iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

just in case you thought this was good news

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unclear what i have done on youtube to make it believe i want an AI-generated rundown of the Gallagher brothers beef in French but i do sort of have to hand it to them

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Nasser gotta be the most chad politician of the 20th century. he looks, unedited, like those huge-chin chad edits of Xi Jinping. it helps that he was also an actual huge chad

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

chess, a game of intellectuals

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hahhaha oh fuck oh shit WHAT

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

i know this isn't, like, the point, but it's so screamingly obvious that this was "written" by ChatGPT for Khan (or rather some overworked person in his comms office). like can we at least do an editing pass to *try* and cover this shit up?

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

no, the rook is there to block. it's still a winning position but it's no longer mate

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

in French, they don't say "beast mode", they say "mode sauvage", and i think that's beautiful

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

RIP Jeffrey Archer, not a day goes by when I don't think about the judge in his 1987 libel case (which Archer "won" by doing a bunch of perjury) summing up for the jury by going "would a guilty man have such a hot wife". one of the most insane legal moments of all time

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

is anyone else reading this. i feel like we're not discussing this enough as a culture. i'm 400 pages in so no spoilers

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

tfw when you're trying to remember the Petrov defence but are worried you left the bathroom light on

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

huge new shitpost/meme image kindly provided by... The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

to be fair this remains the borough's coat of arms, which coupled with the "progress with humanity" slogan absolutely raises many questions already answered by my "we are not rendering the residents of Haringey into advanced biofuels at windowless processing centres" tshirt, etc 2/2

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

retvrn to when Haringey council had the logo of an Iron Warriors warband rather than this youth theatre summer school bullshit

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

pondering the official logo of the 2010 39th Chess Olympiad, hosted by the city of Khanty-Mansiysk

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

never before has my interest been so quickly captured and then lost again in one single sentence

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"conference, the problem with pissing on Thatcher's legacy is that eventually you run out of piss"

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anyway this is all very sensible but i think it says something about how much more regard the Australian government has for its scientists than it does for its horror novelists and screenwriters. bit of a shame, really

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also, it's... quite hard to get there, and to get anyone *out* of there at short notice, so rather than having someone go berserk from the psychological trauma and/or the sheer *smell* of ten thousand decomposing elephant seals on their front doorstep, they're evacuating everyone next week.

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this is not a direct health risk for the two dozen researchers there, strictly speaking -the bird flu won't hurt them- but the Australians have decided that the *psychological* risk of having 20 or so researchers surrounded by thousands of rotting elephant seals for months on end is simply too great

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want to know something fucking gnarly? the Australian government is sending a ship to evacuate its near-Antarctic research base on Macquarie Island because they've realised that bird flu is about to reach the island and will cause mass death among the local elephant seal population.

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the sellers of Samarkand's most hideously shiny polyester flags are the real winners

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was there a deeply cringe interminable closing awards ceremony? oh you *know* there was. that's Zhu Jiner there, winning her medal for the best Board 1 performance, whom I erroneously and insultingly mixed up with Ju Wenjun further up this thread. my bad.

and the women's. told you Alice Lee was a superstar, didn't I

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speaking of individual players, there are individual awards for best players on given boards. the exact way they're calculated is arcane and incomprehensible but, uh, well done to all these guys, especially Abdusattarov's ludicrous dominance

after that it's the various individual stories. Bodhana Sivanandan - who is e l e v e n y e a r s o l d and is the future of English chess and women's chess and basically just chess - had this excellent run.

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there we go: final women's standings. US get their hearts broken by just missing out on bronze. spectacular of Poland to get 5th.

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aaaaand there we go. Savathi here had a bad position which she pulled back into a draw, which will have pulled India up into the bronze medal position. she hasn't lost a game all tournament. incredible stuff

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everyone is now just begging these two women to draw so they can go party

an honest-to-god media scrum for Abdusattarov

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ok, yep, Abdusattorov made the draw, so these are the final men's standings. Obviously these are also pleasingly Spicy from the perspective of the upcoming world championship between Uzbekistan's Sindarov and India's Gukesh.

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the women's does have one ongoing game, in the India-Georgia match, which will impact the final standings so we can't quite say what they are yet. fittingly all eyes on this last game featuring Savathi Shri Baskar, a young IM who has has an *unbelievable* tournament.

the final top 10 will be this but with Uzbekistan on 20. they're won 10 of their matches and lost just one (shout-out Germany), which is an amazing, dominant performance and makes them back-to-back champions. India will be slightly sad about second, Germany will be ecstatic about third.

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Abdussatarov is still playing out an endgame that's presumably a draw, but even if he loses his team wins this round and the entire competition.