iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jessie Gender @jessiegender.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

It’s interesting to read Star Trek and Star Wars as two ways America mythologizes itself. Star Trek sits in tension with itself as imagining a utopian future born from Western liberal ideals while also challenging those ideals to actually live up to their promise. While-

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

there are people going out in the freezing cold and literally putting their lives on the line in defense of their communities and the multicultural secular society they believe in. not interested in what some online wannabe dnc consultant type wants to tell me what is and isn't possible now

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Robin Riley @riley.pub · 27/01/2026

Solidarity from our siblings abroad 😻 Means a lot in this moment. Together we can defeat the global fascist movement! Shout to @barklaart.bsky.social for creating this and posting it to one of the best subreddits: r/catbongos. www.reddit.com/r/catbongos/... #ICEOut #AbolishDHS

A protest poster featuring an anthropomorphized cat wearing a beanie, boots, and a pair of bongos as they march. The poster reads: Crush ICE! Love cats! Fight fash!

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

r/catbongos, a reddit for smacking your cat like a drum (they love it) has taken a hard stance against ICE! It brought me joy, so here's some art 💗✊ #art #fuckice

an anti-ICE, antifascist poster in a pop art style. In the centre is a sketchy cartoon cat.

The cat wears a hoodie, beanie, jeans, boots, an anti-ICE whistle, and a set of bongos strapped to their body. They march in protest, slapping their drums and raising a fist. Behind them is an abstract background of other protesters.

The text at the top says CRUSH ICE. The text beneath says LOVE CATS! FIGHT FASH! [fascists/fascism]

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Iron Spike @ironspike.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

One guy tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up a plane with a bomb in his sneakers, and everybody had to take off their shoes at the airport for the next 20 years. Chatbots have a collective body count equal to Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez, and they're trying to put them in schools.

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Sweatpants Cher @housefeminist.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

one problem with learning is it will make you so angry at how stupid everything is

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

exactly the reason I don't discuss my veganism online 💚😅 I've got a cohesive philosophical viewpoint, but many questions about it are VERY DEFENSIVE - in bad faith, if not actively hostile - and you can't have a civil discussion with something like that

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Sygnin @sygnin.com · 06/01/2026

I solved the 'it's still the Year of the Snake, but everyone thinks it's Year of the Horse' problem. It's now the month of the Snorse. #sygnin

Art of a snake horse creature standing against a red sun

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Sarah Z @sarahz.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Like, my point isn't "copyright doesn't do enough to protect artists"; it's "copyright is literally designed to hurt artists". I absolutely do think a better world would be a world where everything is just public domain. That thread even mentions alternative propositions so artists get paid!

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Sarah Z @sarahz.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

In a strange position where I think there are massive, massive social harms to the proliferation of AI (misinfo, deepfakes, predatory 'companions', surveillance, labour rights) but also feel the mainstream arguments against it range from unconvincing (water) to actively harmful (copyright; "soul")

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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 31/12/2025

good piece with an incidental insanely brutal takedown of klein

The media has spent the last few months trying to make sense out of nonsense, attempting to conjure motive, manifesto, and meaning out of the dumbest shit scrawled onto bullets. These were sad attempts to impose meaning on an increasingly incoherent world by a literati that has not yet accepted its irrelevance in a postliterate society. But the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning, however, was Ezra Klein's bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column ("Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way") can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity. Klein, I would argue, sees both himself and Kirk as being Debate Guys, wordcels who engage in the marketplace of ideas and let speech sort itself out into political action.

Kirk did not commit violence, not because he abhorred it, but because committing violence was someone else's job. Last year, he called for using whips against migrants, saying, "Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?" In early June of this year, as the president deployed troops to Los Angeles, Kirk publicly advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to crush the immigration protests. And in August, he called for "federalizing" the district of Columbia, saying,
"Roll in the tanks, bring in the military."
With his close relationship to the commander in chief of the United States of America, Charlie Kirk was no mere talker, idea-peddler, or purveyor of discourse. He built an empire on legitimizing violence and harvesting the enthusiasm and glee around it. Even before his death became a pretext to enact violence on American cities, he had already substantively shaped history. Charlie Kirk was a part of the real world in a way that Ezra Klein will never be.

