iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brent @bk4us.com · 12/09/2026

Name a non-LOTR character who could resist the One Ring.

Portrait of Fred Rogers from "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood"

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Brent @bk4us.com · 11/09/2026

Quote this with your first anime. Mine was Slayers

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Brent @bk4us.com · 30/08/2026

If you see this, post a #StarTrek I'm trying to collect all the paperbacks. This is from my latest haul from a local secondhand bookstore

25 Star Trek paperbacks layed out on the floor.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 26/08/2026

Wish I knew who to credit...

Picture of a post from somewhere on the internet. "The reason Michael Caine and Tim Curry are so good in their respective Muppet movies is that Michael Caine treats the Muppets as fellow actors, while Tim Curry treats himself as a fellow Muppet."

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Brent @bk4us.com · 19/08/2026

I'm re-reading Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line", and twenty-seven years later this paragraph seems oddly relevant:

Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to the chip that's doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us, this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 27/07/2026

Then this meme sprang fully grown from my forehead

The words "You wouldn't waterboard a computer" done in the style of Hollywood's famous anti-piracy campaign "You wouldn't steal a car"

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Brent @bk4us.com · 27/07/2026

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, soundgarden, pearl jam, or alice in chains.

Album cover for "Flood" by They Might Be Giants

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Brent @bk4us.com · 18/07/2026

Stop scrolling and post two characters who bring you happiness

Screenshot of SecUnit and Gurathin from "Murderbot"

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Brent @bk4us.com · 13/07/2026

I like to think the CIA faked his death and set him up as a paleontologist, so he did get to see Montana after all

Screenshot from Jurassic Park showing the location of Dr. Grant's dig site as "Badlands, near Snakewater, Montana". Sam Neill played Dr. Grant.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 08/07/2026

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_th...

From Wikipedia: Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 is a painting by Russian realist artist Ilya Repin made between 1883 and 1885. It depicts the grief-stricken Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible cradling his dying son, the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, shortly after Ivan the Terrible had dealt a fatal blow to his son's head in a fit of anger. The painting portrays the anguish and remorse on the face of the elder Ivan and the shock and heartbreak of the dying Tsarevich, who sheds a tear at the unexpected betrayal and shock of having been killed at his father's hands.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 04/07/2026

This Onion headline lives rent-free in my mind: theonion.com/trump-claims...

Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole

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Brent @bk4us.com · 13/06/2026

My experience with "diversity stress": sometimes it's a little awkward trying to have a conversation with a non-native speaker. I would gladly live with that awkwardness for the rest of my life if it meant I never had to live with *fascism stress* ever again.

Post by Sohrab Ahmari, saying: Diversity stress may be difficult to quantify. But it thought of as a negative externality or transaction cost that must be reckoned in any cost-benefit analysis about mass migration. My Diversity Stress—and Ours

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Brent @bk4us.com · 19/05/2026

Hans Morgenthau used that anecdote in "Politics Among Nations" to demonstrate the power of prestige. Morgenthau defines "presitge" as a reputation for both unchallengeable power and restraint. US lost the latter in Iraq, now we're losing the former in Iran.

Image of the paper jacket for the fourth edtion of Politics Among Nations by Hans Morgenthau. First published in 1949. Fourth edition published in 1967.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 19/05/2026

In 1813, while retreating from Russia, Napoleon angrily threw down his hat in front of Chancellor Metternich of Austria, expecting him to pick it up for him. Metternich pretended not to notice, so Napoleon had to pick it up himself. That snub showed Napoleon how far he had fallen.

A painting of the moment Napoleon threw down his hat in front of Chancellor Metternich, and the Chancellor refused to pick it up. I don't know who did the painting.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 09/05/2026

Just reached an important milestone

Image from Duolingo. Duo the Owl looks like what I can only describe as a fiery angel, celebrates day 3,000 of my learning streak.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 01/05/2026

Wish I knew who to credit:

Screenshot of a tweet from 2018: Think I probably missed out being an extremely successfuly monk, seeing as my two greatest talents are being very quiet and not having sex.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 16/03/2026

"It has declined" is a verbatim quote from the FDA notice:

Screenshot of text from the FDA notice. "FDA has recommended that RAW FARM, LLC voluntarily remove their raw cheese products from the market, and the firm has declined."

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Brent @bk4us.com · 12/03/2026

1) Oh, yeah... I forgot about that! 2) That was just two weeks ago? www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/trump-surp...

