iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” held the record for longest-running No. 1 for 23 years. I remember that song. It was very big. But at no point did it ever feel like Mariah or Boyz II Men’s most popular song. I’m guessing most under-30s have probably never heard it. Charts are funny.

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

everyone who's ever joined in an online pile on should read this.

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Mike Ginn @shutupmikeginn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

“Middlebrow” is the perfect level of brow for a movie to be. if you want smarter read a book if you want dumber read some posts

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Michael Stahlke @michaelstahlke.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Right before I left twitter for good, I got into some real humdingers because I thought it was irresponsible to detonate thousands of explosive devices when you had zero idea where they were located.

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pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky” @pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A warning about the supposed final Fall album that’s coming out soon: it is NOT a real Fall album, it’s just Mark E Smith rambling nonsense over music that has no connection to the vocal

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Finally listening to the new Carly Rae Jepsen, which is pretty great. I do think she could have lost a track or three and made “Amalfi Coast” at least three times longer. Few pop songs from this decade are screaming for a Neil Bogart-style 12” treatment like that one is.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The fact that every major news outlet includes vocal tics and hesitations when it’s a woman saying “like” and not when it’s a man saying “um” is itself wicked telling.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

"This election is about the threat of trans kids" is the worst possible messaging for Dems yet so many candidates are leaning into it. No voter will flip R->D over it. Low-info voters read this as "you're focused on bullshit that doesn't affect me" while the base reads this as "you're an asshole."

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Catbus @catbus.phd · 18/09/2026

he donated it all to two charities, Guide Dogs for the Blind & The National Autistic Society as big a piece of shit as Morrissey is, that's how awsome Johnny Marr is

share.google

The Smith's Johnny Marr's guitars sell for almost £4m at auction

One instrument was used on the The Smiths' debut album and also appeared on the cover of Oasis's debut single.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

When I moved from Arkansas to LA as a kid in the ‘90s, the near-total absence of mosquitos was truly shocking. In the best way — I soon stopped associating summer with being itchy 24/7. Fast forward 30 years, and my citronella candle and mosquito repellant budget is starting to become a problem.

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Lauren @beavisetc.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Carly Rae Jepsen album release day is a very important holiday for a certain type of late 30s-early 40s white guy. Please be respectful of their religious practices today

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

One of the most important moments in my musical education: My gloriously Afroed, 70s refugee 5th grade basketball coach hears me blasting this cover way too loud on my Walkman. He asks: “You’ve heard the original, right? No? Oh man. I’m gonna bring you a tape tomorrow.”

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Are you a person who listens to and enjoys country music from this or any other era? Failing that, have you eaten dinner at a Texas Roadhouse within the last year? Great, you likely have a more sophisticated understanding of why country is trending up than the NYT op-ed, and don’t need to read it.

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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 11/09/2026

There are very real safety concerns we need to address with generative LLMs. Deepfakes, privacy, AI psychosis, etc We don't need to entertain goofy nonsense from people claiming they're inventing the torment nexus from the science fiction classic "Dipshit That's Not The Torment Nexus Go Outside."

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

On my 15th birthday I was inexplicably given a Hank Williams boxed set as a gift. It took me months to get around to listening to it, but once I did I barely listened to anything else for a while. Had previously assumed that genre/era had nothing to offer me; turned out I was very wrong.

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the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

people, tomorrow is the Sunday news roundtable shows and shit. do what you like but just a thought, those shows are ass and the clips we post to get mad about stuff are taking up space that might be better suited to good jokes

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

69-year-old man in too-tight polo shirt who’s spent the last 40 years sitting on corporate boards and writing checks to software companies while enjoying material comforts that Ptolemaic pharaohs would have found decadent: “It is very important that I convince this podcaster I’m a real badass.”

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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

One of the global hallmarks of the anti-trans movement is that it's pushing people to reject levels of gender integration that were completely uncontroversial as recently as a few years ago.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

My first time covering SXSW, I got an extremely long, extremely detailed pitch to come watch and interview the then-unknown Grimes, which devoted multiple paragraphs to her Mississippi riverboat excursion. (In hindsight, I’m pretty sure she wrote it herself.) I’ve never turned a pitch down faster.

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Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

By almost any measure Dolly embodied "the American Dream." Some people will come from nothing and make it big and consider the problem now solved. Others will remember that there are still others with nothing and use what they have to help.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Cops sent out a public APB and splashed surveillance footage everywhere to try and catch an old man who picked up $30 off the floor of a Walmart and gave it back to the guy who dropped it.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Even putting aside the hatefulness of his broader campaign, this is just an astonishingly embarrassing way for anyone old enough to get a driver’s license to behave. Like, “everyone in the freshman dorm common room gets up and leaves when they see you coming” level embarrassing.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Unfortunate to see this break containment and spread to people who seem unfamiliar with Kacey’s Whole Deal.

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Jeff Weiss @passionweiss.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

"2Pac is Alive" conspiracies were once inescapable. Truthers pointed to numerology, lyrics, Cuba sightings and "doctored" coroner's photos. But seeing the autopsy pictures in court was a horrifying reminder of how real, tragic, and senseless it all was. www.powmag.net/p/2pac-trial...

powmag.net

2Pac Trial: The Naked and the Dead

Reporting from Las Vegas, Jeff Weiss watches as autopsy photos clash with conspiracy theories.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Any “pragmatist” Democratic strategist who previously cited polling to push candidates toward more conservative positions that *isn’t* currently telling them to go nuclear against data centers was never actually serious.

