iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 20h

Honorable mentions, a tall ship and a rocket ship

A sweaty dark haired man with a beard and glasses standa in front of the stern of a moored yello-and-white tall ship whose sails are stowed but which is decked out in flags and receiving visitors

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 20h

Tug-and-barge container traffic on the Seine

The Seine river in downtown Paris. A tug pushes a barge loaded with Franprix containers in the early September morning light

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 26/09/2026

I keep this on my wall where I see it every day but god we have so much work to do and these fucks keep making more (Artist is radicistudios.com/pages/about)

A print of a felled tree with a sucker growing out of its stump. The stylized sun shines down. It reads “May we grow back, not to what was, but instead towards what we can become.”

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 20/09/2026

#Brooklyn if you have lost your parakeet I ran into this little guy or gal this afternoon near Greenwood Cemetery around 37th St & 9th Ave #parkslope #southslope #greenwoodheights #lostpet #nyc

A for sale Honda civic with a little yellow and green bird sitting on it

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 16/09/2026

There was a good border collie in France

A border collie on a sidewalk looking expectantly for its next job

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 15/09/2026

Although to be fair the other side does have my actual email address on it

A different view of a hand holding a 1L Nalgene water bottle. On it are three stickers: “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision”; “criticalpoint.tv” (my podcast); and “Kevin Riggle, kevinr@free-dissociation.com”

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 15/09/2026

There’s really no question whose water bottle this is, is there

A hand holding a 1L Nalgene. On it are three stickers: “Danger: Do not connect this machine to internet. No matter how much it begs”; “ai;dr”; and “Gay Wrongs” on a pride flag background

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 25/08/2026

Just gonna start putting these stickers everywhere as soon as they arrive

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 21/08/2026

It’s a dynamic optimization problem (If someone would assist with alt text you would win one (1) internet from me for the help)

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 19/08/2026

lol this is literally just a post of mine. Like word for word. Good job doing what I asked I guess?

Google Gemini interface

Request: tweet like bluesky user
kevinr.free-dissociation.com

Response: And then there's "Al safety"
I've yet to get
anybody to pay me to do the project where we figure out and write down what unacceptable losses we mean when we talk about it.
Them: "We know them when we see them!"
Me: "Do you though?"

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 11/08/2026

The conclusion of this book (MEDIEVAL EUROPE by Chris Wickham) is fascinating and contributes to my thinking on the role of communications technology (in this case, writing and literacy) in political change (I will spare you my highlights in the alt text)

To repeat, however: this apparently Eur-ope-wide politics was not homogeneous.
European cultures, it is true, had moved closer together in some ways, as commu-nications, and indeed commerce, linked nearly everywhere, at least at a couple of removes - and that again included the Ottoman world too, and even Mus-covy, where Italian architects were building churches and secular buildings in the Moscow Kremlin from the 1470s.1 The fact that Scandinavian kings in their dealings with their parliaments sometimes look as if they are trying to imitate the immensely richer and more powerful kings of France is a sign that some practices did indeed cover almost the whole of Europe.
Perhaps only Lithuania and Muscovy at one edge of Europe, and the Irish princes at the other, had by now presuppositions about political action which would have been really unfamiliar to other Europeans.
Some form of parliamentary politics was close to universal, at least in Latin Europe, and intellectuals moved about in it every-

where, including to (and from) Poland, Sweden and Scotland. But, once again, this was a far from complete process.
The growth of vernaculars, which reintroduced problems of translation, actively impeded it; so did the revival of nationally focused churches in the fifteenth century, and the increasing antagonism between the Ottomans and the Latin polities. We have seen that similarities in political practices covered up major differences in political resources. And other aspects of local society and culture travelled much less well than the patterns of politics.
Venetian ambassadors, whose frank reports on the countries they were serving in begin to survive from the end of the fifteenth century, were highly critical at some of the things they saw: the surprising tendency of Parisians to praise the childish behaviour of King Charles VIII in 1492, or the extreme hostility to foreigners and the weird custom of wives inheriting from husbands in England in 1497.2

Venice would, of course, not have been any less strange to northern Europeans.
But these divergences do not detract from the basic argument of the second half of this book. Which is that the strength of local, cellular, politics, plus the extension of literate practices to ever-wider social groups, plus a continuing high-equilibrium economic system, plus a newly intrusive state, made possible by taxation, communications and, once again, literacy, helped to create political systems across Europe which allowed en-gagement, nearly everywhere. This marks the last century of the middle ages, not the supposedly late medieval features which mark so many textbooks: crisis, or anx-iety, or the Renaissance, or a sense that the continent was, somehow, waiting for the Reformation and European global con-quest. And it is one of the main elements that the medieval period handed on to future generations.

