iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Mei 🪽 @meidotwav.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

treat your body like a data center. consume as much water, art and literature as possible. upset local municipalities with your existence.

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nico @nicodelort.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

i dont want to download an app i don't want a qr code menu i dont want to talk to an ai assistant i dont want ai summaries for my searches i dont want to optimize my workflow i dont want to jump on a call i dont want to rate anything i don't want to create an account LEAVEME ADLONEe

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sibaku @sibaku1.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Interesting service for Japanese learners I want to share! ohanasikagawa.com A ~weekly free event, where Japanese and English learners can have two 1-1 sessions (15 min per language each) + free sessions befere and after. I think it's well organized and a great opportunity to speak to various people

ohanasikagawa.com

Ohanasi Kagawa | Free Online Language Exchange Community

Ohanasi Kagawa is a free online language exchange community where Japanese and international learners connect safely through one-on-one conversation.

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a. pearl ✍️🏻 @apearlwrites.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Had a Taskmaster/Supernatural crossover dream where, post-task, Greg Davies says, "The women were quite astute in picking their implements, whereas Dean, I'm pretty sure you spent at least 5 minutes hitting that ball with a piece of bark."

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Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I just checked my voter registration. I encourage all of you to do the same. Try your state's official site. AVOID VoteSafe.Org. It's an Elon Musk scam to harvest data.

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Michaela Joffe @joffeorama.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

an old comic I didn’t feel like updating to be about ai but is still basically about ai anyway because we’ve always been living in hell

panel 1: a weird creep pokes at a laptop and says “Finally, through the aid of machine translation and google, I have removed the taint of woke western localization from this video game!”
panel 2: two anime boys say “Hello” “It is”
panel 3: “You must go there” “yes”
panel 4: “When the executive manager is downed, can you believe it?” “There is!” the weird creep sheds a tear and says “Ah, as the developers intended!”

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sakura christmas @prof-christmas.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

What makes these beaded sculptures of fleeting children by Numata Yuka even more poignant is that this ”abandoned” elementary school in Japan was actually closed in 2012 due to demographic decline. Historical photos of Yuya Elementary in Gero, Gifu, here: gero-art-discovery.jp/en/school_fo...

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The Kimono Gallery @roger1952.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Firefly (Hotaru), a prominent 1913 Nihonga painting of a woman by the renowned Japanese female artist Uemura Shōen.

Pausing in the midst of suspending a translucent olive-green mosquito net (kaya), a young woman twists her body with fluid, serpentine grace. Her raised arms, bared to the elbow, work to secure a green cord against the net’s vermilion brocade border—adorned with a delicate asano-ha (hemp-leaf) pattern. She wears a cool indigo-blue summer kimono decorated with blooming lilies and lattice lines, held loosely by a soft, pale pink obi. Beneath the pooling hem of her garment, a solitary, bare white foot emerges against the neutral silk ground. Bending her head back in gentle curiosity, her gaze is drawn down toward the lower left, where a single, delicate firefly (hotaru) hovers in the warm twilight air, emitting a faint, golden point of light.

Painted in 1913 (Taishō 2), Firefly (Hotaru) is a landmark masterpiece of Nihonga by Uemura Shōen (1875–1949), the pioneering artist who elevated bijinga (pictures of beautiful women) to unprecendented heights of moral dignity and psychological depth
Aesthetically, the painting hinges on the delicate interplay between physical boundary and open atmosphere. The sheer, cascading netting functions as a spatial kekkai (protective threshold), establishing a domestic sanctuary while employing miegakure (the design principle of hide-and-reveal) to filter the space through translucent folds. The unadorned silk surrounding her forms an expansive field of yohaku (meaningful negative space), allowing the viewer to sense the warm, humid air of a late summer evening without structural clutter. Her poised contour and unforced posture embody an innate, unpretentious iki (chic refinement).

