iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm getting around this by learning to cobble and repairing old boots, usually full welt construction workboots or army boots made in older styles that are repairable:

A full welt construction workboot that has had the heel replaced, and replacement sole is about to be glued on.

A full welt construction workboot with the heel repaired, sole replaced, and new hobnails being added.

150 5

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A note left on the grave of General Ross in Halifax:

A photograph of a note and Bic lighter left at the grave of General Ross in Halifax: The note reads 'General Ross, thankyou for your service. You are needed again, RIP.'
Major General Ross was the British officer who burned the White House in 1814.

031 3

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Almost certainly bollocks/scam, but if not, and the chimp isn't drugged, muzzled and otherwise nobbled, the MMA guy is just going to get any or all, of his face, arm(s), leg(s) and dick, torn off, and then beaten to death with the soggy end:

Screenshot of a Polymarket post reading 'Just in, MMA fighter, Cole Johnson, announces he will be fighting an adult chimpanzee on 9/11'

020 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Automated content moderation, how it's going on Tumblr: I do a handcrafts post about the various shoe and boot repairs I'm learning how to do (Vimes Boots Theory!) and the moderation bots decide that it's mature content and slap a 'Potentially Mature Content' label on it...

A tumblr post about repairing shoes and boots, which the automoderation function has labeled as mature content, and added a banner reading: "We reviewed your post and determined it needed a Content Label."

121 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Before and after imagery of the site of the Rasuwagadhi border crossing building, showing how the glacial collapse and outburst debris flow has cleaned the site down to bedrock

0106 10

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone choose to build at the apex of a debris fan crossed by a quiet brook, or atop a little ridge or scarp that's the only bit of land with a view....

Screenshot of a tumblr post, riffing off the Pelican Mouth is safe place meme, about building site descisions: It reads "Also Valley Margin debris flow fan with pretty babbling brook perfec t size for put house location! Well drain gravelly footing and brook is at bottom of steep banks safe happy house site on Debris Fan. Put House on Debris Fan. no problems ever on Debris Fan because good elevation and solid foundation with many boulder and big gravel giving good support to foundation. A Debris Flow Fan yes, a safe place for House Site, with good view over surrounding flood plain, can trust babbling brook at apex of Debris Fan to always being picturesque running happily past Huge Boulders with shallow ankle deep water only friend Debris Fan Is good Location and perfec View, build on friend Debris Fan..." The tags read 'If any of your friends is geotechnically or geomorphologically qualified, ask them about their opinion of your house rental, purchase or build site BEFORE you pay money for an expensive hazard zone location you think is picturesque or unusually cheep...'

24318 43

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

The oldest I pinged while driving SHRIMP-RG was about 4.35. We were production lining them, doing two 800 grain mounts a day when no other work was booked on the spectrometers:

A reflected light microscope image of an epoxy grain analysis mount for U-PB dating of zircons, with a grid of 800 Jack Hills zircon crystals mounted and polished, ready to analyze.

010 1

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Some quality boudinage texture in deformed and metamorphosed mudstones, siltstones and sandstones, Yilgarn province, West Australia.

A dark chocolate brown metamorphosed siltstone and mudstone unit, with deformation texture of more sandy layers into sausage shaped boudins, from extensional deformation of the rock unit. A rock hammer is present at the left of the photo to show the scale, which is about 0.5m by 1m in field of view.

010 1

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Sometimes the termite mounds are up for something. Really Up for something. Back away slowly.

A red-brown termite mound amid pale khaki spinfex grass against a background of snappy gum eucalyptus. The top of the mount is particularly phallic in shape.

020 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

When the JV partner mapped a breccia & claimed it's a deformed Archaen kimberlite breccia on some wafer thin regional microdiamond results, but you find it has tree root casts & really resembles goethite/hematite Miocene scree breccias we worked with back in the '90s with <redacted big iron guys>

Oxidised red brown breccia of weathered and ferruginised banded iron formation fragments, with a cast of a tree root centred in frame beside a 20 centimetere field notebook for scale. Hammersley Ranges, 2006.

220 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Here's a cut section of a similarly sunfaded loose sample I collected about five metres from that big one: Marginal selenite or barytes, covered by banded agate, then void fill of crystalline quartz, with some bright green chlorite void fill at the centre.

A cut sample of agate from the same Rakaia locality, showing marginal selenite or barytes crystals, then banded agate, then crystalline quartz void fill with green chlorite in some central voids.

110 1

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Here's another from the Rakaia Gorge. You have to get dropped off by jetboat or engage in quite a bit of rock climbing to get to this outcrop - the basaltic andesite lavas here contain large (~ up to two feet diameter) quartz, agate and selenite (and sometimes barytes) filled geodes and amygdaloids

A large sun-faded white quartz geode with infill of selenite and barites exposed in grey brown basaltic andesite lava. A rock hammer is to the top left of the photograph to show scale, with the Geode being about two feet/50 centimetres across.

150 5

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

How about some intergrown plagioclase feldspars, in a groundmass of plagioclase and aenigmatite, with the odd bit of clinopyroxene. Cross polarised light, about x20 magnification. Basaltic Andesite, Rakaia outcrop of the Mt Somers Volcanics. 1994.

