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The Intrepid

A Farewell to a Firearm

Trading Down from an AR-9 to Something Much More Boring I didn’t own a firearm when I took my first defensive handgun class in June 2019. The range handed me an anonymous Glock 19; a month later I bought a Smith & Wesson Shield because coworkers swore by its

The Architecture of the Hollow Square

How Volunteers Make Sacred Harp Singing Possible When hundreds of singers gathered at the Laurelhurst Club in Southeast Portland for the 34th Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention in mid-October, what visitors saw was striking: a massive hollow square of voices, no conductor, no audience, just people facing each other

Oh! You Petty Thing

Everyone's a Thief When Everything's Stolen There's a bassline that tells you everything about how culture gets stolen and resold: D to F, bouncing on that minor third, then leaping to G♯—the tritone, the devil's interval—before snapping back to D.

The Infrastructure Hypothesis

Examining Why Nothing Changes We notice something missing from the articles we read about crises: calls to action. Not just absent—systematically absent. The diagnosis is intricate, the stakes presented as existential, the moral clarity apparent. Then nothing. The reader closes the tab, scrolls to the next story, and continues.

Mecha Borg: Operation Outback Echo

A scenario expansion for Mecha Borg: Under Falling Skies 1. Introduction Premise: In the aftermath of the war, the conflict's detritus litters the Earth. In the Australian interior, among the rust-red mesas and ruined airbases, small remnants of the original antagonists continue to fight in disconnected skirmishes—conflicts

Drunk in the Ditch, Looking Upwards

A Meditation on Belief, Craft, and the Reactor Core I was thinking about Oasis's debut LP. It was an unapologetically extroverted rock record, a 180-degree flip from the illegible shoegaze that Creation had been known for. A slouching electric rock LP that didn't strut or groove,

JARLS: Pressure Drop

Extended mechanics for Stress, Bonds, and Heat I say, and when it drops, oh, you gonna feel it Know what you were doing's wrong I say, when it drop, oh, you gonna feel it Know what you were doing's wrong – Toots and the Maytals The Core

The Luminous Republic Gazetteer Vol 1, No 2

Official Organ of the Republic of Madame Lumière Vol. I, No. 2 — October 1920 — Price 5¢ HARVEST EDITION RENEWAL NUMBERS BREAK RECORDS: 37,842 CITIZENS RESTORED THIS QUARTER Municipal Councils Report Unprecedented Success in Civic Purification WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Department of Civic Renewal announced that 37,842 citizens underwent

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