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Lightspeed Magazine @lightspeedmagazine.com · 15/09/2026

The 2026 LIGHTSPEED + NIGHTMARE Kickstarter is NOW LIVE! Check out our star-studded lineup of authors & peruse our rewards: subscriptions, signed books, rare magazine collectibles, t-shirts, mugs, and other fun stuff. Thank you in advance if you're able to offer your support.💖 bit.ly/LS-NM-26

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Isaiah D. Colbert @shineyezehuhh.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Let Shueisha know you don't want AI-translated manga. mangaplus.shueisha.co.jp/www/custom_p...

mangaplus.shueisha.co.jp

MANGA Plus by SHUEISHA Survey Language Selection

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daryl "rupert pumpkin" b 🏳️‍⚧️ @hypercubexl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

GDT's reddit AMA spitting fire www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

reddit comment:

Hello! Did you intend the ending of Pan’s labyrinth to be real or in Ofelia’s mind?

Guillermo Del Toro's reply:

My interpretation, and it's exclusively mine, is that it's real.

Because there's two things. One is what people call “The Shining Question.” The Shining Question is, Who opens the door for Jack to get out of the fridge? And Ofelia is in an attic with a guard outside her door, and she draws the door with the magic chalk, and she shows up in the labyrinth. So, the only way she could have gone into the labyrinth is the magic chalk. And the flower is real at the end. The flower that blooms in the dead tree. And the reason I think it’s real is because—and this is why I'm in favor of the human factor in art—I think that art does transform the world. You know?

Think about it for a second. One of the goals, with all this movement, is to make you believe that art is vulgar. That art is nothing special, and anybody can do art. That is like me telling you that I'm faster at running than Usain Bolt but I “run” in my motorcycle. Well, that's not the same. That’s not the same at all.

Art is important, and they want you to believe it isn't. It's part of the idea of control. The goal is not to have artificial intelligence. The goal is to foster natural stupidity. The goal is to foster you not looking for answers, and to trust yourself entirely to an engine. Look at the way we are dipping our toes into these things. We are starting to ask the machine, Is this true? For now, there's a correlation between reality and what the answers of the machine are. For now. But soon, we won't even investigate further. We will be told it's true. And if the machine is in the hands of somebody who should not be trusted, then your reality has been completely and utterly fucked. Because your intelligence ends at the question. You don't seek the answer. It's given to you.

Q: You recently mentioned that AI creates 'semi-compelling screensavers' and that you'd 'rather die' than use it. As a filmmaker who relies heavily on practical effects and creature design, what do you think is the biggest thing lost when a computer generates an image instead of a human hand?

GDT:

The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process. Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%. I'll give you an example with the Pale Man.

We sculpted it as an old man, with a face. And then I said, Let's take out the face. This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, Take out the face, and then I said, Let's put the eyes on the hands. This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.

AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist.

And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him—because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model—and I asked him, How did you do it? He said, “We put him in a storm in the ocean.”

And you're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim…

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Xero now with 100% more 🎃 @artificer-ind.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Still patiently waiting to be "left behind" by AI rather than it chasing me across every damn space like a slasher in a low budget flick.

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Daniel ／妥仁得 @kaihat.su · 08/09/2026

Kanji contain many different strokes. This chart I made shows these various strokes with their Japanese names (and my English translations) by using an aggregate glyph. Many foundries have their own variants of the glyph. An updated chart from my old fonts in games microblog, Fontendo, on Twitter.

A chart showing the many different strokes to be found in kanji, with labels showing their Japanese names alongside English translations.

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Garth Marenghi's Catbus @catbus.phd · 04/09/2026

'Insects and Autumn Leaves' Kogyo Terazaki

color woodblock print of autumn leaves and a variety of insects including a stag beetle and praying Mantis

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pumpkin spice doodlemancy 🎃 @doodlemancy.com · 30/08/2026

brain, i understand that you'd rather do Preferred Activity, but right now we have to do Task. if we finish task we can do Preferred Activity WITHOUT feeling weighed down by the need to do Task. do you see how that works ah it's biting me my brain is biting me

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Aftermath @aftermath.site · 24/08/2026

Badly In Love is a Netflix Japanese reality dating show that's more than its bad reputation aftermath.site/badly-in-love-...

