iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If you didn't already know what my profile picture was (or it hadn't occurred to you to look at it before), see the Alt text for an explanation:

"It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."

"Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

What if labyrinths and mazes could be a GM tool? How can we use invisible games tethered to strange details to structure psychological horror? Can Uno be terrifying?

A classical labirynth with the U-turns numbered and 4 quadrants colored red, green, blue, and purple. The center is numbered 17 and contains all 4 colors swirled together.

A woman is playing Uno. She's got 3 cards in her hand while she plays a Wild Draw 4. Her eyebrows are raised and mouth is open like she's saying "aaaaaaaah!" Truly terrifying

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I miss when AI generated images was just experimental hallucinogenic weirdness we could all laugh about.

Probably a woman at a restaraunt, but her head and the background are an urban street scene and her arms turn into packs of small dogs getting scritches where they meet the table. She has buildings for eyes. She's wearing an open long sleeve shirt made of multi-exposed photographs of children playing. Her eyes are buildings.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I think there's potentially a valid reading of the Tao Te Ching that it was an early attempt to describe fractal geometry and Chaos Theory.

TheyreTheSamePicture.meme

The pictures are a yin-yang and part of the Mandelbrot set.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Imagine if our 2D hero weilding their 3D sword is exploring a dungeon that's the surface of a 3D shape? Standing on the red X, they might be able to tile the blade out of plane and strike at locations in other rooms that they can't even see. What about hyperdimensional items that aren't weapons?

A dungeon drawn on paper, but there's other pieces of paper taped to it to make curving loops of hallways and extra rooms sticking out of it.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Even states that have "reformed" eminent domain laws in response to this ruling often left themselves loopholes, which would make it easy to seize that property there as well. A truly massive redistribution of wealth is necessary to have any chance of avoiding total system collapse. This is a start

Graph: Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. (1989-2023)

Highlighting the distribution of household wealth by wealth percentile (Top 0.1%, 99-99.99%, 90-99%, 50-90%, Bottom 50%) over the past three decades. According to the Federal Reserve, the top 10% own about 67% of the total household wealth.

The graph shows that the total Household wealth of the bottom 50% of US households has roughly tripled since 1989, topping out at around 3%. Meanwhile the total household wealth of the top 10% has gone from around $10 trillion to around $100 trillion with the greatest per capita gains coming at the very top 0.1% richest Americans.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

The tax laws necessary to implement a national wealth tax already exist. All that's necessary is to extend the application of existing law. #WealthTax #TaxTheRich

1. A U.S. person whose combined assets are valued at or above $100 million on any day of the tax year must—

a. pay real estate tax on all property equal to the highest combined state and local real estate tax rates on any such property that they owned at any time during the calendar year.

b. file Form 8621 as if each directly or indirectly held stock they own as if it was a Passive Foregin Investment Corporation (PFIC).

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

This cabinet changed my life. I saw a Gary Knox Bennett retrospective at the #OMCA. It's a gorgeous cabinet with a rusty nail stuck in the face right at eye level. I didn't know furniture could say "fuck you" until that moment. I never thought about design the same after that.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

@aspenideas.bsky.social has been reputation washing for billionaires and executives for decades. I wonder if the workers who had to import that title into the website, make the programs, and set up the space were pissed, or if they let themselves believe they were talking about someone else.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I don't know what either of these are supposed to mean, but they captivated my imagination on the way home tonight.

isthisabird.meme

Me, making this meme

This meme

Is this art?

A terminator, skinless, glares redly at you from the future.

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy" it says across the top.

"of the good." it says at the bottom.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

I'm surprised NASA didn't get get DOGEd to bits the way they're pushing woke gender ideology on entire planetary bodies and naming the mission after a notorious Lesbian.

A screenshot of an infographic showing the major milestones of the Artemis II mission with large red arrows added to point to the words "trans-lunar" and "trans-earth".

https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-ii-press-kit/

This whole post is satire and should not be taken seriously.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Here's a fun little riddle I just made up: What does an ice pick axe, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Large Hadron Collider, and the tiny Ascobolus immersus fungus have in common?

A sky blue ice pick on the right and an ice climber overhead swinging a different ice pick into an ice cliff.

A view of the Pillars of Hercules from across the Strait of Gibraltar near sunset. The hazy sky is bathed in a warm glow and the water is luminous. The lightly forested slopes in the foreground are also covered in brown grasses.

A massive machine 40-50 feet tall is opened in two halves where one clearly sockets into the other. In between and dwarfed by them are cranes and work lifts to help engineers access the immense rings of electromagnets and who knows what else fills the space.

A tiny amber colored fungus sprouts from white hairs. Glossy smooth protuberances just from the main mass, filled with little brown ovoids.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

@rossbryant.bsky.social YouTube's got you in some prestigious company in this rap playlist.

