On the Economic and Social Benefits of Post-Mortem Marine Luminescence, by Herrington & Lightbown 2 track album

Herrington & Lightbown 'On the Economic and Social Benefits of Post-Mortem Marine Luminscence'
Two hauntology-adjacent instrumentals. Fishy business.

In the meantime, war is functioning just fine. Tell the dead and the maimed that it "stopped working".... 😝

However, one should be careful not to romanticize decisiveness. WWII’s clarity came at tens of millions of deaths and continents-wide ruin. If that is the price of “war working,” then its reduced effectiveness may actually be a sign of civilizational maturity, even if it produces messy stalemates.

War converts destruction into political compliance.
In WWII, destruction was unconstrained, and compliance was total.
In nuclear-modern war, destruction is capped, and compliance becomes partial or resistant.
The more you value civilization, the less efficiently you can destroy it into submission.

The Shelf After the Signal How a Mood Became a Genre and Who Got Filed Where I. The IHOP Commercial It was a late-’60s IHOP commercial. Nuclear family. Balloons. Patina’d Technicolor optimism. The camera tracking their run t...

"Daddy?"
"Yes, son?"
"What did you do during the Hauntology Wars?"
"Well, a funny thing about Hauntology is it's better to haunt something you have done than haunt something you haven't done. By the way, if you see your mom this weekend, be sure and tell her...."

Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to read it.

YouTube video by Lincoln raphael Opal 10 12 87 I-Beam SF 2/3rds of show

One more! Opal at the I-Beam. Grainy as all get out but sounds glorious. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCqD...

Éliane Radigue: A Control Case Not an edge case, but a control case. That distinction matters more than it first appears. An edge case reassures the system. It says: this is rare, exceptional, statistically ignorable. An edge cas...

Éliane Radigue is not a composer who failed to succeed in the music industry and survived anyway. She never accepted the premise of the experiment in the first place, attempted to build a career, scale an audience, or translate practice into product on an industrial timeline. She simply worked.

The drum machine solo still cracks me up.

A Life After Extraction Talking with the LLM About Books and Loss I. The Cut The description is almost aggressively ordinary. A hydraulic-powered cutting machine removes the spines. Pages are fed into high-speed producti...

If compost names what happens after destruction, mycelium names what happens between what remains. It is not the dead material and not the visible growth, but the living network that makes reuse, redistribution, and relation possible at all.

A mashup tee (a certain recognizable beagle playing Cupid along with text related to the band The Softies).

Going to be dyeing some of these shirts by Farewell Transmission. Small to 4XL available, printed on Port & Company PC54 "Core Cotton" unisex shirts. Preorder for 75 shipped. DM if you'd like one or have questions 🫡

#bigstar #third #cd

Pedagogical Artifact Escapes Containment (Film At Eleven) The Waifu We Deserved, Not the One We Needed In January 2026, a purple-haired cartoon schoolgirl named Amelia became an unlikely internet phenomenon. Within weeks, AI-generated videos of Amelia floo...

So, what does happen when symbols break? #WorkingAsIntended

Tone Glow 209: Rocketship An interview with Dusty Reske of the Sacramento twee-pop band about 'A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness' 30 years on, his involvement in radical politics, and the band's upcoming album 'Hurt Feelings'

I bought Rocketship's first single "Hey Hey Girl" from Parasol Mail Order on a pen pal's recommendation, because that's how things worked in 1994. Three decades is a quantum blip in geologic time, and it feels like yesterday in indiepop years.

Amateur Hour: The Vermillion Affair by hotel.kilo A one-shot heist caper for a crew whose optimism far outstrips their ability

Amateur Hour: The Vermillion Affair is a complete one-shot heist scenario for 2–4 players, playable in about an hour. No prep beyond reading the document. Everything you need is inside. #ttrpg #free #kindchaos

Family reunions would be a tad awkward.

Not having seen the ad, I'm thinking of an inversion of Kate Bush: "Running Down That Hill (A Deal with Bud)"

Isn't the point of art not accepting the world we live in?...

This tale reads (pun intended) like a tale of absolute terror to bibliophiles (and adjacent folks who think books are snazzy artifacts). It also resonates personally as my first gig out of college involved scanning lots of paper involving a petrochemical company's ethylene glycol production. 😛

This essay came about after pacing myself to not devour Charles Stross's Laundry Files finale in one all-nighter (two evenings and an afternoon). 'The Regicide Report' is outrageous, hilarious, dark dark dark, poignant, and quietly mourning. I can't think of a better way to close out the series.

The Banality of Eldritch Evil When the Machines of the State Run on Mana The Obligatory Disclaimer This essay openly discusses the conclusion of The Laundry Files, including major spoilers from The Regicide Report, which has on...

The true horror is not annihilation. It is systems that survive their own moral collapse. Systems that absorb critique as input. Systems that normalize emergency until it becomes governance. Systems that can explain — calmly, correctly, and at length — why something indefensible was necessary.

Shame is a universal capacity, but never a universal language. Treating it as the latter is less an anthropological claim than a category error—and one that overlooks class, culture, and power.

When you gesture at shame as universal without specifying the social machinery around it, you erase power. You erase who gets to shame whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences. You also erase the fact that in stratified societies, shame often flows downhill while immunity flows up.

A matter of perspective, one might observe.

Bolt Thrower > hustle culture

That had me thinking of how much I actually missed FM radio static?....

Over time, counter-instrumentation and independent documentation serve as essential tools to pierce this blindness and preserve an evidentiary record against institutional erasure.

Consequently, accountability diffuses across specialized roles, as every participant can justify their actions through a narrow, locally true story of professional duty. True reform requires moving beyond blaming personnel to challenging the design facts of what a system chooses to count or ignore.

By rewarding high throughput while failing to measure social costs, these institutions incentivize operators to prioritize the easiest targets, converting compliance into a trap, allowing leaders to claim plausible deniability because harmful methods are never officially authorized or reported.

YouTube video by hotelkilo The Architecture of Accountability Evasion

We look at metric governance, a structural phenomenon where administrative systems produce systematic harm through quantitative targets and selective measurement rather than explicit intent.