketch, rough, clean, lineless): 1-50 pts
- Colour (none, flat, detailed, painting): 1-50 pts
- Shading (none, cel, smooth, painting): 1-50 pts
- Background (none, pattern/photo, scene): 1-50 pts
- Finish (Boolean: special amount of effort?): Factor + .2

Automated Bonuses:
- First Strike of the Day: Factor + .5
- Guild Challenge Completion: Factor + .3

Writing Scoring Criteria:

Base Criteria (Self-submitted):
- Kind (prose, poem, screenplay): No score effect
- Structure (rough draft, edited, polished): 1-50 pts
- Character Voice (basic, developed, distinct): 1-50 pts
- Scene Setting (minimal, descriptive, immersive): 1-50 pts
- Plot Complexity (vignette, scene, full story): 1-50 pts
- Finish (Boolean: special amount of effort?): Factor + .2

Automated Bonuses:
- Word Count Bonus: 1 point per 50 words
- First Strike of the Day: Factor + .5
- Guild Challenge Completion: Factor + .3

3D Scoring Criteria:

Base Criteria (Self-submitted):
- Make (CGI, clay, papercraft, other): No score effect
- Modelling (basic, detailed, complex): 1-50 pts
- Texturing (flat, mapped, procedural/painted): 1-50 pts
- Materials/Shading (basic, PBR, custom): 1-50 pts
- Scene/Lighting (basic, composed, environmental): 1-50 pts
- Finish (Boolean: special amount of effort?): Factor + .2

Automated Bonuses:
- First Strike of the Day: Factor + .5
- Guild Challenge Completion: Factor + .3

Hidden Score Implementation

The hidden scoring system operates through several layers:

1. Individual Score Tracking

   • Players can see their own contribution totals
   • Cannot view other players’ individual scores
   • Team totals remain hidden until checkpoint reveals

2. Checkpoint System

   • Seven hidden checkpoints throughout the event
   • Only winning team announced at each checkpoint
   • Victory margin expressed as percentage range
   • Individual scores reset after each checkpoint

PICTOCLASH has no explicit anti-gaming measures that prevent abuse of the honour system. This is a deliberate decision, as the only reason to game the system would be to ruin the fun - first and foremost - for oneself.

4-3 - Fighter Profile

Fighter profiles serve as both public portfolios and personal organisational hubs within PICTOCLASH. Each profile presents differently depending on whether viewing your own or another Fighter’s space, though both share a cohesive visual design that emphasises artistic identity.

The profile header features a circular profile picture (minimum 500x500 pixels) alongside the Fighter’s chosen display name and pronouns. Below this, social media integration enables Fighters to link their artistic presence across platforms, with supported services including DeviantArt, Twitter/X, Threads & Instagram, ArtStation, and personal websites. These links appear as subtle icons that match the profile’s color scheme, which adapts to show the team they’re currently on.

The bio section provides space for Fighters to express themselves through both text and simple Markdown formatting. This area often includes information about artistic preferences, commission status, or event-specific details like preferred character types or collaboration interests. Guild affiliation appears as a special badge next to the bio, complete with the guild’s distinctive icon and color scheme.

The character gallery forms the heart of the profile, displaying each character’s reference image in a responsive grid layout. Hovering over a character reveals quick statistics such as number of Strikes received and given. Each character card can be expanded to show full reference sheets, character descriptions, and a gallery of received Strikes. For public viewers, this section focuses on showcasing the characters available as Strike targets.

However, when viewing your own profile, an additional “Strike Planning” section appears. This personal organisational tool provides a specialised interface for managing your intended Strikes. This planning section supports drag-and-drop reordering. Fighters can mark entries as “In Progress” when they start working on a Strike, helping them manage multiple projects. The system also provides a “Quick Strike” button next to each planned entry, which immediately opens the Strike submission interface with the relevant character references pre-loaded.

4-4 - Receiving a strike

When another Fighter creates artwork featuring one or more of your characters, PICTOCLASH posts a notification. The primary notification appears in your inbox, a tab of the profile. This notification includes a preview thumbnail and the attacker’s username, allowing quick recognition without needing to open the full message.

Upon opening a Strike notification, recipients are presented with an artfully designed display showcasing the submitted work. For visual art, the system provides both an optimised preview and access to the full-resolution version, while written Strikes are formatted with clear typography and proper spacing. Below the main submission, the attacker’s personal message appears if they chose to send one.

The Strike viewing interface offers two primary response options, each designed to maintain the game’s gift-giving spirit while furthering competitive engagement. The first is the ability to tip the attacker additional PictoCash as appreciation for their work. Tips can be sent in predetermined amounts (10, 25, 50, or 100 PC) and include an optional thank-you message. This system encourages high-quality submissions and builds positive community interactions.

The second and more strategically significant option is the “Avenge” button. Selecting this option immediately opens the Strike creation interface, pre-populated with the attacker’s character gallery for easy reference. The system tracks these revenge Strikes separately, and completing one within 24 hours of receiving the original Strike grants both players bonus PictoCash, encouraging rapid-fire artistic exchanges between players. These revenge chains often become highlights of the event, with players pushing each other to greater creative heights.

Each received Strike is automatically added to your character’s gallery, creating a collection of interpretations by different artists throughout the event. The gallery interface allows sorting received Strikes by date, artist, guild, or whether they’ve been avenged yet.

5 - Economy and User Obsession

5-1 - PictoCash and PictoQuests

PictoCash serves primarily as a measure of contribution and engagement rather than a premium currency, and can not be bought, only awarded or earned.

Players earn PictoCash through various activities, with Strike completion being the primary source. The amount earned scales with the complexity and effort involved - a simple headshot might earn 10 PC, while a full scene with multiple characters could net 50 PC. Receiving Strikes also generates a small amount of PictoCash, encouraging players to maintain active character galleries that inspire others to create. Daily logins and checkpoint victories provide supplementary income, ensuring that even players with limited time can participate in the economy.

The most engaging aspect of the PictoCash economy comes through PictoQuests, a dynamic challenge system that generates artistic tasks for players to complete. Drawing inspiration from social media art challenges, PictoQuests present players with specific creative constraints or goals. When submitting a Strike, players can toggle whether their submission fulfills any active PictoQuests. Only one PictoQuest is active at a time, and a new one is generated when the current one is completed. They are viewable on a marquee banner at the top of the main page and are logged on the fighter’s profile.

PictoQuests fall into several categories, each with its own generation rules and reward structures:

Technical Challenges focus on artistic execution, such as:

• “Create a Strike using only analogous colours”
• “Submit a piece using exclusively cross-hatching techniques”
• “Write a scene from a first-person perspective”
• “Create a Strike without using black lines”

Community Challenges encourage interaction:

• “Submit a Strike featuring a character from the Pixelweavers guild”
• “Create a response piece to another player’s Strike”
• “Write a story that continues another player’s narrative”

Thematic Challenges add creative constraints:

• “Incorporate falling snow into your submission”
• “Place a character in a coffee shop setting”
• “Include at least three different light sources”
• “Write a scene that takes place at sunset”

Style Exploration Challenges push artistic boundaries:

• “Create a Strike in chibi style”
• “Submit a piece inspired by art nouveau”
• “Write in the style of a fairy tale”
• “Create a Strike mimicking vintage comic book style”

Time-based Challenges add urgency:

• “Complete three Strikes within 24 hours”
• “Submit a 30-minute sketch”
• “Write a 1000-word story in under two hours”

PictoQuests are generated daily randomly, with weighting for each specific event being possible. The system ensures a mix of accessible and challenging quests while avoiding repetition. Rewards range from 20 PC for simpler challenges to 200 PC for complex or time-intensive quests. Some rare “Epic PictoQuests” might appear during special events, offering substantial rewards for particularly challenging or unique tasks.

5-2 - PictoStore

The PictoStore transforms earned PictoCash into tangible benefits while fostering community contribution. Unlike traditional virtual marketplaces, the PictoStore emphasises creative tools and resources over cosmetic items, though profile customisation options are available.

Community members of substantial standing can contribute to the store’s inventory by submitting their own digital assets, but this is handled by the team on a case-by-case basis. These might include custom brush sets for digital artists, reference pose collections, background templates, or writing guides. Each submission undergoes a quality review process that considers both technical quality and practical utility. Contributors donate their work to PICTOCLASH to support and promote the event, and do not receive a cut of the PictoCash sales of their assets generate, nor is PictoCash converted into real money.

Inspired by the Fortnite store, the inventory rotates regularly, with new items appearing daily and special collections launching during events. Digital art assets include brush packs optimized for popular software, texture collections, and reference materials. Writers can find character development worksheets, world-building guides, and prompt collections. All items in the store include clear usage rights documentation, ensuring contributors and purchasers understand how assets can be used both within and outside of PICTOCLASH.

Carefully selected partnerships with art supply manufacturers and digital tool providers enhance the store’s offerings. These collaborations might include exclusive brush packs from tablet manufacturers, special filters from photography software companies, or educational resources from online art schools. These sponsored items undergo the same quality review as community contributions, ensuring they provide genuine value to participants.

The store also features guild-specific sections, offering specialised tools and resources relevant to each creative community. Pixelweavers might find optimisation scripts for digital workflows, while Traditionalists could access scanning guides and paper texture collections. This specialisation ensures that all participants, regardless of their preferred medium or style, find valuable resources in the store.

6 - Technical Implementation and Moderation

6-1 - Content Guidelines and Moderation Tools

PICTOCLASH maintains a PG-13 rating across all content, ensuring the platform remains accessible and safe for younger teens while providing enough creative freedom for meaningful artistic expression. This rating applies to all aspects of the platform: character designs, Strike submissions, profile content, and user interactions.

Content guidelines are clearly outlined during registration and remain easily accessible through the help center. These guidelines specifically address:

Prohibited Content:
- Excessive violence or gore
- Sexual content or nudity
- Transphobia and homophobia
- Hate speech or discriminatory content
- Harassment or bullying
- Real-world political messaging
- Commercial advertising outside the sponsor system
- Unauthorized use of copyrighted material
- AI-generated artwork

Allowed but Subject to Moderation:
- Mild fantasy violence
- Romantic themes within PG-13 bounds
- Religious or mythological references
- AI-assisted elements (backgrounds, textures)
- Generative code art

Every content piece on PICTOCLASH features a prominent but unobtrusive “Report” button. When clicked, it opens a modal with specific reporting categories and a free-form text field for detailed explanations. Reports enter a queue system where they’re prioritised based on several factors:

• Number of reports for the same content
• Content type and visibility
• Keywords detected in the report description
• Time since content posting

The moderation interface presents reports in an efficient dashboard where staff members can:

• View the reported content
• Access the reporter’s explanation
• See the content creator’s history
• Review previous moderation actions
• Apply appropriate actions from a standardised list
• Add internal notes for other moderators

Regarding AI art, PICTOCLASH takes a firm stance favouring human creativity while acknowledging the nuanced reality of modern artistic tools. The system differentiates between prohibited AI-generated art (where the core artistic elements are AI-created) and acceptable AI-assisted art (where AI tools augment human creativity). Examples of acceptable AI assistance include:

• Procedurally generated textures
• Code-based generative art
• AI-enhanced upscaling of human-made art, especially of scans
• AI tools for color palette suggestion
• Background element generation tools when used as reference

6-2 - Moderation Actions and Appeals

When content violations are confirmed, moderators can take several graduated actions:

1. Warning Notice: For minor first-time violations, explaining the specific guideline breach
2. Strike Removal: Removing individual pieces while maintaining the user’s account status
3. Temporary Restrictions: Limiting submission privileges for a set period
4. Account Suspension: For serious or repeated violations
5. Permanent Ban: Reserved for egregious violations or pattern of abuse

All moderation actions include:

• Clear explanation of the violation
• Reference to specific guidelines
• Instructions for appeal if applicable
• Duration of any restrictions
• Steps needed to restore privileges

The appeals process provides users a structured way to contest moderation decisions. Appeals must:

• Be submitted within 7 days of the action
• Include specific justification for the appeal
• Provide any relevant context or evidence
• Demonstrate understanding of the guidelines

6-3 - Future Considerations

While PICTOCLASH maintains its PG-13 focus, the platform architecture includes provisions for possible future expansions like “PICTOCLASH After Dark” events. These potential additions would:

• Require robust age verification
• Maintain complete separation from main events
• Include additional content warning systems
• Feature enhanced moderation tools
• Implement stricter participant vetting

However, such expansions would only be considered after establishing a proven track record of successful moderation in the main platform and extensive community consultation.

