iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A lot of cheaters rationalize it as actually making things more fair. Yeah I cheated a little but I deserved to win because... - he was just getting lucky rolls - his list is OP - that's really where I meant to put my piece anyway - everyone forgets that rule - I got screwed last game

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

On the other hand, one of its preparatory steps is quite important to include in a comprehensive set of instructions and I missed it: ensuring that the fasteners are open/loosened first.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My experiences with pants in the world? I've worn and also seen many pants and my experience says that the brief sentence described would work nearly all the time. (zip-in-back pants exist, but do not make up more than a fraction of a %). Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

On the other hand, if we accept a certain small error rate, we can do just fine. "The front has the fastener. If no fastener is present or if the fastener is on the side of a leg, the back has the tag." I bet that works for well over 99% of all pants.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If the goal is just to write instructions that work, can't you just specify that it is to be done standing up? For the second, that's exactly the sort of issue my wife brought up. "Deciding which side of the pants is the front" might require more steps than the rest of the instructions combined.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My wife points out that you first need to orient yourself. "Start by standing up." Also that writing the orientation step for any particular pair of pants is easy, but writing it for all extant pants is much harder. "The zip is at the front, except when it isn't."

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

3 or 4 depending on the pants. I think each of these could be written as discrete steps, comprehensively. 1: orient the pants 2: legs in 3: pull up (If necessary) 4: fasten

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Reposted by Jim McGarva

lumpley @lumpley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

15 years ago when Apocalypse World was new and people were beginning to understand and work with it, it was seductive to look at "acting under fire" and see, not one basic move of several, but the template underlying all the game's moves. Like @kierongillen.bsky.social 's classic gag:

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Dungeon World has a lot to answer for. Not that it's the only culprit, but the broadening of "act under fire" to "defy danger" and making that a move you can use for anything with any stat is a direct precedent for later even-sloppier pbtas.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Obviously cost is a whole other thing. The price of it is criminal.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's not gone! Yes, profs have had to make compromises to the way things have changed, but that's mostly on the grading side of things, and mostly in the big required classes. The higher up and the more niche you go, the more you will find profs still being rigorous and engaging your curiosity.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The valar got mad when Melkor wanted to change the tunes. In the sickos version, what music did Melkor want to play?

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It truly is just a bad translation to begin with. They took a phrase that made some sense in Latin and translated both words wrong.

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Reposted by Jim McGarva

John C. Brady @jcbrady.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Literally the only visible form of energy, but, sure, whatever.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The article says that people claim not to listen to country because they want to signify their middle class status. Instead of the obvious - they just don't like it. Most people don't. Most people don't like punk either. Most people don't like most genres!

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The article sets up this dichotomy that working class people listen to country and middle class don't. But Country music is a minority taste across every class. Most working class people live in cities (as do every other class), and rural/urban has a lot more to do with musical taste than class.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The article author doesn't know what working class means and that ignorance is putting in a ton of heavy lifting. It's the typical "The guy who owns the ATV dealership is working class but the barista isn't" bullshit. Most working class people do not listen to country! The premise is wildly wrong!

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

If you want this to be a slow speed residential street, replace a couple of the lanes with trees and bike paths. Force the traffic back onto the actual arterial road. My street has parking on both sides and cars have to slow down to get past each other. That's also 40 km/hr. How are these the same?

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Very frustrated with Mississauga designing major arterial roads and then posting speed limits on them as if they are small residential streets. This four-lane divided highway has a posted speed limit of 40 km/hr. Yeah, right. Of course everyone on it drives 65!

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

You just need to make sure your AI agent understands when you give it a big ol' wink. "But your honor, I specifically told it not to hack into the bank and erase all records of my debt."

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Going to need to see a source on this. Oh, the source is "a tiktoker said it happened?" Great. Totally solid, no need to investigate. The entire editorial board needs to weigh in on this thing that is definitely not made up!

