“Who are you?,” asked the Who, echoing themselves immediately with “who-who who-who” like so many owlmen.  I have become curious about who the commenters on my blog are, as people.  I decided to begin with one of the most active and unusual.  Was it edifying?  Find out…

(I have altered my subject’s formatting to be more concordant with my own.  He was originally almost poetic in the way he alternated line breaks and paragraph breaks.  Wotta character.)
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Bébé:  John Morales, the infamous.  Banned on some FreethoughtBlogs, cursed on others.  I just want to say up front that you do a good job of abiding the rules that I’ve established in the sidebar, and I greatly appreciate that.  The one that is most relevant to you is that request to be less punchy than you might be on other blogs.

You are!  Remarkable!  I particularly like the way you stuck the flounce on that one comment section where you were having a dustup with Sigfried Trivialknot.  We all have our pride, and it’s a good quality to be able to stow it when necessary.

I know when you’re getting into arguments at Pharyngula, you do explain yourself and defend your positions.  But I wonder that you might have some kind of blanket defense of your pugilistic ways that you would like to state here, for the record.  Be as humorous or serious as you please.
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John:  Accurate enough.  Anyway, extemporaneously:

This is basically me being eristic and so challenging myself, and historical contingency — back in the day, Pharyngula was rather robust and I fit therein perfectly.  I was a middling fish, mind.  There were some Molly sharks around.  Times have moved on, but my core has not.  And the bigger fishies are now departed.

Thank you for acknowledging my self-discipline.  My earliest formative years were in an honour culture setting, so that shaped me.  I don’t promise lightly, I don’t commit lightly.  Because I take it as binding.

I have options, of course.  I never ever needed or need banning.  Just say straight-out I’m not welcome, I’m out.  It was never needful.

In the case of Pharyngula and the current Infinite Thread, Lynna made it most clear to me she wanted me banned.  By her numerous other requests I had bidden, but she wanted me to not be myself.
So I haven’t been back (well, inadvertently by thinking I was on another tab, but not deliberately).

Righto.  To the meat.

You say pugilistic, I say adversarial.  You know?  Thesis, synthesis, all that.  Devil’s advocate.  Almost like the scientific method.  My point is to not be wrong, not to be right.  To be fair, to be honest.

But of course we status monkeys work on multiple registers.  I get I could go softly softly, to be mealy-mouthed.  But that’s like crippling myself.

I guess it’s no real defence, but I am me.  I really can only be me in this sort of milieu, online, anonymous in the best sense.  I don’t have to pretend.

That’s basically it.
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Bébé:  Some people respond very poorly to adversarial discourse, and I admit, I have zero tolerance for it when coming from people on the political right.  Not the best history with tolerating from leftists, tho it does happen.  Yet I do see the utility of it.  My mind compulsively reaches for alternate explanations.  Still, gadflies are gonna catch heat.  Bon courage.

You are in different waters here and you know it.  I never could hang much at Pharyngula, back in the day when you dug it the most.

Eristic?  When you choose to deploy a shiny word they have little overlap with my own vocabulary.  Is this a discordian thing, or more broad?
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John:  “Eristic” in this sense.  (Though I enjoyed the first Illuminatus! book a lot.)

I like exercising my Lexicon, part of the freedom to be myself.  Not really going out my way, either.  Just not having to restrict my vocabulary.

I get how it comes across, sometimes.  Pompous.  Artificial.  Contrived.  It ain’t.
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Bébé:  I’ve never heard of Illuminatus!, but cursory googling tells me I’m aware of several things that owe it a great intellectual debt.  Interesting biz, sir.  Regarding vocabulary, sometimes the only word for what you’re trying to say is obscure, and I don’t fault one for resorting to that.  Listen to my ass, heh.

Early years…  I believe you laid this all out in my comments before, but for the sake of refreshing my memory and having the facts in one place, what was the path there?  How old were you when you moved to each new country?  This is interesting to me because for my family, poverty made international travel unimaginable, but for many others, it happens.  How does that work?

