iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 27/09/2026

A finger, hovering over the screen. Do I tap like? The post is perfect as it is.

Obama meme post about a post having only two likes. The post itself only has two likes.

Maybe this post will only get two likes too

John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 13/08/2026

“irony is the order of the day at the Obama Center.” @katewagner.wehwalt.net nails the eerie feeling of visiting. Our ironic moment: our visit led us to discover the Osaka Garden right next to it. A 130 year old, exquisitely designed (free to visit!) gift from one of Chicago’s sister cities.

A bridge over the water at the Osaka garden in chicago

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 18/07/2026

“It’s 480 BCE, our Spartan warriors have been beaten by the Persians and everyone is talking about Homer’s Odyssey. It’s 2026…”

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 27/05/2026

I highlighted a bunch of passages when I read @tricialockwood.bsky.social’s No One is Talking About This years ago, and every now and then one will pop up again and I am forced to pause and sit in awe of just how perfectly she puts her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

Politics! The trouble was that they had a dictator now, which, according to some people (white, they had never had before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been having, constantly, since the beginning of the world.
Her stupidity panicked her, as well as the way her voice now sounded when she talked to people who hadn't stopped being stupid yet.
No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 05/05/2026

I’d start a professional whack-bat league

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 02/05/2026

Incidentally, it’s one of the reasons why Michael Frayn’s Noises Off continues to kill every time it’s performed even though it’s over 40 years old and arguably overdone. Frayn recognized that the act of constructing a farce machine is itself a machine. He created a farce about performing a farce.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 02/05/2026

Farce is one of my favorite genres because when done well, it’s superficially silly but underneath is a profound exploration of the human condition. It’s enjoyable the way people enjoy watching those intricate rolling ball sculptures. The intricate mechanics that all make weird sense together.

A rolling ball machine with lots of people standing around it

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 19/04/2026

Ursula K. LeGuin, in the afterword to A Wizard of Earthsea. Wowee.

A Wizard of Earthsea
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might.
Or does might make right?
If war is the only game going, yes. Might makes right. Which is why I don't play war games.
Ursula K. Le Guin

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 18/04/2026

@visakanv.com‘s description of good work having “an idea in the car” echoes the feeling of reading a lot of AI writing. The human impulse towards efficiency strips all the dynamic life from the writing. Lots of interesting parallels between the photocopier and LLMs as well, prob not a coincidence.

xerox'd flowers °
When my work does well, it's usually because the idea was driving. But then I get cocky, or arrogant, and think, "I was there. I was involved. That was successful. should drive this time." And it doesn't work, because there's no idea in the
car.
visakanv

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 26/03/2026

@visakanv.com “The lotus of my optimism grows out of the mud of my despair.” 🔥 It’s like the serenity prayer for the person blessedcursed with an overactive mind.

The lotus of my optimism grows out of the mud of my despair. And really, someone with a blissfully charmed life probably wouldn't think to make a big fuss about being optimistic and prosocial and so on. They'd just be that way naturally. It would be something that they'd take for granted. I don't take mine for granted, because I had to fight for it.
Visa

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 08/03/2026

(Re-)reminder to stop writing for everyone and write for someone instead, whoever that someone is for you (for me). Via @visakanv.com

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 25/02/2026

Are we talking about people writing stuff in books today? Sweet! That means I can share one of my all time favorite poems: Marginalia by Billy Collins

Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page–
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil–
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet–
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 02/02/2026

Nothing could honor the legacy of Groundhog Day more than deeply understanding its pointlessness and honoring it anyway

3 posts

The definition of Groundhog Day as a situation in which the same or usually negative or monotonous experiences occur repeatedly is the bread.

A post explaining that the groundhog doesn’t actually see his shadow but a person receives the message verbally is the meat.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 09/11/2025

I’d make this trade any day

Zohran sign saying “two wheat for one sheep”

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 22/05/2025

Michael Keaton reboot: Multiblipcity

The poster for Michael Keaton classic, multiplicity

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 21/05/2025

Alt text won't be able to do it justice, but the italicization in this section makes @chuckwendig.bsky.social's point best. Generative AI is not writing. If you want to see what writing looks like, check this out. This is writing with a capital WRITE.

Here’s the trick, though —

These people are, unsurprisingly, rubes.

Because they misunderstand the fundamental problem with generative AI, particularly when it comes to using it for informational services —

AI doesn’t know anything.

I’ll say that again, a bunch more times, because you need to get that:

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

AI doesn’t know anything.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 18/05/2025

Be wary of taking parenting advice from anyone, esp someone on the internet, but @visakanv.com is speaking to the “Not sure I’m ready” question. Whatever you think your limitations are, you’re probably wrong. Parenting shows you reserves of strength, grace, and patience you didn’t know you had.

