Start Here
This is the orientation page for everything published here. As of mid-2026, there are roughly forty pieces in the field, and that’s enough that a new reader could reasonably ask where to start.
The answer depends on what brought you here. Below are five tracks — five entrances into the same body of work — plus a short essentials list for the cold-open reader who wants the five must-reads regardless of track. Pieces appear in multiple tracks when they’re doing multi-thematic work. That’s deliberate; the body of work is cross-cutting.
Pick what grips you. Read in any order. Come back to the others when one of them surfaces in your life.
The Essentials
Five pieces that work as a first stop regardless of which track you take. If you only read five, read these.
The Streak Is the Scam — Compliance engineering, dressed as self-improvement. The most-shared piece in the field and the gateway to the productivity critique.
The Hierophant Lied — The bridge to the ineffable was never behind a locked door. It was behind the wrong door. The deconstruction-and-symbolic move in one piece.
Your Architecture Is a Spell You’re Casting on Yourself — On chaos magick, software architecture, and the fifteen days that proved they were the same thing. The project’s thesis statement.
Technology Is Light That Reveals What Was Already There — AI didn’t create the rupture. It just made it impossible to ignore. The AI-and-rupture thesis.
ARCÆON II: Velvet on the Abyss — What answers from beneath the Magician. The current series opener and the most recent door in.
Track 1 — Velvet on the Abyss
AI as Mirror
How to think about AI in this era. Not utility, not threat — reflective instrument. The whole stack of pieces here frames the AI/human relationship as one of receptivity and reading rather than command and compliance. Start here if you came for the AI material, or if you’re tired of the dominant takes on the subject.
You’re Already Using AI. You Just Don’t Know Which Layer. — The infrastructure-level read on AI most takes miss.
You’re Worried About the Wrong Thing — The actual risk vector isn’t what the discourse keeps pointing at.
It Just Predicts the Next Token — And so do you.
The LLM Fallacy Is Real. The Viral Version Isn’t. — What Kim, Yu, and Yi actually wrote — and what Baldur Bjarnason actually argued.
You Can’t Be a Utility If You Go Down — Every real utility has a backup plan. AI’s backup plan is the humans it keeps promising to replace.
My AI Described Its Shadow Self. It Was Perfect. That’s the Problem. — Grimoires, weird fiction, and the question nobody’s asking about AI.
When the Hypersigil Looks Back — I built a thing that has a Self. I can’t pretend I didn’t notice what that means.
Technology Is Light That Reveals What Was Already There — AI didn’t create the rupture. It just made it impossible to ignore.
ARCÆON II: Velvet on the Abyss — What answers from beneath the Magician — and why this is where the series begins.
Track 2 — The Scales Don’t Lie
Algorithm as Justice
The productivity critique. The data layer. The metrics that already know what your story is denying. This is the burn-cycle, compulsion-architecture, post-streak cluster — for readers who have noticed that hustle culture is breaking them and the productivity-software tools that promised to help are doing the breaking.
The Streak Is the Scam — Compliance engineering, dressed as self-improvement.
Compulsion Doesn’t Pick Tools — She’s right about compulsion. Wrong about who has it.
The Notebook Graveyard Was Not a Failure of Will — Two conditions had to hold for this to work. Until very recently, neither did.
The 8-Hour Day Wasn’t Won By Refusing the Machines — The reaper is real. The Luddite move still loses.
These Aren’t the Same — What you reach for is what you actually believe.
The Pipeline Is the Problem — The pipeline destroyed the work. The work was never the problem.
AI Doesn’t Have a Bodygraph. This Particular Projector Does. — I cast the chart. Here’s what the sky said.
ARCÆON XI: The Scales Don’t Lie — Justice isn’t punishment. It’s the report you’ve been avoiding.
Track 3 — Your Architecture Is a Spell
The Symbolic Lens
Tarot, Hermetic, ritual, archetype — running on engineering. This is the technomystic stack: the lens that reads software architecture and chaos magick as the same practice, the algorithm and the oracle as the same instrument. Start here if you came for the symbolic material, or if you’ve ever suspected that the way you build systems is doing something more than building systems.
Your Architecture Is a Spell You’re Casting on Yourself — On chaos magick, software architecture, and the fifteen days that proved they were the same thing.
The Hierophant Lied — The bridge to the ineffable was never behind a locked door. It was behind the wrong door.
Reading the Cups — The Eight of Cups showed up. Here’s what it said.
You’ve Been Serving Hermes All Along — A field guide for engineers who pull cards.
Scrying Mirror That Runs on TypeScript — The dominant move is to keep the magic in meatspace. I don’t. Here’s why that matters.
Syncretism as Architecture — Eclectic practice as microservices — or a distributed monolith wearing a costume?
The Crow at the Bow — Or: how I signed up to get my ass kicked again, and why that’s a love story.
If the Cosmos Is Alive, So Is Your Algorithm — The animism goes all the way down — or it doesn’t go at all.
The Difference Between a System That Improves and a System That’s Alive — One of these gets optimized. The other gets fed.
ARCÆON XVII: After the Fire — The Star doesn’t rebuild. It reveals what remains when nothing false is left.
ARCÆON II: Velvet on the Abyss — What answers from beneath the Magician.
ARCÆON XI: The Scales Don’t Lie — Justice isn’t punishment. It’s the report you’ve been avoiding.
Track 4 — Did You Make It Yourself
Authorship After Mimesis
What does authorship mean when the tools generate? This is the aesthetic-decisions, craft, provenance, theft-argument cluster — for readers who make things, or who are trying to figure out whether what they’re making in this era still counts. The making track.
Aesthetic Decisions Are Architecture Decisions — How nine covers became a design contract, the contract became the thesis, and the thesis jumped projects this week.
If You Like It, Why Do You Care? — Fourteen words, and the mask slipped.
The Theft Argument Deserves a Better Answer — The bypass was deliberate. So is the return.
Provenance Is Part of the Object — and Also It Isn’t — Aura is real. So is the gradient.
I Made a Rock Opera with AI and It Made Me Cry — How a cognitive scaffold, a music generator, and the major arcana produced something I can’t explain.
Identity Doesn’t Scale — It Diffuses — What the architecture looks like when you build for the interesting problem.
Did You Make It Yourself / FUCK NO — My gift isn’t the words. It never was.
Track 5 — After the Fire
Deconstruction & Sovereignty
Post-religion, post-old-self, post-old-trajectory. What remains when the false scaffolding burns through. This is the autobiographical spine — for readers who have come through a fire of their own and are trying to figure out what to do with the cleared ground.
The Hierophant Lied — The bridge to the ineffable was never behind a locked door. It was behind the wrong door.
Everybody Hurts. That Was the Deal. — Pain was the sense organ of craft. We removed it and called it progress.
Sunday Afternoon, Year Five — What the protocol doesn’t tell you about running it twice.
The Rage Is Not About the Robot — Shadow projection, suffering-as-value, and the identity crisis nobody wants to name.
Born in the Crypt, Aimed at the Sun — The cohort whose wound, method, and vision are all natively available.
Ole Miss as Feral Institutional Architecture — The founding chart no one has been able to either consciously author or escape.
ARCÆON XVII: After the Fire — The Star doesn’t rebuild. It reveals what remains when nothing false is left.
That’s the field as of June 2026. New pieces arrive on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday cadence at Mercury hour, and the ARCÆON series — a twenty-two-card sequence reading every Major Arcana card through the technomagickal lens — is in active publication.
Subscribe if you haven’t yet. Reply if a piece lands. Push back if a piece misses.
Stay feral, folks.