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The Intrepid

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

The Spectacle as Shield

This is the story of how the legal profession fought AI to protect its relevance—and how the tech industry smiled, built the AI, and made the stuffing. Introduction In April 2023, attorney Steven Schwartz became the unwitting face of artificial intelligence's invasion of the legal profession. His

Myth, Millstone, Machine

American Identity in the Age of Symbolic War There's a photograph of Jimmy Stewart in uniform, standing beside his father behind the counter of the family hardware store in Indiana, Pennsylvania. A recruitment poster looms behind them—"Time for Service"—while shelves lined with medicines and