iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

// Wendell Berry on software brain… -- The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines – 1/ @reckless.bsky.social @theverge.com

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

@typewriteralley.bsky.social, @ericacbarnett.bsky.social, @mayor.seattle.gov - Do we know who the decision makers were to give no severance to the front line workers? Seems very cruel and usual in the current economic climate… 1/

Screenshot of PublicCola Headline from 2026-08-26 on frontline workers getting no severance:

KCHA Layoffs Begin, With Executive Positions, Financial Staff Untouched - By Erica C. Barnett

...The staff who lost their jobs on Tuesday received no severance...

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

1904 gravestone for Harold Steele, age 3, from the graveyard across the street from our house in Crown Hill, Seattle.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Yesterday – The day the first Land of the Lost memorabilia I’ve ever bought arrives (in the form of tiki-bar swag) – the co-creator of the show, Syd Krofft, dies… Hmmmmm

Black t-shirt with a tiki-bar style illustration of Sleestak from Land of the Lost TV show

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

My dad was a fur bearing trapper in Southern California in the 70’s - From the San Bernardino mountains and Yucca Valley to deep in the Mojave Valley - As weird then as it is now.

7 year old boy with his father, a fur bearing trapper in 1977 in Highland, CA. The father is holding several coyote pelts in the left of the picture ($25 each in 1977 dollars) and several bobcat pelts in the right of the picture ($350 each in 1977 dollars). The boy is holding a taxidermied badger.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

This is who runs this account…

80's kids in an orange Missile Command t-shirt with a heavy plastic iron on from the mall.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Look what arrived from @dansinker.com - This patch was a rallying point during my colon cancer in 2023 and now I have a beanie! So many entendres then and MNow.

Me wearing a green beanie with @Dansinker’s “Trying” patch on it next to an illustration of Minnesota with Paul Bunyan on it. My wife Jen grew up a few files from where George Floyd and Renee Good were executed.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

This is the fault of @danklyn.bsky.social - Please direct all inquiries to him.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

We have coyotes on roofs in my neighborhood here in Seattle… myballard.com/2025/07/29/b...

Coyotes on the roof of a single family home in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

I was visiting Robert Lang recording studios a few years ago here in Seattle and snapped this pic.

Gold record of MXPX's album "Slowly going the way of the buffalo"

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

From the shelf behind me…

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

Straight from the airport on Friday.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

In other news, am visiting my brother in Highland this weekend and keep passing your old place on the way up to his place.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

It’s @jenzug.bsky.social’s birthday today - And this is the hat we got her to celebrate!

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme www.garbageday.email/p/charlie-ki...

“We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”

Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme
https://www.garbageday.email/p/charlie-kirk-was-killed-by-a-meme
via Instapaper

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Coincidence that the U.S. Federal Government just threatened a state that bans open carry? * Time to brush up on what a well regulated state militia means. ** Believe them when they tell you who the fuck they are. -- Now a bit of film criticism and why it matters in moments like these… 1/

Infographic of the wikipedia maps of the United States where it is legal and illegal to visibly carry firearms in public places. Map on the left is where handguns are legal / banned to open carry, and the map on the right is where long guns like rifles and shotguns are legal / banned to open carry.

Below this is the wikipedia detail on open carry laws for the state of Illinois that the Federal Government of the United States threatened on September 6, 2025 with the statement "Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR" featuring an AI generated image of President Trump as Robert Duvall's character Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore, commander of 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regimen in the film "Apocalypse Now" – which is loosely inspired by the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

On Duvall's character, the late Roger Ebert wrote this on what struck him as the greatest sequence in the film -

'The best is the helicopter attack on a Vietnam village, led by Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), whose choppers use loudspeakers at top volume to play Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as they swoop down on a yard full of schoolchildren. Duvall won an Oscar nomination for his performance and its unforgettable line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” His emptiness is frightening: A surfing fanatic, he agrees to the attack only to liberate a beach said to offer great waves (“Charlie don’t surf”).'

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

@erikahall.bsky.social - Was having breakfast out the other day and for some reason the clickens came to mind…

5 bright red chicken sculptures sitting on molding inside of a restaurant.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Using one photo already on your phone, what is the announcement tomorrow at 2?

20 ft high sculpture in NYC’s Central Park of a bust with purple shoulders and head, shoulder length black hair, and a bright green beetle silhouette as a face. The beetle changes colors depending on your angle of view. The image shiws people emerging out from behind it on both sides.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

I am at the Lumineers show in Seattle and all of the white dresses and floral crowns are making me feel like some kind of Midsommar ritual is about to take place.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

Picked up M. Ward & Damien Jurado posters from the #VeraProject silk screen crew last weekend at @timberfest.bsky.social - This was the paper they used to roll those posters up - A work of art in & of itself.

