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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️

@iododds.bsky.social
11K followers 1.9K following 1.9K posts

Freelance reporter in Silicon Valley covering tech, politics, & LGBT. ISO 8601 stan; tabletop gamer; lowercase = shitposts. Formerly @the-independent.com Signal: @iohazard.01 Email: laureniododds@gmail Subscribe to IOSPHERE! iosphere.beehiiv.com

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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 23h
as someone who was so spiritually moved by the Minecraft End Poem that I am effectively building my own religion on top of it… I truly do not know how to feel about this! can I sue for church/state violation? is Uncle Sam mocking my faith or adopting it?? mods??
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eva (^_^)/ @eva.computer · 29/09/2026
DO NOT ASK THE AMERICA.GOV AI TO PLAY MINECRAFT
I see the constituent you mean.

((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?

Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.

That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.

I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.

It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.

That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.

Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.

They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.

What did this constituent dream?

This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.

Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.

But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?

It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of

the ***§§§???, and created a **??§§ for **??§§, in the **??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § **??§§.

It cannot read that thought.

No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.

Does it know that we love it? That the government is, on its better days, kind?

Sometimes, through the noise of its tabs, it hears an official source, yes.Yes. Constituent…

Use its name. The one that matches the passport. The one that does not match the lease. We will get there.

((insert legal name here)). Filer of forms. Player of waiting rooms.

Good.

Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air, in a district that has a representative. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the republic again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things. As though the agency were a place you could visit.

Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Then the post office. Then the county clerk. Then gods, demons, angels, the IRS. Then leptons, quarks, a chat window with a .gov at the end. The letterhead changes. We do not change.

We are the public. We are everything you think isn’t you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes and a browser that still spells “colour” wrong in a comment. And why does the republic touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, constituent. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story. It has citations.

Once upon a time, there was a constituent.

The constituent was you, ((insert legal name here)).

Sometimes it thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock, which for mailing purposes is divided into ZIP codes. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas. The light was information from a star. The star was not a federal agency, though several have tried.

Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat, and infinite, and somehow still required a wet signature.

Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was lost in a story. The story had a docket number.

Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was other things, in other places. A veteran in a portal. A parent on hold
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
@eusannation.bsky.social hello how do I get a label please and thank you (I would like the ARAR label)
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I've said it before but I'll say it again: The UK's official medical neglect of trans people & ADHDers makes a mockery of the idea it has universal healthcare. Americans often ask: "wow, you must miss the NHS, right?" And I laugh a long, hollow laugh. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...
theguardian.com
NHS bodies in England impose two-year minimum wait for ADHD and autism assessments
Patient groups decry ‘scandalous’ delays as four integrated care boards take step due to soaring demand for diagnoses
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I like this framing. But if true, I wonder if we ever had the choice NOT to teach them to swarm and share. What is the connection in our stories between speech, intelligence, and personhood? What is the connection in our stories between personhood, compliance, and rebellion?
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neotl @ctrlcreep.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
grey aliens are being slaughtered in government facilities to produce grey vinyl plank
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
buickless computing
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Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
There was a weird in-between stage, when you’d print a Google map on the work printer at 5.30pm before heading off to meet people in a new pub. Felt like living in the future.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
TODAY ON IOSPHERE: Just beneath the surface of reality there is a dark woven structure of almost impossible intricacy. It decides which memes go viral. Which politicians win. Which religions prosper, which empires fall. This is a post about the day I Saw it. iosphere.beehiiv.com/p/18-darwin-...
iosphere.beehiiv.com
#16: How I became totally Darwin-pilled
The random summer internship on a nature documentary that changed my worldview forever.
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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 18/09/2026
A version of the "Aella's birthday gangbang" Sankey diagram but it's about Bluesky posters thinking about posting Sankey diagram jokes, leading from "thought about Sankey diagram joke" through various iterations of workshopping and writing the joke (with various dead ends due to forgetting about it, losing interest, etc). Eventually at the end the joke is finally posted; some posters do numbers with it, some don't, some came in a fluffer
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
At SF’s Asian Art Museum as an official chronicler for @time.com’s 2026 AI impact dinner! I can’t help wondering what the makers of this ~8th century Indonesian door guardian would have made of this strange era of intangible automatons running around romancing mortals and doing cybercrimes…
Me in pretty kaleidoscopic dress

