Zero Company is a story about people with money problems, estranged families, and career plans whose lives are backdropped and upended by the prequel trilogy's operatic turns of fate.

I have been deeply enjoying ZCOM these past few days and Rob's writing here really nails down why. I'll probably say my own piece about it in the near future but there's something very core to Star Wars that ZCOM gets very right, on top of being just a really solid tactical game.

So, how does China’s economy work today? [...] Private capital exists mainly in creative industries, yet these capitalists are fully aware of their short leash; they are given power, but not enough to form an independent class. Their freedoms, as many Western economists have described, can be taken away at any moment if they fail to serve the fundamental interests of the masses.

A Technology Anomaly Tragicomedy

Insanely cool story presented in the form of a forum thread, written by blackle mori. Just jump in an start reading, and don't miss the "What's New" box at the bottom.

“AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying online.

In the past week I have received 10 different sign-up requests for my mastodon instance from really obvious bots, and I wonder how many of those were "AI Agents".

US imperialism stands as the greatest obstacle to everything that communists want to achieve, and it is urgently important for communists in the US to build an anti-imperialist opposition.

Good piece in Cosmonaut arguing the need for better discipline within the DSA for anti-imperialist stances.

Many members in DSA argue that, by campaigning for Democrats like Zohran Mamdani or AOC, they are already building a workers’ party. They say that DSA’s elected representatives are merely “using the Democratic Party ballot line”. This is a delusion.

Now as a ‘level of war’ coequal with strategy and tactics, operations can and indeed must be more than just that, because it would have to consider uses of force beyond simply maneuvering against enemy armies in the field for the purpose of battles, but that frame will serve us pretty well here because it is the frame Hearts of Iron adopts across the entire series. Which is not a critique: this is a game about World War II, which was very substantially a war concerned with large conventional armies maneuvering in the field.

I feel like I have to note that I recently unfollowed and blocked Bret Devereaux on socials for being an anticommunist pedant. That said, that reactionary knows how to write about war

HTML isn't only for people working in the tech field. It's for everyone. Learn how to make a website from scratch in this beginner friendly web book.

Lovely little website -- I've read it in the past and am noting it here so that I have a record of it for later to recommend for people.

We were invested in liberation. So, without an understanding of what we were trying to liberate for ourselves, we were finding sympathetic and empathetic connections to other modes of liberation — specifically Black and brown liberation. There’s a reason why Zion is mostly Black and brown folks. We were inherently predisposed to seeing our own liberation connected to these other modes of liberation.

Really fascinating interview with Lilly Wachowski about movies, music, the Matrix, transness, and liberation.

Here I will detail a perspective on how to understand the Cuban reforms from a Marxist point of view and, by comparing them with other socialist experiences of reform, try to elucidate how we can think about this kind of policy change under Communist-led governments.

It is impossible to consider Cuba, and Cuba's oppression by the American state, without getting into complex, contradictory feelings. Even before the current reforms, Cuba was contentious -- not initially a communist revolution, wrenched into communism by circumstance, and then under siege for the entirety of its existence by one of the most powerful capitalist empires on the planet. It is a model of resilience and survival, and of compromise. This last bit, I think, is well-defended in this piece.

And what have been Cuba’s playing cards in the 21st century? Arguably, the worst ones out of any Communist-led state. Any complete analysis of the Cuban Revolution in general, but especially in the 21stcentury, should always start from the decades-long, bipartisan effort by the United States to subjugate Cuba once again. Until the late 1980s, Cuba had the help of the Socialist Bloc and could benefit from the echoes of early Soviet hopes of developed socialist countries reversing unequal exchange and breaking the chains of underdevelopment in other regions. The impact that the 1989-1991 collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe had on Cuba is impossible to overstate; it is tempting to see it as isolated as the early Soviet Union, but with the crucial difference that one was a transcontinental mammoth and the other an island of a similar size to Iceland, 90 miles away from a state committed to defeat it.