Silk screen poster on green paper that’s says, 1) Go at your own chosen speed - Joan Baez (in red), and 2) Fix your hearts or die - David Lynch (in blue)

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

Roasted some fresh figs from the tree tonight.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Reminds me of @chuckwendig.bsky.social's "Meat Frinds"…

// Meat Friends by Chuck Wendig
- Original twitter thread on Jan 18, 2019

FRIDAY. You're a soul with skeleton architecture wreathed in the armor of blood meat and skin, you chew food with facebones, you squeeze that food of its nutrient energy and then eject it wherever you want, you have a mouth snake that ululates and tastes, YOU'RE A GODDANG MIRACLE

Seriously I know I've covered this before but the human body is FUCKED UP and TOTALLY AMAZING

YOUR BLOOD CAN TRAVEL 60,000 MILES IN YOUR BODY. THAT'S A QUARTER OF THE WAY TO THE MOON.

NO WONDER WE CALL IT THE BLOOD MOON, THAT'S WHERE YOUR BLOOD IS TRYING TO GO

TO THE FUCKING MOON

INSIDE YOUR BONES IS MARROW

MARROW THAT MAKES BLOOD

MARROW THAT MAKES UP TO 500 BILLION BLOOD CELLS A DAY

THE HUMAN BODY IS HEAVY METAL AS HELL

This squishy sack of viscera and bone is YOU, and it lets you sing and write poetry and tap dance and knife fight, you're a cauldron of acid, a recycling center, a creativity machine, a super-computer made of MEAT, what glorious twisted beings we are.

And sometimes we MASH OUR FLESH MACHINES together in various configurations for pleasure and then sometimes we make SMALLER FLESH MACHINES as a result it's like slapping two blood-filled iPads together and they make an iPhone oh my god we're so weird and wonderful

We can REARRANGE our configurations and stick temporary or permanent paintings on our skin with ink and change our hair and our faces and our very identities and then we keep on gallumphing around and sloshing about, MAKING COOL STUFF and FINDING OTHER MEAT FRIENDS omg

Our MEAT FRIENDS sometimes make MEAT FAMILIES or MEAT VILLAGES or we use the PUDDING COMPUTERS inside our skulls to create technology that allows our meat to talk to other meat across vast distances holy crap science and biology and technology whoa

But once upon a time we were just little microbial life ahhh it's fucking astonishing

Somewhere along the way the tiny organism that was us was like I WANNA SEE SOME SH…

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Bonny Light Horseman, self-titled

Bonny Light Horseman album cover that is a an ultra close-up of a white horses face.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Gates on Musk… "The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one"

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Clicken merch has arrived in Seattle! Thanks @erikahall.bsky.social !!!

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Loved talking w/Matt Johnson on the @fontawesome.com Podcast about "Why Design Is Hard" – We dove into what really makes design challenging in organizations: 1️⃣ "Figma is not the job" - we often have a product design culture that worships artifacts & avoids relationships 1/ #UX #DesignLeadership

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

// C.S. Lewis on "What? You too?" -- The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’ …It is then that Friendship is born… 1/

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Same! I love this poster soooo much. Have had it for a year or so and just got space to hang it up in the studio yesterday!

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Can I offer anyone a Chesterton Fence? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._C...

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

// Annie Dillard on being still to know… -- …my only weapon was stillness, and my only wish its continued presence before my eyes. I knew it would fly away if I made the least false move. 1/

// Picture of a quote by Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek…
--

…my only weapon was stillness, and my only wish its continued presence before my eyes.

I knew it would fly away if I made the least false move.

In half an hour it got used to me – as though I were a bicycle somebody had abandoned on the bridge, or a branch left by high water. It even suffered me to turn my head slowly, and to stretch my aching legs very slowly.

But finally, at the end, some least motion or thought set it off, and it rose, glancing at me with a cry, and winged slowly away upstream, around a bend, and out of sight.

--
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard, 1974

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

// Annie Dillard on the world as an amoral monster and us as moral freaks… -- Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak. 1/

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

I've jokingly / not jokingly call this "Nemoseagullicism" - Here's my slide on it from a talk I did at Ignite Seattle in 2011 - The "mine, mine, mine" mindset is so determinative, destructive, and hard to break, especially when it's flames are fanned.

Slide from a 2011 Ignite Seattle talk with a picture of the 3D animated Seagulls in Finding Nemo saying, "Mine, Mine, Mine." Title at the top of the slide comically labels this as "Nemoseagullic" behavior.

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Bryan Zug @bryanzug.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Posted this 8 years ago today. More relevant now than ever. Anti-neighbor, power hungry, religious nationalism is on full display. This is about as far from the refugee welcoming, beatitude driven, ethic of Jesus as one can imagine. I don't have a great alternate name for it… 1/5

Picture of a book quote that reads…

// Hauerwas & Willimon foreshadow trumpianity's troubling ethic (in 1988 — 35 yrs ago)…
--

The project, begun at the time of Constantine, to enable Christians to share power without being a problem for the powerful, had reached its most impressive fruition.

If Caesar can get Christians there to swallow the "Ultimate Solution," and Christians here to embrace the bomb, there is no limit to what we will not do for the modern world.

Alas, in leaning over to speak to the modern world, we had fallen in.

We had lost the theological resources to resist, lost the resources even to see that there was something worth resisting.

--
Stanley Hauerwas & William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, 1988

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