iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The purpose of a system is not what it was designed to do or what its stated purpose is, but how it is used and what it actually does. The privileged bind themselves together by being sure betrayal would be mutually assured destruction. Often, women and children are the currency for this.

I think the salient insight for Bluesky is that the team running the place absolutely don't want to do community management because it's expensive to pay people to do hands-on work, and all their decisions are attempts to avoid having to do it with a safety kayfabe to appease media and regulators.

Yanis Varoufakis on Larry Summers

Hey, remember all the rich and powerful people who visited Jeffrey Epstein's island? Remember when Larry Summers, who corresponded with Epstein, directly asked Yanis Varoufakis to join their clique and explained the terms? lbo-news.com/2020/04/25/y...

lbo-news.com

More Larry Summers content. with him much in the news as a Biden adviser. From Yanis Varoufakis’s Adults in the Room, pp. 21–24: Determined to delay the serious business ahead of us a few moments m…

Remember the stories about blackmail stored in safes at the Whip's Office of the Conservative Party? Remember that every major party in Westminster has a Whip, whose job it is to make sure MPs vote the way party leadership needs them to?

Remember the stories of how British Prime Minister David Cameron stuck his penis in a dead pig's mouth while he was at university? Remember how all the powerful people who attended with him came out to say the story was clearly nonsense?

Bela Lugosi's Dad 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇵🇸 @belalugosisdad.bsky.social · 17h

Understand that the dominant faction within the ruling class (in nearly every country) are an alliance of powerful people who band together to benefit themselves above all others, and they cement the bond by exchanging blackmail, committing criminal acts together. Unrelated, Greek Fraternities...

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Reposted by LJ Amber

This is why I've always disagreed with the idea that "art" is purely subjectively defined. Art is a communication. The listener/viewer completes that communication in recieving it, but it is the intentionality of the creator that makes it art. "AI music" is no more music than traffic noise is.

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This stuff is really just a proxy for "Society would be better if we returned to high employment and mass union membership with a correspondingly fairer distribution of wealth," but it's filtered through the American inability to articulate these things as causes of what's desirable.

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Mainstream political consultants advising "left" candidates across the world make perfect sense when you understand their purpose is to prevent their candidates engaging in anything that might lead to class war. That's why ads like this are so rare, and so effective.

Being a moral person who commits to making society better and improving life for the powerless and then follows through shouldn't be this astonishingly heroic feat, but when your society's political body is rotten to the core it makes you a saint among devils.

Its a shame CDPR appear to be frequently associated with regressive social shit, because their generosity toward their players is genuinely pretty great. I played and liked the Witcher games, even with some of the juvenile guy stuff in them.

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But damn, the kids today have no idea just how deeply they're socialising on Hard Mode compared to twenty-five years ago. Growing up in the literal panopticon can't be good for them.

I get it: everyone is trying to pop off so they can get exposure for their hustle. Used to be only professional comedians who stole jokes for their sets were causing harm, whereas now being funny on the individual level is a promotional asset for nearly everyone.

One thing that sucks about social media is that everyone is now a would-be professional comedian. Used to be, people repeated good jokes they'd heard as part of the general cultural collective. Now if people repost a joke without citing the author, it's theft. Everything's monetised.

I really need to figure out some kind of text to speech or voice replacement software so I can do interviews, I've had a few requests and I'm unfortunately extremely camera and microphone shy. Anyone got recommendations that don't break the bank?

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Platonic ideal of a visual pun.

This is so stupid it's absolutely perfect.

I know this probably doesn't need saying, but definitely save this and give it back to them if they do become an artist.

Future illustrator in the making.

If you aren't a weirdo freak about your art you're not an artist.

Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Reposted by LJ Amber

I give up. I’m moving into a cave.

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Spokane Rising @spokanerising.com · 29/09/2026

Momentarily thought one post was a reply to the other...

Two posts on the timeline.

Top post by Andy Raff:

Its payday and we know what that means! Vampires. Vampires is what it means.

Nighthawks is £13 and just based on the bit of the demo I played, well worth it.

(My nemesis is gonna be the guy who looks a lot like a guy who played the live vampire game I ran long ago who I hope is in jail IRL.)

Bottom post by princess online:

notice how they akways draw the blood but never put any back in

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Reposted by LJ Amber

Send Stephen Miller to The Hague.