A youtube playlist:

Catfish, Swamp Sessions
Harry Mack, Minotaur
Samara Cyn, Sherwyn, Pop n Olive
Kamauu, Ivy
Sampa the Great, Energy
Doechii, Denial is a River
Tobe Nwigwe, Been Broke
Ross Bryant, Stores
Run the Jewels, Meowpurrdy

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

"As the Ministry of Enlightenment outlines its propaganda against Gorman, it's likely that we, the audience, have been exposed to exactly this kind of propaganda against foreign states when their resources were needed by capital." DaMo youtu.be/y7zj0QqVruc?...

The AP headline reads "US forces seize seventh sanctioned tanker linked to Venezuela in Trump’s effort to control its oil" above a picture of Venezuelan oil refineries.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

One of the many ways AI is making everything worse is that once companies have an AI product, they rebrand features they already had as "smart" and make you use their dumb AI if you want to keep using it.

screenshot of google settings being dumb.

gmail can't do fucking spell check anymore because it's a "smart feature". I had spell check in 90's. What the actual hell.

My teenager Sagan says, "this is alt text bro." He says I'm using it wrong.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Peyton Watson got so good, so abruptly, it's got to be making @nuggets.bsky.social's front office sweat trying to figure out how they're going to be able to afford to keep him.

"Players with 125+ points, 15+ steals/blocks, 15+ made 3-pointers, 60+ 3-point shooting % over a 5 game span since the '01-'02 NBA season: Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Peyton Watson"

A picture showing KD from the year he won MVP and pulled this off, Kobe Bryant, and Peyton Watson between and in front of them. Below that is the text of a tweet from KD, "Aye @peytonwatson" you locked the fuck in my boy. It was only a matter of time."

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

My oldest learned to make seed bead bracelets and so he made one with anarchy symbols. Which is maybe the most hippy homeschooled teenager thing I've ever seen.

A white seed bead bracelet with red and black anarchy symbols.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Introduce yourself with four spaceships

The Enterprise D from Star Trek the Next Generation

Empire Strikes Back Yoda lifting Luke's muck covered X-Wing out of the swamp.

The Saturn V rocket on the launchpad with the main engines blazing.

It's a dymaxion map of the earth labeled "Spaceship Earth"

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

How life and planet can generate these patterns and colors. It's just so much weirder than you'd expect.

Blues, greens, tans swirled like an acrylic pour, but it's West Side National Park, Bahamas.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

I can't stop. There's just too many cool things.

$gravity fractals in red, blue-grey, and rust-brown, and white.$

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

The Earth has so many absolutely bizarre looking places.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Feeling unknown And you're all alone Flesh and bone By the telephone Lift up the receiver I'll make you a believer

Pope Leo looking like he's singing into a mic. A bunch of Catholic types in black and paparazzi behind him crowd around.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

For me it was Might & Magic IV: Darkside of Xeen - especially love the faces the characters made when they had debuffs - and the riddle chests. I also like how the frame around your view of the world would animate in certain situations. And of course Heroes of Might & Magic III was a masterpiece

a bunch of giant green rats in a pixel art dungeon. A retro CRPG with a party of 6 heroes. They're all poisoned, confused, or sickened, or something. There's a clunky set of stone buttons on the right side.

HoM&M III swamp city screen. A jungle ziggurat, a tree house, a weird squat stone bunker with a giant gold minotaur head... all kinds of stuff really.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Oh I didn't see the lil button to get more thread. Thanks! Also color matching, so my rocket ship socks might go better with gray pants that matched the the exhaust plumes. He might say it's garish, but I think these are the only acceptable clothes for declaring war on your own citizens.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

If you see this, show off them mouths 💋

In this arresting digital art piece, a person's face, so close as to be seen only in part - mouth, nose, and one golden eye - leans forward toward the viewer, a teasing smile playing across their lips. Eyes wide, pupils dilated in excitement. The piece pulses with raw sexual energy and barely restrained anticipation.

"I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart" - Charles Dickens
"[The] poetics and and semiotics of the mouth in Dickens’s novels encode desire, sexual attraction and agency. Not only an erotogenic organ in its own right, the mouth is a cipher for sexual identity, an axis between the interior and exterior world, and a literal and metaphorical site of consumption. By focusing on readings of Dickens’s innovative poetics, the erotics in Dickens’s novels can be recovered."

"The act of biting into the flesh of another is an absolute rejection of the norms of social communication and of verbal language; it is a refusal to interact within conventional codes. Controlling the appetite was a hallmark of civilisation, but to go so far as to bite into human flesh represents more than barbarism. It is a universally understood taboo which when transgressed implies a vigorous libido, a sadistic streak, or a calculated strategy to shock the other. It can be sexual or an erotic act, or a combination of impulses. What is radical in Dickens’s ‘biters’ is that they are middle-class male characters who should,
according to cultural ideals of the gentlemen, transcend such oral impulses."

