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  • Quest Active: Unknown Armies Movie List

    Quest Active: Unknown Armies Movie List

    I’ve never played the roleplaying game Unknown Armies, but I’ve read the book, and it’s a fascinating read into a system of magic (essentially) based on the works of Carl Jung. It’s paranoid and interesting, with magic built on obsessions made real.

    I stumbled across the ruleset in a Reddit discussion of the movie Under the Silver Lake. That movie captures a very specific flavor, of a world hidden within the world, conspiracy and paranoia humming just beneath the surface, buried in pop culture. A descent into the underworld, but the underworld is Los Angeles with Egyptian undertones.

    I wanted to find something like it. I needed a movie list.

    So I built one by drawing from several online sources, ending up with a recommendation of about 50 films that evoke that same uncanny frequency, the feeling that something vast and strange is organized just out of view.

    I’ve already seen a chunk of them, and now I’m working through the ones I haven’t (not all of them, just ten or so).

    I’m three movies in, and I have to be honest, they have been, without exception, bad. Some have been vaguely interesting.

    Still, a quest is a quest. And a quest has a decidedly Pilgrim vibe. The remaining titles look interesting:

    • Lord of Illusions, Barton Fink, Ghost World, Layer Cake, To Live and Die in LA, Wild at Heart, The Stepford Wives, The Machinist, The Limey, The Fisher King, The Cooler, That Obscure Object of Desire, Stranger than Paradise, My Own Private Idaho, Klute, Lost Highway, and Blue Velvet.

  • Kundera, Hegel, and the AIs

    These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person…wants to please, impress, or enrage.
    — Read on american-innocence.com/p/kundera-hegel-and-the-ais

  • 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn’t be there

    The more scientists study the Red Planet, the more they find unusual objects and patterns scattered across Mars’ surface. Here are some of the most baffling.
    — Read on www.livescience.com/space/mars/32-things-on-mars-that-look-like-they-shouldnt-be-there

  • The usefulness of useless knowledge

    Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely to be polluted by bad science. The merely odd, purely curiosity-driven research is less likely to be tainted. Incestuous as it might seem, the people best placed to hand out funding for basic scientific research are other scientists.
    — Read on timharford.com/2026/04/the-usefulness-of-useless-knowledge/

  • Interview with Alicorn on how story conflict is optional and characters in utopia should do fewer drugs

    Casual sex and drugs are things a lot of people enjoy and utopia should have space for them, but if that’s the vision the whole thing orbits around, you’re leaving a lot of people with other tastes out, you’re not making it clear where you put the LARPers and the woodworkers and the people who like sports for some reason, and utopia should be roomier than that.
    — Read on thingofthings.substack.com/p/interview-with-alicorn-on-how-story

  • There Is No Boomer Succession Plan

    There Is No Boomer Succession Plan

    …think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back.

    As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become over-optimized around a single person (or generation), no matter how talented, in ways that sacrifices the long-term trajectory of the institution or future generations.
    — Read on www.aaronrenn.com/p/boomer-succession

  • You’re Weirder Than You Think

    One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here’s a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans).
    — Read on www.atvbt.com/youre-weirder-than-you-think/

  • The history of games, from wargaming to Gygax

    The hunger for wargaming fell off after World War I and World War II. You also make this point about that one thing pushing Dungeons & Dragons, which comes from the same lineage as wargames, in the direction of the medieval and fantasy setting is that there’s a lot of anti-war sentiment because of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. D&D was instead an escape from the reality of modern war. 
    — Read on asteriskmag.com/issues/14/shall-we-play-a-game

  • Links of the Day

    Spotting the upper class. Surprisingly funny and good natured.

    Best video games about Rome.

    Ignoring the big thing is no longer easy to do

    Common phenomena we still don’t understand

  • What we know about UAPs

    What we know about UAPs

    When the economist Tyler Cowen was in Chicago last month, I asked him why he keeps talking about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). He said it’s because it’s abundantly clear, after his conversations with government officials over the years, that they have files on things they don’t understand (he basically says the same thing here). So I thought it would be helpful to recap what we know so far after Trump released a portion of the UAP files:

    • There are things that the government can’t explain.
    • There are lots of things the government can’t explain – how to solve the common cold, how to cure poverty.
    • People have started saying that UAPs are extraterrestrials or spiritual beings.
    • People have always said that UAPs are extraterrestrials or spiritual beings.
    • People have always believed, in one form or another, that there are higher beings around. It’s only in the last 100 years or so that we stopped believing.

    My conclusion after all of this is — this is still a nothingburger without definitive evidence, but investigating it is worth the time. What do you think? Is there something to this?

  • The case of the disappearing secretary

    The case of the disappearing secretary

    Their fate [secretaries] is the subject of this essay, and a lens to think through the implications of AI for work with a bit more nuance than “LLMs are a scam” or “white collar work is doomed.” Perhaps those all-or-nothing predictions will turn out to be right! But honestly I doubt it. Instead I think it will be messy, confusing, exciting, strange, unfair and apparently irrational, just like it was last time.
    — Read on rowlandmanthorpe.substack.com/p/the-case-of-the-disappearing-secretary

    Terrific, intelligent look at potential futures of work with AI. Highly recommend.

  • There is an angel

    There is an angel

    The patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, a major figure in the drive for Italian unification, described the Italian family as the “country of the heart.” In his typically prophetic voice, Mazzini wrote, “There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter.”

