iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Fry @benfry.com · 28/09/2026

so you're saying there's a chance

Stack of no less than 8 error messages stating

The application “Safari.app” is not open anymore.

Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/09/2026

…while Paul and I plotted about what a modern type specimen might look like when your input is the trove of information in a modern font file.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/09/2026

…Katherine figures out the color changer on the knitting machine and makes a scarf…

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/09/2026

…Karlie donning headphones to make weird sounds with a new AMYboard… (www.amyboard.com)

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/09/2026

…Ellory took a shot at learning to use the embroidery machine…

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 17/09/2026

We have a paper in Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Several years in the making, Delphy (www.delphy.bio) is one of the tools for outbreak response that we've been building over the last several years with Pardis Sabeti over at the Broad Institute.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/09/2026

There's a 10% chance that Rowboat will kill us all before the end of the decade. Until then, I hope you'll find it's drastically faster, more accurate, less expensive, and more fun than using an LLM to play with large datasets. Our latest: buttondown.com/rowboat/arch... Give it a try: rowboat.net

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 09/09/2026

The new Duo rumored to be announced by Apple today is looking sweeeet

Mid-90s ad spread touting Apple's PowerBook Duo

Conjuring my high school self to say “sweet” in the most 90s midwestern way possible

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 06/09/2026

Ha, they've deleted the post, but the kids in the picture are still bored

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 20/08/2026

Felt obligated to pick this up just as a thumbs up to the author for its title, but I'm half an hour in and we already have this banger from Paulina Borsook: “As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.”

Cover for “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy” by Gil Durán

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/08/2026

Thanks! and as it turns out, the piece I was preparing for the show was the original for the Nature cover:

full version of image used on the Nature cover

Francis Collins wields a Nature cover with my illustration

even closer detail… includes thousands of tiny letters, rendered manually by extracting their curve geometry and projecting it into a false 3D isometric perspective (to maintain size relationships and avoid the distortion from proper 3D perspective)

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/08/2026

Throwback from 2001… Had to revive an old project for an upcoming show, and in the process, ran across this old poster from around the same time.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 17/08/2026

I mean, here's Burger Beard from the SpongeBob movie breaking down what's currently happening in American democracy:

Question: It must be a little surreal for you. You grew up in the Franco regime, and to see things of a similar shape happening in American politics—does that bring out any echoes for you?

Answer: Well, they are different characters. Franco came from a completely different background. Franco was never elected democratically, and Trump was elected democratically. And, whether you like it or not, that is a fact. And those facts should be respected. That is a very important thing. Sometimes I have the impression that we are living in a post-democratic state of mind, worldwide, in which the guys who access power democratically, they try to take the law and bend it, they try to colonize these institutions that are supposed to be impartial to extend the time in which they can be in power. We are in dangerous times—we are not just playing with ideologies, we are playing with the system itself. This is a new game.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 08/08/2026

Finally had a chance to actually listen to this today; it's fantastic. Even better than the last. And I still think you look great as a Scooby Doo villain.

Title card for Scooby Doo episode “A Clue for Scooby Doo” with a glowing green character in 60s diving equipment.

The image bears a remarkable resemblance to Nat Torkington wielding his banjo on the cover of You, Me, Everybody's 2026 smash hit album “Midnight.”

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 07/08/2026

“$1 billion in new SNAP benefits raises GDP by $1.5 billion”

Chart from https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/july/quantifying-the-impact-of-snap-benefits-on-the-u-s-economy-and-jobs underneath the heading “Expanded SNAP Spending Raises GDP”

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 30/07/2026

brb, I've just split in two because the part of me that cares about foreign policy is devastated at what our State Department has become, while my information designer self cannot stop laughing at this map slop www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“The map presented in Brazil on Sunday showed a landlocked Nigeria in the Sahara and placed Mozambique in the Horn of Africa. Photograph: Picture obtained by Reuters/Reuters”

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 16/07/2026

Just look at this beauty… The first laptop ever, the Grid Compass 1101… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Co... I don't feel like Bill Moggridge gets enough credit for what an incredible merger of form and function this was.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 13/07/2026

“MIT mechanical engineers designed a robot that can swim underwater, break through the surface, and continue flying in air. Diving birds manage this feat. ‘So we knew it was possible. Just no one had tried this in a mobile robotic system’” news.mit.edu/2026/new-fla...

