iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I did pretty much the same thing six years ago, coming from the perspective of a formerly-rabid fan. Disagreed with you on a lot of it, but it'd be surprising if we agreed throughout, really. bishopsreviews.wordpress.com/2020/11/23/b...

bishopsreviews.wordpress.com

Beach Boys albums, from best to worst

So I was a huge Beach Boys fan back in the day. I’m still a fan, just not a superfan. But I unearthed some old vinyl I didn’t realize I still had, and I now have a r…

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Look, this is the party that gave John McCain a backdrop of Walter Reed MIDDLE SCHOOL for what was supposed to be the biggest speech of his career and was presumably signed off on by some sort of high-up folks in the campaign. They've never been all that competent.

wired.com

McCain Uses Walter Reed Middle School, Not Army Hospital, as Backdrop

John McCain accepts the Republican party’s nomination to be its presidential candidate at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Projected behind him on the 51.6 by 30 foot video wall is the W...

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I have had two bad culinary misfires in the past month, despite recipes from people I thought of as near-infallible: Marcella Hazan and Madhur Jaffrey.

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Reposted by Jake Wildstrom

Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

AI has exposed the austerity con game in higher ed. For years, we have been told there is no money for students, faculty, staff, capital improvements, libraries. But somehow universities have suddenly come up with the money to pay for AI services??

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

If it's so unimportant, what prevents him from taking an ethically sound stance on it? If your answer is, "the significant number of people who will rebel against treating trans people with dignity", then all those people are what makes it an important issue.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Yeah, I don't remember explicitly single-sex sports being a thing at all at that age. I played youth soccer, and I think upwards of 95% of the participants were male, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't explicitly "boys' soccer", and girls who played soccer can and did join the teams in our league.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Chlorpheniramine maleate is also Shell's preferred antihistamine. I can never remember the generic name, just have the brand-name from when I was a kid lodged in my brain, so to me it's always Chlor-Trimeton™.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

When your PR people try to make you triangulate: "The liars of the right will paint us as genital-mutilating perverts no matter what we say or do, and the sort of people inclined to believe them will do so. For everybody else, being kind and thoughtful looks better than capitulation."

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

When you're asked about surgical transition in youth: "There's well-established medical guidance for when social, hormonal, and surgical transitions are appropriate, based on sound research. Those guidelines are effective in making sure everyone receives age-appropriate care."

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

When you're asked about trans people in sports: "The government doesn't need to mandate anything here. Professional leagues can make their own rules based on the aspects of human performance they mean to showcase. Amateur sports build community and character and should generally be open to all."

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Hey, Democrats, I know you have people to write your talking points for you, but they suck. You're welcome to use some of mine. I'm not any sort of fancy politics-talking person, but I think I can do better than the fancy people you have.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

(Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they said "this is not cool and this is not us", but legally they don't have much action they could take that has any chance at all.)

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

IANAL, but I wouldn't think copyright helps them here, so this is just talk. A mechanic isn't copyrightable (it's patentable, with different rules). A Tetris clone using novel art assets and independently designed code isn't an IP violation.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Does any app have a hamburger button that looks like a literal hamburger, i.e 🍔 instead of ≡? Seems like a great opportunity to invent a sort of reverse skeumorphism.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

I read this quoted without context and figured it was about something like when Duke Filippo Maria Visconti accidentally disrupted his own ducal line by rewriting his will in a fit of pique and died the next day. Different kind of inheritance, there.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Notably (the crop is tight enough it might be outside the visible area), it doesn't have a business name on it, which either suggests stunningly multifactor incompetence (not just a terrifyingly bad picture, but failing to _actually advertise_) or a straight-up fake.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series. I feel like I ought to have more, and maybe I do, but I can't recall them now.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

How do you feel about the other 13 nonempty subsets of {Crosby,Stills,Nash,Young}? (A surprising number of them exist as actual collaborations)

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I'm sure it's not a popular worldview for matchmakers, but at some point you have to just accept that maybe some people deserve to be alone forever.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I assume the metric is "a president losing a war that _specific president started". GW1 is the only one of those fully engaged in by a single president, but loss there was ambiguous--Korea comes close though, & you could argue Truman did all the losing in that one and Eisenhower just wound it down.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Stick a fork in this trend; it's done. I predict that in about three years legacy newspaper cartoons will discover the "6-7" trend and incorporate it into strips to the befuddlement of their three remaining readers (@jfruh.bsky.social and two other poor souls, presumably).