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Anime News Network @animenewsnetwork.com · 21/08/2026

Award-Winning Translator, Jan Mitsuko Cash, Calls on American Manga Industry to Double Their Rates!

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Betsy Aoki (she/her) @betsyaoki.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Not sure I announced this prior? This summer has run away from me! A new poem in Strange Horizons from a very angry horse yokai - ht to yokai.com for the inspiration strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

strangehorizons.com

Bakotsu says his skin is our skin

I was the horse who melted under the heat of the rendering.

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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 16/08/2026

A lot of people don't know this, but when you brush a cat, you are legally required to show them the wad of cat hair that came off of them and tell them "this is enough for another whole cat"

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Xythar @xythar.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

>yamanashi >has a mountain right there

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Rex 💫 @rexpo.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

LIMITED PRINT DROP OPEN - 3 DAYS LEFT // 13/08 - 19/08 🔗 rexxxpo.com/pages/resurr...

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Daniel ／妥仁得 @kaihat.su · 17/08/2026

Here is an easy way (with a phrase from the book) to spot the difference between Mainland Chinese glyph conventions versus Japanese conventions in fonts. People *will* notice and it can affect the credibility of your work - if something basic like the font is wrong, how can I trust everything else?

A simple image using the Japanese phrase 「沖縄文化」, meaning "Okinawan Culture", to show the differences between Mainland Chinese typographic conventions (top) versus Japanese conventions (bottom), with glyph differences circled in red.

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Matt Jakubowski (he/him) @mattjakubowski.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I for one think that if you’re a literary journal who opposes AI in any writing submissions, you should also never use AI for any artwork on your site. Seems like a no-brainer! Support all artists, not just writers. And yet! A lot of journals seem ok with AI art. Please change this policy, folks!

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Ross Sayers @rosssayers.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

[James Stewart as Odysseus] now listen here, Agamemnon, I'm going home, y'see. You keep your fancy armour, I'm getting off this crummy ol' beach. [Spotting the Cyclops] now here's a curious fella, he's only got one peeper

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 08/08/2026

This 1911 book shows that taking photos of cats and furnishing them with an amusing caption was a thing long before the internet publicdomainreview.tumblr.com/post/8243890...

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Utopia Science Fiction Magazine @utopiascifi.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

We've said it before, but we'll say it again. If you "write" with AI and manage to trick a magazine, you are not just stealing from us. You are stealing a place from a real writer and robbing human connection from a reader. Shame on you!

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Jocelyne Allen @brainvsbook.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

I made this for a talk I'm giving, but maybe you can use it, too?

AI翻訳 in a red circle with a slash through it

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a. pearl ✍️🏻 @apearlwrites.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

One of my all-time favorite woodblock prints.

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Tal Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

onigiri are truly among the perfect creations on earth 🍙

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Cal C @cdcubed.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

surprise! more slop from Shueisha they are never going to pay real people @ rates commensurate with the skill it takes to localize manga properly. that's not their business model do not support this latest iteration in a long line of scams. please stop falling for this shit every time ffs

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shafer brown @shaferbrown.com · 06/08/2026

in a mood to hit the trails, here's a few different hikers from over the years

2024 pet portrait commission

A cat and their truffle hog walk along the path at the base of a river gorge. Stakes along the path lack a rope, indicating an off season exploration of the trail.

2021 faux risograph fantasy pet portrait

in the foreground a tuxedo cat barbarian climbs a mountain, eyes cast upwards. On his shoulder, a tiny wizard with similar markings holds loosely to his head. On the horizon across a lake is a stone fort and scattered clouds

2020 full color pet portrait

A pair of adventurers descend to an old vacant stump and well at the bottom of a dense dark forest. The old wizard made it first and rests against his staff. The younger rogue hangs from a vine.

