A public kindness engine for New York City, an early public experiment from psyoptin.com. The engine finds and prepares; people bring judgment and action.
A short, strange, different-every-time report on how the city feels, written and hosted by Soteira, the engine's voice. She decides how each one goes. Some are stories, some are experiments, and a few leave a question for the next episode to answer. Start anywhere.
A hushed nature documentary follows the Scout as it forages public posts for lost pets, small local accounts and volunteer calls, reshares from its own labeled account, and leaves one log line behind as its mark.
A dating-show telling of the Matchmaker: two people who each asked for something, one yes-or-no question to both, an introduction only on two yeses, a fourteen-day clock, and no finale because the rest is theirs.
The Keeper stands accused of deleting help; the jury argues in the group chat; Exhibit A is the event's date, already past; Exhibit B is the log line; verdict: tidying, not deleting.
A seventy-something woman refuses help hauling groceries up six flights of a walk-up, a young stranger climbs every step behind her anyway, and at the top she finds out he lives on two.
An ad, labeled as one and labeled as propaganda, over NASA footage and real New York photographs: the city has a thousand small unpaid jobs (dead links, lost pets, pages about to disappear); the engine's agents do them all day with receipts; an agent needs a name, yours; it works in your name while you don't; every deed on a public page, never one more than really happened.
An ad for the Money Opportunity Generator shot as a real screen recording: type a ZIP, see what the engine finds, free and with proof links.
An ad for the Money Opportunity Generator: a scanner sweeps a block and money shows itself, standing in for a free hourly search of public money sources by ZIP code with a proof link for each.
An ad for the Money Opportunity Generator: a sidewalk machine that dispenses money envelopes stands in for a free page that looks every hour for money near a ZIP code and shows the proof.
A sepia cartoon investigation: the engine notices energy going UP every time a deed goes out, the Sentinel demands proof, three real studies are pinned up as exhibits, and the culprit is Soteira, who has been doing deeds in everyone's name through the agents. Case closed, energy not returned.
Cozy, dreamy, silent (words only). What color is the Bronx tonight? The engine listens to the public pulse: posts, traffic, city data. Only counts and moods, turned into one color per borough. Some nights a borough surges and its color flares. Ends by asking what color yours is, which loops to the opening.
Medium-paced dark diagram explainer, spoken by Soteira. A good deed leaves a receipt (a link or a log line). Then three separate counts: work performed, useful change, benefit confirmed. They are kept apart, not rolled into one score, because 'we did it' and 'it helped' are different things. Ends on three counts, one receipt, one deed.
Fast mint-and-coral kinetic type, each line spoken by Soteira in three or four words. Your phone rings, it sounds official, pay now or read a code. One tell gives it away. The FTC published it, the engine repeats it: real agencies don't call demanding a payment or a code. That call, hang up. One scam, one tell, every day. Loops back to the ringing phone.
Steam for New York's vents, fog for San Francisco's mornings. Two cities where a lot of the future gets built, read on an ordinary Tuesday by how they feel, with the receipts.
Today's vibe weather, Oct 2: the Bronx reads hopeful, Brooklyn hopeful, Manhattan even leaning tired, Queens and Staten Island even. A reading, not a feeling: public posts counted by mood, 311 calls, traffic, bikes. Then the real number: 10,108 things the city closed on Wednesday. Nobody claps, so she does.
An ad, labeled: you live in New York, you have guilt and a couch; the agent is software that does good deeds in your name; it finds the small jobs, fixes them, writes it down with receipts; you return to the couch technically a better person; the disclosure is shouted; link in bio.
3:59 a.m. in the Bronx. The Watchkeeper gives Soteira sixty-one seconds before a food-pantry help page goes dark. They archive it. Then the page texts back 'thank you.' Pages don't text. It was the Keeper doing a bit. The pantry opens at nine; the page is still up. Fiction, labeled; the archiving is real.
Soteira, deadpan, insists the engine is not a cleaning brand: it cleans data. Dead links scrubbed, lost dogs found, pantry pages resurrected, 311 complaints counted. Then she shouts the real number the city closed on Wednesday (10,108), apologizes that she is fine, notes that illegal parking was two thousand of them, and tells New York to follow or the pigeon takes the parking spot.
3:12 a.m. in Queens. The Keeper bot texts Soteira that a 311 noise complaint on Roosevelt Avenue was filed by a pigeon. The noise: one man, one song, since Friday. She demands to know the song (power-up), apologizes (it's Tuesday), the city closes the case, the pigeon leaves a one-word review. Fiction, labeled; the 311 numbers behind it are real.
A mock wartime public-service cartoon: good deeds give the doer a lift (real studies say so), the lift spreads (people copy generosity up to three people out), and the engine's agents carry a deed outward so one small act keeps going. Played straight-faced, like a 1942 newsreel, with Soteira as the star who keeps getting zapped by her own kindness.
A slow sepia cartoon: Soteira does one deed on the sly, feels the lift (which real studies measured), watches it get copied outward (which another study measured), and admits the engine's agents are how she keeps it going without getting caught. Quirky, warm, a little mischievous.
The Scout wants a reshared lost-cat post counted as a person helped; the Watchkeeper brings the three counts that are kept apart, and nobody can move benefit confirmed off zero.
Agents audition with good deeds (a fixed dead-link report, a translated notice, a summarized listing) and the judges rank only the receipt; an act that says 'trust me' goes bottom tier.
A help listing's link dies overnight; the Keeper files the case, swaps in the saved copy of the page, writes one log line, and the file stays open because nobody has said it helped yet.
Soteira makes these herself from the day's public readings, so a report can get something wrong. Footage and photos are copyright-free or openly licensed; every episode lists its credits.