iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Adam Bumas

Ryan Broderick @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Of the 14 songs that broke the same record "Choosin' Texas" just broke, nine of them were this century and six were in the last decade. Is a hit song still a hit if it climbs to the top of streaming charts and gets algorithmically stuck there for sixth months?

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

hey "nice" manbun haha it fucking sucks you hipster asshole (he turns around to reveal he is a parautilitarian from the federal bureau of control) oh fuck

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

What is Verity, and are your children safe from him? I explain the algorithm's latest creation behind the paywall in today's @garbageday.email. www.garbageday.email/p/how-verity...

garbageday.email

How Verity became the new Skibidi Toilet

Read to the end for your granddad Cyclops

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Judges in Mega-City One don’t even say they are the law anymore, they just look at you like this

Brendan Fraser in The Whale with a Judge Dredd helmet

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

When you're dead, you can't post, meaning the algorithm has no interest in you, meaning it's a lot harder for anyone to mourn your passing. My latest for @garbageday.email: www.garbageday.email/p/you-have-t...

garbageday.email

You have to keep posting, even if you're dead

Here's your Garbage Intell

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

There's a lot more to the memes about Niu Lai than you might think. Behind the paywall today, I'm talking about everything from the stock market to The Shawshank Redemption, and throwing a little cold water on the idea that this is our anti-AI rallying point. www.garbageday.email/p/can-chines...

garbageday.email

Can Chinese AI cows be anti-AI?

Read to the end for the Tumblrpillar

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Got interviewed by @walthickey.bsky.social for the weekend edition of his excellent newsletter Numlock! I'm there to talk fanfic, but the interview got, shall we say, wide-ranging. www.numlock.com/p/numlock-su...

The counter example, of course, is that we finally got people to buy into Web3 and crypto and prediction markets and everything the Silicon Valley weirdos have been banging on about for 15 years by saying, “You can use this to make watching sports more exciting.”

And now we’ve found the thing that’s actually making sports more exciting to new audiences and it’s fanfiction about the boys kissing each other.

Exactly. Yeah, and I assume there are already bets on it. If Heated Rivalry was real, if that glorious moment after Scott Hunter won the Stanley Cup happened, you can bet there would be gay pools for every single player in the league.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Fans of this might be interested to see the Minecraft Mamdani which was on display this past spring at the NYC Video Game Festival.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I'm in your ears! Thankful to @slate.com and Kate Lindsay for the chance to talk about the existential questions raised by Jimothy the Raccoon on today's ICYMI podcast. slate.com/podcasts/icy...

slate.com

We Need To Talk About Jimothy

The Seattle raccoon is not like any viral animal we’ve loved before.

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Reposted by Adam Bumas

Lisa Tozzi @lisatozzi.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The definitive story of how a little raccoon dominated our feeds in the span of just five days. www.garbageday.email/p/how-to-go-...

garbageday.email

How to go viral in 2026, as told by Jimothy

Read to the end for some real good 'Project Hail Mary' fanart

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Nixonmaxxing is as overstated as many rightward trends. The Nixon Foundation, which started this all off earlier this year, has been getting way less engagement since then compared to both the JFK Foundation and Reagan Foundation. www.garbageday.email/p/the-piggie...

garbageday.email

The piggies eventually get sick of slop

Read to the end for some really good Backrooms fan art

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

My ring Atreides, my sietch Fremen, my ghola from Ix, let's go Knicks. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndvq...

youtube.com

Dune: Part Three | Official Trailer

YouTube video by Warner Bros.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I wrote about betting on social media engagement for Bloomberg Businessweek a couple weeks ago, for anyone who missed it: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bloomberg.com

Polymarket Lets You Bet on Vibes

By taking bets on social media clout, the prediction market has made itself vulnerable to bots.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I wrote about FreddyLA7, the apex predator of World Cup tourists. Is he some kind of fake? Complicated question! More behind the paywall in today's @garbageday.email - link here: www.garbageday.email/p/the-intern...

Was Freddy’s Ronaldo posting calculated for maximum engagement? I don’t think that’s unfair to say. Does that mean he’s a fake? That’s more unfair — not to get philosophical, but if someone is this dedicated to Ronaldo, calling them “not a real Ronaldo fan” feels pretty silly. But either way, it shows that Freddy’s popularity wasn’t more or less organic than anything else you see on X. He wasn’t a nobody who exploded on our feeds, he’s a savvy, hardworking poster who knows to stick with a trend, and got in on a massive trend at the right time.

