iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 24m

sometimes something happens in a community you're in and the only reaction you can really have is "well no one's going to be the least bit fucking Normal about this are they"

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Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫 @lookitup.baby · 14h

BREAKING NEWS: “Do geese see God” is a palindrome

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 11h

When I was at OU students would be mystified as to why I have a strongly negative opinion of frats, and, well.

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Erin Kane @dianamonkey.bsky.social · 17h

"As things stand, students who commit infractions like plagiarism ... are often punished more harshly than the male students directly responsible for making the campus dangerous for female ones. Until there is zero tolerance for sexual assault on campus, women will not be protected here."

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Dr. Michelle A. Rodrigues 🐒 @marspidermonkey.bsky.social · 15h

We need MeToo, Part 2: Actual Fucking Consequences

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 16h

GOAT OR BIRD????

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 16h

Not sure exactly what the guy who pulled alongside me and flipped me off was screaming, but since it ended with "kids" and included "motherfucker" at least twice, my guess is my "protect trans kids" bumper sticker was not well received?

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 21h

Excuse me, you all need to be as obsessed with this Little Guy as I am:

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Suzan the chalant goth @sillysyntax.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is a truly lovely store! Didi and staff are wonderful and look at all the great books they have! It's already Iconic! Thank you for being so hospitable. I'm having a great time. 💜🙏🏽

Shelves filled with SFF books! This is only a small portion.

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Michael Busch @michael-w-busch.bsky.social · 22h

Per @chanda.blacksky.app: I would like it if scientists did not refer to their machine learning projects as "AI". Because it takes me a while to read through a paper and confirm that it is not about using text generator slop in place of actual science.

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Cathy Newman ⚜️🐘 @cenewman0.bsky.social · 22h

Devastated for the Fort Hays community about the closure of the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, and this letter from the univ president makes clear how dramatic reductions in state funding leave universities with no good options viable long-term. www.fhsu.edu/news/2026/09...

fhsu.edu

To the Fort Hays State University Community

I need to share a difficult decision with you, and I want to be transparent about how we arrived here, what it means, and who ultimately holds the power to change the path we are on.

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 22h

Well that's just absurd, it's just not reasonable for it to be this pretty?

A view of a road. The sky is cloudy, the mountains covered in snow, and the trees a frankly ridiculous shade of gold.

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 23h

one cool thing about teaching an upper-level course i've designed myself is when i'm like "hmm idk if i can lecture on that confidently", i can just invite one of my friends to guest lecture and we *all* get to learn something new

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 23h

take two on students heading out for fieldwork. the plane took off more or less on time, so now we just need to see if they can land by the time they get to the island or if they have to turn around 🙃

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 23h

Make that 4:30-6:30. Drexel board gets there at 5. Based on info we currently have.

a pachycephalosaurus is MAD under the words "emergency protest today Demand Drexel Disaffiliate. Constitution center, 525 arch st Tuesday Sept 29, 4:30-6:30

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

🚨🚨Emergency protest🚨🚨 The Drexel board will be at the constitution center in Old City (525 Arch St, Philadelphia, PA 19106) from 5-6. We're asking Drexel to disaffiliate from the Academy of Nat Sci to allow them to negotiate what's best for them w/o Drexel interference. Be there.

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Katie Phang @katiephang.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A case that isn’t getting the headlines it deserves: an LSU student was raped by an LSU football player. He admitted it, but the school is still letting him play football. How multiple systems have failed this young woman & why she went public to get the help she needs: youtu.be/LihN7hsNKnw?...

youtu.be

SHOCKING College SCANDAL EXPOSES Stakes Of Trump’s DANGEROUS AGENDA!!

YouTube video by Katie Phang

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Richard Waite @waiterich.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We scream into the void. We stare blankly into the abyss. We post into the ether

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Well there's another brand I've gotten stuff from in the past that I'll be skipping in the future 🙃

An ad from the dog clothing company Spark Paws, showing a human and a border collie in matching unicorn-themed hoodies. They're sitting on a carpet of disconcerting genAI leaves, too evenly spaced and with a different set of perspective and scaling than the figures. The shadows are wrong. The dog looks stressed, presumably because they are trapped in some sort of digital feywild and can't escape.

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Raven Amos (Autumn Edition)🎨🐦‍⬛ @alaskanime.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Heads up, #science people, this "Earth BioGenome Project/Genomes on a Tree (GoaT)" uses generative AI extensively in their advertising, so I would definitely not trust anything that comes out of this. If they can't be bothered to use real graphics and make their own posts, I doubt their app is good.

Screenshot of a post from "Earth BioGenome Project" bluesky account advertising a new "science app" that has "we vibe coded the shit out of this" stink all over it. The post shows two slides, one which looks normal-ish with text over the top of slices of different photos of animals, plants, and fungi. The other one is definitely generated by some kind of Gen-AI steal prompt. It shows a goat in a lab coat by a weird looking "tree" and for some reason there are infographic type logos above sets of text, something that gen AI loves to do when "creating" slides.

