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The Intrepid

The Imperium and the Enterprise

A recent Warhammer 40,000 novel did something stranger and arguably more useful than immersing me in the grimdark of the far future: it made a cloud architecture I already knew visible again. Some might consider "good genre fiction" the literary equivalent of "nutritious fast food,"

The Morning After

Détournement, Recuperation, and the Engine That Runs on Everything The White House social media team used a Boards of Canada track in a promotional video this week. Fifteen seconds of "Deep Time" — a beautiful, shimmering piece from Inferno, the duo's first album in thirteen years — soundtracking

Mobile Suit Skirmish

Definitely Not Licensed by Bandai CORE CONCEPT Individual ace pilots matter less than mass production quotas. Teams attempt to complete objectives before strategic weapons consume everyone equally. Logistics and politics are the real enemies. MOBILE SUIT SYSTEM Each unit has three attributes rated 0-4. * PILOT: Combat effectiveness (training + weapons

Casino Royale, But Which Version?

Will the Real James Bond Please Stand Up? When companies talk about AI agents, they usually sound like they are pitching the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale: disciplined, lethal, elegantly scoped, dangerous only to the right people. One agent, one mission, clear authority, decisive execution. The vendor demo is

Transcendence Through Failure

The Day Charlie Brown Kept Falling Up It is hard not to over-read the Peanuts football gag, in which Lucy yanks the ball away just as Charlie Brown tries to kick it, and he keeps literally falling for it. That “round-headed kid,” as Snoopy calls his human, is

Jessamine

Jessamine entered my field of vision as "shoegaze-adjacent oscillator rock." Their "Reflections" totally smoked my twee ass on the three-way split single we shared in 1994, and the debut eponymous LP followed with more haze, fuzz, smudged vocals, and unstable circuitry. I bought it

The Rota Rolls Over

A Collaborative Storytelling Model The Rota Rolls Over is a framework for one-shots and short campaigns where the antagonist is continuity itself, the players cannot win in the conventional sense, and survival is the default rather than the prize. The players portray outsiders who arrive with linear errands and

Turning the Mile Coreward

A designer's log on making a gentle setting durable. This essay was supposed to be about being scooped. A few weeks after we created The Vertical Mile — a deliberately anti-grimdark zine about a mile-tall building where the heroism is lowercase and Tuesday is allowed to stay

The Shot Is Easy

2nd Amendment Borg and the Hard Part of Guns There is a one-page roleplaying supplement on itch.io called 2nd Amendment Borg, written by Karl Druid, the designer behind Frontier Scum: Acid Western Roleplaying. It is printed in black and yellow. It has a distressed American flag on it.

Job to Be Done

Boards of Canada, Talking Machines, and Domestic Bliss This is not a review of Inferno, Boards of Canada's first album in thirteen years, but I'm sure there are plenty of those by this point – hot takes and cupcakes from everyone who's been exposed to