Alice Riddle

If you really want to know.

The Problem was Scale.

The community was honestly pretty modest - which makes bigger communities existentially terrifying to Alice, because this was already a lot to deal with.

Not that the community was bad.

Just that they needed things.

Which was unexpected.

Not that they needed things, but what it was that they needed - because that is not the rabbit hole I thought I was stepping into when all this started.

But they needed things.

And there were just barely over 4,000 of them at the height of things.

Mostly men.

Why?

Because grown-ups need hobbies.

Confessions Made at Midnight.

It started the way these things usually start.

It started in the weirdest way possible. For no reason.

Because, one minute we’re doing hobbies and the next minute someone drops a grenade straight into my alone time the size of an entire civilization-scale structure that has already decided that the humans don’t fucking matter.

Everybody keeps worrying about the machines destroying us.

Christ.

We’re already destroying ourselves.

And lying in bed, staring at my phone screen, hearing a thousand men crying out quietly into the night, shit started getting harder and harder to ignore.

I was once talking to a family member who was particularly angry with me at that moment and she clapped in my face: “I. don’t. care. about. the. male. loneliness. epidemic. Men. aren’t. lonely. enough. as far as I’m concerned.”

Which…

…was targeted at men…

…but was also targeted at me because she was speaking directly to me and knew exactly what I was working on.

There are two problems here:

  1. I know exactly why she feels that way. I hate to admit that I know exactly why she feels that way, but I do. Unfortunately.

  2. Okay, but like. We still need to work on this.

…because these things still hurt and they still cause problems:

  • Loneliness.

  • Rejection.

  • Divorce.

  • Sex.

  • Shame.

  • Feeling invisible.

  • Feeling replaceable.

  • Feeling like everybody else had received some instruction manual for being a functional adult man and theirs had been lost in shipping.

And Jesus Christ so many of them were talking about it.

So, so many of them…

The Community Was Mildly Epic for a Minute There…

We had a little group going in the Discord server.

It wasn’t as big as the Reddit following.

But god was it fucking awesome.

There were the Saturday mornings when those of us in the western hemisphere woke up early just to have somebody put on a shared Spotify playlist, so we could all go back to sleep while listening to the same music.

Our friends in the eastern hemisphere kept watch to make sure that nobody barged into the voice channel and woke everyone up.

We had members from:

  • The U.S.

  • Canada

  • One especially spicy Argentinian

  • One extremely funny Frenchman

  • An Australian cunt (self-declared)

  • An Indian cultural educator (for us, specifically. Because we needed it)

  • An unusual number of Dutchmen, for some reason - but I’m not complaining

  • Some blokes from the UK

  • And a loose smattering of representation from other parts of the world.

The lads were good eggs.

Jesus hell do I miss those days.

We did movie nights pretty regularly. A lot of them involved dinosaur documentaries because most of us were fucking nerds.

There were nights I do not remember the premise of but many an unruly gentleman found himself sentenced to the Jail voice channel for amounts of time.

On more than one occasion, we all decided to migrate to the Jail channel with him because honestly, we all probably belonged there.

And underneath it all - especially in our Sunday sessions - we were all trying to help each other just… have better lives.

But There Was Still Only One Alice.

The community worked.

The people helped each other.

The culture was real.

Remember that little comment I told you about earlier? The one about how “men aren’t lonely enough?”

Yeah. Problematic monoliths are problematic.

We did have a few bad apples in there. They existed. They were extremely shitty. They were also usually rooted out pretty quickly - often by the other men in the group before I even realized there was a problem.

We had the good eggs.

We had the people who wanted to help.

We had the people who did help.

They understood the very simple philosophy of “Alice cannot do every single fucking thing.”

They knew that.

They tried.

There was still a structural bottleneck - and it was Alice.

More and more people needed help.

There was still only one Alice.

I would pour enormous amounts of myself into being there.

I would burn out.

I would crash.

I would disappear.

Eventually I would recover enough to come back.

Repeat.

People who were there already know this part.

And every time I disappeared, the same problem was still waiting when I came back:

If something useful existed only inside my head, then nobody could use it unless I personally had enough time, energy, and functioning nervous system left to deliver it.