A freezer case at Aldi full of bags of Soules Kitchen "67" chicken nuggets. The front of the bag features a cartoon of a happy tow-headed moppet and an image of hands holding six- and seven-shaped chicken nuggets, with arrows suggesting the juggling motion associated with the whole "6-7" thing.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Over four months later, the university having scheduled classes into NS212C, facilities finally looked into the fallen projector and figured, "huh, maybe we should do something about this before the class scheduled next Monday in this room."

View through a classroom door of two workers, one on a stepladder and the other seated. There's still a hole in the ceiling like there was four months ago.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Like, not the newest games or real-time video crunching, but checking mail and browsing and the like. I don't know if it's website and app designers thinking that faster computers mean they can cruft us up with extra processing & don't have to actually optimize as much, or what, but it does happen.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The one thing about tech on a basic functionality level that irritates me is that there seems to be some sort of Red Queen's Race with actual speed. Like, it seems every decade or so even with good informational hygiene computers and phones get intolerably slow for everyday stuff.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The introduction of basic economy is confounding, because it is crappier than anything available before and has mentally filled that position which regular economy used to hold. It's cheaper but that doesn't register as much as that it's worse.

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Reposted by Jake Wildstrom

Adam Rawnsley @arawnsley.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I'm not Hasan Piker's biggest fan but if he can exorcise the malignant spirit of James Carville from the Democratic Party then he can't be _all_ bad.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Back when discourse was more disarmament rather than abolition, I sometimes heard people say, "but what will the police do about violent crime?", and my response was "send someone out with a notepad to take a report afterwards, same as they do now."

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

It feels a bit like it's in conversation with the immediately preceding story, which has the exact same punchline, but describes a less overtly voyeuristic behavior. It seems like one read on it is "you think that guy's over the line (or maybe not?), get a load of _this_."

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I knew Talmud was big on putting forward several different perspectives and leaving it to the reader to determine which to credit, but it honestly never occurred to me that this bit was basically a joke and that Kahana's ridiculous defense was the punchline.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

As I understand it, FDR developed his political philosophy (the one which extensively expanded the national social safety net under the New Deal) hanging around Al Smith and watching his post-Tammany-Hall machine mobilize Irish-American New Yorkers by talking to them and fulfilling their needs.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

62a:3 is _insane_. Spy on your teacher having sex, accuse him of unwonted lustfulness, and and then, when he asks what the fuck is wrong with you, say, "sorry, I was just trying to _learn from your example_."

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Re "why we don’t have anything better": is LoC classification actively worse? I'm not trying to debate their relative merits, just trying to get a sense of what you think of them comparatively. Both have kind of had to adapt a bit over time.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

But there's one I keep stumbling upon which I _think_ is New English Library, but it's definitely trying very hard not to be fun. Murder is a big deal, y'all, and the NEL wants you to know these are Serious Books for Serious People.

A book cover for _Have His Carcase_, in blue-grey and black, with narrow, sans-serif white lettering. The upper half of the cover is dominated by a black-and-white photograph of a woman in a hat reading a newspaper.

A book cover for _Murder Must Advertise_, in grey and black, with narrow, sans-serif white lettering. The upper half of the cover is dominated by a black-and-white photograph of a woman at a typewriter

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Harper's design seems very American, and very mid-90s. I feel like if I had a brain injury where I couldn't decipher text and I saw these, I'd reckon the author was Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard or something: still crime stories and funny, but a bit more gonzo and a bit less British.

Harper Paperback trade dress for _Have His Carcase_, featuring thin, abstract letters in bold colors, with Dorothy Sayers's name in red with a blue minimalist drop shadow. Central on the cover is a somewhat impressionistic picture of a woman in a hat on the seashore near a bleding corpse.

