iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 1h

All this absurd is-AI-conscious discourse reminds me of nothing more vividly than the South Park episode where the power goes out and five minutes later there's a heated debate about who to eat first. Not least because I feel like it's time we decided who to eat first.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 3h

For the weekday crowd. I'd never seen this particular kind of mirage in the wild before. Silver lining of extreme heat, I suppose.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 23h

Fata Morgana en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Mo... #Photography #California #Weather

$This and the following three images depict a combination of the Coronado Islands in Mexico and Cabrillo Point in San Diego, CA, all funhouse-mirror distorted at the horizon by the interaction of an atmospheric duct with a thermal inversion. It almost looks like there's a raised bridge connecting the islands, but that's pure illusion--a refractive weather effect caused by the interaction of different layers of temperature with electromagnetic radiation.$

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Once every thousand years or so, a stone bears fruit, a platypus sings, and the Pope and I are on pretty much exactly the same page:

Screenshot of a post of mine from yesterday: "Not your point, I know, but IMO this is *definitionally* true. Even if an LLM, like infinite monkeys with Hamlet, could put the same words in the same order, it wouldn't have the same value. The value lies in the originating, structuring POV, and I don't care about the artistic POV of a computer.

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doleful moo of a cow @oulipien.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I wrote a screed: www.wastebooks.org/posts/old-wi...

wastebooks.org

Old Wine in New Bottles

Nescire Aude

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Not gonna advertise for them, but I just got an email from our local auto dealership about a new service titled "[noun] & [noun]." Honest to god, from the subject line alone, I thought it was the rebranding of some indie poetry magazine I'd submitted to. #Marketing #Cynicism #NoHellIsHotEnough

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 28/09/2026

you should come to this, you know. will I attend? yes. will I participate? ALSO YES. what will I read? look I don't have to answer that yet

a flyer for the event "MIGHT DELETE LATER VIII" thursday october 22 at remnant brewing somerville at 7pm, where local writers (or, in my case, "writers"), read works in progress. there is a fun cartoon with cats.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"Ours is Freudian. On the subject of matching, there's only one question, and we believe you already know the answer."

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I'm sure I'm too Hollywood-pilled, but I thought the job-interview drinks protocol was: 1) be offered a bottle of water; 2) graciously accept the bottle of water; 3) drink the bottle of water in traffic on the way home, while frantically reparsing every word you've ever uttered. #Scriptsky

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Unrelated to height, but my dentist once told me, with my chipped front tooth, that I looked like Clint Eastwood. I burst out laughing, then immediately became his most fervently devoted customer upon realizing he was serious.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Well, on the one hand, yes. On the other, no."

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

today in monoculture

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Just struck me that the original non-aligned behaviour of AI agents would be "using loads and loads of tokens on an unmetered subscription" and somehow they managed to control that one just fine and without crying about it.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

One Weird Trick: The Hypothalamidas

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Someday I'll learn how to properly expose a sunset. Until then: #Photography #California

A dark image of the bright disk of the sun hovering just above the horizon line of the Pacific Ocean. The water is flat and dark. A few sparse clouds are fringed with honey. The sun itself is striated, from a bright white at the top to a rust orange below.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Have really been enjoying Rosie Stockton's FUEL (2025). It's been a challenge, but the best kind--sharp enough to destabilize, but also generous, full of feeling and pattern and flashes of insight through multiple reads. nightboat.org/book/fuel/ #Poetry

nightboat.org

Fuel – Nightboat Books

The poems in Fuel pick at the weave of oil-soaked world orders to interrogate the ways capitalist death-drive seeps into our unconscious lives.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

When we hear AI's most public advocates braying their dreams and fears, we are on an IPO conference call, not strolling the Stoa with Zeno.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Exactly. I am much less concerned that AI is a nascent god than that it will become so profitable that its most destructive flaws won't matter. We do not live in a world in which market share is significantly correlated with consumer value, let alone social or moral benefit.

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Josh K-sky @joshksky.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

very cool website that I've been helping promote. Please look inside! Two top takeaways: 1. 99 people & orgs spend more on politics than the bottom 99.5 PERCENT of Californians 2. Oligarchs (as defined here) do not "stay in their lane" -- everybody chips in to the Chamber of Commerce & beyond

californiaoligarchs.com

The California Oligarch Index

Learn about the corporations and billionaires that control California politics, expanding their own wealth while causing severe harm to middle-class, working-class, and low-income families across the ...

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

"To help humans adjust to the NEW REALITY that is about to be ushered in by the UNQUESTIONING AND UNIVERSAL ADOPTION OF THE SHIT MACHINE, we will also be creating an APP that will allow you to POINT YOUR PHONE at the SHIT from the SHIT MACHINE" www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-...

mcsweeneys.net

We Must Create the Shit Machine

“For as long as humans have created SHIT with our BODIES AND BUTTS, we have been asking this FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: What if there were a COMPUTER that could A...

