iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

the literacy crisis in this country is out of control

I can recall meeting older scholars, long ago, who said that when they were young they had a hard time getting their hands on a copy of Shiji or Han shu. If they were lucky enough to get one, they thought nothing of copying the entire text out by hand, so they could recite it day and night. In recent years merchants engrave and print all manner of books belonging to the hundred schools, and produce ten thousand pages a day. With books so readily available, you would think that students' writing and scholarship would be many times better than what they were in earlier generations. Yet, to the contrary, young men and examination candidates leave their books tied shut and never look at them, preferring to amuse themselves with baseless chatter. Why is this?

locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Cis woman. I was a grad student TA for a gen ed course, male undergrad asked me out/propositioned me *in the written comment section of the end-of-term teaching evaluation form.*

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 28/09/2026

“high de-coupling” seems like a nice way to say “extremely fucking gullible”

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

“Net Stockings and Social Nets: Twi’lek Artists’ Survival Strategies Under Imperial Administration“

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Higher Education is not just about training workers, but also about training citizen leaders and good citizenship in part means thinking that the details matter, that getting them right matters, because it impacts some of your fellow citizens. "It only matters if job" is poison to citizenship.

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

my 9/11 recollection is being a teenager in the middle of moodily reading The Great War And Modern Memory in the days before and after it Happened, which probably explains some things about my adult brain that I’d rather not dig super deep into at this moment. allpoetry.com/Mcmxiv

allpoetry.com

Mcmxiv by Philip Larkin

Read the full text of Philip Larkin's "Mcmxiv." Explore its meaning, poetic devices, and over 49 reader interpretations and comments by fellow poets.

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Connor Ewing @cmewing.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

University leadership: We stand ready to support our faculty as they confront the disruptions & uncertainty caused by AI. Faculty: Great! We'll need smaller class sizes, especially for incoming students and— University leadership: Lol, no. We meant like subscriptions to Claude.

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Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com · 29/07/2026

you shouldn't be mad about destroying books. you should be mad about who is allowed to have access to the scans, and why the public isn't able to benefit from this at nominal fee to be paid directly to the author, rather than the knowledge being rented from a middleman.

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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 24/07/2026

This sort of thing is done for practical reasons, to tell the old story in a fresh way that'll attract audiences old and new. But from a *thematic* standpoint it has the eerie side-effect of making the Star Wars universe feel static and Sisyphean. Nothing ever changes, not really.

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

If my knowledge of Ming-Qing Yangzhou lore is relevant, probably built a lovely lakeside pavilion and a few pleasure boats and filled them all with opera singers and courtesans. Or an unpermitted KTV, I guess.

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Fortune cookies: USA Takeout cartons: USA Kikkoman soy sauce: Japanese brand Calligraphy the set dressers dug up: characters used in TW/HK (not PRC) such a pitch-perfect example of "not geopolitics, just racism" that I almost thought I was watching Katherine O'Hara (RIP) doing a bit. if only.

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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

“Salute to America Immediate Evacuation” is an instant classic.

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

‘Decadent ruler botches the national rites, summons the military for his entertainment, unnatural thunder and poisonous miasma descend on the imperial capital,’ this is all getting very Xia/Shang/Western Zhou coded.

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

So many of these early Obama-era “facts over feelings, from the center-left” Wonk Guys have gone off the rails from the moment they actually had to grapple with a fact that didn’t care about their own personal feelings (bigotry is irrational and often intractable, trans people are real, etc.).

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GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 17/06/2026

awake me: oh hey, brain, you’re back early brain: sleep’s haunted awake me: what? brain: *loading a pistol and going back into REM* sleep’s haunted

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Worldcon In Memoriam @wcinmemoriam.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Author Jane Yolen (b.1939) died on June 11. She wrote books and novels for all ages, including Briar Rose, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Yolen won 2 Nebulas, a World Fantasy and was named Grand Master by SFPA, SFWA and World Fantasy. She served as SFWA President.

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kourge the jafnhár 🏳️‍🌈 @kourge.net · 10/06/2026

汝契咪咪呼？哀哉，深牢！千年深牢罰歹母

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

So what I’m getting here is that the actual question is “Why doesn’t Batman use his vast wealth to relocate the residents of Gotham and turn the site into a sealed zone?”

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EmilyTav @emilytav.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Aside from the obvious insanity, this is also why I think usage numbers are inflated. These companies desperately need to create the illusion of demand, and this is one way they are doing it.

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Brett Karlan @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Lord I see what you've done for others (hack Canvas) and want that for me (hack Brightspace too)

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Dr Eleanor Janega @goingmedieval.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Kinda tired of the "historians will say they're close friends" meme. Babe, we've been screaming about how gay everyone is for *decades*. Funding for history keeps getting cut as a result. There are entire moral panics about it. You just haven't read any history since highschool.

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Never really quite "got" the neologism 刷存在感 (farming/grinding in a gamified sense for a "feeling of one's existence") but oof, this is it, actually, isn't it. Chinese social media a few years ahead of English as usual.

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Gay ISIS Brony @rainbowdaesh.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Economists are the chiropractors of the social sciences.

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Jacob Grier @jacobgrier.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

I mentioned this before, but although I wrote this as a break from grim political news, one of the first things I found out when I started on it was that the original owner of one of these cafes is detained and facing deportation. Trump truly poisons everything. lakeoswegoreview.com/2025/11/14/l...

lakeoswegoreview.com

Longtime Lake Oswego business owner detained by ICE, faces deportation to Vietnam - Lake Oswego Review

This story was updated from its original version. The Quachs lived the American dream until it became a nightmare. After the fall of Saigon, Danny and Mary Quach’s families separately […]

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Gwen Snyder is uncivil @gwensnyder.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

For women, one of the very difficult things about the Epstein emails is having all our worst professional suspicions confirmed. You wonder in darker moments if men say this kind of awful stuff about us (individually, and as a class) to each other, and here it is all confirmed in writing.

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Ana Marie Cox @anamariecox.com · 28/10/2025

I’ve played with LLMs a fair amount and noticed something that these studies that show using LLMs degrading intellectual performance may not be picking up: What if having pretty good critical thinking skills makes LLMs less appealing/satisfying to use in the first place?

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 28/10/2025

An LLM-produced essay is tangible proof that a student doesn’t care, and yet responding to it properly requires hour upon hour of careful work. It’s asymmetrical and overwhelming.

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China Spektrum @chinaspektrum.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

#WordOfTheWeek 精神内耗 (jīngshén nèi hào) – “spiritual burnout” a social media cultural phrase, capturing a deeply felt sense of emotional burnout in modern life.

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

the trump administration is destroying ALL higher education but we only hear about the ivies because that's where the rich and powerful went or where their kids go. the obsession with them is missing the bigger picture.

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locust shell 空蝉 @locust-shell.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

The overture to Raid on the White Tiger Regiment/奇袭白虎团 comes pretty close to it, though (delighted to learn that even yangban xi is in Doonesbury, a true panorama of the 70s)

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Hal O'Wien @kbuts.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

THIS WHOLE STAR WARS SMACKS OF GENDER, I yell as I flip over the holotable at my uncle's barbecue, turning Life Day into the Life Day of Shit

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

No, because they have no idea any of it is happening. Just a vague sense that stuff is getting done.

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Kingfisher & Wombat @tkingfisher.com · 25/01/2025

Yet again, I would like to apologize to the shade of Sheri S. Tepper for all the times I thought her villains were “kinda over the top.”

A screenshot of a post about Trump demanding Greenland

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