iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Emma Berquist @emmaberquist.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

was scrolling through netflix and apparently they not only remade Rebecca but cast armie hammer lol

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Emma Berquist @emmaberquist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I think I’d be really good at deep sea diving. I wouldn’t get narcosis, I’m built different

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Reposted by Emma Berquist

lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 25/09/2026

started listening to the audiobook of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by richard rhodes on my walks and came across the Death Machine passage this morning. still hits like a hammer 15 years after I first read it. my GOAT will never be washed

“The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they were only proximately the mechanism of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization—anachronistically speaking, a software package.376 “The basic lever,” the writer Gil Elliot comments, “was the conscription law, which made vast numbers of men available for military service.377 The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns.” Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it and moved through it. Thus, Elliot demonstrates, “It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches.”

“What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. “The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman,” Siegfried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. “What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.”378 Men on every front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged”

“on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fostered malingering.Whatever its ostensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a “strategy of attrition.” The British tried to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a “strategy” so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the American Civil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefield’s bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated and death-making overwhelmed any rational response.379 “The war machine,” concludes Elliot, “rooted in law, organization, production,”

“movement, science, technical ingenuity, with its product of six thousand deaths a day over a period of 1,500 days, was the permanent and realistic factor, impervious to fantasy, only slightly altered by human variation.”380No human institution, Elliot stresses, was sufficiently strong to resist the death machine.381 A new mechanism, the tank, ended the stalemate. An old mechanism, the blockade, choked off the German supply of food and matériel. The increasing rebelliousness of the foot soldiers threatened the security of the bureaucrats. Or the death machine worked too well, as against France, and began to run out of raw material. The Yanks came over with their sleeves rolled up, an untrenched continent behind them where the trees were not hung with entrails. The war putrified to a close.But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns

and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.

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Reposted by Emma Berquist

The Onion @theonion.com · 25/09/2026

“I remember seeing him on TV and thinking, ‘No, that can’t be Kash,’ but sure enough, there he was, addressing the nation about a missing person case.” — Daisy, local golden retriever

theonion.com

Dog Can’t Believe Guy She Hooked Up With 10 Years Ago Now Head Of FBI

WASHINGTON—Reflecting on the past fling and remarking how time had flown by, local golden retriever Daisy told reporters Thursday that she could not believe the guy she hooked up with 10 years ago was...

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Emma Berquist @emmaberquist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It's such a scam, there was that atlantic article a few years ago that I still think about where the dentist gave a patient NINE ROOT CANALS

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Emma Berquist @emmaberquist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

god she's so deranged, I can't fucking wait

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Reposted by Emma Berquist

Mrs. Detective PikaBOO, Esq. @clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social · 23/09/2026

Can you imagine what her cow friends said when she tried to tell them about it

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Reposted by Emma Berquist

Atrios @eschatonblog.com · 22/09/2026

I think you had to be very online at a time when most people weren't to know that the bush administration was comically evil to the extent that it was, but for those of you who weren't: trust us! these were stupid evil people, not so different from the current ones!

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Reposted by Emma Berquist

Congressman Greg Casar @repcasar.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

ICE wants to deport Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a DoorDash driver who they just shot in Austin yesterday. The federal government can't shoot someone and then try to make them disappear to escape scrutiny. Wilber Rafael Garces Perez needs a doctor right now, not a deportation.

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Reposted by Emma Berquist

Isaac Chotiner @ichotiner.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

New Interview: I talked to the analyst Jaser AbuMousa about what life is like in Gaza today, and the devastation of his own family. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...