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The Intrepid

No Niin: When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

And the roost is about to collapse There’s a Finnish expression—no niin—that captures resignation, inevitability, and dry acknowledgment all at once. It’s what you say when the thing everyone knew was coming finally arrives. It’s what you mutter when the roof leaks again, or when

A Playable Folktale: The Patch

In a town that outlived its own future, the archives remember too much. Tone: Melancholic resilience. Fog and sodium light. The quiet after loud noise.Length: 2–4 hours (single session or 2–3 session arc) THE WORLD A coastal Oregon town once hosted server farms for Pacific Node West.

Soft Targets: A De-escalation Supplement

System-Agnostic Conflict Resolution for the Armed Citizen Compatible with reality. No dice required. Consequences permanent. "This doesn't need to go that way. But if it does, I'm not lying about what 'that way' means." — The unspoken doctrine of every competent person who

The Box Set and the Ledger

Frankie, ZTT, and the Accounting of Survival One simply does not write about Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome in 2025 without confronting mortality. Doesn't happen. The music is too bright, too decadent, too confident in its own futurity to hear it now without

The Silence at Saint Corvin's: The Mirror Text

A designer's essay on inverting Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose through procedural gothic INTRODUCTION: THE INVERSION ENGINE The Silence at Saint Corvin's is a mirror text to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The monastery remains. The investigation remains.

After Complicity

Or, What Participation Looks Like When You Can't Help But See Things Differently I. The Mechanism of Rejection When I showed up for jury duty, I had no idea it would be so goddamned complicated. Three days in the Multnomah County Courthouse. A criminial case: felon in possession

Your "Listener Age" Is Your D&D Level

Spotify says your listener age is 68. That’s not a roast. That’s your level—your Dungeons & Dragons level. Every December, social media fills with Wrapped screenshots, and inevitably someone posts their listener age with a joking wince: It says I’m 72. I listened to too much

Mecha Borg: Operation Backwater

A deep-space assault on a fortified asteroid installation. Premise In the cold between planets, where sunlight is thin and radio lag makes command meaningless, a splinter faction maintains an automated weapons platform carved into a hollowed-out asteroid. The war has moved on without them. Their orders expired two years ago.

From Missile Defense to Field Guide: A Conversation About Scale and Agency

Or: How We Zoomed Out to Extinction and Back to Tomorrow Morning I. THE STARTING POINT It began with a opinion piece about missile defense - the kind of wonky policy critique that appears in The Hill on a Tuesday and vanishes by Wednesday. The argument was straightforward: the United

Indie Pop’s Moment and the Tension Beneath It

The Bandcamp piece about indie pop’s “big year out” radiates genuine delight, and that delight is real. You can feel the warmth surrounding bands like Sharp Pins, The Cords, Horsegirl, Autocamper—young musicians making melodic, slightly shambolic guitar music and finding community in a year otherwise defined by conflict