Lights for cats

Blog roundup (2/18/2026)

"Death in September", Immerschon

I've been thinking a lot about how Charlie Kirk died for his luxury beliefs, and how it simultaneously feels like I never stop hearing about it and that nothing has come of it. In this article, Immerschon conjectures about the reasons that the Horst-Wessel-ification of Kirk has failed.

There is a clear message behind the WWE-type staging at the Charlie Kirk memorial that took place today in Arizona: don’t worry, we are still asking nothing of you. This is still entertainment.

"Question 3", The Pervocracy

I hear a lot about "depersoning" in politics (or its more annoying sister phrase "lack of empathy"). I love this short fiction piece because it actually displays the mechanics and logics of this depersoning.

Question 2: Shall Lot 329, located at 93 Maple Street, be re-zoned to allow for the construction of a pickleball court?

Question 3: Shall Shelly Kellberg, of 184 Hudson Street #2, be cut with a knife until she is dead?

My praise for this article is that it makes me want to reread the Gateless Barrier and also Jack Spicer's notes on Outside. That is, its description of those destroyed by madness—starving, hysterical, short-form—convinces me that the only way forward is to surrender one's ego more, to leave dualities and the desire for virtuosity behind and simply say true things beautifully. I feel that I, too, am vulnerable to building "a tomb of online proof that [I] once existed, like a mad pharaoh terrified of [my] obsolescence".

In recent years, Twitter’s crash-out has inflicted its fleeing users upon the greater internet like shrapnel to worm into whatever remaining platform will allow them to post banal <100 word observations about being horny and stupid. And Letterboxd, “the social network for film lovers,” has opened its arms to these stateless posters, welcoming them to retell the same nine jokes in their reviews and pages-long minutiae about their personal star rating system.

"The beautiful, useless metaphor", Sam Sorensen

And speaking of abandoning one's ego, I was just coming to terms with my taste in RPGs. To put it shortly, I believe that history will absolve "system doesn't matter". That is, I think we should construct meaning mostly by writing one good, true sentence after another, and save the system-juggling and extradiagetic word-painting ludo-metaphors for custom Magic cards.

Again, that's its own article, and one people have been harassed for writing, so all in due time if at all. In the meantime, though, I came across Sorensen's blog post, where he argues a lemma of all that: the part against mostly-extradiagetic word-painting ludo-metaphors in RPG contexts. He takes the words out of my mouth, it's nice.

But it’s also very liberating. Nowadays when I write systems or classes or whatever, I just write what is true. Fighters are good at fighting. Wizards can do magic. I still use systems, obviously, but I don’t try to convey messages and meaning through my mechanics.

meow mix, Meowballz

If I had to summarize the theme of this 5-minute video in two words, it'd be "seamless transitions". That is, it's about the experience of scrolling, but also the dropped barrier between play and work, between virtual agon and real brutality. I read into it a sort of midrash of the concept of "slop", a coping with the oxymoron "wanting more of the same thing".

Much ink has been spilled, and many a electron has been allocated, toward trying to articulate something novel about the "terminally online condition" or its history; this succeeds. Just turn the volume up.