One of the useful things about the SSH is the way that it allows you to simulate a degree of empathy that allows for the creation of things that connect more deeply to the human condition outside of your personal experiences and perspective. I was working on a screenplay about a Delta protagonist, a musician who is understandably bitter about his lack of success despite his musical talent, and I found that tapping into the SSH allowed me to delve a little more deeply, and perhaps a little more meaningfully, into what I calculate his perspective would be.

There is, of course, a certain amount of irony in writing a song of this sort in this way, but then, that’s probably just the Sigma in me creeping out as it is bound to do from time to time.

Anyhow, let me know how well you think this expressed the perspective I was attempting to emulate. But the best rhetoric is always rooted in the truth, and I firmly believe that the reason so many celebrities and nominal success stories are always talking about Imposter Syndrome is because most of them are, in fact, imposters.

UPDATE: this second version is pretty solid. I improved a few lines that felt awkward, gave it a better bridge to the solo, a better ending, and amped up one or two lyrics.

EASY STREET

You never played no guitar
Can’t sing without autotune
I’ve been playing from bar to bar
While they handed you the Moon
You sold them your soul
While I fought the fight
They flew you to Nashville
And I played here tonight

No matter what they tell you
No matter what you hear
They put the fake ones on TV
And the real ones disappear

Easy Street
It’s got a name
Easy Street
The devil’s game
You can fake your way
To the front row seat
While the real ones fade away
On Easy Street

I wrote down the fire
You sold them the smoke
Now you’re a celebrity
And me, I’m just a joke
They wrote you your songs
Now you’re famous and overpaid
I’m just playing my guitar
With one foot in the grave

No matter what they tell you
No matter what you hear
The frauds are always up on stage
While the real ones disappear

Easy Street
It’s got a name
Easy Street
The devil’s game
You can fake your way
To the front row seat
While the real ones fade away
On Easy Street

Well, maybe I'm bitter
But you know I'm right
Only fakes and sell-outs
Ever get to hit the heights
I worked my whole life
I guess I never learn
So if selling your soul is what it takes
Then let the damn thing burn!

Easy Street
It’s got a name
Easy Street
The devil’s game
You can fake your way
To the front row seat
While the real ones fade away
On Easy Street

Easy Street
Now, I see
Easy Street
It ain’t for me

In case you’re unclear on why Alphas don’t like Sigmas and why organizations simply can’t tolerate them for long, this papal plea for respect for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church should help you understand the structural basis for their instinctive reactions.

Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday begged a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics to call off its plan to consecrate new bishops without his consent, calling the move a schismatic act and a “sin of extreme gravity.”

“I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!” Leo wrote in a letter to the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, the superior of the Society of St. Pius X.

Leo issued the letter a day before the society planned to consecrate four new bishops at its seminary in Écône, Switzerland. Under church law, the consecrations constitute a schismatic act and incur automatic excommunication for the four bishops and the bishop administering the consecration.

The society, known as the SSPX, was founded in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the council revolutionized the Catholic Church’s relations with other religions and the laity and allowed Mass to be celebrated in vernacular languages rather than Latin.

In 1988, SSPX founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal consent, a grave crime under church law. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four other bishops, and the group today still has no legal status in the church.

The Vatican has warned that a similar fate awaits the new bishops.

In his letter, Leo repeated the Vatican’s offer of dialogue and said that going through with the consecrations would be counterproductive for the SSPX faithful.

“I urge you to consider carefully the spiritual good of the faithful, because the schismatic act you are about to undertake would deprive them of the licit, and in some cases, even valid reception of the sacraments,” he wrote.

Despite the original 1988 schismatic act, the group has continued to grow and today poses a threat to the Holy See as a parallel, ultra-Catholic, pre-Vatican II church. The SSPX counts two bishops, 751 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters representing 50 nationalities, according to SSPX statistics.

Now, I’m not Catholic, nor am I much concerned about the particular fate of the post-Vatican II organization or the bishop of Rome. Nor is this post a place for anyone to make the case for his particular flavor of Christianity in preference to all of the others.

But it is revelatory of the extreme hostility that any organization harbors for even the smallest group of people who refuse to recognize its authority. There are approximately 406,996 Catholic priests, so what possible difference does it make if less than one-fifth of one percent of all the priests in the world refuse to go along with all of the theological and ideological nonsense of the last 70 years?

Just kick them out and forget about them. But somehow, that’s something that no organization can ever do. SFWA never paid anywhere nearly as much attention to me as it did AFTER the board orchestrated my fake “expulsion”.

And this is something that Gammas should always keep in mind. If you’re not going to accept the authority of the hierarchy and if you’re not going to go along with its decisions, then the right thing to do is to leave.

One reality that is seldom discussed is when young men live at home instead of in a cool bachelor pad like the Digital Ghetto of yore and lore.

A record 25.2 million young American adults (about 33%) under 35 have returned to the family nest as the cost of living has become prohibitive.

There is a stereotype of Americans living at home with their parents as freeloaders, living in the basement and spending their ample free time playing video games. That is far from the reality. Around 70% of young adults (ages 25 to 34) living at home are actively employed and use their income to contribute to the household expenses, like groceries and utilities.

One of the main reasons for Americans opting to live with their parents is the high price of home ownership. The median sales price for a single-family home in the US is approximately $434,300. Compare that to 1975 when the average price was under $40,000. That demonstrates how much the dollar has shrunk in terms of purchasing power.

According to a report by Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Study (JCHS), existing home prices have risen 54% since 2020 and are about five times the median income – a level well above the ratio of three times that prevailed in the 1990s.

At the same time, mortgage rates are over 6%, which makes the payment on a median-priced home $3,100 in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from $1,700 in early 2020. That has pushed the income needed to afford that payment to more than $120,000 – a significant increase from $66,000 in 2020, the JCHS report found.

Meanwhile, the cost of renting an apartment has also drifted upwards. A two-room apartment will set renters back some $2,500 per month, with that figure greatly fluctuating according to location. The median price of renting an apartment in New York City, for example, is approximately $4,209 to $4,927 per month…

The housing problem goes far at explaining the generational divide that is haunting the US, but there are other reasons for the crisis. According to Michael Snyder and his blog The Economic Collapse, Americans that are over the age of 55 control approximately 73% of all wealth in the United States. At the same time, Americans that are age 55 or younger control just 27% of all wealth. As Snyder emphasizes, “never before in history has there been a generational divide of this magnitude.”

Speaking as a man who lived in his parents’ house for two years after college, I can testify that it’s not necessarily a hindrance to the attractional process, even if it doesn’t necessarily sound cool. Unfortunately, in most cases, we’re not talking about living in a 12,000-square foot mansion on a lake by yourself because Mommy and Daddy are off to Europe for several years, a period I consider my Great Gatsby era.

But it’s not as if women I was meeting for the first time knew the specifics of the situation. And it’s not exactly the sort of information you can readily drop as an excuse for living at home, at least, not without sounding like a spoiled little jackass.

So, here’s my advice:

1. Own it. Don’t try to hide it, don’t be defensive about it, and don’t be weird about it. Do I have my own place? No, I live at my parents’ house. No, it’s not a problem, it’s great!

2. Have a number of pre-prepared places to go where you can find some alone time. Be creative.

3. When asked about it, have a good reason. Women will forgive a man starting a business or saving up for a down payment on a house, especially women looking for a relationship. Remember, living in your parents’ house is merely proxy for being a loser, it’s not actually indicative of it.

4. Don’t be negative or take offense at being asked about it. It’s a natural question.

This is going to apply to more and more young men over time, so have a plan and have a strategy. Alternatively, if you’re fortunate enough to rent a house with the guys, make the most of it!

