iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 3h

Monkey’s Paw curls: they become the kind of Warhammer fans who think the Imperium of Man are unironically the good guys.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 3h

Damn that’s cutting, as someone in the Willamette Valley suffering from lack of access to good bagels.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 4h

The house at the address in the screenshot appears from the outside to be a remarkably unremarkable McMansion, like the sort of thing the owner of a successful local car dealership might buy. Wouldn’t be surprised if neighboring properties are also his though.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 4h

I’ve heard liberals argue that compromise with the right should be done for its own sake. Even if the left gets enough power to not need any compromise, they should compromise with white rural conservatives anyway to “heal the country.” Immigrants and trans people therefore lose no matter who wins.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 16h

This is just 20th-century fascism with a half-assed Homeric coat of paint.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Today I learned that the “most woke outlet on the planet” is … DuckDuckGo’s AI summary bot?

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

God I have this problem. Hair got way thinner and curlier. It’s a steeeep learning curve.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

It’s like this everywhere and I also hate it. I’m in a pretty progressive city out west and you only need to drive 15-20 minutes out of town to start seeing psycho Christian nationalist yard signs.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Now you’re just making me remember the insane Richard Dawkins “Claudia” post.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

This makes me think of the people who were awfully excited to find a supposedly unproblematic slur in “clanker,” even making up versions that dissolve all pretense like “clanka.” There’s no way you can do that and not make me wonder what other words you wish you could say.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I think she's a good example. By all accounts she's very impressive in smaller group settings when she can display the policy and negotiation chops she's good at, but she does not have the sauce for connecting with voters that Obama or her husband had.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I'm actually not talking about the issues so much as the requisite social skills. The sort of charisma that you need to get people to sign checks at a fundraiser and the charisma that gets a crowd amped at a campaign rally don't have a ton of overlap. The latter is optional, but the former isn't.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The answer is that the trait being selected for in successful politicians isn’t rhetoric or an ability to connect with voters, it’s the ability to solicit campaign cash from wealthy donors.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Read the Silmarillion but most identified with either Fëanor or the late Númenorean kings.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

They’re just fruiting bodies sprouting up from a vast fungal network of billionaire patronage.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I bet you eat metamorphic rocks and stuff with fossils in it. Real ones only eat carbonaceous chondrites that haven’t been altered by billions of years of planetary geology.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

“Fellas, is it gay to be so powerful that you can culturally and economically dominate your rivals without firing a shot?”

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

An AOC candidacy in 2028 would amplify these conflicts a hundredfold, and the pressure on the left to subsume itself into a broader liberal coalition supporting her would be tremendous.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Gen Z probably has it even worse than us but we’re barreling towards “retirement” age much quicker.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If a bunch of Boomers all retiring at once and drawing down pension budgets is destabilizing, Millennials all becoming too old to work but in desperate need of assistance is going to hit the economy like a train.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I’m 36 and dealing with insane drama because I got stuck with wildly incompatible stranger housemates because I can’t afford my own place. I’d hoped college dorms were going to be the first and last time that happened, but apparently that’s just how my life is.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I once got asked by a (cis male) nurse if taking estrogen could make you pee blood.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Only inside this post’s light cone!

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I usually feel a sense of pride in my willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt, by holy crap some people really do not deserve it. This is a post about pronoun use, among other things.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

IDK I’ve met so many Harry Potter adults in real life that its prevalence online is extremely unsurprising. Think people in their 30s who talk about how much they want to visit the theme parks. The initial marketing blitz produced a lot of people captivated by nostalgia even 25 years later.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Meanwhile if some random homeless person is found murdered the perpetrator is usually never caught.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I’m definitely sensation-seeking to the point where I’ve tried a lot of that shit and do things like mountain climbing for kicks on the weekends. For whatever reason I’ve always been able to step back, as in “I’ll do it again but no rush.” So I think it’s more about escaping than just sensation.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Checking in as a caffeine self-medicator after my shitty insurance refused to cover slow-release stimulants.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Not only did I pull an all-nighter writing a term paper with my own brain, I got an A on it too.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My 2004 Toyota Matrix that I bought this year cost me $1000.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It’s basically cult social isolation but mostly self-inflicted.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It’s all going to come down to the merchandise. HBO will take a hit, but the parent company gets paid whenever my local grocery store sells Harry Potter-themed Halloween candy.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah it turns out she can’t write a movie script to save her life.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I’ve never heard that term for it but I have heard Riley’s Law: “Once you post transphobia, you never post normally again.” www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?t...

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Ooooh boy I personally experienced the “you’re the nicest least toxic man I’ve ever dated” alternating with “that criticism was very sexist of you.” I don’t even think it was intentionally manipulative, but that brand of relationship toxicity is definitely how you hard-boil an egg.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I work at one and steadily declining sales are obvious to everyone.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Don’t worry there are looots of other opportunities for that.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I live in the Pacific Northwest so I think trans women might have actually been a solid majority of the audience when I went.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I watched it with a big group of trans women and that was all of us, along with laughing our asses up. Not sure there was a cishet person in the entire theater.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Notably however, you can’t expect to fire your staff and replace them with consultants and not suffer catastrophic losses of institutional knowhow and competency.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I think it gets a pass on “slop” because it was first, but it’s on other fiction to not repeat LOTR’s biggest mistake over and over. It’s also worth noting that Tolkien himself eventually recognized that he screwed up by making orcs uniformly evil sentient beings with no hope of redemption.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Meanwhile my trans ass is over here wishing it was that easy.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Pretty sure that was a joke agreeing with you.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Not really? I feel like most of the completely unhinged “everyone who died in the Cultural Revolution had it coming” types aren’t here, unless they all have me blocked. Twitter is full of them though.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

To be clear, this isn’t nearly on the same level as the rape factory thing, but if you look at basically any facet of campus life there’s probably a fraternity or sorority somewhere making it worse.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is always wild to me because if there’s one thing most Americans fucking hate it’s their health insurance. The big thing is most voters are outrageously risk-averse and hate change.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

They’re sources of other forms of rot on campus as well. At my alma mater several frats paid bounties for copies of exams so that their members could cheat by studying from them. This led to students attempting to steal stuff from classrooms and incentivized non-Greek students to also cheat.

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