7 - Technical Implementation Requirements

7-1 - System Architecture Overview

PICTOCLASH requires a modern web application architecture that prioritises scalability, real-time interactions, and efficient media handling. While specific technology choices remain open for implementation teams, the system requires several key architectural components:

Frontend Requirements

The user interface, designed in Figma by Ruby Morgan Voigt, emphasises clean visual hierarchy and intuitive interaction patterns. Any frontend implementation must support:

• Responsive layouts supporting primary breakpoints:
  • Desktop (1920px, 1440px, 1280px)
  • Tablet (1024px, 768px)
  • Mobile considerations (though not primary focus)
• Real-time notifications without page refresh
• Client-side image processing for upload optimisation
• Smooth transitions and micro-interactions as specified in Figma
• Efficient canvas handling for image previews
• Markdown parsing for written submissions
• Drag-and-drop functionality for Strike planning
• Progressive image loading for galleries

Backend Requirements

The server architecture needs to handle:

• User authentication and session management
• Real-time event processing for notifications
• Image processing pipeline for Strike submissions
• Scoring system calculations
• PictoQuest generation and verification
• Caching strategy for frequently accessed content
• Rate limiting and abuse prevention
• Database scaling for high-volume periods

Data Storage Considerations

Multiple storage systems are needed:

1. Primary Database

   • User accounts and relationships
   • Character data
   • Strike metadata
   • Scoring records
   • PictoCash transactions

2. Media Storage

   • High-resolution artwork files
   • Profile images
   • Character reference sheets
   • Optimized preview versions

3. Cache Layer

   • Active session data
   • Frequently accessed galleries
   • Current scores and standings
   • PictoQuest status

7-2 - Critical Systems

Image Processing Pipeline

The system must handle various image-related tasks:

• Format validation and sanitisation
• Thumbnail generation
• Metadata stripping
• Resolution verification
• Multiple preview sizes generation
• Storage optimisation

Real-time Components

Events requiring real-time updates:

• Strike notifications
• Score updates
• PictoQuest completion
• Team checkpoint reveals
• Chat messages within guilds

Background Processing

Tasks that should run asynchronously:

• Image processing
• PictoQuest generation
• Statistical calculations
• Notification dispatching
• Report queue processing

7-3 - Integration Points

External Services Required

• Media CDN for artwork delivery
• Backup storage system
• Analytics platform

API Considerations

The system should provide:

• RESTful endpoints for basic operations
• WebSocket connections for real-time features (optional)
• Rate-limited public API for potential future integrations
• Webhook support for sponsor integrations

7-4 - Security Requirements

• CSRF protection
• XSS prevention
• SQL injection protection
• Media file validation
• Rate limiting
• Session management
• Content encryption
• Secure file storage
• Audit logging

7-5 - Development Considerations

Documentation Needs

• API documentation
• Database schema
• Component library
• User flow diagrams
• Error handling guidelines
• Contribution guidelines
• Setup instructions

Testing Requirements

• Unit testing
• Integration testing
• Load testing
• User acceptance testing
• Security testing
• Image processing validation
• Scoring system verification

Deployment Considerations

• Containerisation support
• Database migration strategy
• Zero-downtime updates
• Backup procedures
• Monitoring setup
• Error tracking
• Performance metrics
• Scaling protocols

7-6 - Future-proofing

The architecture should maintain flexibility for:

• Additional media types
• New scoring mechanisms
• Extended social features
• Mobile app development
• API expansion
• Multiple language support
• Additional payment systems
• Enhanced moderation tools
• Machine learning integration for content moderation
• Alternative authentication methods

PICTOCLASH Minimum Viable Product Specification

Core Features for MVP

1. Essential User Functions

• Basic account creation (email + password)
• Profile with:
  • Username
  • Profile picture
  • Pronouns
  • Short bio
  • Character list
• Simple character creation (name, reference image, description)
• Basic team assignment (two teams only for first event)

2. Strike System MVP

• Image upload for visual art
• Markdown submission for writing
• Basic validation:
  • File size/format checks
  • Minimum resolution/word count
  • Timestamp verification
• Simple scoring system:
  • Base points per submission
  • Character accuracy multiplier
  • No complex bonuses for first release

3. Streamlined Event Structure

• Fixed two-week duration
• Three checkpoints instead of seven
• Basic team score tracking
• Simple win/loss announcement at checkpoints

4. Minimal Economy

• Basic PictoCash earning:
  • Fixed amount per Strike
  • Small bonus for checkpoint wins
• No store implementation in MVP
• No PictoQuests in first release

5. Critical Moderation Tools

• Report button on all content
• Basic moderation queue
• Simple action tools:
  • Content removal
  • User warning
  • Account suspension

6. Essential Technical Features

• Secure authentication
• Image upload and storage
• Basic notification system
• Simple database structure
• Fundamental security measures

Not Included in MVP

• Guild system (implement in v2)
• PictoStore
• PictoQuests
• Complex scoring bonuses
• Social features
• Advanced moderation tools
• API for external integrations
• Real-time updates
• Complex analytics
• Sponsor integrations

MVP Data Structure

Users

- ID
- Email
- Password hash
- Username
- Profile image
- Pronouns
- Bio
- Team assignment
- PictoCash balance

Characters

- ID
- Owner ID
- Name
- Reference image
- Description

Strikes

- ID
- Creator ID
- Target character ID
- Submission (image/text)
- Timestamp
- Base score

Reports

- ID
- Reporter ID
- Content ID
- Report type
- Description
- Status

MVP Development Phases

Phase 1: Core Authentication

• User registration
• Login system
• Basic profile management
• Security fundamentals

Phase 2: Character System

• Character creation
• Reference image upload
• Basic gallery view
• Team assignment

Phase 3: Strike System

• Strike submission
• Basic scoring
• Simple validation
• Notification system

Phase 4: Event Structure

• Checkpoint system
• Team score tracking
• Winner announcements
• PictoCash tracking

Phase 5: Moderation

• Report system
• Moderation queue
• Basic action tools
• Content removal system

Phase 6: Testing & Polish

• User testing
• Performance optimization
• Bug fixes
• Security audit

MVP Success Metrics

• Successful user registration
• Strike submission completion rate
• System stability under load
• Basic moderation effectiveness
• User retention through event
• Strike completion rates
• Report handling efficiency

Post-MVP Priorities

1. Guild implementation
2. PictoQuests
3. Store system
4. Enhanced scoring
5. Social features
6. Advanced moderation tools

I had to make due with the two levels you could play in the demo - the first one, Welcome to City 17, and the zombie level, We Don’t Go To Ravenholm. It was the first time I had a character hold a gun, a real gun - not one that shoots crossdimensional gateways, but one that could kill.

At age 12, I don’t think I was ready for that. The game became everything I talked about, always watchful to not mention it to my parents who at the time didn’t understand video games and saw the for the time pretty realistic violence as just that, violence. It wasn’t Gordon Freeman who had murdered hundreds of zombies with all manner of grenades, shotguns, and whatever else I could hurl at the creatures using my gravity gun, it was me.

I’m not here to adjudicate whether or not videogames cause violence, I think we all know by now that that discussion yields no new insight - but I will wonder what caused me to identify so much with an MIT graduate with a PhD in theoretical physics. It certainly wasn’t his blasé attitude towards the alien invasion that surrounded him, or being hired by a man in black whose motive we can only speculate about - in fact, it wasn’t at all about him. You aren’t Gordon Freeman. Instead, Gordon Freeman is you.

The topic has been discussed to death and back, and make no mistake, it certainly wasn’t Valve’s invention. The voiced protagonist is, in fact, a pretty new invention. Some sources claim it was Dragon’s Lair, although that game’s use of classic hand-made animation through LaserDisc may disqualify it on that count. By 1987, in Metal Gear for the MSX2, voiced protagonists were still not en vogue. In part because games just weren’t that complex yet, in part because voice - even compressed to fit into a 24 Kilobyte tape - was just too much data to spend a big chunk of the medium.

CD-ROMs changed all that. Suddenly, you had 700 Megabytes available, at a time where most people didn’t even have half of that as a hard drive. Myst was lauded at it’s release for using incredibly high fidelity visuals. It was because they had the space available.

Still, Half-Life, released well into the CD-ROMs life, didn’t voice its protagonist. They voiced other characters, sure, but never Gordon. Never the character you’re supposed to play. It’s not that Gordon himself is an everyman, it’s that his life does not get in the way. You accept that he never speaks because it’s easier for the writer if he doesn’t - and in that, he’s like any other convenience. I don’t think that canonically, within the world of Half-Life, there’s a numerical counter for his health, measured in 1-100, and we don’t worry about who puts a single magazine of 9mm ammunition in the wooden crates.

So naturally, it feels weird to me when a game tries to explain this.

The Bradwell Conspiracy was one of the first “big budget” releases on Apple Arcade. It remained exclusive for a while, but it was also released on Steam, PS4, Xbox and Switch not long after. It’s a little Portal, a little Firewatch, a little Stanley Parable, a little Control - but unfortunately it doesn’t become something greater or even comparable to its parts. The game prides itself on its team of BAFTA luminaries and industry icons - including developers that have worked on beloved and iconic series like Fable, Batman Arkham and Tomb Raider. It’s a real shame that The Bradwell Conspiracy isn’t much fun to experience, both as a story and as a game.

On the subject of protagonists, the game suffers from what I call the Destiny problem. Your character isn’t voiced, but your sidekick - a pair of Bradwell Electronics smart glasses named Guide - is.

Right from the first scene, before you even get to move, Guide tells you that you can’t speak because your larynx was injured from smoke inhalation. This is even before you even understand what happened - an explosion at the Stonehenge Museum built by the Bradwell Foundation knocked you, a regular everyman museum visitor at the gala announcing the foundation’s clean water initative, out and rubble is blocking the exit. Your guide glasses scan you - however they do that - and diagnose you with Freeman syndrome. No talking, to no one.

That doesn’t mean you’re unable to communicate. Your only confidante, Amber, a disgruntled Bradwell employee, can look through your eyes if you send her a picture from your glasses. Aside from communication, this also serves as one of the two key mechanics to solving the puzzles the game shows you. The other one is a handheld 3D printer MacGuffin that can scan and make things from Substance or “Bradwellium”, the plot fuel of the game. This is already a setup for a great puzzle game with lots of twists. It’s mostly used for subpar platforming.

