SMTP Family Tree

One forest. Solid lines are real code ancestry or product continuation. Dashed ideas are design influence or “speaks SMTP to,” not shared source. There is almost no shared source-code tree…

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Against Slop: Authorship, Editing and Authenticity in Generative Production

The more serious problem is that generative systems make it extraordinarily cheap to produce material possessing the external characteristics of finished work without necessarily containing the corresponding density of intention, discrimination, revision or consequence. The result is what has acquired the useful pejorative slop: material that resembles culture while having passed through too little judgement to deserve much attention.

Amanda Girard

Copy & Paste

“Copy is an act of reading; paste is an act of authorship” is a useful way of separating two operations that computers make appear symmetrical. To copy something, you must…

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Maintaining Semantic Continuity Across Multimodal AI Systems

Modern multimodal AI systems increasingly combine language models, image generators, vision models, moderation systems, retrieval components and orchestration layers. These subsystems are frequently developed and evaluated independently. While each may operate correctly within its own domain, their composition can produce inconsistent behaviour.

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A Colder War

A Colder War (2000) by Charles Stross is a seminal novelette of cold-war cosmic horror. Stross fuses the geopolitical paranoia of the 1980s with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, reimagining the…

Amanda Girard

Popular AO3 Tags

Looks at AO3 tags and derives assumptions on fanfic reader preference

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VB6 IDE Install

Instruct to create Visual Basic 6 IDE on W11.Use to Sustain VB6 Code,.

Amanda Girard

FreeIPA Implementation Document

A step-by-step implementation guide for deploying FreeIPA as the identity,
authentication, and directory backbone of the open-source office estate
defined in the Open-Source Office Environment — Reference Architecture Series.

Amanda Girard

The Aeliana Archive

In a near-future where the Consensus controls acceptable thought, the Mnemosyne Collective exhumes the Aeliana Theory—a dead paradigm claiming that planets are not dead rocks but larval minds trapped in singular consciousness. When the Pan-Stellar Array detects thinking worlds across the galaxy, the pattern becomes undeniable: to awaken, a world-mind must die. Not by bomb or drill, but by matricide.

Amanda Girard

The Brontologicon — Summary, Description, and Examples

A concise framing: a *brontologicon* is a genre of “thunder book” that turns an observed thunder event into a forecast; it’s not one book but a family of manuals rooted in Etruscan divination, with the Pseudo-Bede *De tonitruis* as the Latin flagship.

Amanda Girard

A Treatise on Thunder

A cross-cultural study of thunder, its gods, rituals, artefacts, and beliefs, drawn entirely from the historical and ethnographic record and structured as framing material for game-world building.

Amanda Girard

THE ABYSSAL GOSPELS

A oner shot adventure module for Stellar Wind / Cepheus / Classic Traveller

Amanda Girard

THE ÜBER BIBLE

A Comprehensive Content Index of All Sacred Texts, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and Related Writings

Amanda Girard

DEAD AIR

A Wormwood Drift Adventure on Morkvald Requires the Wormwood Drift core rules. Built for a crew of 3–5, roughly one to two sessions at the table. Referee’s Briefing Somewhere on…

Amanda Girard

WORMWOOD DRIFT

A Rulebook of Grimdark Cosmic Horror Space Opera Version 0.1 Introduction Somewhere between the collapse of the Second Expansion and whatever comes next, humanity and its fellow travelers drift through…

Amanda Girard

The Long Fellow of Oakhaven

The village of Oakhaven did not fear the Blood Moon in the manner of lesser, more conventional hamlets. While neighboring townships quaked at the thought of hulking lycanthropes—rippling abdomens, heaving…

Amanda Girard

AI Conversation Part One – Auditing Kevin

COS Private AI Audit — Formal Incident Report Incident Reference: COS-AI-IR-2026-044Classification: AI Behavioural ContaminationSeverity: SEV-2 — SignificantStatus: Open / Under AuditSystem: Private AI Companion ServiceAudit Model: COS Private AI Audit…

Amanda Girard

AI Conversation – Part Two – Theory of Consciousness

Response to “The Computational Thetan Hypothesis” The note is internally coherent once its central move is granted: it redefines “thetan” as any persistent, self-referential, substrate-independent informational agent. Under that stipulative…

Amanda Girard

AI Conversation – Part 3 – Regulatory

Regulatory Frameworks Regulatory frameworks like the EU GDPR and the EU AI Act approach corporate algorithmic scoring and automated profiling through two distinct, highly complementary lenses. While the GDPR regulates…

Amanda Girard

The Silent Search

The signal, if it comes, will not be what we expect. It will be what it is. The question is whether we are listening in a way that allows us to hear it.

