Category: Stories

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In the age of digital fluency, the archetype of the innocent adolescent is rapidly eroding. Today’s teens aren’t just navigating social media—they’re mastering it. They’re fluent in irony, manipulation, and emotional nuance. And some of them, disturbingly, are wielding what psychologists call dark empathy: the ability to understand others’ emotions not to connect, but to control.

This isn’t your typical “kids these days” lament. It’s a reckoning with the uncomfortable truth that emotional intelligence and moral development don’t always keep pace with cognitive sophistication. A 14-year-old might know how to build a brand on TikTok, decode adult insecurities, and provoke reactions with surgical precision—but that doesn’t mean they grasp the ethical consequences of their actions.

🔍 What Is Dark Empathy?

Dark empathy is empathy stripped of compassion. It’s the ability to read someone’s emotional state and use it against them. In the hands of a teen who lacks emotional maturity, it becomes a weapon—one that can devastate reputations, relationships, and lives.

This isn’t hypothetical. We’ve seen cases where adolescents manipulate adults into compromising positions, then flip the narrative to cast themselves as victims. The adult may be culpable—but the teen isn’t always innocent. And that’s where the moral fog thickens.

⚖️ The Victimhood Paradox

Society tends to default to a binary: adults are predators, teens are prey. But what happens when the teen is the one orchestrating the harm? What if their actions stem not from naivety, but from a calculated understanding of how to exploit emotional vulnerabilities?

This doesn’t absolve adults of responsibility. Power dynamics still matter. But it does demand a more nuanced view—one that recognizes that victimhood isn’t a fixed identity, and that emotional harm can be reciprocal, even if legal culpability isn’t.

🧠 Emotional Intelligence Isn’t Optional

The real crisis isn’t that teens are manipulative. It’s that we’ve failed to teach them emotional intelligence. We’ve given them tools—Reddit threads, YouTube psychology breakdowns, Discord servers full of moral relativism—but not the wisdom to wield those tools responsibly.

And when institutions—schools, churches, families—ignore this gap, they create environments where harm festers. Where manipulation is rewarded. Where accountability is blurred.

🔄 Reframing the Conversation

We need to stop asking “Who’s the victim?” and start asking “What systems allowed this harm to happen?” That means:

• Teaching emotional literacy alongside digital literacy
• Holding teens accountable without demonizing them
• Recognizing that power can be misused from both sides
• Creating cultures of integrity, not just compliance

Dark empathy is real. So is emotional immaturity. And when they collide, the fallout can be devastating—not just for individuals, but for the moral scaffolding of society itself.

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🎭 The Performance of Poise

She moved like she lived a full life. That was the bait.

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She didn’t wear independence like armor—she curated it like a brand. Not out of deception, but necessity. In a world that rewards optics over authenticity, she learned to thrive in the performance. The jobs were not about a career, the curated friendliness, the image of being “approachable”—all of it a performance. She didn’t love working as a babysitter; she tolerated children she could feel confident managing. Her life felt like a series of hollow gestures and missed connections. Not to repel men, but to attract a very specific kind: the white provider. The man who sees a woman thriving and thinks, I could use that in my life.

But she wasn’t selling sex. She was buying leverage.

Her body wasn’t the product—it was the currency. The fantasy wasn’t about earned intimacy—it was about strategic investment. Every flirtation, every tease, every calculated softness was a down payment on future control. The transaction was already underway.

🌍 Inheritance of Aspiration

Her mother crossed continents chasing a better life. She inherited the ambition, not the burden. Her migration was symbolic—not for survival, but for optics. Not for opportunity, but for aesthetic lifestyle.

She wasn’t escaping poverty. She was escaping mediocrity, boredom and neglect in her parents’ home.

She was meticulous about who could be seen with her. She needed men who fit the narrative—white, stable and wealthy. Not someone who couldn’t be socially rationalized, but one that slotted into her fantasy without breaking it. Men who could be explained away as friends, mentors, patrons, even father figures. Their presence enhanced her image, made her allure seem aspirational.

🧠 Mercurial Manipulation

She played mind games with surgical precision. She didn’t seduce, she curated men.