Harper Paperback trade dress for _Murder Must Advertise_, featuring thin, abstract letters in bold colors, with Dorothy Sayers's name in blue with a grey minimalist drop shadow. Central on the cover is a somewhat impressionistic picture of a bleding corpse at the foot of a wriught-iron spiral staircase.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Hachette also keeps things lighthearted, except that they include a little spray of blood to remind you these are murder stories. They have a very consistent style. Notice how they _also_ have a monocle, albeit a stylized one.

Hachette book cover for _Have His Carcase_. Text is in sans-serif outlined capitals, and green is the dominant color, with white and gray borders. A stylized monocle sits at the upper center, and a straight-razor with blood spattered around the blade sits in the center.

Hachette book cover for _Murder Must Advertise_. Text is in sans-serif outlined capitals, except for "must", which is in cursive, and grey is the dominant color, with white and yellow borders. A stylized monocle sits at the upper center, and a typewriter with blood spattered above it sits in the center.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Open Road Media definitely leans towards "silly and fun", but their trade dress is weirdly inconsistent, with a complete changeover in style from _Have His Carcase_ to _Murder Must Advertise. Both are basically lighthearted though; the "empty suit" design particularly seems to fit the style.

Open Road Media book cover for _Unnatural Death_, featuring the upper torso of an empty black pinstripe suit over a grey vest, white shirt, and red tie. A monocle hangs suspended where the wearer's right eye would be.

Open Road Media book cover for _Have His Carcase_, featuring the upper torso of an empty oatmeal-colored sport coat over an off-white vest, white shirt, and black-and-white striped tie. A monocle hangs suspended where the wearer's right eye would be.

Open Road Media book cover for _Murder Must Advertise_, featuring chunky text in blue and yellow, a silhouette image of a wrought-iron spiral staircase. Blue, black, yellow, and white polka dots are scattered on the art.

Open Road Media book cover for _Gaudy Night_, featuring chunky text in purple and black, with a fountain pen replacing the letter "I" in "night", and a silhouette image of a human figure. Purple, yellow, and white polka dots are scattered on the art.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Apropos of nothing, looking at trade dress for various editions of the Lord Peter Wimsy stories. It's interesting because they're both murder mysteries — and thus gritty — but also moderately comic, with the central character being a faintly Wodehousian upper-class twit, and art can go either way.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I unfairly identify Ashland with the horrifyingly industrial site on the Big Sandy River welcoming me back into Kentucky's smothering embrace when traveling on I-64 from West Virginia. It's unfair because even though the highway exit is "Ashland", Ashland is 8 miles north and presumably less ugly.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

datacenter "projects" progress to the stage of becoming real, working datacenters. www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-al...

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

FWIW, they (for whatever value of "they" you have in mind) actually can't. Ed Zitron, among others, has noted how few

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

As a notable example, a large enough jackpot makes a Powerball ticket have positive net EV, but it's _still_ not a winning idea to buy one, and an even worse idea to buy several thousand, because all that value is jammed into a single, extremely-low-probability outcome.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

The third book was conspicuously the high-water mark of the series. After that she got too big for editors, too big for pagecount limits, and indulged her worst lore-development impulses, resulting in bloated, poorly written works far too into their own shoddy worldbuilding.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Between this and the discovery that solar panel shade can actually _increase_ certain crop yields, people are discovering that there are truly extraordinary opportunities to make better use of the earth's surface area with solar panels. There's so much power waiting to be harnessed!

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

For historical buildings, decorative swastikas are unsettlingly common. The Ny Carlsberg Glypotek in Copenhagen is a gorgeous sculpture museum and, like, there's a swastika on every ceiling. It was built in the 19th century and trade dress for Carlsberg beer had a lot of swastikas, so...

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Or a windmill. Windmills are good.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I don't even know what it is, and now _I_ want a mangerine for snack.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

"Also seemed pretty sure that there aren't many swayable Republicans" Not with that attitude, no.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

It's fascinating that Anthony's work is hardcore sketchy, but every fan interaction he had was apparently wholesome and kind. Apparently within the industry he had a reputation as a pain in the ass to peers, but his deportment towards fans was entirely not what his writing would lead you to expect.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Even if you had an oddball version I don't know, I'd venture you're misremembering the bottom-of-screen travel picture, because Apple // graphics tended not to work that way (split-screen modes were usually text-on-bottom for technical reasons, especially with text that scrolled).

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