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working notes from the textual underground

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I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe …
Jul 25, 2026
I've got the new Masters of the Universe queued up on Prime for viewing tonight. I suspect I'll be viewing it through two lenses. The kid, waiting to hear "I have the power!" and the storyteller who's curious to know if they can make the mythology of Eternia something more than a marketing reboot. One...
Masters of the UniverseMythology
This morning I picked up How to Practice …
Jul 24, 2026
This morning I picked up How to Practice Self-Inquiry by Ramana Maharshi. I expected a quick survey read, a reconnaissance mission into the territory of the question Who am I? Instead, before I had travelled very far into the book, another question appeared: Is this your game? Is this your true mission? I could almost...
mythogeographypsychogeography
The Currency of Ordinary Lives
Jul 23, 2026
Field Notes from The Old Mint, Southam I went out for a short wisdom walk this afternoon. Nothing grand. No pilgrimage. No mountain path. Just enough movement to loosen the mind and let a little air into the machinery. Walking does that for me. It opens a space in which thoughts can arrive without being...
Old Mintpersonal stories
“Same shit, different day” is one of those …
Jul 22, 2026
“Same shit, different day” is one of those phrases I hate because it usually arrives wearing a smirk. It reduces a life to a conveyor belt: wake up, coffee, work, scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. A little verbal shrug before another day gets fed into the machine. And yet, some mornings, it’s mostly true. Routine isn’t...
diceLuke Rhinehart
The Grid and the Ghost: A Soft-Cyborg’s Guide to Psyche and Soul
Jul 20, 2026
(1) The Linguistic Stutter The cursor on my screen is a rhythmic, glowing pulse. It is the heartbeat of a binary ghost, a small white rectangle of light that blinks with the mechanical patience of an entity that never sleeps. I sit here in the quiet hours, a "soft-cyborg" tethered to a vast network of...
AIDND
I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around …
Jul 19, 2026
I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week. It’s a lovely bit of mischief...
psychogeographyWalking
Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You …
Jul 18, 2026
Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its conclusion. It gives you somewhere...
Rebecca Solnitwriting
It feels to me as though this is …
Jul 17, 2026
It feels to me as though this is the only true choice we have. You did not ask to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose the circumstances into which you arrived. The only real choice, I think, lies in deciding how we will play the hand we have been...
Game of LifeNotes
The Horizon
Jul 16, 2026
I'm standing in a field looking towards the horizon. It occurs to me that I've spent a lifetime doing this. Different fields. Different coastlines. Different countries. Different versions of myself, always finding a line where earth gives itself over to sky. The horizon is a peculiar thing. It promises distance while refusing arrival. However far...
Alice Cooperchoice
The Door, the Black Hole, and the Trace: Notes on Obscurity
Jul 15, 2026
(1) The door opens I keep thinking about a passage I read recently: "Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go." I like the mystery of it. The unknown is a black hole,...
existentialismobscurity
I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical …
Jul 14, 2026
I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical thinking and the kind of intelligence that has to sit beside it. Critical thinking gets a lot of the limelight. Fair enough. It is the part of the mind that asks for evidence, spots the loose plank in an argument, and refuses to be charmed by every...
barefoot-philosophercritical-thinking
What the Street Was Certain Of
Jul 13, 2026
Leamington Spa deríve 2026-07-13 The morning began with a quiet decision to let the town rearrange itself around me.1 I had spent the weekend building two small dérive apps. Nothing polished, just enough to nudge my attention sideways. And now, standing at the edge of Leamington Spa, I wanted to see what they would do...
deriveleamington spa