She needed a GBF, so she made one out of her classmate. Young, brilliant, emotionally raw. He repeated it. Wore it. Became it. Not because it was true, but because it was the only way to stay close.

She surrounded him with sexualized environments, talked about her conquests, sent him selfies and innuendo—but never intimacy. He was the nerd in her orbit, the virgin, the safe accessory that made her look desirable without risking her leverage.

She was beholden to her long-distance boyfriend, mostly for appearances. It signaled exclusivity while she quietly pursued something else with a coworker.

He thought she was his to puppet: You think she’s your bitch, but little do you know—she lets you believe that while you’re hers.

And if you think this tale is about her, think again. It’s about all of us—trading pieces of ourselves in markets we didn’t build, but learned to master.

She had no real friends, so we organized a birthday party for her. She dramatized avoiding eye contact with me throughout—looked away every time I spoke. I treated her like family: brought treats, chose thoughtful gifts. But the enthusiasm was short-lived. Her excitement was real, but curated. It served a purpose: to be seen, to be admired; until the social optics of that collided with reality.

🧨 The Game of Control

She offered just enough to keep them hooked. Just enough softness to make them feel chosen. But they weren’t the choosers. She was.

They would pay. Not just in money, but in attention, in loyalty, in lifestyle.

She didn’t offer love—she offered negotiation.

Her body wasn’t a gift. It was a tool of leverage.

And the promise of exclusivity wasn’t intimacy—it was control.

💋 The Siren’s Strategy

• Independence as performance: not to be alone, but to be chosen.
• Sex as leverage: not given freely, but exchanged for security.
• Commitment as conquest: not mutual, but strategic.

She didn’t want equality. She wanted elevation. And she knew how to get it.

The man, dazzled by her poise, mistook her for a muse. But she was a tactician. She knew that the promise of exclusivity—of being “his”—was the most valuable thing she could offer. Not because it meant intimacy, but because it meant control.

And yet, beneath the choreography, something flickered. A hesitation. A moment where the script didn’t quite fit the scene.

She knew how to get what she wanted.
She just hadn’t decided what she was willing to lose.

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🪟 The Window of Uncalculated Affection

There’s a time in adolescence—brief and fragile—where affection is given freely.

• No one’s keeping score.
• No one’s performing.
• Love is not yet a transaction.

But for girls, that window often begins closing far earlier. Before they even reach high school, they’re absorbing the message through media, peers, and even well-meaning adults—that:

• Their bodies are currency.
• Attention must be earned through performance.
• Love is something to be traded, not shared.

🧍‍♂️ My Son’s Memory: A Testament to Purity

My son’s memory of his high school girlfriend, before either of them understood the social games—is a testament to that purity. Before leverage, co-signing, or social capital entered the equation. It wasn’t about negotiation, performance, or positioning. That relationship wasn’t strategic. It was spontaneous. It was raw, unfiltered affection—something he hasn’t felt since. Age 16 isn’t the beginning—it’s the tipping point. By then, the conditioning is often complete.

💔 The Gendered Conditioning of Adolescence

• Girls and the Currency of Appearance: From a young age, girls are taught—explicitly and implicitly—that their value is tied to how they look and how they’re perceived. Media, peers, even well-meaning adults reinforce this.
• Boys and Emotional Detachment: While girls are often over-sexualized, boys are frequently discouraged from vulnerability.

🧠 The Psychology of the “Tipping Point”

• Age 16 as a Cultural Milestone: It’s not just about physical maturity—it’s when social hierarchies, romantic expectations, and identity pressures converge.
• Loss of Spontaneity: By this age, many teens have internalized the rules of engagement: who they’re “supposed” to be, how they’re “supposed” to love.

🌱 Mourning vs. Romanticizing Youth

• I’m not idealizing adolescence—I’m grieving what’s stolen from it.
• My call here is to protect emotional authenticity, to create spaces where affection isn’t a transaction but a gift.

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Magnanimous, dignity man.