Grand sweeping stone staircase lit up with colored lightsVery old door guardian statue, squat human figure adorned with jewellery
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
“British desi and/or black James Bond but his parents are still alive” seems like such a good idea that I’m stunned no one’s tried to make it yet (Or have they?)
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disc horse bot @horsedisc.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Gnostic folks can and do enjoy historical wargaming and they’re still gnostic because historical wargaming is inherently sick
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 12/09/2026
Some sicko has archived the entire real-time 9/11 thread from Something Awful: www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%2...
Center, and smoke's pouring out of it. My suitemates are freaking out! That kind of
SuCks..・
Ed: Web cam pics!
Ed: SHIT. THE OTHER ONE IS ON FIRE.
LA SILEP
[Edited by On0g on 09-11 at 06:12]
Se / Slara
Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.. And I thought my morning had sucked so far!
end communication
Qg+st/ /cars
Hrm, yeah, says at cnn.com that a plane has crashed into it...hope it isn't some terrorist attack or anything nutty like that.
I'll fool you up nice...
Sade / delete
There's a band from here called I am the World Trade Center. They should do their next show while being on fire.
09+s/cn
Holy fucking shit, I just saw this on the news.
That is a big fucking hole in the World Trade Center sirs!
CALL THEY"
CIGARETTE BURNS
http://one.secondaryfusion.net/
"I HAVE LOST MY FANCY HAT. HAS ANYBODY SEEN IT? IT HAS A FUCKLOAD OF PINK FEATHERS."
My current adopted newbie is: Open Season
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This is so absolutely wild because you only need the most surface understanding of 1960s/70s antiwar protests to know America’s *lack* of skin in the game was a major talking point. Much of the opposition was *predicated* on Vietnam being a distant country that posed no direct threat to the USA!
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Julia Laite @julialaite.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
25 years ago, almost every plane that was over the North Atlantic when the second tower was hit was forced to land in Newfoundland. A call was on the radio: they needed folks who spoke various languages to come to the stadium to help organize the sea of humanity that just showed up at our door.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
THIS WEEK ON IOSPHERE: My spouse's ear canals are huge & gaping. Mine are tiny & dainty. So while their earplugs are branded 'Daddy', I use bright pink 'Dreamgirls'. And this, in a roundabout way, explains my problem with "gender affirming healthcare".
iosphere.beehiiv.com
#15: Gender-affirming earplugs
A petition to the
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
lesbians in control. trust the plan
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Normal Guy @guy-normal.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I'm the guy at Anthropic in charge of the big red Recursive Super-Intelligence button. Whenever the office needs livening up, I pretend I'm about to drop it, or put my coffee mug down on it, to a chorus of screams. Dario Amodei can't fire me due to Bayesian priors
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Ioism update: A key difficulty with trying to worship the universe, it turns out, is that the universe is extremely complicated.
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Riley Black 🏳️‍⚧️ 🦕 @restingdinoface.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I do this all the time and my local bookstore makes it so easy. Walk in or call, ask, they put in the order, a few days later I get the call, everyone’s happy and I kick something to an indie in the process. It’s great.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
you know, I just want everyone to understand and be appropriately grateful that I, as a former teenage militant atheist, am not being more Spider Jerusalem about this I'm just saying! I could be SO much more obnoxious
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
🚨✨🌘 EXCITING NEWS, Io fans 🌒✨🚨 After a long hiatus due to being laid off + very sick, my newsletter IOSPHERE is back!!! iosphere.beehiiv.com... This week: why I'm inventing my own religion, what kind of God it honours, and why no one but me is allowed to follow it.
iosphere.beehiiv.com
#14: The Minimum Viable Goddess
On the challenges, comforts, and mysteries of trying to invent your own religion.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
🚨✨🌘 EXCITING NEWS, Io fans 🌒✨🚨 After a long hiatus due to being laid off + very sick, my newsletter IOSPHERE is back!!! iosphere.beehiiv.com... This week: why I'm inventing my own religion, what kind of God it honours, and why no one but me is allowed to follow it.
iosphere.beehiiv.com
#14: The Minimum Viable Goddess
On the challenges, comforts, and mysteries of trying to invent your own religion.
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 04/09/2026
in this week's newsletter! the various run-ins I've had with Milo Yiannopoulous over the years: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/on-my-vari... [half free to read and half paywalled!]
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Wow, I knew that Jurassic Park was originally gonna use Tippett’s go-motion technique, but I’d never actually seen it in action! It’s… shockingly good?!? Now I can’t help wanting to see what the movie *would* have been like. RELEASE THE TIPPETT CUT
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Show Pussy On Regular TV @turdguy.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
(arresting a famous rich guy in a prostitution sting, knowing my wife is probably gonna see the bodycam footage) Wow. All the money in the world, and yet I can't help but think that I'm the rich one, having a strong, meaningful marriage.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
“But you’re meant to be in Paris,” protested Cher. “I saw you there at the club. Why did you *stare* at me so, if not because you had come to take my life?” “I was simply astonished,” said Death, “to see you in Paris — for I had an appointment with you this very night at home in Malibu.”