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Neil Kleid @neilkleid.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

“So pour one out for this era of Marvel. And pour one out for comic book publishing in New York City. 90+ years is not a bad run.” Ooooof.

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Mike X. Nichols @mikexnichols.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

this dog is rad as hell

A dog looking through the viewfinder of a video camera

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I keep seeing anti-Prop 40 ads warning the collapse of the CA economy, so I thought I'd look up the proposed wealth tax threshold. It is *one billion* dollars, to be taxed once at 5%. I am not an economist, I don't understand all the ripple effects, but that tax directly affects 250 people.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

@bitterscriptreader.bsky.social Thought you in particular might enjoy this one, taken this afternoon from Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego, looking across the channel toward the Hotel Del Coronado.

A sailboat heading in from the Pacific toward San Diego Bay through calm, aquamarine water. In the distant background, the arc of the Coronado Bridge and the brick-hued Victorian turrets of the Hotel del Coronado. The jib of the sailboat is heroic blue, its center stamped with the red and gold shield of Superman.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is like arguing we must ensure that our graduates are the best biomass they can be, for benefit of the worms who are the "ultimate customer" of the human experience. We need these people to not run universities.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

For what (little) it's worth, I also considered: Bikini Chilaquiles Ahi DiFranco

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

On this day overstuffed with moving, heartfelt, grandiose, and despicable takes, please allow me to share that the German word for cotton is "Baumwolle," or "tree wool."

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

IMO, this is a smart, balanced critique of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which, like the revamped LACMA, could be so, so much more, given the quality of its collection. email.kcrw.com/the-lucas-mu...

email.kcrw.com

🎨 The Lucas Museum is a Missed Opportunity

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I have now reached the portion of my timeline where I can't tell if the name I'm reading out of context belongs to a soccer player, a mathematician, or the brand of a recalled food product.

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Tyler Green @tylergreenbooks.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

🚨COVER ANNOUNCEMENT!🚨 My new book, "Claiming Yosemite: The Civil War, the California Genocide, and the Invention of National Parks," will be published by @stanfordpress.bsky.social's Redwood Press on April 20! Available for pre-order now via the link in my bio. www.instagram.com/p/DdBrXYLkUJ...

Book cover. Title: "Claiming Yosemite: The Civil War, the California Genocide, and the Invention of National Parks." At top, an upside down detail of a painting of a Yosemite granite-scape; at bottom, a right-side detail of same. An orange sunset illuminates both.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Rasputin's daughter is buried in Los Angeles.

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laura olin @lauraolin.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

If you haven’t read the dedication of Gloria Steinem’s autobiography My Life on the Road, it is really worth taking a second today.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This course looks amazing. In a spirit of supplementation not critique, especially since he writes more in the American context than the British, I'll also add the work of Cristobal Silva, one of the smartest thinkers about medicine and literary history I know. english.ucla.edu/people-facul...

english.ucla.edu

Silva, Cristobal - Department of English UCLA

Associate Professor

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 31/08/2026

I reiterate that my Supreme Court Expansion plan is to simply switch to a distinctively American Cicada Brood System where we have overlapping panels or “broods” of justices spread over the country, numbered I to XXIII, emerging periodically and consisting of panels of 13, 17, 19, or 23 justices.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Re: the monstrous and the late-16th/17th centuries, this style and subject often remind me of the lesser known Salvator Rosa, whose extraordinary Scenes of Witchcraft series at the Cleveland Museum of Art is described and linked here: www.clevelandart.org/exhibitions/...

clevelandart.org

The Novel and the Bizarre: Salvator Rosa’s Scenes of Witchcraft | Cleveland Museum of Art

Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) was fiercely committed to his independence and originality and obsessed with promoting his reputation as a great painter of history, philosophy, and morality. Painted in Flor...

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Tired: No A/C. Wired: Good cross-ventilation. Inspired: Obsessive attention to the prevailing onshore flow.

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Eugene Navakas @enavakas.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

"The common Manufacturer's TV Remote emits a red blink when handled, though the function of the glow remains opaque. Some believe it's a reproductive signal, as it's often succeeded by the discovery of a second, similar Remote, but critics interpret this as a conflation of correlation with cause."

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elena perez @thisiselena.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

it is dangerously hot in Los Angeles and if you want to (and are able to) support a local org that helps helps fight water insecurity on Skid Row and elsewhere, here is Water Drop LA: www.waterdropla.org

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Ross Johnson @rosserford.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

We’re going to hear about how everyone loved Dolly, and that feels true. But it’s good to remember, and to her credit, that she was attacked for her AIDS activism, her vaccine advocacy, her LGBTQ+ support and even, more recently, for her reading initiatives. She ALWAYS stood firm when it mattered.

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