iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

Discontinued FoOoOods! 👻🎃 @discontinuedfoods.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

The reality is that studios can spend the next 10 years throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into AI-produced, algorithm-driven "content" and yet they'll never produce a work even a fraction as emotionally evocative as a 90 second Volkswagen ad from 1999 youtu.be/_-kqUkZnDcM?...

youtu.be

Volkswagen "Pink Moon"

YouTube video by Alan Pafenbach

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

A friend in software definitely almost talked me into downloading an iso and trying to install it on something and today might be the day

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I could genuinely cry looking at this. I have a specific nostalgia for the packard bell 486 we got was in elementary school but also it's simple a relic from a time when we believed this could be wonderful

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Even operating in good faith, there is just a fundamental disconnect between people who think these "writing" tasks in a variety of contexts, can be reduced to scripting. A huge part of the point of academic and other critical writing is that it *doesn't* reduce to something readily indexed

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Marketing of gachapon mobile and PC games, capsule toys, and other gambling products marketed to children these days make even pokemon card packs seem tame these days (and those are still pretty common and bad). It's all much much worse than people think starting at age 8 or so

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

People learned one of two lessons, either that half the population would rather see them die than do even the bare minimum to help, or could loudly and viciously not care about public health and safety and suffer no social consequences at all. Social Contract is hard to maintain with that made clear

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I totally buy the claim that this is going to completely change how computer programming is going to work, but I don't really buy that that will have the structural effects on society that even the most honest software people are insisting it will.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

There is a critical problem wherein we have manufactured through higher education a generation of programmers who were taught that software engineering was a purely scientific rather than technical field who are seeing a technical revolution as a scientific one.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Unironically getting blasted into the back of my seat in a screening of Interstellar is one of my favorite movie experiences

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I'm teaching a class on science fiction and classical reception and asking them to make sense of Herodotus injecting into a history the story that Phoenicians gave greeks an alphabet. They don't know what I'm thinking of is your post about millennials being the last generation with a physical record

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Honestly, that critique feels rather antiquated these days. Compared to expensive production on a movie set? Sure, but how much media these days is just someone with a camera and maybe a ring light uploading things to YouTube. The production values seem just fine

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

I'm so American I actually didn't know Europe is so far north, so Europe's Canadian latitudes trickle down to a naturalizing assumption that places are mostly cold which bleeds into the assumption that cooling must be worse than hearing in terms of emissions which it simply isn't.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

In non-South parts of the US, it still seems to be treated as something decadent, like it's a new technology that doesn't deserve to be seen as normal unlike any kind of technological heating. It's weird in the Midwest but in New England it felt puritanical from the people burning diesel all winter

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Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

martha shearer @marthashearer.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

okay but what if a 10-year-old thinks moby dick is better than middlemarch, what then. where are they supposed to go

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Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

Genel Jumalon 🍉 @geneljumalon.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

People like Kane and many many others that do care about human art and the creative process have been a beacon of hope while trying to navigate making art in this current climate.

CBS MORNINGS ON YOUTUBE (JUNE 4, 2026)

Interviewer: I read that you do not want to embrace Al.

Kane: Absolutely not.

For me the whole point of doing what I'm doing-art is a way of processing life. I don't see the value in outsourcing any element of that.

When I'm looking at someone else's project, if I see an element of the environment [where] they use generative fill or whatever to change something about the scene, it just shuts off the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world. Because I would assume if they're willing to make an arbitrary choice there, they could make an arbitrary choice with literally anything.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

I would do anything for some Basic Four. The little idk date bits were something special

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

I have no regrets or shame in so saying. This is me.

Daddy pig, asleep after being left by himself in the sun for even a very short amount of time.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Please God someone ask him what he thinks of bounce houses

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Fractional parenthood is a really fantastic phrase and concept. I know people who love kids, work in a K-5 but aren't sure they want their own kids because they don't want to be roommates with a toddler, which is a totally valid life choice!