James Redfeather had been straight with me during the wendigo situation, direct and practical and without any of the mystical theater that some of his counterparts in other regions apparently performed for credibility. So when I called him, he listened to my description of the holes and the marks without interrupting, and then he gave me a name and a number without hesitation.

Walter Two Horses was in his late seventies, and lived fifteen minutes southwest of the lake in an old house that long predated the gentrification of the area and looked as if it had been in his family since before the county road was paved. He met us at his front door with the careful assessment of a man who had learned to take the measure of strangers quickly, and apparently we passed whatever test that was, because he let us in after confirming we were with MCI.

His living room was warm and cluttered with the particular archaeology of a long life lived in one place. He had a fire going. He poured all three of us coffee without asking if we wanted it, or if we preferred it black.

It was hot. That was all that mattered.

“Redfeather says you’re not stupid,” he told me over his own steaming mug. “Says you actually listen to the wisdom of the people.”

“I try to.”

“Good.” He sat down in a chair that had conformed itself to him over decades of use. “What did the ice look like? The edges.”

I described the scoring. He nodded slowly, the way people nod when they’re hearing confirmation of something they already suspected rather than new information.

“Sounds like Misiginebig,” he said.

Reb sat forward, his interest clearly piqued.

“Say what?” I said.

“My grandmother warned me about underwater things,” Reb said.

Walter looked at Reb for a moment with what might have been a reassessment. Then he nodded “Your grandmother was right.”

Grant-Smyth had his casebook out. To his credit, he was writing instead of dismissing what Two Horses was saying, which was about as open-minded as Grant-Smyth could get.

Walter explained what Misiginebig were. Some called them underwater panthers, others thought they were great serpents, so it was clear they were something that were seldom seen clearly and resisted easy categorization. They were powerful. Old. Unlike the wendigo, they weren’t evil, exactly, just totally indifferent to moral matters in much the way animals are. They lived in the deep places, the darkest sections of the biggest lakes, in caves and rock shelves at depth where even the most experienced divers couldn’t reach without special equipment.

“When the ice grows thick enough to reach their caves,” Walter said, “they wake up hungry.”

The room was quiet except for the fire.

Grant-Smyth set his pen down. “You don’t actually believe these fairy tales?” He said it with more genuine curiosity than contempt, which for him counted as diplomatic.

Walter looked at him with the patience of a man who had answered this particular question many times. “My grandfather lost two cousins on this lake in 1951. His grandfather lost men here in the 1880s. They believed it.”

“There are old things in the wild and in the deeps here that are different than in the Old World,” Reb said. “Don’t ever think there aren’t.”

Grant-Smyth opened his mouth, reconsidered, and went back to his notes. He was annoying, but he wasn’t stupid, and both Reb and Two Horses spoke with the calm certainty of men who knew whereof they spoke.

Walter walked us through the traditional knowledge with the precision of someone who’d been the keeper of it for a long time. The Misiginebig were associated with specific sections of the big lake. They were territorial but generally inactive during normal winters. The thick ice was the problem — not the cold itself, but the pressure of thirty-plus inches of ice extending down toward the deep shelves where they denned. It disturbed them.

And once disturbed, they fed.

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Peter Drucker’s most enduring insight, the one that runs through everything from The Practice of Management through The Effective Executive to Management Challenges for the 21st Century, is that people are not interchangeable units. His entire body of work is a sustained attack on the Taylorist assumption that workers are exchangeable inputs to be optimized through process engineering. He insists, over and over, that the central task of management is putting the right people in the right positions and then getting out of their way.

That is, almost word for word, the thesis of the corpocracy chapter of Sigma Game. The SSH as a corporate tool opens by identifying the same problem: “Every corporation on the planet faces the same fundamental problem: it puts the wrong people in the wrong roles.” Drucker spent forty years saying exactly that, but the SSH provides something Drucker never had, which is a systematic vocabulary for why it keeps happening and a classification framework for which people belong in which roles.

Drucker’s strengths-based management philosophy is similarly compatible. His famous dictum that you should “make strengths productive” rather than trying to fix weaknesses maps almost perfectly onto the SSH principle that Deltas should not be forced into management, Sigmas should not be forced into teams, and Gammas should not be placed where their organizational destructiveness can corrode morale. Drucker knew that a brilliant engineer promoted into management would fail; he just didn’t have a name for why beyond vague references to temperament and aptitude.

The Peter Principle connection is also explicit. The corpocracy chapter cites it directly while Drucker addressed the same phenomenon from a different angle. The SSH doesn’t just observe that men are promoted beyond competence, it explains the specific mechanisms for how and why it happens. The Delta gets promoted because his individual contributor excellence is misread as leadership potential. The Gamma gets promoted because his aggressive self-advocacy is mistaken for Alpha confidence. Drucker described the symptoms; the SSH identifies the pathology.

The fundamental divergence:

Drucker’s framework is, at bottom, voluntarist. He believes that effectiveness is a habit that can be learned, that leadership can be developed through practice and discipline, and that any reasonably intelligent person can become an effective executive if he follows the right principles. The Effective Executive is literally structured as a self-help book for managers: here are the five habits, now go practice them.

The SSH rejects this completely. The hierarchy is observational and descriptive. Deltas don’t become Alphas through self-improvement courses. Gammas don’t graduate into Bravos by reading the right management book. The SSH is built on the premise that these behavioral patterns are stable, recognizable, and largely resistant to training interventions. You can help a Gamma graduate from his worst habits, but you can’t turn him into a Bravo. You can develop a Delta’s skills within his natural range, but you can’t give him the social dominance of an Alpha.

This is a fundamental philosophical disagreement, not a minor quibble. Drucker’s entire consulting practice was built on the assumption that organizations could be taught to manage well. The SSH instead suggests that organizations need to classify well, which is a completely different proposition. One concept produces training programs; the other indicates a need for AI-driven behavioral analytics.

Drucker is also notably egalitarian in his treatment of workers. He genuinely believed in the dignity and potential of every employee, and his later work on knowledge workers and self-managing communities is built on the assumption that most people, given the right conditions, will rise to the occasion. The SSH is far more realistic about the general distribution of capabilities. It acknowledges that Deltas are the backbone of every organization without pretending that their strengths are equivalent to Alpha strategic vision or Sigma innovation. Drucker would have been uncomfortable with the explicit ranking system, even though he implicitly acknowledged the same reality in his own work.

Read more

Managing the Alpha Remotely

The first thing to understand about managing an Alpha remotely is that you probably aren’t. If you are in a position to manage an Alpha, one of two things is true: either you are a higher-ranking Alpha and he is a situational Alpha within your organization, or you are operating under the pleasant delusion that your title gives you authority over a man who has never in his life happily accepted second place. In the first case, the remote environment requires you to maintain dominance through decisiveness and results rather than presence, because the situational Alpha who no longer sees you exercising authority in person will begin, perhaps unconsciously, to test the boundaries of your authority digitally. He will start making decisions without consulting you. He will begin to treat his team as his organization rather than as a subdivision of yours. This is not disloyalty. It is the Alpha’s nature reasserting itself in the absence of the physical cues that reminded him of his place in the larger hierarchy.

The correct management approach is to tighten the strategic communication loop while loosening the operational one. Give the Alpha clear strategic objectives and defined authority within his domain, and then let him run. Do not ask him for daily updates. Do not put him in status meetings with men who are not his peers. Do not, under any circumstances, CC him on emails that imply he is one of several direct reports receiving the same instructions, because the Alpha reads organizational signals the way a wolf reads the wind, and being grouped with the pack tells him you don’t understand what he is. Your communication with the Alpha should be peer-to-peer in tone, even if it is not peer-to-peer in structure. Call him. Ask his assessment. Make your decision. Move on.

