iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Mary/Merry/Marry and Florida, sure, but of course they're sneakers! What else would you call them?

What gave you away
Answers that point most strongly to New Jersey.

How do you pronounce Mary/merry/marry?
all 3 are different
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
sunshower
the first vowel in "Florida"
[ɒ] as in "saw" ("flaw-ri-da")
What is your *general* term for the rubber-soled shoes worn in gym class, for athletic activities, etc.?
sneakers

Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Thanks, Mom! (I have never lived in New Jersey or New York, and while I learned to talk in Vermont, the rest of my life is a 50/50 split between GA/SC and AZ. Mom? Jersey City.)

Dialect map that really just confirms I learned to talk like my mother.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

The "you're still not over the torture *yet*? It wasn't even me!" bit is also easy to be amused by, which makes it easy for 'Miya's point to really catch one right in the gut.

"This day, the day where I looked like this, continues to define that relation *because* Fern denies its relevance. I can't let it go because she can't let it be."

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

And of course he invents politics, and probably also political assassinations (RIP to the lightning tongued, inventor of cunnilingus) Vidyujjihva seems pretty Leveret-like to me, since we've seen him fall in with revolutionaries in a few lives now. I love this description of him, so evocative:

Vidyujjihva was a mouthy man, a mobile and expressive mouth, a mouthful of trouble. In bed it was lightning and love; at the table, it was fast wit and puns (he had once made love to their inventor, he said, and she had curse blessed him with their importunity); in the bitter dark, it was invective, a mouth full of knives.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

"Mid-17th century in the year of YOUR lord" your, presumably, being the "AUDIENCE, mostly WHITE and mostly AMERICAN," but also the Portuguese Catholics (w/souls) in the play. I had wondered if there was an implied conflict between having a soul & reincarnation. Chapter 17 seems to contradict that.

(Their otherness is about where they are from. Fernão is a third-generation Catholic from the occupied coastal territories in the West: despite his name, he has no Portuguese ancestry. It is also about their souls. Fernão has one, which is tortured; Embi and Omiya and the others do not.)

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

She builds the bomb in his backpack. She chases off his killers, forces his eyes open, and avoids the "grandmother by another mother," the dancer. Was the bomb the passage? Is this her leaving Leveret, the way Gma Sits told her she'd have to? I can't decide. But at least his beard still sucks.

—Your passage is paid, she says.—Your beard still sucks. I’ll see you later later. I’m gone, gone, gone to the other shore.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Well, and there's this, from the factions (this is the Outside's assertion):

The Documentary is a record of the haunted world, they say, which we the dead know is not a flowing river of cause and effect, but a glacial ocean, whole and complete, past and future laid out in full, frozen and transparent. An akashic record, like Uncle would say.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Another dead child; V's ghost uncle. V's father has an unused bank of days, and her other grandmother gives her explosives for her birthday (but only on her birthdays), and also a cryptic message.

You too will go into the past one day, and come back into a different future than the one you left behind. I want you to know—it’s not so bad, in the end. You lose your home and everything you fought for, but you get to love.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Someone highlighted the whole devastating paragraph where the dead describe themselves, but I'll pull out the sentence that punched me the hardest. Banking on sentiment, because everything else is gone.

We decide to remember ourselves bright and innocent, untroubled by aches and pains and guilts and fears and abuses, unmarked by the things we did or the things that were done to us.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

🐾 Low hanging fruit, my meme game is weak, but I wanted to participate

Screen shot of President Scroob from Spaceballs, Murakami-style.

"Zoo Sub? I have the same password on my luggage!"

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

"Every hometown's got the ominous megastructure, what's yours?" I'll nominate Augusta, GA's Trestle. Kid from my high school (several years before I attended) died jumping from it. Access was not nearly as blocked off as it probably should be, at least not in the late 90s.

Picture of an abandoned train trestle over the Savannah River. The structure is obviously in a state of decay. There is a boat on the river, and trees on the bank.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

On the one hand, being solidly middle-aged myself, there's something to the idea that by a certain point in one's life, one has accumulated enough pain or disappointment or loss that it becomes a presence within a person. On the other: it's money, Nutmeg. Your dept. store owner's wife charges $$$

Nutmeg would often ask herself, "Is it not just these women? Do all the women of the world carry this kind of 'something' inside them? And why are the ones who come here all middle-aged women? Do I have a 'something' inside me as well?"

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(broken my own thread. Bah) This passage. Yes, nameless veterinarian, you are allowed to be deeply unsettled by the violent end of your life's work. I'm fairly sure that counts as trauma.

The veterinarian took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was trembling--so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had experienced an emotional trauma. A large number of animals had been "liquidated" in a moment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, he felt no particular shock or sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled.

He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette and trying to sort out his feelings. He stared at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked as it always had. He could find in it no signs of change. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had known until then. After all, the world that held him now was a world in which bears and tigers and leopards and wolves had been "liquidated." those animals had existed this morning, but now, at four o'cloc in the afternoon, they had ceased to exist. They had been massacred by soldiers, and even their dead bodies were gone.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Poor Haydn. Perpetually overshadowed by Mozart.

