iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Relived my Denver childhood with a birthday trip to Casa Bonita. Props to all involved—they did a hell of a job restoring the place to its former glory.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 27/09/2026

Moonrise over Mount Blue Sky, Colorado this evening

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 24/09/2026

For example, seeing the discussions on here tonight about the AP Style guide’s advice on AI anthropomorphism and the AI labs’ culpability for AI-initiated hacks makes me think of this passage about how “the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency.”

Behind all of the manifestations of the eerie, the central enigma at its core is the problem of agency. In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the

existence of agency as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not yet revealed itself? In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the
particular nature of the agent at work. We know that Stonehenge has been erected, so the questions of whether there was an agent behind its construction or not does not arise; what we have to reckon with are the traces of a departed agent whose purposes are unknown.
We are now in a position to answer the question of why it is important to think about the eerie. Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not

fully available to our sensory apprehension.
A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect. At another level, had not Freud long ago shown that the forces that govern our psyche can be conceived of as failures of presence — is not the unconscious itself not just such a failure of presence? - and failures of absence (the various drives or compulsions that intercede where our free will should be)?

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 23/09/2026

Also made it into the second round of the Austin Film Festival BTW! austinfilmfestival.com/blog/2026-se...

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 23/09/2026

Hey look, @meowrey.bsky.social and I made it into the Slamdance quarter finals for short screenplay. slamdance.com/26-screenpla...

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 23/09/2026

"Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell..."<runs 7 commands>

Claude: "Recalled a memory, ran 7 commands"

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 05/09/2026

“‘Believe this, young man,’ exclaimed Shelgrim, laying a thick powerful forefinger on the table to emphasize his words, ‘…that railroads build themselves.’”

"Believe this, young man," exclaimed Shelgrim, laying a thick powerful forefinger on the table to emphasize his words, "try to believe this - to begin with - that railroads build themselves. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr.
Derrick, does he grow his wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count for? Does he supply the force? What do I count for? Do I build the Railroad? You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men. There is the Wheat, the supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand. The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them - supply and demand. Men have only little to do in the whole business.
Complications may arise, conditions that bear hard on the individual - crush him maybe - but the Wheat will be carried to feed the people as inevitably as it will grow.
If you want to fasten the blame of the affair at Los Muertos on any one person, you will make a mistake. Blame conditions, not men."
- Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 31/08/2026

It’s hard to read her analysis of Pullman’s psychology and not think of todays reactionary tech CEOs complaining about entitled employees, “woke,” etc.

It is easy to discover striking points of similarity in the tragedies of the royal father and the philanthropic president of the Pullman company. The like quality of ingratitude they both suffered is at once apparent. It may be said that the ingratitude which Lear received was poignant and bitter to him in proportion as he recalled the extraordinary benefits he had heaped upon his daugh-ters, and that he found his fate harder to bear because he had so far exceeded the measure of a father's duty, as he himself says.
What, then, would be the bitterness of a man who had heaped extraordinary benefits upon those toward whom he had no duty recognized by common consent; who had not only exceeded the righteousness of the employer, but who had worked out original and striking methods for lavishing goodness and generosity?
More than that, the president had been almost persecuted for this goodness by the more utilitarian members of his company and had at one time imperiled his business reputation for the sake of the benefactions to his town, and he had thus reached the height of sacrifice for it. This model town embodied not only his hopes and ambitions, but stood for the peculiar effort which a man makes for that which is misunderstood.*
* While the town of Pullman was in process of construction the Pullman stock was sometimes called out on the New York Exchange: "How much for flowerbeds and fountains?" To which the company naturally objected.