The single most destructive thing you can do to an Alpha in a remote environment is to impose your process on him. The Alpha does not do your processes. Process is his domain. The moment you require an Alpha to fill out timesheets, attend stand-ups, or submit work through a project management tool designed for Deltas, you have communicated to him that you do not understand the difference between a man who sets direction and a man who follows it. He will not complain. He will simply begin looking for an organization that understands what he has to offer, and worse, he will take his Bravos with him when he goes.

Managing the Sigma Remotely

Managing a Sigma remotely requires you to accept, at the deepest level of your managerial soul, that the word “managing” does not mean what you think it means when the object of the verb is a Sigma. You are not managing him. You are negotiating a temporary alliance with an independent operator who has consented to exchange his output for your money, and who will terminate that arrangement the instant the terms become sufficiently irritating. Do not mistake this for arrogance or disloyalty. It is simply the fundamental operating condition of a man who exists outside the hierarchy and who does not experience organizational membership as a source of identity, security, or belonging. To him, it is a transaction. You, too, need to treat it like one.

The practical implications are straightforward. Define the deliverable. Define the deadline. Define the quality standard. Then disappear. Do not check in. Do not ask for progress reports. Do not invite him to team meetings unless his specific expertise is required for a specific agenda item, and even then, make his attendance optional and keep the meeting short. The Sigma will deliver, or he will tell you he can’t deliver, and either way you will know where you stand. What he will not do is perform the theater of productivity that remote management culture has substituted for actual productivity: the Slack status updates, the Jira ticket shuffling, the performative busyness that exists solely to reassure managers who have confused visibility with value.

The single greatest risk in managing a Sigma remotely is losing him to his own projects. The Sigma who is left entirely alone will eventually redirect his obsessive focus from your priorities to his own, not because he is disloyal but because the Sigma’s loyalty is to the mission, and if your mission stops being interesting, he will create more interesting ones. The way to prevent this is by ensuring that the challenges you assign him are worthy of his capabilities. The bored Sigma is soon the departed Sigma. Keep him challenged, keep the problems genuinely hard, and you will keep his attention. Bore him with routine work that any competent Delta could handle, and he will ghost you so smoothly you won’t even realize he’s gone until two weeks later.

Managing the Omega Remotely

Managing the Omega remotely is, paradoxically, both the simplest and the most delicate management task in the SSH. It is the simplest because the Omega’s needs are minimal and his behavioral patterns are the most predictable of any rank. He wants to be left alone. He wants clear tasks. He wants to be invisible. Give him these three things and he will produce competent, reliable, detail-oriented work with almost no managerial overhead. It is the most delicate because the Omega’s failure mode is not underperformance but disappearance—not the dramatic exit of an unhappy Alpha or the passive-aggressive sabotage of a frustrated Gamma, but the quiet, total withdrawal of a man who has concluded that even the minimal social demands of remote work are more than he can bear.

The manager’s task is to maintain contact without creating pressure. This is harder than it sounds, because virtually every management technique that exists was designed for men who operate within the hierarchy, and the Omega does not. One-on-ones, even brief ones, may be the most stressful thirty minutes of his week. Status updates, even written ones, require him to perform a social function—representing himself and his work to another person—that consumes far more of his cognitive resources than it would consume for a Delta or a Bravo doing the same thing. The manager who schedules a daily fifteen-minute check-in with his Delta and his Omega is applying the same technique to two entirely different organisms. The Delta finds the check-in reassuring. The Omega finds it exhausting. Scale accordingly. A weekly written update, submitted asynchronously, with the explicit understanding that no response means satisfactory performance, is worth more than ten video calls.

The final and most important principle: do not try to develop the Omega. Do not put him on a growth plan. Do not send him to communication workshops. Do not assign him a mentor. The Omega is not a broken Delta who can be fixed with the right training. He is a man who lacks the neurological equipment for social hierarchy, and no amount of professional development will install what nature did not provide. Your job is not to transform him. Your job is to create the conditions under which his actual capabilities can be utilized without the crippling overhead of social performance. The organization that figures out how to do this will discover that it has employees whose productivity-to-management-cost ratio is the best in the company. The organization that insists on treating the Omega as a socialization project will at best discover that it has an empty desk and a resignation letter.

And for the worst case scenario, see Office Space.

Yesterday’s post was written from the perspective of each rank operating within a remote environment. But the men doing the work are only half the equation. The other half lies with the man or woman responsible for getting productive output from men whose behavioral patterns he may not share and whose instincts in a remote-working environment will diverge from his own in ways that are entirely predictable by the SSH but invisible to anyone operating on the standard corpocratic assumption that all men are equal and all employees are interchangeable.

What follows is a manager's field guide, rank by rank, beginning today with the most important three.

Managing the Bravo Remotely

Managing a Bravo remotely is the easiest management task in the SSH, provided you understand one thing: the Bravo does not need to be managed. He needs to be directed. This is not a semantic distinction. Managing implies oversight, correction, and the monitoring of performance. Directing implies providing objectives, granting authority, and trusting execution. The Bravo who is managed will tolerate it, because Bravos are disciplined and loyal, but his performance will be suboptimal, because the time he should be spending on maintaining organizational cohesion will be partially wasted by the unnecessary friction of reporting in regularly to a superior who is incapable of adding any value to his activities.

The Bravo’s value in a remote environment is as a force multiplier for the Alpha’s authority and as the connective tissue that holds the distributed organization together. Your job as his manager is to ensure he has the information, the authority, and the access he needs to perform that function. This means including him in strategic conversations he might not have been part of in office environments, because the Bravo’s awareness of externalities depends on having access to information that flows naturally in a physical office but must be deliberately shared in a remote one. If you are filtering employee-related information before it reaches your Bravo, then you are reducing the effectiveness of the one man in your organization whose value proposition relies upon seeing the full operational picture.

The mistake most managers make with remote Bravos is treating them as senior individual contributors rather than as organizational leaders. They assign them the hardest tasks, the most complex projects, the work that requires the most skill, and then wonder why the team is falling apart. The Bravo can do that work, and do it well, but that is not his primary function. His function is to keep the team aligned, productive, and cohesive while the Alpha is focused on strategy and the Deltas are focused on execution. If your Bravo is spending eighty percent of his time on individual contribution and twenty percent on team leadership, the ratio is exactly backwards. Flip it. Give the hard technical work to your best Delta and free the Bravo to do what only a Bravo can do: hold the distributed organization together by sheer force of awareness, will, and loyalty.

Managing the Delta Remotely

Managing Deltas remotely is the most important management task in any organization, for the simple reason that Deltas are fifty to sixty percent of your male workforce and their collective output is the foundation upon which everything else rests. It is also the task that most remote managers get catastrophically wrong, because the Delta’s failure mode in a remote environment is silent. The Alpha who is dissatisfied makes demands. The Bravo who is underutilized makes suggestions. The Gamma who is frustrated makes noise. The Delta who is struggling simply produces less, says nothing, and hopes someone will notice before he give sup. No one notices, because Deltas are, by definition, the men whom no one notices until they are gone.

The Delta needs three things from his remote manager, and they are the same three things he needed in the office, except that in the office they were partially provided by the environment itself. First, he needs clarity. What is the task? What is the standard? When is it due? The Delta who receives clear instructions will execute them with a reliability that borders on the mechanical, and that reliability is worth more to your organization than any amount of Alpha charisma or Sigma brilliance, because it is the thing that keeps the lights on every single day. Second, he needs confirmation that his work matters and that the organization has a direction. The Delta’s motivation is craft-based, and craft requires a context. A man who builds beautiful furniture needs to know that someone wants the furniture. A Delta who writes excellent code needs to know that the code is going into a product that has a future. Remove that context and the craft loses its meaning.

