iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Cheapest cards available. Next time I won't get glossy. But also? Next time is 100 cards away. By then I imagine I'll have a new website and design new cards to match!

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

In what, not long ago, was the "poorest city in America", when I mention Chicago or San Francisco the response often references litter (which this burg has in abundance) or crime (about which the natives complain ceaselessly). I always find that this person has never left the state county, country.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Among my friends I've counted the most unique, talented and intelligent people I've met

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Thoughts are free and so it shall always be... Keep an eye on Neuroimaging tech! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf71...

youtube.com

Die Gedanken sind frei (+ english translation)

YouTube video by Dicker Hund

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

in the US we change our clocks (oh, god, why) early Nov. 1 I prefer to think of it as an Extra Hour of Halloween!

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Leaving a social gathering without saying farewell? That's not autistic, melad, it's the Irish Goodbye!

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I find I continuously do these sort of *chimes*: I awaken, finally coherent in the dark. Further from the fire which glows, all tumbledown, in luminous coals.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I'd been optimistic that the bursting of the IA investment bubble wouldn't crash the economy like the housing bubble did. Now I find AI spending fueled 40% of U.S. economic growth in the past year! Oopsie?

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I write everything, Markdown First. I output pdf, rtf, html versions with a click. Even host GitHub repositories of .md docs as web pages— no (extra) clicks necessary. So VSCode —infinitely versatile tho not exactly optimized for prose— is my word processor. www.xda-developers.com/vs-code-is-b...

xda-developers.com

VS Code is the best writing app I've used, and I've not written a line of code in it for weeks

I used it to clean up HTML, and it accidentally became my writing setup

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If, by some strange chance, the mind survives death, I reckon the reason we haven't heard from (m)any of them is that 10,000 years pass, for them, in every instant. And before we could possibly have made out their first syllables, they've, well, sort of forgotten about us?

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Egyptian iconography depicts a dung beetle, rolling backward, the Sun.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

2/2 You say "Who might have deployed em?" Beings from the previous universe, ofcourse. They're gonna need energy early and this is the earliest energy of the (new) universe! If nothing else, this makes me think we're not looking for Dyson Spheres properly: A star lost in in dust? —Patent Pending!

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

1/2 Patent Pending: It occurs to me that Little Red Dots, which are now suspected to be Black Hole Stars, might be extremely early universe versions of Dyson Spheres: A cloud of accumulators, nano dust, deployed to absorb the enormous energies of energetic Black Holes.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"Perfect I may be but a paradox is still a paradox!” —Sheen, from A Billion Days of Earth

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Swoopers and bashers, plotters and pantsers: Vonnegut originated the first axis, the second emerged from, maybe, nanowrimo culture? But these axes intersect. A plotter may swoop through a first draft. Bashers knocking out perfect pages, one at a time, may have no fixed goal. Terrain, not spectrum.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

If you're real, and you know it, clap your hands!

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

"If you don't believe the straight man, you don't believe the comic" —Tommy Smothers

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

the idea that any religion, if only followed purely or closely enough, is a good one, is demonstrably false allow me to demonstrate

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The cosmos is absolutely chock full of "rays" See: Camera Obscura donmarkbaldridge.com

donmarkbaldridge.com

Don Mark Writes

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

On the 12th of this month, apparently, Earth will "lose its gravity" which, I need hardly remind you, would be bad for all concerned. Almost as bad as if this planet hosted a significant percentage of persons capable of falling for such nonsense. Oopsie!

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

"Dont' trun around and do as I say" —Rock Hudson in "The Fat Man" (1951) being indecipherable.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

"immortality is now probably unavoidable" —arthur c. clarke

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Getting someone who understands perfectly well how a mirror works to become astonished THAT a mirror works, is, like, my whole deal.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

"There is no paradox, as the Little Pale Book tells us: It's going back, kills your grandma."

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Errors and paradigm shifts both begin with anomalies

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

For an actual apocalypse (and how we might avoid it) see my new blog post, beginning: "What we call empty space is not entirely empty." www.donmarkbaldridge.com

donmarkbaldridge.com

Don Mark Writes

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

It's modern magic that's "primitive", not the other way around. In ancient times magic was sophisticated, layered and pervasive. We're the ones knocking rocks together.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

"And after the end? Well, hunker down; it’s a long wait. But what’s that to me? Am I not contiguous with eternity?"

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

The floors were polished hardwood. The walls were pure white. "White as alkaloid crystals," Wiggs Dannyboy was to say. "White as yeti dung, white as the Sabbath, white as God's own belly. Floral patterns, they're for your doomed. Your immortalist wall is a white one." —Jitterbug Perfume

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

"Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a living system is a learning system." —Stewart Brand, 1980

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Reposted by Don Mark Baldridge

An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog @hugobookclub.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

"Typography is the architecture of a spiritual public square." -- Paul Renner

A portrait of Paul Renner with his typeface Futura in red behind him.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

The skin of an orange has a quality like plastic. Tomato skins, that weird membrane between the shell and the boiled egg. You can make plastic from milk (casein). And, turns out, lab conditions make us much more likely to detect "microplastics" where there are none. news.umich.edu/nitrile-and-...

news.umich.edu

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny pollutants, according to a University of Michigan study.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Le Guin's Earthsea is more SciFi than fantasy, in that it posits that the cosmos is essentially founded on language.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

"Where the myth claims to explain once and for all the essence of phenomena, SF first posits them as problems and then explores where they lead; it sees the mythical static identity as an illusion, usually as fraud, at best only as a temporary realization of potentially limitless contingencies."

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Yeah, existence remains bizarre no matter how accustomed we may get to it through habit. Just being alive, and knowing it, is the weirdest imaginable condition.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Indeed, it would be best for my purposses if the reader never saw that I was saying anything of the kind, but just began to see the cosmos differently, as an entity, possessing a certain strangeness. To have, in effect, an alien encounter with the universe.

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Don Mark Baldridge @donmarkmaker.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

For makers (particularly those with any experience the sound studio) I can't suggest a more effective oracle than the Eno/Schmidt Oblique Strategies: stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique....

stoney.sb.org

Oblique Strategies

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies card set reimplemented as a dynamic web page.

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