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Latest — 14 Sep 2026

What the Machine Does

Stafford Beer said the purpose of a system is what it does. Not what the charter says. Not what the judge reads before the oath. Bald fact. A better starting point than good intentions. First, one has to define the system. If you draw the box around a courtroom, you

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Keeping the Furniture

A companion to Reject Narrative Structure. There is a pressure that shows up during play — the small persistent tug to bend what you're doing toward a beat, to make this moment land, to give the scene a shape it hasn't earned yet. It is real, most

So You’re AR-curious

That is a normal thought. The rifle is everywhere, it takes a standard magazine, and half the internet will tell you that you are incomplete without one. You can want one without joining a militia, naming it, or writing a novel about the collapse. Here is the civilian version. An

Team Bravo: The One Year War

A 24” x 24" table. Six-sided dice. A tape measure. Index cards or Post-It notes. Any models you like. The Basics UNITS have five numbers, printed on a card and never modified by anything: Skill (2–5), Move (inches), Resistance (0+), Hits, Size (1–5). Plus weapons,

A Million Monkeys (Minus One)

Causal redundancy, and what a measurement can be asked to mean There's that old joke about a million monkeys at a million typewriters eventually producing Shakespeare. A recent MIT paper suggests a different experiment. Suppose the monkeys have been typing for some time, their pages collected to train

Neighbors: Tenants Not on the Lease

A yōkai bestiary for Neighbors Ten folkloric Neighbors, moved out of the mountains and into the city. ABOUT THIS SUPPLEMENT — READ THE LICENSING FIRST This bestiary adapts 《刀と妖怪 — Espadas y Yōkais》 by Mechanical Past (mechanicalpast.itch.io), a bestiary module for 《Espadas y Espectros》, a role-playing game by Sergio

What Does “Medicare for All” Mean?

“Medicare for All” sounds almost self-explanatory. Medicare exists. Extend it to everyone. Done. But the closer I have looked at S. 1506, the current Senate bill carrying that name, the less the phrase resembles a description and the more it resembles a compressed file. There is quite a lot

Who Owns the Sound?

On custodianship, control, and identity In a guitar shop last week I saw a 1970s Fender Mustang Bass that had been Olympic White and was now the brown of an aged cheese rind. Nitrocellulose ambers, ultraviolet does its work, and forty years in bars adds a layer of literal tar.

The Corridor

A science-fiction setting. This version assumes no familiarity with the Classic Traveller role-playing game whose rules the numbers come from; a companion document exists with the full technical derivations for those who want them. The Premise Two rich, technologically advanced worlds sit about twenty light-years apart. Between

Does My Bot Sound American to You?

Hooray for machine translation, although I’m sure quite a bit gets lost along the way. Which, conveniently, is exactly the blind spot that got me thinking about this in the first place. A Finnish communications professional, Maria Morri, recently posted about her experiences writing and thinking with different AI