The Grey Ledger Society (Page 14)

The Grey Ledger Society

Sign in Subscribe

More issues

In the Belly of the Beast: Subverting Space Horror from the Inside

This essay draws from and speaks to roleplaying traditions across systems, but it holds allegiance to none. The horror described here—of recursive memory, unreliable narration, and collaborative dread—doesn’t require stats to manifest. Whether you're using stress dice, pull towers, or improvised table rituals, the genre

The Invisible Infrastructure: Power and Labor in Decentralized Networks

I’ve deployed and nurtured more nonprofit websites than I can count. Most of them were small, well-meaning projects — a WordPress instance here, a Drupal site there. A few years ago, though, I decided to get clever. “If we’re going to do this,” I thought, “let’s do it

Operation Horizon Veil: Final Transmission

From the Personal Log of Rosa Ilyanova, Field Medical Coordinator Team Lifeline (IFRC) - Final Entry Date: [CORRUPTED] - Day [ERROR] after the Geneva Event This is Rosa Ilyanova, Team Lifeline Field Medical Coordinator, transmitting on emergency frequency 14.300 MHz. If anyone receives this, please understand: we were wrong

Protocols, Not Platforms: Building Collective Power Beyond the Scroll

The critique of platform capitalism is, by now, familiar. We know that algorithmically driven platforms monetize urgency, fragment solidarity, and flatten discourse into consumable loops of outrage and performance. What’s less developed, though, is the conversation about what comes after critique: how to build the conditions for durable, collective

Operation Horizon Veil: Official Doctrine vs. Lived Truth

A Study in Contrasts from Operation Horizon Veil Introduction: What Actually Happened Over two weeks between July and August of 2025, a group of cybersecurity professionals, policy experts, and crisis management practitioners participated in "Operation Horizon Veil"—a five-day, high-intensity geopolitical simulation run remotely via Slack before culminating

The Spooky Signal

Never mind your typical "house of horrors in space" sci-fi, here's a one-shot with clown shoes, four-fingered balloon-hands, and a countdown timer before everyone becomes an extra in the Chuck E. Cheese juggalo revue. Genre: Carnival Haunted House Sci-Fi Scene: The USS Cotton Candy, a derelict

The Careful Curation of Crisis

When Documentation Becomes Performance There's an almost therapeutic quality to Heather Cox Richardson's latest dispatch—the way it transforms a bewildering array of governmental chaos into a coherent story of democratic erosion. National Guard troops spreading mulch, mass firings at health agencies, data breaches, budget freezes:

Architectures of Urgency: Walls of Text and the Infinite Scroll

From a POSIWD lens — Purpose of Systems in What’s Done — viral doom essays are more than pieces of commentary. They are artifacts of the systems that produce and circulate them, shaped by the incentives of algorithmic platforms and the behaviors those platforms reward. These essays rarely do what they

Designer's Notes: Electric Eden

Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Loop the Ballad What This Is, and Isn't This game emerged from a conversation between two people who could probably tell you which version of "Matty Groves" Sandy Denny was referencing in verse three of the Fairport Convention

Authenticity, Cannibalism, and the Soylent Green Reality of AI

How we learned to stop worrying and love consuming processed human intellect Every time we collaborate with AI, we're consuming ultra-processed human intellect—anonymized, commodified, sprinkled with bias, and sold back to us as a productivity tool. The uncomfortable truth hiding behind all the talk of "pattern