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Latest — 08 Sep 2026

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

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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

Team Bravo: Designer's Notes

Or: how a question about a 1977 combat results table turned into a tiny game about giant robots. We wondered how settled the d6 outcomes were in wargames. Strength versus defense, roll a die, look up a table, repeat. Reasonable question. Charles Roberts worked it out in the late fifties,

The Intelligence Layer Needs a Signature Line

A companion piece, written in agreement with the enterprise intelligence layer argument — and in service of the parts it leaves for the reader to supply. The intelligence layer argument is generally right about the thing most organizations get wrong. Governance debates stall because they're abstract, and infrastructure makes

Team Bravo: Combined Arms

A 24” x 24" table. Six-sided dice. A tape measure. Any models you like. 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, each with a Power and a Range in

The Floor and the Room

There is a paragraph making the rounds among people who write about music, and it has done the useful thing of splitting a room that mostly agrees with itself. It appears near the end of an essay occasioned by yet another round of publication closures, and it proposes that we