Markets rotated into defensive stocks today while our sector absorbed the selling. The building's HVAC rotated into active hostility. Both events registered simultaneously, and only one required me to sit on my hands until sensation returned.

So the Anthropic memo spooked data center valuations this morning. A junior analyst asked for my read on compute demand outstripping supply, and my hand, unsupervised, sketched a spiral into the notepad at a speed no human wrist permits, then punched clean through the page into the one beneath it. I folded the notepad shut and said the printer paper here is "genuinely too thin." He wrote that down too.

Elsewhere, the younger Trumps disclosed on Instagram that a Kremlin-adjacent boxing federation president funded two nights of their wedding as a "gift." I am archiving this under gift economy anomalies, a folder that now auto-generates subcategories faster than I can name them, the newest labeled, without my input, "acceptable bribery, if photogenic."

Someone slammed the conference door and my pupils went fully vertical, slit to iris in under a second, the way they do right before something in my ancestry used to strike.

A woman across the table looked directly at me for four full seconds.

I blinked twice, manually, to reset the aperture.

She asked if I needed water. I told her the fluorescent lighting was "doing a lot today," which is true, technically, of every lighting system on this planet.

—Z, notepad casualties this quarter: 3.