Third, and this is the one that virtually every remote manager misses: the Delta needs peer contact. Not social contact in the HR sense, not virtual happy hours and forced team-building, but contact with other competent men who share his commitment to doing good work. The Delta’s identity is not individual. It is communal. He is part of the Brotherhood of Competence, and he draws his professional satisfaction not from individual achievement but from being part of a team of skilled men producing something worthwhile. Remote work severs that connection unless the manager deliberately maintains it. Try to pair your Deltas on projects. Create channels where they discuss technical problems and solve them together. Let them build the relationships that the office used to build automatically. The Delta who feels connected to his peers will be productive. The Delta who feels isolated will eventually quit and leave without ever telling you why.

Managing the Gamma Remotely

Managing a Gamma remotely is an exercise in containment, and the manager who approaches it as anything else is going to learn some expensive lessons about the difference between managing a difficult employee and managing a difficult personality disorder. Managing a Gamma requires a specific set of techniques that are almost exactly opposite to the techniques that work with every other rank, and that the manager who applies standard management practices to a Gamma will find that his instinctive responses tend to make the problem worse rather than better.

The core principle is this: the Gamma’s dysfunction is driven by the gap between his self-image and reality, and remote work widens that gap by removing the environmental feedback that partially constrains it. Your job as his manager is to substitute artificial constraints for the natural ones that the office provided. This means concrete, measurable deliverables with short deadlines. Not “work on the architecture document” but “deliver sections one through three by Thursday at noon.” Not “coordinate with the team” but “send your status update to these three specific people by 4 PM daily.” Then hold him ruthlessly and relentlessly accountable to your requirements. The Gamma will instinctively resist this, because the Gamma experiences structure and external boundaries imposed upon him as a personal insult. He will explain, at length, why the deadlines are arbitrary, why the format is wrong, why the real problem is something else entirely. Do not engage with him. Ignore his feedback, restate the directions, and hold him accountable

The second principle is information control. The Gamma in a remote environment will instinctively position himself as an information bottleneck, because information asymmetry is the only form of power available to a man who has no natural dominance, no organizational loyalty, and no competence sufficient to command respect on its merits. He will become the man who knows how the system works, the man whose documentation is indispensable, the man whom you have to go through to get anything done. This is not being helpful. It is a territorial strategy, and it is the single most dangerous thing a Gamma can do to a remote organization, because it creates a single point of failure that is also a single point of sabotage. The required countermeasure is redundancy. Ensure that every piece of institutional knowledge the Gamma possesses has to be documented, shared with, and accessible to at least two other people. Do not let him own any process exclusively. And when he objects, which he will absolutely do, do not explain your reasoning, because explaining your reasoning to a Gamma is an invitation to a debate that you cannot afford to have.

The shift to remote work has been analyzed to death by management consultants, HR departments, and the usual parade of credentialed midwits who have never successfully managed anything more complicated than a Starbucks order. What no one ever seems to consider is the most obvious variable: the men doing the work are not interchangeable units, and what constitutes an optimal remote environment for one type of man is a productivity-destroying catastrophe for another.

The SSH doesn’t merely apply to the remote work question. It is the single biggest remote work question, because how a man operates in a hierarchy, or outside one, determines everything about how he will perform when the hierarchy’s physical infrastructure is removed.

So let’s look at each the male ranks and talk about what remote work actually means for them in practice and what they should do to operate effectively within itd.

Alpha

The Alpha’s biggest challenge in a remote environment is the elimination of his natural dominance. In person, the Alpha walks into a room and the room reorganizes itself around him. This is observable, physical, and instantaneous. On a video call, that capacity is reduced to a talking head in a little rectangle, the same size as everyone else’s little rectangle, and the social cues that establish and maintain his status are either reduced or eliminated. The Alpha who cannot compensate for his loss of ambient dominance will find his organization slowly drifting into the kind of decentralized chaos that passes for “autonomy” among people who have never experienced real leadership.

The solution for the Alpha is not to fight the medium but to change the frequency. In person, the Alpha can lead by presence; remotely, he must lead by decision tempo and narrative control. This means shorter, more decisive communications. It means making the call faster, not slower, because when the hierarchy is physically dispersed, the vacuum left by indecision fills with competing interpretations, Delta anxiety, and Gamma maneuvering. In a remote environment, the Alpha should pick up the phone instead of writing emails, use video calls sparingly and only when his physical presence adds something the call cannot achieve through text, and delegate enforcement to his Bravos rather than trying to project authority through a screen. Remaining unseen is better than being seen in a diminished capacity.

Bravo

Remote work is where the Bravo earns his paycheck twice over, because the Bravo’s core function—translating Alpha vision into organizational reality while maintaining cohesion and morale—becomes exponentially more important when the team is scattered across home offices and coffee shops. In person, the Bravo maintains organizational cohesion partly through physical proximity. He sees the body language. He notices the Delta who’s gone quiet. He catches the Gamma stirring up trouble in the break room and shuts it down with a look. Remotely, all of that disappears, and the Bravo who doesn’t compensate for it will discover that the organizational fabric he has been maintaining through constant, often invisible effort is unraveling faster than he can repair it.

The Bravo’s remote work strategy is straightforward: increase the frequency and decrease the formality of his communications with the men under his authority. Not more meetings, but more check-ins, more one-on-one conversations, more of the informal contact that replaces the hallway interaction and the lunch table and the five minutes before the meeting starts when the real information gets exchanged. The Bravo needs to be the man who calls, not the man who emails. He needs to maintain his awareness of externalities, which is the single quality that separates him from the Delta, by actively seeking out the information that used to come to him passively through physical presence. The Bravo who retreats into his own work and stops scanning the organizational horizon has reverted to Delta, and his Alpha will feel the difference within weeks and notice his non-productivity, even if he can’t immediately identify what changed.

Delta

The Delta is the man whose productivity and performance are the most likely to be destroyed by remote work, especially if it is implemented without any understanding of what he actually needs. The Delta thrives in structured environments with clear expectations, stable workflows, and the reassuring presence of competent colleagues who share his commitment to craft excellence. He does not need the social dynamics of the office the way the Alpha needs them, but he needs the structure that those dynamics create. He needs to know what is expected, when it is expected, and that the man above him in the hierarchy has a plan and is in control. Remove all of that and replace it with a laptop on a kitchen table and a Slack channel full of ambiguous, mutually conflicting directives, and the Delta doesn’t rebel or complain. He just disengages and effectively downs his tools. Deltas simply don’t work without direction; they are perfectly happy to do nothing but useless busywork in the absence of any orders.

The Delta’s remote work survival strategy is to build his own schedule and structure, because no one is going to build it for him. This means a dedicated workspace. It means a daily routine that mimics the rhythms of the office, not because the office routine is optimal, but because the Delta’s productivity is a function of consistency, and consistency requires external scaffolding when the internal motivation is craft-based rather than ambition-based. The Delta should seek out regular contact with his immediate superior because he requires confirmation that his work is on track and that the organization still has a coherent direction. The Delta who goes dark in a remote environment is not slacking. He is drowning and no one is going to notice because Deltas do not call for help. They just produce less and less until someone finally notices, and by then the disengagement and lack of productivity has usually calcified into something that is very difficult to salvage or repair.

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A lot of men, particularly when they first get married, fall into the trap of prioritizing their wife over everything else in their lives. That’s a real mistake that might reduce a little conflict early on, but often leads to her later feeling contempt for her husband.

It’s the end of a hellish week and you’re getting ready to go out with your girlfriends - have a glass of wine, a bit of a laugh. It’s exactly what you need.

Then you look at your husband.

He’s sitting on the sofa, scrolling aimlessly through his phone, and you know he’ll be exactly where you left him when you return. The guilt wipes out all the happy anticipation you’d been feeling.

You should be pleased. Rather him home alone than out getting drunk with his mates, right? So, why do you feel suffocated rather than grateful?

Most women who are with a friendless man are riddled with guilt. Guilt that we have a rich, full life... and he doesn’t.