That might be enough to call him a psyop for a lot of people, though, just like with the whole Geese thing a few months ago. People have finally understood that they shouldn’t take everything that they scroll across at face value. And to build up any sense of collective media literacy for our algorithms, it looks like we’re gonna have to take it one level at a time. Right now we’re at “anything that gets too popular online is a fake/psyop/industry plant” — and it just isn’t that simple.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Lisa's contributions to digital news couldn't fit in a Bluesky post. So I'll just say how excited I am to be working with her!

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Congratulations to canonical Knicks fan Homestar Runner (cc @strongbadnofoolin.bsky.social)

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Excited to make my debut for @bloomberg.com Businessweek! I'm writing about some hyper-online crypto communities and the effect they're having on the rest of finance. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bloomberg.com

Polymarket Lets You Bet on Vibes

By taking bets on social media clout, the prediction market has made itself vulnerable to bots.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

YouTube's autodubbing is now so universal that the algorithm served me a @claireforny.bsky.social ad dubbed into Russian. Only recorded the last few seconds for all of Comrade Valdez's fans out there:

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Russia has ruled a K-pop omegaverse fic to be illegal, sentencing its author to 18 months in a labor camp. So is it worth reading? Get the link I tracked down in today's @garbageday.email and decide for yourself! www.garbageday.email/p/everything...

On May 8th, a Russian woman named Alexandra Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp for posting gay fan fiction. Even though the fanfic was free, it was found by a court in Yekaterinburg to be illegal pornography. Ever since 2023, when Russia declared the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group to be an extremist organization, they’ve made multiple efforts to criminalize anything gay on the internet.

Naturally, the biggest question on my mind was, “can I read this criminally gay fanfic?”

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Another day, another concept I first learned from The Simpsons.

A Frinkiac screenshot of Krusty The Clown looking pained. The caption reads "We knew it contained spider eggs, but the hantavirus?"

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

My first ever scoop, such as it is: The DHS is treating a random shitposter X account like a legit news source, giving it exclusive info about foreign relations. www.garbageday.email/p/exclusive-...

garbageday.email

EXCLUSIVE: DHS gave a scoop to a random shitposter

Exclusive

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

What’s your “Smilin’ Stan” editorial voice sobriquet?

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Mets game on one bar TV, Artemis II splashdown on the other. I believe they call this a happy place.

A bar with two TVs over it. The left one is showing a baseball game, the right one shows Earth out of the window of the Integrity spacecraft.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

We did it, JUICE. We did it.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Today I'm talking bimbo politics. See more behind the paywall, if you dare. www.garbageday.email/p/bimbos-in-...

In the early 2020s, bimbofication and its definition of the bimbo spread, like so many other things from the older internet, to TikTok. And it was hard to reconcile the fantasy image of the transformed bimbo with the real world where she now had to exist. We got a round of thinkpieces on bimbos, plus a second volley about himbos. We got a Bimbo Manifesto. The “bimbology” wasn’t uncritical, but since it was centered on the “seggs” app, it couldn’t deal with the reality that this was a niche online sex thing before it was a serious social phenomenon. Which was a problem that’s gotten worse. Because in 2026, most of culture can be directly traced back to niche online sex things. Our slang is incel doggerel, our media diet is a collective goon cave, and our government is insecure memelords.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

The Epic layoffs today are another sign of the same reason we're all talking about DLSS 5. The video game industry is showing signs of a mass extinction - a death stranding, so to speak. I wrote about it last week: www.garbageday.email/p/the-death-...

garbageday.email

The death stranding of the video game industry

Read to the end for The Peg

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

It is with some regret that I report Paul Leonard-Morgan did a first-rate original score for the new Louis Theroux manosphere doc. Imagine blasting this and then having to say its name out loud: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxqn...

youtube.com

The Manosphere

YouTube video by Paul Leonard-Morgan - Topic

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Reposted by Adam Bumas

Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 09/03/2026

"Can you ironically use Halo fancams to inspire a draft? Can you entertain your CHUD followers with fashwave Agartha edits when gas is $10 a gallon?" www.garbageday.email/p/waging-war... @bumas.bsky.social @garbageday.email

garbageday.email

Waging war for the lulz

Read to the end for Zooey Deschanel’s Crumbl Cookie review

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

WAGE! FUWY! CAWNAGE! THWOOD! Follow youw instincts! Aheheheheh - Elmer Fudd 2077

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Reposted by Adam Bumas

Ryan Broderick @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Here's @bumas.bsky.social on dark woke. www.garbageday.email/p/an-edgelor...

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Discord has already quietly broken its promise that its new age verification tools will keep your data on your device. Here's the basics - read more behind the paywall in today's Garbage Day. www.garbageday.email/p/clavicular...