Autumnal Bard - a 2019 fantasy pet portrait of a cat walking across a convenient fallen log bridge over a stream while singing to welcome the fall. the grass is yellowed and dotted with fallen leaves

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Seia Tanabe @seiatanabe.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I’m aiming for global publication and need a skilled English editor/line-editor to bring my stories to life in English. Seeking someone who loves horror/speculative fiction and can refine my drafts. Please reply or DM with your rates and past work!

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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

People who don't write books assume writer's block is staring at a blank page with zero ideas. In truth it's invariably the opposite. Writer's block is when a dazzling array of options become tyrannical, team up with an unwillingness to fail, mug you in a dark alley and stick a bag over your head.

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Marie Brennan @swantower.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

THE WRITER'S LITTLE BOOK OF RESEARCH comes out next week! If you're unsure of how to go about finding information on [random topic you need for a story] -- and you know better than to ask AI -- this book is for you! Pre-order it from your preferred retailer here: www.swantower.com/writing/the-...

swantower.com

The Writer's Little Book of Research - Swan Tower

Writers of all genres can have a dizzying array of research needs, from broad contextual information to highly specific facts. Thanks to her academic background, award-winning author Marie Brennan is ...

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Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

“She’s just a translator” shows that you don’t understand what translation is. Some of this comes from the ‘automation’ of translation, through things like Google translate. It’s as though it’s just looking words up in a dictionary. No. It’s an art and a science at once. To get meaning and feeling.

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a. pearl ✍️🏻 @apearlwrites.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The cat baby is getting her supervised outdoor enrichment (on the harness, of course), I've written over 300 words of a new story, and there's a nice breeze blowing through the bamboo in the yard... life has been A Lot lately, but these pockets of peace really do keep me going.

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dawn of the debb @debbshock.com · 30/07/2026

this owl has just about had it with the bullshit and me too

tired looking owl peeping out of a wooden thing.

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Cy Catwell @pixelatedlenses.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

A very not casual reminder that I’m very open to work and would love to not be unemployed as a highly skilled remote worker with almost seven years of experience working with Japanese pop culture as a critic, as well as equal experience editing a variety of media. Heck, I’ve even got a portfolio!

pixelatedlenses.carrd.co

Cypress Catwell's Carrd

The professional carrd website for Cypress "Cy" Catwell.

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Aftermath @aftermath.site · 29/07/2026

All the video game studios that refuse to use generative AI aftermath.site/video-games-no...

someone holding up a sign that AI crossed out

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𝑪. 𝑫𝒂𝒂𝒆́ @christinedaae.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Your local shrine maiden wrote something fun again! My latest article for UnseenJapan:

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

This Is Just To Say I have turned off the AI features that were in the update and which you were probably hoping to monetize Fuck you they were stupid so unnecessary and so annoying

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Proloe 🌙🧚‍♀️ Very Fairy Vtuber @proloe.gay · 28/02/2026

I do not like this gen AI I do not like what it implies I do not want it in my art I do not think it makes you smart I do not want it in my games I do not like its goals and aims I do not want it in my books I do not like the way it looks I do not like it, I don't care I do not want it anywhere

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Dr. Paula R. Curtis @paularcurtis.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

If you’re wondering about the history of female emperors in Japan, I wrote about it for @nursingclio.bsky.social! Women were emperors in the past (and very powerful ones too!). But like most things, men in the 19th century ruined it for everyone. nursingclio.org/2019/04/30/j...

nursingclio.org

Japan’s Once and Future Female Emperors

With the abdication today of the Japanese emperor, Akihito, and the passage of the throne to his son, talk has emerged yet again about the future of Japan’s imperial family and its insistence on ma…

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Susan Taylor @sataylormd.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

... a voice is what a human being has when that human being also has rights and membership in society, the voice with which to participate in society and to determine who she is and what she does or does not consent to." lithub.com/penelope-spe...

lithub.com

Penelope Speaks: Rebecca Solnit on the Western Literary Tradition of Silencing Women

The following first appeared via Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency. Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the Br…

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a. pearl ✍️🏻 @apearlwrites.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I have SIX story drafts about 90% complete, two new story ideas, and made more progress on my horror novella... fall is going to be a very busy submission month 😈

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