A small note in this piece that I think about often is that -- as the author correctly details -- Cuba was almost entirely a monocrop economy until the 90s. Much of its money to survive was provided by the Soviet Union, who, beautifully and tragically, paid exorbitant and unnecessary prices for Cuban sugar until its collapse. An internationalism that feels almost unbelievable now. Even great China makes sure to not disturb the monster of the United States overmuch, and one can hardly blame them for it. But still.

This essay will trace the main contours of his biography and examine three critical aspects of his thought: his understanding of the nature of the majority of the peasantry and their role in the revolution; his exposition of Marxist epistemology; and his analysis of the challenges of building socialism after Liberation.

Ken Hammond is one of the best english-language writers on the history of modern China and this piece is a great read if you want a 101 on Mao and why he was so important.

Most of the critiques I've seen of "algospeak" miss the mark, for me. If you see someone getting in a fight about it online, they're probably going to accuse the algospeaking poster of being a child. That's the wrong tack to take, I think. You should instead be accusing these people of not understanding the website where they're posting, and not caring enough to read any of the other posts!

lurk moar!!

But the founders of the most wildly successful bakeries with the most locations seem to have pulled cookies out of their collective asses. And the PE business model is to buy a company, or a stake in it, and treat that money like a loan. The company pays it back. But the PE firm goes in with the intention of selling the company in a few years, after it has wrung as much cash as possible out of the operation to get the company’s shareholders a return that is higher than the stock market. That’s why PE investments usually mean opening lots of locations, inflating costs of goods, and enshittifying the product.

[L]et me express a perhaps controversial view that no single person in history has ever made a greater contribution to the liberation of humanity as that made by Mao Zedong. Further, if that is the case, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that he is the greatest person to have ever lived.

Rest in peace, big man.

It is a simple fact that the People’s Republic of China has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union. That the Soviet Union no longer exists and People’s China does. That it has developed further than any other major non-imperialist country has ever done. That China accounts for the overwhelming majority of global poverty reduction. That China leads the world in the fight against climate catastrophe. None of this would have happened, none of this would have been possible, without Mao and his leadership.

A free, searchable archive of public domain footage from U.S. government films. Search by describing what you see — CLIP-powered visual search, not keywords.

Really neat search engine for public domain documents and images. Was tipped off to it by this youtube video. Probably useful for people (like me) who love to use public domain material in projects.

This video explores how Cartesian dualism shapes capitalism's relationship to the body, why your body often knows something is wrong before your mind admits it, and what any of this actually has to do with building a better world.

Ignoring the clickbait headline, I think this is a really good exploration of Cartesian dualism and how that relates to dialectical materialism, communism, and revolutionary thought.

Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men.

Slightly older piece now, but a real banger for examining the modern Silicon Valley psychopaths. These people are evil and their brains are entirely rotted by AI

What is it like to be a student in Alpha School’s high school boot camp?

This is one of the strangest accounts of what, I would call, widescale academic child abuse I have ever seen. Alpha School, naturally, is a big believer in both genAI and x.com, America's two largest fascist propaganda networks.

Numerous students report that they are currently experiencing what Alpha School calls “boot camp,” which is not something I found described anywhere on Alpha’s official website, or anywhere else. The students share that, as part of boot camp, they are required to join Twitter and obtain at least 100 “authentic” followers by early October 2026.

In other words, she contained multitudes of things in apparent mutual tension with one another, albeit in her case the overall effect was anticommunist and pro-American, even as it was anti-sexist and beneficial, in particular, to "working women" in the imperial core.

The best piece on Steinem I've read so far, pointing out both her massive flaws as well as her respectable actions.

The vehicle will cost the equivalent of just under $9,000 and will be chargeable through household outlets. It seats six, but with a max speed of about 30 miles an hour and a range of 90 miles per charge, it's geared for local driving, not road trips.

Still hate cars, of course, but this is honestly incredibly cute, and it's anti-imperialist (?)

I spend a lot of time on Bluesky, for which reason my soul will surely meet oblivion in the jaws of Ammit; but while I'm there I see a lot of AI boosterism. Here's a taxonomy.