A Quiet Marker of Life

The above phrase appears verbatim on my horoscope, but over time, it has become a quiet marker of how I move through life. I don’t approach people with calculated intent, nor do I barricade myself from the world. Instead, I move mindfully, engaging where there is willingness, learning where there is depth, and offering where there is room to receive.

The Challenge of Misinterpretation

Yet, even in this considered approach, understanding is not always assured—intentions can be reshaped by perception, and meaning can be lost in translation. I’ve seen how those who grew up in emotional scarcity, can turn vulnerability into sport. In a memorable encounter, I recall one particular girl—socially awkward, raised in a home where care was likely spread thin:

Honouring Silent Contribution

At first, I felt an unspoken social obligation—not to her alone, but also toward the quiet labour of care her own family endured because her mother was a professional nanny. I’ve seen how roles like hers often come at a quiet cost to their own families. Recognizing that dynamic, I instinctively extended generosity—as both a nod to the support her mother embodied and a nurturing gesture toward the girl so as not to pass her by unseen for her small acts of help, showing up in quiet ways and subtly supporting our household in ways she may not even have realized. So I reciprocated, inviting her in, offering food, creating space where she could exist without expectation.

The Illusion of Connection

She carried that absence in the way she wove denial and emotional misdirection into her subtle teasing; a capricious game of shifting moods and playful deflections. To her, testing someone with empathetic inclinations was not cruelty—it was entertainment. Her behaviour was as unpredictable as a fleeting dance of light on water, choosing transient amusement—a poster example of ephemeral engagement that prizes momentary diversion over lasting connection.

Rethinking Generosity

Reflecting further, I’ve come to see that the gap in understanding generosity isn’t solely an issue of personal history. The lived realities shaped by economic constraints also colour how giving is perceived. For those whose daily experience is marked by practicality and immediate need, unguarded acts of selfless care can seem both unexpected and perplexing.

In this light, even gestures meant to heal can be misread—dismissed as irrational rather than recognized as pure, if unconventional, compassion. It reminds me of a story in which a man, moved by instinctive generosity, exchanges his fine clothing for the tattered garments of a beggar—not as charity, but as a quiet recognition of dignity. Yet, when the beggar later testifies in court, his worldview does not allow for such an act to be perceived as kindness. Instead, he declares it as madness, unwittingly sealing his benefactor’s fate in a system that cannot make sense of unguarded generosity. It is a sobering reflection on how lived realities shape our ability to receive and interpret care, and how—without shared understanding—giving can be mistaken for recklessness rather than reverence.

Embracing Purposeful Generosity

In the end, I recognized that I wasn’t truly meeting her need—I was fulfilling a role in a game she never intended to sustain; a fleeting engagement that was never intended to yield genuine reciprocity. And in that realization, a piece of me shifted. I lost one way of freely offering kindness, yet gained an understanding that generosity must be extended only when there is a recognized willingness to receive, and more importantly, I no longer assume that being understood is the same as being valued.

I once carried magnanimity as a gift freely offered, but now I recognize it as energy that must be placed with precision. I embrace a vision of purposeful generosity—where connection is cultivated rather than forced, and where wisdom dictates the flow of my presence.

The transformation wasn’t about becoming harder—though I did traverse that phase—it was about becoming clearer. And in that clarity, I walk with a different awareness—not less willing to engage, but more attuned to where my energy truly belongs—primarily with myself. The version of me that once grinned easily would have given freely without hesitation. I stand as my own benefactor, quietly expecting the reverence and loyalty that come from honoring the dignity of one’s inner worth.

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The main cost with every new host is that it needs a monitored, smart uninterruptible power supply (UPS), preferably a dedicated one due to its limitations of a one-to-one physical connection to a single host Securing multiple hosts wherein one provides the UPS monitoring data to the others might introduce points of failure preventing the graceful shutdown of those other hosts, though I have set that up untested with my fingers crossed.

This is why one computer that does the work of four, such as one with 256 GB RAM, a 48 virtual core processor, and many more PCIe lanes for multi-port network interface and storage controllers that can be passed through to virtual machines. It might be prudent to consolidate even at a cost equal to the sum of individual computers for such a system, since it eliminates the hassle of sharing a UPS and likely consumes less electricity with lower heat dissipation than four physical PCs, and allowing greater runtime when on battery power.