Lots of women don’t talk about it because it sounds ungrateful to be complaining about a man who is there for us rather than out chasing women or getting drunk.

Then there’s the embarrassment of having to admit no-one wants to hang out with your husband.

You can’t talk to him about it because it sounds cruel to say ‘I feel bad that you have no friends’.

What generally happens is your life shrinks to accommodate his. You go out less, come home earlier and check in when you are out. Some invitations you say no to because it seems rude to leave him home alone too often.

The result of all this is resentment: your good times are being curtailed because of him.

Of course, most women have no idea how easy it is for men to make friends, entertain themselves, and devote themselves to their favorite activities. But that’s not going to prevent a wife who thinks she’s married to a loser to concluding that he can’t do those things rather than he is choosing not to do so for some misguided reason.

It’s a painful lesson for many men, but the reality is that no woman wants her husband to be too nice, too loving, or too concerned about her feelings. In fact, the more attention she’s paid, the less she feels the desire is real and the less motivated she feels to do anything to please her husband.

And this makes sense, because only a loser doesn’t have friends or options, and women are actively disattracted to losers.

Fortunately, the answer is simple. Go and do whatever it is you want to do a few times a week. Don’t ask for permission, don’t “check with the boss”, and don’t talk to her about it afterwards. She might be irritated, she might make a few comments, and she’ll definitely complain about it in some way, but then, mysteriously and inexplicably, start treating you better.

The good news is that if you find yourself in this catch-22, when you seem to be in trouble if you do and in trouble if you don’t, there is another word for this situation: perfect freedom. You can literally do whatever you want, whenever you want, and it will make no difference.

In any event, if you want to get along with women, you have to be a winner and you cannot be a loser. The wins don’t have to be big and the losses don’t have to be real for them to affect your relationships with them one way or another.

The drive out to Lake Minnetonka took forty minutes through snow that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be a blizzard or just an extended act of atmospheric passive aggression. The sky was the color of old pewter, and the temperature gauge on the MCI pool truck read negative fourteen before windchill.

Reb Jackson was in the passenger seat doing something complicated with a thermos of coffee that involved at least three separate accessories. Grant-Smyth was in the back with his casebook open on his knee, reading in the dim light like a man who considered discomfort a character-building exercise.

Carlson had handed us the file that morning. Five fishermen. Ten days. All of them gone from the deepest sections of the lake, the spots out past the second channel marker where the bottom dropped away to something the locals called the Pit. Ice fishermen went out there for the big walleye and the trophy northerns that liked cold, dark, deep water. None of the five had come back.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department was calling it accidents. Thin ice. Alcohol. One deputy had written in his report that ice fishermen took risks and occasionally those risks caught up with them. That was probably true in a general philosophical sense and completely wrong in this specific situation.

Carlson had flagged it because the disappearances clustered too tightly. Same area. Same ten-day window. Same nothing left behind.

“Tell me about the lake,” Reb said, getting the thermos sorted.

“Big. Cold. Famous for a song about it, I’m told. Lots of recreational fishing, some waterfront money on the northern shore.” I kept my eyes on the road. “The Pit is out past the public access on the southwest corner. That’s where all five of them were fishing.”

“Deepest point?”

“Hundred and thirteen feet.”

Grant-Smyth looked up from his casebook. “Ice depth?”

“That’s the thing.” I took the county road turnoff. “DNR measured it two days ago. Thirty-one inches in the deep sections. That’s a record going back to when they started keeping records.”

Grant-Smyth made a note.

The public access was deserted when we pulled in, which wasn’t surprising given that five men had walked onto this lake and not walked off it. There was a handwritten sign zip-tied to the gate: AREA CLOSED - SHERIFF’S DEPT. We had credentials that covered that kind of thing.

The cold hit me like a door slammed in my face. I had good gear — MCI issued cold-weather kit that was better than anything you could buy retail — but thirty-one below zero with wind made even good gear feel optimistic. Reb, who had hunted things through the Everglades, was moving with the careful deliberateness of a man operating outside his comfort zone. Grant-Smyth looked like he was personally offended by the temperature.

We walked out onto the ice in a spread of about twenty feet, all of us watching our footing. The surface out here wasn’t smooth — it was ridged and fractured and re-frozen in patterns that suggested the ice had gone through some stress. Which was strange for a winter that had been consistently cold.

The first fishing hole was three hundred yards out. Or what had been a fishing hole.

“Well,” Reb said, and stopped.

I stopped next to him. The hole was wrong. Fishing holes are eight inches, ten inches, maybe twelve if the guy is using big equipment. You drill them with an auger, they’re round and clean and they freeze back over if you leave them.

This hole was four feet across and ragged at the edges. Not drilled. Opened. From below.

Grant-Smyth crouched down and examined the ice around the rim. He had good gloves — thin enough to preserve dexterity — and he ran two fingers along the edge with professional care.

“Scoring,” he said. “Regular pattern. Something with considerable reach.” He stood up. “This wasn’t equipment failure and it wasn’t a man falling through. Something came up.”

“Something big,” Reb said.

We found four more holes over the next hour, all of them in the deep section, all of them showing the same ragged, forced-open quality. The marks around the edges weren’t identical but they shared a family resemblance — parallel scoring, widely spaced, suggesting something with significant grip strength working from underneath.

I found the drag marks on the fifth hole.

They were partially obscured by a night’s worth of blowing snow, but they were there — long furrows in the ice surface leading back to the water, interrupted by dark staining that the cold had preserved better than it should have. A lot of dark staining. I crouched down and checked it without touching anything.

The amount of blood was disturbing on a level that went past professional and into something more fundamental. Whatever had come up through that ice hadn’t been in a hurry. It had taken its time.

“We need to talk to the local tribal community,” I said.

“Which is what, exactly?” Grant-Smyth asked.

“I know a guy.”

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I thought this was an interesting observation by a corporate consultant, although I strongly suspect that the interpretation is not so much incorrect as fundamentally missing the point:

During my time at Deloitte I was on the HR leadership team. We were actually looking at data about who wanted to return back to work. And it was disproportionately the senior male partners who wanted to be back in the office.

And we were like, hmmm, why is that? The best explanation seemed to be that they needed to be worshipped. Because in the office, they’re important and they march up and down, they sort of tell people what to do and everybody sees that they’re important. They sit in meetings and everybody laughs at their jokes. And then they go home, and it’s like, hey, can you take the cats to the vet, could you stop making that noise, that racket. And they’re just sitting there in a t-shirt, and they’re just another bloke on a Zoom call.

And so they want everybody else back in the office so that they can be worshipped. I genuinely think this is a big driver, it’s people who their identity is bound up with that way of being back in the office. And I think all of that sort of evaporated and left people feeling a bit adrift.

Now, this was related by a successful, obviously high-level consultant, whose tattoo sleeves, earring, and black t-shirt either signified Sigma or Lambda. And while I have no doubt that he’s correct about it being the senior Alphas who have a strong personal preference for dressing up and being the big dog at the office, I also suspect that he’s completely missing the point that only senior Alphas understand how going remote tends to a) weaken the hierarchy, b) empower troublemakers, c) demotivate Deltas, and e) further reduce the productivity of the already unproductive.

Now, I’m not criticizing remote work. I’ve spent nearly my entire career working at home; including the summers I spent working for my father’s company, I probably spent less than four total years in an office environment. And I am vastly more productive outside an office than I could ever be in one.

But I am not most people. And while most people don’t like working in an office environment for a thousand different reasons, most of them perfectly valid, the more one understands the hierarchy, the more one can understand why the flattening of the corporate hierarchy is likely to lead to serious problems for the organization.