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Art vs Artist 2025!! 🌞🐍😻🦌🕷🐛👯‍♀️🐈🌲🍾🐸🐭 I drew a lot less, but I wrote a lot more! And started my first ever garden. So here's to a lifestyle diverse as my art style, algorithm be damned 😉

art vs artist grid, with 3 rows of 3 images. The central image is a photo of me, Laura, in a handknit watermelon beanie in the city. The surrounding images are 8 of my artworks from this year: homeowning cats in love, year of the snake, sinister apocalypse deer skeleton, milky flower spider woman, extremely popular mantis painting, empress theresa's little black everything dress, mice on the mouseboat, and fergus the cat portrait.

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Kendra, spooky version @kendrawcandraw.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

"You shouldn't make art for the money" buddy I'll take it one step further and say we shouldn't have to labor for capital at all but in the meantime pay an artist

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C. Robert Cargill @crobertcargill.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

A reminder that the key to writing is getting the very best out of your brain, but in order to get the best out of it you have to take care of your mental health. Stress, concern, and depression will take a toll on your work. So always make sure to take care of YOU and you'll get your best work.

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onion person @junlper.beer · 23/12/2025

rightwingers privately disagree with a good bit of what they espouse because it’s not about being moral it’s about getting unlimited money and personal power

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Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

one lesser awful thing about the Epstein files is that genuine crimes against a huge number of children are being morphed into fuel for the influencer industrial complex who don't care about truth or accuracy and just want grist for the content mills

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Tom & Lorenzo @tomandlorenzo.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

You've got to figure the type of person who'd go to Stonehenge on the Solstice is also the type of person to completely lose their shit when encountering a random black cat there

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🦇 bat 🦇 millman @mpoltonsimon.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

The running theme between the Epstein story, banning trans healthcare for minors, religious homeschooling and the complaints about adult children estranging themselves is a fundamental American belief that children are property with no rights of their own

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Universal Basic Income now! There's no reason not to do it - it's the most transformative, utopian policy we could implement TODAY, and has minimal costs and drawbacks! And everyone benefits. Even if you don't give a shit about the poor, just imagine how many Silksongs you could have 🕸🐞

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

that red on the ground is stunning💗

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Darryl Mott @gamerstavernshow.com · 21/12/2025

And this is another reason. False positives of "AI" art is constant in TTRPGs because Midjourney and others admit to heavily training on fantasy art from D&D and M:TG. This is especially true of "AI detector" sites, which are themselves "AI" and can't tell the difference.

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Hell Frasier: Bloodline @babadooknukem.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

my child, who has a better understanding of color layering and shading than most adults, got tired of coloring and instead of encouraging them or just letting them know its ok to put a project down I chose to teach them to outsource creativity to the demon rectangle

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

Congrats to Australia, this is really cool! report.cervicalcancercontrol.org.au

There were no cervical cancer cases diagnosed in women aged <25 years in 2021 – the first time that this has occurred in data going back to 1982. This remarkable achievement is almost certainly due to the impact of HPV vaccination. Across women screened at all ages, biopsy confirmed pre-cancer (HSIL) detection rates have also declined, by 21%, most likely reflecting a lower detection of disease among participants returning for their second round of HPV-based screening. Lower rates are expected, as most prevalent disease was detected and treated in the first round (age-standardised rate per 1,000 women screened was 7.5 in 2024, compared to 9.6 in 2019, the corresponding year in the first round of HPV screening) (indicator 3).

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

vegan product names are just like that. sausage label that stopped me dead in Woolies:

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nora "the tea kobold" rude (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 18/12/2025

republicans believe children should be forced to carry pregnancies to term and should be allowed to be pushed into coercive marriages by their parents because they see children as fundamentally sexually exploitable and i am tired of pretending their transphobia has some other angle

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Rudbeckia @rudbeckia.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

I love my two blackout drunk Minnesota sons

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Rebecca Watson @skepchick.org · 15/12/2025

One way that the reaction to Rob Reiner's murder mirrors Charlie Kirk's is that the best way to eulogize each of them is to quote their words, and in both cases, doing so pisses off conservatives.

