iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Anthony Strand @durwoodclapper.bsky.social · 5h

Scholastic sent me a whole box of paperback copies of Sorcerer’s Stone that I sure didn't order. When I asked why, my rep told me they're sending complimentary giveaway copies to random schools that do Book Fair.

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 1h

boosting my own jokes again because i accidentally saw them again and laughed again

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

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Jennifer/Aster Unkle 🏳️‍⚧️ @spookycutewitch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The longest discussion of Char’s Counterattack in the history of dining happened here

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Richard Perez @skinnyships.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Garbage Day

Illustration of Pokémon Trubbish and Garbodor

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

what if i made some kind of tri fold zine where the left side is things Socrates said, the middle is extremely similar in sentiment TV Guide letters, and the right is extremely similar in sentiment facebook comments

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nora "the tea kobold" rude (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 03/10/2026

(clasping your hands between mine) no. *we* have an *ourgrain*

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yeah I may use some of the stuff I've made for Born Into TV for my personal blog, since I'm also updating RSS manually. But I don't post a lot on it so it's not been that bad lol

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Oh my god I found it Okay I can save everyone on earth the time, nobody needs to watch Dallas 2012, you can just watch this one clip www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZBi...

youtube.com

Dallas 2012- JR: "I don't need more angry bird."

YouTube video by Samu

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

ok hilariously I was looking into XMLTV, a standard format for TV listings, and this is fate

XMLTV PROJECT
The XMLTV Project is a set of (mostly Perl)

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

i'm making a website documenting tv guide magazines, i stopped asking "is there enough of an audience" ages ago

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

people say that facebook is bad but it keeps showing me posts from some stranger a few towns over who is feuding with golden corral because they shut down abruptly and employees found out the day they closed down so who can say if its bad

A man on a ladder who has just changed the road sign in front of a Golden Corral to say "FUCK WINCHESTER"

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

why does the WaPo print headline on the botched TN execution read like The Onion

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Especially when you have people in 2026 screaming about WOKE!!!!!! but then you have TV Guides from 1981 like "the producers of Dynasty really like having a gay guy from a TV action group doing diversity consulting for their show"

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There's a lot of good (albeit short) articles in TV Guide over the decades, especially about social stuff like TV action groups, censorship, etc. That's the kind of stuff that is very interesting to me that I want to make more accessible.

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

lmao by the time i saw this notification i already saw the "blocked" but i don't have time for PR in my replies from anyone

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

yeah I hate how much time I've spent writing this code rather than filling the database, but that database is kinda useless unless it becomes webpages lol, luckily I've gotten the worst of it out of the way now

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I've been FORCED to organize and clean up some as I go, because some of it was just unwieldy or I needed it to be a bit more reusable than I was making it lol, but it's definitely in the realm of "I'm not worried about anyone else ever needing to make sense of this and don't need to get too clever"

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Essentially I want all of this to end up being kind of wiki style (but not a literal wiki), where you can click on, say, the name of a TV show or person and see all of the other coverage of that show or person in the database

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is also an example of what I want to do with the feature articles, this page was done manually but I'll be adding a lot more articles soon once I get these pages generating from the database I'm building (also it's a great read!) borninto.tv/tvguide/arti...

borninto.tv

TV Guide Archive | How The Gay Lobby Has Changed Television (Part 1)

From TV Guide Issue #1470 (May 30 1981 - Jun 05 1981): Homosexuals explain how the Moral Majority helps their cause -- and why they worry about an anti-gay backlash.

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So it's kind of in a proof of concept stage right now. If you want to see examples of what a more complete page looks like, this is sort of my test case: borninto.tv/tvguide/year...

borninto.tv

TV Guide Archive

Born Into TV TV Guide Issue #1470 (May 30, 1981 - June 05, 1981 )

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But I'm updating it fairly frequently, I took some time to just work on the static page generation because I want to keep it extremely low tech and simple, but it's too hard to manage all this by hand. I'm getting more and more of that done so I can start working on getting more data in now

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It started with my proposal to folks to watch the TV that was on the day they were born. I had a lot of people asking me to help them find specific scans, because while the IA has a ton of scans, they're a nightmare to navigate. So I got it online ASAP to give people just a list of the scans.

