iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 22h

This mini-conference I'm at is in a Bavarian Alps hotel attached to a monastery, and I gotta say it's awfully pretty out here.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 30/09/2026

The "play minecraft" thing with America.gov is weird in part because today Google bragged about Gemini powering it, but if you ask Gemini itself to play minecraft, it gives you a decidedly unweird answer.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 30/09/2026

I'm struck by how people keep making arguments against AI that are also arguments against, e.g., hiring a plumber or paying a mechanic to fix your car or using GPS to navigate across town.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 28/09/2026

This whole thread, if you know anything about me, is very funny.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 28/09/2026

Well this is sure to turn Malik Nabers around on my fantasy team.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 28/09/2026

It's important to recognize that if you think Bluesky is nothing but politics, you're missing the vast majority of Bluesky.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 27/09/2026

It's an awesome show, and I'm glad to hear it's making its way to future generations. One of my most prized possessions is an original animation cel from it.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 18/09/2026

One time when I was a kid, my dad needed to do some project involving concrete, and it was before the internet, so you needed to get a book for help. And this is the one he bought.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 18/09/2026

I sometimes imagine a space alien trying to make sense of our world just by looking at trending topics.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 16/09/2026

I remembered this column again today.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 16/09/2026

"It's hollow, just like the moon," he whispered as he handed the ball over.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 16/09/2026

No. No. The whole *point* of the Arkham Horror board game is that you can never hold all the rules in your head, and all attempts to fully figure them out while playing condemn you to madness. It's what makes the game perfect. www.belloflostsouls.net/2026/09/arkh...

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 15/09/2026

This is very cool. I've written a total of 216,000 words on my @leaflet.pub blog. Nifty dashboard from @goose.art here: tangled.org/goose.art/fo...

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 11/09/2026

I also appreciate how many Buddhist texts start with the ancient Indian version of the opening of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 11/09/2026

Thinking about this teaching as I read news about the GOP Midterm Convention and what's getting said by the people there. suttacentral.net/mn139/en/suj...

Saying untrue, false, and pointless things behind someone’s back is a principle beset by pain, harm, stress, and fever, and it is the wrong way. That’s why this is a principle beset by strife. Saying true and correct, but pointless things behind someone’s back is a principle beset by pain, harm, stress, and fever, and it is the wrong way. That’s why this is a principle beset by strife. Saying true, correct, and beneficial things behind someone’s back is a principle free of pain, harm, stress, and fever, and it is the right way. That’s why this is a principle free of strife.

Saying untrue, false, and pointless things in someone’s presence is a principle beset by pain, harm, stress, and fever, and it is the wrong way. That’s why this is a principle beset by strife. Saying true and correct, but pointless things in someone’s presence is a principle beset by pain, harm, stress, and fever, and it is the wrong way. That’s why this is a principle beset by strife. Saying true, correct, and beneficial things in someone’s presence is a principle free of pain, harm, stress, and fever, and it is the right way. That’s why this is a principle free of strife.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 10/09/2026

The front page of the NYT has a story about oil prices at the top, and no story about Trump saying he'll end the war the day after the midterms.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 09/09/2026

You can make strong and moral arguments against much of America's foreign policy over the decades, but to look at this list and then characterize all of these nations at these times as people exercising democracy is just utterly discrediting to the worldview behind it.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 08/09/2026

A lovely new essay about the value of liberal virtue signaling from @sarahskwire.bsky.social. Full thing here: www.liberalism.org/p/bite-by-bi...

Maybe small steps do matter. A political philosophy that is marked by skepticism about grand plans, men of system, and the romance of politics should recognize the importance of small signals that indicate that someone cares, even a little bit, about something we think matters. It’s nonsense for liberals to insist that people refrain from voicing opinions about politics until they can guarantee the kind of massive structural change that we otherwise find so suspicious.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 06/09/2026

I just gave Gemini the URL of the repo, and it then used its agentic browsing in Chrome to crawl it and look at PRs and then summarize what it found.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 05/09/2026

Being ignorant of how a piece of technology works and then jumping from that to concluding the tech is threatening or a scam is remarkably and sadly common.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 26/08/2026

The last bullet in @cdprojektred.com's business philosophy page on their website sounds like a warning.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 23/08/2026

Working on the final editing pass of my book, and here's my core claim, my pitch for liberalism, and it's one that has become even more relevant today than when I first started developing these ideas.

"So here’s my pitch: The practices that make your life better are the same that sustain a liberal society. A liberal society is one where everyone can pursue diverse paths to happiness and where economic and cultural change are constant and inevitable features of the environment. No matter what you do, unless you set out for a cave as a hermit, you will be surrounded by people doing things differently from you. That is what freedom produces. If your response to it is resentment, if you experience others’ happiness as a threat and experience cultural dynamism as something that must be ended, you will be miserable. And that misery will draw you to politics and politicians promising to stop the change and destroy the diversity. Your misery will feed illiberalism. And illiberalism will deepen your misery."

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 22/08/2026

Ugh. After a week or two on top, @pfrazee.com has just muscled his way over me on the trending Standard.site blogs chart.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 22/08/2026

Someone claiming to be Libs of TikTok has set up shop on a non-Bluesky PDS and is leaving comments on Standard.site blogs, including mine, talking about getting around being banned by Bluesky.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 21/08/2026

Okay, maybe she should run for president.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 15/08/2026

I like that if you want to take a break, you can just unpin all the feeds in Bluesky and it'll happily tell you there's nothing to see.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 11/08/2026

This dork somehow managed to spontaneously get a lobe of his lung twisted up and needed surgery to remove it. But he's home now, recovering, with a bunch of staples down his side and a cone on his head, and a vet bill he'll never earn enough to pay me back for.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 10/08/2026

When I was an undergrad, my friend and I made a T-shirt store selling shirts that just said "Idiot" under some historical figure's portrait. That was over 25 years ago, but it still exists on Zazzle. And someone just bought the Johann Gottlieb Fichte one.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 08/08/2026

This is an unconventional way to deliver demands, but sure, why not.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 08/08/2026

It's weird to pretend this kind of behavior is anything other than unprofessional and childish. Hopefully Cousins loses his starting job sooner than later. apnews.com/article/raid...

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 05/08/2026

Note, the edit button has a time limit, so you won't see it on old posts. But on a fresh one, it shows up in the three dots menu.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 04/08/2026

The security and privacy concerns with Boox tablets are so troubling that, frankly, it's probably irresponsible to be recommending them.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 03/08/2026

The glamorous jet-setting life of a published author.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 30/07/2026

Paid memberships and member-only posts are oh-so-close on @leaflet.pub it looks like.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 29/07/2026

Sure. dotcoms are pretty well claimed at this point. (Though my daughter managed to get her firstnamelastname.com just a few weeks ago.) But we're also in an era of *tons* of top level domains beyond com, org, and net. And one or more of those is probably available. E.g.:

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 29/07/2026

This book is the most fun I've read in quite a long time. Blade Runner is my favorite movie and the story here is so well told.

Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 27/07/2026

I'm pretty confident I know people who owned a complete set of these as children.

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Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 27/07/2026

Post a perfect album from the 90s

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