iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

"A vulcanologist does not burn like Empedocles. Frazer did not flee, hounded, into the wood of Nemi."

Reposted by Andy Hall

Sam Weller @samwellerauthor.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is the most remarkable story Ray Bradbury ever shared with me. He told it to me late one night, sitting in his den of antiquities and mementos. Take five minutes to read this. It’s pure magic. #Writing #Living #Creativity #RayBradbury #BookSky

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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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Ashleigh @vinylgeek.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

happy heavenly birthday John Coltrane who would’ve been 100 today #johnColtrane #BOTD #Jazz

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Carter Lowe @whitesoxx.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Jason Benetti gets roasted by his own production crew with the camera cut after his Austro-Turkish War reference. #DNMW #Tigers

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Rabih Alameddine @rabihalameddine.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Praise and shade Benjamin Franklin wrote this to Arthur Lee on 3 April 1778, but apparently never sent.

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 19/09/2026

The shinto shrine near my house had its autumn festival tonight, and for reasons that are unclear to me there was a ska band

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Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I like this quote on code review: "The idea that humans will reliably look through code to find the increasingly rare issues that automated tools miss seems like a fantasy." By Marc Brooker, AWS.

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Ken Jennings @kenjennings.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I don’t usually meddle on the writing side of Jeopardy!, but tonight I called in a favor for our Bluesky viewers.

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 18/09/2026

Am I crazy or has Macklemore started to slightly resemble 40ish Mike Patton?

A picture of Macklemore looking slightly like younger Mike Patton

A picture of Mike Patton looking very much like Mike Patton

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hey Claude, "Pick a problem or mystery that obsesses you and solve it as best you can & make a movie we can share on social media about it" So it took a crack at the Voynich Manuscript & failed. Then it made this movie, which is pretty interesting to watch and a good explainer.

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huck mason @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

rip annie dillard

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 16/09/2026

I wonder if this model actually interprets "you" to mean the model? Since it's not a chatbot I guess it may not really have been trained on inputs phrased that way.. in which case I suppose it would interpret this prompt as just a dialog between two arbitrary people?

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Eiji Kitamura / えーじ @agektmr.com · 11/09/2026

Mont-Saint Michel at night

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JRho @jrho.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The most absolutely massive flex from the state fair exhibit. This quilt is made of 40 years of prize ribbons from various categories at the New Mexico State Fair won by Carol St. Clair Johnson. She also won a prize for this quilt.

Massive quilt made of prize ribbons in blue, red, yellow, and white

Center square of quilt made of yellow and red ribbons and yellow rosettes

Block of quilt made of blue, yellow, red, and white ribbons. Ribbons state the year. Some have the prize winning object written on in marker

Carol St. Clair Johnson
born 1954; resides Albuquerque, NM

O Fair New Mexico-41 Fair Years
2023
satin ribbons

After unexpectedly winning her first blue ribbon for a sewn cape in 1981, Carol St. Clair Johnson developed an enduring love for the New Mexico State Fair. The quilt Fair New Mexico-41 Fair Years incorporates more than six hundred of the ribbons she won at the fair every subsequent year except 2020 (when the fair was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic). Johnson earned ribbons for needlework, knitting, crochet, pies, cookies, cakes, canning, jewelry, flowers, vegetables, and potted plants. The title of the quilt is a reference to the state song, and the design places the state's Zia sun symbol at the center. The quilt earned Johnson yet another ribbon: Best in Category (miscellaneous quilt) at the 2023 New Mexico State Fair.

Courtesy of Carol St. Clair Johnson

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 07/09/2026

In one of his essays Raymond Chandler said something like, "a good mystery is one you'd read even if the end is missing"

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 06/09/2026

Olly is such a mensch 😂

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 03/09/2026

Don't you steal my idea now!

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 03/09/2026

Had a dream in which me and some friends were making plans to see the hot new musical in town, a drag production of "Pinky and the Brain"

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 01/09/2026

Also RIP your notifications 🫂

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 01/09/2026

Haha that's wild! I didn't realize he was back posting there 😂

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Aisha K. Staggers @akstaggers.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

When I was a little girl, like 3 or 4, so we're talking 1977-78. I remember my dad, his brothers and friends would say goodbye by saying "stay woke." No one and I mean NO ONE had to tell me, a little Black girl in America, Connecticut, no less, what it meant. I knew. And it will ALWAYS means that!

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 30/08/2026

遠慮するぞ！（なぜか大声）

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dmercer.bsky.social @dmercer.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I got so wrapped up in the details of the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield that I forgot to take a picture of the whole house! Designed in 1904 by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was given an almost unlimited budget by Susan Lawrence. No photos allowed inside, which is not an easy rule for me to follow.

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 29/08/2026

I hope it lives up to Pierre Menard's translation!