It was barely two weeks ago, remember, that Donald Trump announced out of the blue that he was sending a US Navy hospital ship to Greenland to provide medical care for “sick” islanders. The Danish and Greenland governments were baffled by what he meant; the US government never even bothered to try to explain the presidential announcement; and, at the time, both US hospital ships were in dry dock undergoing repairs. Let’s check back on that, shall we? Today, there’s only one hospital ship at sea — and it recently transited the Panama Canal and is now off the west coast of Mexico, apparently heading toward a long-term repair and overhaul in Portland, Oregon. There’s been no further mention of Trump’s tweet. The entire episode just came and went, as baffling as ever.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 11/03/2026

That was fun! www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/

Screenshot of my score from the "Just Noticeable Difference" color test. My score is 0.0033, which is quite good, though I'm not sure what it means.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 10/03/2026

If you see this, post a robot.

Johnny Five from the movie "Short Circuit".

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Brent @bk4us.com · 24/01/2026

Quote skeet a gif with a clue of where you're from...

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Brent @bk4us.com · 19/01/2026

🧵To celebrate MLK Day, I want to talk about one of my favorite books, "The Politics of Nonviolent Action" by Gene Sharp. People like to praise nonviolence, but how does it actually work in practice? Why does it work? (1/16)

Book cover. The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part 1: Power and Struggle. By Gene Sharp.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 18/01/2026

I made sure Paramount knows that their relationship with Trump is the reason I canceled.

Screenshot of the cancellation screen from Paramount+, asking why I'm canceling. I chose the option marked other, then wrote in the text box: Paramount is an ally of the Trump administration, and I'm not giving my money to that.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 15/01/2026

And since the word "prescient" gets used a lot when talking about B5's politics:

Screenshot of a paragraph fro the article: "The literal text of the show suggests that the natural result of Capitalism’s decay is a re-emergence of Fascism, and Earth is already locked in what we can now recognize as a familiar pattern of increasing technocratic censorship paired with a loss of political efficacy on the part of normal people when the series begins. There’s an election going on in the first episode and the conservative party wins on the basis of what we are to assume is reactionary rhetoric. He’s not the guy our protagonists were supporting, but the whole thing is treated with a shrug. It eventually leads to a civil war. We’re immediately thrust into a cynical world wracked with bureaucratic inertia and callow appeasement. Our heroes emerge as heroic because they choose to reject apathy, normalization and compliance. Watching Earth inexorably slip further into violent authoritarianism is gripping stuff, brilliantly played as background noise for the first two and a half seasons and just as novel as it was in 1994 even when expressed in the silliest possible terms (Earth Gov is really out there literally quoting Nineteen Eighty-Four on its propaganda posters, huh?). But I’m not sure how cognizant the show is of its own political subtext, or, y’know, text in general."

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Brent @bk4us.com · 16/12/2025

Was reading this paragraph (first pic) by @annaleen.bsky.social when a thought occurred to me, so I did a quick web search (second pic): buttondown.com/thehypothesi...

Screenshot of a paragraph by Annalee Newitz. Make no mistake: AI people, if they emerged in this current moment, would be oppressed. Companies trying to develop “artificial general intelligence” — or human-equivalent cognition — do not deign to call these potential creatures “people” or even “creatures.” Sometimes they’re called a “superintelligence,” reducing them to a very specific, economically valuable function. The idea is that we can make money on these future artificial people, if we imprison or abuse them correctly with software.

Screenshot from the domain name omelas.ai. Someone has already registered the domain name, and they're trying to sell it for twenty-thousand dollars.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 11/12/2025

No book; I like to practice a very literal interpretation of Matthew 5:33-37.

A screenshot of the Book of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 33 through 37: Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you: Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 25/11/2025

Finally reading www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/kash-patel... I think this part should get more attention:

