iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

bsky.app/profile/jmro...

000

Ok, I never went that far. But I was earthship curious.

My mom made money after college tutoring Pitt football players. Marty Schottenheimer was a gentleman, but Mike Ditka was an arrogant prick. I owe it to her to report her truth.

How many sketches do you want me to post? I did the fucking insolation calcs.

120

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain, That we could sit simply in that room again. Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat, I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

JRoth @jmroth.bsky.social · 14h

I’m sincerely annoyed how close-run some of my intuitions are around this stuff. Nothing anti-vaxx or woo, but this sort of back-to-the-land, market-rejecting stuff still tugs at the part of me that loved Walden* and sees that ‘70s solar hippies were right. *yeah, I know, I don’t really care

130

JRoth @jmroth.bsky.social · 14h

Oh yeah, that’s a good one bc it’s something we all recognize as magical thinking, but for us it’s derogatory, while for Caesar it’s clearly laudatory. No earthly power would question him punishing them, but he believes in powers beyond the earthly.

000

JRoth @jmroth.bsky.social · 21h

Yeah, that's a great bit.

JRoth @jmroth.bsky.social · 21h

Best reason to live on Mars is to be free of Elon Musk, but...

021

JRoth @jmroth.bsky.social · 23h

Weds morning I was field measuring a Hindu-owned convenience store for some plumbing drawings, and tucked in a closet, on a shelf behind the CCTV monitor, was a tiny little shrine, complete with incense stand. Certainly more Roman than Christian.

000

JRoth @jmroth.bsky.social · 23h

I remember when everyone on Bluesky said that Dems were going to lose VA-Gov & NJ-Gov bc Spanberger & Sherril didn't talk like this, and then they won by 15 & 14 points. It was 12 months ago.

000

JRoth @jmroth.bsky.social · 23h

I saw that as I passed by on Friendship and almost took a hard left just to savor it.

lynchinginamerica.eji.org

I'm not sure a generation that struggles to believe drivers used paper maps is going to be moved by what their great grandparents maybe* witnessed. *ppl have over indexed on "lynchings weren't only in the South." 5 recorded lynchings NE of Baltimore over 73 years.

Explore The Map | Lynching In America

Over 4,000 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950.

100

I always appreciated the bit in "Rome" where Anthony accuses Caesar of playing at religion, and Caesar, with full seriousness, tells him he's not playing at all. Julius is meant to be slippery, and at that moment, the audience loses grip entirely bc *we* assume it's play-acting at religion.

3151

Ostracization seems like a pretty clear example of this: utterly alien to a modern American individualist, completely normal to Athenians.

030

Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

"Nobody alive has seen this" isn't the same as "never before," but it's effectively the same. See how Nazis have revived globally as the WW2 generation has died out.

140

Reposted by JRoth

Wow! Texts are super rare for the Hittites, basically there’s just one archive and it’s 95% lists of prayer sacrifices to mountain gods, so this is really, really exciting!

201604388

So the birds didn't do it, but if they had: you just know we'd call it human-like behavior, instead of accepting that humans doing it is bird [animal]-like behavior.

We, er, they catch strays all the time.

Each denomination is just her in a different hat.

❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.ﾟ✿ ⋆ @sababausa.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Reposted by JRoth

Wow, Walter Nixon was appointed by LBJ in 1968, he’s still alive, and at 98 if he were theoretically still sitting on the federal judiciary today he would only be the 2nd oldest sitting federal judge en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_...

en.wikipedia.org

Walter Nixon - Wikipedia

062

Hilarious asterisk on that last one.

000

I've never given a dime to Defector, and never even considered it. I certainly don't regret that. This i their whole vibe, just as surely as The Onion under Collins.

090

ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 08/10/2026

"oh, thank you! I was always insecure about that, but you're the first to mention it."

