The book’s thesis is Chicago made the Great West, and the Great West made Chicago, and untangling which wagged which is impossible because they needed each other. The other less explicit thesis is that Chicago made great things, and that happened because its leaders and citizens believed in making great things, like turning the dreary Chicago River, a slow-moving silty creek, into the best harbor on Lake Michigan, which even required changing the direction it flowed.
— Read on walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/not-walking-chicago
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Of course nothing is ever simple with TTRPGs – just ask someone to define OSR, whether systems matter, or whether variable weapon damage is the true way (it’s not). Predictably, curating the list sent me down a rabbit hole of questions and categorization.
— Read on uncannyramblings.blot.im/an-osr-community-list-of-settings -
The coming years will not be quiet. They will not be polite. You do not get to price a generation out of housing, bury them in debt, flood their minds with chaos, strip them of meaning, and then expect compliance wrapped in motivational quotes.
— Read on x.com/basedtorba/status/2012698421228875778 -
Merritt helped popularize the idea that the greatest adventures are not across oceans or among the stars, but beneath our feet.
Again and again, Merritt sends his characters downward into hidden worlds. The Moon Pool is perhaps the clearest example. What begins as a scientific expedition soon becomes a descent into a sealed subterranean realm, complete with alien rulers, strange technologies, and layered environments that must be navigated step by step. The story almost reads like a traditional dungeon expedition, with each new chamber revealing fresh dangers and deeper mysteries.
— Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-original-dungeon-delver.html -
At some point (says Brooks) the meritocrats won and became the new elite. Their anti-bourgeois ideas became the foundation of our modern values. But part of the elites’ job is to run the financial system, and another part is to enjoy being very rich. This was a bad match for bohemian anti-bourgeois values, so they added some layers of irony, detachment, and misdirection.
A meritocrat in good standing must be (for example) a quirky, free-spirited person who happens to have a passion for banking. And in the course of pursuing this passion, they happen to have made $300 million as the CEO of Amalgamated Bank. They didn’t become CEO in order to make the $300 million. They became CEO because they were passionate about transforming banking and expanding its reach to underrepresented minorities.
And they certainly didn’t spend the $300 million on a mansion in a ritzy part of New York with well-manicured grounds and legions of servants. They spent it on a rustic cabin by Lake Tahoe made from locally-sourced pine. Sure, it happened to be 20,000 square feet and have an IMAX-sized media room. But that wasn’t why they got it.
— Read on www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-first-sixth-of-bobos -
The catfish is found in some medieval encyclopedias. It is a monster that lives in rivers. The female lays her eggs and immediately abandons them, but the male stays to keep watch over them until they hatch and the offspring grow large enough to be safe on their own. While on guard, the male builds a kind of structure around his young, and drives away other fish.
— Read on bestiary.ca/beasts/beast107542.htmA directory of medieval beast descriptions. Fascinating throughout.
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What’s scarce now isn’t content or attention. Its coherence with context.
Customers, employees and investors are swimming in information but struggling to understand what it all means. When meaning breaks down, trust exits the building.
Hiring storytellers is a proxy move. It’s a signal that something feels disconnected, but leaders can’t quite articulate what it is.
— Read on martech.org/companies-arent-looking-for-storytellers-theyre-looking-for-meaning/ -
As I’d begun contemplating a modular reorganisation of the rules, I realised I could also improve organisation by collating everything around each topic in a single place. Indeed, the ideal would be for each rules topic to be completely covered on a single page or on a spread of two facing pages.
An excellent interview about game design, amateurs building things, focus, and organization. More on thaumavore.substack.com/p/the-dolmenwood-rpg-is-essentially
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The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why.
— Read on www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife -
Liquid Glass, especially as expressed on MacOS, is a lightweight poorly considered design system as a whole, and its conceptual thinness is not sufficient to properly allow the Mac to carry the weight it needs to bear.
— Read on daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job -
Imagine that we put QR codes on every tombstone. Walking through a graveyard, you scan the QR code to get an AI trained on that person’s data to tell you about their life, provide advice, share historical perspectives. This information could also be added to a HomePod or Alexa. The knowledge of our ancestors would surround us.
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In a world of information overload, we have not become more skeptical. We have become more confident that what we know is right and what we do not see does not exist. Institutions designed to limit exposure, protect fairness, or filter noise now appear suspicious simply because they fail to provide visibility on demand.
— Read on www.behavioraleconomics.com/the-modern-peril-of-the-availability-heuristic/ -
The modern entertainment business is largely (and increasingly) populated by people who possess social, cultural and financial capital and who enjoy a certain degree of privilege. Ozzy was the opposite of that kind of person.
Excellent obituary of the late Ozzy Osbourne here, by a writer who takes a class-based angle. Even after a (massive) life, what remains is just the stories people tell.
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What NPCs need isn’t more lore. It’s shape.
This is a tool I’m going to use to create NPCs who survive contact with play. It fits on an index card. It works for merchants, villains, allies, and authority figures. And it’s resilient under improvisation.
— Read on neillwhyborne.substack.com/p/the-7-sentence-npcInfo on writing durable, memorable basic characters.
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Our claim is that in a world of full automation, inequality will skyrocket (in favor of capital holders)….
The relative wealth differences in a thousand years—or a million—will be downstream of who owns the first dyson swarms and space ships. And space colonization isn’t bottlenecked by people’s preference for human nannies and waiters.
— Read on x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2006505366423745004 -
Vienna is the height of world sophistication at the beginning of the century:
Certain cities, during certain periods, exert disproportionate influence on world culture: Paris in the 1920s; New York in the 1970s…Vienna around the turn of the century might just outdo them all.
But despite this power, citizens had the sense of “dancing on the edge of a volcano”:
The Viennese were fuelled by cocaine, champagne, sex and dancing; stupefied by morphine, pastries, cakes and cigars. Culturally, there was an emphasis on ephemerality, on taking hits of hedonism while being cynically aware of the meaninglessness of it all.
It’s familiar:
It’s not hard to spot parallels with our own time: an era of elite overproduction, in which young, highly educated people have their paths to success and achievement blocked off by older generations.
More here. Has it always been this way? History rhymes?
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Since 2000, the story of TVs falling in price is largely the story of liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs going from a niche, expensive technology to a mass-produced and inexpensive one.
— Read on www.construction-physics.com/p/how-did-tvs-get-so-cheap -
Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through.
— Read on sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-rare-people-who-are-solid -
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
More here. I maintain that enshittification extends beyond online services to all instances when a company ceases to deliver a beneficial good in order to maximize profits.
If your grocery store has shifted from selling low-margin, high-quality food to overindexing on candy and junk food, your grocery store is enshittified.
Basement Whatever 