iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

It‘s apparently considered a modern masterpiece by a lot of younger film people, which enhances my general feel of living in a completely separate material reality from most under-thirties.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Yes! He’s great, one of the stars of Potter Park.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It‘s a weird thing to have to know and explain to the sort of person who claims the company is going to collapse next week because of some rules quirk they find offensive.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The scale of How Bad Is This Sports Scandal tops out at “Brian Knows About and Has Opinions On It,” and, boy, do I ever.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Yeah, I have three things like this because my car dash starts up with giant red alarm X’s unless all of the back seatbelts are buckled and there is no other way to make it not do that.

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Reposted by Brian Solomon

Azure Emerald Empire @azureemeraldempire.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

John le Carré, “The Uncle Who Worked at Nintendo”

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Ford and Fisher’s performances were both huge drags on that movie, IMO. They felt exhausted and weirdly out of step with the rest of the cast/overall tone of the film.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

I maintain that “the Jedi were Galactic Space Cops” was probably the greatest conceptual sin of the Prequels, tho it’s obviously one of many. So, so many.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

If I ever win Eternals, it’ll be on the wishlist.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Fun fact - that model exists because I lost a game!

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

(well, I guess a limited number actually *live* it, but it seems like a common self-image fantasy)

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

I feel like this is kind of a common Type of Guy in both the Administration and the general Trump/MAGA orbit.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Maybe the best single-sentence summation of the past year and a half that I’ve seen yet.

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Reposted by Brian Solomon

Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

hawks will be like "you really believe in negotiating a joint comprehensive plan of action with Iran? that pales in comparison to my strategy, winning a war of regime change" and then not win a war of regime change

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Everyone exists in different but somewhat overlapping cultural spaces and etc., so who knows, but I absolutely think that “Hey Jealousy” is that song more than “Creep.”

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

It’s kind of tough to extract, because the Imperium isn’t really “fascist” and doesn’t actually have a lot of overlap with the real-world goals of modern fascists, but they’re of the same phylum and share a lot of surface traits and the slogans all work together at a glance.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

I am personally easily sold on the idea that Orks are better than human because Orks are very funny.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

It is an argument over the specifics and arrangements about the contents of a void.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

This has ended up in a weird feedback loop where fans become the creators, and GW itself is necessarily attentive to fan meta-discussion, and so now this cultural football game over what the Imperium “means” is enmeshed in the setting even though the truth is that it never really “‘meant” anything.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

To an extent, yeah, but I always think of this as a very fan-ish mistake, viewing “the Imperium” as a thing that needs to be rooted for or against. It’s a place and a setting and essentially the air that characters breathe. It isn’t meant to be interacted with in big idealistic terms.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

It is difficult and maybe silly to think about in retrospect, but the return of actual, crushing global authoritarianism wasn’t something people worried about directly in the 80’s 90’s, and a lot of things created in that timeframe touch on those concepts in a way that seems more meaningful now.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Anyway, skip to 25+ years later, and 40K is now both 1) a huge global IP, and 2) suddenly, unpleasantly relevant in a lot of ways. Neither of these things were supposed to happen, and both of these concepts are very often just plain orthogonal to the whole spirit it was created in.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

(please enjoy the three or four sentence fragments strung together awkwardly and occasionally repetitively there, oops, gotta edit before posting…)

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

The “it was originally satire” thing isn’t, I think, just isn’t very strongly true. 40K has always *contained* satire, and the Imperium’s been used to express horror at brutal authoritarianism, but I don’t you can’t really look at any era of the setting’s development and say that was a big driver.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

I have a lot of long thoughts on all of this, but the core thing here is that the creators of 40K weren’t interested in narratively judging the Imperium, likely because it really didn’t seem particularly relevant at the time. It was basically just a big vehicle for making fun minis and flavor text.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Roboute Guilliman torched billions on Colchis alone because the Emperor told him to. He exists to create galactic engines of order that are oiled, as needed, by human blood. Then he wakes up and is all “oh, boo-hoo, there’s purity seals, how could this happen, a-bloo a-bloo.” It’s sorta ridiculous.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

I really think this doesn’t work well. It’s clearly GW trying to metanarratively say “no, no, the Imperium’s bad and we think it’s bad!” but the big differences between the imagined future of the pre-Heresy Imperium and the actual 40K Imperium boils down to “it has some religious trappings.”

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

This is pretty much exactly how I got a gig doing a comic strip for the student paper during college, but I figured that’s the highest you could go with that tactic.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Man, that thing is pleasant. Just a nice mini all around.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Fairly sure it was a long time before that. I read his college blog way back in at least late 2003-ish, and I think even by then he was already against it in retrospect.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Might be misremembering something from over twenty years back, but I strongly recall him having already turned against the war *way* before he had any kind of major public profile?

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Reposted by Brian Solomon

Peli Grietzer @peligrietzer.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Helen of Troy looking like Lupita Nyong'o is incredibly unlikely, would require a black swan event

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Yup! The manager then took me aside to ask if I was threatening him by walking out with you to your car.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Remember how there was a entire management position that existed specifically just so what happened to you wouldn’t happen, and yet

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

God, that whole saga. That whole fucking *place*.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

It does also have some reprises that likely don’t reflect well on it by inevitable comparisons. “Buried in the Red” is not “The Hounds,” or anything near it. “Light’s Last Stand” doesn’t approach “Will of One,” tho I have come to love how gonzo it is within the context of their catalogue.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

I dunno, think there’s some (“Hold Back the Night” has been out for like ten years and still gets stuck in my head), but Act III is definitely focused on the Rock Opera side of things. I’m real curious what Act III pt2 is gonna be like, in that sense.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Huh! Most everyone I know who likes Protomen stuff loved it. (I’m included, here, tho I think it gets notably weaker in the second half)

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Don’t know this for sure, but It sorta seems like the commercial success of the Garfield collections created a boom for comic strip collections in general? They existed before, but I don't think they were as widespread, comprehensive or regularly-released until the 80’s.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

I hope you’re right. Seriously. It’s very hard for me to square that with the way police in the Twin Cities responded to Derek Chauvin’s arrest and conviction, tho.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

This is true, but I honestly have trouble believing that there’s any amount of violence or law-breaking - so long as both are directed against left-coded groups - that would dim the sense of respect and camaraderie that rank-and-file cops feel towards ICE/CPB.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Love how often that social media people I follow for completely unrelated reasons turn out to be fellow Warhammer nerds.

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Brian Solomon @lexingtonnet.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Allowing for the breadth of human experience and etc., but it seems unusual for people to hold much truck with their tastes and convictions at age six beyond the age of, say, eight.

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