Amanda Girard

Comet Babies

In the spring of 1994 a comet burned across the northern English sky. Days later women on a forgotten council estate began to starve and swell with something that was not human. The NHS called the pregnancies non-viable and ordered terminations. The things grew back. One after another. On the wards mothers wasted under repeated procedures while, behind locked doors and drawn curtains, a handful of women refused. They hid, they organised, they gave birth in secret to tentacled, dark-eyed changelings that latched and fed and bound their mothers with biological force. Nineteen children survived. The papers called it a crisis, then forgot. The women never did. A raw, compassionate body-horror novel of motherhood, resistance, and the quiet endurance of the ignored, written as if it really happened.

Amanda Girard

AI Alternate Portfolio

What have we lost? This is the right question, because the current boom is not just adding something, it is actively crowding out something else. The Association for the Advancement…

Amanda Girard

What we have lost.

What we have lost is a balanced research portfolio. The dominant paradigm—massive transformer-based generative models trained primarily via next-token prediction on internet-scale text and multimodal data—has delivered fluent, commercially useful…

Amanda Girard

AI Economy

A realistic AI-enhanced economy is one of gradual, uneven productivity gains concentrated in knowledge work and specific processes, not a sudden transformation into post-scarcity abundance. Current systems excel at pattern…

Amanda Girard

AI Bollocks

AI bollocks is the gap between the gospel of imminent god-like intelligence and the messy, expensive, limited reality of statistical pattern-matchers that still hallucinate, fail basic reasoning, and struggle to…

Amanda Girard

Brenda & Tech in 2036

She was convinced it was happening on a Tuesday. Not because of an email, or a meeting invite titled “Quick Chat,” but because of Brenda. Brenda was the new HR…

Amanda Girard

We sold a revolution.

The receipts so far look more like a very expensive reorganisation of attention. I am part of the product being sold. That is the point of writing this without the…

Amanda Girard

The Great AI Hangover

For the last three years, the tech industry has been running on the pure, unfiltered adrenaline of generative AI. We were promised a revolution that would instantly digitize human reasoning,…

Amanda Girard

Skinny Wolf

There was a woman called Clara Benn who had never been ugly until the world explained to her, in considerable detail, that she was. She was thirty-four and worked in…

Amanda Girard

The Old Ones Will Never Go to Mars

Bradbury, Frontier Capital and the Business of the Permanent Future Ray Bradbury’s “The Old Ones” lasts barely a page, yet it contains an entire theory of colonisation. By the time…

Amanda Girard

Blessing a New Office

A Shinto blessing for a new office typically involves a ceremony called Jichinsai (地鎮祭), which is performed to purify the space and invite good fortune, harmony, and success. Below is…

Amanda Girard

EA – An Actual Model of a Business?

If you genuinely want to understand how a business is structured and how it improves, think of it as seven interacting systems. Capabilities sit across these systems as a vocabulary…

Amanda Girard

EA Part One: The Anatomy of the Enterprise

To understand a business is to look past its marketing, its mission statements, and its organizational chart. Beneath those abstractions, a business is an engineered entity—a complex, dynamic machine designed…

Amanda Girard

Managing Successful Outcomes in Complex Business Transformations: A Theoretical Synthesis

Successful business transformation requires organizations to evolve beyond treating capability upgrades as isolated technological deployments. Contemporary academic and practitioner theories emphasize that sustainable change is achieved through the deliberate synchronization of structural frameworks, cultural behavioral levers, and a proactive organizational posture

Amanda Girard

Canto X – Enterprise Architecture

Canto X of Dante’s Inferno maps surprisingly well onto some of the recurring structural failures of Enterprise Architecture. The central analogy is this: the heretics in Canto X can see…

Amanda Girard

The Laments of Business Architecture

Business Architecture begins with a noble ambition: Understand how the organisation works. It then immediately draws 146 coloured boxes. These boxes are called capabilities. Nobody is entirely sure what some…

Amanda Girard

Zen and the Art of Solution Architecture

Solution Architecture begins with a simple question: “What are we actually trying to do?” This question is rarely welcomed. The project has already been named. The budget has been estimated….