Once you fall into the secret R&D facility below the Stonehenge Museum, you’re given the impression that this is a massive sprawling underground refuge for crazed scientists of all types. What it amounts to is a series of winding corridors that all look the same.

Your objective is simple: Escape. After all, the museum above was bombed, and you’d like to leave it behind as soon as possible. For a reason that’s never explained, the main entrance is locked, as is the private train that brings Bradwell employees from and to London down to the facility. The only option, Amber tells you, is to get to the medical sector of the facility and board one of the evacuation pods that are supposed to bring the injured outside to safety.

The museum Guide can’t do much except exposit cheery dialogue, so your first course of action is to get hired under a false name. You pick up the glasses that belong to the guy that was supposed to start today, and make your way to the onboarding course, which teaches you the basics of the company: Bradwell Electronics makes… electronics, unsurprisingly, but have recently discovered a form of programmable matter they named, even more unsurprisingly, Bradwellium. Bradwellium can be manipulated by a handheld 3D printer that’s not further elaborated on - The corp uses it to produce all manner of objects, but it’s not abundant enough to be everywhere. In fact, the onboarding obstacle course will be the most Bradwellium you’ll see until the final boss fight.

Once you get through the parcours, you return to the lobby, a new path now open to you. Through the security office you make it to “your floor”, the research department where the guy who owns the glasses is supposed to work. You intend to leave with the lift, but the power is out, so you assemble a bioreactor from parts you can print. When it’s done making power, it opens a tiny portal that’s leaking the same reddish dust that Bradwellium bricks are made from. Amber tells you to disregard it.

The way to Medical now open, you keep hearing about other Bradwell projects, including the NARAC study. Despite being deeply involved in Bradwellium production and synthesis, Amber doesn’t know what that is. But, you don’t have to worry about that, you just need to find the parts that fix the escape pod.

Continuing to steal other people’s glasses and printing whatever you can find, you make it to a lab in medical containing a server. Through some truly awful platforming you reset the device to diagnostics mode, and steal the “super powerful” Bradwellium data core right out of the machine. This yields you the blueprints you need to fix the pod, and also reveals that NARAC is a project involving ingesting Substance to see what it does. A global surveillance system named Aequus is also mentioned, but barely elaborated on.

At the pod, you realise the computer meant to steer it is missing, and that it’s on the CEO’s computer. Through complete coincidence, the employee’s Guide you last picked up opens the door to the Bradwell’s underground home, which is inexplicably in the medical section. There, you get sent the code to Melissa Bradwell’s private panopticon office tower out of nowhere by Amber, and at the top, find John Bradwell’s Guide glasses. These should open all locks and doors, and you find the blueprint for the computer on Melissa’s computer, which also has a honeypot file on it that triggers an alarm if you click it. Whether you do or not doesn’t matter, because you run back to the evac station, print the computer and the lid, sit in the pod and leave.

Unfortunately, this is where the game remembered there had to be a plot, so Melissa stops your pod and reveals that Amber was the one that planted the bomb at the museum. She gives a half-assed apology and a quarter-assed explanation that if she didn’t, Melissa would have taken over the world using her surveillance network and that she had to stop her. Since you have no agency or say in the matter, you’re running like a rat through the maze that is the utility corridors of Bradwell R&D, until you’re crawling through a vent, which buckles and sends you falling right into the Aequus control centre, because of course it does.

There, Amber instructs you to disable the system, which you can only do by turning it on first. When you do, it is revealed that through the drinking water the Bradwell Foundation Clean Water Initiative provides, everyone on Earth is meant to unwittingly ingest trace amounts of Bradwellium, which crosses the blood-brain-barrier and allows the system to read people’s thoughts and see through their eyes. Upon hearing this, Amber panics and drops three F-bombs, the only ones in the game, and you work together to disable the data cores like you did in the medical section. After that, it’s revealed that the system is already online, and that the only way to truly stop it is to stop the production of Bradwellium. Conveniently, the Bradwellium mine is located next door.

At the mine, you see the origin of Bradwellium - a wormhole, a portal to another world that’s a desert entirely composed of Bradwellium dust, with what looks like Stonehenge in the background. You use a mining laser to destroy the wormhole stabilisers in a puzzle boss fight so terrible it might genuinely put the Bed of Chaos to shame, the portal closes, you barely make it to the lift taking you out of the mines, and the game… ends.

If you thought that was an abrupt ending, you’ve just had the same experience as I have. There’s no explanation for anything, the fact that Bradwellium is from another world isn’t even mentioned in the dialogue, and you’re left to piece most of the plot together yourself, mainly because despite doing everyone’s dirty work, you actually have no agency in the story whatsoever. You’re just a robot, running around, and while the game does let you photograph anything, and Amber will comment on it, it’s very easy to forget that the mechanic is there.

And I have to add that I like this game, despite everything. That’s not an endorsement, because it is quite poorly designed and executed, but I personally have a soft spot for games like this. A mystery, with an artistic vibe to it, that you’re supposed to uncover with the help of someone you don’t even know if you can trust. It’s why Control is one of my favourite games, and it’s why I love games like Firewatch, Alan Wake, Disco Elysium, Return of the Obra-Dinn, the Professor Layton series - and that’s what I was looking forward to. And let’s not forget, that is what this game should be. By all accounts, every piece is there - but it just… fails.

One thing you probably can’t see in gameplay footage is that the controls just feel… off. They’re obviously designed to be played with a controller, but they do allow mouse and keyboard. Everything feels floaty and unresponsive, and that’s even worse on the Mac version, and there’s a noticeable delay between when I press the mouse button and when the printer actually plays the animation and prints.

That also extends to the literal key bindings. You can’t jump in The Bradwell Conspiracy, presumably because the environments are so restrictive it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, so the photo button is spacebar. I’ve taken more photos accidentally than ones I wanted to take, and it doesn’t help that every single photo triggers a voice line from Amber.

On the subject of voice lines, many critics praised the direction of the voice acting in this game, and I’m sorry if I just have to disagree here. Despite having blown up a museum around one of the most well-known cultural heritage sites in the world, despite falling at least four stories, despite being trapped in the place she never wanted to return to, Amber constantly maintains a cheery outlook and demeanor, to an uncomfortable degree. This could have worked if it was just a façade, but with Amber, I can’t pick up on that. It only makes the one time when she does lose her shit so much more jarring. The Guide glasses are also voiced, and I can’t help but wish there would have been a little more technological flair in his voice too. After all, he’s an AI running on a pair of Meta Ray Bans.

The graphics are another point of contention. I didn’t count, but I’m willing to believe there’s less than 30 textures in the game. Geometry is similarly limited. This is most likely a holdover from the game being developed to work with pre-M1 Apple Silicon, so processing power was limited, which was turned into a stylistic choice. I get why, but while this game tries to imitate the low-poly style of Firewatch and The Witness, it fails because these games benefitted from interesting environments realised within this style. There’s not many ways you can make office and laboratory corridors interesting. A hyper-realist style like in Control would have done a lot more to tickle those liminal-space-receptors in my brain, but again, that’s probably infeasible given the hardware it was designed for.

The humour is also pretty bad. Most of the jokes are delivered poorly, and the few visual gags that are there fall flat because of the clear specificity - to build a joke in a world this low-poly you have to make your gags stick out like sore thumbs. You can tell that the writers were proud of some of the jokes, especially in the employee orientation area, but they are rarely more than “evil corporation is very aware that they are evil but choose to do it anyways”. Another reason why Amber shouldn’t really be surprised at the state of affairs.

Earlier I said I like this game. I don’t think that is what I meant to say - I think I find it charming. It’s disappointingly bad at gameplay, annoyingly bad at graphics, laughably bad at controls and embarrassingly bad at character writing. I guess I could say it trailers nicely, but that’s really only a kudos for the marketing team at Apple that clearly must’ve never played a video game before, which… okay, point taken.

Still, I don’t want to say that this is a bad game. The Bradwell Conspiracy is by all accounts irredeemable. It needed more time, it needed more people, it needed more performance available to its developers, and it needed a desperate rework of the controls, but… I can see that this is someone’s passion project.

But so are tons of other games that are far better, and those didn’t get carte blanche from Apple.

The Bradwell Conspiracy gets a 3/10.

Content warnings: Mental illness, suicide, death.

It had been four years since Lutèce Nehalem had tried to kill herself.

That had been tragic, if it weren’t just a statement of fact. It wasn’t uncommon, either. In the moment, suicide always made perfect sense. Some suicide attempts were impulsive acts, but some were planned and took a lot of deliberation. The textbooks had always made a clear delineation between the two, and the latter was a lot harder to treat. The goal of therapy was always to improve the patient’s life, brighten their outlook and motivate them to improve themselves. Those who had attempted to end their life and failed were usually less receptive to these methods, but the principle was still the same. Despite everything, life was still worth living. Even if it wasn’t, that hardly mattered. If one looked hard enough, one found. Suicide was not permissible under any of the schools that authored the psychology textbooks. It was the one thing they agreed on: Suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

In a way, death was an equaliser. The circumstances of one’s death hardly mattered in the moment. At the end, everyone would die. Was it not the most basic freedom to take control of this universal constant for one’s self? No being should be made to suffer unnecessarily, after all.

Wherever Glenn had landed, it was a desolate and hopeless wasteland. In the distance, two moons gently flew under the horizon and disappeared. Namaka and Hi’iaka, if the maps were accurate. They had no reason not to be. He was confident he had the right place. Piles of scrap metal and discarded starships dotted the landscape, accruing around the three metal towers that provided an atmospheric tent. He wasn’t planning on leaving his ship.

Glenn went to the counselling office and made sure everything was still in its right place. The traditional Orci mask was still on the wood-clad wall, the books were all in order, the two seats were placed where they belonged. That pleased Glenn.

He took one of the tapes from his music collection and slid it into the player by the bookshelf, and turned it up to a comfortable level. One would still be able to have a conversation over the gentle swinging of the piano.

Steps were coming from the airlock below. Glenn straightened out his jacket, readjusted his glasses and stepped down the staircase. Below, in the airlock staging room, his patient waited for him to lead him up.

“Welcome, Ms. Nehalem. Please, come upstairs.”

She followed him. She was nervous, maybe even a little worried, maybe even anxious. Glenn had seen it many times before. As he stepped over to the table where his tea set was placed, Lutèce looked around the room, studying the ceremonial mask and the diploma on the wall. Glenn poured boiling hot water over the little pile of powder in each of the ceramic mugs. The tea smelled excellent. He took the tablet and placed it on the wooden cube between the two identical reclining chairs.

“Please,” he said. “Take a seat.”

She took a seat. He had learned not to let appearances sway his thoughts, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t observant. Like she had told him in her message, she was a child. Fourteen years old, according to the letter. She didn’t mention the metal, though. The right side of her face was completely void of any skin, instead having a round piece of metal - most likely titanium - welded to her head. Instead of a right eye, there was the black mirror of an oscilloscope display, and above it, an array of sensors. A singular green dot was displayed on the screen that masqueraded as an eye.

Her left arm was also metal, as were her legs. The parts were a little oversized for her adolescent frame. She didn’t seem to mind. Her legs still dangled in the recycled air above the ground. The chair was too big for her.

“I assume this is your first session of this type?” Glenn opened his ledger and readied his pencil. He took pride in the fact that he used real paper and pencil for his session notes and didn’t distract his patients with the pale glow of a tablet computer.

“Yes” his patient answered. “I was told you can help me.”