Visa saying having kids turns you into a morning person the way being chased by a bear turns you into a running person

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 07/04/2025

i'm sorry or you're welcome

the "put a bird on it" image from portlandia but b, r, and d are blacked out so it says "put AI on it." same vibes

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 31/03/2025

Most software interfaces do something close to this, highlighting one choice with a different color However, there's a subtle distinction: - the software version signifies what the software maker wants you to do - the real world version signifies what others in your situation have done

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 28/03/2025

There’s a throughline in these 3 seemingly disparate @visakanv.com tweets: specificity. Lots of latent fears prevent people from being specific: - of loneliness - of rejection - of failure Counterintuitively the opposite is true. Specificity makes connection, acceptance, and success more likely.

people tend to think "It's unrealistic if not impossible to make a living doing what you love" because their model assumes you're not going to talk to 100,000 people
but once you have a decent-enough product that even 1% of people like, then it's just a matter of distribution

whenever I try to put together some kind of
"master resource" it almost always ends up being overwrought and tedious
when | write something like a personal recommendation doc for a friend, it almost always ends up being useful for other people and way easier to share too

imo: if you email an author about a very specific bit of their work, and tell them a short story of how precisely that work affected you, and the before/after of how that changed something in your life, you'll instantly be in the top 0.1% of emails they've loved receiving

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 24/03/2025

A gaggle gone gaga over Goggins gather in the Gogg-gang, agog.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 16/03/2025

The @skokielibrary.bsky.social makes me happy every time I step inside. Look how the shelves are arranged. Covers out! Yeah yeah, it would more efficient to arrange them spine out, but look at them! I bet so many more people grab them of the shelves

Interior of the Skokie library with glass light and books

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 01/03/2025

Any other Tom Lehrer nerds out there?

Wooden blocks stacked that say antimony arsenic aluminum selenium

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 12/01/2025

It’s the star for me. It’s misshaped for some reason (italicized???), compared to the Texas flag which it’s probably referencing. It’s not like they did it to align with the styling of the H. There’s a curve at the bottom of the point on the H which screws up the kerning between the H and ⭐️.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 20/12/2024

Noticing some throughlines between @jamellebouie.net , @isabelwilkerson.bsky.social , and Geo. Washington today (I’d tag that last guy but he’s not on here yet)

This, in fact, has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States - to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status. The purveyors of supremacist ideologies have worked in concrete ways to bound the two things, survival and status, together; to create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another.
Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed ...
Jamelle Bouie

A certain kind of violence was part of an unspoken curriculum for generations of children in the dominant caste. "White culture desensitized children to racial violence," wrote the historian Kristina DuRocher, "so they could perpetuate it themselves one day."
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson

One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.
Notes on George Washington's Farewe...
Lambert Strether

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 18/12/2024

A religious experience. And a very “I’ll have what she’s having” expression on the face of the girl sitting next to her

A girl at an Elvis concert wishing she was having the feelings of the girl sitting next to her

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 17/12/2024

30/ anyway back to the winners in the post-internet world... the reasons both sides of the smiling curve take all the value is because of the different ways they exploit the leverage the internet gives them

a drawing of the smiling curve from stratechery.com with writers and focused publications on the left hand side and google and facebook on the right.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 17/12/2024

28/ the idea of the smiling curve was first articulated by one of the founders of Acer, Stan Shih to describe how two sides of value chain in PCs (creation and marketing) had all the leverage (and would reap all the profits) vs. the middle (manufacturing) which would get squeezed

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 17/12/2024

27/ it can make a little more sense in graph form: the x-axis roughly means size or cost structure or position in the value chain the y-axis roughly means value captured, profit made, or simple "leverage" it's called the smiling curve, for obvious reasons 😁

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 16/12/2024

3/ I'm more interested in leverage in the sense that Archimedes (supposedly) used it: "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

archimedes picking up the world with a lever

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 14/12/2024

That long forgotten poke button was actually a really nice distillation of how to be on the internet. The things you poke, poke back.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 12/12/2024

Give me the final moment of Flat Pack any day. "Ah, this is heaven!" 😭

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 11/12/2024

🎯 "cool is a virtue if you define it as the brilliant shine of a life well lived, a smile on the face of excellence."

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 10/12/2024

Nick murray willis takes recordings of european football commentators at the height of their excitement and animates them: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDwd...

an image of a woman yelling at a man covered in filth: "Messy!"

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 10/12/2024

new slack font alignment just dropped

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 10/12/2024

i'm not a security person, but having done all sorts of trainings, compliance, password management, security keys, etc. no joke, this guy was some of the highest ROI i've seen

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 09/12/2024

This point from @visakanv.com reminds me of the classic @romanmars.bsky.social axiom: "Always read the plaque." Because they're both talking about the same thing: context. Context has always been important, but even more so in a world with the internet full of hot takes and context collapse.

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 04/12/2024

the top comment on black thought's 10-minute, one-take freestyle from 2017: www.youtube.com/watch?v=prmQ... so true.

a comment saying "this isn't the last time listening to this."

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John Stokvis @johnstokvis.com · 27/11/2024

Even the word “tweet” originated from outside the company out of necessity. The developer Iconfactory was building a Twitter client and needed a short way to say “post on Twitter”

The first tweet, made by Jack Dorsey, was made on March 21, 2006. It has the Snowflake ID of 20.
The Iconfactory was developing a Twitter application in 2006 called "Twitterrific" and developer Craig Hockenberry began a search for a shorter way to refer to "Post a Twitter Update." In 2007 they began using
"twit" before Twitter developer Blaine Cook suggested that "tweet" be used instead.

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