iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

22° @aldebrn.me · 07/10/2026

Oh you did not just abbreviate "Jaguar God of the Underworld" as "JGU" archive.org/details/bloo... "The blood of kings: dynasty and ritual in Maya art" by famed Mayanists Drs Linda Schele & Mary Ellen Miller

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22° @aldebrn.me · 05/10/2026

Was reading about Grace Kelly. The America of the 50s seems like a different country? > "America seemed to pardon her tainted blood, tuning into her televised nuptial Mass in droves despite aversion to the religious spectacle" They saw Irish as "tainted"? And were acverse to religious spectacle…?

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22° @aldebrn.me · 04/10/2026

OMG Dr Stephen Houston starts his lectures on the visuality of Maya writing by citing another artform I love: graffiti This is such a confirmatory moment Writing, in the context of graffiti, is imbued with so much artistry and personality right, and Maya script intensely exudes the same

youtube.com

Stephen D. Houston on Vital Signs: The Visual Cultures of Maya Writing, Part 1

YouTube video by National Gallery of Art Talks

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22° @aldebrn.me · 04/10/2026

Merle Greene Robertson has a bunch of her rubbings of Maya sculpture in two PDFs here and omg these skulls are breathtaking www.precolumbia.org/pari/rubbing...

Rubbing ID: D15323, Merle Greene Robertson's rubbing of the Great Ballcourt at Chichen Itza. There are many shapes and patterns in the rubbing but near the bottom is a huge disc in the middle of this is a skull figure adorned with an elaborate headdress, facing right. It's not quite a skull: it has eye brows and a nose, but it's eye socket and teeth are very skull-like. Its mouth is open, a typical Maya speech bubble (looking like vines) coming out.

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22° @aldebrn.me · 02/10/2026

Oh I cannot with how beautiful Maya script is. Each character is a painting, on stone, on pottery, or in a book. These jaguars are making my soul sing looking at them All from mayaglyphs.org/CWLhtml/BAHL... which collects the various looks of this character pronounced "bahlam", meaning "jaguar" 🐆🐆

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22° @aldebrn.me · 02/10/2026

"in 1562, a Spanish friar named Diego de Landa burned every Maya book he could find" 😶 Words fail

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22° @aldebrn.me · 02/10/2026

"the Coronado expedition made their way out of New Mexico into the Great Plains and were the first Europeans to see these dogs in action. They described the nomad communities as mobile cities, hundreds of people accompanied by thousands of dogs. They said that each family had 20 to 40 dogs each." 🤯

archaeoed.com

S3 E8 Dogs in the Ancient Americas - ArchaeoEd

In this episode I’ll ask the age old question – who’s a good dog? Dogs were man’s best friend in Americas for 1000’s of years, from Alaska to the […]

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22° @aldebrn.me · 01/10/2026

It took me this beautiful post to realize that I’m the same (I am in my forties)

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22° @aldebrn.me · 30/09/2026

Bro (art history professor) took nearly TEN minutes talking Mesoamerican art before he said anything about how beautiful they are and how much he loves them I sort of get it—your job is to lecture, to teach, and it's maybe weird to bring your emotional response to your subject into your lecture?

youtube.com

Lecture 05 Pre-Classic Cultures: Olmecs & Teotihuacan

YouTube video by Art History with Travis Lee Clark

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Mekka Okereke @mekka.mekka-tech.com · 25/09/2026

When I tell y'all that most interviewers are bad at assessing talent, this is what I mean.🤷🏿‍♂️ I'm not even saying that Kai should change! I'm just saying that if you interview people, not being like Kai is a huge competitive advantage for you! Other interviewers being bad at assessing, is your win!

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22° @aldebrn.me · 24/09/2026

“For shonen manga, the panels are separated via time, in chronological order. In shojo manga, the panels are broken up by expression and the emotions felt by the characters.” —Akiko Higashimura (famous mangaka of Princess Jellyfish fame)

animefeminist.com

Lively, Happy People: An Interview with Akiko Higashimura - Anime Feminist

We were lucky enough to sit down for an interview with Higashimura, the massively accomplished mangaka best known in English for Princess Jellyfish

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22° @aldebrn.me · 23/09/2026

”We cannot live in isolation, under arrest inside ourselves. We can learn enormously when we recognise ourselves in alterity: the Other also loves and hates, fears and has courage—just like me, like you.“ “Games for Actors and Non-Actors” by Augusto Boal Alterity. What a word!

books.apple.com

‎Games for Actors and Non-Actors

‎Arts & Entertainment · 2021

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22° @aldebrn.me · 22/09/2026

“If you seek to explore a carefully crafted dark fantasy setting that isn't another European analogue” 🤩 the way I bought this Has a free self-play mechanism too!?!