A radial cluster of intergrown plagioclase crystals within a dark matrix of finer grained plagioclase and aenigmatite. Viewed in cross polarised light.

020 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Some crenulation cleavage developing in kink banding in Alpine Schist, Westland, New Zealand.

Photo of black and white biotite-quartz-albite Alpine Schist with zig zag folding and developing crenulation cleavage. Alpine Fault, New Zealand.

040 4

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Spare photo from my phd, taken in 1995-96, on the southwest slopes of Cerro Piramide, near Puerto Ibanez, Chile. Radial flow marks on the side of a dacitic dike intruding oxidised red volcaniclastic sediments, Ibanez Formation, Jurassic. Taken with a crusty old Pentax K-1000 full of volcanic ash...

$Side view of an intrusive igneous dyke, forming a vertical wall of blockily fractured pale cream to grey rock, spotted with lichens. Radial flow striations are visible on the side of the dyke where the country rock has been eroded.$

030 3

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Ok, looking at a screenshot, there's way up, and discordant contacts here. The dendrites to the lower left look to nucleate, and grow down to the left from the finely layered granodioritic material (I'm assuming the pink/grey layered material is your granodiorite)

130 3

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

In case you haven't already, and are in Aotearoa/New Zealand, tonight's the last night for submissions on the current bunch of fash's bigoted sex and gender amendment bill. Here's my text:

To the committee
Here is my submission on the the 'Definitions of Woman and Man' amendment bill.
This bill is both medically, scientifically and socially wrong. It is a targeted piece of legislation designed to increase persecution of some of the most marginalised people in our society, and it is both scientifically illiterate, and medically disastrous for the many people within our society that are genetically intersex, experience gender dysphoria, or have endocrine differences that give them phenotypes that are intermediate between the socially constructed ideas of sex and gender.
It is, in short, a partisan amendment designed to increase social strife and use thousands of our citizens as scapegoats for political purposes. This bill should be discarded.
Yours Sincerely
...etc

050 5

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Sometimes you just need to engage in ritual magic at the dark of the year in a blood consecrated stone circle atop a hill in scudding mist beneath the waxing gibbous moon.

A misty hilltop, with a small circular clearing surrounded by gorse. A circle of stones is visible amid the hummocky long grass.

250 5

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Me to Gemini, GPT, Claude, etc. I want my father back you son of a bitch.

Three screenshots from The Princess Bride, where Inigo Montoya has bested the Six Fingered Man in combat, and the Six fingered man is offering anything for his life, to which Inigo replies 'I want my father back, you son of a bitch'.

061 6

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Solidarity, Matthew! (Also, if you stick to your principles, there is this wooshing noise that will happen as the Overton Window rushes past you, and suddenly you realise that too the current techbro neofascists, as a right winger of the 90's and '2000s, you look like a Trotskyist.

A photo of the rather Odious NZ politics commentator Matthew Hooton, over which is superimposed his recent quote "The current National Party in its current formation ... exists to stay in power and deliver corporate welfare to it's donors" I have to say I'm surprised to agree with him. Solidarity, brother!

100 1

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair:

A screenshot of a Roundcube Webmail interface. There is nothing in the inbox, and all the subfolders are greyed out and indicate no unread messages.

120 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I suspect in this case it's taken from the same, or similar US data as this plot from the EPI:

Plot of the decoupling of productivity and hourly compensation from US data, titled 'Growth of real hourly compensation for production/nonsupervisory workers and
productivity, 1948–2011' and showing the two diverging from the 1970s, with productivity climbing and production/non management worker wages remaining flattened while productivity rises. From: Mishel, Lawrence. "The wedges between productivity and median compensation growth." Issue Brief 330 (2012): 1-7.

020 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I've been seeing various versions of this effect for decades now whenever someone plots indexes of inflation adjusted wages or buying power or so forth, vs profits or productivity measures, and you get that neoliberal diversion in the 70s-80s:

Productivity vs wage indexes plot showing the decoupling of wage growth from productivity growth showing the flattening of wage growth attributed to various neoliberal deregulation projects. Plot from Fleck, S., Glaser, J., & Sprague, S. (2011). The compensation-productivity gap: a visual essay. Monthly Lab. Rev., 134, 57.

210 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

How we got here: Neoliberalism, corporate capture, and the dissassembly of the fixes put in place to remove the economic inequities that caused the awfulness of the 18th, 19th and first two thirds of the 20th century:

Yet another example of that graph showing the intentional neoliberal decoupling of productivity (still going up) from wages (basically flat since the mid seventies) since the 1970s that is the reason for the massive global destablisation currently happening.

121 2

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Sometimes shitposting between our awful social media addictions can create beatiful things: Many of our politicans are not only spherical bastards, but also spherically incompetent

Bluesky/tumblr screenshot: Bluesky user Fiona Tribe notes ;'Yes, Swiss Scientist Fritz Zwicky coined the term 'Dark Matter',which is impressive, but he also coined the term 'Spherical Bastard' to describe people who are bastards no matter which way you look at them, and I think that should be celebrated more', to which tumblr user Them-faetale has added:

"I would like to propose the addition of "spherically incompetent" to the lexicon, in the same vein. It means someone who is incompetent no matter which way you look at them.