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Pro tip: top 20 on Royal Road, author of Best Ongoing Story *does not mean* I'm loaded. There is a *huge* variation in author incomes. I'm less than two years after debuting, and I've not even published my work to eBook yet.

I'm no Christian, but I've seen the face of the Devil.

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Dear AI assholes, stop messaging me about my work, I do not give a flying fuck what your LLM regurtitates after you feed my copyrighted work into it, I am not going to hire you. Fuck off and [breaks Bluesky ToS]

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As someone who took the time to plot six stories before embarking kn the first in order to make sure it all would fit coherently, yeah, this Lost shit annoys me.

^don't; changed pluralisation and didn't bother copyediting

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Ghost of Tsushima works like it does because the core gameplay loop abilities being unlocked are tightly tied to the narrative conceit of "Samurai slowly abandons honour and learns to fight dirty, becoming a ninja." Also because, even without them, the samurai combat is incredibly satisfying.

Post-tutorials, Ghost of Tsushima is very much the former, while something like Dishonoured 2 is the latter. There's merits to both approaches. I maintain that really, really good games try to forgo tutorial entirely and just drop the player in the sandbox with level-based context clues for help.

This is why there's two ways to do modern games well: planned, sequential unlocking of abilities in a kind of prolonged tutorial, or an open scenario with everything employable more-or-less from the jump (though order of access may vary).

If you're writing cheques in the first chapter that doesn't get at least partially cashed in the first chapter, it's not a good first chapter. Similarly, if a game offers something cool in the first scene/level/section but doesn't actually let the player use it, it's not a good introduction.

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This is identical to the way to write good first chapters. A first chapter has to set expectations for the reader and show your ability to deliver on your promises to them; it has to, in miniature, tell the reader what the story will be and reward their decision to start reading.

You know what? This post singlehandedly converted me from being a groundfloor purist to now accepting that, yeah, there is a logic to having the ground floor be the first floor. It *is* weird to call the top floor of a three-story building the second floor.

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Genius is a real thing, but it never has to advertise itself as such, and it's not the same thing as natural aptitude. If anything, genius is natural aptitude plus years of dedicated training and polishing to hone potential into breathtaking skill. The work is real and constant.

I dunno, if anyone could pull off a terrible hat it'd be Sluggo.

When queer and neurodivergent kids cut ties it wasn't a big issue because the parents could always say they kicked a 'fag' to the curb, but now 'normal' kids are cutting ties it's not so easy to play off. A 'normal' kid wants nothing to do with their parents? People assume the parents are assholes.

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Every woman into games is Anita Sarkeesian to a certain kind of fuckwad.

I really love psychosexual art like this, you can really get a feel for how the artist relates to themselves and their sexuality through it. Art that reveals yearnings, fears, and conflict is always the most striking imo.

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Yes, this describes Saphienne, Hyacinth, and Laelansa. If the red flags had led to what seemed like the obvious outcome it wouldn't have been interesting. Also, it wouldn't have been true to life: most successful relationships are people being comfortably weird with each other, not perfect matches.

Too sheltered from the wider academic disciplines and their core areas of concern. You want students to graduate with at least a passing familiarity of what the study of History, Sociology, Literature etc entail. Better for society, and they might learn something about themselves on the way.

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So if someone is looking to just skate through on bare minimum to focus in their major, they usually can, but anyone who is genuinely curious can take intro courses that give them real exposure and might lead to more. The argument, which I agree with, is that you don't want students who are ...

Think it's a bad system at all. I can't stress enough that almost all universities offer qualifying credit courses for the mandatory exploration that are stupidly easy - we're talking 'intro to Astronomy' where the test is stuff like "What is a moon? Name the planets? What does te Earth orbit?" ...

'Minor' in a particular subject alongside the 'Major' focus of their degree, and so go on to stack up graduating credits focused on that minor subject alongside their major. Common examples are people taking intro Psychology to meet social science credits and getting really into it. I don't ...

Mandatory field to graduate with their degree. The electives offered in these aren't hard, they're mainly there to let students explore other intellectual interests and broaden their horizons a bit. A lot of students discover they really like a field, and so decide they want to ...

Hi Mike, American universities run on an entirely different model to UK universities. Basically, the equivalent of their first year is spread out as electives from a bunch of mandatory fields to give the student exposure to more than their focus subject. Thus a student needs 'credits' from each ...

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