iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Saw @astra.bsky.social and @naomiaklein.bsky.social speak about ‘End Times Fascism’ this evening. Great talk abt how the right uses apocalypse to frame its message, ceding the grounds of life, humanity, and green & growing things. Life, etc, is generally pretty popular, and worth organizing around.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

SOLD: Thirteen Heavens. 8x10, photo & encaustic.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Today and tomorrow at 257 Eglinton Ave W, second floor, 11-4pm, ‘EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES’ Paintings by Nadine Saxton. Works for all budgets. Come through!

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Hey Toronto! My mother, a very talented painter, is hosting an art exhibition this weekend, and you should come see it! Right on the eglinton crosstown, pieces available for all budgets, entertaining fluff written by yours truly. Come through!

Poster for ‘Emotional Landscapes’, an art exhibition by Nadine Saxton. Saturday & Sunday 11-4pm, 257 eglinton ave W, second floor.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

My Linkedin is just dozens of postings like this. When LLMs produce something usable, there's a reason for that: it's someone else's writing. LLMs are best understood as a copyright-laundering service. Labour & intellectual property enter the black box, and emerge freely exploitable.

Linkedin job posting for 'expert' writers to train AI.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Couple hundred folks out in the snow outside the US embassy shouting for an end to the blockade of Cuba. Let Cuba live.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

100+ workers organizing in Toronto tonight, here to show solidarity with #Minneapolis #abolishICE #defundICE #ICEout

Room full of about 100 people gathered around a banner that reads ‘solidarity has no borders’, many hold signs that read ‘abolish ice’

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Procession of Ghosts Across the Rainswept Land

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

If you’re a #writer or other creative looking for a place to work quietly in the heart of #Toronto, the Toronto Writers Centre has just moved into lovely new digs at Bloor & Spadina. 250/mo, 24hr access, no kids, all the damn coffee you can drink. You won’t find a better deal on a desk in this town!

A lovely newly unpacked office space reserved for WRITING and WRITING ALONE. Lovely birch floors, snug cubicles, cosy bookshelves, etc

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Recently finished reading ‘As birds bring forth the sun—and other stories’ by Alistair MacLeod. Kicked my ass. Absolute belter. Total classic. Wall-to-wall. All killer no filler. Had me hooting and hollering. Everything people hate about Can-Lit—which is to say everything good about Can-Lit.

Cover of ‘as birds bring forth the sun’. Image of the bleak, rocky shore of I assume Cape Breton Island.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Just finished reading ‘the visitors’ (‘79) by Clifford Simak. Not unpleasant but not particularly interesting at first, this one turned into an unexpected banger for me in the last quarter.

Cover for ‘the visitors’; a vantablack rectangle swoops over a pair of small human figures standing among the dark pines & golden fields of the American Midwest

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Some art I made for the Lore Book we do quarterly over at the @thewrongstation.bsky.social patreon. I think it's pretty radical, twisted, etc.

Got a skull with two viking swords thrust through its eye sockets, against a background of lily-of-the-valley. Orange, black & green on white.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR YOUNG WRITERS: forget grammar just get good at moving furniture because your coworking space WILL get priced out of its neighbourhood

All of the Toronto Writers’ Centre’s shit piled up in a nice lady’s garage, pending move-in day at the new space

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Very excited to have a story in this collection by @infestedpublishing.bsky.social ! It’s about an angel steering a meteor into the earth. I actually first wrote this one ~17 yrs ago. Back then it was about cosmic injustice. But these days I’m more of an apologist for The Cleansing Power of Fire.

A goat’s head, surrounded by dark rays, tinted with a hellish glow.
‘The cleansing power of fire’

A red portal opens on a dark starburst. ‘The cleansing power of fire’ 21 June 2025

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Playing around with some designs for Wrong Station season 10. Went with a 10-triangle 'Tetractys' device because the roman numeral X has degenerate vibes these days

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Just finished reading: Orsinian tales, by Ursula K. Leguin. Beautiful, sad stories. UKL’s overlooked as a prose stylist; usually she’s pretty unassuming, but here she really lets it rip. Maybe the collection is best understood as a series of oil paintings.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell x the Green Knight Polycrisis Arthuriana. A young knight thinks he’s the next Lancelot. He’s not. He sets off to slay a dragon & fails. He flees through a haunted countryside. Finally the worst happens—he gets to become everything he once wanted to be #2025Pit #A #F

Book cover. Blackline, Aubrey Beardsley style illustration against an ecru background. A cluster of images floating over hills & forests. A black flower; a woman with a sword; a crowned dragon, a wing and pillar, a mournful woman, a steel helmet, an old man gazing out a window at the light, a dogheaded man, a blindfolded man, a young knight lying exhausted with a skull-faced jester whispering in his ear. “Blackflower”.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

Just finished reading: ‘Red Shift’, by Alan Garner. I’m not sure if I liked this book, but it hit me full in the teeth. I remember being confused and unsettled by Garner’s kids books as a kid. They’re hazy in my mind; half-remembered, unsettling. This book felt that way while I was reading it.