Her voice sounded normal. Maybe a bit low for her age, but other than that, perfectly normal.

“Well, I certainly hope so.” He handed her the cup of tea. She took it with her mechanical hand. “Tell me. What’s on your mind?”

“I don’t want to live.”

“Why come to me, then?”

“I… want to live. I mean, I want to want.”

Glenn scribbled a note on his ledger.

“Why don’t you tell me a little about that?”

His patient sighed and leaned back in the chair, her feet now almost touching the upholstery.

“How would you feel if you were the last of your kind?” He didn’t answer. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.”

She looked out of the porthole, off world, at the sun.

“I’m not supposed to exist.”

“In all my years of counselling, I’ve never met someone who wasn’t supposed to exist” Glenn answered. Inferiority, lack of self-confidence.

“I mean that literally. I’m not supposed to live.”

“You’ve made it this far.”

A pause.

“Maybe I should start at the beginning,” she said and leaned back. “Do you remember when the Martian archive was discovered?”

Glenn did. An ancient piece of technology, perfectly preserved. Designed to be read from, the datasore known as the Martian archive was the legacy of whatever civilisation came before his. It contained historical records, personal accounts, an impressively thorough copy of their computer network. The language used in the archive data was easy enough to decipher, and had been chosen to be the universal language of the galaxy, since it belonged to no one.

“When humans went extinct,” she began. Humans were the dominant species of the system that both Mars and Earth had been a part of. “It was Earth that came first. They were an impressive species. So many civilisations on one planet, and it wasn’t even populated half way.

“They relied on fuels. Minerals they pulled from the ground, crude oil that powered their machinery for decades, centuries even. The parts of Earth the fuels came from were ravaged, destroyed even. And the parts that remained didn’t fair much better either. Producing oil and burning oil both brought the planet to its knees. Eventually, the atmosphere dissolved and everyone burned to death.

“Mars was there, of course. Home to the richest of the rich, those that could afford their own spaceships, those that could afford sending supplies the twenty light minutes up there. But when Earth suffocated, Mars had its days numbered. But humanity wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

“Their plan was to assemble everything they had - their history, their encyclopaedias, their research, their art, their culture - and make a copy of it. Put everything on a computer, leave that computer somewhere it would be accessible but protected. If there was someone out there, they’d recover it.”

She made a vague gesture with her organic hand. “They did, of course. You know the rest.”

“I have a feeling there’s more to this story.”

“There is” She took a sip from her tea. “Among the recovered data, there was a sequence of organic information. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen mostly. Genetic code. At first, everyone thought it was Talosian, since it looked more or less exactly the same, but it wasn’t. It was human DNA.

“A team at the Talosian Institute for Archaeology took it upon them to try and resequence the gene, splice it into something from which to make a human. This was illegal, of course. Not to mention unethical. But they did it anyways.

“Tula Nehalem was the project leader. She did most of the work on the project, and she was the one who eventually would carry me to term. She’s… my mother, I suppose. Just not biologically. When the ethics commission pulled the plug on the project, she refused to terminate, and when I was born, she did everything to keep me alive. She did all my body work, too.” Lutèce tapped her oscilloscope eye. Her metal finger made a clinking noise as it his the glass. “Without her, I’d already be dead.”

“I assume something happened to her.”

“She got caught. Far as I’m aware, she’s in some Talosian prison. I got away, and somewhere within my implants there was enough information to make me an engineer. Enough knowledge to pay for a one-way trip home. I ended up here. Set up shop, sometimes some pirate comes through and I fix their ship. In return, they give me food and medicine.”

“I’m sorry about your mother.” Glenn said.

“She’s not my mother.” She looked out of the window again. “My mother died two hundred years ago.”

“How do you feel about this? It’s quite a life you’ve lived.”

“I feel sick.” she answered. “Not just physically, too. I don’t want to live. I’m supposed to be dead, I’m supposed to have been dead for centuries.”

“But you’re not.” Glenn said. He’d have to approach the topic at some point. “You’re alive, and I for one think that’s a testament to you and your species. How many beings can say that they’ve come back from extinction?” Lutèce cracked a faint smile.

“I guess, if you put it like that.”

“I understand how your life may seem cruel. How it is cruel. But you’re special. Why would you throw that away?”

Another pause. Lutèce needed a moment to think. No, not think, that’s not what it looked like. Prepare for what she was about to say.

“I’m dying.”

Lutèce Nehalem pulled her shirt a bit down, revealing a metal rectangle embedded in her skin just under the clavicle. Glenn had seen this before, on some other patients. A chemotherapy intake port.

“My condolences” Glenn said. She just nodded.

“Fourteen different types. Turns out two-hundred year old DNA really doesn’t like being sequenced into a Talosian egg cell.”

“Prognosis?”

“Negative.” She covered the port again and drank from the tea. “I’ve not seen a doctor in a while, but I’ve been sticking to the regiment. The drugs I get from the pirates, and implanting the port wasn’t that difficult.” Glenn noted down that she did it all herself. At fourteen years, she held a tremendous amount of independence, even disregarding the fact that she was her own oncologist.

The question hung in the room like the thick smell of something gone rotten.

“Maybe a month. Maybe a week. At this point, who knows.”

“Is this why you tried to take your life four years prior?”

“Partially” she answered. “I mean, it was the cancer. Yes. But it was also the idea of being the last of your species. The crushing loneliness of having an entire solar system to myself. Not finding any joy in the world. The metal digging into my skin the more I grow. It just didn’t seem worth it.”

“But you don’t feel this way now?”

She nodded. “Oh, I do. I don’t want to live. I want to die, leave this behind and let humanity finally rest.”

“Yet you feel like you shouldn’t throw your life away.”

“You see the problem.”

Glenn closed his ledger.

“I’d like to be honest with you.” He leaned back in his chair and took a sip of the tea. She looked up to him, expecting something she’d heard a hundred times before from random people online, the pirates that came to her to get their ships fixed, her pharmacist.

“Go ahead”

“I don’t think suicide prevention would help you.” Something changed in his patient. If he had to infer from the limited time he’d already spent with her, he’d say that this was the first time anyone had ever said that to her.

“Is that your expert medical opinion?” she retorted and put the cup of tea down. One track of the record stopped and the next one played, bridging the awkward gap in conversation.

“I don’t think you’re suicidal,” he elaborated. “I think what you’re looking for is more akin to euthanasia.” She scoffed.

“I don’t need euthanasia. I can just wait a few weeks.” Deflection. She’d considered this before, that much was evident.

“Ms. Nehalem, I think you’re misunderstanding,” he began, leaning forward a little bit. “You’re in a unique position, one that puts you under a lot of stress. It most likely depresses you, and the lack of social interaction all the way out here on the rim of a dead system is also getting to you. You’re faced with your own mortality and, by extension, that of your species.”

“So far, so obvious. What’s your point?”

“I’d like to help you, but I don’t know what you need from me. Would you like to be happier? Would you like a fulfilling rest of your life? Would you like to die right here, right now, and get it over with?”

The room went deathly silent. Even the music from the tape player seemed to quiet down.

“Do you care?”

“Of course I do. Just because you’re paying me doesn’t make my desire to help you any less genuine.”

Lutèce processed that.

“Do you mind if I ask you some questions for a change?”

Dr. Glenn nodded. “Be my guest.”

“How many patients do you have?”

“Around fifty.”

“Do you have a family?”

“Yes, I have a wife and two children.”

“Adults, I assume?”

He nodded.

“See, that’s your legacy. When you eventually die, that’s what you’ll leave behind. Your children, your wife, and all the patients you’ve helped over the years.” It dawned on Glenn. “What do I have? One-hundred-and-fifty tons of scrap metal, a dainty sublight rocketship that’ll barely last for a trip down the well and back, and fourteen cancers.”

“If you’re afraid that you won’t leave a mark on this world, rest assured that you already have.”

“Maybe on you. Maybe on the ethics committee at the Talosian Institute. Maybe on the pirates that drop by to have me fix their reactor twice a week. Maybe on the pharmacist who sells me poison under the counter so I can cling on to this miserable existence a little longer.”

“Isn’t that enough? You’ll be remembered.”

“No, it’s not” she said. “When historians look back on the galaxy, on the solar system, on Earth, they’ll just see that humans existed, they had a good run for some twelve-thousand years, and then their own idiocy killed them. And maybe, if the records are ever declassified, they’ll include a footnote about how one xenobio graduate tried to revive them and got too attached to the little frankenstein she let grow inside her, which, surprise surprise, died a few years later anyways without any notable achievements.”

“Frankenstein?”

“Human story about a doctor who tries to create life and winds up with a monster.” Glenn considered that.

“You conceptualise yourself as a monster?” She shrugged.

“I mean, I kind of am one. I’m a human born from a Talosian, and my body is actively rebelling against my existence.” She pointed to the oscilloscope embedded in her skull. “And let’s not forget all this.”

“Was the moster violent? Evil?”

“No, it was just trying to live. The people of the town shunned it, and it ran off to live in the woods” she explained, realising how well the metaphor actually fit.

“So how does the story end?”

“The monster swears to make Frankenstein’s life miserable if he doesn’t make another monster that can be his companion. He agrees, but when he fails and the monster kills his partner, he runs away and eventually dies at sea.”

“Do you think you resent your mother?”

“Tula’s not my mother,” Lutèce replied. “And yes, I do. She made me. I didn’t ask to be born, and even when I was, I was nothing but an experiment to her.”

“Didn’t you say she got attached to you?” Glenn asked and jotted down a note on his book.

“Well, in the way you get attached to your favourite screwdriver.” She crossed her arms. “Not like you would a daughter. She tried her best, but she was never a mother to me.”

“If you acknowledge that she tried, how can you still discredit her for that?” Lutèce sighed.

“Look, if you want a child, or alternatively, have a science experiment grow in your womb for nine months, you gotta come to terms that it’s going to take up a lot of time and money, not to mention love and attention. If you’re not ready for that, or rather, if you can’t guarantee that you can commit to that, you shouldn’t have children. Normal or monster.”

“And she couldn’t.”

Lutèce shook her head. “Nope, not really.”

Another short pause, only punctuated by jazz.

“How does the story end?”

Lutèce had dreaded that question.

“When the monster sees Frankenstein dead, it mourns and realises that everything it did only made it more miserable than even its creator.” She took a deep breath. “It vows to end its own life and disappears into the snow.”

“How do you feel about that? If you were the monster, what would you have done?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have killed around five people,” she deflected. “But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it. Disappearing, I mean. Just leaving everything behind and dying alone. If I’m not leaving my mark on the world, I might as well die with some peace and quiet.”

“So it’s either dying on your own terms or going out with a bang so loud the whole universe will remember it.”

She put her mug back on the little table between them.

“What does happiness mean to you?” Glenn challenged her. “How does it feel?”

“I’ve never been happy. Not for long, anyways. I try to distract myself with fleeting joy, like a new video game, or a book, but it doesn’t last.”

“Well, like you said, that’s joy. I’m talking about happiness. Eudaimonia.”

“I don’t think that’s something I’ve experienced.”

“Humour me, if you will,” Glenn proposed and took out one of the books from the shelf by his seat. “The works of Plato. A human philosopher.”

“How does someone who’s been dead for two hundred years help me now?”

“More around two thousand and six hundred.” Glenn paged through the book, looking for a specific passage. “He argues that happiness can only arise once one has engaged with the six dimensions of what it means to be happy. Self-discovery, improving your best potentials, a sense of purpose, effort, hard work and finding joy in the things that help you express yourself.”