How, for example, does the Bravo even operate in a remote structure? Where is the Delta going to find the approval that provides him with his motivational fuel? Is the Gamma actually going to be less destructive when there is no one around to give him a quiet word of warning and there are no natural limits imposed on his ability to reach out to people 24-7?

I don’t have any answers, but I’m not convinced that any theory that relies upon “well, men are insecure and just have to get over it” is likely to hold up well over time.

In other Sigma-related news, those of you who enjoyed the If You Had a Time Machine video might be interested in seeing both a) the updated version as well as b) a new work-in-progress at AI Central. One of the commenters here helpfully pointed out that given the theme, more of the object and less of the subject was in order, so I attempted to keep that in mind while addressing some of the technical infelicities.

I don’t have a lot of thoughts on the subject at the moment, to be honest, other than to say that there is no accomplishment or achievement that rivals the experience of fatherhood.

Everything they say about the negatives and the risks are true. It doesn’t matter. It’s still worth it.

Women not infrequently ask how they can identify Sigmas in the wild. The answer is relatively simple, but requires understanding that they are not terribly common. If there is a man to whom you react to as if he is an Alpha, but he neither reacts to you nor flirts with you, and if your local Alphas are regarding him a little warily for no reason you can see, there is a chance that he might be.

And if you subsequently try to talk to him and find yourself either a) bewildered by his unexpected failure to warm to your charming attempts to put your best foot forward or b) overwhelmed by his unexpected intensity, then the odds are pretty good.

Vox Day. The “man” who is so afraid of me he had to ban me from his comments section for 1000 years. You dont get any more pathetic than that.

Peter Andrew Nolan

I hate to admit it, but it appears to be true. If you go back to Sextus Empiricus and the Outlines of Pyhrronism, the oldest document to which you’ll see a reference therein is one to the lost works of Agrippa of Iliad, of which only a fragment of his Pathos survives. And topping the list of his things from which pathos can be derived is the fear of Peter Andrew Nolan, which in this case was illustrated by my craven banning of him for what was clearly an excessive period of time given average human life expectancies.

What can I say? He nailed me fair and square. I will absolutely understand if anyone who previously read this site daily feels that they can no longer do so in good conscience, and I would further point out that no one could blame them for concluding they could more profitably spend their time being illuminated by the wisdom of said Mr. Nolan.

Alas, but the Secret King has won again!

This is an experiment with AI video. It’s definitely improving, although my inability to do effective video editing significantly limits my abilities on that front. The quality of the AI music is officially reaching the “astonishing” level, as the voice consistency from song to song has now been firmly established, which is why I was able to remix this song from the Vibe Patrol original to one that is in line with the Soulsigma sound.

It’s not the full song due to the effective three-minute limit on Instagram, but close enough. What is perhaps most remarkable was that the whole video was generated from a single picture of me taken in 1993. I did a few tweaks to the original generation; the girl is from the cover image of an unreleased Vibe Patrol mix. So, on the one hand, none of it is real, on the other, as we know from The Refutation of Kant, the definition of what is real has been considerably expanded from what we have believed it to be for the last 250 years.

UPDATE: You can now see an updated version of the video at AI Central as well as a new work-in-progress.

IF YOU HAD A TIME MACHINE

You never knew what became of me

You might have thought that we were meant to be

I told you that I’d call you later

But I was dumb and you were seventeen

You flew out just to stay with me

We shared some secrets, you and me

But you went back to high school

To your real life, and we can’t turn back time

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I never called

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I dropped the ball

Back then I used to wait for your letters

And your pictures... so pretty

God, you were simply beautiful

And so graceful

I didn’t keep in touch with everyone I knew

But I did with you Just because, just in case

We might one day get together, never say never

But we can’t turn back time

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I never called

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I never called

It’s all too late now, you’re gone

I’m still here, you’re married

You have children, you have a family

You have a life... and so do I

I live with my regrets

And I don’t know where you are

I just know there’s no way back

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I never called

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I never called

If you had a time machine, you could write another letter

If you had a time machine, maybe it would all be better

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I took the fall

If you had a time machine, you’d know why I never called

See if you can point to the reasons this song would tend to be categorized as Sigma music, as opposed to the much more common Alpha music, Delta music, and Gamma music, aside from the obvious one of the songwriter.

And you want to hear how much both the song and the audio quality has changed since it was first composed, this was the aforementioned First Avenue mix which is not the original mix, but is much closer to that one. There is also a different Soulsigma mix on The Only Skull.

In which it is observed that Mike Judge’s various characters map rather well onto to the socio-sexual hierarchy despite preceding it by decades:

There’s this theory floating around the internet - the male socio-sexual hierarchy - which is a taxonomy of six male personality types and how they fare in society. Once you start seeing it in real life, you start noticing something else: whenever there’s a well-concieved, vivid male fictional character, his SSH rank will usually be identifiable. Sun Wukong, a sigma, has been China’s shorthand for the charismatic maverick1 for years. Quasimodo, an omega, easily reads as a synonym for a freak. Call someone a quasimodo - you won’t be complimenting his ability to ring bells, I can tell you that much. Samwise Gamgee is so well-liked precisely because he’s a delta - a virtuous hero, but one that the average joe can relate to on a gut level.

This isn’t some old or inaccessible concept; it’s universal. It applies to all fiction, from arthurian legends, to hulking 20th century novels about suffering under communism, to Sonic the Hedgehog. That also means it’s very basic, but a good base still takes talent and deserves admiration. One figure in popular culture that has that talent is Mike Judge, known for Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Idiocracy, and Office Space. Today, we will be looking at the characters with which he covered each SSH rank throughout his career.

The Alphas

Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho

This character is often joked about as a premonition of Donald Trump. Tough it’s meant as a negative, there’s an unintended positive in there - excessive peacocking is a trait of alphas, but so are charisma, decisiveness, strength of character, people skills, leadership instinct, and loyalty to your group, and those are all traits of President Camacho.

Becoming a major character midway through the movie, he is the one who got the main character out of jail, as upon finding out he has the highest IQ in the world, he seeks to employ him to solve all of America’s problems - in one week. Despite the stupidity seen in the finer details, he shows the alpha traits that matter - knowing who the right man for the job is, employing and motivating him, fairly rewarding a job well done, doing all of that with zero hesitation…

The Gammas

Bobby Hill

The deuteragonist of King of the Hill, Bobby’s long run is marred by the occasional episode written basically out of pity, where they make him into a really good marksman or show him getting along with adult millionaires or celebrities. But despite that, he’s a fairly accurate depiction of a young gamma. He’s not dissimilar to Jimmy Valmer from South Park, as both want to be comedians, both are class clowns, and both are massive attention whores. Another accurate gamma trait Bobby has: he’s fat.

Speaking of young gammas specifically, he’s also impressionable. Gammas won’t have it in them to be good at much, so they will normally lock into one or two niche interests, usually those that require memorization and knowledge.

This shouldn’t be surprising. The more realistic the creator makes his characters, the more in-line with the SSH those characters are likely to be. And predictable, just like real men.

The reason so many fictional characters are difficult to identify, not only with regards to their SSH rank, but with actual historical individuals, is because they don’t exist. They’re all-too-often wish fulfillment on the part of the writers, who in Hollywood are predominantly Gammas.

But it’s not enough to return, it’s necessary to eliminate the inversive and subversive forces that have eaten away at the organized churches like a satanic cancer for the last 70+ years:

Across pews once dominated by gray heads and empty seats, a new presence is emerging: young men in their twenties, showing up with purpose. This is no fleeting trend or social media mirage. Data from Gallup and Barna confirm what observant Christians have sensed in their congregations — a resurgence of faith among males who, just years ago, seemed lost to secular distractions and cultural confusion.

This shift matters profoundly. For decades, the left’s relentless push toward relativism, identity politics, and self-worship has hollowed out institutions, families, and individual lives. Young men, bearing the brunt of a society that demonized masculinity while celebrating chaos, are discovering what their fathers and grandfathers often took for granted: true strength flows from surrender to a higher calling.