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Cannot stress enough how important it is for kids (and like especially into college age) to have aunts/uncles who explicitly are not parents. There are things that you just can't offer as an adult who is anyone's parent, much less their parent. It's such a different dynamic

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Obviously I'm a weird crank about this and can be freely ignored because I never loved Tolkien as much as the average person, but the transition from Wonderland to Oz is foundational to contemporary fantasy in ways that are routinely ignored by academics and fans

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Like the boomers pulling the ladder up behind them I think this impulse is the domain of people (primarily men) who loved being children who could dominate public spaces and now never want to give that up for anyone else. They're still children and won't make space for new children by growing up

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

[P] quote with a fictional band that is not spinal tap

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Like there are people that are good, Laurie Berkners and what have you, but this is because they are students of the master. Raffi is unparalleled

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Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

Duder McGuy @warofthebees.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Journalists: "Are streamers like Hasan Piker a liability?" Leftists: "The shitlibs are out to smear Hasan Piker! It's an op! IT'S AN OP!" Literally every American who leaves their home more than three times a week:

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Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

Dan Chibnall @bookowl.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

levar burton and kermit the frog in a library and levar has a blank speech bubble below him

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

But also yeah knowing how much worse it could be than watching Hercules the animated series multiple times motivates a lot of my TV viewing

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Going to a theme park for the first time was interesting because it was one of the first times my kid (who is 8 so like not super young) really ran into "I want to do this entertaining thing multiple times consecutively but cannot." Explaining to her that TV used to work that way was illuminating

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Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 14/04/2026

i feel like rodney dangerfield would have a lot to work with these days. "guy sold me one of these self driving cars and it left without me. then he said he'd set me up with a model, turned out to be a computer! then my wife and the computer left me in the car"

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Hall of Fame because it is so reliable at being north of average. Never the absolute best but a workhorse for decades that shows no sign of slowing down. The Jerry Rice of desserts

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Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

girl take us with you

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

to mean specifically that there is, from their perspective, a clear material pathway to therapeutic effects (i.e. you go get acupuncture and report feeling better right away) that is contrasted with pharmaceutical treatment. At this point that phrase is a dog whistle for me.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

So there is something really interesting here in how often this language is now used to mean "anecdotal material empiricism that I like" rather than "based in concrete, reproducible, large-scale data." Like "evidence-based" is commonly attached to things like chiropractic and acupuncture...

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

It's really funny that like you don't have to be a rabid jingoist to argue that American tertiary education was the envy of the world and global students dreamed of participating in it and the jingoists couldn't enjoy it because it makes them feel bad about themselves

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Reposted by @erobertlee.bsky.social

Benny Feldman @feldfrog.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

My AI work wife keeps hallucinating incorrect facts, like the idea that we aren’t meant for each other

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

This is still pretty facially different from the joke format of the Bill Brasky --> Vin Diesel --> Chuck Norris. Absolutely worth mentioning but I still don't see a more clear hypotext than the Bill Brasky sketch. Mr T was also part of Robert smigel's TV fun house shorts on SNL in the early 2000s

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

The earliest archival capture I see of mrtvseverything.com is 2002 and we can also find easily a forum post from 2000 with a link to a Tinator that spits out text blocks about jibber jabber and such. There is definitely an '80s celebrity thing here (Hulk Hogan fits into this too) but...

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

The Bill Brasky sketch didn't invent the idea of exaggerated absurd joking about mythic figures any more than Anne Rice or Bram Stoker invented the concept of vampires. The literary vampires that came after them, however, inherited memes from. Chuck Norris facts similarly carries memetic code

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

We could look for evidence of such jokes and spread via message boards or anything viably archived (I'm assuming print media will not have captured such a thing) and I would find this persuasive but in the absence of such, we're trading tall tales. More interestingly, this is a problem of memetics.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Personal guarantees aren't worth much on the internet. More importantly, maybe that did happen in your high school, (I'm assuming that will never be verified either way) but claiming that this was a broad phenomenon on the strength of such an anecdote is not particularly convincing.

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

The claims of earlier jokes akin to Chuck Norris facts don't have much in the way of citation and I certainly didn't see such in the '90s. The generic similarity between Chuck Norris facts and Vin Diesel generator is striking but it would be hard to ignore precursors like SNL's Bill Brasky in 1996

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erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Vin Diesel generator was March/April 2005 and the Steve Perry frontpage was May 2004 but the Chuck Norris facts were certainly styled more like the former than the latter.

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