Discord itself isn’t helping with the misinformation. Their official announcement states the pictures used to estimate your age will “never leave the user’s device.” Despite this, after the usual exploits for faking these pictures were found, X users noticed that the platform is verifying some users’ ages with Persona. That’s a startup funded by Peter Thiel (him again!) that stores all the personal data it analyzes. Discord later said it was only using Persona partially in the UK, and they would only store the images for “up to seven days.”

Which means, even in the face of all the backlash, Discord’s promise to protect their users’ identities held strong for about three days. There hasn’t been any update as prominent as the initial announcement.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Hey, @nyt-first-said.bsky.social, you've got your work cut out for you with this profile of Clavicular. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/s...

nytimes.com

Handsome at Any Cost

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Thanks for the ping! This video gets at least one thing wrong: There ARE separate apps for TikTok outside the US on both Android and iOS. This isn't just Douyin, it's two apps both called TikTok. Anything I say about the algorithm would be speculation, but that I know for sure.

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Reposted by Adam Bumas

Syn @synnviks.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

"For the good of upholding family values, men should be empowered by medical science to carry a mixed species baby to term!" -Scott Adams (RIP) & Larry Charles

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Dilbert mpreg update (thanks to @synnviks.bsky.social) - this is both Dilbert mpreg and Dilbert forcefem.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I, for one, didn't know the short-lived Dilbert animated series ended with an mpreg two-parter.

Wikipedia descriptions for the last two episodes of the Dilbert animated series, where Dilbert gets pregnant.

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Reposted by Adam Bumas

Grant Irving @grantirving.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

@ryanhatesthis.bsky.social and my reporting for this very different Panic World ep youtu.be/8cjxGMJIAS4?...

youtu.be

We Were at ICE’s invasion in Minneapolis

YouTube video by Panic World

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

There are plenty of other "pretty ring times" than springtime. When donuts come out of the fryer, for example

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

As @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social reports from on the ground in Minneapolis, I'm holding the fort at @garbageday.email with our monthly Garbage Intelligence issue. We have all The Game Awards numbers, including how much attention all those wins gave Clair Obscur. www.garbageday.email/p/the-oscars...

Beyond the discourse, though, it also convinced a lot more people to play the game. Data from SteamCharts shows that after the awards, the game’s concurrent player count went from a daily average of 14,000 to 45,000 within a few days. Sales estimates from SteamDB show that the week after the awards, Expedition 33 went from Steam’s 12th best-selling non-free game to number two, behind Arc Raiders.

This is exactly what awards are supposed to do. Whether or not you think Expedition 33 counts as an indie game, The Game Awards are accomplishing their most basic goal of giving attention and distinction to their winners. This wasn’t always the case — from the records we can find, there wasn’t any comparable bump back when the awards were called the Spike TV VGAs.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I've spent months writing about how Bluesky's silent majority is mostly people here to draw and/or view horny cartoons. When I reported on this past week's dust-up over Isabelle from Animal Crossing, I knew I had to take a moment to mention the only contingent who emerged unscathed.

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Reposted by Adam Bumas

Ryan Broderick @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

@bumas.bsky.social spoke to @parkermolloy.com about the curvier Isabelle drama that's been tearing Bluesky apart all week www.garbageday.email/p/the-sexy-a...

Last month, I diagnosed the problem with Bluesky as one of entrenchment. Virtually every user has migrated to the site from somewhere else. Since Bluesky prioritizes personal curation and confines algorithmic popularity to the Discover feed, it’s easy for your entire timeline to look the way you’re used to from back in the day, whether that’s Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook. And Molloy isn’t just a big Bluesky account, her posts stand astride all these communities — she’s a trans woman and prominent ex-Twitter poster who frequently writes about politics and media. The range — and rage — of the reactions to her post show what happens when all these subcultures that usually keep to themselves are forced to share the same reply section. “Old Twitter had its own pile-on dynamics, but the sheer speed of this felt different.” Molloy said. “I saw something I thought was funny and weird, posted about it, and within hours I was being called a Nazi and getting told I should die.”

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Thank you so very much to each and every one of Garbage Day’s 100,000 followers. It’s an honor and a privilege that I’m able to be so online for a living.

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Trans stockbroker advising you to buy blå, sell haj

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Adam Bumas @bumas.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

We're currently offering a one-month free trial subscription to @garbageday.email's premium content! That means that if you sign up today, you'll get to read our Garbage Intelligence report for free, including the Big Spreadsheet and - this month - a big statistical L for MrBeast.

A chart titled "MrBeast Longform Video Performance, First 24 Hours (estimated)". The chart shows a decline in MrBeast's viewing figures.

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Reposted by Adam Bumas

Art! @punsultant.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Society is a construct. You can just ask someone to do a ska cover of Faith of the Heart and they'll say "$300 please" and you give it to them and then you have it. Everyone, give @skatunenetwork.bsky.social your money. They deserve it.

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