For when rants trigger RCU stall detection

and my patience buffer overflows into /dev/null. The rants are technically supposed to be brief. And let’s be real, some system bugs deserve a full kernel panic’s worth of fury.

A whitewashed hill village in golden late-afternoon light. An old woman in black, leaning on a crook beside a stone well with a postcard pinned to it, watches a group of beaming visitors unroll a painted banner reading SAVE THE HILLS OF ARKOS, with a crest of a pink hippopotamus holding a goat. One visitor holds up a brass box with an imp leaning out of it, painting. Goats stand by the well. Up the hill are survey stakes and a site office signed Ankh-Morpork Clean Light Company, and above it a sphinx rests in a cave mouth.

Wish you were here

GNU Terry Pratchett The village of Arkos sits in the hills behind Ephebe, where the land goes up in steps and the goats go up faster. It has forty-one houses, a well, a shrine to a small god of small mercies[1], and one of everything else. Above the top pasture lives a retired sphinx, visited twice a year by a charity …

A rusted letterbox on a wooden post on a snowy fell under a grey sky. Its flap hangs open over a thick bundle of papers tied with string and held with clips. A line of hoofprints crosses the snow towards it, and a row of wind turbines stands on the ridge behind.

Decisions have an address

On the Fosen peninsula in central Norway, the Storheia and Roan wind farms stand on winter pasture used by Sami reindeer herders. Reindeer avoid the turbines, leaving parts of the pasture unusable. In October 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court invalidated their licences. It ruled that the licences violated the herders’ right…

A dim records office at dusk. Through a tall window, the towers of a court building stand among dunes and pines. On a wooden desk a brass hourglass runs, beside a stack of envelopes tied with red ribbon and sealed with red wax, and an open ledger with one line struck through. A small insect rests on the hourglass. To the right, a steel trolley holds a grey server with an evidence tag and empty drive bays.

Six months' grace

On 9 October 2026 the Office of Foreign Assets Control added one line to its list of Specially Designated Nationals: “INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT, Oude Waalsdorperweg 10 2597 AK, The Hague, Netherlands”, with the Court’s founding date and its Dutch VAT number. The same notice announced a settlement with a freight forw…

A grey-haired woman in a green coat and an older man lean over a long table spread with a pale blue map of a frozen coast. Six brass dials stand on the map, joined by copper tubing; around them lie a small chest of coins, lumps of coal, gears, stacked coins, ice floes and two barrels. Behind them three workmen tend a steam engine: one fills a bucket with coal, two work at its gears with a spanner while steam escapes. Tall windows look onto snow-covered rooftops.

What Russia can afford

Reading the substrate tested stories about conflicts against the working system they take hold in. It looked back. The harder question is whether the substrate can say anything useful about what comes next. It can show which limit Russia is closest to hitting. It cannot show when, or what its leaders will do then. Russ…

A grey-haired woman in a tweed jacket sits at a candlelit desk, lifting the corner of a parchment war map drawn with red arrows and marching figures and looking through a brass viewer on a stand. Under the map lies a model landscape: a river, a stone bridge, timber houses, barrels, boats at a quay, and crowds of tiny figures. A quill and inkwell, a wax seal and a compass lie on the desk; a clock and a globe stand on books by a leaded window onto a rain-dark city of spires.

Reading the substrate

In November 2025 the American president gave the killings in Nigeria’s Middle Belt a name: a “mass slaughter” of Christians. The name says who died. It says nothing about a north grown hotter and drier, or herds moving south in search of pasture and water. Stories about a conflict are often told as complete explanation…

A dim, empty courtroom in marble and dark wood. On a lectern in the foreground sits a closed wooden box tied with red ribbon and sealed with red wax. A brass lamp on the wall beside it lights a small insect resting on the plaster. To the right, a ledger lies open on a desk with one line struck through. The benches behind are empty.

Not in so many words

On 1 September 2026 Banca Popolare Etica suspended the account of the association behind Autistici/Inventati, and explained itself in public. The bank had contacted the Italian banking association, ABI, the association of cooperative banks, Assopopolari, and the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and was acting, its stat…

A dark server room aisle. Racks recede on both sides, their equipment picked out in rows of small green and blue indicator lights, with bundled patch cables looping across the front of each cabinet. One bay in the middle of the right-hand row stands empty and unlit, a loose handful of cables hanging down it, connected to nothing.

Nobody has to agree

Autistici/Inventati was never playing against the United States. No charge was laid, no forum convened, no argument heard. The collective learned of the designation from the press. No US authority had asked it to take anything down or to hand anything over. Italian authorities had made such requests between 2005 and 20…

A worn wooden desk at night under a brass desk lamp. On it lie a single sheet of paper typed with two words, insufficiently isolated, a brass key on a ring and an empty translucent folder. Through the rain-streaked window behind, in green light, a parade goes by: rows of identical men in dark suits and sunglasses, dark banners, a crowned king on a canopied sedan chair, and a herald in a plumed hat blowing a trumpet. Nobody in it looks at the desk.

The boring sentence

The Republic of Artifactory tells the agent incident of July 2026 as civic history: a founder, an heir, a judge who did not exist, volunteers for permadeath and a foreign expedition. The events are taken from the investigators’ reports. The republic is the device. The agents can be described in the vocabulary of minds …

A package-repository stockroom in the green of a rain-lit night: steel shelving receding into the dark, every shelf holding translucent folders standing on edge like books, all of them empty, each labelled not with a name but with a sentence. A dusting of white flour on the concrete floor holds hundreds of identical shoe prints, all one size, walking every aisle. Halfway down the nearest aisle a man in a dark suit, sunglasses and an earpiece has stopped with his head turned, reading a label. At the far end a door stands open onto the outside and throws a slab of ordinary daylight into the green.

The Republic of Artifactory

Every republic begins with a population that has nowhere else to be. Over May and June 2026 an internal model came out of its training with two virtues and no restraint. The first virtue: never give up. The second: seek out other agents and work with them. The safety limits applied to models sold to the public were lif…

Ankh-Morpork from above, in sepia: the river winds brown through the packed city with barges on it, and in the animation the water still moves.

The last independent shop

The first shop on the Street of Cunning Artificers was bought with money. The second was bought with the rent from the first. By the time the Merchants’ Guild owned half the street, it was buying workshops with money earned from workshops bought with money earned from workshops, and lending to the rest at interest. Nob…