“So?”

“Let’s work through them. Self-discovery is first. Who are you, Lutèce Nehalem?”

When she recounted her life’s experiences, Glenn had to put in effort not to lose himself to much in the harrowing tales of abandonment and trust issues. Lutèce was not well. She never had been.

“I didn’t even have a name. Tula never gave me one. She called me Fourteen, I was the fourteenth attempt she made at cloning from digital DNA. I had worked. Well, at least I didn’t instantly liquify. I guess that counts as a success.

“I chose Lutèce by myself. Human society was ordered around districts of the planet they called countries, and in those countries there were cities, not unlike the cities we have on planets now. Urban centres. One of them was Paris, and as far as I can tell it was a bustling but somehow still humble metropolis. It never forgot where it came from, and I liked that. A different civilisation had called it Lutèce. I like to think it fits well. Sticking to your roots, and all. The people that come here to have their ships fixed call me Sprocket. I don’t mind it, at least they respect me for who I am. They don’t know I’m human, of course.”

Maybe that was something to work on.

“What brought you to Haumea?”

“The sun” she answered. “Earth. I wanted to be here. I still do, I belong here.”

“Yes, but why Haumea? Why not Earth?”

“Haumea is out far enough that it’s still easily reachable with an FTL drive. And I do need my customers to survive.”

Glenn didn’t say anything. There was something Lutèce wanted to say, but hadn’t.

“…and Earth is dead.”

Her remaining eye glazed over slightly, and a small tear formed.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s hilarious.” She tried to hold back her tears, laughing nervously. “I spend all my life looking for the place I belong, and when I find it, it’s dead. No life, none. Extinct. Just a desolate wasteland.”

Glenn handed her a box of tissues. She took one.

“That was four years ago.” It concided with her suicide attempt.

“I assume the events were connected.”

Lutèce nodded.

“You don’t know how it felt. I had come so far. I barely had supplies, and I was flying for weeks. And then I finally was there, I touched down, and… there was silence. Absolute deafening silence.”

“Were you expecting something else?”

“It was so quiet I could hear the blood rushing through my body. There was absolutely nothing. No grass, no trees, no birds… everything was empty. Just rocks. Grey rocks. The sky had burned and left nothing behind.”

Glenn poured another tea.

“I rocketed back up the well, to this place. Set up my little makeshift home, the atmospheric tent. But something like that… it doesn’t leave you. Earth was dead. I had to be dead too.”

“So you tried to take your own life.”

“A few days later, I walked out of the tent.” She swallowed. Her voice was quivering. “I was outside, and I turned off my suit core. I’d suffocate in around ten minutes. I waited. Everything went dark. I don’t know how long I was out, but my implant had detected that I was about to die and shot me full of adrenaline, and also activated my suit again. I didn’t die, and I haven’t tried since.”

“Why do you think you haven’t?” Lutèce hadn’t thought about that before.

“Well… if it didn’t work the first time, I suppose it wasn’t meant to be in the first place.” She smiled faintly. “The universe telling me ‘hey, here’s another thing you suck at.’”

“What did you feel when you fell unconscious?”

“Relief” she said and looked out of the window at the rocky desert, to the spot where the air fluttered at the edge of the tent. “And then I felt like bawling my eyes out when I came to.” She shook her head. “Eye, I mean. Just the one.”

“Yet you wouldn’t try again.”

“The universe denied me closure.” She looked around nervously. “And that’s that.”

“So you just went on?”

“What else was there to do? I set up my makeshift home and started digging through the piles for anything salvageable.”

“The scrap was here before?”

“Haumea was a dumping ground. Still is. Mostly used by porters and pirates that can’t be bothered to jettison their unrecyclables into the sun. That’s metal, complex machinery, reactor parts and depleted fuel. There’s mounds like this all over the planet.”

“And you made a job out of using this garbage to fix up pirate ships?”

“Yeah. By accident, too. Pirate ship landed here once and couldn’t get off again, busted launch thrusters. Fixed it, word got around. Next day someone with broken retro rockets smashed into my little rock. Fixed that too. And that sort of became a regular thing. They knew I didn’t keep records, didn’t take money. I eventually shared a list of things I needed to survive with them. Food, water, a recycler, hygiene products and, of course, cancer meds.”

Glenn looked outside at the little habitat Lutèce had built herself. It had been improved with various things from the scrap heap, and the emergency habitat tent it was made out of had been added to with many smaller rooms made out of welded scrap metal. There were a few windows too, and one of them was a room made of the circular observatory of what Glenn assumed to be a former Navarean research vessel. He could see her bed under it, next to it the chemotherapy machine.

“Is doing this something that fulfills you?” he asked and went to the second point on his list of the prerequisites for happiness.

“Maybe not fulfil. But I do get some satisfaction out of it. It’s a puzzle, and I like puzzles. And I’m slowly getting better at it, too. I can swap a reactor in record time on a smaller ship.” She pointed to the other ship on the runway. A sublight dinghy, directional thrusters and reminiscent of ancient lunar landers. “I built that from scratch.”

“Very impressive. Does it fly?”

“It flies, all right. Landing, that I’ll have to work on.” she joked. For a moment, all her fears and depressive notions were gone. Wanting to keep her happy for even just a moment, Glenn engaged.

“What made you build a sublight ship?”

“Well… I always liked the idea of exploring. There’s so much of the galaxy that’s barely mapped, and most of that is star systems with many planets, like this one. Earth, of course. All the ruins there are a lot of fun to explore, especially what used to be big cities. Same applies to Mars, that’s usually in better condition. Then there’s old abandoned Lagrange stations, like the one by the asteroid belt. I recovered some pretty cool trinkets from there.” She sighed, and the smile vanished from her face. “But it’s all dead now. It’s also depressing if you stay for too long.”

“What do you think is your purpose in life?” he asked. Number three.

“To die and end humanity’s chapter in history” she replied, as if she’d thought about this many times before. “I’m serious. Maybe they have some unfinished business I have to take care of before, but I must die. Eventually.”

“Unfinished business?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I’m just saying if my entire species had to die, I certainly wouldn’t have time to tie up all the loose ends.” The wording was curious to Glenn. Her entire species had to die. She saw herself at a remove. A delusion of grandeur, perhaps?

“Do you think you’re going to uncover the secrets of why humans had to die out?”

“Well, no. It was capitalism. Unchecked ecological exploitation.” Surprising amount of knowledge for a fourteen-year-old. Then again, it was her species. If anyone would know, it was her. “Maybe there’s someone still out there. Maybe some humans made it. Maybe I’m not the last one.” She quickly discarded the thought. “I mean, you’re right. That’s silly.”

“So apart from dying, what, to you, is the meaning of life?”

“Making sure your species lives on? But, well, I can’t do that.”

“Some argue that life is what you make of it. That living well and being content is the meaning of life, and there’s no greater good than your own contentment.” She crossed her arms.

“Well, that’s no good to me” she muttered. “That all you got? Procreation, a life well lived, what else is there?”

“Well, the industry argues that there’s a lot of money to be made. That how successful you are, fiscally, determines how much your life was worth in the end.”

“That’s not helpful either. I have fifty credits somewhere on a chip I found in a scrap heap.”

“What about nihilism?”

“The idea that nothing has any meaning and life is just a path to death? Well, I can see it.”

“It’s a powerful philosophy, if not a particularly sunny one.”

“You’re actually considering it? I thought you were supposed to get me better.”

“Nihilism doesn’t have to be hopeless. For instance, optimistic nihilism argues that there is no inherent meaning to the universe, no reason for life to exist, and nothing exists with purpose. But that just means that we get to create our own purpose. Our own goals and ambitions become the meaning of life, in essence.”

“I like that idea, but it seems flawed,” she answered. Glenn was intrigued.

“How so?”

“It’s a justification after the fact. It’s not a real philosophy. If you don’t have ambitions in the first place, this won’t give you any.”

Glenn considered that for a moment.

“That may be true, but I don’t believe that you don’t have any ambitions. You mentioned you like exploration. Doesn’t that make you happy?”

“Happy”, she scoffed and rolled her eyes. “With me? No such thing.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss. Maybe you just haven’t found the thing that makes you happy.”

“If that’s the case, I won’t find it in a few weeks.”

“Well, experimentation begins at home. Why not just try something new? Crochet, perhaps. Or baking.”

“Engineering is fun. I mean, fixing starships. And building my own.”

“And exploration, too.”

“Yeah, although I wish there was more than rocks and ruins.”

“Most of the things should be well preserved, no?”

“Yeah, sure. Personal effects, books too, sometimes. Some of what I assume to have been shops still have stock sometimes.”

“Ever found anything interesting?”

“Most of the time the batteries are shot. They still thought Lithium Ion cells were very impressive. After two hundred years, they’re mostly dead. And besides, the really impressive stuff you find in outer space.” She adjusted her seating position. “Humans had this weird obsession of either keeping their trash on world or shoot it out into the void. Not into the sun, just into space. I found a car in orbit around Saturn once. A nice one too.” Again, she distracted herself. They both noticed at the same time. “Figures that I’d love rifling through literal garbage.”

“Isn’t that always the case though?” he asked. “Whenever I pass a giant pile of trash, I always have to thoughts, in no particular order. The first one is ‘oh wow, that’s disgusting!’ and the other one is ‘I bet there’s some good stuff in there’.”

“Is there ever?”

He nodded over to the sublight ship parked between two scrap heaps. “That one works fine.” She chuckled.

“Yeah, guess you’re right.”

“Do you think you’re doing your best? Are you putting in as much effort into the things you love?” Number four on the prerequisites for happiness.

“I’d say so. Fixing starships is serious business. You can’t really cut any corners or you’ll pay for it with your life. Or someone else’s life.” She looked at her ship. “That being said, I wouldn’t trust this with atmospheric flight in any case. I can barely land it, let alone fly it through air for longer than liftoff.”

“I’d like to talk to you about your customers. The pirates whose ships you repair.”

“Not much to talk there. They show up, I fix it, they usually leave money or order a porter to deliver some supplies for me.”

“Did they ever threaten you or abuse you in any way?”

“What? No.” she answered, probably questioning his methods. “No, they may be pirates, but they’re not savages. No, they get their ships fixed, they pay me in one way or another.”

He looked to the clock on the wall. The session would be over soon. His notepad was almost completely filled with notes about Lutèce, and they all coalesced in one conclusion. He wouldn’t be able to help her, at least not to any meaningful degree. He didn’t even have to run through the last two points. He closed the book with Plato’s wisdoms and looked her in the eye.

“I think I’ve heard enough.”

“For what, a diagnosis?” She perked up.

“No, that one I could have given you before. You’re depressed as a result of your terminal illness. But you know that, and that’s not why you’re here.” She nodded. “You’re here because you want help. You don’t want to feel like this any more, even though on the surface you appear as though you couldn’t care less.”

Again, she nodded.

“Generally, I would advise any patient with depression to adopt a self-care regimen. A balanced diet, exercise, social interaction. Antidepressants too, and in very severe cases, psychosurgery. In the months to come, you’d usually be better.”

“But not me?”

“Like you said, you don’t have much time left.” Her heart sunk as he said that. “It’s not going to make a meaningful difference.”

“So what do you suggest, then?” she answered. The lump in her throat became bigger, and she felt tears forming on her organic eye. She of course couldn’t see, but the pale green dot on her oscilloscope probably jumped all over the screen. It tended to do that when she was emotional.

