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Latest — 07 Feb 2026

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

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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

The Dungeon as Mirror: A Systems Theory of Bounded Play

It started with a dungeon map—corridors branching into chambers, chokepoints narrowing into passages, the whole thing rendered in that particular style of competent anonymity that machine learning produces so effortlessly. I. The Map Without a Key The image appeared in a Facebook group dedicated to AI-generated art. It could

Pitch-Slapped

The Bureaucratization of Aesthetics The story we tell about cultural flattening usually starts with a villain. Auto-Tune ruined singing. Algorithms ruined music. AI is ruining writing. The plot is tidy: a tool appears, standards collapse, character disappears. It’s emotionally satisfying precisely because it’s structurally wrong. The problem is

The Banality of Eldritch Evil

When the Machines of the State Run on Mana The Obligatory Disclaimer This essay openly discusses the conclusion of The Laundry Files, including major spoilers from The Regicide Report, which has only just been released. If you care about encountering that ending uncompromised, stop here and come back later. This

An Ode to a Prius Driver

On illegibility, bumper stickers, and the refusal to be sorted I was behind the Prius for three miles on Northeast Sandy, long enough to inventory the contradictions. "Don't Tread on Anyone." "Oregun Infidel." "Truth Is the New Hate Speech." These sit alongside

No Exit: When a Systems Theory Guy Walks into a Dungeon

A Systems Theory Guy walks into a dungeon. This is not, at first, a joke. It’s an accident. He picked up a dungeon crawler novel expecting low-stakes grotesquerie: profanity, cartoon violence, the literary equivalent of a stress ball. Instead, somewhere between the loot tables and the severed limbs, something

Contained Excess: Psychedelia, Custody, and What Survives

There is a temptation, when revisiting canonical rock records, to argue over taste: whether Jim Morrison now sounds corny, whether Forever Changes is overrated or underheard, whether Atmos remixes are revelation or necromancy. Those arguments miss the more durable question. What matters isn’t whether these records are “good” or

When the Crows Return to the Roost

On Doctrine, Muscle Memory, and the Violence We Trained For I. The Doorstep The photograph was taken on January 11, 2026, by John Locher of the Associated Press. A woman stands in the doorway of her home. She is framed by the door jamb, her body language caught between defiance