iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

don @donnorum.com · 10/09/2026

describe an anime poorly but accurately in six words: "duino elegies fanfiction... with giant robots" (reminding me of @maxgladstone.bsky.social)

The head and shoulders of Unit-01 from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

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don @donnorum.com · 30/08/2026

'tis still the damn season for spicy snickersnoodles

An adult copperhead on the – as evidenced by the faint footprints visible – well-traveled trail on which I daily run.

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don @donnorum.com · 29/08/2026

Some annoyingly sloppy misattribution on my Doggo-Page-a-Day calendar. It didn't seem out-of-character for a mountaineer, but the capital-J 'Joy' wasn't a stylistic bit I could ever recall seeing in Krakauer's stuff. The quote's actually from Christopher McCandless, reproduced in 'Into the Wild'.

The corner of a page-a-day calendar showing a quote - "You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.... It is in everything and anything we might experience." - misattributed to Jon Krakauer

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don @donnorum.com · 26/08/2026

finally getting around to uploading the clip @stevenorum.bsky.social pulled of @donoteat.bsky.social from @wtyppod.bsky.social turning into the god-damn joker live during taping, for your soundboarding delight. turned into a video because i guess bluesky doesn't support standalone audio?

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don @donnorum.com · 18/08/2026

scryfall.com/card/und/16/...

A clam dressed like Alexander Hamilton holding a gun.

Alexande Clamilton {2}{U}

Legendary Creature — Clamfolk Advisor Rebel

Whenever you cast a wordy spell, scry 2. (A spell is wordy if it has four or more lines of rules text.)

{1}{R}, {T}: Choose target creature you don’t control. Reveal the top card of your library. Alexander Clamilton gets +X/+0 until end of turn, where X is the number of lines of rules text of the revealed card. Alexander Clamilton fights that creature.
0/4

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don @donnorum.com · 03/08/2026

i can't be the only one who hears this, right?

A frame from Futurama S01E12, "When Aliens Attack", showing Zapp Brannigan finishing his speech in front of Kif Kroker on a starship bridge. Instead of his original dialogue, he's quoting lyrics from Taylor Swift's "Mastermind": "And the touch of a hand lit the fuse of a chain reaction of countermoves to assess the equation of you. Checkmate, I couldn't lose."

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don @donnorum.com · 28/07/2026

Was trying to decide if 'busses' was supposed to be read as passenger mass transit that can be powered by a variety of renewable energy sources and quickly and scalably deployed across existing automotive infrastructure networks, or as 'kisses'; but...

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don @donnorum.com · 08/07/2026

woooooo canada day screwin' up my plans for posting so's there are now TWO posts this-week-slash-today woooooo www.dreamtheory.media/the-art-of-f... and in case it wasn't clear donnorum.com/2026/07/08/i...

A screenshot from "Parks and Recreation", S03E07 - "Harvest Festival", showing Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) standing in front of a map of Pawnee in City Hall. The map shows Pawnee in blue, with a dozen white dots, and is titled "City of Pawnee History of Wamapoke Incidents". The original caption was "This is a map of all the atrocities that the Pawnee settlers inflicted upon the Wamapoke Indians... The atrocities are in blue."

It has been remixed to read "This is a graphical representation of all the allusions in the story ... the allusions are in blue."

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don @donnorum.com · 08/07/2026

forgot about the 'the room' joke until pulling the link. remembered the awful pun on a britney spears lyric, tho. (could've spun up some python to manually facet this into a slightly less spoiler-y link, but c'mon. bsky.app should really handle that natively.) www.pulpasylum.com/grow-up-by-d...

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don @donnorum.com · 14/06/2026

i just realized that from a certain point of view i appear to be constructing a room-sized lament configuration. although considering that my copy of tcathr is octavo/medium octavo and may end up housed within — maybe? (you know just without all the happy-go-luckiness it had in the hellbound heart)

An upwards-angled view of the corner of a rectilinear structure made of aluminum extrusions and stained wood panels, midway through assembly.