000

Reposted by JRoth

Participatory make-believe — that is, not believing in something as a group, but rather believing in imaginary things as being more real than reality — is the root of fascism as a system of belief and a way of knowing about the world. This is why so many occult and cultic milieus flow into fascism.

1234

Yeah, the most cynical possible reading of those states' motives—for 50+ years—seems to be the correct one. "I would do anything for Palestinians, but I won't do that*." *integrate the displaced, center a 2-state solution, accept refugees when literal bombs are falling, root out Hamas

Wannabe Apparatchik @apparatchikwannabe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Reposted by JRoth

the presumption of victory is also where you get all of the glazing of “the resistance” by tankies, no matter how bad the actual military situation is, because these people axiomatically believe that their chosen sides are on the verge of a total, world-remaking victory which will justify everything

0973

Reposted by JRoth

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Caitlin Flanagan viciously attacked a friend of mine for being sexually assaulted. She’s the scum of the earth.

1247952

Flying Tigers one of the rare instances where the stories understate the amazingness.

000

Once Judge was off the postseason roster, there was no plausible path. Like, maybe they go 5, they have good pitching, but the offense wo Judge is bottom third in the league.

So I don’t disagree as such, and I don’t have strong data center feelings, but I will say that one thing we’ve learned about housing affordability is that small margins matter. Cities with ~no pop growth have housing crises bc of the difference btw 90% vacancy and 95%. Just a little crowding out…

041

I can take the exuberance or the incoherence (those roofs!), but not both. I want to cross a bunch of shit out with red marker.

100

Funny story: after dinner, I checked the score: 4-4. I showed my wife, told her that so far every game where a team scored 4, they’d won, so this game would finally break that. Then I noticed that there was a challenge on the play….

000

1. this totally sucks and I’m sorry it happened to you 2. The last time I was in this situation was pre–universal cellphone, and I’m now remembering the agony of having no idea whether I’d been stood up or there was just a snafu with no way to communicate. 3. Seriously, I’m sorry.

Sam Lloyd @llamsoyd.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Reposted by JRoth

great bit by major league baseball that the 19th, 24th, 28th, and 30th highest payroll teams are going to be four of the five squads still standing tomorrow, given that the whole sport will shut down for 2027 because owners have brainwashed everyone into believing teams like them don’t have a chance

29033

I try to be open to the myriad expressions of human creativity, but sometimes I just have to say: what the fuck, man.

FWIW, a friend of mine just posted a picture of herself at a chalkboard 20 years ago. Caption is that she was working on a problem that OpenAI solved last month. In fact, OpenAI cited her thesis. Doesn't seem to be nonsense.

TBH it always felt like a lot of people wanted to anoint him after, like, 3 seasons. OK, that's an exaggeration, but I bet that you could find "Hall of Fame" mentioned in at least a few articles from when the Bosox signed him.

000

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And was Daj on the desert island?

000

Reposted by JRoth

SC because not trying to pile on, but Chesa was (in part, not monocausal, etc) successfully recalled by SFPD sandbagging. I personally know people in the city told by on duty cops “sorry can’t arrest this obviously dangerous person threatening you, due to the DA”. Like, it worked.

1234024

Need to start assigning remedial MTV videos from the 1980s to these people.

Yeah, this is the thing: the world is full of secure jobs that don't require a degree, but they're not very high status, a lot of them are femme-coded, & they don't pay like email jobs. So those jobs just don't count for these ppl who imagine they're owed deference, a good paycheck, *&* a pension.

120

*I don't even mean the literal fact that he likes Andrew Lloyd Webber, I mean that his very public persona, for 45 years, has never been anything rock-adjacent. As a NYC celebrity, he never hung out with Billy Joel, let alone a Ramone. Nothing rocks less than a rich guy in a suit.

120

Today I drove past an HVAC company or something that had a rock out front painted with "Trump rocks," and aside form the cringe of it, I just couldn't get over how obviously untrue it was. Nothing about that man rocks*, but his fans just ascribe good qualities he doesn't have to him. It's delulu.