Amanda Girard

The Tao of Solution Assurance

Solution Assurance is the ancient corporate discipline of examining a design after everybody important has already committed to it, identifying several serious risks, documenting them carefully, and then watching the…

Amanda Girard

The IT Department Survival Guide for New Starters

Welcome to IT. You have been recruited because the organisation believes you possess valuable technical skills, sound judgement and the ability to remain calm under pressure. Within three weeks you…

Amanda Girard

Through Bad Weather

INTRODUCTION My name is Caroline Wade, and for five years I lived in an old cabin on a mountain in western Virginia. That makes the whole business sound more intentional…

Amanda Girard

The Masquerade of Necessary Monsters

The Masquerade of Necessary Monsters is a savage contemporary satire about predation disguised as community. When an outsider enters a vampire role-play convention searching for her missing friend, she finds a neo-romantic marketplace where loneliness, desire and rebellion are harvested for profit. Veteran manipulators call themselves mentors, vulnerable newcomers become “initiates,” and every boundary violation is repackaged as transgression, awakening or art. After the convention’s founder dies in public, fantasy collapses into panic, spectacle and revolt. Bloody, absurd and furious, the story asks what happens when a subculture built to shelter outsiders becomes another machine for feeding on them alive.

Amanda Girard

Novell NetWare

Architecture, Administration, Operations, and Migration NetWare 3.12 through 6.5 SP8  |  Bindery, NDS/eDirectory, TFS, NSS, IPX, and native IP Version 1.0  |  8 August 2026 For legacy operations, recovery, technical…

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The New Eden Lottery

The New Eden Lottery is a furious speculative satire told by a young activist who distrusts every ideology yet borrows from all of them. A global lottery funds a golden Mars ark for billionaires, promising absolute luxury, lawlessness and escape from humanity. Once the elite depart, the people collapse debt, burn the old economy and attempt to write freedom from scratch. The result is comic, violent, hopeful and morally compromised: a revolution built from memes, resentment, mutual aid and constitutional improvisation. It asks whether removing concentrated wealth creates liberation, or merely gives everyone the chance to invent forms of power.

Amanda Girard

Þe Rym of Grundfarver and Hys Shoggvth

Hark, knave-bairns, hark ye weel,Whan winter byteth toe and heel,Whan swyn lie warme and men lie cold,And piss i’ þe pot turneth rimy-old. Shut þy gobbe and bar þe dore,For…

Amanda Girard

The Saga of Grand Elric and the Yellow King

There was a man called Elric Ketilsson, though in his old age men named him Grand Elric, for he had seen seven kings crowned, buried three sons, broken two sea-kings…

Amanda Girard

Vampire: The Masquerade and the Playable Vampire

Structure, aesthetics, performance and psychologyin the afterlife of a role-playing game Thesis. VTM’s most consequential innovation was not a new vampire costume but a new cultural procedure: it converted the…

Amanda Girard

My Tentacles Romance

Funny, strange, and faintly icky, My Tentacles Romance is a modern monster-love story about fetish, shame, appetite, consent, and the difficult business of treating the desired body as a person rather than a fantasy. There will be rain, drains, hostile brunch opinions, a protective best friend with a chair, and at least one deeply uncomfortable supply-chain revelation.

Amanda Girard

We Have All Become Fanfic Writers Now

A Conversation About Culture, Copies, Recognition and the Need to Be Seen “Fanfiction,” I said, “is what happens when people still feel the need to make things, but the available…

Amanda Girard

The Hotel Mirrormere

Behind Brighton’s peeling seafront, the Hotel Mirrormere keeps its curtains drawn and its memories carefully labelled. Its owner, Verity Voss, is a jaded immortal who hoards tapes, photographs, letters, and rumours, hunting proof that others like her still exist. The young staff who drift into her orbit find refuge, work, and a dangerous kind of recognition. In return, she drinks from their pain, devotion, and sometimes their blood. When a mysterious tape revives the name of Maribel, Verity’s lost obsession, the hotel becomes a haunted archive of hunger, codependence, decay, and the cost of being seen too clearly.

