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The Intrepid

Governance Under Majority Rule: Two Paths, Two Outcomes

Executive Summary In 2025, both the federal government of the United States and the state government of Oregon operated under unified party control. In Washington, D.C., the Republican Party held the House, Senate, and White House and succeeded in passing a sweeping legislative package known as the "big,

The Rigged Game: Using Tabletop RPGs to Examine Workplace Dysfunction

How satirical games help us process the impossible position of middle management The Beautiful Trap of Middle Management You're given impossible targets by executives who've never done your job. You're blamed when your team can't deliver miracles with insufficient resources. You'

The Knot and the Bridge: Language, Adaptation, and the Ethics of Clarity

Should we talk about the weather? Should we talk about the government? -- R.E.M. "Pop Song '89" We live in a time when nature no longer waits politely in the background. Floods, fires, droughts, and storms no longer feel like seasonal disruptions—they are systemic

The Tyranny of the Curve: How Data Visualization Betrays Creative Life

I am not a quantity, I am a free soul! The words echo Patrick McGoohan's defiant Number Six from The Prisoner, but they could just as easily be the battle cry of every artist, writer, scientist, and musician who has ever felt reduced to a data point on

TiGGR: Seveneves

Series Introduction Neal Stephenson's Seveneves is a novel that refuses to stay in one genre. It begins as a hard science thriller about humanity's desperate escape from Earth, transforms into a claustrophobic survival story aboard makeshift space habitats, then leaps 5,000 years forward to reveal

When the Monster Lost Its Bite (By Design)

To call someone a monster once meant banishment from the moral community. Now it means trending on Twitter. The word once carried weight, demanded attention, forced a moral reckoning. It was reserved for the truly horrific - those who had crossed fundamental lines of human decency in ways that shocked

A Legered Meal: Luce, Portland, Oregon

A life skill one picks up in college is surviving on pasta (or ramen, but that’s another story). Unfortunately, this has the side effect of making Italian food seem prosaic. Spaghetti with "meat" sauce becomes a culinary punchline. Eventually, you graduate to “fancier” options—chain restaurants cloaked

Elfen Lied: A Monsterhearts Hack

This hack adapts Monsterhearts 2 to the world of Elfen Lied, a story of Diclonii—mutated humans with invisible telekinetic arms called vectors and a primal urge for violence. The game retains the core mechanics of Monsterhearts but introduces new Skins (the Diclonius and the Runaway), tweaks to the setting,

The Vanishing Ritual: A Practitioner's Guide

A mini-grimoire for those who would become ungrammable What This Is A vanishing ritual is not disappearance—it is un-being. Where banishing casts something else out, vanishing casts yourself beyond reach. Not in fear, but in sovereignty. You are not the prisoner escaping; you are the cell evaporating. This is

Democracy Inaction: It's Too Busy Miming

How Political Theater Replaced Actual Governance with a Mosh Pit Welcome to American democracy, where the elected officials are cover bands, the venue owners count money in the back office, and everyone in the mosh pit thinks they're changing the world by body-slamming each other. The Mimecraft On