The text of the main post reads:
How do you coordinate a global genome-sequencing effort? Before starting a new genome, researchers need to know: What's already been sequenced? What's underway? And where are the gaps? That's where Goat — Genomes on a Tree — comes in. Explore GoaT.

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Markus Eichhorn @markuseichhorn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"I didn't know anything about X so I asked chatGPT." You still don't know anything about X. You have read what a sophisticated summary-generating tool predicts as the answer to your question. You have no critical insight, no direct experience, no awareness of the underlying evidence. Stop talking.

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L. D. Lewis, Sea Witch Apologist 🧜🏾‍♀️ @ldlewiswrites.blacksky.app · 28/09/2026

Periodic reminder that dropping a note telling a writer you liked a thing they wrote takes like 4.5 seconds and recharges our batteries for 27-28 hours a pop

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And exhibit 284028 in why you need to double-check the AI summary:

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Andrew Horn, allied and relatively proud @bbofun.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

My scottie, Bailey, has a doctorate in aroothmatic.

A handsome black scottie, being stretched under his chin. He wonders why the hand holding the camera isn't involved in the skritching

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

as usual the focus is on sports but as someone working in higher ed, my more immediate concern is "how is this going to impact harassment protections for a particularly vulnerable subset of the population"

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Dr Katie Twomey @k2mey.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026

This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

*stares at my fridge* I have never seen content more completely unrelatable to my life

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The main reason you haven’t heard about campus sexual violence in a few years is because Trump and SCOTUS have made it much, much harder for survivors to come forward. You might vaguely remember that Title IX was a big battleground in his first term. And that we lost.

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C. Bukowski @thishurt.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Y’all this is the baseline Loki needs in order to avoid being euthanized. Please boost this as much as possible. I’m a hot mess right now. There is no way I can cover this from my disability and stay housed.

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I just finished this collection and y'all need to go purchase it *immediately*

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 27/09/2026

There was a time when social media was actively useful to me as a writer because I could think out loud and yes we might disagree but aside from batshit right wingers, it was pretty chill But now people are wound up and feeling powerless and taking that out on each other

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Michael Busch @michael-w-busch.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I keep encountering people describing text generators being used to "review" research proposals and papers submitted to journals. There is no way to do that and simultaneously fulfill the obligation to keep the contents of proposals and papers confidential.

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

one cool thing about reading old records is when you glimpse a very human moment across centuries. these three sisters all got married within weeks of each other in 1818- not super weird, but unusual enough it caught my attention. i wondered if there was a reason.

three records of the brides of a series of marriages. They are Barbara, Theresia, and Anna Maria, the daughters of Georg Weninger and Elisabeth, neé Robl (or Roblin, with the customary feminine marker used in the area on the surname)

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Carrie-Edmund Laben @carrielaben.com · 28/09/2026

*they're not wrong to be outraged. Some of the proposed solutions are bananas. Boycotting eBird will not in any way hit Cornell where it hurts; if you really want to punish them you should probably use it twice as often. It's not a profit center.

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CG Partridge @partridgecg.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

For the morning crowd....

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Doing the overnight filtration step now, but initial results for the cedar-apple cider are extremely promising

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Elizabeth Hargrave @elizhargrave.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

ICYMI - come birding with me in Colombia Jan 11-20! 🦜 Please share with your favorite birder/ Wingspan fanatic 🫶

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

As a nerdy high schooler, I would bemoan how we didn't have tracks for students to "skip the useless stuff". As an adult working in STEM, I recognize that going to an arts magnet school from grades 7-12 was absolutely critical to developing the creativity and critical thinking I use daily.

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Today's canning: First up, alpine currants and local Manchurian apricots (the latter from the farmer's market)

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Emily Lakdawalla 🏳️‍⚧️ Uranus Expert @elakdawalla.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I’m looking for book recs for my 17yo. Urban fantasy or near future sci fi with action and adventure. Doesn’t need to be YA. Female protagonist would be good. Any suggestions?

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

So I went to the Eastern European market again and found something I think will make this next batch of cider absolutely incredible:

A small bottle of syrup with a cute little label. Translated, it says "Taiga Cache Cedar Syrup. Golden magic of cedar syrup: call of the ancient forest"

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Dr. Az Klymiuk @klymiuk.ca · 27/09/2026

A gentle nudge to some of my colleagues.

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Professor Goose @thundergoose.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Biology is AMAZING! This is a microscopic wasp. The wings have a distinct shape because at this size air resistance is different.

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 27/09/2026

If you’re good at history, that doesn’t mean being able to reel dates off the top of your head. It means being able to articulate and understand both sides of a conflict, and coherently argue how that led to to present situation

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 27/09/2026

the world would be a better place if all science students also studied history- and I don’t mean “memorise the list of Presidents/monarchs”, I mean “here is why people have fought and killed each other in the past and how that ended up for everyone”

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Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

i thought i was having a stroke because suddenly none of the words in this birth record book made sense and then i realized they'd switched from Latin to Czech, and the handwriting is hard enough to read to begin with that i hadn't initially noticed 🙃

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