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/07/2026

A 12yo watches JAWS for the first time… (We've started having our daughter write down what she thinks will happen, to keep her from spending the movie blurting things out and ruining the surprise—or simply frustrating—the rest of the room.)

Page from a notepad showing a 12yo's notes while watching Jaws. Includes things like

Someone's gonna die ✓
(pls) John Williams? ✓✓✓
…
gonna hire the guy – prob gonna die } torso bitten? / get sucked in with fishing rod / spear → expert hates him

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/06/2026

Had to dust off an ancient piece of code from 2004 that used an early version of Processing. Amused to see the supported platforms list in the source:

screen capture of Java source code reading:

static final String[] platforms = {
"", "windows", "macos9", "macosx", "linux", "irix"
};

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 12/06/2026

Happy SpaceX-Grok-xAI-Twitter-X IPO day www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-...

“Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.”

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 07/05/2026

From February 2020, before “sarscov2” and “covid” were even named, this piece from @edyong209.bsky.social holds up remarkably well: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Quote from the piece: “Each new crisis follows a familiar playbook, as scientists, epidemiologists, health-care workers, and politicians race to characterize and contain the new threat. Each epidemic is also different, and each is a mirror that reflects the society it affects.”

This portion highlighted: “In the new coronavirus, we see a world that is more connected than ever by international travel, but that has also succumbed to growing isolationism and xenophobia. We see a time when scientific research and the demand for news, the spread of misinformation and the spread of a virus, all happen at a relentless, blistering pace. The new crisis is very much the kind of epidemic we should expect, given the state of the world in 2020.”

And finally: "It's almost as if the content is the same but the amplitude is different," Bhadelia said. "There's just a greater frenzy, and is that a function of the disease, or a function of the changed world? It's unclear."

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 29/04/2026

Hairball the cat is unimpressed with your network graph visualization.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 09/04/2026

“Porting Mac OS X to the Nintento Wii” This made my day—first, that there are people out there who do things like this, but second (and more to the point), that he also took the time to document the process in detail. So much to be learned here: bryankeller.github.io/2026/04/08/p...

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 07/04/2026

Fall is the best, but spring in Boston is a close second. Animals re-emerging, plants are blooming, and massive flakes of heavy, wet snow are falling on this fine morn, the seventh of April.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 04/04/2026

Happy Easter! 🐣 Shotton's site is also worth a visit if you're needing more elegant and clever in your morning (or afternoon, or evening, or…) dshott.co.uk/collections/...

Screenshot of the linked page; see the page for better descriptions!

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 04/04/2026

The Midnight covers are *gorgeous*… my compliments to the chef

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 02/04/2026

Unintentionally celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary today having just started “Apple in China” which so far is the best retelling of their history I've read in years.

Cover of Patrick McGee's “Apple in China”

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 27/03/2026

The machine would later make the trip with me to San Francisco after school to start my new job (with Netscape!) An aspiring Duchamp from the moving company converted the machine's original shipping box into this wonderful post-Dadaist creation.

Power Computing machine upright in a box with foam stuck to the sides.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 27/03/2026

RIP Mac Pro (2006–2026) My first Mac Pro was a Power Computing Power Tower Pro, purchased my senior year in college with every dollar I made during an internship the previous summer. The “world's fastest Mac” in 1996 (by quite a bit), coming in at 200 and 225 MHz…

Spread from a MacWarehouse catalog from 1996, depicting several options from Mac compatible maker “Power Computing”

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 23/03/2026

Still working to get the right marketing message for Rowboat, but in the meantime, lots of updates this month: improved cell editing, map improvements, plus a fresh desktop release: rowboat.net And for the superfans, all the gory details on the release page: docs.rowboat.net/releases/ 💪

The original Jaws poster, lovingly re-fashioned by Paul to depict a tiny rowboat and massive shark mouth heading upwards. The top reads ROWBOAT instead of JAWS. Get it? Ok ok it gave me a giggle.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 18/03/2026

Someone asked Christoph Niemann to paint a garage… 💛 www.christophniemann.com/detail/garag...