A reputed, well-supported, smart and especially a rack mountable UPS is obtained through a B2B reseller, which translates to higher costs and hassles of both initial acquisition and periodic battery replacement.

Consider these additional “costs” as well:

You need a cool secure space away from possible water damage, with hardware either locked up or at least not having accessible removable external storage that is easy to steal.

To access the PC at the console for maintenance, you might also need an IP KVM switch, usually one for each PC, especially if distributed due to space constraints or to mitigate the risk of physical loss. I use slower, somewhat glitchy, host bus-powered single-port nano KVMs for occasional management rather than an expensive multi-port one that I only ever had in the wired VGA/USB era. A higher-tier Pi KVM is reserved for accessing the Intel-based Mac mini server remotely since there is no Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) for non-Mac clients and VNC viewer does not scale the display resulting in a scrolling mess.

This of course makes sense only if one does not require physically separate hosts such as for high availability or locational diversity. Not having a remote location except a t2.micro (1 GB RAM) FreeBSD instance on AWS, I have chosen to separate hosts across floors, coupled with automated off-site backup. The basement utility closet with the water supply has a wall-mounted (hence off the floor) mini rack for the essentials at the utility point of entry, whereas the larger and noisy equipment like a NAS with 7200 RPM spinning drives, and a Proxmox host is across the passage on the same floor on a non-conductive wood stand with feet.

File-level backups of configuration files backed up to the NAS from the various services are synced to TrueNAS SCALE (see Home Lab II) as a second copy two floors up, with ZFS snapshots of that copy to TrueNAS CORE in a full-sized rack starting this quarter once I order, receive and set up TrueNAS Mini R in the full-sized rack upstairs. A very costly unit once outfitted with under-provisioned power-safe data centre grade SATA SSDs for performance storage in addition to quiet NAS HDDs.

I would not put noisier surveillance HDDs in a NAS unit that I could already hear from across the hallway, considering the ambient sound level is 32 dB without, and the Mini R is stated to be 45 dB. Noise is a price I don’t ever pay, so I might have to move systems around if the security NVR project ever gets off the ground.

Off-site backups are automatically uploaded on a schedule to one or more cloud storage providers. Often, there’s an additional cost for proprietary cloud backup with dissimilar products given that even S3-compatible storage integration does not work as universally as intended.

I added a new PC (system76 Thelio Prime) as a node to make a Proxmox cluster, and in doing so expand the services and robustness of my home lab. Equipped similarly with 24 virtual CPU cores and 64 GB RAM as the original host, except being AMD Ryzen 9900X with PCIe 5.0 for higher IOPS.

The second NVMe slot on the mini-ITX motherboard being PCIe 4.0 – and hence likely in a separate IOMMU group – gave me an unexpected advantage of being able to make it my future network-attached SSD by passing that controller through to TrueNAS in a VM, hosting Nextcloud. This makes for an insanely powerful NAS compared to the Synology DS-1019+. A similarly powerful pre-built one would have cost thousands of dollars just to get the processing capability and otherwise would be overkill in the number of drive bays and thus fan noise and power consumption. A single backed-up SSD is adequate for me; and as a courtesy reminder – RAID is not a backup plan.

Next year will add an additional performance tier of onsite backups using ZFS snapshots to TrueNAS Mini R ZRAID pool 3 × 6TB, in addition to the existing file-level onsite backups to Synology DS-1019+ BTRFS pool 5 × 4TB over NFS.

The NVIDIA 4060 Ti GPU pass-through enabled a gorgeous Ubuntu remote desktop for when I need to work in Linux, so I don’t have to rely solely on Windows Services for Linux (WSL) on my portable computer. This being unstable over RDP has been set aside as of this writing. I use Spiral Linux (or Bodhi Linux for slimmer) if I need a GUI but not necessarily remote desktop.

These are of course just some of the building blocks and more services are becoming production ready for 2025.