This is inspired by those instances when someone is trying to explain why something they were responsible for was done wrong, but every excuse just leads to a different kind of incompetence. Like, when the thing they made is shit and perhaps you point out it seems to be generated by AI, so they make a big song and dance about how long it took them to do all that work... At which point they are claiming that they spent ages making something fuckin awful and wrong, so that's actually worse!?

Also for politicians who, for example, try to reassign blame every time they're criticised that they or someone in their party did something shitty. It inevitably becomes a big pile of excuses all the way down, attempting to cover the facts of their incompetence."

230 3

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Perennially relevant:

$Edititorial cartoon by Wilcox in which four doric columns hold up a triangular roof labelled Democracy. Left to right the columns are labelled accountability, Transparency, Judicial Independence and Free Press. The columns are cracking and fracturing. Also from left to right, the speech bubbles appear from behind each column - Accountability says 'I don't hold an integrity commission..'; Transparency says 'The inquiry was held in-house and the findings are confidential...'; Judicial Independence says 'We've appointed some of our best friends to the AAT) (australia specific, although any court could go there, especially a supreme one) and from the Free Press column 'I refuse to debate on the public broadcaster...'$

000 0

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Here's that handy plot of straits vs direness if blocked:

A graph from the Economist of various geographic chokepoint straits of importance to trade, and the distances of the alternative routes if they are blocked.

000 0

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

I've probably caused noise complaints via versions most of these methods except possibly the lawn roller:

A newspaper cartoon from 1919 titled 'What are they up to next door', showing various neighbours engaging in noise making activities such as lawn rollers, dropping weights, leaping off beds, smashing bottles, hammering the walls, or racing furniture while shouting 'whoop'

000 0

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Apparently people are already onto these...

000 0

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

And my partner in reenactmenty crimes, J., going a bit earlier with a more late migration era look:

A woman in late migration era to early medieval clothing laid out on a mortice and tenon wooden bed to represent a migration era burial. She wears a blue woolen tunic and white linen undertunic, over which is a lighter blue peplos, pinned at the shoulders. Both woollen garments are decorated with tablet woven red and blue bands. At her hip is a belt with a blue woollen ring pouch, and she has naalebinded socks and light leather slippers. On her head is a veil, and to the right of her head is a carved bone comb. To the left of the bed on a rug is a bag and pouches containing early medieval sewing equipment, plus a jug, cup and knife, together with woven leg bindings, a rigid heddle, and some spools of wool

0100 10

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

That did start a bit of a trend, we all got into it. Here's me in an early medievalish anglo-scandinavian grave goods and clothing-ish bed burial:

A man in early medieval clothing lying on a mortice and tennon jointed wooden bed, on a herringbone woven blanket, wearing a brown woollen coat, braes, hose, legbindings and turnshoes, belted with a leather belt bearing two knives and a pouch. At his feet is a roundshield, and he holds a small axe in his right hand. To the left laid out on a rug is a bow, arrows, spear, helmet, plus a platter and jug with food offerings, and a small ceramic cup.

1130 13

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

10th month of deployment; Crossed the atlantic three times so far, sewage system borked, and now a fire depriving the crew of 600 bunk spaces. So, how about that mutiny health bar in the corner of the captains dashboard?

NYT Screenshot noting more than 600 crew members on the Ford are bunking in corridors, on floors and tables, after a fire in it's tenth month of deployment as it transits the red sea towards the current warzone.

000 0

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Nobby in Feet of Clay had the right response to people discovering that you're a politically useful lost scion of aristocracy, which is to hit the window helmet first and keep running, and then hide the evidence:

000 0

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

These are the much younger Flinders Ranges examples - but that photo from Isua seems to show a much larger scale (but no scale marker!) The wiggly bedding with the pointyness is pretty diagnostic, but you also need the larger humpy shapes as well,

Much younger ~700ma Stromatolites from the Brachina Gorge in South Australia, Flinders Ranges.

Macroscale stromatolite with rain weathering, Flinders Ranges.

Cross section through a stromatolite hummock, Flinders Ranges, South Australia.

111 1

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

I can't currently access the paper, but the images of the Isua structures do seem to look like stromatalites I've seen in the Brachina Gorge in South Australia, with a similar cross sectional structure.

NYT image of the Isua stromatalitic structures

141 4

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

So the wave buoy at the entrance to the harbour recorded a 13 meter wave this morning: Don't think too hard about all the grogans surfing in on that from the failed privately owned sewage centre that had to shift to the short outfall pipe again in the storm last night.

Maximum wave height plot for 16/2/2026 at the mouth of Wellington Harbour NZ, showing wave heights climbing from 1, to 2, then a step up to sustained heights between 5 and 10 metres over the 15th, to a peak of 13 metres early on the 16th of February.

010 1