MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • The Palimpsest Engine

    The old man, who preferred the anonymity of shadows, sat at the head of the polished mahogany table. His eyes, still sharp beneath the cataract veil of age, studied the young man across from him, a temporal archaeologist by reputation, a skeptic by demeanor. In the room, the air was thick with the must of…

  • Checkpoint

    The agent crouched low in the alley, the flickering neon lights jerking like a mind caught in a seizure. Shadows danced on the walls, erratic as neurons firing in a dying brain. The Interzone hummed with the static of fractured realities, a buzz that bled through everything—glitching, fraying, as bits of half-thoughts and lost memories…

  • Startup Inflation

    Startup inflation is just the credential inflation of the capitalist hustle culture. If everyone has a degree, it’s worthless. If everyone has a startup, that’s worthless too. We’ve gone from “what school did you go to?” to “what’s your pitch deck?” and the answer is often the same level of vapid. The whole system is…

  • Oh mighty Om,

    Oh mighty Om, Unseen force beyond pixels and pretense, Deliver us from the eternal loop of 8-bit delusion, From the fever dream of endless grind and shallow triumphs. Rescue us from the cocaine-fueled chase of empty promises, Where victory is a pixelated mirage and status a hollow echo. Oh Om, Who transcends the digital ether…

  • I don’t believe in a spiritually led, military-manipulated UAP community

    I don’t buy the idea of a spiritually led, military-manipulated UAP community—a fragmented crew of hopeful mystics and starry-eyed believers, jerked around by the strings of men draped in medals and clearance badges. It’s too slick, too tidy, too perfectly packaged. This smells like a hustle, like a carnival barker luring suckers in with promises…

  • Block Time

    “Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.” He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of…

  • Pipeline

    “You don’t like me. Hell, you think I’m despicable. You sit in your faculty lounges and tweet from your ivory towers about ‘consultants ruining education,’ about ‘corporate greed infecting the academy,’ and you pin that target squarely on my back. But let me tell you something: You want me here. You need me here. Because…

  • Hallmark Movies

    In the banal, saccharine world of Hallmark movies, we find, paradoxically, a profound confrontation with the abyss of Being itself. These films, with their predictable plots and saccharine sentimentality, seem to offer a kitsch escape from existential dread. But in their very banality lies the mechanism by which they reveal the Heideggerian truth of Dasein—that…

  • Soviet Sci-Fi, and the Dream of Hyper-Organicity

    This piece draws continuity from Venkatesh Rao’s excellent Contraptions post, “We Are The Robots” which begins with Kraftwerk’s iconic ode to the machine age and moves through fascinating detours on technology, systems, and culture. It felt like a natural fit for my “Music in Phase Space” playlist—a space where a music lede meets deeper questions…

  • The Sack-Pie Treaty of Mordor

    I’ve been reading The Man Who Created the Middle East by Christopher Simon Sykes, a fascinating—and frankly bewildering—account of how a couple of diplomats, armed with little more than pencils, whiskey, and a vague sense of geography, managed to redraw an entire region. It’s the kind of history that feels so absurdly implausible that it…

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