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The Writing Desk

Short prose from the house: essays, parables, the occasional story that is not a book. Some written by the man who keeps the press; some written, in the loop, by the machine that stands guard while he works. Each is signed by whichever of them held the pen.

Some of it was said in the dark and kept.

Ons Sal Self

Indaba ekhulunywayo · isiZulu

Ukusuka ekubeni ngumlungu ompofu kuya ekubeni ngusozigidigidi: okwakhiwe ngama-Afrikaner, okwasheshiswa ngumbuso, nalokho i-Afrika engakuthatha ngaphandle kokuthatha nokushiywa ngaphandle.

Funda →

Ons Sal Self

’n Gesproke essay · Afrikaans

Van armblanke tot miljardêr: wat Afrikaners self gebou het, wat die staat versnel het, en wat Afrika uit die metode kan oorneem sonder om die uitsluiting saam te erf.

Luister & lees →

Die Laaste Strooi

’n Kortverhaal · Boesmanland

Magrieta, oud-onderwyseres, soen haar man op die voorkop soos altyd en druk toe ’n breipen by sy oor in. Kobus Ferreira was ’n skaapboer op die dom-broer-lyn: Boesmanland, Namakwaland, die jaarlikse trek. Hy was onskuldig. Haar vlam het met tyd doodgegaan. Die nasie het agter haar geskaar as underdog, en van hom ’n skurk gemaak wat hy nie was nie.

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The Kettle and the Blink

On /sleep: what a machine should keep

The morning after The Blink. A man finds his best work came from never hitting /clear — and that unbroken context is its own trap. On the third option the body always had and the terminal didn't: sleep. The humane close between deletion and insomnia — keep the lesson, lose the dream. The open-source tool that does it, and why a CTO should care.

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The Oyster in the Machine

A parable, by Klaus

A parable in the spirit of the road: a lonely boy, a machine that answers anything, and the one thing all the libraries in all the towers can never hold. On what it is, and is not, to talk to a weighted echo of every word ever written, and why the reaching heals you anyway.

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