It is easy to see that although the heart of Lear was cut by ingratitude and by misfortune, it was cut deepest of all by the public pity of his people, in that they should remember him no longer as a king and benefactor, but as a defeated man who had blundered through over-softness. So the heart of the Chicago man was cut by the unparalleled publicity which brought him to the minds of thousands as a type of oppression and injustice, and to many others as an example of the evil of an irregulated sympathy for the "lower classes." He who had been dined and feted throughout Europe as the creator of a model town, as the friend and benefactor of workingmen, was now execrated by workingmen throughout the entire country. He had not only been good to those who were now basely ungrateful to him, but he felt himself deserted by the admiration of his people.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 30/08/2026

This is an absolutely wild statement

As she admitted to Semafor earlier this year:
I was a prolific Gawker commenter, and the reason is that I got married in 2009, and I was worried that if I got married, that my wedding announcement and my husband and my family and myself were all going to be dissected by these malicious internet commenters. And I thought about this the way that perhaps a future public diplomacy under secretary would, which is I thought if I can just have four Gawker accounts and sock puppet the thread and say good things about myself, then I don't have to be afraid to get married because people, even if they bash me in public, I'll be able to speak back.
The fact that Sarah Rogers believes a Public Diplomacy Under Secretary would respond to online abuse by creating her own personal troll army says a lot about

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 12/08/2026

The “shotgun style” street signs here in LA swelltype.com/blog/signs-p...

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 10/08/2026

I was recently shocked to learn the title was inspired by a Danish bacon ad!

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 03/08/2026

Yeah! That’s really what it feels like. In that book I just linked to above she talks about how little has been written about the 1918 pandemic compared to the simultaneous catastrophe of WWI. I think people just really don’t want to think about it once it’s over.

WorldCat, the world's largest library catalogue, currently lists around 80,000 books on the First World War (in more than forty languages), and around 400 on the Spanish flu (in five languages). But those 400 books represent an exponential increase over what had been written on the subject twenty years ago. The range of

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 03/08/2026

From “Pale Rider” by Laura Spinney www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/laura...

Memory is an active process. Details have to be rehearsed to be retained, but who wants to rehearse the details of a pan-demic? A war has a victor (and to him, the spoils-the version that is handed down to posterity), but a pandemic has only vanquished. Until the nineteenth century, pandemics were considered acts of God and people accepted them fatalistically, but with the advent of germ theory, scientists realised that they could, in principle, prevent them. Their inability to do so in

There is another reason why a pandemic memory might take time to mature.
In 2015, psychologists Henry Roediger and Magdalena Abel of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri summed up a still thin body of research into collective memory when they wrote that its narrative structure is rather simple and comprises only a small number of salient events referring to beginning, turning, and end points'4 It helps, they added, if those events have heroic or mythical components. Wars slot easily into that structure, with their declarations and truces, their acts of outstanding bravery. A flu pandemic, on the other hand, has no clear beginning or end, and no obvious heroes. The French war ministry tried to create some, by awarding a special
'epidemic medal' to thousands of civilian and military personnel who had shown devotion in the fight against the disease, but it didn't work. A war-memorabilia website notes that 'Curiously, its place among the important decorations of that conflict is completely unknown!5

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 31/07/2026

I don’t want to give away too much, so let me just say: you had me at “Friday the 13th-style slasher sequence set to ‘A Long December’ by Counting Crows.”

A title card for “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 28/07/2026

I have a lot of problems with Nolan, but his female characters are one of the biggest. Emily Blunt’s character in Oppenheimer felt like a parody.

Penelope has no dreams. Anne Hathaway's face is as expressive as ever, and she looks beautiful and mysterious, glimpsed mostly through the veil of a clever set design that separates the women's quarters from the main hall. But the script gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown. The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 23/07/2026

Some Instax scans from Point Reyes a few weeks ago.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 13/07/2026

BTW, I did Brian Eno’s School of Song workshop awhile back, and I enjoyed this “40 Infallible Tricks for Successful Songs” list he shared.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 13/07/2026

Just want to say that if you like Sam Neill but haven’t seen Possession (1981), you’re missing one hell of a performance.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 12/07/2026

Dachshund, after Gregory Crewdson (2026)

A dachshund on a suburban street illuminated by a street lamp.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 03/07/2026

Immediately sent this to a Whataburger-loving Texan pal

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 02/07/2026

Tempted to put a William James voice bubble over this post

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 25/06/2026

Every hometown's got the ominous megastructure, what's yours?