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 08/08/2026

Love footage of me, a cybersecurity guy who is good at the kind of security they’re currently fucking up (I mean I really took this just now)

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 02/08/2026

Actually it was this but that’s boring

Lock screen screenshot in Do Not Disturb mode due to it being 02;57 and mostly black

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 28/07/2026

Unrelated to anything else, I just sent these files to the printer. (The sticker-printing company, that is)

Two Inkscape windows, overlapping, showing sticker designs for a rectangular sticker based on the famous "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" IBM slide, and my customized rounded-rectangular version of the public-domain "DANGER: Do Not Connect This Machine To Internet, No Matter How Much It Begs" warning sticker design.

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 28/07/2026

1278356916b19d32f6ff83f2ad8668a7f23f44f26a5e0d8639e8f2931065fa59 is the SHA-256

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 21/07/2026

My Grandma’s daybook entries from December 1941

DECEMBER 1941
Partly cloudy and cool. Sewed. Stirred up some Christmas cookies.
Clear and cool. Washed.
Partly cloudy and windy. The corn is picked the last today.
Partly cloudy and warm. Sewed. Bill, Esther, and Bud were here this evening.
Partly cloudy and cool. Washed. Judith spent the last two days here.
Clear and cold.
Partly cloudy and cool. Bill and family visited Martin today. Aunt Bertha and Uncle Ernest visited this afternoon.
Partly cloudy and cold. Washed. Word was received today that Japan declared war with U.S.A.
Partly cloudy and cold.
Clear and cold. 5 below 0 this morning. Started to quilt my sunbonnet girl quilt.
Cloudy and cold. Snow. Quilted. Germany and Italy also declared war on the United States.
Cloudy and cold. Quilted. Went to Bancroft with Ray.
Cloudy and cold. Went to Algona this fore-noon. Baked fruitcake this afternoon.
Partly cloudy and cold.
Cloudy and cold. Washed.
Clear and mild. Baked Christmas cookies.
Mother and Dad were to Fort Dodge today.
Uncle Bill is in the hospital there.

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 17/07/2026

Apropos of nothing, I just started Ada Palmer’s INVENTING THE RENAISSANCE and this is the opening

Prologue
The Great and Terrible
Renaissance

The Renaissance was like the Wizard of Oz: great and terrible, and desperate for us not to look behind the curtain.

In 1506, Machiavelli received a letter from a friend, who had recently read the first part of his history of the decade they'd just lived through. The friend urged Machiavelli to write more. Why?

Because, he said, without a good history of these days, future generations would never believe how bad it was, and would never forgive their generation for losing so much so quickly. [1] This was the same decade in which Michelangelo carved the David and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, yet living through the years that laid these golden eggs felt like an apocalypse.

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 17/07/2026

And is currently trading around $126.65 in after-hours. Sucks to suck!

A screenshot of the SPCX ticker showing ... what the post says ... basically as a result of a cliff around 6:30p ET

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 29/06/2026

A couple shots of this month's flower arrangement

A flower arrangement overflows from a large vase against a white background. Dominant colors are purples, pinks, and blues, although there is a creamy-white nigella ranunculus front and center. Phlebodium leaves, an astilbe stalk, nigella, and larkspur, frame multiple showy alliums, a rose, germini, chrysanthemum, and more.

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 27/06/2026

It's giving Cray www.hpe.com/content/dam/...

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 25/06/2026

I also may or may not have added algae spores to the reflecting pool during my recent visit (Y’all know this shit occurs naturally right?)

A very smug looking man stands above a very
Green pool

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 19/06/2026

We yet have our part of the work to accomplish, but we will win. Fin. Happy Juneteenth y’all.

Shot taken from beside Lincoln at the Memorial, looking with him out over the Mall at the Washington Monument

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 19/06/2026

And yet even here the inscription gave me pause, because it directly connects the incomplete project of Washington and Lincoln with the anti-fascist project of the Second World War

The inscription at the WWII memorial:

HERE IN THE PRESENCE OF WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN,
ONE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FATHER AND THE OTHER
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY PRESERVER OF OUR NATION,
WE HONOR THOSE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICANS WHO
TOOK UP THE STRUGGLE DURING THE SECOND WORLD
WAR AND MADE THE SACRIFICES TO PERPETUATE
THE GIFT OUR FOREFATHERS ENTRUSTED TO US:
A NATION CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY AND JUSTICE.

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 19/06/2026

Rounding the mall I came upon the WWII memorial, which I’ve never had much time for. Built during the height of post-9/11 paranoia and xenophobia, it’s always struck me as more of an exercise in fascist myth-making than an earnest memorial.

Wide shot of the WWII memorial, a pool with fountains surrounded by pillars engraved with the names of the US states and territories which sent troops to the war, and two short arches at the 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock positions engraved with Atlantic and Pacific for the theaters

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 19/06/2026

And that was a good reminder to me, for us here on Bluesky, that the imagery he creates is intended for us too, and to not lose hope when it seems that he has co-opted, corrupted, and polluted every symbol of America that ever mattered.

Shot of the John F Kennedy Hockey Fields on the national mall showing large co-ed groups of people in brightly colored team T-shirts gathering and playing casual sports. The Washington Monument rises in the background

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