    The concept reminds me of the Greek idea of a household daemon, and maybe that’s where it originates. I also agree. There is a strong force in families, and why not personify it. What do you think?

    From My Two Italies.

  • An interview with Disco Elysium writer Helen Hindpere

    …I came to know Kurvitz and Rostov, the creators of Disco Elysium. We were idealistic back then and wanted to live this romantic life, having an art collective and a political commune, etc. But in reality, some of us moved in together as flatmates and started a blog; it was like 2010 when blogs were huge. Because it was difficult to break into the institutions of Estonian cultural life, we created a space to share what we had to offer. And that’s where the name ZA/UM came from. It was what we called the blog, our collective, and all our shared ideas. We wrote about politics, but also published short stories, poems, artwork, etc. Even though the collective was Left-leaning ideologically, we didn’t limit it to Left-wing writers. That would have been impossible as there are so few of them in Estonia. To make up for this, we encouraged debate and discussion. We would have a writer representing one side of an issue publish their article, and then another who would argue against it. Sometimes there were 50 comments in a row.
    — Read on platypus1917.org/2025/02/01/forward-looking-return-an-interview-with-disco-elysium-writer-helen-hindpere/

  • Imagined Communities

    Benedict Anderson claims that newspapers created national identity.

    Specifically, the development of print capitalism meant that suddenly people across the country were reading the same words over their tea and coffee in the morning, and (per Anderson) this massive shared ritual created a sense of kinship across millions of people who would never actually meet each other, therefore creating the modern sense of a nation: an imagined community, because most of the members are strangers, but no less real for being constructed
    — Read on www.atvbt.com/imagined-communities/

  • Picaro and the “Story” of D&D

    Picaro and the “Story” of D&D

    …there’s a strong affinity between the pulp fantasy story and the picaresque, which is probably no accident. The picaresque is a clear antecedent of “adventure stories” of all sorts and many pulp writers latched on to the Picaro archetype as an ideal vehicle for telling lurid, sensationalistic tales set in far-away lands. I contend that it’s here that we find the thematic core of D&D and that the game was written on the assumption that most characters would come from this mold.
    — Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/10/picaro-and-story-of-d.html

  • The Shaman As Superstar – The Doors

    “Robbie and I were sittin’ on a plane an’ like it’s first class, so you get a couple o’drinks, an’ I said to Robbie, ‘Y’know, there are these Apollonian people…like, very formal, rational dreamers. An’ then there’s the Dionysian thing…the insanity trip…way inside.’ An’ I said. ‘Youre an Apollonian…up there with your guitar…all neat an ‘ thought out…y’know…an’ you should get into the Dionysian thing.’
    “An’ he looks up at me an’ says, ‘Oh, yea, right Jim.’”
    — Read on thedoors.com/news/the-shaman-as-superstar

  • From Clicks to Vowels: How Sperm Whales’ Language Is Far More Human Than We Thought

    From Clicks to Vowels: How Sperm Whales’ Language Is Far More Human Than We Thought

    sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them.

    We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels. Like in Slovenian, some vowels prefer particular tones. Like in human language, there’s a lot of coarticulation (a process when you say “tense” but the word sounds like “tents”).

    More on the work learning whale speech here. Is this really happening?

  • The State School Upper Middle Class

    About a political group underrepresented in the Trope Land of garbage that passes as major media discourse these days:

    For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight of globalization and shifting demographics…But we haven’t talked a lot about a very large, influential, and important segment of American society: the state school upper middle class.

    And

    In inflation-adjusted terms, this cohort earns slightly more on a per-household level than their socio-cultural ancestors. With that money, they can afford to live a life that’s similarly slightly better in relative terms. What I mean by that is that the level of expectations, in terms of the lifestyle you can afford on your income, have moved in parallel with the rising standard of living….

    And

    That sense of doing okay is an important component of analyzing this group of people because it informs their worldview. Their reality meets expectations; the life they expect to have is the life they do have.

    And

    They want stability, consistency, and competence. Moreover, the ideas that the state school upper middle class exhibit in their lived experience—marriage, children, stable employment, education—that used to be associated with red-leaning voters are now likely to be found among reluctant, unenthusiastic Kamala Harris voters.

    And

    the state school upper middle class may not be the elites who set trends and determine morals, they are the ones who make up a large share of home purchases across the country, they are the ones to whom corporations pander, they are the ones who can break the tie in an off-season election. In short, these people are important, and I get the sense that, due to their relatively silent existence, they are being underdiscussed in the intellectual space.

    Interesting, and I agree we don’t hear much about this group. More here.

  • Why the U.S. Pulled Ahead of Europe

    More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith offered a simple way to think about economic growth. He argued that prosperity depended less on grand strategy, and more on a small set of conditions that allowed ordinary economic activity to proceed with confidence. He summarized them as peace, light taxation, and a tolerable administration of justice.
    — Read on www.thevccorner.com/p/the-great-divergence-us-vs-europe-growth

  • Understanding Demonic Policies

    Nobody’s saying things have been going great in America over the past quarter century.

    Instead, the right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.

    But it’s not some huge secret why it seems like the government keeps spending and spending without us getting any amazing new public services — it’s transfers to the elderly.

    How do we get more skin in the game on policy? Common sense is that when voters get the benefits and penalties of their preferences, the voting improves. I think this requires: Public scorecards, replace gerrymandering with an automated system, make it easy to replace politicians who are poor managers.

    More here.