iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

The fundamentally most fascinating thing about APs for me is the need to be both a good game and a good show, which don't always pull in the same directions.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

True enough. I think, as a filmmaker myself, I find myself resistant to turning one medium into another (novels have different strengths than films, etc). Although in games that emulate a cinematic narrative, like a Star Wars or Star Trek themed game, the technique makes sense.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

I, personally, push back on attempts to make APs feel more like movies or TV, I dislike a narrator using terms like "cut to" or "fade out" or "the camera moves in on". I see AP as its own medium and as such I think it should play to those strengths: second person narration, immersion, etc.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I have to say, I don't care for Mike Flanagan's work.

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Rhiannon Held/R.Z. Held @rhiannonheld.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Happy birthday to me! Preorders are live! I'll do full posts when After the Warding is released on Tuesday, but meanwhile here are some links! HYBRID will have a print edition, but that's coming later. books2read.com/aftertheward... books2read.com/hybridrzheld

books2read.com

Available now at your favorite digital store!

Hybrid by R. Z. Held

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Sarah and I watched the 1994 Street Fighter II Movie anime last night, fully uncut and uncensored in the original Japanese, and it was a fun time! Animation holds up! We're looking forward to the new movie.

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J. Caleb Mozzocco @jcaleb.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Just a heads up that McFarland updated the "About The Book" section on their website about my upcoming book, GIANT MONSTER MOVIES. So, there's now a solid paragraph explaining the premise of the book, if you're interested:

mcfarlandbooks.com

Giant Monster Movies - McFarland

Giant Monster Movies 100 Years of Big-Screen Behemoths J. Caleb Mozzocco 978-1-4766-5833-9 979-8-3686-0128-1

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Erica Henderson @ericafails.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Ok this is the favorite commission for day 2. The prompt was "ghost rider as a mail carrier"

Ghost rider driving one of the new electric mail trucks

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weeder @weeder.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

So funny watching the media try to write 2000's era Grand Theft Auto Outrage articles now that the whole country is a casino run by murderers.

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Patrick Cosmos @veryimportant.lawyer · 09/10/2026

There should be a political party that wants to stop this and punish the people doing this

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Laura Bassett @lebassett.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

“If you don’t like public executions just don’t watch it” says the crowd trying to ban drag shows and books

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Christopher Bird @mightygodking.com · 09/10/2026

For my entire life Democrats decided "saying that these pieces of shit are, in fact, pieces of shit" was bad politics despite the fact that the GOP won countless elections pretending that generally decent people were pieces of shit and saying that loudly

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Scream Scene @screamscene.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Alfred Hitchcock teaches us that patience is a virtue with his slow burn classic, THE BIRDS (1963)! We cover a lot, including Tippi Hedren, the sodium vapor process, the Capitola bird incident, AND a full hour of discussion! Plus, Sarah sprinkles bird facts throughout. You're welcome! #filmsky

soundcloud.com

Episode 358 - Patience is a Virtue

Alfred Hitchcock teaches us that patience is a virtue with his slow burn, classic horror movie, THE BIRDS (1963)! We cover the film's source material, special effects processes, and Hitchcock's histor

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Rosemary Jones @rosemaryjones.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The 1911 Flying Girl arrived in the mail today. It is in much better condition than my 1912 Flying Girl and Her Chum. Both by L Frank Baum writing as Edith Van Dyne.

The Flying Girl cover is still bright red and illustration shows Orissa piloting her brother’s experimental plane. The Flying Girl and Chum is much more battered and the cover has darkened to a brownish red. Illustration show Orissa and chum seated side by side in plane.

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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There are so many people, so many, that love film and want to dedicate their whole lives to making films, in front of the camera, behind it, in editing suites and casting rooms and makeup trailers. And that these locusts can come in and just devour the industry, take it from us all, is devastating.

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Jay Kuo @nycjayjay.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is a community note for the ages.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Well and to be fair your impression of Astarion can be drastically different depending on your interactions playthrough to playthrough.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I think it's "understandable" to the degree that due to how in depth and frankly good that game is, people could have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with "their" version of Astarion and feel very strongly about it.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Audiobook seems like a cool way to do it since you get Newbon reading it too.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

That's an interesting take! It is at least refreshing to see someone giving the book props, the online reaction from Astarion superfans seems to be so overwhelmingly hostile. Definitely a hazard when adapting a character who can be very different in the minds of his fans, playthrough to playthrough.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I think if the author could have found a way to remove the racism element, while retaining the central idea that Astarion was not a good person and not a good magistrate and basically was responsible for the attack on his life, that would have been more ideal.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I think for me the issue is that it changes Astarion from an unfair magistrate who got attacked by people he screwed over because he was prejudiced, leading to his being turned into a vampire -- to a version of the story where Astarion was right all along, actually.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Oh, it's the tree from The Last Unicorn

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Christopher Bird @mightygodking.com · 04/10/2026

my favorite fact about the formation of the FDA was that it was largely in response to one quack who endorsed surgically grafting goat balls into your body as a panacea, and then spread out into a variety of branded snake oils and other quackery which sold like wildfire because he had a radio show

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I honestly love hearing Japanese people talk about English words like this because it's nice to know that the over-the-top exoticizing of a foreign culture isn't just an "us" thing, y'know?

