iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This has reminded me of the existence of that Queenstown show that is getting made, created by an American and seemingly with very few people from NZ even in it.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

What's a pirate's favourite letter of the alphabet? ...R? 'Tis a fine letter to be sure, but a pirate's first love is the C!

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

THE TRUCK ARRIVED. It only took 30 hours. (And was apparently immediately headed on to Queenstown?) But the important thing is, all of Nessie's stuff is here! (...well, hopefully. They seemed unsure of which sections of the truck were hers)

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It's been kind of staggeringly bad, really.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Friends, there is still no truck. It is apparently arriving "after 4 or 5". If it doesn't show up tonight things will get interesting as I am going to Chch for a week tomorrow morning. But hey, at least the communications have been excellent during all this.

Text exchange in which the question "when can I expect my things to arrive in Dunedin" has been answered with "OK"

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

...check the "dispatch" status, which is what we are waiting on now. Meanwhile this is what their website says:

Screenshot of a website, text that reads:

Live Tracking
Track your move in real time with our GPS tracking link. Know exactly where your stuff is — every step of the way.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

My partner, whose stress at trying to move (and in with me, no less) is not being helped by the fact that she does not know where her stuff is or when it will arrive, has called the company 3 times; she has been told firstly they can't reach the drivers, then not called back, then that they will...

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Gave away my existing fridge a bit prematurely, as it turns out

A kitchen bench covered in all the things I took out of my fridge, which I had carted away in anticipation of a new fridge arriving later that afternoon, which it manifestly failed to do.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Day two of waiting for a moving truck in Dunedin that left with a house full of things in Christchurch at 1:20pm yesterday. Where is it: who knows? Who can say: certainly not the moving company, so far

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

(Of course, not helping matters is that the world does have plenty of newspapers that are indeed deliberately and nefariously out to do things.)

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If the same publication is getting called both a "left wing rag" and "right wing propaganda" all the time regularly (and they are, you will discover this very quickly when you tell strangers you work for a newspaper), maybe it's a little bit of a Rorschach test, eh.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Again I would never suggest that the media is free of structural or systemic issues, but it's weird that people forget/ignore that any conviction they have that paper X is obviously biased left or right is likely equalled on the opposite pole of the political spectrum, but in the other direction.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Having one of those days online where, after spending 10 hours in a newspaper office yesterday, the number of confident proclamations I am running into about the nature of newspapers and what they are apparently deliberately and nefariously out to do feels like crashing into a different reality.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Home safety tip: when pulling the "straighten out the chip packet and tip the remaining crumbs into your open mouth" manoeuvre, do not 1) miscalculate badly and pour some of the crumbs into your eye; 2) make this mistake with a packet of Lime and Black Pepper flavoured chips

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

UK too, to similar levels of awesome success. "Oh we're just doing realpolitik", fellas, that's got the world "real" in it

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The only poll that counts is election day etc, but sure look like Labour's steady-as-she-goes, win the centre, don't scare the horses (where the horses are a shaky National voter) etc approach has been very effective at ... driving a bunch of its potential voters to the party further to its left

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Ha, yes, although I do not think I am understating it when I say that if they went with "Somehow Palpatine returned a second time, like we just can't kill this guy" it would probably destroy Star Wars as a franchise.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Also I guess we can be confident that they might make something that ignores unliked stuff that went before because the 8th movie did that to the 7th movie and the 9th movie did it even worse to the 8th movie

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I mean this will never get made people, because Disney has 100% painted itself into a psychological corner, BUT if it did I guess the hope of the side would be that they *can't* just do "just the Empire basically comes back" *again* (right?!) so maybe there will be a new direction possible there.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

<General Grievous voice> Another name director for my collection of non-realised Star Wars projects

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"Are people under the influence of the Dark Side fully responsible for their own actions, or could you plead 'I was Dark Side at the time' like an insanity defence?" is I think a key, ambiguous question in the franchise that it manages to avoid definitively answering by killing its villains off.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Ah, that special time of year where once again those of us for whom a sleep "schedule" is an academic concept at best are hit by the online wave of complaints that daylight savings is apparently somehow going to ruin lives for months on and get to ponder the truly alien nature of the lives of others

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Boy nothing sets you up for a positive day like opening up Bluesky and reading a well-researched and argued article you totally agree with about the dire state of the world and future that pierces the bubble of background-level denial you operate in at almost all times just in order to function

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Now seated for Coyote vs Acme, up yours extremely specifically David Zaslav

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

No obvious birds and bees, but <spoilers>

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I watched Settling, the NZ romcom thing. Fun, but one of the main characters 1) had a full time magazine writing job before 2) she wrote one travel piece online that was somehow going to launch her into a world tour. Think we need to update our conception of writing "careers" from Hemingway's time.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The future alien xenoarcheologists basically have no chance of working out what the hell our deal was.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Everyone games on my timeline today up in arms about the "crunch is life" idiot and no-one talking about the fact that Minecraft appears to have some kind of bracket fungus now, smh

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

It's legitimately a great game but a tough sell for so many, I suspect. I have fallen off it in part because when I think about doing some gaming for a couple of hours 5 punishing rounds of dying to the hardcore people that are left does not seem like a fun time. Will check out PvE for sure though.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

She would never trust Italians again.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Was reminded of this which was introduced to me by my Dad because ... it was pretty much exactly on brand for my Dad, being a lifelong English teacher of a certain vintage.

The poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

...but predicting your video game will come out in four years, in the Year of our Lord 2026?! DOOMED. At least we got this fancy cinematic out of it I guess

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Hey everyone The Otago Daily Times is maintaining its unlikely but nevertheless undisputed title as New Zealand's #1 video game publication www.odt.co.nz/life-and-sty...

odt.co.nz

Lively accompaniment

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Good read. Particularly striking part:

Extract from an essay about AI Doomerism which argues the more pressing problem is the inability to enforce the rule of law in this area. It reads:

And here I think the last forty years of nihilistic refusal to govern for the public interest takes its toll on our imagination. I had a recent conversation with an AI doomer sympathizer, and I asked him why criminal prosecutions or holding these companies liable for harms wouldn’t restructure incentives and force safer products. He agreed that it would, but argued that in his experience, there is no way to enforce the rule of law against the powerful. No jury could ever convict, and no prosecutor would dare take on OpenAI or Anthropic.

I was sort of shocked, and then I realized it was more realistic for him to imagine that bots would take over our civilization and supplant humanity than to imagine that we might apply the rule of law to Sam Altman.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

If only there were some ethics

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Given we know Hollywood is rooting around amidst the Common Folk for new horror film IP in the wake of Backrooms, Obsession etc, I expect this sign on the front of the $2/costume shop at the Dunedin bus hub I walk past every day to get a three-picture deal any day now.

A printing service advertising image, letting you the passer-by know they will create face masks of a real person from a photo for you. Two examples are shown. The eyes are cut out as they would be in a mask, except the masks are placed on a white background, creating a child whose slitted eyes appear to be rolling back in demonic ecstasy as he visualises murdering you and a woman whose soulless blank stare is paired with a wide-mouthed toothy smile, which seems likely to continue to widen so she can better start to swallow you whole from the top of your head.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

...how is this so close to the original?!

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I love the way Hawks tosses their PDA thing onto the couch with a little spin.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Boy, that minute or so clip of Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary sure is enough to tell me I will be unable to watch Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary.

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Ben Allan @benallan.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Goddamn, Silo really got to the good stuff this season.

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