iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 23h

Does Miss Demeanor have impeccable deportment, commit petty crimes, or both?

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Communists rallying in the park. How do they manage to make such a charismatic movement so tedious? They have the red flag. They have "The Red Flag." They have had great orators and polemicists. Their basic program is attractive. Why in the world are they still using the same Lego set of phrases?

230

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The most ecstatic hymn of the 20th century was addressed to the skyscraper headquarters of a large financial institution.

000

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It is all about pursuit of pleasure. What pleasure delivery system you use is a matter of life and death and of good and evil, but the end is always pleasure. Only, upon examination, pleasure turns out to be an abstraction from experience. The actual experience is deep engagement in pursuit.

000

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Maintaining a sense of how you are good by continually denouncing other people as bad requires a continual supply of people to denounce as bad. This leads to needing there to be bad people, and, if necessary, creating them.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This book keeps telling me that the Renaissance wasn't a golden age, and then dropping in asides like this. "La virago Caterina had many more adventures, including the famous moment when enemy troops threatened her children and she bared her genitals up on her fortress walls, declaring:

220

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Things my somewhat snooty former writing teacher wife said while reading @tkingfisher.com's horror novel The Twisted Ones. "This book is creeping me out." "I have to finish this now because I don't want to be reading it after dark."

71749

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Grim, gross, grey day. A day for irritably chewing away at something that gives you enormous jaw muscles but grinds your teeth flat.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This makes me so sad. Everything was by the book. I like Officer Brito, the guy trying to talk Ms. Cisneros down, and I bet he is paying dearly in nightmares for his empathy. She walked through the tasers. She was in spitting distance of the officer when shot. She had already stabbed two people.

200

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

High winds make the dog excited and happy. GSDs usually disapprove of anything out of the ordinary, so this is surprising. Maybe it seems like something she could bite the way she does jets of water, and that if she keeps looking she might find it.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The little chill of saying "life's too short for that" and realizing that, yes, your life is now too short for that. Kind of a thrill, though. (No drama, no trauma. Just old.)

020

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It appears that the forebrain and hindbrain evolved from different progenitor cells and were connected after the fact. The cerebellum, which handles bodily proprioception and coordination, attention regulation, and maybe movement learning is in the hindbrain.

220

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

On Fall nights shades ride alleycat races on the the ghost bikes left to mark the places they died. You only see them if you are going fast yourself. Back when a messenger, I asked a Wall Street ghost why she was unruly now, after death. She said "All they left us was wind and speed."

030

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It is not that I can remember poetry and philosophy, and not appointments or duties, because I love them. I love them because I can remember them. Everything else winks in and out of existence. I am, of course, absurdly lucky to be able to love anything at all.

021

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

If angels are capable of self-corruption, then devils are capable of self-reform. If human souls can become better in Purgatory, then human souls are capable of moral reform after death, and can also become better in Hell.

130

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

He would be astounded that I wasn't alone and homeless. Then he would find out I left the girl he loves for no better reason than loving someone else more, spit in my face, and walk away.

020

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It is really fun to imitate the way people stand, walk, or gesture. It lets you put on their body and see what it feels like. It gives you a taste of their habitual background emotions. It is also wholly rude and intrusive. It would be terrible to be caught doing it. I don't know why this is so.

120

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This is my theory, which I have, and which is mine. No one is quite sure what to make of Sanchin kata, a karate kata involving bodily tension and slow, hard, restricted breathing. Breath is forced out with the belly while the chest is kept from contracting and the throat is constricted.

120

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

When you feel bad for no reason, remember that you felt good for no reason, too, and that it didn't bother you. That way you can focus your whining and sniveling on the feeling bad part, rather than on the no reason part. Focused whining irritates your friends more, and is therefore better.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Maybe the space program was never anything more than a pretty mask to put over the ICBM program, and atomic energy never anything more than a pretty mask over the nuclear weapons program. Maybe they were there to conceal, not to work.

030

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Three distinct theses, any of which can be false when the others are true. 1. Social progress occurs. 2. Technical progress occurs. 3. Progress is difficult to reverse. That last one is seductive. It is pleasant to think that real progress would not be accidental and easily undone by accident.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Hearing people begin to speak in the voice they think in is at least as exciting as seeing them undress, because occasionally much more startling. Very few people suddenly become much larger when undressed, or turn out to be conjoined siblings, or are revealed to be part machine.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I can't recall the smell. I analyzed it at the time, and remember the words: concrete dust, burning jet fuel, some other chemical taint, and a faint, probably imaginary, hint of rot. I remember coughing and wiping my nose for a year or so. The actual smell is gone.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Things I was frghtened of as a child: things falling onto my head from trees, boring through my skull and eating part of my brain (thank you, Frank Belknap Long) that everyone could read minds but me that adults were a different species and children died at about 12 years old

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

If I ever had a superpower, it was the longing. When there was a book I wanted, I longed for it, and it began to work its way toward me. It called to me from libraries, bookstores, and street bookstalls.