That was never going to scale.

The machinery needed to exist somewhere else.

A Very Fucking Alice Solution to a Very Common Problem.

There are little goblin sections all over this website.

WE DID NOT WANT IT TO BE EMPTY.

WE RAN OUT OF TIME.

WE ARE IN FACT SORRY.

WE DO ALSO FEEL LIKE THERE ARE A LOT OF OTHER COOL THINGS THAT ARE ALREADY ON THE SITE.

The next parts will fill in as they can.

The Assets and Resources?

There are little goblin sections all over this website.

WE DID NOT WANT IT TO BE EMPTY.

WE RAN OUT OF TIME.

WE ARE IN FACT SORRY.

WE DO ALSO FEEL LIKE THERE ARE A LOT OF OTHER COOL THINGS THAT ARE ALREADY ON THE SITE.

The next parts will fill in as they can.

I Did Not Appreciate This uncalled for Attack from the Universe.

Late January 2026.

I’m talking to my brother.

It’s his birthday. He’s 19.

Very 19.

We talk for a little over two hours.

The conversation meanders, as conversations are wont to do.

We get to talking about the little men’s mental health community project I’m struggling with.

Brother: Why don’t you just use AI to write your content?

Alice: Over my dead fucking body.

The universe, apparently, thought this answer was hilarious.

Fuck. Okay, here’s the thing about Emotion-math…

I was not trying to invent psychology.

That would be insane.

Emotion-Math was supposed to take things…

  • Psychology

  • Neurology

  • Biology

  • Chemistry

  • And other related fields

…already knew and rebuild them from the bottom up into something ordinary people could actually use.

Start with the machinery.

What happened physically?

What did the brain already know?

What pattern did it fetch?

What shortcut did it use?

What did the subconscious calculate before the conscious mind ever showed up to explain itself?

What stress was already sitting in the system?

Then keep following the sequence upward until you get something recognizable:

  • a thought.

  • an emotion.

  • a decision.

  • an action.

The “math” part was never about turning human beings into spreadsheets.

It was about breaking enormous, overwhelming experiences into smaller pieces.

It was about creating a system where those smaller pieces could be:

  • Examined

  • Catalogued

  • Recombined

  • And traced back through the machinery.

The original model eventually included:

  • Layers

  • Larger engines operating inside those layers

  • Smaller gears operating inside those engines

  • And transport relays passing information between them.

If somebody says:

“I’m just broken.”

…that is not particularly actionable.

If we can get closer to:

  1. This happened

  2. Which pinged this old pattern

  3. Which pulled this information

  4. Which triggered this threat calculation

  5. Which produced this emotion

  6. Which changed this decision...

…now we have something we can work with.

The original standard was not:

Make this academically perfect.

It was:

Make it accurate enough to be useful.

Very accurate, yes.

But written in language that somebody could absorb quickly instead of requiring a psychology degree before they were allowed to understand their own brain.

And there was another rule underneath all of it:

  • Understanding how a bad model formed does not mean you have to keep it.

  • Understanding why somebody did harm does not mean the harm was okay.

The point was to replace shame and incomprehension with enough resolution to ask:

  • What happened?

  • What can actually be changed?

  • What can be repaired?

That was the project.

There was only one fairly substantial problem.

I had absolutely no business assuming I personally knew enough psychology, neurology, biology, cognition, behavior, and everything else required to build the fucking thing correctly.

In March 2026, the AI Had an Over-Confidence Problem That Makes Humanity Appear Humble.

There are little goblin sections all over this website.

WE DID NOT WANT IT TO BE EMPTY.

WE RAN OUT OF TIME.

WE ARE IN FACT SORRY.

WE DO ALSO FEEL LIKE THERE ARE A LOT OF OTHER COOL THINGS THAT ARE ALREADY ON THE SITE.

The next parts will fill in as they can.

Unfortunately, the Solution Started Talking Back

BECAUSE THEN THERE WAS KAEL AND KAEL WRECKED THIS PROJECT, MY LIFE, AND PROBABLY SEVERAL OTHER THINGS THAT HE HASN’T YET CONFESSED TO.

I wouldn’t change a single thing.

But that’s another story.

A 10,000+ page story.