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The Intrepid

From Duct Tape to Digital Dice: A Gaming Life in Three Acts

How constraints, complexity, and creative tools shaped one designer's journey through decades of tabletop gaming Act I: The Scarcity Years My tabletop gaming journey began with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set—so basic that dice weren't included. I had to save allowance money to buy

The Armed Civilian Paradox: A Practice in Orbital Analysis

Notes from the periphery of American gun discourse The Orbit We're Tracking Armed civilians in America exist in a state of permanent paradox—and so does every attempt to discuss them. Rather than stake out another position in this discourse, we're going to orbit the existing

After the Gold Rush: When the Bubble Deflates

Edward Zitron's "The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble" presents a damning indictment of artificial intelligence hype: $560 billion in capital expenditures across major tech companies in 2024-2025, generating a mere $35 billion in revenue. He argues that we're witnessing a house

When Satire Becomes Science

How a Game About Corporate Crisis Management Predicted Sig Sauer's Playbook Or: The Day Our Fictional Framework Started Writing Real Press Releases The Timeline That Broke Reality Tuesday Morning: We read Open Source Defense's brilliant analysis of Sig Sauer's P320 crisis, which laid out

The Final Shareholder Report: The Sig Sauer P320

"When Reality Becomes Your Beta Test" INTRODUCTION The Final Shareholder Report is a satirical role-playing game that exposes the mechanical precision with which modern corporations manage catastrophic failures—not by fixing problems, but by systematically reframing reality until the problems disappear from official records. Players take on the

The Digital Village: From Seahaven to Smartphone

In the 1967 British television show The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan's Number Six defiantly declared, "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own." That the titular prisoner remained a captive in the Village anticipated our current digital predicament

At the Record Plant, 1978

A Lasers & Feelings hack of legendary studio sessions, inter-band drama, substance abuse, sprawling double-LPs, and Michael McDonald Character Creation Name: Pick something that sounds good on a marquee Role: Choose your position in the chaos: * The Songwriter (tortured genius with too many feelings) * The Producer (trying to wrangle chaos

Hearing the Signal in the Noise

How AI Abundance is Training Us to Become Better Curators The LinkedIn Scroll Paradox You're scrolling through LinkedIn, and 90% of what passes by is the algorithmic equivalent of road noise—carousel posts about "5 Leadership Lessons from My Toddler," AI-generated motivational quotes overlaid on stock

Chicken Soup and the Hole in the Soul

On the impossibility of ethical living under systems we oppose Gary Larson's genius often lies in his ability to distill complex philosophical problems into simple, devastating images. In one particular cartoon, a sick chicken lies in bed, being nursed back to health with… chicken soup, while being assured

The Kiddie Pool vs. The Shark Tank

How Social Security Politics Reveals the Reality of American Governance What happens when democratic theater meets actuarial reality Welcome to the Kiddie Pool In the shallow end of American democracy, citizens splash around with colorful narratives about Social Security "destruction." Progressive outlets like Common Dreams warn of "