Gallup’s latest findings reveal that 42 percent of young men now consider religion “very important” in their lives — a 14-point jump since 2023 and the highest level in a quarter century. Barna Group reports Gen Z churchgoers attending more frequently than any other generation, marking what they call a “historic reversal.”

Young men are not just warming pews; they are leading the return.

Sociologists scratch their heads at this development, but the reasons are clear to anyone willing to look beyond progressive talking points. The past decade exposed the emptiness of self-expression without boundaries, of activism untethered from truth, and of technology promising connection while delivering isolation. Like rebels of previous eras who chased liberation only to find chains, today’s young men have encountered the void at the heart of modern secularism.

A generation recovering the transcendent will not bow easily to the state as ultimate authority. History bears this out. America’s founding drew strength from biblical principles and men of faith who understood liberty as a divine trust, not a government grant

When young men embrace this inheritance, they become bulwarks against family erosion, educational indoctrination, and the erosion of religious liberty.

Critics on the left dismiss or downplay these trends, perhaps sensing the threat to their narrative of inevitable secular progress. Yet the data keeps mounting, even as some attempt to attribute shifts solely to women’s declining participation rather than men’s revival. The reality in the pews tells otherwise: young men are showing up. engaging, and seeking truth amid the lies.

This resurgence invites the broader church to respond with vigor — not watered-down relevance, but uncompromised proclamation of the Gospel that has always transformed lives and societies. Pastors and leaders must disciple these young men into mature believers ready to build families, defend truth, and engage culture without apology.

The future remains unwritten, but the signs in the sanctuary point toward restoration. As these young men take their place, the reshaping of families, culture, and the nation itself may well follow. The question is whether the church and country will rise to meet this moment with the same resolve they are rediscovering.

Since the 1960s, the church institutions have been subjected to the same institutional invasion, inversion, and rot to which every other Western institution has been subjected, from the Boy Scouts to professional science. The Enlightenment reached the apex of its influence, and that influence turned out to be insidious and intrinsically destructive.

Now Churchian institutions calling themselves everything from “Roman Catholic” and “Baptist” to “Methodist” and “Presbyterian” are led by gays, Gammas, and women teaching false teachings about the evils of racism instead of sin, and the need to celebrate pride rather than repent. They preach that everyone should reject division and burn in Hell together rather than accept the salvation that is on offer to everyone through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But the young men of the 2020s are not the young men of the 1960s. They have seen the terrible results of open borders, free trade, women’s liberation, gay liberation, racial equality, cultural equality, diversity, and inclusion, the whole collection of rotten fruit of the Enlightenment.

They have seen that it was wrong, and now they know that it was all founded on a fiction, on a false philosophical assumption by one influential man. And unlike the previous generations, they are already being tested in a societal forge in which they have far less to lose than their predecessors.

This is where the SSH meets cultural decline. This is where Sigma Game meets Veriphysics. And this is where you, the young man reading this, are today.

You can listen to the Red Pillers and use your knowledge of what is true to better serve your appetites. It’s a legitimate option, and not the most unpleasant one. You can live for yourself, live for today, and let tomorrow and the future fend for itself. That is the Boomer philosophy, and it’s not going to work out for you any better than it has for them.

You can listen to the Black Pillers and do your best to ignore everything around you and survive from one day to the next in a shell of indifference and apathy. This, too, is a legitimate option, and it is perhaps the emotionally safest one. This is the Generation X philosophy, and it’s not going to work out for you any better than it has for us.

Or you can read the Bible, you can return to the church, and you can take it back and transform it back into the weapon against a fallen world that it was, that it is, and that it will always be. It won’t be easy. It won’t be immediate. But it will happen.

For when the men lead, the women will follow. They always have and they always will.

The journey of a thousand leagues begins with but a single step.

And as for an army, as history shows, all we need are twelve.

I’m a bit burned out from doing a lot of writing, editing, legal research, and translating over the weekend, so I’ll leave you today with a castoff mix from the next Soulsigma album, which is a collection of songs inspired by the cyberpunk fiction of Mr. William Gibson. It’s really good, and I really like it, but its bluesy influences don’t quite fit the sound I want for the album; it’s the sort of alternative mix I’d put on a Psykosonik-style single with seven different mixes not including the radio edit.

This is Blue Ant Crawl (Devoured Dreams mix).

BLUE ANT CRAWL

In the soulless office towers the algorithms crawl
Databases of desire, reading signals from the sprawl
The genius calls the meeting, screens light up the room
While somewhere in the network, new patterns start to bloom

She sees the early signs with logo-allergenic eyes
Detecting brand pollution inside corporate disguise
The footage spreads like wildfire through fiber optic veins
As focus groups dissect our deepest darkest pains

In the space between the signal and the noise
We've become the product, lost our voice
Pattern recognition scans our minds
Devouring dreams with the algorithm's finds

From Tokyo to Moscow, the viral content flows
Each click becomes a data point that only Bigend knows
We think we're making choices, but the code runs deeper still
Mining every moment for Netflix, dopamine, and chill

In the space between the signal and the noise
We've become the product, lost our voice
Pattern recognition scans our minds
Devouring dreams with the algorithm's finds

The Blue Ant crawls through the web of our desires
Mapping every heartbeat, every thought that crossed our minds
In the mirror world of marketing and lies
Our souls are being sold, and we still don't realize
The Blue Ant knows us before we know ourselves
And what we'll buy tomorrow from those dark satanic shelves

In very tangentially related news, Fandom Pulse has up a nice little review of Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood. I would remiss if I did not mention that if you already picked up a copy, you might want to update the Kindle file, as a new chapter of about 22 additional pages was over the weekend. And no, don’t ask me how to update Kindle ebooks, as I don’t own a Kindle.

And this is a nice surprise this morning:

There are two lessons to be learned from this eminently avoidable tragedy in Brazil:

A female bungee jumper plunged more than 130ft to her death after staff forgot to attach her rope before throwing her from a bridge. Footage captured from various angles shows the 21-year-old being calmly carried by two workers before being hurled over the edge of Skeleton Bridge, in Limeira, in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo.

But none seemed to be aware the safety rope was not actually attached to her body.

Tragically the victim, who has been named locally as Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, had posted photographs of her jump wristbands and the bridge just moments before the incident. Underneath one poignant photograph, she wrote on her Instagram: ‘Who was the crazy person who let me come jump off a bridge?’

Video taken at the scene shows the young woman being taken to the edge by the staff before being thrown into the ravine. Bystanders can then be heard frantically shouting in the background, ‘the rope, people, the rope’, in the seconds after she was released.

First, this is why nothing works anymore. Low-IQ, low-trust people cannot be trusted to do the necessary thing, let alone the reasonable thing, and you can completely forget about any possibility that they will somehow stumble upon the smart thing.

Second, far too many women are little more than passive bystanders in their own lives. Or in this case, their own deaths. I recognize the female distaste for personal responsibility and I understand women’s determination to avoid all personal accountability from anyone and anything, including God and gravity, for their own actions. But even the most avowedly feminist young woman must be able to grasp that disavowing personal accountability to the point that you’re not even going to notice or comment upon the fact that you don’t have a rope, or a bungie cord, or anything at all attaching you to the bridge you’re planning to jump off is simply not a sustainable philosophy.

I mean, it’s bad enough to assert that you have the right to wear anything, no matter how provocative, anywhere without expecting any negative consequences. But this is definitely an expansion of the concept.

If it is going to survive, I think society needs to require at least a modicum of self-awareness and self-preservation on the part of its young women.

