The Grey Ledger Society

Sign in Subscribe

The Intrepid

The Calamine Chat

A Three-Part Meditation on Not Buying a New Bass Guitar Part I: The Conversation The itch begins a few weeks before my birthday. Nancy's been playing her Fender Player Mustang bass for about a year now — short scale, flatwound strings, P/J pickup array. It's the

Constellations

Liner Notes to a Life as a Musician with a Lowercase 'M' Constellations are mysterious products of someone deciding that a pattern of stars represent something wholly unrelated, and the difference between the connection of dots that represent the Big Dipper versus the imagined Ursa Major is like

Let's Keep The Tin Foil Hats Off for Now

MEMORANDUM TO: Fellow Pattern-Recognizers and Historically Traumatized Observers FROM: Someone Who Also Remembers the 1980s RE: Let's Keep The Tin Foil Hats Off for Now DATE: October 24, 2025 Alrightey. A carrier group heads south, boats get struck in Caribbean waters, a Colombian president gets sanctioned, and those

Mecha Borg: Under Falling Skies

Giant robots clash. You are not the hero. You pilot mass-produced war machines in a conflict where individual heroics are temporary and systemic violence is permanent. Roll d20. Tick the clock. Say something before the heavens bury you. You need: standard set of gaming dice (d20, d12, d8, d6, d4)

We Are the Reactor

Strafing Our Own Hydroponic Garden... Because We Can The first essay dreamed of gardens—hydroponic pockets of meaning cultivated under artificial light, night jobs tended in the margins of the extractive day. But what if there are no margins left? What if the garden was always inside the reactor? Every

We Can’t Enjoy the Garden for the Weeds

A defense of companionism: human intention + machine capability in the hydroponic gardens The online “authenticity” debate—the endless argument over whether content was written by a person or a machine—has become the cultural equivalent of rearranging deck chairs after the cruise ship of information architecture struck the iceberg of

The Signal Architecture

Community Radio Beyond the Algorithm As in all things, there is a hierarchy in the rarified and esoteric world of experimental radio. Tier One—the visible international layer—includes NTS, Resonance FM, WFMU: institutions with foundational infrastructure, sponsors, and mythologies. Tier Two—the invisible local stratum—is made of college

Haruspicy Is Murder: From Twin Peaks to the Man Amplifier

Or: The Silly Human Race and Its Uncertain Machineries of Certainty Someone on social media recently wished they could "put all of Twin Peaks into a blender and have a random number generator pick a scene as a form of divination." The wish is funny because it'

JARLS: Just Another Rules-Light System

Just Another Rules-Light System (JARLS) is a fast, flexible framework for modern and near-future tabletop play. Handle tense negotiations, desperate firefights, and high-stakes improvisation without slowing the table with charts or canon. It’s designed for one-shots and short arcs and for scaling up with theme-specific add-ons when you want

2048 at 50,000 Feet

A Field Report Aboard Democracy's Red-Eye I discovered 2048 somewhere over the Atlantic. The flight map on the seatback screen showed a glowing line arcing from Dallas to Helsinki, but the progress bar of time-to-destination refused to move. The cabin lights were dimmed to simulate night. Everyone was