“Live like you want to live. If there’s anything you’ve always wanted to do, do it now.”

“That’s it? That’s not very comforting.”

“I know. But it’s all I can do for you.”

The tape ended. There was absolute silence, something Lutèce was only too familiar with. The fifty minutes were almost up.

“You’re a fucking fraud.” Lutèce stood up and reached in her pocket, producing a credit chip and throwing it on the floor. “Take my money and get the fuck off my planet.”

“I understand why you’re upset, but there’s no need to lash out-”

“As if you care. As if any of you fucking care. This is a job for you, nothing more, and because I’m gonna be a tumour-ridden corpse soon you don’t put in any effort.”

“Just because I’m getting paid for my work doesn’t mean I don’t have a genuine interest in getting my patients better. This is more than just a job to me.”

“Is it? Are you interested at all in the truth of how I’m feeling?”

“I’m only interested in the truth.”

“And yet you charge for an hour that’s only fifty minutes long.” She got out of the chair, turned to the stairs and went down to the airlock. The fucking audacity of this hack to tell her that there was nothing she could do anymore. That she was doomed to a joyless existence.

The door opened and she hopped out of the ship onto the cold grey surface of the planet she’d called her own. Hands in her pockets, she went back to her tent-house. A few minutes later, the ship of her therapist ignited and lifted off, rocketing into the star-dotted void.

And just like that, she was alone again.

An hour later, Lutèce still steeped in her anger. Her hand hurt from clenching her fist. She had punched her pillow, over and over again, with both her organic and mechanical hands. Over and over and over. She imagined it being Tula’s face. Eventually, she had to pay for dooming Lutèce to this shitshow of a life. A life so bad even a renowned psychotherapist couldn’t help her. Tried to play god, and all it got her was a prison sentence and a terminally ill daughter. Fuck you, Tula, she said to herself over and over again. Fuck you, she shouted. I never asked to be born.

There was a ping from her radio setup over on the table. Someone was hailing her.

She snapped out of her fit of rage and crying. When she released her fist, she realised how hard she’d been clenching it. Marks from her fingernails were a deep red in her palm.

The radio chimed again.

“Who is this?” she answered the phone, trying to overplay that she’d been crying.

“Sprocket. You got time to look at my thruster? Been acting up all week.”

“Lyle?” One of her regulars.

“That’s the name”

She sighed. “Bring her in.”

She wiped away her tears, turned off the radio and wheeled her garage cart outside. It was always a brisk twelve degrees under the atmosphere. Not too cold, but she usually wore a jumper. Her ship was standing on the otherside of her improvised runway. Tanks were full last time she checked. She hooked up her machines to the cart, put on her welding cap. Broken thrusters usually also meant a little body work. Her arc welder worked fine.

The PU None Of Your Business, a pirate ship disguised as a galactic delivery ship, entered the atmospheric tent. Lutèce could see the problem while it was burning to a stop already. The port side thrusters didn’t run, most likely a pinched water line. The ship touched down on the already burned part of the planet, and Lyle jumped down from the airlock. Gravity was low enough that he didn’t hurt himself.

“Thanks for helping me. Left thruster-”

“Port thruster.”

“Whatever. Can you fix it?”

“Easy.”

“Good. Ay, I don’t have any supplies right now. That okay?”

“Not ideal. Talk to Alix and pay for the next shipment, then.”

“Come on, Lucy. We’re buds-”

“My name’s not Lucy,” she said and flipped down her welding hood. “And you’ll pay Alix next time you see them if you wanna leave here with a working thruster.”

“Jeez Louise,” Lyle answered but then nodded. “Fine.” Lyle was a bumbling idiot, but at least he was easy to intimidate.

“Good. This won’t take long.” She pushed her tiny body off the ground and magnetised her boots to the side of the ship, then walked up the hull to the damaged part. Within a few minutes, she had patched the water line to it and fixed the hole in the hull. Probably a tiny asteroid ripping through, nothing she hadn’t seen before. She welded a piece of titanium over the hole. It was heavier now, but it would hold. Then, she disengaged her magnetic soles and hopped back to the ground.

“That was it?” Lyle said as she flipped up her hood and put away the welder. “I coulda done that!”

“But you didn’t, so you better get me my cancer meds and snacks.”

“Yeah, yeah.” There was an awkward pause as she put away her equipment and wheeled the garage cart inside again. “Ay, you doin’ good?”

“Why?”

“You’re cryin’.”

Lutèce quickly wiped away a tear that she didn’t even realise was there. “I’m fine. Arc welder.”

“If there’s something on your mind, you can talk to me.” She laughed.

“I doubt that.”

“Try me.” Lyle said and sat down on the ground, patting the spot next to him. Lutèce just rolled her eyes, but then sat down.

“I guess I’m just scared of dying” she sighed.

“Oh, you get used to it.”

“No, you don’t understand. I have maybe a few weeks left to live. Even with meds.”

“Lemme tell you something, kid.”

He lay down on the rocky ground and looked up at the stars. Lutèce followed suit. The stars didn’t move at all. Occasionally, one of Haumea’s moons moved across the black sky.

“You don’t gotta be scared. First thing I learned in this world is that it can be over, just like that” he snapped his fingers on the last word, for emphasis. “And that’s fine. In the end, you can’t do anything about that. I mean, you can try to hang with the right people and keep your ship in check so that it doesn’t happen that soon, but even if it does, not that big a deal.”

“I just don’t wanna be forgotten.”

“Why? Doesn’t matter to you.”

“Huh?”

“You’re dead. What does it matter if you’re remembered? Doesn’t make any difference to you. People worry so much about what to do to make their life memorable and worth rememberin’ they forget to live. Nothing lasts forever, and your life doesn’t for sure.”

“That’s… weirdly comforting.”

“Eh, don’t think too much. Falls apart when ya do that.”

“So you’re not scared of dying?”

“If my time comes, it comes.”

The night sky was beautiful. She could see the eye of the galaxy, with the four arms of the milky way coalescing around the black hole. The endless blanket of stars stretched to infinity, and presumably far beyond - and it was quiet, as quiet as it always was. But this time, Lutèce didn’t mind.

They lay there, quietly, for the better part of half an hour. For the first time in a long while, Lutèce had thought of truly nothing. All the rage she felt towards Dr. Glenn, all the hatred she kept inside about Tula, it was silent for once. The pain from all her illnesses was also silent, as if to grant her a moment of respite.

“Well, I gotta go. I’ll talk to Alix about your payment. Stay gold, kid.” Lyle got up, and so did Lutèce. He saluted goodbye, got back into his ship and rocketed away from the planet. Lutèce was alone again.

The modified emergency tent she had called her home for almost four years now was clean and tidy. She’d spent some time getting it all set up. Her clothes were all clean and neatly folded in the dresser, her bed was made, the kitchen was spotless and the bathroom was shining.

It was a good day to never come back.

She placed a hand-written note on her desk. She’d never read it again, but someone else might.

The door she left unlocked, keys in the lock. Atmospheric generators were on, too. The solar panels and backup batteries would keep them going for a while.

She walked down the surface of her little scrap planet and climbed into her ship from the bottom. She sealed up the hatch, put on her spacesuit and sat down in the cockpit. The engine roared to life, and she pulled up the controls for lift-off.

Lutèce took a quick look at the map, not that she needed to. She knew where she was going. She set the ship’s autopilot to the third planet and engaged, taking care to map the trajectory in a way not to fly into the sun. Aligning flight vector, it replied with text on a screen.

She leaned back in her seat as the ship burned some more fuel. Accellerating towards destination. It stayed that way for two hours. She had leaned back and tried to get some sleep, but couldn’t. She was too anxious.

Firing retrorockets. Burning even more fuel in front of the ship, it slowed down to not slam into the surface of the planet. She could see the blue marble now, with the five continents and the adorably tiny moon.

Autopilot complete: Earth.

She switched to her long-range scanners. It was a long shot, of course, but she was crazy not to send at least one pulse out. Scan for life signs, she ordered the computer. A pulse of light wandered across the digital simulacrum of the planet she was supposed to call her home.

One positive result came back.

Over on the northern hemisphere, in an area her old maps marked as Cascadia, there was a single life sign. A tree, a pinus longaeva, by a river delta.

She ran another scan, and it returned the same result. There was life on earth, even if it was just one tree. Good enough for her, she thought. She flipped up the landing camera and prepared to touch down on the planet, playing carefully with the bottom-firing rockets to not crash into the surface. After a few tense moments, her ship had landed.

She was on Earth again.

Luteèce knew she wasn’t going to return. She turned off all the lights, the beacon, then the reactor itself and left the key in the ignition. The hatch at the bottom of the ship was manual, so she flipped it open and climbed out onto the dirt surface of her home planet. A few steps forward, and she came face with the last tree. It was a lot taller than she expected. A few of the green needles were scattered across the ground. The river nearby was flowing, and even though the water wasn’t clean, the sounds of a babbling brook comforted her a lot.

It was a good place to die.

Lutèce Nehalem sat down on the ground and leaned against the bark of the last tree on earth. She put her hands on the glass of her helmet, twisted it off and put it to the side. The air from the outside was thin, but it smelled of pine needles.

A few deep breaths was all it took to fill her with the peace and tranquility she had been looking for all her life. She wouldn’t be remembered. The human race would have most certainly died with her, at some tree, at some place in Cascadia. That would be her legacy, and no one would know.

But somehow, she didn’t mind dying at home.

Her vision went blurry, presumably from all the toxic compounds in the air slowly suffocating her. It didn’t hurt. Lutèce didn’t fight it and just breathed in deeper and deeper, in and out. Around her, everything went dark as her consciousness slipped away from her more and more.

On the 10th of July, 2289, Lutèce Nehalem died peacefully.

Darest thou now O soul,

Walk out with me toward the unknown region,

Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,

Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,

Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not O soul,

Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,

All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,

All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,

Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

Then we burst forth, we float,

In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,

Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.*

Walt Whitman

The great thing about Uberspace is that they do everything just like you would yourself. Their servers are literally just bog standard linux boxes. They run sendmail, nginx, and a little bespoke utility that lets you configure those without having to delve into config text files. It’s quite powerful, and more importantly, this means that everything they do is completely by the books and predictable. Hosting at Uberspace is pretty close to actually hosting yourself. It also means that their mailserver config is more or less exactly as RFC 9051 and its obsolescences want them to be. Ports are what they should be. TLS and SSL is supported, at the correct ports. It’s a joy to use.

So imagine my surprise when suddenly, out of nowhere, Apple Mail on iOS refused to communicate with the SMTP server. It could read email fine, most of the time - but sending it was out of the question. It just plopped my emails in the outbox, which I didn’t even know the Apple Mail app supported displaying.

I put in a solid afternoon troubleshooting this, but I couldn’t figure out what was causing the issue. Uberspace staff, consider this my bug report - and no, I don’t have any further information on what happened or why it happens only on iOS and iPadOS. I’m in the dark here. Regardless, this appears to be a client issue anyways; I tried other clients and they all - with some exceptions - worked perfectly. Or, well, not perfectly, but that’s not the server’s fault.

I went through at least 15 email clients. All of them suck. I’m being completely genuine - I’ve not found a single email client that works as you’d expect. I’ve found ones that I can tolerate, but that’s about all I can do here really.