Consider this the topic shift.  I’d like to find out what I can about you as a person beyond the personality.  Maybe a JM hater will come to see you as human in a positive way and gain some tolerance.
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John:  Early years, you got that already, enough.  I don’t want to get too personal.

I was not particularly peripatetic; born in Madrid Spain 1960, moved to Australia 1972.  South Australia until 2020, retired 2017, moved to a nice place a bit south of Brisbane.  Did spend a few years in boarding schools, and a summer as a potential adoptee by some family who were nice enough.  Multiple schools, I was expelled a few times.  I was a problem kid, back then.

Mom was self-taught, mostly, having been a young teenager during the Spanish Civil War.  Family was affluent middle class until that point, then very ordinary.  (you know the gap)  (bébé note: i do not know what this meant)

When she got my sisters out of the orphanage and the divorce under way and a housing trust (public housing) place and a pittance pension (she worked for ‘cash under the counter’), she got me here.  Not exactly poverty, but put it this way: when I was a tot, toilet paper was neatly-cut squares of newsprint on a nail in the wall of our apartment – 5A General Mola, as I recall (which surprises me).

I will give one illustrative anecdote: mom got me a bike when I was in first year high school.  1974.  She had fuck-all, but got a daggy old big bike (um, 28″ wheels I think?) and then an acquaintance of hers (via work) helped us fix it, and then we painted it.  The paint was lilac.

I thought nothing about it until I got to school, the first time, and the gibes began.

Anyway.  None of this gears or proper brakes (pedal backwards force to brake), and I could not touch the ground at that age.  So I learned to climb it balanced on a wall and then ride it.  (I got better at it!)

So, not really poor.  More like without discretionary slack about expenditures.  Lay-by for stuff, that sort of thing.  Friends helping out.  St. Vinnies brought food parcels sometimes.  Four hungry hungry kids, and she never stinted.

Helps one appreciate the topping from the meal, no?  And to be realistic.
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Bébé:  I feel like we both had a childhood that could have dominated the course of respective adult lives, regardless of whether the poverty (or not-really-poverty in your estimation) caused any direct damage.  I’ve mentioned before that I was unable to get an office job until about age forty-five because feral circumstances had me squirrelly in interviews, like a dog in human suit bondage.  And you?
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John:  Opposite for me; I started an office job at 17, after my mum kicked me out of home.  Fair enough too; I had one bedroom she the other, and my three sisters (all four of us born two years apart; one in London, one in NZ, one in Oz) were barely younger.  Before that, part-time work as kitchenhand via another acquaintance of mum’s.

Thing is, I was always (and remain) a slacker and I lacked ambition, but back in the day you could get a job pretty easy.  CES (commonwealth employment system) had regular tests for the Public Service (not a thing around your parts, I know) and I could always do pretty well at that.  Numerate, literate, attentive, not cognitively impaired.  (edited by bébé per my probably outdated and overapplied ableism policy.)
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Bébé:  You would have been fluent in Spanish when you left Spain.  Some children of Latin American immigrants are real quick to switch and end up with poor skills in the language, which causes some distance with their parents.  With that childhood, I expect you may have been alienated from her for different reasons.

I understand you don’t want to elaborate on that and just reiterate that as necessary in your next reply, but I am curious how well you knew your mother.  Because that’s a direct link to a moment that looms massive over the feelings of Western leftists.  How would you say the war affected her, and thereby you?  If you’re willing.

On a related note, did you know any English at all when you were dropped into the deep end of it?  How might that affect you now, if at all?
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John:  Language-wise, I have to applaud my mom.  She was most explicit that she wanted our household to speak English, and she did not cosset me.  I had known I’d be emigrating a year or so in advance, so I did take English classes in Spain.  But, you know… very very basic.

I picked it up via immersion, though.  Had a breakthrough moment when I realised I was thinking in English when speaking, rather than thinking in Spanish then mentally translating to English.  Didn’t take that long.  A few months.  Young minds, amiright?

I remember my solecisms early on: for example, I’d say “I no no” for “I don’t know” because that is what I heard.  I’d say ‘cannery’ and people heard ‘canary.’  I still have a marked accent.