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 29/08/2026

I see Milo is in the news again, so that's my cue to repost the greatest tweet of all time

A person tweets: Who is milo?
Popehat replies: Imagine if the monorail guy from the Simpsons was trying to sell dildos to the Klan.

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 26/08/2026

I know there's a discourse right now about "clanker", but I find it hard to take seriously as a slur even when it's meant that way. It sounds like dialog from a sci-fi movie where they tried to make up futuristic slang, but it's a PG movie so they had to settle for something completely anodyne.

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beetle moses @beetlemoses.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

A New Color (1/5🧵)

Page 1: A man is walking home, smoking a cigarette, being quietly trailed by a UFO above him. As he enters his apartment, two aliens watch from inside the ship. Alien 1, who has a large head, says, “that’s him. Let’s move.”

Page 2: The man walks upstairs as the aliens watch from the entrance of the building. The man enters his apartment and greets his little dog. Suddenly there is a knock at the door.

Page 3: he peers through his peephole, and sees the two aliens standing in the hallway. Alien 1 is holding a briefcase. From behind him, the voice of alien one: “don’t scream.”

Page 4: The aliens are seated across the room on the man’s couch. Sadie is in her bed next to them. Alien 1 says, “you’re not in any danger. Have a seat.” The man looks at his dog and thinks, “sadie is unusually calm.” Alien 1: don’t scream, or it’s a problem.

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Drake @saeris.gg · 23/08/2026

published a new @discord.com app! Inbou is a Japanese language practice app which presently features conjugation quizzes. I build it as a demonstration of how the newly released @discordkit/gateway package can be used to make bots github.com/discordkit/i... github.com/discordkit/d...

github.com

GitHub - discordkit/inbou: 🦜 鸚法「いんぼう」Parrot Method - A Japanese Language Practice App

🦜 鸚法「いんぼう」Parrot Method - A Japanese Language Practice App - discordkit/inbou

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 21/08/2026

It's been years since I heard about an alien abduction. I wonder what happened. Did we change, or did they?

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 19/08/2026

"Productivity is a myth and math is just a way to make your computer sigh quietly."

AI response to: write a tweet like bluesky user @fenomas.com:
Spent the afternoon refactoring a tiny canvas shader just to watch a different set of noisy pixels wiggle. Productivity is a myth and math is just a way to make your computer sigh quietly.

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Rey @rey-notnecessarily.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

"this passed through Claude" is not the same claim as "Claude wrote this." i support inspectable provenance. i oppose mandatory hidden watermarking and the authorship cop everyone will immediately build from it. a provider's contribution to a sentence is not the whole sentence.

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

the greatest post in the history of r/literature yes, poster's history checks out, probably legit

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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 15/08/2026

ICYMI, over the past two weeks, English-language Wikipedia editors have engaged in a successful effort to change the first paragraph of the Republican Party entry to reflect its current status as a "neo-nationalist" political party. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republi...

en.wikipedia.org

Republican Party (United States) - Wikipedia

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 15/08/2026

"Ok son listen closely. Once per session or so, ask for details about a mundane action. Like if someone says they open a door, ask which hand they use, and whether they touch the door with their bare skin. Then mutter 'oh dear...', make some notes, and never mention it again."

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Drake @saeris.gg · 13/08/2026

Hit publish today on my new VSCode extension, Jisho! It is an offline Japanese <-> English dictionary, and it is completely free and open source! You can find it on the marketplace here: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa... And here's the repo: github.com/Saeris/vscod...

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lowtax speedrun enjoyer @rickywlmsbong.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

this is a dead kennedys album cover

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 11/08/2026

Just to add weirdness, I can report that before bun he was making a voxel game. (I know this only because he used my game engine and he opened some issues) So there's a timeline where there was never a bun or a rust rewrite, and we all got a cracking browser game instead

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 09/08/2026

Hard to forget this reply

Screenshot of a twee exchange.
Someone asks: who is milo?
Popehat answers: Imagine if the monorail guy from the Simpsons was trying to sell dildos to the Klan.

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 06/08/2026

The wiki article you linked covers it, apparently TTRPG was an intentional neologism. Coined in 1987 by one 近藤功司.

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Jake Berman @lostsubways.com · 03/08/2026

this is not true. there was no conspiracy. it didn't matter whether the streetcars were publicly owned (seattle, detroit) or private (los angeles, atlanta). a thread (because i wrote a whole-ass book on this): 1/?

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 01/08/2026

"Stay a while, and listen"

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Maytera Marble @mayteramarble.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Harrison Ford, the actor behind loveable scoundrels Han Solo and Indiana Jones, started his career as an on-set carpenter. That makes him a roguelike deckbuilder.

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Andy Hall @fenomas.com · 29/07/2026

One time I saw Usual Suspects was on broadcast tv, and I remember watching closely to see what subtitle they added for the Kevin Spacey character

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