iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Passed a car on the highway today with a full-width decal across the rear window reading, in fancy script, “pull the trigger Budd Dwyer.” What is the message here?

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 06/10/2026

the main thing I have confirmed: I Love Jimmy Stewart

my top ten list so far. honestly, click the link in the first post if you want to see it

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 05/10/2026

Found a stump that looks like a guy

A weird looking decayed stump that looks kinda like a face.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 04/10/2026

Look at all these tomatoes my neighbor gave me

A whole bunch of cherry tomatoes, in various states of ripeness

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

i know i don't need a fifty dollar baseball cap. i know.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

korine's list itself is just a Google Doc that serves as the, uh, backend, kinda, for this whole thing, but it was important to me that the 'rating' experience be fun, easy to do on a phone, easy to do with keyboard controls, etc. it mostly does the thing!

a screenshot of the wzrdz.cool ladder. dominated by a poster for LAURA (1944) and CROSSFIRE (1947).

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

My partner's been watching a ton of movies and I've watched a bunch with her. She's going through all the Oscar BP nominees chronologically. She's giving them star ratings, but I thought it'd be fun to make an ELO ranker to more precisely rate them. My ladder: pictures.wzrdz.cool/pictures/lad...

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 25/09/2026

“Shout out to Acton, MA!”

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 23/09/2026

a throwback to the best picture of my dog (small, in a coat) getting stomped by a dog named Bash (large, mighty)

a snowy day in a field by the woods. there is one dog, Imbiamba Jombes, who is small, tan, and wearing a coat. His face is scrunched up and his eyes are closed, and the other dog, Bash, is jumping over him. One of Bash's mighty paws is on top of Imby's head, hence the scrunching. Bash's mouth is open in trumph.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 14/09/2026

those fingerprints of the hands of entropy on a signal become aesthetically desireable through nostalgia, yes. and we see it with digital art, too; there's a reason that chiptune and glitch art are so close. i always think of Brian Eno's quote on this topic...

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 13/09/2026

Your “don’t use a phone, dummy” page made me lol

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 08/09/2026

pictured: paul and his "harness"

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 07/09/2026

The audio works pretty okay, and the Addition selector works. Almost no animations, but the skeletons are rigged so that's something that _could_ be done. The model looks dumb but is recognizably inspired by Dart, but definitely looks worse than the original model.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 07/09/2026

the humble potato, what's better than that, I had a pierogi from this psychopath last night for the first time and it was a treat

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 06/09/2026

Only after establishing the parameters - can an observer distinguish a male interlocutor from a female one - does Turing move to machines. And his claim is that "can a machine fool you into thinking it's a woman" is less ambiguous a question than "can a machine think."

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written,
or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating
between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an
intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator.
The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as
"I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man
can make similar remarks.
We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this
game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as
he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace
our original, "Can machines think?"

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 06/09/2026

The full essay is only 20 pages and worth reading - courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/t... - but the first page is the relevant bit. Turing seeks to move away from the unfalsifiable "can machines think" (smart) towards a "relatively unambiguous" question:

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the
'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an
interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the
other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other
two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the
end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The
interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:
C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?
Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and
cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:
"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 06/09/2026

in Slay The Spire 2 news, I've been doing what I call "Round Robin Streaks," where I have to win as each character at Ascension X in a row in order to 'clear' that ascension. Today I finished A4 with a fun Regent deck: sts2.wzrdz.cool/runs/doceon/...

a deck list for a Slay the Spire 2 deck. Regent, focused on creating a load of stars and then Stardusting.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 04/09/2026

Easy, open-source, and it gives me a home for the half-finished Godot 3d FPS port I've been pecking at. I am most charmed by the ascii version :)

a screenshot of a Godot port of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Here's a hobgoblin and a hand axe and an interface, more or less.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 04/09/2026

Is Matt Lucas wearing a Titanium Court jumper in this episode of Taskmaster?

A picture of Matt Lucas, a bald comedian, in a jumper that looks like it might be from Titanium Court?

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 02/09/2026

Without saying your age, what is your favorite movie that came out when you were 20 years old?

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 02/09/2026

love to see all the cool towns up top here

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 31/08/2026

Ever seen WHAT'S UP DOC (1972)?

Barbra Streisand in WHAT'S UP DOC, eating a carrot, looking awesome.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 29/08/2026

the best we can hope for:

A scene from Futurama, the animated cartoon. Bender Bending Rodriguez, a Bending robot, looks sad and is wearing a black veil over his eyes. Professor Farnsworth, who is ancient and has glasses with lenses that are easily three inches thick, is comforting him. On the far side is a small monkey in a suit and a hat (the hat makes him smart).

The image is captioned "All those times I said 'kill all humans,' I'd always whisper 'except one.' Fry was that one!"

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 28/08/2026

myaku myaku, I myiss myou.

Myaku Myaku again, this time facing forward with his reflection, faintly, behind him.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 28/08/2026

just can’t stop thinking about him…

Myaku Myaku, a weird little freak and the mascot for the 2025 World Expo in Osaka. He’s a blue guy with a red thing around his face, and he has a bunch of eyes.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 26/08/2026

Certainly possible; the NOT I Mouth is a good deal less sexy. But the lips against a pure black background is definitely suggestive, particularly with the theatrical serendipity.

The Rocky Horror mouth, bright red. Lower lip is bit, sensually?

Billie Whitelaw's Mouth from Beckett's NOT I. Mouth is open, against a pure black background, mid-scream or laugh.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 26/08/2026

Someone’s just happy to be a part of the discourse.

Clanker, a giant rusty animatronic shark thing from Banjo Kazooie. His mouth is open and his eyes are fixed and vacant.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 23/08/2026

The most important feature is highlighted below:

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 20/08/2026

Maybe! This is in the Contents section of that site, which lists Poledouris as the author of the foreword and Heine as the author of the notes. Not sure, though, and I will enjoy listening tonight in any case.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 20/08/2026

Yeah, inside of the Fable chat it does show what sources it used for its brief (there are 88 of them so not easy to share here.) Thanks for the interesting question, though; I’ve been watching a lot of old films, so this will be interesting to trace :)

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 04/08/2026

1. Book I've read the most: All-time is probably still HATCHET, which I probably read a dozen times a year all through elementary and middle school. In the last 5 years, it's the Scholomance trilogy, which I read once a year as a treat.