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don @donnorum.com · 28/04/2026

so i was out running last week and a couple of guys LITERALLY cat-called me - like, shouted "MIAOW!" out the window as they drove past. ngl, it was kinda... weird, def. more perturbatory than complimentary, and it took me 'til the end of the block to remember what i was wearing and go, RIGHT. yeah:

Close-up of my torso from the Saturday morning before Promise Land 2026 - hydration vest with soft-flasks, grass in the background, but most importantly a short-sleeved graphic tech tee with an enormous KAIJU-CAT on it erupting out of some Hokusai-esuqe waves with a tiny-by-comparison helicopter in the foreground.

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don @donnorum.com · 22/04/2026

Several of the families of Canada geese in the park have just hatched this season's goslings and so if you are or are responsible for a baby or a dog or an other curious and/or rambunctious type mammal of fifty or fewer pounds...

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don @donnorum.com · 22/04/2026

After a long day working at the polls yesterday, I went out on a run this morning and found 'MURICA:

A fixed blade knife on a desk, the blade battered and chipped. A close-up of a bald eagle in front of the Stars and Stripes is enameled on the blade, but likewise battered and chipped. The scales of the grooved handle are printed with a waving US flag, also scuffed.

Someone seems to have tried to use it to pry something at some point, as a considerable amount of the tip has been snapped off.

The desk also features spring clamps and MDF strips, as I'm currently gluing up inserts for bookshelves and was too rushed to move them out of the way for the photo.

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don @donnorum.com · 01/04/2026

Man, "phthisis" sounds like some weird, made-up fantasy disease...

Mana Cost: 3BBB
Type: Sorcery
Rules Text: Destroy target creature. Its controller loses life equal to its power plus its toughness. Suspend 5-1B (Rather than cast this card from your hand, you may pay 1B and exile it with five time counters on it. At the beginning of your upkeep, remove a time counter. When the last is removed, you may cast it without paying its mana cost.)
Rarity: Uncommon
Artist: Carl Critchlow
Set: TSP - Time Spiral
Number: 122
Language: English

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don @donnorum.com · 03/02/2026

Morning run. Wish it hadn't ended up so blurry, but I was a bit off my usual pace and running late. (Plus, I've only ever shot, like... two? panoramas on my phone, counting this one.)

An unfortunately-kinda-blurry 360-degree panorama from this morning, maybe half an hour before dawn - sun peeking over the horizon, full moon in the sky. Standing in the middle of a sheet of ice stretching as far as can be seen over hill and swale across a park, with a split-rail fence sticking up nearby and buildings far-off up the hill and down the path. A week and a half of scattered passage has left barely a mark on the snowcrete expanse.

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don @donnorum.com · 20/01/2026

If I had a nickel for every time I found a nicely framed piece of art just lying beside the trail on my morning run, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

A vivid pastel drawing of a couple of pears on a plate, on a... table? bedspread?, under glass in a wooden frame, held in someone's left hand in front of a framed, centuries-old map of Africa hanging on the wall. An Ikea wing chair with a fleece gimme blanket tossed over it is in the background.

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don @donnorum.com · 18/12/2025

— and, as of this morning, I also have to worry about — on a scale from "a buck-forty costume accessory from Temu" to "in the centuries after the Edict of Nikaea, the Dathomiri witch-cults flourished throughout the western realms" — just how magick-y THIS might be —

A small pleather pouch, five flat tassles at the bottom, with a black zipper (open) at the top and a long braided cord attached to the top, lying on a faux-wood-grain table. On top of the pouch is a flat circle of polished stone with a spiral pattern to it.

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don @donnorum.com · 17/12/2025

I don't know if it's because of mirth, magic, or mental illness, but every few weeks I've been finding colored glass beads scattered along the sides of the trail during my morning run. At this point, I don't know if I should be looking forward to a 1UP, or looking over my shoulder for ghosts...