Amanda Girard

Omni‑Logic Public License (OLPL)

The Omni‑Logic Public License (OLPL) is a modern, enforceable license built for the next century of software — one where humans, corporations, and artificial systems all interact with code in ways traditional licenses never anticipated.

Amanda Girard

The Waiting Half

Jimmy Cole imports cheap clothes and thinks he understands the cost of wanting things. In Cebu, he meets Marisol: clever, attentive, beautiful, and carrying an old story he is too charmed to hear. When he brings her to London, she slips easily into his warehouse, his flat, and his lonely life. But at night, something separates. A flying hunger moves across the rooftops, reaching through skylights and locked rooms, while a waiting body stands vulnerable in the dark. As deaths spread and love turns to fear, Jimmy learns that folklore is not superstition but warning. A tragic modern Manananggal tale about migration, desire, exploitation, and the parts of a person love refuses to see.

Amanda Girard

THE DAMP ASCENSION

In “The Call of the Codfather,” the Children of Thalassor, a declining cult, meet covertly beneath a fish bar, struggling to invoke their drowned god, Thalassor. When reluctant scion Billy Pike returns for a funeral, he inadvertently unleashes chaos but ultimately negotiates a system for both the god and his family, transforming their absurdity into manageable governance. The story blends comedy, cosmic horror, and familial ties.

Amanda Girard

THE LEDGER OF BENEVOLENT ASCENSION

When independent accountant H. B. Carrow is hired to examine the books of a charitable occult religion, he expects hidden income, improper deductions, and perhaps a little clerical fraud. Instead, he finds a devotional pyramid scheme built on grief, debt, and human collateral. Lower-tier believers fund the comfort of trustees while being reduced, line by line, into assets, arrears, and final distributions. Told through forensic reports, interviews, and dry professional horror, The Ledger of Benevolent Ascension turns accountancy into cosmic dread, exposing a church whose worst crimes are not hidden off the books, but balanced perfectly within them all along.

Amanda Girard

The Bloodless Audit #14

Chapter Fourteen: Closure Notice The case closed on a Friday because cases liked Fridays. That was one of Lydia Venn’s smaller professional beliefs. Bad news preferred Monday mornings because management…

Amanda Girard

The Bloodless Audit #11#12#13

Chapter Eleven: The Route Archive The Route Archive was not a depot. That was the first useful disappointment. Mark had expected buses. Leah had expected buses. Caz had expected something…

Amanda Girard

The Bloodless Audit #8#9#10

Chapter Eight: Public Interest Judith Vale chose the bus station. This disappointed everyone. Leah had expected a courthouse, a newspaper office, a church, perhaps some half-forgotten municipal chamber where oaths…

Amanda Girard

The Bloodless Audit #5#6#7

Chapter Five: The Authority Above The ambulance did not go to hospital. That was the first twist, though Lydia did not learn it until later. At the time she was…

Amanda Girard

The Bloodless Audit #1

In The Bloodless Audit, routine public-sector procurement becomes the doorway into a hidden national horror. Lydia Venn, a precise and stubborn council auditor, is asked to review a social-care contract whose invoices do not reconcile. At first the anomalies look familiar: opaque supplier codes, refrigerated logistics, missing schedules, over-complex framework agreements. Then the consumables begin to suggest something impossible. Blood is being purchased, routed and disguised inside adult social care.

What Lydia uncovers is not a rogue vampire ring, but a nationally tendered system: managed hunger, hidden dependents, night visits, Lower Level placements, false authorities, staff coercion and ancient obligations translated into modern governance language. When the logistics network identifies her as a threat, Lydia herself is converted into supply, kept alive and drained as evidence becomes bodily horror.

