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The Intrepid

A Priority Inversion

When the Issuer Is the Substrate If the geopolitical system is failing sideways, the creditor system is not. It is behaving exactly as designed — and that is the problem. Debt does not panic. It does not speculate about legitimacy, humanitarian outcomes, or long-term stability. It waits. It compounds. And when

Since When Could a Tiger Swim?

I didn’t start watching Der Tiger expecting it to turn into a meditation on genre mechanics, altered states, and what happens when stories keep running after meaning has quietly exited. I put it on assuming a familiar proposition: a German WWII tank film, competently made, tense, claustrophobic, grim. The

When the Gearbox Slips

Except When It Briefly Re-Engaged A recent Guardian article on the efficacy of public protest makes valid points. Protest has mattered. It has bent U.S. history. It has moved elections, forced legislation, built movements, and sustained people through long arcs of struggle. From abolition to suffrage, from civil rights

The Soggy Kindling

Or: The Claims That Cannot Survive as Slogans What does it mean when you can sense that something will end badly before you know how? Earlier in the week, a headline drifted past: a large federal immigration enforcement surge, thousands of agents, a city with a long memory of police

Failing Sideways, Even Backwards

Scope Collapse Without Coordination In well-run software systems, “failing forward” is a disciplined practice. An incident occurs, assumptions break, and teams ship imperfect fixes under pressure. The system degrades but survives. Crucially, this only works because there is coordination: shared event logs, a common incident definition, and agreement—however grudging—

Welcome to Dismayland

Any musical genre can eventually collapse into self-parody, and given its confrontational aesthetic and theatrical posturing, extreme metal seems uniquely suited to hoist itself on its own petard of po-faced seriousness. The (black) magic(k) of Belzebubs—the webcomic and multimedia project by Finnish cartoonist JP Ahonen—lies in its

Wolves Evolve: Ulver as Weather Systems

Ulver Neverland (House of Mythology) There is a long-standing temptation to describe every new Ulver album as a “reinvention,” as if the band were engaged in a restless chase for novelty. Neverland quietly dismantles that idea. This is not a reinvention so much as an adaptation—an adjustment to conditions

The Easy Part and the Hard Part

The Clackamas County Sheriff's Office operates a well-furnished public gun range just outside Portland, Oregon. Given the city's reputation as a liberal bastion, its existence feels, at first glance, slightly implausible. And yet it's there, within easy driving distance, offering a four-class defensive handgun

Yes, Damon. And...

Sound, Subsidy, and the Ground We're Actually On Damon Krukowski's Why Sound Matters insists on what platforms would rather we forget: sound is material, labor is real, and the way we treat both reveals what we value. Noise pollution, streaming's devaluation of recorded music,

The Politics of Friction: You Wanna Be the Brake Pad?

On Systems, Sacrifice, and the Distribution of Cost Introduction: The Seduction of Simple Numbers A piece of equipment from manufacturer A has a failure rate of 1 in 100,000 cycles. Manufacturer B's equivalent fails at 1 in 50,000 cycles. If your use case requires 20,000