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Jake Cole @jakecole.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

They are such mainstays of classic rock radio that it flies under the radar how thrillingly weird ZZ Top is. The only band to really embody what a strange, strange place Texas is in its mix of aggro macho posing and the tacky kitsch undergirding that image.

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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

i don't love the image rehabilitation of this guy from 'total wingnut' to 'harmless oddball' but i do think it's worth pointing out that even the total wingnut keeps being way more sane and normal about zohran than various professional commentators

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Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

"There's something that Notorious B.I.G. once told me. Honestly. We were in a hotel in Providence. I was interviewing him, and what he told me, he said, fuck the guys, the girls are the ones that buy the tapes. Same thing with books." www.welcometohellworld.com/everyone-in-...

What do you suppose has made true crime stories in general so popular? And this story in particular? It’s a secondary question because people are murdered all the time, accidents happen, but not every story becomes something that millions of people are paying attention to.

Well, it's it's a few things. I did an event at another bookstore a couple days after the book came out, and there were like 120 people there, and it was 95% women. Women 35 to 60. The comic answer is they fantasize about killing their husbands. That's what everyone says.

There's something that Notorious B.I.G. once told me. Honestly. We were in a hotel in Providence. I was interviewing him, and what he told me, he said, fuck the guys, the girls are the ones that buy the tapes. Same thing with books. Women buy books. Dudes don't. It's nice to see a couple guys here. Hope you buy the book. But you know women do buy more books. They consume more true crime. They consume more movies. I don't know why that is. You'd have to ask the ladies here. With all true crime, I think a lot of women look at these stories and they want to figure out what happened. They want to understand the psyche of what drives someone to kill. Maybe more than guys.

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Mike Drucker @mikedrucker.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Every few months people are like “Is BlueSky dying” and every few months it doesn’t fucking matter because who gives a shit

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

So the story he’s going with is that he and the Secret Service pulled off an elaborate, ‘60s caper movie scheme to secretly sneak him onto a plane where he was *more* likely to be killed?

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I usually steer clear of generational warfare discourse, but the fact that we’ve only had one president born after the 1940s — who won his last election 14 years ago — is a very meaningful facet of modern US politics. This is not the case at all in other western democracies! It’s pretty weird!

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

If you remember his nba career it immediately got derailed because he wouldn’t fly and had mental health problems and I remember sympathetic news stories about his struggles and it’s wild to see someone asking for unique care and consideration do these trolls for attention to belittle other people

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

If the guy didn’t want to show sex he probably should have made the movie about a different day where the sex purge wasn’t happening. That would be my one punch up to the script.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

RIP William Orbit. Not sure there’s a better way to explain the late 90s than, “yes, this innovative, sexy, impeccably produced pop masterpiece first appeared on the soundtrack to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Yes, Madonna’s grinding on Austin in the video. It was a real coup at the time.”

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

When I was a kid my mom smuggled a wedge of parmigano-reggiano back from a business trip to Parma. It was such a revelation that we didn’t even grate it on anything, we just sat there ravenously breaking off pieces and eating it straight. These days I buy the same stuff at Trader Joe’s for like $7

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onion person @junlper.beer · 04/08/2026

suspiciously green bananas is sadly one of the funniest things i’ve read in awhile

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

A genuine masterpiece of billionaire self-pity. Owner of a vast media conglomerate believes he’s been silenced; upset that people would make assumptions about him based on his public actions and not his personal beliefs; declines to specify what those beliefs are.

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the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I don't even know what to say. This is real, this is true, so, like, thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. This took over 25 years to happen so if there's any lesson here it's either "keep at it, who knows" or "many people are divorced"

image of a gold record superimposed on part of Vaughan Oliver's iconic cover for the Mountain Goats' "Tallahassee" album, with a banner beneath it showing the entire album cover, an RIAA seal, and the text: Presented to THE MOUNTAIN GOATS to commemorate the RIAA Gold certification of more than 500,000 copies of the 4AD single "No Children"

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I had a pretty over-the-top crash-out a few months ago when someone accused me of using AI to write something. But goddamn, man. The smug self-satisfaction from these motherfuckers who think they’ve outsmarted you because they saw a TikTok about “AI tells” and don’t actually read.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

There is a 99% chance I would not recognize the name Hasan Piker if some of my least-favorite members of the Democratic Party hadn’t spent the last half-year talking about him obsessively on every platform available to them.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I know this is just meant to be a thought exercise, but I wrote my 33 1/3 book in about a month after procrastinating on it for the previous five. You probably could too — I’m really not that smart. Give it a shot!

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

We absolutely need a Poptimism 2 entirely for pre-1954 pop music.

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Like the hypocrisy and the open corruption, the naked, brazen lying is itself aspiring authoritarianism. They aren't lying to cover anything up. They're saying, "We know we're lying. You know we're lying. And we know you know we're lying. And there's nothing you can do about it."

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

The president spending weeks telling increasingly baroque lies that no one actually believes about something no one else even cares about, going so far as to call in the National Guard and have people arrested over it, then abruptly losing interest … just something the happens in this country now.

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Andrew Barker @barkerrant.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Even for FIFA this is getting insane. Infantino is really going to blow up one of the biggest, cushiest grifts in all of world sports just to squeeze a few bucks out of the Kushners. sports.yahoo.com/articles/gia...

sports.yahoo.com

Fifa executive puts job on line in scathing attack of Gianni Infantino over World Cup plan

Fifa’s chief operating officer Kevin Lamour has not followed senior advisor Carlos Cordeiro out the door but accepts he could lose his job by speaking out

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Micah @rincewind.run · 31/07/2026

what if we made an entire product out of the most abusive possible use case

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