iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Matthew Perpetua @fluxblog.bsky.social · 22h

my master list of playlists laying out a history of alternative rock has expanded again, now up to 47 fluxblog.substack.com/p/fluxblog-4...

fluxblog.substack.com

Fluxblog 493: a history of alternative music in 47 playlists

My ongoing project of exploring this history, covering 1965-2019

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

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The book creaked, stiffness in the leather skin of it complaining of disturbed rest. The rind of dust and soil that had built on its pages crumbled and fell away to the ground as each stiff and brittle page was turned. The ink had faded to illegibility, the thoughts recorded as lost as the names of those who recorded them, but pressed between them, dry and preserved, she found the leaves she was told were there, impressed in the dead book like silt-buried fossils.

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Sometimes my wife and I like to send each other text messages as though they’re democratic fundraising messages, and I believe she has produced the jewel of the form.

, it's
and I
have some personal news to share with you.
Being a mom is one of the greatest joys of my life, and I feel deeply that we should have salad tonight
This year has been challenging in many ways, and I have immense gratitude for the kindness and support of family, community, and people like you who have continued to stand by me through everything. It means the world, and I wanted you to be among the first to know that squash is in the oven and kale is in the fridge.

As many of you are aware, ve been navigating one of the most challenging periods of my day while waiting for dinner.
Facing baseless federal hunger brought on by not eating since lunch, fighting for the working kids of this country, and now caring for a mean toddler and helping him grow up in a world that isn't always easy. But it has also reminded me exactly why I do this work and who I do it for.
I will never stop working to eat dinner. I will never stop fighting for what is right, even when there is also some feta in the fridge. And I will never stop being so very thankful that you are by my side in this important work and that there is tahini in the pantry for dressing
With love and gratitude,
stop to end

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

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She’d gathered up the cables draping from the access port in her head and gently twisted them into a knot above their ingress, plastic and rubber and copper facsimile of a ropey coiffure. She lit a gasper and let it burn dangling from her lips like a stick of acrid incense to cover the smell of adhesives and plasticizers coming from her newly manufactured parts. Updates and diagnostics trickled over her brain. There was nothing to do while this happened. Just hold the moment in stillness while the body repaired. She’d once heard Le Chevre talk about the fine ladies he used to know taking a spa day. She’d never been, but she imagined this was close.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

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It was unworldly, the smell coming off them. The bags had been built well, tough stitching, heavy canvas, but they reeked like they’d been stored in a basement where some mad scientist was running breeding experiments to create a strain of dank that could beat Superman. After a few washings in hot water and some liberal application of Febreeze the stank was finally conquered. Keep trying, Dr. Mold. You’ll get him yet.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

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Beneath her it thrummed its combustion heartbeat, metal flesh of it rattling in its rivets like an anxious animal. They will be here soon and she will be ready and the beast she piloted will be given the release it wants until all are satisfied.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

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A rind of salt had grown on the timber pilings of the beach house. It was full of furniture and dishes and linens, all waiting to welcome the people who would not come. They had moved out by way of abandonment, leaving the house to soak in seawater unattended. Darkening wood cladding under the tenancy of the tide that had moved in.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I am often happy to find out that a show I'd like to go to has been sold out because it means that the acts I like are doing well and I don't have to actually go through the ordeal of attendance.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

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It stood in the yellow beaten-down grass wearing the shape of a man. Invisible under the suit’s layers, something pupated within. Growing and burning and metamorphosing the contents, contained within the armor that had meant to keep it out. At once the stillness shattered and the helmet came off with the grown thing erupting, yellow and orange, like a fungal gout of flame where the man’s head had been, black spores rising in a plume above.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

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She lingered and admired her dim reflection in the reflective gloss of the vending machine. Lips peeled back, she checked her shiny dental implant, each day as if for the first time, as if she had not performed this same ritual half a dozen times a day each day since she got it. Each time it went the same way: she started, mouth open, as though searching for some bit of food caught in the gaps, or some blemish in the surface of her lustrous chrome teeth. Then when none was found, she ran the meat of her tongue against the edges and surfaces of both rows, stopping to dance on the tips of the fangs she had specified in her order. Then lastly a false, grim, rictus grin that melted genuine. Inspection became admiration, and she couldn’t help but smile back at the pretty girl with the shiny silver teeth flirting with her from the other side of the machine’s plastic surface.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

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Somewhere distant in the night the fireworks went off. Celebrations of some unknown thing far away and flashing lost in the cloudcover, making no dent in the blackness. For him it was no sign of joy, just the percussive echo of it like the work of hammers on stone. Penitent works, unseen in the dark.

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Russ McSpadden @peccarynotpig.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

BREAKING: Armed and masked agents of the U.S. government have invaded the sovereign Tohono O'odham Nation.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

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Most of the world had gone grey and still. Snow fell, windless and glittering and diffused all the light that remained in the world into the opacifying air. It drank up all sound and brought limits close. Footsteps crunched at the volume of cannocannonnfire, but could not be heard beyond a few paces. It was perfect for the work to be done required solitude. No one to witness.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Introduce yourself as what almost killed you. Hi, I'm a van full of buddhist monks.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