110

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

This reads like good science fiction. A 15-year-old girl emails a retired topologist saying that math is boring except for geometry, and asking if there is more math like geometry. Much comes of this. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...

nytimes.com

The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice (Gift Article)

Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn.

221

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

There are three paintings of Mad Meg storming Hell, one a masterpiece. Nothing is known of Mad Meg other than that she stormed Hell.

000

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

When you really like an author, speculate what the terrible revelation about them will be. It is a way of keeping aware that you don't really know them, and they aren't really your friend. Also, whee, speculation! Here, a dead boyfriend in a shallow grave packed with dermestid beetles.

100

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Gut bacteria regulate mood. What kind of design process winds up with members of another taxonomic kingdom regulating mood?

092

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Night and Day, Virginia Woolf This is not thought well of, because it is a 19th-century marriage plot, and she is a modernist. However, it holds her up to Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy for comparison. She is more acute than Hardy and funnier, though more unkind, than Austen. I will re-read it soon.

120

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

There is this guy who has been watching you for a long time, and he knows pretty much everything you do. He tells you to do stuff you were just about to do and is very pleased when you do it. Sometimes he does this so incessantly and in such detail that it is hard to work.

100

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The best thing about La Morte d'Arthur is that Milton considered basing his English epic poem on it, but decided that it cannot be entirely turned to Christian purposes.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

"When I think I am arguing I am not arguing at all. I am only turning about in search of a less cruel position, and I may pass by some decisive reason without perceiving it. As the excess of my suffering blinds me, let me follow that rule approved by all wise men, which is called prudence."

100

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I wish someome would do a take on Ben Grimm that takes his test pilot career and engineering degrees into account. Why cannot he measure his body's strength and durability, and then figure out how to use those capacites to best advantage under a variety of circumstances?

020

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The proper function of consciousness is to rejoice. It is to have joy in anticipation, in the moment, and in recollection; to reflect and speculate upon joy; and to act on joy as diamonds act on light, slowing its passage and showing it forth. The problem is how not to do the same with suffering.

020

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

If the Ring trilogy is a Christian myth, then Gollum is a Christ figure who dies and saves us. The world is redeemed, not by valor, but by weakness and failure.

110

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I have to put Virginia Woolf's Night and Day down every couple of pages because I can't stand to know this much about people. Someone should write a purgated version, with a fight scene, love scene, explosion, or exposition punctuating every insight. This is like trying to swim in rapids.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Robot police dogs would let us stop ruining good herding dogs. GSD and Malinois police dogs are great-hearted models of courage for us all, but the first requisite for a herding dog is that it move animals without injuring them.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Every so often I think maybe Dolly got good because she started out trying to make things better for people, this changed her character so that she did a little more, and it became a positive feedback loop. One could do that. Then I drop the idea like it's hot. That would be hard.

010

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Do we have Scriptural warrant for believing that anyone other than the fictitious rich man who let a beggar die on his doorstep is in Hell?

000

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Centrist Democrats: "We have seen that Americans will vote for just about anyone who offers them sweeping, radical reforms. Therefore, we must at all costs avoid offering sweeping, radical reforms."

020

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

JFK getting shot when I was 7. No TV, so I heard about it from another kid. I had no clear idea of what a president is, so it had no major impact.

120

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

What an admirable woman Dolly Parton was. When you are that talented, you don't need to do that much good. You made your contribution already. But she was, and she did.

020

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This is socialization. She lies across from me as I sit on the sofa and sees that I see that she has her ball. Sometimes she lets it roll across the slanted floor to my feet, whereupon I pretend to gnaw upon it in a satisfied fashion, and then roll it back.

Longcoat German Shepherd dog lying on her bed in front of a bookshelf, holding her large, green, nubbly ball in her jaws and gazing at you to make sure that you know she is a dog of property.

000

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Working out to the Cramps when you feel bad is good because you can pretend you are dead and decaying but galvanized into hideous flailing.

031

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Someday I will write a treatise on all the entertaining ways T. Kingfisher avoids writing fight scenes. Today we have a fight between three bandits with hatchets and knives and a soldier with two daggers. narrated by a concussed monk concerned only with what kind of angel the soldier might be.

140

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I wonder if you could build AIs who did physics and chemistry wholly without theory, just by looking at a great many physical states and the physical states that followed, till they could predict the next state accurately most of the time. If you could, theoretical science is one of the humanities.

100

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Ghost nuns. If I ever get to referee D&D again, there will be ghost nuns. A long-dead nursing order will come to battlefields at night, care for the wounded, and counsel the newly dead.

120

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The reason you don't see ghosts in cities is that they are so many that they overlap, amalgamate, and become genius loci.

010