Month: March 2026

A four-image cinematic treatment for the giant firetruck-sized plot hole in Dogtown’s soul A four-image cinematic treatment for the giant firetruck-sized plot hole in Dogtown’s soul This does not play like a glitch joke. That would be too small. It plays like a forbidden elegant solution to an overbuilt spy melodrama. The core insult of the…

I am not totally certain though…. This is still thesis-territory, not verdict-territory. But I think I see the emergence of a future polarization grammar inside Cyberpunk, and I suspect Phantom Liberty is not just an expansion but a hinge. A hinge between the old cyberpunk of gangs, corps, chrome and street survival, and a newer…

Amsterdam Sǘn Institute for Strategic Futures Background Paper to the Sún Initiative on Coercion, Trade, and Legitimacy Preliminary Notes on Claims Formation Under Conditions of Asymmetric Recoverability Preamble This paper has been prepared under the notional auspices of the Amsterdam Sún Institute for Strategic Futures as part of an ongoing exploratory inquiry into the evolving…

There is a problem emerging for future blockbuster roleplaying and open-world games, and I do not think enough game developers are treating it like the design emergency it may become. For decades, The United States functioned not merely as a setting, but as a Faraway Land Of Dreams And Adventure. It gave games a huge…

Defenestrating Bretton Woods: Toward a Euro-Arabic Monetary Compact 2026-2040 In politics diplomatic circles there’s a rarely occurring esoteric concept known that sometimes rearing its ugly hear in geopolitics. This is known by the french term l’incompetence. Most often world leaders are competent. But once in a while the system generates a politician that is less…

What if a meaningful share of the world’s countries imposed a small, targeted levy on Americans living abroad — say 0.5% of yearly income, investment returns, or other revenue — and paired it with a mandatory disclosure regime covering assets, property, accounts, and beneficial ownership? The rate would not be the point. The paperwork would….

I Long Covid, Disability, and the Price of Recognition in the Netherlands Part One: The Architecture of Denial There is a particular cruelty that bureaucracies have perfected over centuries — not the cruelty of malice, which at least has the honesty of intent, but the cruelty of institutional convenience dressed in the language of procedure….

CNN — April 1, 2026 The shock rippled across the world in waves. At first many assumed it was a hoax. The date alone — April 1 — produced confusion across newsrooms and government offices alike. Analysts hesitated, diplomats called one another, and social media lit up with speculation that the announcement might be some…

Travel, Lare Distances, Away from Earth. If you you wuld be so nice, please Jim Cameron leaning back with that look he gets when someone explains water pressure to him. He’s nodding before you finish the sentence. Jim knows this shit as he evidences in Avatar. Ridley Scott’s eyes soften, because he recognizes the smell…

I was literally speculating about this one and a half year ago, in ChatGPT. Brainstorming I called it. I contemplated the value for agriculture, reducing the winter season, improving efficiency for solar, maybe even for recreational purposes, and I visited the catastrophic effects on wildlife, human psychology, geopolitics. For me at the time “a full…

So Trump, or the black hyperconservative octopus dark state apparatus behind him, made the US attack Iran, and first methodically grab (CONSOLIDATE) oil access in Venezuela, which was fucking cynical. And now they realize Iran is antifragile and has been preparing for this for decades, and the recent street protests were anything but a sign…

Part I For most of our species’ long and unlovely memory, civilization was not a triumph. It was a wound that learned to call itself a cure. The story we like to tell about ourselves is flattering. Once we were violent, frightened creatures living in mud and darkness, and then slowly we built cities, laws,…