A whole bunch of glass beads laid out next to a black !velvet bag (which I also found while running) - 38 aqua, 10 light green, 11 red, 8 frosted white, 2 green, 2 shiny magenta, 1 magenta, 2 pale blue, 1 shiny blue, and 2 shiny purple.

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don @donnorum.com · 17/12/2025

Actually, a fair number of them are double-shelved and will be... I'd say "until the new shelves come online", but those new shelves are already allocated for (some of) the currently-boxed volumes, so... for the foreseeable.

Anakin-Padme "For the better, right?" (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/for-the-better-right) meme.

First Panel: "I've filled 150 or so bankers boxes with books while reorganizing the house"

Second Panel: "Wow, it must be so weird to see all those bookshelves empty"

Last Panel: "Your bookshelves are empty now, right?"

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don @donnorum.com · 08/12/2025

pace Meckley, it's amusing that a very similar event actually is kinda-sorta canonical, per John 2:14-15. Imagine a random Temple-goer: "Hey, Jesus! Whatcha doin'?" "Makin' a whip." "Oh. Huh. I, uh, I see that. Why?" "For whippin'." "Right..." <Goes about their business, nervously.>

A screenshot of a passage from the e-Baker Street Journal: Philip S. Meckley, "Soteriology and Death in 'The Final Problem'", Vol. 49, No. 3 (September 1999):

"- himself, but to annihilate the attacker, an effort which, we subsequently discover in EMPT, is successful. This would be the moral equivalent of watching Jesus turn, cinch on a black belt, and thrash the daylights out of Pilate and the centurions, an amusing yet wholly noncanonical portrait. Yet one could quibble about this observation, since we have been heretofore -"

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don @donnorum.com · 06/12/2025

Session 0, That Guy: "Wait, so our party is going to be a bunch of randos who not only found weapons, armor, and disguises just lying around, but also, *somehow*, happened to stumble upon an ancient map *and* a spellbook? COME ON, MAN!" A few of the things I've found on runs in the last ~18 months:

A photo of a chair in a corner, showing a framed, centuries-old map of Africa; a painted notebook; employee vests from Wal-Mart and FedEx; the metal remains of a circular LARP shield; and a crude machete / Ork choppa. All of which, yes, I have found while out running around town - within the last year and a half, even.

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don @donnorum.com · 06/12/2025

When I hear "living in the Matrix", I think less about "tOtAlLy ReDpIlLeD, bRo!" and more about being out on a run and picking up a combination lock. Without breaking stride, I got the make & model with a reverse image search, pulled up an LPL video, and cracked the combination within a mile or so.

A two-by-two set of images from the movie The Matrix.
Upper Left: Close-up of Trinity's face (played by Carrie-Anne Moss), slicked-back hair and late-90's-cool sunglasses.
Upper Right: Head-and-shoulders of Neo / Thomas Anderson (played by Keanu Reeves), looking skeptical. Caption - "Can you fly that thing?"
Lower Left: Close-up of a B-212 (Bell 212 Twin Huey) helicopter.
Lower Right: Trinity's face at about a 3/4 angle, slight forward tilt. Sunglasses off, eyes focused forward, expression set and determined. Caption - "Not yet."

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don @donnorum.com · 04/12/2025

The good ol' Gell-Mann amnesia effect slash Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Ma...)

A Mastodon post from Rod Hilton (@rodhilton@mastodon.social):

"He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets."

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don @donnorum.com · 23/10/2025

Kids who only know @billamend.bsky.social's FoxTrot from the Sunday funny pages at their grandparents' house probably have no idea how hard it went in the early days. Case in point: a drunken HS senior hitting a bong rip, inviting a 14-year-old girl to bed, and then suggesting they snort cocaine -

A two-page spread of a FoxTrot storyline from one of the collected treasuries, where Paige and Nicole are invited to an upperclassman's party and encounter drunken debauchery and drug use. Hilarity ensues, an after-school-special type lesson is learned, and everybody goes home safe. (Presumably, who knows what happens to the drunken bros.)

Can't recall which treasury, since mine are not within arm's reach at the moment.

