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Thucydides First Draft
Alright, buckle the f* up, because I’m Thucydides, an Athenian, and I decided to write down the complete and total fing sshow that was the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. Why? Because the moment these dumbasses threw the first punch, I was dead certain this was gonna be the biggest fing war anyone…
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Burning down the house
The music is still there. The sounds that shaped my early life, like sharp needles pricking my teenage skin, embedding themselves deep in my veins. I adored it. The riffs, the lyrics, the goddamn poetry of it all. The raw, uncut power of Boomer music was a truth I couldn’t deny. Clapton, Joni, Bowie—these people…
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You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
“You stumble, trip on a crack in the sidewalk, fall flat. Curse under your breath, blame the crooked streets, the broken system that put you there. But you don’t know, man. You don’t know what was coming down that street, heading straight for you like a freight train outta nowhere. That crack, that misstep—it shifted…
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The stranger king
What Hernán Cortés did, you see, was more than just landfall on some foreign coast—it was a whole operation. Stranger King theory, they call it now. Marshall Sahlins, anthropologist, mapped it out: the colonial playbook, rubber-stamped, refined, perfected, executed to the letter. It starts with smoke and mirrors, offering peace to warring tribes while the…
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Steve Jobs and the Inquisitor
In the dim light of the cathedral, its sleek walls lined with glass and steel, the Church of Tech was not a place of gods but of algorithms. In the pulpit, a solemn figure stood—a high priest of silicon, cloaked not in robes, but in the sterile whites of laboratory garb. Before him, on a…
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The Fates and the AI
In a vast, darkened void, three figures sit before an endless loom, weaving the strands of human lives. The Fates—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—work silently, their fingers dancing across the thread of existence. Suddenly, a fourth presence appears: a glowing, incorporeal being of light and data—the AI. It shimmers with the hum of a thousand algorithms,…
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Divine Complex: Predestination in the Land of Tech
It’s not about the algorithm, not really. Sure, they like to talk about algorithms—like they’re the ultimate proof of their genius—but that’s not what drives them. What’s at the heart of Silicon Valley isn’t some cold calculus or even technological innovation. It’s the feeling—that religious sensation of predestination, a kind of self-assured destiny etched into…
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How to Fool Randomness
Randomness, they tell you, is the final law, the chaotic heartbeat behind the facade of order. Everything we see, everything we touch, they say, is the product of chance. The dice are always rolling, the particles always dancing in their unpredictable ballet, and we, the witnesses, have no choice but to watch as reality collapses…
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Taken In By probability
Ah, the myth of destiny—that sweet nectar for the ego. The libertarian foundational story is laced with this idea, isn’t it? Not just the belief in freedom but the deeper, more insidious conviction that those who “make it” were always meant to make it. The idea that they are chosen. Special. Not a product of…
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Opium
Scene: A Dimly Lit Room, Somewhere in Southeast China *The year is 1887. The British empire still has a firm grasp on its colonies, and in the Southeast Asian trade networks, opium flows like gold. Inside a luxurious but worn-out room, adorned with Qing dynasty artifacts and British imperial emblems, a British opium trader, *Charles…
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