iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I think one question there is whether the ominous implications are intrinsic or extrinsic to the statement itself.

Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Short version is a combination of NYC ethnic friction in the early/mid 20th century and Italian-American identity politics a bit later. They didn't actually put in the provision until the 1970s, but yes, it's still around, and they still write reports about compliance.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

(fingers templed, cool stare) I receive: The drudgery of washing and drying my comfy, plentiful cotton clothes in a machine. I give up: The drudgery of washing and drying two wool outfits in a river.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I find copyediting stuff people have written interesting and satisfying. Doing the same for obot writing? No no no no no.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My immediate response to that post was “Um, yes? A lot?” There’s lots of interesting work on homeostases of drudgery, but if it’s a yes/no question, the answer is an emphatic yes.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I'm so sorry to be missing it, but so glad that it means you can be there!

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🎃🦇💀 wolfman amadeus mozart 💀🦇🎃 @mcmjolnir.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Saw the screening promotional tour of Hot Fuzz and Wright paired it with Bullitt. Kinda inspired choice, had a blast, great crowd.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Never would have occurred to me without this, but Hot Fuzz and The Wicker Man (1970s) would make a lovely little revival house double feature.

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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The world would be in a much better place today if, 70 years ago, Herb Simon had won out and the new computational/math/symbolic systems research field was dubbed "complex information processing" instead of "AI".

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

None of these, it should go without saying, are robust propositions.

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Jeff @jefffreyspies.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I was finishing law school at the same time one of my dearest friends was getting a degree in audiology, the conversation we had about the meaning of “speech” were incredible.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

As is so often the case, Stancil has concluded that if someone else is saying something that's incorrect, it follows that (1) that person is egregiously wrong, (2) that person is operating in bad faith, out of animus, or out of peer pressure, and (3) Stancil's opposing claim is obviously correct.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

AIs are doing things that resemble human cognition in some ways, and don't resemble it in others. They are—and this is a thing Stancil gets right—far more capable at doing some things that only humans could do until now than some knee-jerk AI critics admit. But.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Whether an LLM is "understanding" is the very definition of a definitional issue. And what is common sense to one person (Will Stancil, say, or not-Will-Stancil), may not be to another (not-Will-Stancil, for instance, or in the alternative, Will Stancil.)

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This is a very silly framing of the relevant issue. It's like saying "if a text-to-speech converter is analyzing speech, interpreting it, and converting it to written language, but is not 'listening,' the word 'listening' has no meaning." No. "A meaning different than mine" is not "no meaning."

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Six likes so far, which is about a half a dozen more than I expected, so you may be right.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It's from her Pet Shop Boys album!

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I'm going to go ahead and say that this is the most niche joke I've ever posted to social media. Intended audience: me.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I guess the question is whether they're hoping to get funders or hoping to get clients, and how successful they can become in attracting the former if they're not showing any success in attracting the latter.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

If so, they should have waited until they could roll out with a more compelling product.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And even she had to both marry rich and hustle for years to get herself to where she wound up.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Yep. My TikTok feed has a fair amount of both AI and non-AI schlock microdrama, and if I'm not paying attention I might mistake one for the other, but it just takes me half a second of looking at the screen to see the humanness in even the most wooden actual-person performance.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

She's a great example of what I was talking about in the next post:

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

But it's a tactic that in the best-case scenario gives you a very different kind of celebrity than movie stardom, and one that only does THAT if you're an incredibly compelling presence, and have a (strategic or intuitive) knack for getting and holding public attention.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Because, again, even humans don't get to be movie stars by going on CNN and saying "I'm going to be a movie star, as soon as someone puts me in a movie." And that's not because humans haven't tried! That's a tactic humans have tried!

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Now, maybe the people behind "Tilly Norwood" are deluded enough to imagine that these "interviews" have a chance of themselves sparking viral celebrity, creating demand for the movie that they're claiming they're going to make, but man, that's a lousy strategy—and a lousy product to push it with.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The way celebrity works is that the public latches on to someone they see DOING something—singing, acting, modeling, reality TV, being related to someone famous, punching strangers on TikTok, whatever. And it's that interest that enables the celebrity to get bigger, or big in a different medium.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The first movie with an AI lead character if we ever get one, is either going to be a corpse-puppet of an existing celebrity or a generic one-shot AI made for that movie or an alley-oop of an AI character that went viral in some other media niche. It won't be a Tilly Norwood.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And this response to "a different character" gets at a chunk of why I think that either they're not actually hoping to make "Tilly Norwood" a "movie star," or are doomed to flame out ignominiously if they are. Because if you wanted to do it, you wouldn't be doing this.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Yeah. "We made money on the first Tilly Norwood Movie, so we're going to do a sequel" is viable if the first condition is met. But that's more of a "people like this animated character" thing than a "people like this actor" thing, and the latter is what makes for movie stars.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I'll admit to not having any idea who the most likely Dem candidate(s) in that race would be.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And the real-world impact of this remains muted so far, but one does get the sense that's she's genuinely, viscerally disgusted by the whole thing.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Yep, but see my next post—whatever ability to influence the senate that Murkowski has next year, a very large chunk of it is going to come pretty much directly at the expense of Fetterman.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And a 2027 senate in which Fetterman is the 51st Dem and Murkowski is the 49th Republican might well be one in which Fetterman has less leverage on certain questions than he's fantasizing about now.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

(I am not a "Murkowski will save us!" person. But it does seem clear that her inclinations and incentives are quite different than, say, Collins's.)

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It does occur to me as well to contemplate where Lisa Murkowski, who is up for re-election in 2028, lands on all sorts of questions in 2027 if she finds herself in a Dem senate—particularly one in which Mary Peltola is her Alaskan colleague.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It's distinctly possible, and the effects could play out in interesting ways, too. A Fetterman who's the 52nd Democrat may find himself with rather different incentives than a Fetterman who's the 51st.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And that's also a really interesting analogy, because it suggests that the path for such a project wouldn't be "here's a celebrity," but "here's a niche persona you find compelling in that niche," with the idea being that the "celebrity" part unfolds through a dynamic relationship with the audience.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And the fact that that person exists when the camera isn't rolling is itself exciting in a long list of ways.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Yep. And the fact that there's a THERE there—change from movie to movie, both in terms of acting and aging, but that change, in tension with continuity, emerging as something intentional, something that is partly chosen, partly inherent to the PERSON behind the performance.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I think it's very unlikely that this company ever makes a Tilly Norwood movie. But the chances that they make a second? With "Tilly Norwood" "playing" a different character than in the first? Basically zero, even if we assume a wildly improbable level of success for the first one.

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Angus Johnston @angus.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This is such a good point (the post below and the one after it). The distance from where we are to "financially successful narrative AI movie with AI actors" is vast, and the distance from there to "AI movie stars" is probably just as big, maybe bigger.

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DJ Jazzy Sweater Vest @craig.agitate-discourse.org · 19/09/2026

You can already fine tune the character in every way you can imagine, Tilly Norwood would just be adding extraneous constraints to the character with a lot of extra steps. The only possible benefit is to inject “star power” to the production and a Tilly Norwood could never gain that status.

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DJ Jazzy Sweater Vest @craig.agitate-discourse.org · 19/09/2026

The whole intended business model makes zero sense. Say someone wants to make an AI movie, they use prompts to produce exactly the characters they want for the story, what is there to gain by bringing a specific AI actor into the production?

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