iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is illegal levels of adorable. I'm reporting you to the Internet Police right now in fact.

Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

"Don't think 'like a deer but bigger', think 'like an elephant but smaller'" is a sentence I remember seeing somebody write about moose at some point too.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Relatedly, people often don't realize how titanic moose are till they see one up close, or towering over something they know the size of. A coworker at a previous job said something like "your brain can't process what it's seeing at first, because it thinks a moose *can't* be that big".

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I can see this if say, they've only seen cows at a distance with other cows, but saw a hog up close. The different distance plus the lack of a direct reference in one case but not the other warps your sense of proportion. (Then you see a dog in a cow pasture and go "tiny dog or huge cows...?")

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

(I saw an "Active Bees In Area" sign in Phoenix once, at the old Papago Amphitheater, but I don't know if that's specifically about Africanized bees.)

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

In reality they don't seem to have wanted to go much further than a little past the southwestern deserts and southern Florida, and even there they appear to be limited in how numerous they are.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I vividly remember a map in Weekly Reader in the mid-80s predicting "killer bees" could eventually reach as far north as southeastern Virginia, where I lived at the time. (That was actually the far northern extent of the range marked on the map.)

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The funniest thing about that movie (and a lot of it is hilariously awful -- Amtrak passenger cars *exploding* during a "bee-railment" being a notable high point) is the disclaimer at the very end:

Disclaimer at the end of Irwin Allen's _The Swarm_ (1978): "THE AFRICAN KILLER BEE PORTRAYED IN THIS FILM
BEARS ABSOLUTELY NO RELATIONSHIP TO THE INDUSTRIOUS, HARD-WORKING AMERICAN HONEY BEE TO WHICH WE ARE INDEBTED FOR POLLINATING VITAL CROPS THAT FEED OUR NATION."

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Passcode lock, not biometric" has been standard protest advice since at least Obama's second term when federal courts started ruling on it.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Use a burner, and don't take photos or videos while you're there" has been standard advice to people attending protests since at least sometime during the Bush II administration.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

In the US (and as I understand it, most of the Five Eyes) inspection of phone contents is becoming routine for border entry, immigration enforcement and any police interaction more weighty than a hi-how-ya-doin' at the corner store.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Herzog as a party clown, shows up in street clothes and no makeup. "The most hilarious absurdity is the numbing mundanity of human life itself; I could not come close to plumbing that darkness. Here, everyone take an axe, destroy some possession you love and revel in feeling the pain of its loss."

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

In flashback we find out that Agent Smecker had encountered this man's work before, and his inability to solve the string of cases or understand the mind behind them was the first nudge toward the path that ultimately led to renouncing his work in law enforcement to help the MacManus brothers.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Boondock Saints 3: The brothers must take on their deadliest opponent yet, a man who sees his own criminality as a means of survival, but an ultimately pointless one in the face of inevitable death; as a result, no impulse toward self-preservation or fear of moral judgment inhibits him.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Aw, but the original name had such delightful comedic possibilities of its own. "Where are you starting college in the fall?" "Oh, I'm going to WAIT." "For what?!" "I dunno, chemistry of some kind." "Well that seems pretty vague to hang your future on!"... etc.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

To partially balance the scales, though, there *is* a Slaughter Rec Center at UVa.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There's a dentistry practice in central Maryland run by a Dr. Toothman. (Actually, it's a second-generation family business, run by a son who worked in his father's practice and took it over when the senior Toothman retired.)

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Or _When the Wind Blows_. "You know the guy who did that cute little children's picture book, _The Snowman_? Did you know he did a whole other animated movie as well?"

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

These days the memory of Riyadh Solar Time seems to exist mostly in the tzdata file and in the documentation of the pytz project.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Apparently, depending on how you read the directive, it could either mean the time changed slightly once a day, or *continuously throughout the day* (i.e you would have to make many tiny adjustments over the day).

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

You joke, but for a brief span of years in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia implemented "Riyadh Solar Time" -- the time changed every day such that 00:00 every day was at sunset in Riyadh.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Wisconsin hosted some truly oddball "concept" buildings back in the day, like The Gobbler: www.lileks.com/institute/mo...

lileks.com

LILEKS (James) :: Institute of Official Cheer :: The Gobbler

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I just looked that up and one of the examples on the web page I landed on (after obvious ones like medical and scientific instruments) was "shipping containers containing depleted uranium shielding" -- a thing I would not have guessed needed to exist, but I assume there's a good reason it does.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Me, to one of the dogs: "You know my entire existence isn't just to pet you, right?" Dog, while I'm sitting on the couch letting her stretch up and lay across my shoulder: "Disagree."

