iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 08/01/2025

Thank to @sawtoothwave.bsky.social for including my most recent album, "We're Able (Forty Dialogic Valences)" in their "2024 music year in review"! substack.com/inbox/post/1...

substack.com

Inbox | Substack

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 04/12/2024

It's a year-and-a-half later and I've come to realize that the original post here is only half the story. I now also, intermittently, use two sets of em-dashes inside of a single sentence.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 27/11/2024

As far as I can tell, Whole Foods customers tend to be in the 30- to 90-years-old range, while Trader Joe’s customers tend to exist more in both the 15- to 29-years-old and 91- to 140-years-old ranges.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 16/08/2024

Robbin' Vader to pay Maul.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 13/01/2024

I've never really understood what the word "expat"/"expatriate" means. After taking a light dive this morning, I think my confusion stems from the fact that it maybe should be "EXOpat"/"EXOpatriate."

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 10/01/2024

I haven't hung out here for a while, but I was just playing with my cat and got a weird feeling that someone thought of this and posted it, and I was like, "If I'm right, I need to sign in and share it."

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 13/09/2023

I guess Lifetime Movie Network is really running low on ideas.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 27/08/2023

Hey, here's a post I made to Slack this morning that didn't go over very well.

An image of a screenshot from Slack that reads, "Hey, here's a post I made to Facebook this morning that didn't go over very well." with an attendant image that reads, "Hey, here’s a joke I made last night that didn’t go over very well: I was in a conversation about popular, fictional characters from the 1970s and 1980s and I told people that, when I was a kid (1) Ronald McDonald would come to a local McDonald’s sometimes and I’d get to meet him and (2) real-life “Star Wars” characters would come to Toys R Us and I’d get to meet some of them as well.
Then, a little further down the line I said, “Oh, also at Toys R Us, I got to meet Kathleen Turner’s character from ‘Body Heat.’” followed by an ASCII shrug.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 05/08/2023

Attention: Scientists and scientifically-minded people of my Bluesky network (maybe not so much, like, non-science-y “independent researchers” or whatever): Might you have an air purifier recommendation? We’ve been using...

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 27/07/2023

I'd have to see how they MEASURE up.

A National Geographic magazine cover with a lone shark under the text, "Sharks: Rulers of the Deep"

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 26/07/2023

Meanwhile, MARGOT ROBBIE is an anagram of MR. GO-TO BARBIE.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 25/07/2023

Gut Check Alert: Is it okay that I feel like the more psilocybin a person takes, the more likely they are to call everything that ISN'T psilocybin "a neurotoxin"?

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 17/07/2023

As someone who’s been using chess engines to analyze his games since way before AI existed, it’s been really interesting to watch the machines go from, “Inaccuracy.” to “Daayyyuuuumm, bruh! Slick trick jimmy-jammin’ the ol’ bish downtown for a little somethin'-somethin'!"

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Reposted by Joel Roston

Jordyn Bonds @skybondsor.com · 16/07/2023

What's up with aspirin?

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 29/06/2023

I mean this in the nicest possible way, but what sort of maniac would ever click on a music theory video made by a guitar player?

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Reposted by Joel Roston

JP @jpbrammer.bsky.social · 28/06/2023

doing numbers on bluesky (20+ likes) feels like making all my buddies at the bar laugh while doing numbers on twitter feels like accidentally alerting The Predator to my location

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 28/06/2023

Just sayin’: “Je suis le Rappeur, Il est le DJ” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the French Prince

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 26/06/2023

If you ever find yourself living in Boston in the early afternoon of Monday, June 26, 2023 and you think to yourself, "I think I'll go for a long bike ride—it's not supposed to rain until around 4pm," then this is for you: It will defs rain before 4pm.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 22/06/2023

"Nobody on the road. Nobody on the street."

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 18/06/2023

We're havin' a real hike over here!

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 16/06/2023

Attention scientists and, like, tree-people of Bluesky: @skybondsor.com and I went for a hike this morning and encountered a bunch of trees with these cool, wavy, line-y channels/grooves in them. Is there a, like, fun science-fact that explains what's happening here?

Wavy cut--out dealies in the side of a bark-less tree that fell over in the woods.

Wavy cut--out dealies in the side of a tree that fell over in the woods.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 09/06/2023

Over the past few years, I’ve read all six Shirley Jackson novels. While I loved them all and carry special parts of each of them around with me, as far as I can tell, the only unambiguously clear impact they’ve had on me is that my phone’s customizable lock-screen reads: WHAT IS THIS WORLD?

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 09/06/2023

"Party A retains the right to decline the formation of a friendship for any reason." chat.openai.com/share/00fa810d-68c7…

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 07/06/2023

I mean, the machines are polite, so that's something.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 06/06/2023

The print edition of Bait/Switch’s Spring 2023 issue is NOW AVAILABLE! My piece, “A Peculiar Incident,” and the attendant interview I did, are tucked right in there on page 60. For the Internet-only people, you can check everything out here: www.baitswit.ch/a-peculiar-incident

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 01/06/2023

I would NOT be shocked to learn that Pinterest is an alien lifeform attempting to disguise itself as a website. Like, whatever Terence McKenna thought/suspected about the origins of psilocybin is exactly on a spectrum with what I think/suspect about the origins of Pinterest.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 29/05/2023

Non-technologist here. Going forward, English is going to need a word that means, like, "When you instantiate an instance of an AI-powered utility with the intention of using it for practical, functional reasons, but are so curious about its capabilities that you just wind up, like, 'testing' it."

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 27/05/2023

I've said it on every single social media platform I've joined and I'll say it again here: It simply does NOT MAKE SENSE that boomers don't like The Ramones—and we KNOW it's not about the lyrics because they love "Wooly Bully" and their special "bird is the word" song.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 27/05/2023

Along a certain axis, it doesn't get more Boston-y than two strangers on the street animatedly attempting to predict how long it'll take them to prototype something.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 24/05/2023

PERSONAL HORN-TOOTING ALERT: Today marks the second time in an eight- or nine-month period that a person behind me in line, after watching me bag my groceries, smiled and told me what an impressive job I did.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 18/05/2023

"I carried a watermelon." So good.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 17/05/2023

Place is pretty de-centch so far.

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 15/05/2023

I’m psyched to share, "A Peculiar Incident"— a new piece of music that I composed for the quarterly publication Bait / Switch. Check out the piece, along with a companion interview, here: www.baitswit.ch/a-peculiar-incident

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Joel Roston @bointillism.com · 15/05/2023

Man, I love this business. The more crisscrossing, bendy tube-pipe thingies, the better.

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