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Like really insular humour. Like the writers are making each other laugh in the writer's room, perhaps, but it's the kind of hyper targeted jokes that work for you and your friends but mean nothing to anyone else.

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Movies Silently @moviessilently.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This Hour Has 22 Minutes has been on fire too, but that’s not surprising considering the state of things in Canada. I would simply not mess with a country whose #1 export is sketch comedy.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A lot of it is parodying the things *around* Star Wars like action figures and merchandise and video tapes or surface level stuff like costumes and funny names and little guys, but it doesn't really get deeper into the actual genre conventions like his earlier stuff does. It was too new, I think.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think the best thing about being a transfemme lesbian is having the opportunity to become what you think is most attractive to you. (Or maybe that's the worst thing if "do I wanna be her or do her?" is a particular dysphoria struggle)

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One thing that’s interesting about this is that it shows that despite insisting the wokes overinterpet everything, conservatives are actually aware of and agree with their critics about how coded racist appeals work, they just like them bsky.app/profile/newr...

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Hundreds of Beavers is an exceptionally good movie but this is wild.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One of the sad truths when you have seen the same behind the scenes pics of Star Trek your entire life over and over is that now if I see one I have never seen I can no longer feel excitement about it because there's a 90% chance it's AI generated.

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Bruno Dies @brunodias.dev · 28/09/2026

It really doesn't make sense to attribute those job losses to AI-the-technology, because if that were the case we'd be observing AI outputs displacing conventional entertainment products, and they're clearly not. Rather, the impact of AI is that AI-the-business is crowding out other investment.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 26/01/2026

"ai" is not a genie that can't be put back in a bottle, it's a pillar of smoke that dissipates unless you keep burning money

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Scotty ages a lot in 2 years, is all I'm saying.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

As much as I enjoy their performances, I think "Tomorrow's Enterprise" really underscores how weird it is to be having 32 year old Martin Quinn playing 43 year old Scotty and 44 year old Paul Wesley playing 32 year old James T. Kirk. These just don't feel like the characters from TOS because of it.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Legitimately I find Strange New Worlds to be really difficult to square with The Original Series in terms of continuity, and not in terms of visuals but in terms of characters and storytelling. But I didn't mind that as much in earlier seasons when I was enjoying the show! The worse the show gets...

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

There is IMO something absolutely spot on about the British ruling class not at all recognising that smashing up the state to sell it for scrap and cocaine might be a problem, until it started to somewhat impede their ability to wage a really serious war.

I've spent a few weeks asking people if Britain is prepared for war, among other doom scenarios. The short answer is no and the condensed reason for why that happened is that we spent the last forty years stripping off and selling the most resilient systems in the country for parts.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I mean the purpose of the rat patrol is to find rats and they did, so the system is working as intended.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is true of so much now. We used to do things intentionally. Then we stopped. And now we do them again, but worse and at random.

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Jamie McKelvie @mckelvie.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

One of the worst things about streaming with ads is no humans appear to be in charge of placing the ad breaks. Even shows which originally had ad breaks, where there was an obvious break in the narrative for it, don't have the ad breaks put in those places now

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I respect Nia DaCosta's Candyman, but it's got a serious case of Surf Dracula.

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Ben Rowe @cineastbenrowe.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Having played a lot of official 5e adventures, I'm not surprised. I mean, to use a high profile example, there's no reason for 20th level PCs to fight a nerfed version of Vecna at the end of that campaign, they can handle the CR 30 god version.

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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 24/09/2026

Just when I think I can’t hate OpenAI and Sam Altman any more, new details come out about how ChatGPT helped a shooter plan one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history in Tumbler Ridge, BC. OpenAI made an explicit decision not to report the user to authorities.

motherjones.com

ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter focus on guns, tactics, and terror, our investigation reveals

OpenAI’s chatbot fed the shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre.

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Jamie McKelvie @mckelvie.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

My main thought about "10% chance ai will kill humanity in a decade" is that the people who run the tech companies are some of the worst humans alive and they're not even interested in dealing with the harms their products cause *now*

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