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

You're right, it's obviously written to make people picture a young woman. Is it even a real thing? Sounds like they're making up a girl to be mad at. "Movie-bros are bringing big buttery bags of popcorn to job interviews and talking about Goodfellas!" No they aren't, that's just rage baiting.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Did you know that when they emerge, their proboscis is in two pieces? I just found out! Looks like two separate proboscises and then they stick them together into one.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Second one just a couple hours behind! Time to pump up those wings and fly south!

A monarch in the act of emerging from its chrysalis. Its wings are very small, its abdomen dangling beneath.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Maybe, just maybe, they aren't arguing what they actually believe... The "debate" might just be some kind of tactic...

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Imagine if they got their way. Imagine they set up a third category at the Olympics in every event and then fully one third of Olympic gold medals went to trans athletes. A third of NBC's Olympics coverage were trans athletes with trans commentators. Think that would make the transphobes happy??

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Turns out you don't even need to pass kindergarten to be a ceo

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Clearly the negative effects of social media are being counteracted by the positive effects of widespread underage gambling.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

When my kid needs $20 to go to McDonald's with her friends...

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Talking to your friend who "doesn't know actors." Hey, they made a Wuthering Heights adaptation starring Barbie and Frankenstein's monster.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Trying to do this is hard. Some people are good at it, many people don't think about it. It's made way easier by already being plugged into some community and having a kind of social seed to grow. If a person shows up with no social connections but a killer premise, I don't think they get noticed.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The thing I'd put alongside premise is not mechanics but actually a kind of community feeling. People buy games for social reasons. You can make people feel like they are part of a movement. You can snowball an IP's existing popularity. You can make it about status: "people in the know play this."

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I'm really not trying to disagree with you! First thing I said is that there is a lot of truth to it.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I just mean that the premise of a second edition is usually the same as the premise of the first edition. Yet obviously many people who own the first edition will buy the second. There must be something other than premise driving those sales.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

So, what you say has a lot of truth, but if that was all there was to it, we'd never need a second edition of anything. There would be no retroclones, no OSR. There would be one Marvel supers rpg instead of however many... Premise is the thing most-easily borrowed from any game.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The problem with a big tent is people want to vote for something. If your tent includes people for trans rights but also terfs and bigots, anti-zionists and zionists, people calling for a billionaire tax and others for tax cuts, what do you offer? Vote for us and we will squabble and do nothing?

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

HDMI cable from your computer and a Bluetooth controller? Or is the distance too great?

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Reposted by Jim McGarva

Matt Weiner @mattweiner19.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

If they broadened their science fiction reading list to include Ursula K. Le Guin, maybe they'd run across "The Matter of Seggri": How you play is what you win.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I didn't savescum, so I got the canonical ending where you kick a garbage can and die. Kinda wish the game was longer, only lasted around 30 minutes.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

If every paper both supports and fails to support every hypothesis depending on the p-value the reader chooses, then every experiment will have the same results. It's the end of the replication crisis, huzzah!

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Altering p-values after data analysis is definitionally p-hacking. He's actually advertising that you'll be able to p-hack other researchers' results after they publish. Wild.

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Reposted by Jim McGarva

TANG @kjredux.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

"it's critical that I denounce this film without seeing it, but before you object, my reasoning is that I need to for the sake of propaganda."

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Roko's basilisk mogged by Russel's teapot

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Almost there! We had to pull up some milkweed where we were doing work in our garden, so we saved all the caterpillars we found and took care of them until they pupated.

Close up: A monarch butterfly chrysalis attached to a piece of cardboard wedged in a jade plant.

Zoomed out: 4 monarch butterfly chrysalises attached to pieces of cardboard wedged in a jade plant.

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Jim McGarva @jimbozig.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Most voids are fruitless. bsky.app/profile/jimb...

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Reposted by Jim McGarva

paul @ptfen.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

the web sites have got worse

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