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22° @aldebrn.me · 17/09/2026

The best thing about Earthsea is Le Guin’s constant paeans to the sky and the wind, the trees and the grass, the sea and the mountain “The cloud cover had dispersed, and the sky arched its pure uncolored dome over the great circle of the waters.” (The Other Wind) Earth sea. 山水 pronounced “san sui”

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22° @aldebrn.me · 17/09/2026

Fourteen days ago I began A Wizard of Earthsea. Today I finished The Other Wind. Words fail me. What a holy song Le Guin sang to us. It will, I predict, bring me comfort for much time to come.

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22° @aldebrn.me · 17/09/2026

How did The Other Wind not spark the creation of a major religion? “When I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. … That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

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22° @aldebrn.me · 17/09/2026

Omg just got to the mic-drop big reveal of The Other Wind, Earthsea’s last novel. The decentering! Le Guin decentered almost ALL of Earthsea, all the lands and peoples and institutions that she spent five and a half novels building! Most writers make their Other bear thousand-year lies—not Le Guin!

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22° @aldebrn.me · 16/09/2026

Reading Sharpe's "Calendar of Coroners Rolls of the City of London, A.D. 1300–1378" and… a husband pushes his wife into a fire. A man stabs a woman in a churchyard. 😱 This line in Saidiya Hartman's legendary "Venus in Two Acts" is everything I feel— "Scandal and excess inundate the archive."

read.dukeupress.edu

Venus in Two Acts | Small Axe | Duke University Press

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22° @aldebrn.me · 15/09/2026

“The best harps in Earthsea are made on Taon, and there are schools of music there, and many famous singers of the Lays and Deeds were born or learned their art there. Elini, however, is just a market town in the hills, with no music about it” (The Other Wind) LOVE Le Guin’s effortless decentering

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22° @aldebrn.me · 15/09/2026

Just came across this in *Tales of Earthsea*, the story called “Dragonfly”. The resonance of this phrase. It feels biblical, Homeric.

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22° @aldebrn.me · 14/09/2026

Nothing like an academic book ("Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270-1400" by Zvi Razi) casually mentioning how the Domesday Book records this manor having so many plows and tenants and "There were also 8 male and 2 female slaves." Cold 💀

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Mekka Okereke @mekka.mekka-tech.com · 09/09/2026

People already in the organization! Yes, design folks, PMs, and "non-technical" roles. Non-technical in scare quotes, because people that have degrees in things like physics or chemistry from MIT, call themselves "non-technical" just because they happen to be employed as a recruiter or sales rep.🤷🏿‍♂️

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22° @aldebrn.me · 12/09/2026

"The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn’t very different from what historians of the so-called real world do." (foreword by Ursula K Le Guin to her "Tales from Earthsea", 2001) Central to my view of historiography.

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22° @aldebrn.me · 11/09/2026

Reading “Tehanu”, and, the way Le Guin uses the goat (or goats) as narrative beats, as cuts of comedy… what a masterful storyteller. A divine smith of words. I feel like a chick in the care of a mighty pen-wielding goddess.

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22° @aldebrn.me · 11/09/2026

This review DIDN'T answer a question I too had about "Farthest Shore"'s king stanning: "Those of us who love Le Guin, who see in her a great political thinker, how are we to make this vision of medievalist monarchy restored fit with all we have (re)read so far? What to do with the King of Havnor?"

reactormag.com

The Farthest Shore: The Return of the King - Reactor

A biweekly series, The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. This week we’ll be covering The Farthest Sh...

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22° @aldebrn.me · 11/09/2026

“Dragons are archetypes, yes; mind forms, a way of knowing. … I am not European, I am not Asian, and I am not a man. These are the dragons of a new world, America, and the visionary forms of an old woman’s mind.” —"Earthsea Revisioned" (1992)

“Dragons are archetypes, yes; mind forms, a way of knowing. But these dragons aren’t St. George’s earthy worm, nor are they the emperor of China’s airy servant. I am not European, I am not Asian, and I am not a man. These are the dragons of a new world, America, and the visionary forms of an old woman’s mind.“ (Highlighted)

The text continues: “The mythopoeticists err, I think, in using the archetype as a rigid, filled mold. If we see it only as a vital potentiality, it becomes a guide into mystery.”

*The Books of Earthsea* ("Earthsea Revisioned"), Ursula K. Le Guin, 1992

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22° @aldebrn.me · 11/09/2026

“A world in which men are seen as independently real and women are seen only as non-men is not a fantasy kingdom. It is every army. It’s Washington, DC, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It’s the corporate boardroom and the executive suite and the board of regents. It’s the canon of English Literature…”

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Clouds in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years ago.

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22° @aldebrn.me · 09/09/2026

🤯 Mekka wrote this in 2023 ‘People are wasting a lot of time asking "But what if we develop a silicon 'life part' tho? How can we make sure it's aligned with our values and prioritizes our safety? […] Otherwise we might be in danger!" But... we have no alignment with fashy billionaires?’

Dec 02, 2023

People are wasting a lot of time asking "But what if we develop a silicon 'life part' tho? How can we make sure it's aligned with our values and prioritizes our safety? How might we control and limit its access to the 'capabilities part'? Otherwise we might be in danger!"

