iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 01/10/2026

Jason Statham used to shimmy about in leopard undies for The Shamen.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 01/10/2026

These days you can’t even start the day with a mouthful of nut feast because of woke.

A screenshot from an early 90s TV ad for Kellogg’s Nut Feast with the slogan “ALL THE NUTS WITH ALL THE TASTE”

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 30/09/2026

They even look like those little Adipose monsters.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 29/09/2026

Man, they really slashed the budget on the sequel, huh.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 29/09/2026

Finally, an affordable podium for my tiny bodybuilder.

A very weird Amazon listing for an 11 inch Spranster Folding Step Stool where a muscular topless man striking a pose has been photoshopped onto the stool. The scale implies he is, at best, two and half feet tall.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 29/09/2026

The Henson/V crossover we never expected.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 29/09/2026

Great, yet another video game movie.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 28/09/2026

Pretty sure if you injected Aldi’s Sour Apple Tangz into a corpse it would come back to life.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 28/09/2026

Don’t post much gym stuff because I don’t want to be That Guy, but very happy to set a new personal best deadlift of 125kg (275lbs). Total weight lifted in the session: TWO TONS WTF?!?!?

A big ol’ heavy bar with lots of plates.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 27/09/2026

The cop guy in Neagley looks just like James Remar and I can’t get used to it.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 27/09/2026

My wife: What a beautiful sky! Me: Yes, breathtaking. My brain: 🎵THE SIIIIMPSONS🎵

Photo of a bright blue sky with white clouds.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 27/09/2026

I've banged that exact drum in my Speccy Nation books, and also in the Sir Clive obituary I wrote for Eurogamer. www.eurogamer.net/in-memory-of...

The Spectrum was nothing if not an illustration of the old maxim that necessity is the mother of invention and it sold by the bucketload - over 10 million by the end of its lifespan. Britain's nascent game developers couldn't afford to ignore it. At the same time, getting its claustrophobic architecture to produce better, faster, more eye-catching games required inventive coding and design skills. Any programmer who was around in that era can attest to the often-ingenious tricks used to make Spectrum games even move around on screen.

And that, in a roundabout way, is what made Sinclair a world-changer. The games industry would still have existed without the Spectrum, of course, but it would have been dominated by US companies like Commodore. UK developers would still have sprung up to service the new market of eager young gamers, but they wouldn't have had to navigate the quirky eccentricities of Sinclair's creation. A key spark of necessary invention would never have fired.

The UK has always punched above its weight in games design, and that's because of Sinclair. Trace back the family tree of pretty much any UK games companies today, and you'll find connections to 1980s startups that benefited from the leftfield problem-solving Sinclair's computers demanded. It's not just that the Spectrum created a commercial market that allowed a generation of UK coders to spring forth, it demanded inventive thinking that helped to give British games design a unique mix of personality and invention. Pick any of the pantheon of great UK games, the blockbuster franchises that are still going today, and there's Spectrum DNA in there.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 26/09/2026

It’s Saturday! 📺 Post a cartoon TV series you love.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 26/09/2026

The World Is Not Enough (1999)

Bearded Pierce Brosnan in full Tom of Finland fetish biker gear.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 25/09/2026

Absolutely outraged that the Ghosts movie doesn’t feature them going on holiday to the Costa del Sol, as required by British sitcom movie law. We used to be a proper country etc etc.

Poster for Ghosts The Possession of Button House

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 24/09/2026

The article itself is unambiguous so who knows what's going on with that headline.

Daniel Thomas, the far-right agitator and anti-migrant activist, has been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage with intent to endanger life, two days after he filmed himself slashing the side of a dinghy in the middle of the Channel while a rescuer was on board.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 23/09/2026

The rest of the paragraph immediately following that line makes it absolutely clear that any company lurching from one top-down directive to another with no coherent long-term goal beyond slashing away at employee headcount does not, in any real sense, have "a plan".

What’s clear is that there was one plan before Asha Sharma took over Xbox, and now there is another. Between those opposing poles, it is possible that there was no long-term plan beyond “cut, cut, cut.” During the week of the first round of layoffs in July, remaining employees at heavily impacted studios like Doom progenitor id Software noted that higher-ups failed to give them clear marching orders. They were forced to stew in uncertainty right after crunching to finish critically acclaimed DLC. Employees have since repeatedly insisted that, despite management’s claims, Microsoft did not understand what it was ripping and tearing into—that it has done irreparable damage to studios with decades of accumulated expertise and domain knowledge.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 23/09/2026

Really looking forward to this Clayface movie.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 22/09/2026

The games that made me... my9games.net/en/

Atic Atac (ZX Spectrum)
Mercenary (ZX Spectrum)
Frontier: Elite II (Amiga)
Midwinter (Amiga)
Zombies Ate My Neighbors (SNES)
Carnage Heart (PS1)
Final Fantasy VII (PS1)
Timesplitters 2 (PS2)
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (Xbox 360)

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 22/09/2026

Nothing will ever be enough for these people.

Microsoft gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2026 was $60.482B, a 15.36% increase year-over-year.
Microsoft gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2026 was $225.465B, a 16.28% increase year-over-year.
Microsoft annual gross profit for 2026 was $225.465B, a 16.28% increase from 2025.
Microsoft annual gross profit for 2025 was $193.893B, a 13.38% increase from 2024.
Microsoft annual gross profit for 2024 was $171.008B, a 17.09% increase from 2023.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 21/09/2026

This is gorgeous. Reminds me of the Looney Tunes Viewmaster reels where they used models rather than animation cels.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 20/09/2026

I think we can agree the data speaks for itself.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 20/09/2026

Have you ever read Book of the Green Planet, the official sequel novel? It's absolutely INSANE.

Front cover of E.T. The Book of the Green Planet. A hand-painted ET surrounded by alien flora. The blurb at the top reads E.T. goes home in the sensational new bestseller, while underneath the main image it says a new novel by William Kotzwinkle based on a story by Steven Spielberg.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 20/09/2026

UK figures aren't out yet. US figures for Friday are available and...nah. Transformers is doing well, for a legacy re-release, but it's not even close.

US box office chart showing Resident Evil in the top spot with $26,300,000 after one day on release. Transformers The Movie is in eighth place with $1,897,166.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 19/09/2026

Are they taken from a speech by a political activist? Lifted from a paranoid Civil Rights era news broadcast? Nope! It's from the 1989 TV movie Bionic Showdown, in which the Bionic Man and Bionic Woman team up with a very young Sandra Bullock to protect an Olympics-style sporting event.

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Dan Whitehead @danwhitehead.net · 18/09/2026

Oh man. One of those actors who was in some truly great movies, but also made lots of less-than-great movies better with his presence. My personal favourite: his hilariously sleazy suburban swinger dad in TerrorVision.