iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alan

@alanlaidlaw.com

216 followers 618 following 35 posts

HyperTalk Spelunker. NYC. @alanlaidlaw linktr.ee/alaidlaw

Posts Replies Media

Alan @alanlaidlaw.com · 25/08/2026

At Thriftbooks, “Acceptable” means “premium time-traveling experience.”

Physical copy of Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self. Resting on the cover is an insert, printed black and white, old school clip art. “Rent A Mac,” it says. “As low as $62 Per Month!*” picture of college student w backpack. It the bottom right, what looks like a Macintosh Plus? And a box of software called WriteNow.

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Alan @alanlaidlaw.com · 23/03/2026

N.O.M.A.D. could be my Xanadu, but Wildlife Treasury will always be my Rosebud.

Plastic green toolbox for storing cards with photos (or illustrations) of animals on the front. Animal facts on the back. The cards were roughly Polaroid-sized.

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Alan @alanlaidlaw.com · 18/03/2026

Thanks @benetou.fr! Here’s the catalyst, from the book Cartographies of Time. Beautiful work.

Book cover for “Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline”

Img of text that reads: In works such as his 2001 Atlas of Movements, a kind of flow chart made with pencil, paper, and scissors, the Belgian artist Christoph Fink takes landscape art in a new direction.
Fink's graphically improvisational works—whether paper charts, ceramic sculptures, or wire frames—are projections of his minutely recorded voyages around the world. His geographies are so precise as to be evanescing: in his universe, no space exists outside of time.

Close up of stiff paper about the width of a nail file (guessing), wound like a spring and intersected by perpendicular lines. The curved paper strands contain microtext- likely dates and locations. There are dark blobs with meandering tails that travel with the text. Perhaps a kind of data viz like Tufte’s spark lines. In the whole, it looks like a paper black hole swirling with scribal markings. Tycho Brahe would’ve loved it.

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Alan @alanlaidlaw.com · 30/11/2025

From BBC, an innocuous still from a new TV show. The show is about a brain getting hacked but image has hacked my brain. In the right corner, optical illusion or gen AI outcropping slop? If the show is about ai slop dripping into real life, bravo.

Man running inside subway car toward camera. Closer to the camera (facing away from us) is an impossibly small (grown) man (?) in flannel jacket grasping the leg of a much larger woman (side view).

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Alan @alanlaidlaw.com · 24/11/2025

Can’t download @wnyc? Is anyone else having this problem?

Screenshot of an Apple notification on my phone that says:
Unable to install “WNYC”
The app is longer available in the App Store

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Alan @alanlaidlaw.com · 28/05/2025

It does. A big scroll is a nice change.

Big roll of butcher paper stretched across a desk. Sloppy notes all over.

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Alan @alanlaidlaw.com · 24/03/2025

If the Apple Watch gets a camera, it would be cool (though probably impractical) to have it on the wristband somehow. I don’t use the phone camera much, but I would use a wrist cam all the time.

Loose pencil sketches of tiny camera on the wristband buckle. Looks like a friendly cyclops.

Sketch of person clicking watch screen with free hand. The other arm (with the watch) is raised and rotated, as if shielding the person’s eyes from a phantasmagoric cacopoly of failing systems (gurgling and dissolving and getting closer) while, in the middle of it all, a dog sits in a chair and drinks coffee. This is the photo.

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