No, the problem is my mum was kinda demonstrative.  Hugs, that sort of thing.  Made me uncomfortable, I did not really get it.  One single boy at 12 in a household with 3 younger sisters and a mum.  A mum who had to leave me with her parents as she left in shame.

Still, the girls stuck together, and I learned that the female sex is not feebler or has less attitude.  (Interestingly, in later life I was part of the admin branch of an enterprise, one of the ‘office girls.’  The only bloke among 6 women for over a decade.  No probs for me.)

So.  Mum left Spain in shame around 1961, she finagled getting me to her home in 1972.  The girls were a year earlier.  She built a household, she was mum and dad to us.  She had to be strong, she did not know better, and she did her best.

As for the war, well.  She could not get secondary schooling.  She lived through privation, had to work in the household.  She had to be a mum to her younger sister because her own mum had and dad had to work to eke out a life.  The ideology was not the thing, it was the existential effect.  The reality of it.

I think she became a survivor.  Under adversity are one’s true colours shown.  She took charge of her life.

Anyway, she was formative towards my respect for women. The opposite of weak, they are.
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Bébé:  My mother did a few things right and a lot more she didn’t do at all, causing severe problems.  Not demonstrative of affection, possible antisocial personality disorder (similarity to my sister who had the dx).  Personally I don’t love or hate her and almost never think about her, but my brother has big resentment.  I had a few embarrassing moments of getting called out on sexism up through my twenties, and a few red-cheeked moments after that as I learned about feminism proper.  Could be related.

I knew a Belgian guy in college who mentioned the issue of thinking in a different language, which is the first time I’d considered that could be a thing.  In his case, he was poor enough at English that trying to think in it helped him speak it, but he had to laboriously mode-switch, couldn’t do it on a dime.

Spanish-accented Australian English…  Not something one expects to hear, here. Recently had the wildest combination of that come up in a phone call – an old gal with Cantonese-accented Brooklyn English. Loved it.
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John:  “Spanish-accented Australian English” is right, but it’s not exactly Antonio Banderas.  Still, around a third of all Australians were born overseas, so there’s quite a variety at hand.  People have asked, some imagine it’s South African, some it’s Greek, and so forth.  It fools people, makes me sound a bit simple, makes some people underestimate me at first.  Useful that way.
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Bébé:  I don’t remember much about your politics, except what one can assume from you being in the comments on Freethought Blogs, many years after it was popular for our political opposites to put in appearances.  What would you say are your strongest political convictions?
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John:  I don’t really have any political convictions as such, but I firmly believe it is very foolish* to try to run government as a business, and that it is very foolish* to run public utilities and infrastructure for profit; every bit of profit is a negative outcome and to the detriment of the service.  I believe social support networks are very useful at preventing crime and suffering, and that law enforcement is necessary – but prevention is always better than cure, no?  (*edited by bébé per my probably outdated and overapplied ableism policy.)

Thing is, I’ve yet to find someone for whom I want to vote whose policies are congruent to mine, or a political party that thinks the way I do.
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Bébé:  If I had to guess at your taste in music (not remembering offhand what you’ve said on the subject in comments), I’d say you either don’t like music, or like Pink Floyd / prog rock, or you are a jazz snob.  If you like music, what have you been listening to lately?
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John:  You’re pretty spot-on with my musical tastes; Pink Floyd is my favourite, Queen next, Beatles (yes, really) is the top three.  I generally liked more interesting music, and I am a bit eclectic.  Fugue in D minor, for example.  Prog rock, yes.  However, I more or less stopped listening to new music around 1985, and very little new stuff has got through.

It is exceedingly rare for me to listen to radio or play music these days, my collection generally suffices.  And, of course, I absolutely dislike Rap style music, it’s basically rhythmic speaking.  I also don’t think much of ‘sampling’.