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Artificial Banantelligence.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Your cat is clearly Captain America, eternally getting back up one more time no matter how hard your refusal to feed him early knocks him down. Eventually he will discover he is in fact worthy to wield the hammer.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I bet they forgot to put any raisins in it too. (no, I'll never outrun the thundering herd of outraged Southerners I already hear converging on my location, but it was still worth it)

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

(It is still an open question to my mind why a man born in NYC and raised on Long Island sings a song specifically about a place called "Allentown". But if I had to guess, it clearly involves a man named Allen in the real-estate business...)

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So anyway, it wasn't until (I believe) I got curious about where in the UK *specifically* Billy Joel was from, that I discovered my decades-long error on interpreting "Piano Man".

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

(Now, before any Brits reading this laugh too hard about silly things Americans believe about British pubs: have you looked at some of the silly things you lot *actually do in them*, lately? Michael Bentine's sendup of pub sports, the hilarious "Drats", is only just *barely* a work of fiction.)

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

How and when did such a practice arise? Well, my guess was, probably after World War I, with lots of orphans, widows, and men unable to make their old living due to war injuries around. Community efforts at not just letting them die in the gutters must have arisen, I supposed.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Clearly this song was about a musician fallen on hard times, reduced to performing in pubs, where some quaint British custom regarding the poor has been invoked: to keep him from starving, the customers of the pub ensure his jar is filled with (literal) bread by the time he goes home for the night.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I also was not familiar with the slang term "bread" meaning "money" until, let us say, my late 20s. As a result of the foregoing, I had a very... unique interpretation of the song "Piano Man":

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So it's important to understand that for whatever reason, I thought for a long stretch of my life (my early teens until say, my early 30s) that Billy Joel was British, possibly from the same general area as the Beatles.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Now, you need to know that in my younger days I often had only the haziest idea where any given celebrity was from. E.g. I was certain (for years!) that Mick Jagger was from backwoods North Carolina (until in my late teens I found out about the British Invasion and that the Stones were part of it).

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Apropos of nothing but my own flash of memory, let me relate my personal tale of Generations Divided By a Common Tongue:

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I mean honestly, given the origin of the name, this is not an inappropriate way to talk about them IMHO.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Also the "no assholes rule" in business. No asshole is so brilliant that their output is enough to compensate for all the productivity they destroy in the rest of the workplace.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This was literally my first thought (well, I guess I should now say "my forebrain's first thought"...) when I saw this article.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Appeasing Cat Piss Man is never the correct call -- not for your shop, not for your other customers, and honestly not for him either.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Meanwhile untold legions of would-be customers are not coming in after they reach their personal Cat Piss Man saturation threshold. Some number of them are quitting patronizing comic shops entirely because *every* shop seems to have a Cat Piss Man.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

These guys are a drain on comic shop patronage and therefore on the shop's very existence as a purveyor of fine sequential art, but many comic shop owners suffer from one or more GSFs and simply will not address the issue. And it's not that Cat Piss Man doesn't know: he does, he just doesn't care.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"Intensely socially maladjusted" here can be a lack of basic hygiene (the notional cat piss reek), always "accidentally" bumping into female patrons in a way that is clearly cover for a quick grope, droning on constantly about how awful Liefeld's run on his favorite title was, or who knows.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Every shop seems to have that one customer who for whatever reason (he was the previous owner's best friend, he buys notably more comics than average, he used to be cool 20 years ago, whatever) is allowed to continue coming in despite being really intensely socially maladjusted.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I remember reading an article by a comic fan, aimed at comic shop owners, about what he dubbed Cat Piss Man, and what was laid out was very much a GSF1 scenario.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Boy, for a publication that traditionally considers itself the media avatar of the Internet age, Wired's own website sucks absolute ass at really basic stuff like "I want to change my subscription address so the print magazine still gets to me after I just moved".

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Dad taking the win as soon as he sees it.

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"Agentic First! We can destroy other workflows later."

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Joe Thompson @kensey.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Having now done the Google text search, I am in fact glad I did not click the "Images" tab.

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