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Latest — 12 Mar 2026

The Jungle Remains the Jungle

On Downgrade Culture, Cheese Tax, and the Cupertino Conditioning Machine There's a particular kind of morning clarity that arrives only during a dog walk. No screen, no notification, no algorithm deciding what deserves your attention next. Just a small scruffy terror on a leash, sniffing at things that

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What the System Learns

Adaptation, Response, and the Moving Target The previous installment examined why documentation so often fails to produce change: the conversion chain breaks at forums and levers, evidence does not compel action from institutions unwilling or unable to act, and the "smoking gun" fantasy misunderstands how accountability actually works.

The Un-Archive

A Companion Text for Electric Bastionland What It Is The Un-Archive is not a ministry. No charter established it. No Debtholder owns it. It predates the institutions that depend on it, and it will persist after they collapse. Every ministry has a basement. Every basement has a records room. Every

The Method and the Mileage

We started by fast-forwarding through a wrong-way highway chase, only noticing the Wang Chung soundtrack from the closed captioning. The cars were moving at lethal speed, but the volume was down. The spectacle was present; the urgency was optional. We were skimming 1985 Los Angeles the way one skims a

Why Seeing Everything Still Doesn't Stop Anything

The Limits of Documentation The previous installments established how metric-governed systems produce harm, evade accountability, and control the categories that determine what can be measured. A natural response emerges: if the system's durability depends on selective visibility—successes counted, harms ignored—then making harms visible should disrupt the

The River, the Shore, and the Tide Pool: A FiiO Snowsky Disc DAP "Review"

It is possible to review a device by listing its specifications. The Snowsky Disc DAP is roughly the size of two stacked MiniDiscs. It accepts a 1TB microSD card (and, ominously, up to 2TB). Mine currently handles 11,544 FLAC files without complaint, occupying 318 GB and leaving 637 GB

Yo Quiero...

A solo Taco Bell run on a Monday night. Drove by what looked like a fog bank on NE 82nd Avenue; turned out to be a trash can on fire, pluming white smoke into atmospheric river pouring down. The only other diner when I'm waiting for my order

We Jam Econo

A Framework for Persistent, Life-Sustaining Gig Misadventures in Space Compatible with TiGGR: Tiny Game for Generalized Roleplaying Components: 2d6, pencil and paper, TiGGR core rules Players: 1 GM + 2-4 crew (3-5 total) Playtime: 60-90 minutes per gig Tone: Bittersweet persistence — foam-padded bodies, unpadded feelings, infinite continuation WHAT IS WE JAM

War: What Is It Good For? A Lot of Things.

On the distance between those who theorize about conflict and those who live inside it "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time..." — Jack Kerouac, On

The Hidden Battle Over Categories

How Definitions Determine What Can Be Seen The previous installment established a method for reading institutional behavior: when rhetoric and measurement diverge, the measurement reveals the true optimization target. Observed patterns—who gets processed, how composition shifts over time, what happens to compliance channels—tell you what a system is