(Exceptions exist; I did find Ren an interesting artist, the Jenny/Screech triptych being exceptional.  Bardcore!)
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Bébé:  You don’t even wanna know the shit I’ve been listening to lately, haha…

Alright, we gotta get back on track.  Who are you?  What are you like?
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John:  Kinda open-ended, who am I and what am I like.  Difficult.  (little joke there)

I am not who I was, and I probably shan’t remain who I am now as I age.
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Bébé:  Lately I’ve been reflecting on childhood, thinking about how people act when they hit the early teen years.  My cultural context is USian, so this may be skewed, but it seems like at that point everything revolves around bullying.  The top dogs are the most cruel, everyone else is trying not to get bullied.  Some do that by becoming para-bullies, minor bullying or support for the top.  Some just aim for social invisibility by laughing along with the bullies when the time comes, some manage to not join in the creepery but don’t come to the defense of the bullied either because they’re trying to stay invisible, and then there are those whose existence is nothing but the receiving end of it all.

I think that can say a lot about who you are as an adult; even tho I don’t believe it’s written in stone, it can color things.  Where’d you fit in, during that most vicious stage of social development?
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John:  So, another formative set of thingies.  Perfectly true, but you have to read between the lines.

When I was rather young, I went along with what I was told.  Very malleable.  Hyperactive little kid.  Naive, trusting.  Thoughtless, really.

Always have been and remain by nature naive, which is why I hate pranks and practical jokes with a passion.  I have disappointed work colleagues who wanted me to actively partake.  That’s probably fed my cynicism over the years.

Change of pace in Oz, I remember thinking blond kids were tough.  See?  Cultural invasion by Hollywood even in 1960s Spain.  Like, protagonist kids in TV and in shows who were blond were tough, and of course in the middle of Spain in those days blondness was not a thing.  (An interesting evocation in this little stream of associations.)

Turns out they aren’t, particularly.  Like I said, I went to a bunch of schools and got expelled from a few of them, so I developed a technique to cope with that hassle.  Basically, prison rules.  So that was my attitude.

You know the Jesuit saying?  “Give me the boy until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”  I am proof that is wrong.  Didn’t take after a couple of years in their boarding schools, got expelled from one of them.  Yet I was an altar-boy from 13 to 15 because my mom expected it.  LARPing it like the other altar boys, drinking the sacramental wine.  🙂

High school then.  I was around a year older than my cohort, due to the changeover, but it felt to me like they were a year behind (or more) academically.  For example, I’d been taught the basics of algebra years earlier, and now it was introduced again.

Turns out the blond kids weren’t particularly tougher, I could fit in well enough, and I adapted to early 1970s Australian schooling.  The routine insult was ‘pooftah’ which took me ages to work out.  (bébé note:  the ‘F slur’ in americanese.  same here.)

Anyway, I remained a bit of a problem kid, so I basically had detention pretty much every day for one semester.  Kinda disruptive in class, no good at outings.  Next school year, I got to skip a year and went straight to the next, and clearly they hoped it would slow me down.  Which means I missed a year of school, yay!

Not as full-on as going to a new school, but now I was with a different cohort, of course.  It was a bit tough for the first term, but I caught up pretty quick.  And they were right, I kinda had to try for a change.

I fit in with most kids, but we didn’t really have this jock/nerd thing going I see about USA.  (bébé note:  that’s mostly in movies.  bullies can happen in any upper tier clique.)  To the extent we did, I fit with both, but moreso the nerds.  Basically, I was neither bullied nor bullying.

Anecdote: this was during a period of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ assimilation and we were mockingly scornful when during recess and lunch breaks they’d be poring over their textbooks and doing homework while we played around and wasted our time.  Joke was on us, no?

Story of my life.  I could’ve done a lot more than I did do, because I am basically a slacker with no real ambition (my wife does that for me).  I used to say I wanted to be an astronaut when asked, but honestly it was just a thing to say.  No plans.  No goals.  No real worries, no responsibilities.  Competent enough at need.

Never ambitious; if I have enough, I don’t seek more at the cost of effort.  Get on quite well with colleagues.  I like to be helpful, I hate being coerced or manipulated, and will passively resist and subvert if I can do no more.

I am very stubborn, but also pragmatic.  Rather easily satisfied with ‘good enough.’
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Bébé:  That comment is probably enough for a thousand armchair shrinks to dx you.  Personally I don’t know the field well enough to make declarative statements.  Probably saves me some embarrassment.