Lessons learnt:

My next PC would definitely not have a motherboard that maxes out at 64 GB (effectively just over 60 GB) RAM. 128 GB is more appropriate for how much processor you’re leaving on the table without the RAM to utilize it in typical loads. The computer hardware itself is the relatively easy part, the bigger consideration when acquiring an additional host is power, both as in consumption and reliable availability thereof, plus accessories, as I will discuss in my next post.

I had bought a new PC in 2022 to revisit Linux after my initial troubles a quarter century prior.

The fan noise of the (Dell XPS 8950) computer never let me use it stationed next to me for long. It went on a shelf in the rack cabinet as a Wake-on-LAN (WoL) remote access (RDP) Windows OS device. RDP on desktop-focused Linux distros did not work in a typical headless setup i.e. without both the dummy display plug and sacrilegious autologin user. The PC in any event seemed wastefully underutilized considering I have reservations about the use of capable hardware (24 virtual CPU cores) for trivial purposes and that made me both uncomfortable with tolerating its power draw (Intel i9-12900) and resistant to the grating noise.

I was recently intrigued by the Type 1 hypervisor Proxmox how-to, and that opened up a new world of PCIe passthrough that included concurrent use of both the Windows 11 OS using passthrough with the NVIDIA 3060 Ti, to deliver an equivalent experience over RDP to that of the OS running on bare metal as it was previously, and one or more virtual machines (VMs) of Debian or any other Linux distro used for servers without a local GUI using the virtualized on-board Intel graphics.

I could somewhat justify the existence and power draw with the PC being productive 24×7, the on-demand ability to remotely fire up Windows OS as needed, and while allowing me to run experimental VMs alongside. Next was getting the PC to run quieter yet cooler, for which the quickest fix was replacing both 120 mm chassis fans with Noctua fans.

I tend to use hardware that was cutting edge two years ago, usually over-spec for the job but running at or below spec for reliability, so burned-in and with mature Linux kernel support by the time it is deployed. This one was especially new since it underwent a motherboard change in its first year.

This is the kind of productivity I have always wanted, access to multiple machines over RDP and SSH, running in virtual desktops on my Windows on arm portable, that I can swipe through, snapshot, rollback, backup and restore.

The most significant change in CPU architecture in almost 4 decades of computing for me comes in the form of the Qualcomm (remember Eudora Pro?) made SoC, Snapdragon X Elite.

I had always wondered about RISC, having read about DEC Alpha, MIPS, Sun Sparc and Intel iA64.  None of those, if at all attainable, ran consumer operating systems.  My first non-x86 experience was with the Apple M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro in 2021, which by 2024 had software support to virtualize Windows on arm OS.  I was amazed at the smooth x86-64 Windows OS apps compatibility and decided to go bare metal with the Samsung Book4 Edge.

I am quite certain after 6 weeks that this is a great choice for right now since it has WiFi7 and, as a Copilot+ PC, early access to Windows 11 24H2 features; else the Samsung Book4 Ultra with Intel Meteor Lake and WiFi 6E [or upcoming Book5 360 with Intel Lunar Lake and WiFi7] would have served me better for native software availability.

I bought a PC in the Summer of 2022 after 15 years, with the intention of re-exploring Linux on a separate SSD. The hardware being secure boot capable with Microsoft Windows 11 OS and having an NVIDIA graphics card, narrowed the choice of Linux distribution literally to what “sort of works” in that combination, as I write this in early 2023.

I started with the üniversal choice – Ubuntu seemed to install fine including the proprietary NVIDIA drivers with secure boot, but wouldn’t boot up post install. Pop!_OS was pretty much the same except it did not support secure boot.

Fedora Linux showed the most promise, but it was after weeks of struggling that the Arch Linux wiki helped me wrangle a display from the graphical login manager. Rocky Linux and RHEL were a smoother experience save the suffocating dearth of basic software.

I have maintained since my first experience with Red Hat Linux in 1999, that Linux (distributions), and by extension Android, is a hack job. The fragmentation in Linux led me to FreeBSD (for servers) twenty years ago. For a hot backup OS I have a perfected Windows 11 Pro image on the original SSD, that accesses the same external NAS data as the Linux install.

Read my follow up post