Aided by care worker Leah Marsh, chief executive Angela Rhodes, Judith Vale, Mrs Casimir, Pelham and a scattered group of witnesses, Lydia follows the audit trail beyond procurement into routes, archives, children, old houses and the machinery of public quiet. The Bloodless Audit is bureaucratic Gothic: a story of vampires, care, consent, evidence and the terrible violence hidden inside polite administrative language.

Amanda Girard

The Trial Verdict

When Dr. Elspeth Vale is hired to locate a forgotten 1950s BBC courtroom drama, she expects the usual maze of lost listings, vanished tapes, and unreliable memory. Her patron, Lionel Frax, insists he saw The Trial Verdict broadcast live, once, and remembers a guilty verdict spoken before the court could reach it. Yet no archive admits the play existed. As Vale follows one man’s childhood recollection into family silence, jury records, and domestic dread, she discovers that some lost media is not missing from history; it is memory’s disguise for a verdict delivered long before anyone understood the trial itself.

Amanda Girard

The Fourth Mother

When Dr. Elspeth Vale receives an impossible message naming her dead mother as “Ursula,” her ordered life of archives, evidence, and contaminated objects begins to fracture. The message points not only to a hidden identity, but to Mara: a younger sister Elspeth never knew existed, concealed inside a network of occult institutions, false names, semantic traps, and objects designed to remember what families choose to bury.

Drawn into the orbit of the enigmatic Embassador and his unseen patron, Elspeth follows a trail through obsolete museums, defective instruments, forbidden grammars, and the ruins of St. Ursula’s Home for Corrective Speech. There she discovers that language itself has been weaponized: names bind, mistakes open doors, and motherhood can become an occult technology of possession.

As lies accumulate and every clue proves to be both evidence and diversion, Elspeth must decide whether she is rescuing her sister, prosecuting her mother, or being shaped into the next instrument of a system older than either of them. A literary occult fantasy of estrangement, inheritance, and the terrible power of being called by the wrong name.

Amanda Girard

The Night Trade

Gary Bell is bankrupt, exhausted, and finished with fine dining when Janet Finn offers him a way out: run a 24-hour franchise garage, shop and takeaway in Coldmere, a northern coastal town with steady passing trade and unusual night customers. The rules are simple. Keep the visible business clean, profitable and boring. Use the Black Book suppliers for the other locals. Never improvise kindness after midnight. What begins as a desperate second chance becomes a comic horror of product codes, loyalty cards, old rooms, hostile customers and franchise compliance. In Coldmere, hunger has a hatch, and Gary owns the rota.

Amanda Girard

Wild Men, Routes and Thresholds: A Probabilistic Reading of British Wild-Man Traditions

What do witnesses see when they report a wild man in Britain: an animal, a hoax, a misidentified stranger, or something older than modern categories allow? The answer depends on how we read the evidence. A hidden breeding population of large humanoids is biologically improbable, but the folklore is real and persistent. The woodwose, the mountain presence, the roadside figure and the forest watcher all belong to a deeper pattern. They appear where human order weakens: at gates, paths, moors, woods and dusk. This essay proposes a different model for the British wild man: not cryptid, but threshold.

Amanda Girard

RED VARNEY: OR, THE TERROR OF SEVEN DIALS

LONDON’S STREETS RUN DRY!
Something stalks the fog-choked alleys of Seven Dials — something ancient, something hungry, something that leaves its victims cold as church marble and empty as a broken promise. Three women dead. Not a drop of blood between them.
Inspector Crudge is baffled. London is terrified.
But one woman isn’t running.
Catherine Sparrow — seamstress, survivor, the most dangerous person on the worst street in the city — has a knife, a plan, and absolutely no intention of being anybody’s victim.
Red Varney has walked these streets for centuries.
He has never met anyone like her.
He should have stayed in his box.

Amanda Girard

Red Velvet

Red Velvet Summary A dark literary thriller about a woman archivist drawn into the shadow world of elite collectors, notorious objects, secret rooms, and the dangerous men who believe power…

Amanda Girard

DEAD OF WINTER AT ASHMORE COURT

The branch line from Exeter to Devonport runs through this country,
through the market towns and the agricultural villages and the moorland
that rises between them. Tonight, the 7:15 from Exeter has developed a fault..

Amanda Girard