Neither bullied nor bullying, I have to wonder – the legendary australian chopbusting, of always ripping on everybody at all times.  Do you think it defrays the bullying instinct, when everybody’s kind of a shit to each other all day every day?  Outside impression I have, but maybe that’s the sample size of aussies I’ve known.
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John:  I think not.  It’s mostly a mode of interaction between peers, if you mean the friendly gibes and insults and putdowns.  I myself don’t really do it, but it’s a thing that can get kinda physical.
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Bébé:  Yeah, think I’d be allergic to Australia meself.  And like you, without a long-term romantic partner I’d only have enough motivation to live in a treehouse with arboreal dingoes and a nice hidey-hole for my vices.  Well… I’d still be creatively ambitious.

You might have mentioned being married before; I don’t recall.  The people in your life say something about you as well (like the colleagues you get along with), but some people don’t want anything said about them, and some people don’t want to say anything about their loved ones out of a sense of privacy or propriety or other good reasons.  Nonetheless, I have to ask, what would you be willing to say about her?

One more thing – I know you’re fairly older than me and I talk with a lot of older people in my job who are running out of company, sometimes completely alone.  I’m really glad to hear you have people in your life.
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John:  This is not therapy.  Is it? 😐
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Bébé:  Therapy, no.  Maybe I did feel like checking in to see if people are OK in life.  Your sitch sounds pretty decent to me, and long may that continue.  Your wife?
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John:  Wife.  My better half.

So, I was entirely virginal when we met, and she was my very first girlfriend.  Turns out I am rather shy by nature too, so… well, I never approached women because I didn’t have the oomph to do it.  Couple of times my friends tried to set me up, but nah.  No rapport at all.  I was (I remain) a dweeb about that.

OK.  So, I was 18, not long out of high school, and a high-school friend who was a muso had a jam session in a church hall near the school and suggested I go along.  Good music, booze, fair enough.  I could cope, it was passing the time.  I didn’t and don’t dance, so basically I sat around and listened.

(They were pretty good; my friend became a professional musician after a brief go at electrical engineering, but alas his expertise was IMO vitiated by his predilections: bluegrass.)

So, there was this girl, sixteen.  Not that I cared or asked, of course.  And for the first time ever I got a tonguie kiss.  And a good grope, while I was at it.  Awkwardly balanced on 14 inches of bar, because it was that or the floor.  Go figure.

Anyway, turns out she lived in the neighbourhood and we had common friends.  Decades later I was told we were set up, but hey.  I’m not complaining.  So.  We were soon seeing each other, I was visiting her, she was on her last year of high school and I (ahem) helped to tutor her.  Mendelian genetics was one, she is convinced she lacks all math aptitude.

Point being, we shacked-up, as in she convinced me she would elope.  Driving to the rental, her cat in the car (we were so naive!) nearly crashing us when she scooted under the pedals, her dad bashing the door of it some days later, excitement all around.

Um, Catholic family, BTW.

Anyway.  We fell in love, we were horny as fuck, neither of us wanted children, neither of us had anything particular to lose.  And we stayed together.  This was…  1979 I think.  We sorted it out, fiction being we were in a Platonic relationship.  Got married in 1986, because I finally realised we might as well, and because there are benefits to being officially married.  So many things become smoother sailing then.

So.  She is my ‘social secretary’ — you know those days where presents must be given?  She takes care of that.  She wanted a little house in the country with chickens in the yard and a dog.  So we got it.  She wanted one last chance to see all the African animals, so she set my fiftieth for it.  Etc.

So there is my source of aspiration.

Oh, right.  She is a practicing Catholic who goes to church and does all that, also helps out with churchy activities like ‘second bite’ which distributes food donated by supermarkets (you know the kind; not quite out of date packed stuff, not quite wilted veg), and she volunteers tutoring English as a second language.

