You're Almost Through the Door

First, the boring part: Buttondown just sent you a confirmation email. Click the link in it and you’re in. Nothing arrives until you do. If it’s not there in a minute or two, check spam or the Promotions tab, where the algorithm hides things it thinks you didn’t really want.

Now the good part.

Howdy. You just subscribed to Feral Architecture, which means one of two things: something I wrote put a hook in you, or you wandered in by accident and are about to find out what you signed up for. Both are fine. Stay anyway.

Here’s the room you’re standing in.

This is writing that assumes both The Mórrígan and grep are real. You can run a tarot spread and a terminal command in the same afternoon and neither one is the embarrassing hobby. The symbolic and the technical, the witch and the architect, were never supposed to be different people. The world that told you to pick one was wrong, and kind of boring about it.

If you’ve spent years leaving half of yourself at each door, you can stop doing that here. Bring the whole of you. That’s the price of admission and also the entire point.

What Lands in Your Inbox

The essays, when they’re ready. Sometimes a sharp little blade about AI and work and the systems that flatten us; sometimes the long scenic route through tarot, astrology, or what it actually costs to build a life that’s yours. No content-calendar cosplay. No five-tips-to-optimize-your-morning horseshit.

Start Here

Your Architecture Is a Spell You’re Casting on Yourself. Twenty-five years a software architect, and the piece where I stopped pretending that building systems and casting spells are different activities.

Then, if it lands: If the Cosmos Is Alive, So Is Your Algorithm, the same idea followed past the comfortable stopping point.

Want to pick your own way in? Start Here has five entrances, depending on what grabbed you.

The short stuff between essays is on Mastodon and Bluesky. Every essay is in the archive.

Glad you’re here.

Stay feral, folks.

— Matt