The Self-Kin · The Standing Thirds

The Easier Door

Drawn as a Heighway dragon. The hardest shape here, built from the easiest question: fold it in half.

The Local Rule. Answering a simpler question than the one asked. This is a Self-Kin figure: one person, repeating one thing. Everything further out in the catalogue is built by fusing figures like this one together.

Tending. A hard question gets swapped for an easier one more quickly and more often, and the easy answer feels surer..

Fraying. The swap happens less often, so more hard questions are met as asked, slowly and with less ease..

Its Turning. Look. What it builds: substituted questions become visible.

Catalogued in The Self-Kin, alongside every other figure at this scale.

In a Weaving

Tending

You're swapping hard questions for easier ones more often, and the easy answers feel surer.

Fraying

You're swapping less often. More hard questions get met as asked, and more slowly.

Tending is not good news, and Fraying is not bad news — a card describes a pattern already present, never an outcome. How to read the two.

Or follow a thread instead

A Standing Third

Gaming the Terms

Keeping to the letter of an agreement while finding the easy way through it. Creative slack in a bad deal, or its purpose quietly hollowed out.

Part Five — The Standing Thirds

Twelve patterns one person generates alone, each with its Local Rule and both of its poles. Nothing sits underneath them, and every larger figure is built by fusing these.

Part Seven — The Turnings

The Twelve Private Turnings — Self

One per month, kept alone or with whoever's nearest — twelve small occasions, each built to make one Self-Kin's failure mode visible before it hardens.

Part Six — Weavings

The full working deck: fifty-two drawable figures across five kinships, each carrying two readings — plus one figure that's never drawn at all.

Part Five — The Standing Thirds

Nineteen two-person patterns, each one two Self-Kin meeting. Know any two of the three and the third follows, which means changing your own leg changes what the two of you make.