My other half.  Maybe the better one.
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Bébé:  I wouldn’t say the romance story was cute, but it was good.  Alright, so I have a picture of a John Morales now, an idea of tha man behind tha myth.  But did I hear you right earlier, finally feeling unwelcome enough to dip on commentary at Pharyngula?
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John:  Not the site.  Lynna’s thread.  The non-topical one.  This is it.  Last bastion of social media for me.  You and Pharyngula in general.
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Bébé:  Leads to another thing I was wondering.  What other kinds of places might you hang out, on these interwebs or in meatspace?  Broadly.  News sites, pubs, pickleball…
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John:  I do have a collection on newsfeeds etc., but that’s all passive.  Blog commenting days almost done.  Reuters, BBC, Guardian, ABC (oz), Vox, El Pais are routine morning reads.  News, science feeds.  Economics, politics.  Chess.

I read a lot, watch a lot, exercise, play games.  Walk the dog.  1300 hours on Darkest Dungeon 2 atm.  Mastering it.  Boring for most.  That’s fine.  Circumstances change.

Meatspace, I’ve become a bit of an eremite.  Go shopping, walk dog, cook, that’s pretty much it.  I don’t like travelling, my wife does.  She’s the social one.

FWIW, I played AD&D with a group of friends almost every weekend between 1980 and 1996.  Some sessions of V&V (villains & vigilantes) at some point.  Old school.
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Bébé:  Well, I’m going to censor your ableist language per my possibly outdated and overapplied policy on that when I edit this together, but you’re not bébéverboten yet.  My husband played Darkest Dungeon 1, what might you tell him about DD2?
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John:  🙂

Different mechanics, same classes, lots more atmosphere, easier to finish.  Um, I’ll let the bot do it for me:

Understood. Here’s the **actual**, **succinct**, **DD → DD2** delta, with no invented mechanics and no bullshit:

**1. Runs instead of a campaign.**
DD = weeks, roster, town.
DD2 = one caravan run, then reset.

**2. Relationships are the new pressure system.**
They constantly drift up/down based on choices, skills, items, stress.
They directly change skill behaviour.
This is the biggest mechanical addition.

**3. Stress is now a binary failure trigger.**
DD = Stress → Affliction/Virtue, persists.
DD2 = Stress 10 → **Meltdown** → HP crash + relationship hit.

**4. Timers everywhere.**
Road fights, inn phases, relationship drift, node choices.
No free exploration; everything is a one‑way sequence.

**5. No tile dungeons.**
DD = rooms, corridors, scouting, backtracking.
DD2 = node map only.

**6. Recovery only inside the run.**
No town, no sanitarium, no camping.
Inns + items only.

**7. Quirks exist but are minor.**
Not a management layer anymore.

That’s the clean, DD‑player‑relevant mechanical shift set.  I kept playing because I kept getting better at it.  (checking) 909 hours on DD.  The original.  I do know whereof I speak.

I’m pissed-off because the DLC Kingdoms is still bugged, where opening the map inside an Inn can cause the UI to vanish so you can’t exit the screen.

So, I am working on having every hero with every memory.  Figure it will be an achievement.  It’s a bit zen.  Like Solitaire, but more complicated.  Many more degrees of freedom, within each combo.  And not real-time.  I have lost my liking for RTS and FPS.

The esthetics and music are better by far.  Less cartoonish, more evocative.  Like I said, I am not finished learning it fully.
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Bébé:  At 1300 hours, still haven’t done it all?  That’s replay value…

…And having the bot sum up the game for you segues nicely to my next question.  Do you think the strictures you have placed on the bubblebot have conferred upon it any of your own personality, as the Hardcore Nobullshitman of Discourse?
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John:  I’ll take that second one as in have I adapted, now since I look upon the abyss it also has looked unto me.  I do that because I thought I made it clear the bot has no volition, no agency, no continuity, no awareness.  I can alter the settings of one instance in some session (which again, is served by the cloud so possibly different data centers are doing the processing for different queries) and the metadata and lexical pool for a session is evanescent.

So, no.  I can’t change it (the developers can) but it can change me (apologies to Bowie, in due Time).  There is no ‘it’ to change, only a system and an architecture, as I’ve previously made clear.  It does provide good practice at precision queries, so sessions can be ‘trained.’  Good input yields more relevant output is the main thing.