-"The Poetics and Erotics of the Dickensian Mouth" by Colette Ramuz, 2021

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Name 4 movies you love where the same actor is in all 4 movies playing different roles in different genres. Tom Hanks has so much range, we could add 8 more: Philadelphia, Phoenician Scheme, Bonfire of the Vanities, Toy Story, A League of Their Own, You've Got Mail, The Burbs, Catch Me if You Can

Tom Hanks as at least 4 or 5 different characters in the science fiction epic Cloud Atlas

Tom Hanks as a hapless and doggedly optimistic savant in the historical fictional biopic Forrest Gump

Tom Hanks as a marooned FedEx executive in the survival drama Cast Away

Tom Hanks as a heroic army Captain in the WW2 war movie Saving Private Ryan

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

I have only a vague sense of what the rules for this game might be like, but this idea interrupted me while I was trying to finish this article. Some description of the idea so far in the Alt text.

A character sheet for a non-existent TTRPG.

At the bottom is a large circle labeled "THE TRUTH". In this circle, the player will declare what is the central secret truth about the character. This is the core of who they are, the Sun from which their whole self shines. The circle partially eclipses and is surrounded by seven smaller blank circles. In THREE of these circles players will write maybe just a single word that names a specific moment when they briefly glimpsed THE TRUTH. The character might not remember or have been consciously aware of that moment, they might have recoiled from it in horror or embraced it, it may have been a moment of ecstasy, or joy, awe, or terror, or simple confusion. The rest of those seven circles will be left blank for now.

Above these memories of The Truth, there is a large truncated rectangle labeled "The lies you believe about yourself and about the world, and beneath it, between that box and The Truth, are three more circles each adorned with a crown of five diamonds. The lies we believe about ourselves and the world obscure and distort the Truth and as the light of our true selves is filtered through these lies we believe into action. In each of these circles, players names the memory where their character learned these lies and they fill in a number of diamonds showing how committed they are to that lie.

Above that are four boxes that each say "Action" and "Memory". These gameplay actions are each tied to a memory the player can access. At first they'll only be able to have 3 of these special actions each tied to a different memory associated with LIES. The more they use that action, the more they commit to it, filling out more of its diamonds. Overcommitting to these lies creates trauma, filling in one of the tiny circles around a memory of TRUTH. They lose the ability to access that memory through that point. It may be recovered later.

Above that are two questions: Who are you?
and: What you tell yourself you believe.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

"Motel of the Mysteries" is an all time favorite book. Due to an accidental drop in the cost of pre-paid postage, the United States is buried under a hundred feet of junk mail. Centuries later, an archeologist discovers a "burial chamber". Here, he sings into a bowl used to communicate with the dead

A white guy with glasses kneels in front of a toilet. He has the toilet seat strapped to his head as if it's some kind of headdress. He is singing into the toilet bowl.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

This post from back in the day made me want to write a screenplay about a LARP group that takes hallucinogens and gets so into in the game that while they think they're on an adventure defeat a cabal of tyrannical dragon overlords, they're actually assassinating a series of unnamed billionaires.

A screenshot of a post to r/lotrmemes
A picture of Smaug from the abysmal Peter Jackson Hobbit movies
"This is Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit. Smaug famously stole a mountain full of gold. So full that he sleeps buried under gold. We're talking literal tons and tons of gold by weight."
"Forbes ranks Smaug as the second wealthiest fictional character. He had been first, but the price of gold took a tumble and now his vast, overwhelming fortune is only worth an estimated $51,400,000,000.00 or $51.4 billion."
"That means that EVEN THOUGH he has an ENTIRE MOUNTAIN full of almost nothing but solid gold, Smaug would rank as the FIFTEENTH wealthiest American."
"Fourteen Americans have more money than a gold-hoarding dragon."

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

Wait.. I was still joking. I'm still joking right now.

Scream movie phone call meme. "I'm in the joke with you right now"

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Me too. These totally sent me

A CAPTCHA saying "select all squares with bicycles, if there are none, click skip" There is a tricycle. I selected none, but that was wrong.

A CAPTCHA saying "select all images with a fire hydrant, click verify once there are none left" Shown are 9 pictures none of which have a fire hydrant in them. I got it wrong.

A CAPTCHA "select all images with bicycles, click verify once there are none left" I got it wrong because one of the nine pictures has a teeny tiny part of what might be a bicycle in the far background of the image.

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Ben Green @bengreen.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

I've expanded on this annoying abstract diagram to make it more useless.

I've added a third dimension that really didn't need to exist.

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