Let’s run through a few - Outlook, the golden boy. Sure. It’s not free, despite what Microsoft wants you to believe, and I use it at my job because we’re suffering from the disease known as Exchange there, so I was familiar. The “New Outlook”, the one that comes with Windows (someone call the branding police), is just straight up garbage. I connected my accounts, all three, and immediately it informed me that my credentials and emails would be also stored on Microsoft’s servers. I don’t even know how I’d begin to rationalise that, but cautiously, I pressed on. I was presented by a new email. Great, that works - but wait, that’s not an email. It’s an ad, made to look like an email in your inbox. Unacceptable. Next.

Outlook 2019, the paid one, was… okay. Nothing special. Way too bloated, took forever to load, and to this day I don’t understand why Microsoft insists on essentially having two seperate Outlooks for when connecting to an Exchange server or anything else. I can use Outlook, it’s okay, but it’s infested with Microsoft’s business nonsense. For instance, the “Forward to manager” QuickStep shortcut is baked in to the UI, even though it knows that I’m running the Home and Student version. That’s annoying, and to me is just another symptom of Microsoft seemingly being unaware there is life outside an office. I won’t go into it here, but Microsoft’s concept of reality is almost creepily corporate.

Just for shits and giggles, I also tried Outlook 2010. Quite frankly, I prefer that style of UI, it’s charmingly dated. It’s also gold, instead of blue. Why they ever changed that is beyond me.

Outlook 2010 needs some convincing to connect to IMAP servers. It can do it, but it defaults to port 143, and doesn’t understand that SMTP servers also require authentication these days. You can make it work, but you have to be dedicated. Once inside though, aside from the wallpaper and the furniture, it’s just Outlook. Exactly the same. One wonders what Microsoft has been doing in the years between Office 2010 and 2019, but it clearly wasn’t improving the email experience. Forward to Manager makes a reappearance here.

Some more grievances about this outdated app nobody should use - it doesn’t do IMAP keywords, even if you try and force it to, it doesn’t understand threads, doesn’t auto-read emails you click on by default, and of course there’s the vestigial tail of “Send/Receive All Folders” that evokes HotSync feelings of yesterdecade. But other than that - and to its credit, it does at least try to autosync - it’s just Outlook. Don’t close it though, it can’t run in the background.

Admittedly, that’s not where my journey started. I started with Thunderbird, which is more or less what everyone uses. Thunderbitd is… fine? It has a lot of the same issues that Outlook has, and I personally think the interface isn’t suited to power users that use IMAP keywords and folders a lot, and even though it offers extensions, they haven’t been touched in years. Most of them don’t have screenshots and when they do, they’re usually with the Windows 2000 UI. Shout out to Eudora, by the way.

There is a certain dichotomy in email clients. As far as I can tell, there’s two general design styles - pretentious (this is your Spark, Superhuman, Airmail and so on) and crusty (which is your classic Outlook, Apple Mail, basically every native app). The Bat! for Windows is a special case because it marries those two styles. Yes, it’s native. I think. I refuse to check. Yes, it also shows Email like Spark, and in true terrible app fashion, the Reply/All/Forward buttons are round and at the top of the message where they overlap the bounding box - but we won’t hold that against The Bat!. Don’t be confused by the name, by the way. The name is really the one thing about The Bat! that I can excuse. Because good lord, is this app poorly designed. Every email in the email list has three buttons to the side. Every. Single. One. This clutters up the interface, as does the weirdly centre-aligned toolbar which does not at all gel with the classic three-pane UI of folders, emails, and current message. Add to that that they want you to pay for this software Fiat Multipla, and you see why Outlook and Thunderbird are popular.

On iOS, the offerings are hardly any better. Airmail is DOA, Spark does the NuOutlook thing of having to proxy your emails through their servers (presumably for notifications), Superhuman is 20 quid a month, and of course, every single one of these apps insists on grafting AI junk on top that you need to pay for, but you also need to pay for every other sensible feature like multiple accounts. It’s a mess.

There’s always an insane option, of course. An option so obviously designed for and by giant nerds that have no idea how to design an app. You know the ones. Your GIMP, your Blender, your VLC. They all suck. Nobody enjoys using them, but they do anyways, because they’re free and can do everything, somehow. Preside Mail on iPhone is no different.

First, it’s not native. It feels off. Not like an iPhone app should. There’s tiny delays everywhere and th visual effects are in the UX equivalent of the uncanny valley. It also refuses to ever let go of a feature - a digital hoarder’s home. You can still - admittedly, to my immense delight - turn on the iOS 6-style skeuomorph UI. That’s lovely. Everything else isn’t though - Preside does email, contacts, calendars, tasks, and it kind of sucks at all of them. It also exposes every single setting you could want. For this, it actually has a “settings level” menu that lets you choose how many settings you want it to show to you. It hands you control over things you should never have control over. It lets you choose what method it uses to update in the background, for Pete’s sake. And despite all this, it’s not a very good email client. Composing an email is clunky, as is attaching items. Filing and organising is a mess specifically because it brings all the intricacies of IMAP management to the small screen, and that’s a labyrinth. I lost my dog in the menus of Preside, and I’m probably not doing to see him ever again. I barely know how to mark an email as read, and by the way, swipe to go back is not supported.

The Mac version of the insane email app is MailMate, by the way. I love it to death - it’s also the closest you can get to direct IMAP control, and unlike Preside, it is actually native. It has ridiculous features like “Scramble Mode” which shifts all letters on the screen over randomly in a Caesar cipher so you can take screenshots without exposing your details, it integrates with four dozen different task management apps - including yours - it has a brilliant Thread Arcs feature that visualises email like a Git tree and all of this doesn’t matter because it only supports IMAP. Like I said, I love it. But it’s not good.

And that doesn’t leave very much! I chose to stay with Preside, Outlook 2010 and MailMate because I clearly can’t be trusted, but as I hope you’ve come to realise, dear reader, all of these suck! There are no good Email clients! Not one! Not even by accident! Where did they all go?

I think this has something to do with - of course - the way society has changed. When email was formalised, it was literally that - electronic mail. You sent letters. They had a letterhead and a context, a signature, and sometimes a photo was attached. Not so nowadays. Email is a complex thing now, it can even run JavaScript if you’re reckless enough, it can report back through tracking pixels and if you send a marketing email that’s not a modern HTML nightmare, you’re not going to be taken seriously.

Naturally, this also changed how we perceive our messages. Much like the iPhone changed text messages into bubbles and our perception of the medium to instant messages, email changed as well, but in the other direction. Email is - despite being as fast as IM these days - the slow comms. The snail mail. Esnail email, if you will. Most of your emails don’t even get a second thought, because they’re advertising. Newsletters. Spam. Nigerian princes in desperate need of an account to transfer all those dollars into. You get so many of them you need to speed through them.

Emails are the only form of modern comms you’re likely to batch process. You select a lot of them, mark them as read, then archive them. They’re not messages, they’re entries. Files. Quantity over quality, in most cases. Which leads to Email clients being designed with this in mind. Most notably: Email clients provide a list of messages, and not a list of people, unlike iMessage or WhatsApp.

The early clients understood this intuitively. Outlook and Eudora, rest in power, were exactly made for this. You didn’t even have to leave the email list to look at the message. You filed it away, maybe you replied, and only then was a new window opened. Most modern clients don’t do this. Instead, they put the sender front and centre, with a big round picture (something tacked onto the email standard by techbros, by the way) and most modern clients even read and answer emails for you. The whole thing is backwards.

I’m wondering when we’ll be at the point where machines will just talk to each other and not notice. If someone sends me a copilot written email, and my Spark AI+ then summarises it, and forwards it to someone who has Superhuman distill the core points, are we even still sending letters? Is that what email is coming to?

Maybe. Some might even welcome this, and trust me, I get it. Email is first and foremost an annoyance we have to deal with. I get that, and many see it as not an art form but the necessary turn based combat of the office. And, for that, sure. Outlook is fine.

But I digress. I simply can’t believe there’s not a single good email client out there. Not a single one. MailMate comes damn close, but IMAP only and Markdown only for composing is probably a step too esoteric for mainstream adoption.

So, what do I want? Honestly, I want Eudora back. But failing that, my demands are as follows: a native app, with support for all IMAP features like keywords, expunge and redirect, but also Gmail, Exchange, and whatever Apple is doing. Customisable UI, auto-detection of mailservers, Thread Arcs, my dog back safely, and a promise to not enshittify it with core baked-in load-bearing AI features.

Course, no one’s making that. But can’t a girl dream?

Starting in the 1950s, businesses were increasingly organised in a direct hierarchical structure. Partly at fault for this was the proliferation of long range instant communications like the Teletype - suddenly, it was a lot easier to coordinate a huge enterprise with tons of branch offices and departments. The highest order of management has been and still is the C-suite in most American and Australian companies. The CEO, or managing director, has the job of making sure that the entire company is reasonably unified and all working towards the same goal. In most arrangements, the CEO also exercises an almost feudal amount of absolute power over everyone under him, provided there is no overseeing board of directors.

The CEO’s job in most public companies is simple—provide the shareholders with the most value. This is accomplished through oversight of workers, hiring and firing, making purchasing and procurement decisions, changes to the product stack and marketing, but most importantly, the CEO has the power to delegate all of these tasks—but they are responsible for and can be held accountable for all of the business’ decisions. It is, contrary to the public perception of the big business CEO, not a trivial task and requires management experience. It must be said that the actual product or purpose of the organisation is a second-order priority here. If a company produces bad products, that’s usually bad for them, but it doesn’t meaningfully change the CEO’s job description.

The position is desirable to the worker not only because it usually comes with high pay and benefits, but also because it provides a great degree of autonomy and control over workers in the company. It is thus not only a badge of honour and competence, but of power. Tara Swart of MIT Management has suggested that individuals with psychopathic traits tend to thrive in chaotic environments like the daily dealings of a large corporations and are aware that others do not. Plain and simple, the CEO position lets one wield nearly unstoppable power over employees, which is in itself antidemocratic.

And this is where I feel I should draw a line–I’m not suggesting that capitalism or hierarchy in itself is antidemocratic, or that democracy is inherently hindering capitalism, but I’m also not saying to ignore the parallels between the two. This is, in part, what business and management education seeks to solve–it’s to strike a balance between leading a corporation and to provide a reasonably democratic workplace in which every worker is genuinely interested in improving the corporation they work for. The Chief Executive Officer is a highly esoteric position that wouldn’t be lusted after as much if the pay was that of the common employee.

And yet, lusting after the position is what most workers do.

I’m going to have to say a bunch of harsh things here and while I’ll do my best to soften the blow there’s no way around that as the facts here are just, prima fascia, unpleasant to consider.

What prompted my thoughts on the subject to be written down and presented like this was a short video that appeared when I was idly scrolling Instagram, by an account called @khloe_creates. Khloe creates, going off the description alone, lanyards, keychains, customised cups and other low-effort chinesium imprints. One wonders when she’ll will pivot to tasteless lamps with Bluetooth speakers and easily yellowed iPhone cases, but on its face, this is nothing special. Dropshipping businesses that clog up global shipping are a dime a dozen especially on social media, but Khloe Creates has a unique selling point. It is run and operated by Khloe, and that’s remarkable because she is 13 years old.

Trying to litigate if what she’s doing is allowed in her home state of Australia is beyond me, and also doesn’t interest me, so surely someone else can do that if they care. What I care to discuss is why she is doing this. Not because I don’t think she should be allowed to–on the contrary, power to her - but I’m going to provide a hypothesis as to why a 13-year old is doing business on the global market.