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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

as of this week it has officially been 18 years since an anonymous user uploaded this bizarre image of an opossum cornered in a baby grand piano to Wikimedia Commons

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

God, they're all still around 😭. Several spot-on profiles here. Mr C is the standout, but let's not forget B and E:

An except from "Who Goes Nazi?", an article by Dorothy Thompson in 1941 . It reads:

Mr B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He marries for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class - no worse, no better. He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value - success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

An except from "Who Goes Nazi?", an article by Dorothy Thompson in 1941 . It reads:

Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded himself that he is a genius, and there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other "masculine" or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour our her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.

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shaunt @shaunvids.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

the faux-AI evangelists see the artistic process as a race to get to a finished product, instead of something valuable in itself. the process is where you develop those skills you don't have yet, it cannot be skipped, it is where the art happens

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Maaria @maariala.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

The majestic man-taur Half man... half another man

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 07/12/2025

It is an absolutely delightful irony that the richest man in the world is universally acknowledged to be a huge fucking loser who not a single living person envies in any way at all

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Millie(let) @gyro.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

I fucking love memes you can understand through the language barrier, holy shit

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

omg I love her ❤️ Imagine being so fearless. not to mention iconic; half the article is Rachel being arrestingly, cosmically glamorous. The kind of muse that topples empires. Incredible woman

Except from the article "Harlow’s Still Here" by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez:

And to be a trans woman perceived as naturally feminine in the traditional mode, to be able to live as a woman effortlessly without the fear of others’ reactions, lent her a privilege that made her path an easier one than many trans women were facing at the time.

“I could have gone anywhere and lived my life without anyone knowing my story,” she says. “But I stayed in Philadelphia and told it to anyone who would listen.”

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Nicole Field 🧛‍♀️🏺🏳️‍🌈 @faerywhimsy.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

If the writer’s eyes light up when asked, “why did the character do that?” then it’s real.

Tumblr post screen capture by nocryptographer about how to tell AI slop from a story that was created by a human being.

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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

Bronze plaque saying "A Letter to the Future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. August 2019. 415ppm CO2"

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Sarah Z @sarahz.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

The thing is Tarantino is Tarantino and that's never a good thing, but I have to say I absolutely adore his "marginalized people enacting righteous, stupidly gory violence against their oppressors" canon. Inglourious Basterds especially, but truly all of them unfortunately

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Makoto Chi @zasshu.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

there was a “write an uplifting message to give to a queer youth” table at yesterday’s craft fair so i made this

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

how to feels to make art:

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Trying to figure out how to carry all the grocery bags into the house in one trip

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Rebecca Watson @skepchick.org · 29/11/2025

picking out a tree

Indy the dog, looking happy and outdoorsy in a green knit sweater at the christmas tree farm

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Joelle Maslak @jmaslak.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Every trans person who is on a knife edge. On one side is employment for another day. On the other is whether a random transphobe posts "Ick, gross, trans person" with your picture and employer name, and it goes viral. You will get fired, from pretty much any company, if that happens to you.

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Oliver @dubiousdevil.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

*fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you* *fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you* *fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you* *fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you*

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winston @winston.cc · 03/12/2025

it's wild how the positive use cases are like "save 5 minutes reading a long doc" and "write a generic email faster" and the negative use cases are "get encouraged to dive deeper in psychosis, misogyny, or suicidal thoughts" and we're still on the fence about overall value

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Laura @barklaart.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

By that metric, my runner up:

Screenshot of a headline from The Onion. The headline is "Box with Cooking Instructions Immediately Retrieved From Trash", accompanied by a photo of someone's hand salvaging a mac 'n' cheese box from their bin.

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WA Orchids @wa-orchids.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

Plants in the genus Chorizema have stunning flowers. Nearly all the members of this genus are endemic to Western Australia. Like this one seen in Albany in the southwest of WA, which I think is Chorizema glycinifolium. #ozflora #wildoz #nativeplants #nature #inaturalist #Fabaceae

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