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All his life he ate what he’d been fed. Through diligent study he’d discerned the most virtuous practices and held his pride within him that his life was without moral failing. There were other choices he could have made, but he navigated between them as stones of lesser harms on his life’s river, unimpeded and free flowing. He had seen others ruin themselves there, watched them make lesser choices and their infirmities were their reward for their moral failures.
He performed his daily exercises, both strength training and cardio, he ate only the finest, purest, most simple unadulterated foods. He fastidiously rested and slept, drifting when his body said to drift and pushing when it needed to push.
But it happened to him anyway. Small, incidental wounds on his skin took longer to heal. His joints made themselves known in quiet ways they had not before. The lines between rest and wakefulness blurred until the day was no longer so discrete, but a gradation. One day he woke to a pain in his ankle and it was not alarming. It had happened before and he prescribed himself rest until it healed and no longer hurt as he had before. But that day never came. Pain was just something his ankle did now. Neither rest nor diet nor exercise remedied it. Doctors simply recommended that he take pills, anti-inflammatories, but he knew better that this was only a mask, a cope, some way to live with the pain. He had done nothing wrong, he had lived a virtuous life, and his body betrayed him.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

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My sharpest memory of sex ed was the very beginning of it. The boys and girls were separated to receive their own lectures. I don't know how the girls' lecture went, but the boys were treated to the following:
A greying man stood in front of the classroom. None of us really knew who he was, except that he was the guidance counselor. I don't now remember his name, but I think it began with a Z, or maybe his name was "Zhe" or something. Whatever, he was basically a total stranger is the point. Class had started and uncharacteristically, the room full of boys was silent waiting for it to begin. He held that silence for a few moments, then began his lecture:
"PENIS! PENIS! PENIS! PENIS! VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!" he shouted in that blood-freezing dad-found-his-expensive-electronics-broken-and-he-knows-you-did-it voice, then was silent again, waiting for a reaction from us that did not come.
The idea was, as he went on to explain, that we would need the maturity to not laugh at those words. We didn't on that day. But as an adult when I look back on it, a complete stranger yelling "PENIS" and "VAGINA" at a room full of children like he was accusing them of crimes is objectively hilarious.
I never thought to ask any of the girls if they faced the Spanish Inquisition on their side.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

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Day crept grey and hesitating from some point on the horizon. Thin light bloomed iron grey on the groundfog, some silent work still in progress unnoticed by those with enough sense to slumber still. James stepped through it, her feet pulling through the cold sucking mud. She did not know where she was going and daybreak did little to help, scattered and thin, making a large dim cataract of the world. Might as well have my eyes closed, she thought, but spoke only in muttered curses.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

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It was in there somewhere, described in circles and numbers and lines on inscrutable diagrams. It was all levers and fulcrums enough to move the world all locked under the cryptic codes of learned men and the secret languages they speak with each other to keep interlopers like her out.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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It was heavier than she’d thought it would be. Heavier than she’d remembered. If she’d remembered. It was a decade ago, hauling it up the stairs, and though she remembered the day, remembered the selection process, laying for a moment on each mattress in turn and imagining the years ahead and all the time spent there, a life together, and would this be the one to keep me or is there some imperfection or lacking that cannot be negotiated away. It was a commitment, not unlike a marriage, buying that mattress together.
She may not have handled it at all on that day it was laid in their new joint bedframe. It may have been him alone doing all the lifting and arranging, inspired of some spirit to prove his manliness and win a battle that had already been won and recently, to state by action over again that this was the way forward. What she’d wanted. This man, this mattress, this house, all.
That was then. She now lay the mattress upright against the worn siding. Naked and showing its age, fraying, stained and scarred, unhealed nights of bad sleep heaped and readable on its surface. A vigorous love here, a frightened child’s comfort there. Stains layered like an elevation map. All left now for the garbagemen to take away.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

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It lay in the street where they’d left it. Flames crawled up its form and ate its frame and stuffing, beaten back at the top by the guttering of oily black smoke overflowing the effigy’s cavity where it could find egress. Before the procession, pilgrims had taken their turns inscribing the thing’s skin with curses and sins and grudges and confessions and all other invisible burdens they wished not to carry anymore, weary of the company of their pain. Now all gone. Erased in carbon and ash and carried to the heavens for the gods to do with what they wished.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

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They walked hand in hand, dressed in the same cream-colored cloth with bland floral designs like an accordion of paper dolls made of castoff wallpaper. If not for the skirts on the girls there would be no way to tell them apart from the boys at that distance, uniform height and hair between the four of them. They sang lightly and shined brightly in the morning sun on their way, wooden heels on their shoes a galloping cadence on the pavement. And when the doors of the church closed behind them it was quiet again.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

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It had been left in a hurry, abandoned while the vat was hot and liquid and never reclaimed. She had not been the first to find it. The dust settled on the now solid surface bore the wounds of hands and tools where some previous prospectors had tried to mine it for purpose or vandalism. Pieces of the glasstone flowed from the broken kilnform, green and jewellike, precious and rare now. Half manufactured.

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G. Willow Wilson @gwillow.me · 11/07/2026

Somebody (Rebecca Onion) didn't read the books. If they read the books, they would know the Black doctor is in the books. He nurses the Ingalls family through malaria. He's based on a real Black doctor who lived near the Ingalls family in Independence, KS, REBECCA ONION slate.com/culture/2026...

slate.com

Netflix Woke-ified Little House on the Prairie

The 2026 adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel departs from the source material in big ways.

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Levi Fleming @leadpipe.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

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It was beyond redemption at this point. Heat-blistered metal had intermingled with the overcooked oil laminate finish into a carapace wound ringing the basin of the thing that would neither be repaired nor healed. He’d thought it merely dirty and scrubbed until fire ate at his shoulders and his fingers were raw and the steel wool ablated away and washed down the sink while the pan held steady. Fatigued and in defeat, he set it near the garbage can. Doomed for its offense. This is why grandma said never to buy aluminum cookware

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