iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Current master's student here. Getting my degree will be cool I guess but I don't consider it a personal rite of passage (at best it's a professional one). And even if I did, I'm not a little kid with divorced parents who needs my dad to show up to remind me that he still loves me.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

I don't think JKR did this intentionally, but the Wizarding World only makes sense if you understand them to be a luddite society. Their tech is composed entirely of enchanted muggle inventions but for some reason they'll enchant a sword but not a Kalashnikov.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

IIRC Harry went into some detail explaining what a Playstation was in the letter. I think JKR realized several books in that she had failed to establish the historical setting she had envisioned so tried to settle the matter with a clunky tech reference.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

There's a moment in one of the books where Harry mentions in a letter to his Hogwarts friends that Dudley got so mad that he threw his Playstation at something, but the fact I remember that line suggests it may be the only example.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

🇺🇦🇦🇿 and 🇷🇺🇦🇲 are extremely common alignments in Ukraine and Russia respectively. Both tend to see Nagorno-Karabakh as equivalent to D/LPR, along with whatever that entails from their differing perspectives. Plenty of Russian mil bloggers have spent time in both.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

He's certainly been here long enough that his takes are counted in the American gross domestic take production.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Every Holocaust remembrance organization on the planet refers to the "deportation" of Jews to the death camps. I'd bet a high percentage of schoolchildren in this country learn the word for the first time in that context. There's nothing euphemistic about it.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

AI is great for digging up relevant sources on complex topics. I treat it as a research assistance with an amazing talent for finding me links to cite but who under no circumstances is allowed to go anywhere near the final product.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

I won't pretend to know, but whatever really is going on in the army (or in any institution) is more likely to be found in leaked internal documents than in whatever a PR social media account is blurting out.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

He'd also make an excellent fall guy, should Trump ever find himself in the market for one.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

There's also a real possibility that Trump will start hating Musk's face for whatever reason before all of this is over and he'll be left high and dry.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Trouble was that while the truth would have been bad enough to end a political career prior to 2016, Resist Libs couldn't help themselves but to push the envelope so far that nothing short of a shut-and-closed espionage case against Trump would have ever delivered what they promised.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

We are in such weird territory that at this point, I'm wondering if solidly Democratic state governments might be the best ones to put up that fight. Those are actual power nodes still under Democratic control.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 28/12/2023

They unfortunately ran out of historically-themed rollercoasters to franchise. Maybe we can petition a Sherman's march through Georgia ride or, better yet, the Storm of Steel spaghetti coaster.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 28/12/2023

I feel vaguely protective of this car, as if it was an innocent piglet made sentient by its cruel master and transmuted into metal to do its evil bidding.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

Yeah the Vietnam War comparisons only go so far.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

Vietnam War wasn't ended by hippies waving NLF flags. It was ended, ironically, by the silent majority that by 1969 wanted to bring the boys home. In the depressingly unlikely chance a mass antiwar movement emerges in Russia, it'll likely look like that.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

They took liberties with some of the facts of the battle but essentially stuck to the spirit of the source material. Not sure how much control Gibson exerted over the script, perhaps not a lot.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

I'd argue that there's a split. Some Russian liberals have just flat out decided that they support the Ukrainian war effort, while during the Vietnam War you had to look much further left for that sentiment.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

I mean, that was also the impetus behind antiwar protests becoming a mass social movement during the Vietnam War as well.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

All delivered by an actor recruited in Vietnam speaking in a northern Vietnamese dialect, too.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

There was a split in the State Dept in 1945-46 between the Asia desk wanting to support Vietnamese independence and the Europe desk wanting to support France. Asia desk lost.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 29/11/2023

Weirdly enough, We Were Soldiers is the best I've seen in that regard. I once showed the Vietnamese dialogue scenes to my Vietnamese teacher in Hanoi, and she assumed it was a Vietnamese production.

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 28/11/2023

More from my last month's visit to the 28th Mechanized Brigade's artillery positions near Bakhmut, as well as a brief visit to the 47th Brigade in the Avdiivka direction. www.sundaypost.com/fp/ukrainian...

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Bennett Murray @bdmurray.bsky.social · 21/11/2023

My latest from Ukraine: “They have two drones flying above us searching, maybe for us, maybe for somebody else, but we’re too beautiful to die today,” the young lieutenant said cheerfully as the shells whizzed above him. thedispatch.com/article/insi...

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