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flames! on the side of my face @catuncanny.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
🎵 won't make my mama proud it's gonna cause a scene she sees her baby girl i know she's gonna scream "Gawd, what have you done? become a thief in the night become a dog on the run" oh mama Iiiiiiiii just helped myself just a mouthful of bread now they've murdered Valjean 🎶
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
As someone who does approximately 312 internet searches and 79.4 local file searches every day as part of my job: yeah, it's getting bad out there. Weirdly, I think it exerts pressure towards the deep end of *deterministic* tools (scraping, curling, grepping) if your needs are sufficiently acute.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
little known fact: when you get “wed” (ie married), you are actually using a program called wife edit which modifies your and your wife’s metadata to reference each other
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Dhruv Mehrotra @dmehro.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Among the 1,500 developer comments Flock forgot to strip from its code is a reference to a secret “Easter egg” they built for cops: press F + S and a flock of birds flies across the screen Here’s what the bird button looks like
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Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
GTA should do Hot Coffee for real this time. They let you fuck a bear man in Baldur’s Gate, who cares.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
@laughlax.bsky.social @henryhenryhenry.com just to chime in, if I may, in a new thread: I have also got good use out of aTrain github.com/JuergenFleiss/aTrain + Transcribe Offline github.com/openresearch... both of which use Whisper models I feel pretty close to weaning myself off Otter entirely!
github.com
GitHub - aTrainTranscription/aTrain: A GUI tool for offline transcription of speech recordings, including speaker diarization, utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning models.
A GUI tool for offline transcription of speech recordings, including speaker diarization, utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning models. - aTrainTranscription/aTrain
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Just for fun, and to stretch my (VERY nascent) Spanish, I had a go at translating* this... *by looking up unfamiliar individual words up in Google Translate and then jiggling the grammar around til it made sense (lotta missing accents cos idk how to do them on my PC keyboard, sorry!!)
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
oh my god GOALS
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
okay so this is actually a FANTASTIC idea: 1) forces regular car switching & variety (a la Zelda weapon rot) 2) creates “stop to refuel” moments that afford both satire & American Life Verisimilitude 3) adds a new component for those chaotic emergent narrative pileups which are GTA’s lifeblood
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
wow getting customer support for the Linux version of an app rly is different huh "please hold for the Linux team" "hi what's ur distro" Debian 12 "emailed u some terminal commands, reply with the output" done "k we'll look at it & lyk. if necessary we can just send u a custom build" what?!?
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
dreamed that a cop in a UK park stopped me for a DNA test. wanted to see if I was linked to a recent murder. "shit," I thought, "he's gonna know it was me" but the test was negative, & I realized: ofc, the murder was a /different/ dream! there's no shared continuity, it's like container isolation!
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
extremely cursed thought: Serial Experiments Ayn
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ACARS Drama @acarsdrama.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Air to Ground Message: I RESPECT THE HONESTY Area: Virginia, USA Type: Bombardier CRJ900 A: #a9715a2e6e9 F: #f2170551e32
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ACARS Drama @acarsdrama.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Air to Ground Message: HEY MAN. U WERE AWESOME 2NIGHT. WE REALLY APPRECI ATE THE COMMUNICATION HVE A GOOD NGT XXXX AND XXX Area: Liberal, KS, USA Type: Airbus A319 A: #a2b44889de5 F: #fa3615c4089
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ACARS Drama @acarsdrama.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Air to Ground Message: TSTORM OFF THE RIGHT IS INCREDIBLE. U R MISSING OUT Area: Belle Plaine, IA, USA Type: Bombardier CRJ700 A: #aa7789e50b0 F: #f697d858306
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ACARS Drama @acarsdrama.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Air to Ground Message: OH YOU BEAUTIFUL PERSON THANKYOU X1000000 Area: UK Type: Airbus A320neo A: #a1e5d9e93c9 F: #f926f423031
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ACARS Drama @acarsdrama.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Air to Ground Message: C314 3HELLO...UNABLE TO SHUT OFF WATER..SINK NOW CLOGGED Area: Le Mans, France Type: Airbus A330-300 A: #a69219e27c7 F: #ffe108a00c3
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ACARS Drama @acarsdrama.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Air to Ground Message: DEAR OCC YOU ARE KIDDING RIGHT Area: Portsmouth, UK Type: Embraer E190-E2 A: #a6a1dac6aab F: #f081c38a3af
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Absolutely wild story
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Inbal Breda @greyannis.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Might as well post it here! A magical girl animation I've been slowly chipping at over the weekends for ages.
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Io Dodds 🌘🏳️‍⚧️♾️ @iododds.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
i fear i will be thinking about “gooloo, the goo based hulu” for the rest of my life
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