He’s lost our foreign allies. The biggest story of this week was about how Patel broke an important personal pledge to the head of MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency and, arguably, the FBI’s closest partner in the entire world. MI5’s head had asked Patel personally to preserve an FBI liaison officer in London who was vital to certain advanced surveillance tools the Brits relied on for monitoring Chinese activities in the UK. In the face-to-face meeting, Patel agreed and promised — but then reneged when the White House wanted to cut the position as part of its misguided efforts to trim the FBI budget, “leaving MI5 officials incredulous.” It is almost impossible to capture how critical the intelligence relationship between the US and the UK has been over the last eighty years, as well as the larger English-speaking intel partnership known as “Five Eyes,” which includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The idea that you would break a promise to a Five Eyes leader would normally be an anathema to any competent US intelligence leader — and the episode also clearly demonstrates both inside and outside the bureau that Patel doesn’t have the political juice to run the FBI, if he can’t fight and win at the White House for a key position requested by our closest ally.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 22/10/2025

stop scrolling and post two characters who bring you happiness

Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot with David Dastmalchian as Gurathin.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 18/10/2025

A Cold War liberal at #NoKings, celebrating the Four Freedoms and FDR, the Democratic President who led America in its first victory over fascism

A picture of myself at a local No Kings protest waving the Four Freedoms flag (four vertical red stripes on a white background)

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Brent @bk4us.com · 04/08/2025

I had to use highlighters to parse this sentence. First, nine lines in red for a single clause starting with "even though". Then five lines in green for the subject of the sentence. The blue shows the verb and object of the sentence—just two lines.

A screenshot of a poorly written sentence. Various lines are highlighted to show the structure of the sentence. The sentence and the highlighting are described in the post.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 10/07/2025

If you see this, quote with a robot that isn't from Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, or Transformers

Picture of Number Five, AKA Johnny Five, from the movie Short Circuit, released in 1986.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 23/06/2025

Submitted for your consideration... (Hat tip to @washingtonpost.com's Early Brief)

Tweet by Donald Trump on November 10, 2013: Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly—not skilled!

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Brent @bk4us.com · 10/06/2025

This is my final answer.

A picture of a tumblr post titled "Why I do toilet paper the wrong way". The post shows a comic in two frames. In the first frame a cat is playing with a roll of toilet paper hanging in the 'over' orientation and gradually unspooling the entire roll onto the floor. In the second frame, a cat is playing with a roll of toilet paper hanging in the 'under' orientation; in this case no unspooling occurs. Another tumblr user responds with "That's valid." Yet another responds "Okay I'll accept that, but you're on thing ice."

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Brent @bk4us.com · 12/04/2025

Recently went through my downloads folder and found this relevant meme:

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Brent @bk4us.com · 20/03/2025

I don't remember if this is where I learned that fact, but I have to recommend "Fascists" by Michael Mann. It's style is highly academic, but worth working through. It was written in 2004, but the conclusion feels like a prescient description of our present-day politics!

Cover of the book "Fascists" by Michael Mann

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Brent @bk4us.com · 21/02/2025

Google, if you really want to spend money on the ridiculous amounts of energy it takes to annoy an AI with my search queries, well... it's your money! But when I search for "fourier transform of my cat", maybe you can let your AI sit this one out and just give me the web comic I wanted instead.

Screenshot of Google AI results for "fourier transform of my cat": A "Fourier transform" is a complex mathematical tool used to break down a signal into its constituent frequencies, essentially revealing the different "tones" within a signal, while "your cat" is a living feline creature; meaning if you had to choose between the two, your cat is the more tangible and relatable option as it's a real animal, not an abstract mathematical concept.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 30/01/2025

I'm sure this isn't far off:

An image made in in the style of an executive order on the White House website. It reads, "Presidential Actions. Nothing is ever my fault and blaming me is illegal.

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Brent @bk4us.com · 29/01/2025

Some historical context for DEI programs in the military: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_...

From the Wikipedia page "": 1950s desegregation. In 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which declared a policy of equal treatment and opportunity, but did not mention desegregation. He ordered: "It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale." Only the Air Force used the opportunity to integrate its units. The Army was especially resistant to the order, and only cooperated when a shortage of troops in the Korean War required that black soldiers serve alongside their white counterparts. Military units were officially desegregated after the Korean War in 1954. However, racial tensions continued to give rise to segregation and in fighting amongst various units, especially during the Vietnam War. The military inefficiencies caused by this internal conflict incentivized military leaders to seek to establish more harmonious racial relationships in the Army. One scholar argued that, in being forced to actively root out institutional racial tensions, "the military radically revised the moral contract governing relations between it and its members."

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Brent @bk4us.com · 05/01/2025

My theory: most reporters don't understand the issues they cover, so they rely on lazy tropes they see other reporters using. That creates an illusion of broad consensus that the public - including other reporters - repeat as their own understanding to look well-informed. As Michael Crichton said:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

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