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I don't remember if I've been posting it on here but I am working on a project to catalogue TV Guide magazines, make it easy to find scans of specific issues, make it easy to find coverage on specific shows, etc. It's extremely, extremely not done, but it's online lol borninto.tv/tvguide/tvgu...

borninto.tv

TV Guide Archive

Born Into TV Born Into TV's Archive of TV Guide Information

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

we're going to have to start making uglier websites to send a signal to other human beings

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Me before: right now I'm just worried about getting all the data I want onto this site, I'll worry about writing good code or making it look nice later Me now: what if I just leave it this way forever because it at least makes it look like a project made by a human being and not AI slop

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Ben "Ben Pack" Pack @packbenpack.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Just four great movies about guys trying their best :)

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

At some point I'll put the db online because I want users to be able to do some really customized searches later. But right now I just want the info on there statically because especially with AI scraping, I've seen so many people's servers get hammered and I want this to be cheap and easy

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So essentially I had already kinda manually made some HTML pages in the early stages of playing around, and literally all I'm doing now is making it print that html but grabbing the actual info out of my database. Its not even online I'm just running a local database lol

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Is that what I'd recommend? It's absurdly hard to say, I didn't want to spend a lot of time looking around so there could be better choices certainly. But basically like I posted on fedi I am making quick and dirty code that just spits out what I need asap and am not worried about anything else

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I hilariously ended up building it in Perl, because I've dabbled in a million languages but don't code often enough to be married to one, and I was looking for something I could load mysql into quick and easy and saw something about Perl and went "well, I liked Perl 20 years ago, why not"

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Bobsession @bobservo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

me when i spend a nice day at home with my parrot

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Going to an event They ask for my press pass I hand them a 40 year old TV Guide and walk in before they can figure out what just happened

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

lmao I probably did! At least nobody from Cohost made me worried that I might get sued by them, can't say the same for some other sites I've posted about.

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Oh and Stripe didn't kill them or screw them over. Stripe's policies would not have let them do what they wanted when they first started the site. The wording changed, but the rules on what they wanted to do hadn't changed in that update. It likely just prompted them to notice.

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Anyway, the only thing that led to them closing down was they never found a way to make more money than they were taking out. That's it. How people felt about the site largely didn't factor in. More users wouldn't have fixed it.

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

But that last half year or so? They absolutely were REQUIRED to put those out. They said this! Their funding required them to do so! They didn't!

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Before that, sure, they didn't have to. But they kept saying they would. And kept not doing it. And then they'd say "oh we'll have it out soon". And not do one. And the numbers never really worked to begin with. It'd be a different story if they just said "we don't have time anymore".

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I guess we're discussing cohost again, people still think that the financial reports were not something they HAD to do, but if you had read those last few they did you would know that their last stretch of funding required them to release timely, PUBLIC financial reports, and they largely didn't!

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Anyway, if you truly believe that these Halloween candy needle stories are true, you should probably be rioting over the fact that the police do absolutely nothing to catch these people. Why do the cops support candy needlers? Is it an inside job?

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I wrote this thread on fedi and boy fitting it into bsky posts was a pain in the ass

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I also learned that there is a sociologist named Joel Best who has become the leading expert in hoaxes around Halloween candy, only because nobody seems to have tried to challenge that throne. You will probably see his name pop up in news articles about this. www.joelbest.net/halloween-sa...

joelbest.net

Joel Best - Halloween Sadism

Since 1985, I have been interviewed by dozens of reporters from television, radio, magazines, and newspapers. They often ask whether I have updated my research. Therefore, I am posting both my origina...

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

So, to recap: - Needles in Halloween candy? Completely made up for attention/pranks - Drugs in Halloween candy? Completely made up, either unrelated illness or someone trying to cover up a different crime

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wizardry variants kib @kib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

When it comes to drugs, the only cases I found were kids who got sick for unrelated reasons, OR got sick ingesting drugs that belonged to a family member who was trying to cover it up. ONE man poisoned his OWN kid's Halloween candy, but that's a very different situation than candy from strangers.

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