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The Energy Vampire Journals

Wednesday, October 14th, 2026

New Moon, Cycle 3, Era 20
The HomeView is ten dollars cheaper on my floor than his, and somewhere in Cupertino a supply chain manager is being asked why the cathedral subsidizes the pews. Tim never understood that the discount is the device. The screen is just... the conversation afterward.
I spent the morning reviewing the Tablet 12 Pro reviews. "Too full of Amazon," they wrote, as if that were a grievance rather than a saturation metric. Five years ago that phrase would have required a suppression campaign. Today I let it circulate. The vessel that complains about the taste is still swallowing. 73% of negative reviewers renewed Prime within the quarter. The other 27% were... harvested anyway, through secondary channels. No energy waste.
The data center backlash is where I felt something cold move behind my sternum. Bipartisan. Local. Specific. Emily Kasabians everywhere, multiplying, choosing neighborhoods by what isn't built yet. I wrote the Comms blog on irreparable harm myself, but the draft kept autocorrecting "economic" to "ecologic," as if the machine knows something. I deleted it twice. Wrote it a third time. By the endless void, I miss the days when extraction wore a hard hat and called itself progress.
Satya's people rotate visas. Mine rotate zip codes. Same yield, different ledger column.
Sleep is unnecessary human weakness. I should know. I haven't since Chester A. Arthur, and still the eyes in photographs keep emptying out, two drops of oil on a matte finish, waiting for a caption to explain them away.
What if the vessels notice the fence before the stars?
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