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don @donnorum.com · 21/09/2025

The world may be... <gestures broadly...> BUT, I have this year at least found out about FOUNTAIN PEN HIGHLIGHTERS. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

Two side-by-side yellow and green bottles of Pelikan's M205 DUO Highlighter Ink behind three Platinum Preppy highlighters - orange, green, and yellow. In the background is a keeb on a crudely cut neoprene mat.

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don @donnorum.com · 10/09/2025

If you do that for all of the lower-level Headings, then they'll still appear as Heading N in the Style drop-down, but the Navigator will just display the top-level Headings 1:

A screenshot of LibreOffice, showing how setting Outline level: [None] for lower-level Headings results in a top-level-only outline in the Navigator pane.

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don @donnorum.com · 10/09/2025

Posted as I was screenshotting - if you F11 the Styles menu, RClick "Edit Style" on, say, Heading 2, and then select "Outline level: [None]" from the Outline & List tab, that Heading will vanish from the Navigator. (Setting "Outline level: Level N" for Heading N should restore it.)]:

A screenshot of the Edit Style window from LibreOffice Writer, setting the Outline level of the Heading 2 Style to [None].

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don @donnorum.com · 10/09/2025

I had to manually expand each level of Heading to view the full hierarchy:

Screenshot of test.odt in LibreOffice Writer, with the Navigator view open. Title, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 1.1, Heading 2.1, Heading 3, Heading 4, and Lorem Ipsum. The Navigator view is now fully expanded to show all of the headings.

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don @donnorum.com · 10/09/2025

It might be automatically collapsing them - when I reopened a test document, I saw this:

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don @donnorum.com · 22/08/2025

As Upton Sinclair said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary — or, as in the case of David Brooks, his entire career, social standing, and self-image — nay, his whole goddamn Weltanschauung — depends on his not understanding it. (www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/o...)

This progressive/conservative disconnect — which is also, frequently, an elite/non-elite disconnect — is a problem across the West. *For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites.*

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don @donnorum.com · 10/07/2025

One angel, Satan, was so devout that they refused to bow to Adam, an imperfect creation of God. (For this, some Sufis consider Satan to be one of the most perfect monotheists.) A flawed man ignoring God's instructions, proving himself unworthy of the angels, and thereby inciting their rebellion...

Jerry Smith, from the show Rick and Morty, looking derpy and worried as usual, and kinda guilty, too.

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don @donnorum.com · 10/07/2025

Now, in the philosophy of the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty, angels can be viewed as instruments of God's will, brought into being and endowed with limited free will in order accomplish a single, specific task, after which their purpose and existence is fulfilled and they vanish. Sound familiar?

This is Mr. Meeseeks (Look at me!) from the show Rick and Morty. I'm aware that he was 'ripped off' from "Scud: The Disposable Assassin", but this is a bit. Roll with it.

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don @donnorum.com · 10/07/2025

Rick, naturally, is the Demiurge, a small-g physical god who fluctuates between outright malevolence and mere incompetence, foolishness, and/or indifference.

Rick Sanchez, from the television show Rick and Morty. As always, it cannot be stressed enough that one may be a protagonist while _not_ being a hero(ine).

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don @donnorum.com · 10/07/2025

Welcome to my Thursday-morning TED Thread! Rick and Morty S01E05, "Meseeks and Destroy", is a surprisingly lore-accurate Gnostic/Kabbalistic retelling of the Apocalypse of Moses!

Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, standing in front of a classic Wall of Madness during the famous "Pepe Silva" scene.

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don @donnorum.com · 29/05/2025

(I haven't done this, to be clear - once I figured out how to do it, those "whole lotta reasons" carried the day - but I needed _some_ context for this LeVar Burton Hotline Bling meme.)

A reinterpretation of the traditional "Hotline Bling" meme ca. late 2016, featuring the far superior LeVar Burton as Lt. Geordi La Forge. Top panel - Lt. La Forge hold-upping his hand next to "Submitomancy". Bottom panel - Lt. La Forge pointing "that" next to "Submitometry".