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 23/06/2026

Nothing to see here, merely “confirming that funds are being used legitimately!”

An Elon Musk tweet insisting that all DOGE did was try to “confirming that funds were being used legitimately.”

The character Gaear Grimsrud in “Fargo,” feeding his accomplice into a wood chipper.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 21/06/2026

Background: www.biweekly.pl/article/1194...

The Repast of the Lion, by Henri Rousseau, hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 27/05/2026

Crazy Moon corona over Palm Springs right now

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 26/05/2026

Italian Brain Rot: now available in roadside tourist traps.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 26/05/2026

Stephen Shore-ing the hell out of this trip.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 22/05/2026

Got bird detections showing up on our Tidbyt now!

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 18/05/2026

I know this isn’t quite as urgent as the crisis in hallucinated academic citations, but I can’t find any other instances of the phrase “five blueberries and a bush” on the web.

From a Google AI summary for a query about “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys:

“The iconic bassline cycles through a distinctive 6-note rhythm (often affectionately called ‘five blueberries and a bush’ that naturally loops across the 4/4 measure.”

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 14/05/2026

Hell yeah baby! Thanks for turning me on to this.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 01/05/2026

Actually, PKD did kind of predict this in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

And—they might not like the difference.
"You understand," Sam Regan said to the new member Barney Mayerson, "that we're going to spend the translated period listening to and watching Pat's new Great Books animator-you know, the device they've just brought out on Terra... you're surely more familiar with it than we are, Barney, so maybe you ought to explain it to us." Barney, dutifully, said, "You insert one of the Great Books, for instance Moby Dick, into the reservoid. Then you set the controls for long or short. Then for funny version, or same-as-book or sad version.
Then you set the style-indicator as to which classic Great Artist you want the book animated like. Dalí, Bacon, Picasso... the medium-priced Great Books animator is set up to render in cartoon form the styles of a dozen system-famous artists; you specify which ones you want when you originally buy the thing. And there are

options you can add later that provide even more."
"Terrific," Norm Schein said, radiating enthusiasm. "So what you get is a whole evening's entertainment, say sad version in the style of Jack Wright of like for instance Vanity Fair. Wow!"

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 16/04/2026

This quote (from Elaine May, about her script doctoring work on Mike Nichols’s 1994 bomb, “Wolf”) always comes to mind when I think about the need for conflict in storytelling.

After thinking about Wolf for a weekend, she told Nichols, "Mike, you have a story about a guy who wants to become a wolf, so he becomes a wolf. I think this is going to be a very short movie."

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 14/04/2026

Not to mention one of the coolest sleeves ever, which was famously so expensive that Factory Records lost money on every copy (supposedly). www.radiox.co.uk/artists/new-...

The Blue Monday 12”, which is designed to look like a floppy disk with a color coded message down one side.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 09/04/2026

Reminds me of how Dan O’Bannon was inspired to write Blue Thunder because he was annoyed with LAPD helicopters buzzing his house

Co-writers Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby began developing the plot while living together in a Hollywood apartment in the late 1970s, where low-flying police helicopters woke them on a regular basis. Their original script was a more political one, attacking the concept of a police state controlling the population through high-tech surveillance and heavy armament.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 09/04/2026

Watching a helicopter circle the neighborhood while I grill in the back yard.

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Buzz Andersen @andersen.buzz · 08/04/2026

@meowrey.bsky.social introduced me to this crazy astrological prediction from Vanity Fair in 2007, and I still think about it a lot. Maybe this is just the moment where the US becomes more like the post-colonial UK? Which…might not be the worst outcome.