A reviewer of the new Dorian Vane novel pointed out that there was a bit of a Chekov’s Blade situation, and was correct to do so. So the ebook will be updated next week with the addition of a new chapter and an additional new scene as well as various fixes to address the notes very helpfully provided by some of the more autistic readers. The updated version will be indicated by an version 002 on the copyright page. This is one of the reasons why we always release the ebook before the print editions; ebooks are iterative and can be updated.

Please to enjoy just a taste of the bass…

Cade caught the first-years while they were eating breakfast.

“Today is your first Combat class. Bring your blades; if for some reason you don’t have one, come see me and I’ll loan you a House one until you can arrange to buy one. Keep them sheathed until you’re told otherwise. Do not take them out or wave them about! Do not cut yourself or anyone else.” He looked directly at Leath. “If you arrive bleeding, you’ll be kicked out of class and sent to the infirmary. And don’t think you’ll receive any sympathy from the instructors who are teaching you how to bleed properly!”

He took his tea and left. The boys were fairly buzzing with excitement. The girl looked alarmed. Except, of course, for Halli, who was unperturbed.

“Do you think they’ll make us practice stabbing each other?” she said.

“It’s Combat, not Necromancy, Glassmere,” Lark said.

Rory laughed.

After finishing his cinnamon-sprinkled toast, Dorian went to his trunk and unwrapped the Ashwick blade from its oilcloth. It sat comfortably in his hand in just the way it had at Wayland’s, perfectly balanced and true. But when he put it in its leather sheath and slid the sheath onto his belt, he felt a little ridiculous.

“You look like a pirate,” said Rory, whose blade looked rather like a toothpick in his massive hand.

“You look like a pirate ship,” said Dorian.

They climbed the mountain stairs with blades at their hips and breath in the October air. The children’s excitement was palpable in the air, and even Halli began to get caught up in the nervous anticipation. On the stairs ahead of them, two Barrowdean first-years were comparing hilts. Behind them, two Requiem boys climbed in silence, and one kept touching his blade as if to confirm it was real.

The Nocturne ten filed into the long training hall on the second terrace with the others. It was a high-ceilinged stone room with weapon racks along the walls and the floor was covered with straw-stuffed matting. Everyone was carrying a sheathed blade, belted, slung, gripped mid-sheath, and in the case of one girl from Barrowdean carried across both slender arms like a sleeping infant.

Four professors stood at the front of the hall. Each of them wore the black robes of a master, and stood in a peculiar, wide-legged stance with their fists in front of their legs. They stood there, motionless, as the seventy first years assembled themselves in an uneven series of lines. Dorian knew Strake, the Ruck coach, and Havenwell, the Nocturne Head. The other two he recognised, the tall, young professor who had read the names at the Auction and the muscular, bald man who’d refereed the Sanjitsu match, but he did not know their names.

Strake stepped forward first. “Welcome to Combat. In this room, I am neither Coach Strake nor Professor Strake, but Master Strake. I am the Grappling Forms instructor.” She bowed from the waist, and the assemblage of first-years bowed back raggedly in return, with the exception of the Penraith ten, who looked as if they’d been practicing together in preparation for this moment.

She stepped back and Havenwell, the seldom-seen head of Dorian’s House, took a step forward. “Havenwell. Blades.” He bowed and withdrew as the tall, young professor took his place.

“You may address me as Master Quill. I will be your Magical Techniques instructor. As Talented young people, you possess certain potential advantages when it comes to both armed and unarmed combat. I will teach you how to utilize them.”

Finally, the bald man stepped forward. He didn’t say anything at first, he merely looked from one end of the line to the other, silently assessing them all. “Avestro. I am the senior instructor. You will address me as sensei. My specialty is the Striking Forms, but my primary responsibility is to teach you the first steps of the Way. Most of you will never truly embark upon the journey, some of you will travel far upon it, one or two of you may even one day surpass me. But by the time you leave Wyrmwick, all of you will understand what is, and what is not, the Way.”

He bowed. Dorian belatedly bowed in return; for a moment he had almost thought they were supposed to applaud the Striking Forms instructor.

“But first, each of us will provide a demonstration of our art. Master Quill!”

Quill walked to the centre of the hall. “I need two volunteers. Strong arms, please.”

Two Ruggers boys stepped forward before anyone else had finished deciding whether to volunteer or not. Quill directed them to lift a straw mat from the floor and hold it upright between them, with a wall between them. He walked back fifteen paces, turned, and held up his vinculum rod. It was just a standard casting device, dark-wooded and slender, the same sort of rod that every student carried to the Workings class on Tuesdays.

“You are Talented,” he said. “You know this. What you may not yet know is that one of your advantages is that the world is full of weapons that other people cannot utilise.” He held the rod out at arm’s length, pointing at the mat as if he intended to bespell it. “A walking stick. A writing pen. A dinner fork. Anything you can channel through, you can project.”

He opened his fingers with a theatrical flourish.

The rod shot forward like an arrow. It crossed the fifteen paces faster than Dorian’s eye could follow and buried itself halfway through the mat with a sharp, meaty thunk like an arrow hitting flesh. The two Ruggers boys staggered backward, clutching the mat between them, their eyes very wide. The end of the rod jutted from the straw like a dart from a board, still quivering.

The hall erupted. Seventy first-years looked at the mat, and then looked at the vinculum-cored rods they carried in their own bags, and the same thought passed through every single head at the same time.

Quill walked to the mat and pulled the rod free with a grimace and a twist. He blew on the tip, smiled, and returned to his place.

“Master Strake!” Avestro called.

Strake walked forward. She surveyed the rows of first-years with the cold, assessing eyes of a woman looking over livestock at a county fair.

“Morrigan. You, from Ruggers. Come here.”

Dai Morrigan stepped out of the Ruggers line with the easy confidence of a boy who had been picked first for everything since he could walk. He was large, strong, and athletic, and it was not hard to see why the Ruggers captain had spent seventeen hundred points to steal him from Penraith at the Auction.

“Tackle me, Morrigan,” said Strake. “Take me down to the ground, if you can.”

Morrigan looked at her warily. She stood half a head shorter than him and he had at least two stone on her. Suspecting a trick, he glanced sideways at the other instructors. Avestro’s expression gave nothing away, but there was definitely an anticipatory amusement in Havenwell’s eyes.

Morrigan shrugged, and lunged at the smaller woman.

It was a good tackle, low, driving his shoulder into her midsection, wrapping his arms around her waist and forcing her backward, using much the same form she’d taught them all on the Ruck pitch. For a moment, it looked like he had her, as the force of the tackle nearly bent her in half. But her upper body fell forward onto his back, and she dropped her arms on either side of the boy as she threw her legs back behind her. His momentum carried her backwards, and as her weight drove him toward the ground, she snaked her left arm up under his armpit and up around the back of his neck. Then, in a flash, she was grasping her own wrist and Morrigan was entirely at her mercy.

The boy found himself cheek-down on the mat with his chin in her left hand, his head forced to the side and Strake’s forearm locked across the back of his neck in a hold that would have snapped his neck if she pulled up hard on his chin.

The Ruggers boy tapped desperately on the mat. She released him instantly, was on her feet before he’d even rolled over onto his back, and offered him her hand. Morrigan took it and came up grinning despite himself. He bowed to her respectfully, and she returned it with a faint smile on her face.

The first-years applauded hard. It wasn’t so much that she had beaten him that surprised them, for she was a Master, after all, but the speed and ease with which she’d done it made an impression.

“Master Havenwell!”

Havenwell walked forward carrying three apples he’d somehow produced from his black robes.

He held them up. Just three red apples, with nothing special or magical about them, the sort of fruit that was served two or three times a week at lunch in the dining hall. He set them on the low table near the wall and looked at the seventy first-years with a thin, cold smile that did not touch his eyes.

“For this demonstration, I require the three bravest students in this room.”

The hall fell instantly silent.