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Latest — 23 Oct 2026

The Company a Song Keeps

A Bit of Finger About a month after taking a sliver off my right forefinger with a mandoline slicer, I started playing again. Fingerpicking still hurt, so I reached for Nancy's short-scale Mustang bass and a pick. Before long, the descending figure from Nick Drake's

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Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)

A setting for use with The Black Hack (v1.2) The Brief Independent crews haul cargo between mining stations, colonies, and depots in a lightly settled system. Ships are old and loans are large; a late delivery can cost a crew its ship. Law obliges any vessel to answer a

Rasputin, the Chatbot, and the Dog Who Got Away

People prefer a figure. A dynasty is hard to inspect. A monk is easy to point at. Antony Beevor’s account of the last Romanovs is, among other things, a warning about that preference. The empire he describes is already a suspension bridge in disrepair: an unreformed autocracy, a war

The Roused

A Mörk Borg calendar for the membrane The apocalypse is not a dragon. It is a filing error that becomes true. Britain looted haunting and could not contain it. R Unit wrote the dead onto a duty roster. The Unit died. The shop bought the roster. The membrane between the

Ten Sides to This Tale

Once upon a time. It was close to two in the morning at a club I won’t name, and the man on the bandstand had three horns in his mouth at once. The fellow next to me — a serious type, the kind who reads the personnel listings before he

Catastrophe As a Play Stage

The other day, while reading Antony Beevor’s Rasputin, I had the thought that the last days of Imperial Russia would make an excellent MÖRK BORG setting. This is, admittedly, not the most dignified response to civilizational collapse. There was something immediately legible about it, though. The weak autocrat. The

After the Frontier

Friction and the Populated World I detest surveys. I go out of my way to avoid them, and the last one I completed had an Amazon gift card attached to it. So when a popup from Claude last night asked if I would be interested in sharing my thoughts with

Scary Black Guns

Minimum rules for firearms in The Black Hack A firearm is a ranged weapon with a range band and an ammunition die. Everything else comes from rules The Black Hack already has: DEX tests, class and HD damage, Advantage and Disadvantage, Armor Points, Usage dice and Powerful Opponents. Shooting A

"Containment" and a Two Minute Pop Song

I was recently introduced to Nancy’s favorite episode of the classic sitcom Bewitched, in which Samantha’s cousin Serena drops a Boyce & Hart-penned pop bomb, which launched me on a quest chain to learn and record a version of said tune, “Blow You a Kiss in the

The Black Waterside

A setting for use with The Black Hack (v1.2) A near-future coast after an arrival nobody can agree happened. The tide leaves salvage; inland still buys it; institutions keep calendars and lose continents. Play is taking a thing off the beach and finding that explanations fail in public.