iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It is kind of astonishing to me that the Liberty Mutual ad agency seems to think they’ve really hit upon a great catchphrase from which to build multiple ad campaigns from. I guess it’s memorable, but for all the wrong reasons, and I’m not sure the people involved realize that it’s mocked and hated.

Sorry, JD, your son is biracial. He’s not welcome in Pete Hegseth’s Marines.

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Oh, look, it’s another “Fuck your profession and/or your hobby, AI is going to destroy it. Isn’t that great?!” post. Just the most addled people around doing this crap.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The point is that this is happening in spite of Republicans controlling the state since 1994. The solar panel buildout, and especially the wind farms, predate the huge data center expansion. You could maybe make a case that they were built to add capacity for crypto mining, but even that is shaky.

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I have the vaguest memory that I watched this and liked it. But I remember literally nothing about it other than the title ringing a bell.

Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Beyond Lindelof’s daddy issues, Chris Mundy’s 20 years of working on 2nd-rate procedurals and crime dramas really shows in the sloppy plotting and poor attention to detail in this show. Doing two different mysteries in 8 episodes didn’t help either of the mysteries.

Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I binged eps 5, 6, and 7 last night and it did the show no favors. I really like the three leads, but they are keeping this entire show above water practically on their own.

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It’s definitely possible. But in the scene of John driving to the stadium, there were several inches of snow on the ground. And it can all melt from a November storm, but everything from the next day showed zero residue of that snow ever happening. That lack of attention to detail says a lot to me.

Oof, that gives real Alpa Chino vibes.

This show has become a compounding mess. I feel like the three leads are doing great work despite the sloppy plotting and attention to detail. Just as an example, Hal is found in the middle of a winter snowstorm. Yet it’s also football season and the funeral specifically is full of green trees.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I think Senate is a much better move for her strategically. House members don’t usually have the profile to get past Senators and Governors in a Presidential race. Hers is way bigger than most House members, but she would still be a real longshot up against, say, Pritzker and Ossoff in that lane.

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Completely shackling renewables, however, was legislation that was on the table during the last session of the Texas State Legislature, but it ended up not getting through. Thankfully. Although they have put their thumb heavily on the scales to try to help get more natural gas and nuclear going.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I’m not going to try to dig into the data to determine how much of this came from IRA money. But I will say that Texas’ open energy market has ensured that solar was going in well before the IRA and batteries (+ more solar) have continued even after Trump shut down as much of the IRA as he could.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

After that article went viral yesterday I went and sought it out and I had definitely not heard it anywhere. It’s been remarkably siloed for what has apparently been a summer-long smash hit. But it’s not like I’m listening to the radio in my car. It’s all podcasts and my own music choices.

Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

“Cheaper” comes with caveats in the case of Texas. Our open electricity market makes it really easy to get a bad deal. My NextDoor feed is full of complaints about monthly electricity bills topping $500 a month in the summer. I shop around and my peak bill this summer was still just over $200.

Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A familiar story for anyone who follows @volts.wtf. “The Chronicle spoke to more than half a dozen grid experts…to try to understand why Texas’s notoriously unreliable grid had a remarkably reliable summer. The answer was unanimous: solar panels and batteries.”

houstonchronicle.com

Texas shattered energy demand records this summer. Here's why the grid held up.

Texas repeatedly broke electricity demand records this summer, but ERCOT avoided emergencies as booming solar and battery capacity helped keep the grid stable.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Characterizing this absolutely standard list of American critical favorites as “insane” says a lot more about how much one follows TV criticism and pop culture than the list does.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is exactly the list, give or take 10-15 shows, that any given group of American tv critics would come up with. Sure there are some mild surprises, but to characterize it as “insane” says more about Bobby and his connection to American pop culture and tv criticism than it does about the list.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Oh oh oh, it’s my only offer

This fantasy story has a similar energy to something I’ve heard before. What was it…

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One and the same. Probably the biggest name in American manga at the time (apologies to Stan Sakai), AP was doing quite well after a late-90’s relaunch after Dunn brought Ninja High School back. Marvel brought him in to oversee the line. I was a fan of Gold Digger so I watched this all play out.