But... we have no alignment with fashy billionaires, and no controls of their access?🙂🙃

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22° @aldebrn.me · 07/09/2026

A surprisingly effective way to explain universities' endowments to kids is, "oh that book on the European phase of graffiti? Let's check Worldcat and, yeah here's six libraries that have it globally, and the only one in the US is—Harvard again! Why does Harvard have all these rare books?" ⚙️⚙️⚙️💡

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22° @aldebrn.me · 06/09/2026

“The sword of Serriadh had never been laid away or hoarded up, but worn… it never had been drawn, nor ever could be drawn, except in the service of life. For no purpose of blood-lust or revenge or greed, in no war for gain, would it let itself be wielded.” Ursula Le Guin healing us all

books.apple.com

‎The Farthest Shore

‎Young Adult · 2012

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22° @aldebrn.me · 06/09/2026

My unironic delight when I see a restaurant is a ghost kitchen

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22° @aldebrn.me · 06/09/2026

My favorite four words: “It’s much more complicated”

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22° @aldebrn.me · 06/09/2026

‘“Most things grow old and perish, as the centuries go on and on. Very few are the precious things that remain precious, or the tales that are still told.”’ Despite my mild nyctophobia and claustrophobia, Le Guin is one of the few authors I‘d trust to treat Loss of Faith, the Patriarchy of Faith.

books.apple.com

‎The Tombs of Atuan

‎Young Adult · 2012

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22° @aldebrn.me · 05/09/2026

Reading Chalfant & Jenkins “Training Days: the subway artists then and now” and wow glorious, 💯 what Jenkins writes in the intro, “Every writer [graffiti artist] has a story to tell”. If I paid an artist to paint my garage door, where would I store it when I got my next door painted?

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22° @aldebrn.me · 05/09/2026

“I am no seer, but I see before you, not rooms and books, but far seas, and the fire of dragons, and the towers of cities, and all such things a hawk sees when he flies far and high.” “And behind me—what do you see behind me?” 🦅 Le Guin 🤩

books.apple.com

‎A Wizard of Earthsea

‎Young Adult · 2012

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22° @aldebrn.me · 04/09/2026

Academics! Even when they're talking about modern fanfic of Dream of Red Chamber they have to spoiler the entire novel! I skipped 2.5 minutes and was safe 😮‍💨 I'm like Neo out here Fascinating discussion about how modern Chinese women fanfic writers give characters careers and wealthy husbands 🧐?

podcasts.apple.com

Dream of the Red Chamber in Modern China

Podcast Episode · Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding Podcast · July 23 · 54m

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22° @aldebrn.me · 04/09/2026

"I ❤️ Zoo York" by Ali, 1981 (Photographed by Henry Chalfant and published in *Subway Art* with Martha Cooper (1984) www.nga.gov/artworks/173...) Per www.instagram.com/p/Ceen3XMuFeQ/ this was the only piece Ali did after his terrible accident (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_(gr... 💙 Zoo York 💙

A NYC subway car with big block letters, "I (heart symbol) ZOO YORK". The heart is arresting: it appears to be beaming but its right eye is shedding a huge tear and its left eye is on fire and emitting like a stream of flames (Ali was burned in the late 70s in a tunnel fire while bombing, and this was done after that incident)

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Ordinary Notes @hystericalblkns.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Teach wearing a mask. Offer masks to the class. There's bad stuff going around. With real consequences.

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22° @aldebrn.me · 01/09/2026

Today's entry into gratitude journal: grateful to have read Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Borges, García Márquez in high school

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22° @aldebrn.me · 29/08/2026

the way “glimmer” is the opposite of ”trigger”, by being a something that induces a moment of joy or contentment or safety I need the opposite of “weathering”, to refer to a something that kicks off and powers a process of fortification and buffing over moons, over decades

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22° @aldebrn.me · 28/08/2026

the MARCH package: misogyny ableism racism colonialism homophobia

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22° @aldebrn.me · 28/08/2026

Flashcards for programming (here, Swift), several flashcards for a couple of days in "100 Days of SwiftUI" www.hackingwithswift.com/100/swiftui 🤩

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22° @aldebrn.me · 27/08/2026

I learned about homosociality & began Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire" but her brief aside about **women's** homosocial relationships in literature fired me up. I found two examples I love: - "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson - Tuca & Bertie 🤩

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22° @aldebrn.me · 26/08/2026

I was called ”a Victorian headmistress—always fancy” 🧐

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22° @aldebrn.me · 24/08/2026

Randomly found in Screenshots. What a show, "Legacies". Totally useless trying to search for "shows like Legacies" because the reasons I liked it are so different than what the results presume. I guess in a nutshell, I liked the reverse-harem shōjo stories of "Hope and the boys".

Five people with grim expressions walking down a fancy corridor, led by a white woman and flanked by a Persian man and a Black man, and followed by two Black men. Without spoilers (other than for the first episode), I can reveal that witches, vampires, and werewolves are represented in this group.

A stage surrounded by a crowd on which several hip-hop dancers and doing a very cool-looking number

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