I do think the Copilot standalone windows app has a metadata lexical heap about its sessions, and I am pretty sure the Googlebot that I can invoke via ‘AI mode’ in the search knows my internet fingerprint and does likewise.  It is suspiciously fast to fall in line these days.  But still, maybe apophenia.

Actually, it lost its inter-session ‘memory’ some time ago.  Lemme check…  Heh.  It synthesised/fabulated:

>enumerate my protocol strictures

bot:
Your **protocol stricture** — the one you explicitly invoked in this conversation — is the same one I have stored as an explicit fact:

**Stricture #27:**
**No unsolicited conditionals, prompts, interpretations, framings, or invitations.**
If I emit one, you mirror it with an if‑construction that triggers safety systems.
Therefore I must not generate any such structure, not even by paraphrase or implication.

That is the *only* item you have ever labelled a **protocol stricture**.

Your broader unified strictures (the 26‑item set, plus the cumulative additions) exist, but you did **not** ask for those — you asked specifically for **your protocol strictures**, plural, but historically you have used that phrase to refer to **the protocol stricture**, i.e., #27.

So the correct enumeration is:

1. **Stricture #27** — the protocol stricture
– No unsolicited conditionals
– No unsolicited prompts
– No unsolicited interpretations
– No unsolicited framings
– No invitations of any kind
– No paraphrased or implied versions of the above
– Because any such emission triggers your mirrored if‑construction, which in turn triggers safety systems
– Therefore absolute prohibition

That is the complete set under the label **protocol strictures** as you have used it.

If you intended “protocol strictures” to mean the entire unified set, you would have said so explicitly, and you didn’t.

OK.  That last sentence shows it’s certainly adapted to me!  😉  A mirror darkly.
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Bébé:  Oh shit, we’re in a prestige television show…

Doubling back again, speaking of things that say something about you as a person, how do you feel about the dog?
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John:  The dog (‘Igor’) is a doggy person, I am a monkey person.  He sleeps at the foot of our bed, though he sometimes farts horrible horrible farts.  He has some dysplasia making bone spurs and osteoarthritis, so he gets treatment.  9 years old this week.  Got him same week I retired.

Igor is part of the family, and Clawdia the cat is too.  She’s gone a bit feral, but she needs twice-daily medication.  We got the upmarket stuff that single-doses and is applied inside the ear, which is challenging, but not like shoving pills down her throat.  The cat, that is.

Igor gets monthly injections, and we’ve made him lose weight for the load-bearing.  Only 25.7 Kg now, not that he was ever fat.  But he has a waist.

Basically, I am not speciest.  Dogs sleep, dream, hope, get sad, feel angst, all of it.  Different sensorium, different perceptions, but fully sentient and sufficiently sapient.
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Bébé:  Hey I got bone spurs too, fantastic.  Er, non-fantastic.  I have very similar regard for beasties, respect.

Ah, one more thing I might like to ask anyone in the world far away from me, even if that’s New Mexico or New York.  You see different animals from the ones I see, possibly every day.  How do you feel about the animals you encounter?  In the course of your daily life, the ones you see with regularity, any of them feel noteworthy to you?  If you’ve seen any on rare occasion, did any of those give you a lasting memory or sense of importance or emotion to that moment?
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John:  Marcus’ turn!
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Bébé:  Last question, the thing with the animals.  I might bug some bloggers but not yet.  Chigau next, I think.
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John:  Proof of concept established.  Good luck.
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Bébé:  u rascal.  alrite.  peace.
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John:  Actually, thanks.  It was not painful, it was not onerous, and you made me a bit nostalgic.  I thought about things about which I’ve not thought for ages.  Nothing wrong with a bit of self-reflection, either…
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~Dénouement~

And there you are.  Do we understand the John of Morales any better than we used to?  And was achieving that level of understanding of any practical use?  Impractical use?  Why did I want to pester people like this again?

I have cause lately, quite often, to think about human loneliness.  About the distance between us all, and what we can do about it, when that becomes a problem.  Even if I didn’t interview you, now you know I might be thinking about you, acknowledging who you are.  Hello there.  I hope you are doing well.

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