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Mostly, though, I hope Ben Dunn got paid handsomely by Marvel to run the Mangaverse line for the brief time it existed. Because it got him to abandon his own (middling) creator-owned comic, Ninja High School, smack dab in the runup to issue #100. Which was a slap in the face to those readers.

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As a fan of both Marvel and manga, I have minor fond memories of the Mangaverse. It definitely wasn’t a standout comics line. It wasn’t long after this that Marvel attempted to hire an actual manga artist, Kia Asimiya, to draw Uncanny X-Men. He lasted 5 issues.

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Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass should go off and form a centrist consulting firm together and leave Californians alone.

This sounds like someone watched that Salesforce commercial these guys did last year, said, “They still got it” and thought that just putting them together would be enough.

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Looking at the photos, if you told me he did the scores for both of the Black Panther movies, I’d probably buy it.

“Look, since you were actually caught, we have to charge you. You’re going to lose this job, but once we finish this process, we may have a different government position waiting for you. Have you ever considered Immigration and Customs Enforcement? They like this kind of initiative.”

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Sleepy as he is, I think Trump is a lot more responsible for his actions during his second term than Wilson was.

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Director Neil Marshall started off so strongly and then really fizzled out. Dog Soldiers -> The Descent -> DOOMSDAY -> and then we hit Centurion and he’s doing tv episodes, a bad Hellboy movie, and films nobody has heard of. IMDB lists him having 16(!) current directing projects In Development.

Hispanics recently passed Whites in population here in Texas. A lot of them went for Trump in ‘24, and our state GOP did their mid-decade gerrymandering with the assumption that those gains were permanent. They’ve spent the past year testing that theory, and now we’re going to get the results.

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Cheer up, Brian, the Bears are starting Case Keenum this week.

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Gonna be much harder to shut it down starting in January, so if this is the plan, it’s probably why they’re starting the process now.

JD Vance acting a lot like a health insurance CEO today.

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Another thing we hear a lot is about how quickly the tech is moving on GPUs. If this is actually the case, does it follow that once these things are pulled out of warehouses in 1-3 years, are they going to be stocking new data centers with out of date tech?

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As a person who moved from Michigan to Houston 20 years ago, fall is probably the thing I miss most.

Goodbye, Comerica Park: Tigers unveil new stadium name

First time in baseball history a stadium name has gotten a September call-up. I guess the Tigers’ AAA affiliate, the Toledo Mud Hens, are gonna have to find a new name for their ballpark now. www.mlive.com/tigers/2026/...

mlive.com

Comerica Park will soon be Fifth Third Park.

Rob Friedman @pitchingninja.com · 22/09/2026

Reposted by Chris Conaton

Jason Benetti gets absolutely roasted by his own production crew with the camera cut after his Austro-Turkish War reference. 🤣

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Wait, did Scott bring up the catering plane escape unprompted as a way to bolster his argument? Damn, dude.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And yet the trailers went: STALLONE SCHNEIDER JUDGE DREDD Like the studio really thought the “making copies!” guy was on the cusp of becoming a breakout comedy star it was a real coup to get him as the new hotness who would bring the young people out to this movie.

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Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I mean, Pete showed up at a football game yesterday, got cheered, and Texas A&M promptly lost a game they had no business losing against an opponent that, by all accounts, should have been overwhelmed by them. Classic Hegseth.

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I wouldn’t worry about that. The MCU movies are probably a little too complicated for him to actually watch.

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Yeah, if you look at XXL adult diapers in the grocery store, the packages are huge and you’d basically have to have an oversized duffel bag like that to fit a whole set in something.

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You’d think the party representing “Real Americans” would know enough to know that NOBODY, not even the company, calls it “Budweiser Lite.”

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Yeah, this is just a thing Texas A&M does, and has for a century.