Considering her bread and butter is creating provocative and unfortunately not satirical content that’s meant to highlight her age, it’s clear to see that she’s inspired by social media at the core. I’ve previously touched on the dropshipping plague, and to someone not interested or informed about the numerous impacts dropshipping enterprises have on both culture and the environment, the benefits are clear–it’s low rent, reasonably profitable and the consequences for failure are so small that it doesn’t make sense not to try one’s hand at it, if you’re lacking morals. Slap a Shopify page together, google the trends for whatever ABS plastic garbage is flying off the shelves this week, done.

But something about Khloe Creates really… compels me. Gets under my skin. She pitches herself as a “full time student who’s also a CEO”. One of those is simple, most middle schoolers are full-time students, and don’t have any say in the matter either. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction is that she’s 13 and thus can’t be a CEO, but I think what’s bothering me is a much more deeper and sinister issue.

It’s not that she wants to be rich, it’s not that she thinks hard work and perserverance will be rewarded. Without any evidence to back that claim up, I’m comfortable saying that most children her age do want that. A life of ritz, glamour, more money than you can conceive of that age, no worries, every day is christmas and easter and passover and you’re gonna eat so much candy you puke. It’s the platonic ideal of what grown-ups can do. They can’t, of course, but that doesn’t matter at that age. At 13, you have the entire world figured out anyways.

No, what weirds me out about Khloe is that her focus isn’t necessarily on the reward aspect of CEO-dom - it’s her attitude about it. It’s not about play, it’s not about creative expression, it’s about the experience of the corporation. She’s the Chief Executive Officer–pay no mind to the fact that she’s the only employee–because that’s what makes her special. Self-expression through labour, through the perceived status of the job title. Something completely removed from the experience of being a child.

I’m not a big enough tool to accuse her of throwing her childhood away. Frankly, I don’t care about that, and let’s not leave it merely implied: Being under constant stress and being forced to maximise arbitrary sales metrics is, as cynical as it sounds, unfortunately pretty good preparation for the relentless restlessness modern corporate life, especially in the C-suite of not-megacorps, provides.

I have to wonder what compels her. Is it power? She certainly doesn’t have any, no matter how many C-level positions she assigns to herself, so clearly it must be either money or fame. I’m not convinced money is the primary motivator either, unless she’s making some truly obscene amount that far exceeds her 5000 Instagram followers, so the only thing that remains is fame. But… she’s probably not getting that either. Every organic comment of hers is making fun, criticising, calling out the grim cowardice of submitting to the neoliberal torment nexus at an age when most children learn how to calculate the slope of a linear function. The art she sells isn’t even particularly good, even for her age–and when there is a comment encouraging her pathological girlbossery, it’s from faceless accounts with no posts, no followers and no pretense of being a real person.

If she’s happy, that’s great. I’m not interested in shitting on the thing that she enjoys, but I don’t. It makes me feel ill, it makes me like I’m staring into a wormhole to the future.

A vertically integrated, paperclip maximising, joyless future devoid of creativity.

I also know that there are few things as personal as the platonic idea of the workflow. It’s impossible to satisfy everyone’s requirements, and even employment at city hall hasn’t made me enough of a public servant to even pretend to want to.

Raise your eyes up a little higher and read again: These are MY Mac apps of 2023. Not yours. You’re welcome to take any and all recommendations, or use my arguments to convince you why not to use these - at the end of the day I don’t care - but do me a favour and keep your thoughts to yourself. My website doesn’t have a comment feature, and that’s by design. And keep your grubby paws off my email.

Also, a few ground rules here. 2023 doesn’t mean they came out in 2023, just that I started using them. I use an M1 Mac, a big fuck off ultrawide external display, an iPhone and an iPad. This means while I do have a Windows computer, it’s just there to keep me humble and my Returnal high scores backed up. I don’t use Windows for productivity. Some of these apps are paid, the big ones are free, and I try to prefer open-source where possible. It’s not a must though. I’m gay enough for a design degree, but not gay enough for one in computer science.

Nobody understands the sanctity of the personalised workflow better than Apple. At least, that’s what I’m getting out of the fact that the Mac ships with a half-assed Word clone, a quarter-assed Excel clone and no way to split a screen in half to use two windows at once. Yes, I know about the full screen thing. We’re not going there today.

Frankly, there’s… a lot fundamentally wrong with macOS that really shouldn’t be left to people with Xcode copies to fix. Collapse menu bar icons? Seperate app, and none of the options are perfect. Snap a window to the side? Guess what, there’s 15 apps doing the same thing in the App Store.

Which is why 1 Piece was such a pleasant surprise for me. From what I can tell, Takahiro Fujita is–similar to me–a complainer. Unlike me, he actually fixes them though, and does so with a good dose of Japanese jank-charm. This completely free app does it all. It slices, it dices, it snaps windows, it changes focus, it quits, it restarts.

Seriously. You like Magnet, Hookshot, Spectacle, Rectangle, BST? It’s in there. You like Lasso? That’s in there too. You like AltTab? Guess what. It’s in there. Swish too, if you were thinking about it. It also can move your cursor, and lets you easily assign macros to double-tapping the modifier keys, all of which should be built in. Seriously, if you use a Mac, get it. It’s so much better than all the other apps it’s not even funny.

I also finally pulled the trigger on a good friend of mine - Brackets. Adobe Brackets, which was my personal Stockholm syndrome for far too long, finally broke. I mostly do web design, and that means HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. And yes, you really can’t beat Visual Studio Code. It’s fast enough, very extensible, and for an idiot like myself Copilot is very welcome. Also free, but you knew that. Endorsement. Easy win.

I’ve also become one of those assholes that use Setapp. If you can make friends with a student to get an education discount, I think 60 bucks a year is more than okay. Especially because the combination of PixelSnap and CleanShot X are already more than that combined - and definitely worth the price.

I mean, I’ll be honest. If the amount of praise I’d give to those two apps alone was pure carbon, I’d have to plant a minor forest to offset that. Yes, it’s pretentious as hell. Yes, they’re taking themselves way too seriously for an app that makes screenshots that you’ll look at once, then leave on your desktop forever. But it’s also that good. Especially since macOS really doesn’t have anything like Paint. A good alternative here is Shottr, which is mostly free - they changed it recently and I don’t care enough to check.

Paste is also good, and in Setapp. It’s not worth the price though. Think of it like a bonus app you get - if you don’t wanna pay the ridiculous premium, try PastePal, Pastebot and the clipboard history in golden boy Raycast.

AlDente, QuitAll, BetterZip and DisplayBuddy… they don’t deserve to be in Setapp. They’re microprograms at best and could have all been a pref pane, but they do the job and they do their job well. ForkLift is a very good FTP client, Folx is a very good downloader, HoudahSpot is… well, it looks like it was made in the Mountain Lion days, but it’s genuinely really good, so I can’t complain there either. BusyCal is my calendar of choice, since Cron is stupid, and if you don’t already have a writing app, Ulysses isn’t the worst choice. The best choice is, as we know, iA Writer 6.

There is one app that has saved my ass many times, though. It’s called TextSoap, it’s also in Setapp, but I’d pay 60 bucks for it regardless. It is another of the hideous ones, but oh lord does it make up for that in features. TextSoap is, in essence, a text formatting app. You paste in your text - rich or plain, doesn’t matter - and then apply your “Cleaners”. These do various things - like de-smartifying quotation marks, cleaning line breaks, extract text from HTML, reposition or redecorate, and you can even write your own cleaners in their simple-to-use builder. For 50 bucks, it’s honestly a steal if you have to work with text in any capacity, really. It even sits in the services menu so you don’t even have to open it.

Timing– and Rewind, but I have a bone to pick with them– is a really solid app to look back at your history. Think of it like Screen Time, but on steroids. In fact, it is Screen Time, and it even pulls in usage from your other devices through that API. Seeing your workday visually laid out in what you did, all fully automatic, is really really neat and saves you a lot of time when it comes to doing your timecards. Rewind, the greedy fuckers, finally added a free tier that doesn’t suck - but I’d still box it in with a firewall. Don’t trust all that GPT nonsense. My data stays on my device, especially when it’s everything I ever did.

All right, quick fire round. PDF Squeezer, solid addition for Setapp. Makes your PDFs smaller and strips out metadata. PCalc, extremely good calculator, and supports my flavour of autism with Reverse Polish Notation. SideNotes is neat, but I don’t use it as much as I should, Finalist looks very nice for a todo app, Craft is way less cool than it looks, Permute does what it needs to as a nicer HandBrake, Logseq is still stupid if Obsidian exists, and TextPal should be built-in to macOS, StopTheMadness stops the madness of the modern internet and should be awarded a purple heart.

I also had a lot of fun with Monodraw. It’s a design app for making ASCII art, and it’s honestly just a blast to fuck around with. Probably useful too if you’re in the business of making text-mode apps that run from inside the terminal. Speaking of!

Finally, I’ve set up my terminal how I wanted. Currently, I’m using iTerm2 with Zsh, and yes, I have OMZ installed. I also have Starship installed, if only to customise my prompt. It’s fun, and it makes my terminal fashionable and a joy to use. Don’t forget to write your own aliases and functions, even if it’s just to save two keypresses. It’s worth it. The font is Berkeley Mono, by the way. Highly recommend.

(image: itermss.png)

On the creative front, not much has changed. Affinity, CC, Sketch to season and Pixelmator to taste. I did get a new camera this year though - a Blackmagic 6K - and I was honestly blown away by how much better Davinci Resolve is at video editing than even Final Cut. It’s intuitive, even if you’ve only used Premiere and Final Cut before, and it comes with Fusion for mogfx and Fairlight for audio editing. Oh yeah, did I mention it’s free?

Quick look over at the phone, since that rotation of apps is constantly changing as well. Currently, I really enjoy Longplay for the album-focused Apple Music client that I’ve always wanted, Peaks is a cute way to check on your biorhythm even though I don’t know if it works that well - and because Apple Mail doesn’t want to talk to my brilliant perfect Email server (it must be nervous) I switched to Edison Mail. Free, fast, and no serverside nonsense like with Spark. On the Mac, MailMate reigns supreme. If you’re in Germany, use OPNV Navigator for your pubtrans needs. No, not DB Navigator, that one blows - although I wish the Mac version was also free.

I also really like Noteshelf on the iPad to take, well, notes. It’s a one-time payment and can go toe to toe with Goodnotes and Notability easily. Oh, and, secret tip: Yattee is a free and open-source client for YouTube through Invidious and PipeD. Yes, a free app, in the app store, that gives you ad free and sponsor blocked YouTube, with PIP, with background play. To set it up, open it, go to Settings then Locations, and paste https://r.yattee.stream/manifest-invidious-piped.json in the URL field, then hit Reload Manifest. Voila!

And, let’s give a quick shoutout to services: Tailscale is what I’ve always wanted a true VPN to be, and it’s completely free, and for the kind of VPN that they sell to you on YouTube video essays I recommend Mullvad. They store all their stuff in RAM, and keep no logs at all. That alone deserves the rec.

I also switched to hosting on Uberspace. They’re honestly very refreshing and humble, and the servers you get are very reasonable for small web services and personal sites. Don’t give IONOS money. Go to Uberspace instead, and register at Cloudflare - they know what they’re doing and it’s usually very cheap.

So there you have it - all the best apps and services I’ve added to my arsenal and that I can recommend. And before you go and complain that your favourite window manager isn’t on there: I don’t care. Nobody cares, and your one app isn’t an exception.

Swish is still cool though.