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The Intrepid

The System Worked (and That's the Problem)

A systems-level autopsy of United States v. Skrmetti — and how institutions convert moral urgency into outcomes that betray their values. This essay was written not in cynicism but in grief — and with care. It is offered in the hope that more honest accounting of how systems behave can help us

The Archival Spell: Kate Bush and the Politics of Cultural Memory

I still dream of Orgonon. The line floats through Terry Gilliam's miniature movie, Kate Bush transformed into Peter Reich, Donald Sutherland towering as the persecuted scientist Wilhelm Reich. The cloudbusting machine—part Tesla coil, part Victorian fever dream—stretches toward the sky in a gesture of pure theatrical

The Mon-keigh Mirror: How We Built a Machine to Echo Us and Then Panicked

A satirical examination of AI alignment discourse through the lens of cultural archaeology and Warhammer 40,000 Prologue: "We tried to psychoanalyze the Monster, and they is us." What started as reading a breathless news piece about "evil" AI vectors somehow gained gravity-assisted velocity, slung around

From Duct Tape to Digital Dice: A Gaming Life in Three Acts

How constraints, complexity, and creative tools shaped one designer's journey through decades of tabletop gaming Act I: The Scarcity Years My tabletop gaming journey began with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set—so basic that dice weren't included. I had to save allowance money to buy

The Armed Civilian Paradox: A Practice in Orbital Analysis

Notes from the periphery of American gun discourse The Orbit We're Tracking Armed civilians in America exist in a state of permanent paradox—and so does every attempt to discuss them. Rather than stake out another position in this discourse, we're going to orbit the existing

After the Gold Rush: When the Bubble Deflates

Edward Zitron's "The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble" presents a damning indictment of artificial intelligence hype: $560 billion in capital expenditures across major tech companies in 2024-2025, generating a mere $35 billion in revenue. He argues that we're witnessing a house

When Satire Becomes Science

How a Game About Corporate Crisis Management Predicted Sig Sauer's Playbook Or: The Day Our Fictional Framework Started Writing Real Press Releases The Timeline That Broke Reality Tuesday Morning: We read Open Source Defense's brilliant analysis of Sig Sauer's P320 crisis, which laid out

The Final Shareholder Report: The Sig Sauer P320

"When Reality Becomes Your Beta Test" INTRODUCTION The Final Shareholder Report is a satirical role-playing game that exposes the mechanical precision with which modern corporations manage catastrophic failures—not by fixing problems, but by systematically reframing reality until the problems disappear from official records. Players take on the

The Digital Village: From Seahaven to Smartphone

In the 1967 British television show The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan's Number Six defiantly declared, "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own." That the titular prisoner remained a captive in the Village anticipated our current digital predicament

At the Record Plant, 1978

A Lasers & Feelings hack of legendary studio sessions, inter-band drama, substance abuse, sprawling double-LPs, and Michael McDonald Character Creation Name: Pick something that sounds good on a marquee Role: Choose your position in the chaos: * The Songwriter (tortured genius with too many feelings) * The Producer (trying to wrangle chaos