I crossed my legs, settled into the sofa, and listened to Haydn (though if pressed, I could not have sworn it was Haydn). It was fairly nice music, but the kind that seems to melt into air the moment it emerges from its source.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

OK, but this? I'll bet you a nickel that there was massive pressure to "do whatever it takes to keep the antenna running" from somewhere well above the site personnel. Way to kick 'em while they're down.

The report highlighted a reliance on what it called “personal heroics” by personnel at the Goldstone site, described as being “willing to do whatever it takes to keep the antenna running.” The problem with that, the report concluded, is that it led them to do tasks outside their qualifications, work extended hours that led to fatigue and skip tests they felt would have delayed returning the antenna to operations.

Had the site’s personnel “acted with greater deliberation or shown more willingness to leave the antenna in a failed state at any point during the mishap,” the report concluded, “the undesired outcome likely would not have occurred.”

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

And it seems to contradict what Creta said earlier, before Malta returned. Creta is rebuilding herself, until Malta returns and makes use of her. I don't trust Malta. Also, unless she's playing some game here, it continues to be despicable that she's working with NW.

At the same time that I was entirely new, I was almost entirely empty. I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own hands, I had to make this thing I called ‘I’—or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

This passage. It seems *at least* as possible that it will make it impossible for Creta to ever have a sense of self. Along with the whole "prostitute of the mind" business, Creta speaking of having been "pried open" and defiled in body - having others "pass through" her mind...I dislike it.

She has been using me as a medium during the past five years, but it is not as if she has merely been exploiting me as some kind of tool. She has been doing it to aid in my recovery as well. She believes that by passing the minds or egos of a variety of people through me, she will make it possible for me to obtain a firm grasp on my own self. Do you see what I mean? It works for me as a kind of vicarious experience of what it feels like to have an ego.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

#booksky Visiting family, and my sister reported she'd found a thrifted copy of this book that she and I both read and adored as children (but we're over 4 years apart, so we never discussed it). INSTANT trip down memory lane. Going to reread immediately. Anyone else read it?

A photo of the front cover of Behind the Attic Wall, by Sylvia Cassedy. A girl pours tea for two dolls.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

In nomine patri, et fili, et spiritus sanctus, Amen. This was a fun read and also, dear god, these are all terrible, terrible things.

To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Sort of like a photo of the book on a shelf, right?

Screen shot of the listing for the ebook for Mercutio, by Kate Heartfield, at the Pima County Public Library. The Holds information shows one library copy, with three people waiting.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

@katedollarhyde.bsky.social , you asked! Graphic design is not my passion 😅 These are just new authors, and just books already read (For The West Passage and Ambergris, am at least well into). I have a whole "author recs" list that, let's face it, will grow faster than I can read it.

From Martha Wells’s timeline
The Witch Roads, Kate Elliot

From Reactor Magazine’s timeline
Cabaret in Flames, Hache Pueyo
Hache Pueyo’s other books
But Not Too Bold
This City Will Not Kill Me, Ilona Andrews

Other Bsky timeline finds (likely some or all of these belong somewhere above)
Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera
Author’s Bsky Timeline
Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou
P. Djeli Clark
P. Djeli Clark’s books
The Haunting of Tram Car 015
The Starving Saints, Caitlin Starling
Spread Me, Sarah Gailey
Psychopomp & Circumstance, Eden Royce
The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher
T. Kingfisher’s other books (not including works as Ursula Vernon, found another way)
Snake-Eater

From Ann Leckie’s Timeline
Asunder, Kerstin Hall
Kerstin Hall’s other books
The Border Keeper
Second Spear
A Heart Between Teeth
Author Interviews (some from author, some from panelists)
The Ragpicker, Joel Dane (also from her timeline)
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
Scott Lynch’s other books
Red Sails under Red Skies
The Republic of Thieves
Author’s Bsky Timeline
The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (80% confidence on this sourcing)
Author’s Bsky Timeline
The Villa, Once Beloved, Victor Manibo
When They Burned the Butterfly, Wen-yi Lee
The Works of Vermin, Hiron Ennes
Hiron Ennes’s other books
Leech 
Author Interviews (some from author, some from panelists)
The West Passage, Jared Pechaček
Ambergris, Jeff VanderMeer
Peter Wells
Peter Wells’s books
The Sunflower Cycle

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Meant to add this from the closing paragraph. Ouch, right in the gut.

"I would like to believe that this ends somewhere, that this age of extracting every last drop of profit out of a beautiful thing they’ve already bled dry will run its course. Endless crossover, remake, reskinning, whatever other form of zombified content production in spaces where art used to be—in my heart I don’t think people actually want this, no matter how far up and to the right the various lines of their choosing continue to go. But that shift, when it comes, will arrive alongside the death of things we once held dear. "

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Just finished Fever House by @keithrosson.bsky.social , and now I'm itching to read the sequel. Bloody, beautiful language, and great fun to read. Thanks, @richardleis.com for the recommendation!

The cover of the novel Fever House, by Keith Rosson. A black and white fist with malformed fingers, showing the horns.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

I present a contender. Shudder.

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Nicole Baugh @eneffbee.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, soundgarden, pearl jam, or alice in chains.

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