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Latest — 14 Feb 2026

"I Just Set the Goals"

How Accountability Pools Nowhere The previous installment described how administrative systems can produce systematic harm without anyone deciding to cause it. Targets are set. Operators optimize. Reporting systems surface successes and suppress costs. Harms accumulate. And at every node in the system, individuals can tell a locally true story about

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A Life After Extraction

Talking with the LLM About Books and Loss I. The Cut The description is almost aggressively ordinary. A hydraulic-powered cutting machine removes the spines. Pages are fed into high-speed production scanners. Completed books are stacked and scheduled for recycling pickup. The language is clean, logistical, efficient—written by someone who

Pedagogical Artifact Escapes Containment (Film At Eleven)

The Waifu We Deserved, Not the One We Needed In January 2026, a purple-haired cartoon schoolgirl named Amelia became an unlikely internet phenomenon. Within weeks, AI-generated videos of Amelia flooded social media—particularly X—showing her waving Union Jacks, denouncing immigration, embracing Donald Trump, and delivering racist and Islamophobic talking

On the Shoulders of Ogres

I. The Article, the Share, the Machine The article didn’t arrive dramatically. It appeared the way most things do now: as a link in a feed, shared by a sociology professor I follow on Bluesky. A long-form piece from The Atlantic about Ammon Bundy—once a symbol of armed

The Pokédex and the Grimoire

The Persistent Human Desire to Escape Being Human I. A thread circulates on social media, offering a taxonomy so tidy it sparks joy in the hearts of the overwhelmed: use this model for hypothesis testing, that one for survey design, another for qualitative coding. Each recommendation comes with a confident

Following the Thread (Backwards)

It started innocently enough, the way these things often do: Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss, put on after a long absence, and a technical question that hadn’t mattered the first time around. How clean the separation was between rhythm and lead. How intentional the overdubs seemed. And

The Emperor Protects (The Annual Dividends)

A note on canon, capital, and recurring discourse "Honey, would you make some popcorn? The Warhammer 40k folks are talking women Space Marines again." It starts, as it always does, with someone typing the wrong thing into a box. An AI-generated image of female Space Marines appears on

What Gets Measured Is What Gets Done

How Systems Produce Harm Without Deciding To There is a familiar way to explain how institutions produce suffering. Either there are bad actors at the top—architects of cruelty who design harmful policies and direct their implementation—or there are bad actors at the bottom, rogue operators who exceed their

The Auditors Are Here: The City's Forgotten

Past Lives & Factions: They remember. They resist. They recruit. 20 MORE PAST LIVES Roll d20 or choose. Each past life includes stats (Body/Mind/Charm), what you did, and why you can't go back. 1. Electroplasmic Engineer (Body 1, Mind 2, Charm 0)You designed ghost-binding circuits.

The Death Star Will Not Be Exploded

With apologies and respect to Gil Scott-Heron The Death Star will not be exploded. The Death Star will not be brought to you by Fox News in between segments on ICE surges and Taylor Swift's wedding. The Death Star will not be exploded. The Death Star will not