Yes, I know that he reached the rank of Commodore, likely due to his efforts overseeing construction of the Wallenberg class rescue armada at the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards for the evacuation of Romulus, but he was a Lieutenant at the time these photos were taken.

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don @donnorum.com · 30/03/2025

Q: Will the USPS REALLY go to court to stop people sending you junk mail? A: "We have determined that the evidence provided warrants seeking a court order directing compliance with the Prohibitory Order. Your entire case file has been forwarded to our Law Department for the appropriate action."

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don @donnorum.com · 30/03/2025

How it started (December 7, 2024):

A dramatization of the original group chat, folding in some of the offline joking-around. Icon for the chat is a sloth on a rucksack, name of "team sloth". First message: "Woohoo! Best of both worlds - I got to see my name pop up in the Hardrock Lottery live feed... as #44 on the Male Never wait-list." Second message (all are from me): "Of course, in 2023 the Male Never wait-list made it to... #2." Third message: An image macro of Jim Carey with a dorky haircut saying "So you're telling me there's a chance". Fourth message: But seriously, unless, like, the US goes full-on hermit kingdom in the next six months, I think I'm safe for this year." Fifth message: "Just locking in another 2x for when I'll be ready...er." (Context - Your entries into the lottery for Hardrock double each year you enter without being selected.)

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don @donnorum.com · 23/02/2025

Context: My house holds roughly 4x 180-225gal tanks' water-weight worth of books. (Local building codes specify 30-40psf live loads; however, like aquaria, the loading from bookcases is concentrated across rectangular regions, which is why I confirmed my plans with a professional prior to closing.)

A bicep-bulging right arm, Black in a white tee-shirt sleeve, grasps a bicep-bulging right arm, White in a red tee-shirt sleeve, in a handshake so epic that it would make Manly Wade Wellman weep and Robert Howard rend his clothes - the image macro of a chalk drawing of the handshake greeting between Al Dillon (Carl Weathers) and Alan "Dutch" Schaefer AKA "Onyx" (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in the 1987 classic _Predator_. Dillon's arm on the left is labeled "home aquarists", Dutch's "bibliophiles", and their laced fists bear the label of "knowing the precise load-bearing characteristics of residential constructions".

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don @donnorum.com · 09/01/2025

REALITY: [Is... <gestures broadly> ...the way that it is.] WRITERS OF FICTION:

A robot - Bender Bending Rodriguez - stands on the Lunar surface and points at the sealed door of Luna Park out of which he was just thrown. The original scene (from Futurama S01E02, "The Series Has Landed") had him saying " Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own theme park, with blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the park!", a bit which recurs throughout the episode. The edited meme presented here instead has Bender saying "Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own reality, with a series of thematically resonant events whose judicious arrangement evokes deeper meanings! And armored bears! // In fact, forget the reality!"

The more common form of the meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-going-to-build-my-own-theme-park-with-blackjack-and-hookers) uses a scene from Futurama S02E08, "Raging Bender", presumably because (in light of the "hookers" part) it shows a gold-beringed Bender wearing a white fur coat pointing angrily with a fembot in the background; note, however, that both of the fembots seen with Bender in this episode are quite specifically referred to as "floozies", and are definitively _not_ hookerbots.

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don @donnorum.com · 07/01/2025

Dune is even freakier in French.

A French edition of the novel Dune in paperback opened to the Litany Against Fear. The phrase "la petite mort" is prominent in the composition, the French translation of "the little-death" from the line "Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."

In the background, a laptop screen is open to the Wiktionary entry for "petite mort", showing that its only given definition is "orgasm".

Of course, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort, the phrase originally (1572) referred to a "fainting fit", or "nervous spasm", not acquiring its sexual meaning until 1882. (Which, of course, was still almost a century before Dune was written.)

However, the English meaning of "little death" includes "a state or event resembling or prefiguring death; a weakening or loss of consciousness" (albeit with heavy sleep/sexual connotations), which fits perfectly with Fear in the context of the Litany.

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