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/02/2026

This piece was published exactly a year ago, and at the time I /hoped/ it was at least a bit alarmist, but it has proven to be overwhelmingly correct, and perhaps even understated. Well worth reading to understand where we are, where we're headed in the US: www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize state institutions and deploy them against opponents. The Constitution alone cannot save U.S. democracy. Even the best-designed constitutions have ambiguities and gaps that can be exploited for antidemocratic ends. After all, the same constitutional order that undergirds America’s contemporary liberal democracy permitted nearly a century of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South, the mass internment of Japanese Americans, and McCarthyism. In 2025, the United States is governed nationally by a party with greater will and power to exploit constitutional and legal ambiguities for authoritarian ends than at any time in the past two centuries.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 28/01/2026

“my dream of combining my loves of math, art, and teaching into a book is finally a reality” —@gwenbeads.bsky.social www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Cover of “Beading with Algorithms” with 30% promo code RECMATH30

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 26/01/2026

Beautiful perspective from this map of the world re-oriented using the “Spilhaus” projection, which depicts Earth as a single, connected ocean. From Woods Hole's “Why the Ocean” campaign: www.whoi.edu/campaign/why...

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 16/01/2026

21,689 rows of film data (100 MB file!) and filtering by Director instantaneously on hover. All in the browser, no roundtrip to a server. Just insane what we can do here: rowboat.net/f/7vb8dx84 (I'm actually moving slower in the first half to make it less confusing—second half is actual speed.)

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/01/2026

While trying to sort out and assemble my own thoughts about generative AI, it's been helpful to take in the work of others who are more articulate about it. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts. We dig ourselves deeper into crises that have been made worse by technology, from the erosion of electoral democracy to the intensification of climate change. We condone platforms that not only urge children to commit suicide, they instruct them on how to tie the noose. We hand over our autonomy, at the very moment of emerging American fascism.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 23/12/2025

“6 or 7 characters should be plenty for a password, or maybe 8 if you must”

Connect to the file server “borges” as:
( ) Guest
(x) Registered User
Name: [ a very large text field… ]
Password: [••••••••] [x] Add to Keychain

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 09/12/2025

I miss this being the most annoying thing a piece of software might do… It sounded so desperate and lame, but was just an eye roll. Now you fire up one of the Adobe apps and it goes completely nuts phoning home. This is my laptop's firewall saying wtf after double-clicking Photoshop.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 02/12/2025

I'm terrible at marketing so I asked ChatGPT 5 to make an ad for rowboat.net

Actual tweet:

“Shared row data file with GPT5 to analyze, the result KPls were crazy, so I naively asked, and innocently it responded.”

In the ChatGPT window, the user asks “Did you make up these numbers?”

The response: “Good catch - I wasn't able to actually open and parse your CSV file yet”

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 26/11/2025

Inverse Histogram of Seltzer Flavor Preference at New England-based Design & Software Development Studio (2025)

The inside of the fridge at Fathom, with different flavors of seltzer arranged in columns, fewer cans for some show preference for particular flavors over one another.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 25/11/2025

…and Brazil (which also looks nice in night mode).

Brazil's roads in white, on a black background

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 25/11/2025

…which got Paul thinking about smaller areas he wanted to see, like Andorra, Brunei*, Taiwan… * this is Brunei/Malaysia/Singapore (many thanks to Geofabrik for these OSM exports)

Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and all their roads

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 25/11/2025

…so then Katherine was all “um, Hong Kong?” (love this one! look at those neighborhoods! a new favorite)…

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 25/11/2025

…so then Mark wanted a Finland (which also looks sharp on black, evoking NASA's Earth Lights image)…

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 25/11/2025

I dusted off the code over the weekend because Karlie was wanting a version of Alaska to give to a friend who moved there and is feeling the disconnect* of living in a very rural area. * no offense to Alaska, which is stunning and arguably better for its lack of pavement

A map of Alaska's roads… things are looking… sparse

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 25/11/2025

Fun with streets… from 2007, here's what a map of the United States* looks like made up of only roads. No other features have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. * the “lower 48,” sorry AK & HI www.benfry.com/allstreets/

All of the streets in the United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.

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