Cover for ‘red shift’. a flare of sunlight shines through the silhouette of a tower on a hillside, against a reddening sky

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Just finished reading; Solidarity, by @astra.bsky.social & @lhh.bsky.social This is a really important book, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s about politics and the history of an idea, but it’s a super easy read, and the clear prose lets the clear thinking shine through.

Cover of ‘Solidarity’. On a sky blue background, a murmuration of starlings whirls in a figure eight. Two more prominent birds fly among them, maybe symbolic of how solidarity is a value that reconciles the needs of both the individual & the collective

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Recently finished: The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford. Went in with high expectations—people talk about it like it’s the Velvet Underground of fantasy novels— and there’s some undoubtedly cool stuff in here, but the book never really came together for me.

Cover of ‘The Dragon Waiting’. It’s modern and slick, with some monochrome woodcuts of 15th century warfare in the background.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Just finished ‘THE FEMALE MAN’ by Joanna Russ. A tough, challenging book; defiantly its own thing; extremely fun and funny; goes hard as fuck; prophetic; probably one of the most important books of the 20th century. I think a lot of people would find unreadable. I think everyone should read it.

Cover for the sf masterworks edition of The Female Man. Four feminine figures with the same face whirl about a cluster of planets. They are rendered in pink because the person at Gollancz publishing who chose the cover design probably just read the word ‘feminism’ in the synopsis and said, aight, let’s go with pink I guess

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Just finished reading: MARTIAN CHRONICLES by Ray Bradbury. Loved this book profoundly as a teenager—some parts of it hold up very badly; others extremely well. So clear on a re-read that this is a Book About America; about the excitement of the frontier, but its essential tragedy & evil.

Book cover. Ray Bradbury stares thoughtfully into the distance. Behind him, MARS, and some bats? And a frowning man’s face? And some manner of Orb?

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 25/10/2024

I read a lot of this genre as a kid, and coming back to it has been bittersweet. It’s fun (sea battles kick ass), but it’s a reactionary genre, & neither Aubrey’s mild meritocratic streak or Maturin’s vague liberalism really took the edge off that for me. Maybe I just need to read the next 20 books…

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 05/10/2024

Sometimes this city is a lot less evil than I think.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 04/10/2024

Just finished: Red X by @daviddemchuk.com. Lucid, elegant prose; a charismatic monster; a forthrightness about violence & sex that never feels exploitative. ‘Fun’ doesn’t seem right for a book so thoughtful, frightening & sad, but there’s a joy & energy to the storytelling that propels you forward.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

From the same library & probably donor, another space libertarian parable. So much 20th c. Sci-fi ianticipates trumpism. Tales of local big men shaking off the shackles of centralizing institutions. States rights & the lost cause, with lasers.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

Spotted at the little free library… SPACE KKKOPS. Lots to unpack here. 1) thinly veiled anticommunist moral panic, 2) copaganda on Republican mars, 3) dbl white hetero male leads, one of whom seems to be a reincarnated medieval welsh king. STATUS: didn’t take home b/c I’m scared of Challenging Ideas

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 29/09/2024

Found this in the little free library. Now I am ready to enter—my mid thirties

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 26/09/2024

Recently finished: reread of the Golden Compass. Still exquisite, but now feels so much a product of the ‘90s—last flowering of a liberal optimism destroyed by neoconservatism’s triumph, and by the failures of Obama, Trudeau, etc. Pullman’s prose is superb. Clear water, but blazing fire when needed.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 25/09/2024

Spouse bought this shirt & I’m worried it will give them too much Power in our relationship

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 23/09/2024

Just finished: Catherine Moore’s ‘Jirel of Joiry’ stories. Protofeminist 1930s Sword & Sorcery. Sometimes tough to read in 2024 because prose tastes have changed, & because despite the sword, Jirel’s plots tend to revolve around sexual jeopardy. 1 story in the collection, ‘Hellsgarde’ is excellent.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 20/09/2024

Saw @astra.bsky.social give a talk on Solidarity at the Toronto Library yesterday; my partner and I talked about it the whole way home, feeling more excited about the possibility of a better world than we had in a long time. Really recommend Astra’s work if you’re feeling the pull of despair.

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 20/09/2024

Just finished: The Dwarf. Maybe a perfect book, in that it accomplishes precisely what it sets out to. A really interesting ‘game’ to the text; trying to assess beautifully sketched characters through the dark lens of Piccoline’s gaze. RIP Don Riccardo, Party Boy #1– you died as you lived, partying

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 20/09/2024

Here’s a sketch of one of my beautiful little freaks. Sweet baby

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Alexander Saxton @aewsaxton.bsky.social · 20/09/2024

Cover art for a fantasy novel I’m querying. Proud of the design, very proud of the book. Hazy Arthuriana, dark-but-not-grimdark; it’s about finding moral clarity amidst personal failure & institutional collapse. It also has like twelve to fourteen sick-ass monsters in it

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