iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 20h

"Man, that is flagrant false advertising!"

Otto from "The Simpsons" looking over his shoulder angrily at the cover of the novel "Stoner" by John Williams; he is saying "Man, that is flagrant false advertising!"

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 16/09/2026

First sentence of the book my kid was reading is quite something.

From "Ranger's Apprentice": "MORGARATH, LORD OF
THE MOUNTAINS OF RAIN AND Night, former Baron of Gorlan in the Kingdom of Araluen, looked out over his bleak, rainswept domain and, for perhaps the thousandth time, cursed."

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 25/08/2026

"They're making a mockery out of my words, man. This whole thing has turned into a theatrical mockery."

From "American Movie" (1999), Mark and Mike sitting outside between auditions.

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 24/08/2026

"Ooh. Hardcovers—ooh! Nyam-nyam! Oh. This very good."

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 21/08/2026

"Lincoln in the Bardo" is like reading Bsky or Twitter. Should've printed it as a big scroll.

A page from "Lincoln in the Bardo" (2018) by George Saunders in which the formatting of the page resembles a social media feed with short posts, each marked with the poster's name.

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 20/08/2026

"Think of two parallel lines… What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self."

From "Libra" (1988) by Don DeLillo:

Ferrie took a while to finish chewing his food.

"Think of two parallel lines," he said. "One is the life of Lee
H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable?
There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny."

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 17/08/2026

"The members of the committee would allow only generalities to carry upward. It was the President, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts… The White House was to be the summit of unknowing."

From "Libra" (1988) by Don DeLillo:

Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination. The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late. The Deputy Secretaries were interested in drifts and tendencies. They expected to be misled. They counted on it. The Attorney General wasn't to know the queasy details. Just get results. Each level of the committee was designed to protect a higher level. There were complexities of speech. A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored. It had to be this way, Win admitted to himself. The men at his level were spawning secrets that quivered like reptile eggs. They were planning to poison Castro's cigars. They were designing cigars equipped with micro-explosives. They had a poison pen in the works. They were conspiring with organized-crime figures to send assassins to Havana, poisoners, snipers, saboteurs. They were testing a botulin toxin on monkeys. Fidel would be seized by cramps, vomiting and fits of coughing, just like the long-tailed primates, and horribly die. Have you ever seen a monkey coughing uncontrollably? Gruesome. They wanted to put fungus spores in his scuba suit. They were devising a sea shell that would explode when he went swimming.

The members of the committee would allow only generalities to carry…

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 11/08/2026

Not from where I got the book but the bookmark is apt, no?

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 10/08/2026

The publisher's website calls it "a new kind of love story."

From Missouri Williams' "The Vivisectors": "It goes like this: When he touched me, I saw a body in mourning. I saw a sun-bleached statue standing in the ruins of a city whose name nobody remembered."

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 17/07/2026

(Cont.) Incipient realization here also captures some of the experience of reading “Ratner’s Star”, of chewing through these Lilliputians’ discussions of language and knowledge, then biting down on a blurry, non-resistant bit just before (sometimes) “getting” it—something.

From “Ratner’s Star” by Don DeLillo:

This feeling always occurred when he was on the verge of solving a drawn-out mathematical problem. It seemed to mean, nearing the end, that he preferred to abandon all the structural forms, the intersecting perspectives, the entire weightless system of exact relationships; discard it all in exchange for the scantest condition of existence…

From “Ratner’s Star” by Don DeLillo (cont.):

The intuition of mathematical order occupied the deeper reaches of cognitive possibility, too old and indistinct for tracing, predating even the analytical scrapings of logic and language. Because his work's natural tendency was to provide a model of his own mind, of himself as a distinct individual, he was puzzled by the lack of an adequate vocabulary for mathematical invention, by his inability to understand what made his mathematics happen. In retaliation, as it were, against the secrecy of his own constructions, he engineered a desire to subsist on minims of specific being. It was to this, the unknown self, that the basest nature was clearly preferable.

At the module he scribbled nonsense on a pad.

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 14/07/2026

“I wouldn’t be yelling if I didn’t respect you.”

From “Ratner’s Star” by Don DeLillo:

"If I seem to be raising my voice," Mohole said in a calm tone, "it's only because I recognize your right to correct me. I wouldn't be yelling if I didn't respect you. Yelling is a bond between people who respect…”

Continued from prev.: “…each other despite invalid corrections. We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other's views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals. If we didn't accept the burden, we'd be sworn enemies. Friendship is exasperating at best. But think of the alternative."

"I am."

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 12/07/2026

M. John’s anarchism sure comes out in some excellent lines. They feel and sound good.

From “The Machine in Shaft Ten” by M John Harrison: “However accidentally, he had impelled the human race to confront its own clown-like glorification of its metaphysical inferiority - and I think he felt the resultant terrifying sense of impotent rage more than anybody.

“'With any luck, he said, 'when we have finished here, Man will have no place or purpose at all. We've lived too long with them. We deserve the dignity of pointlessness.’”

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 09/07/2026

And now I'm thinking about how the sewer in the Death Star (Trash Compactor) was a single, well-realized trap room, but the sewers in Dark Forces (Anoat) were a sprawling labyrinth that made me stop playing.

From "Star Wars: A New Hope", Han and Leia being crushed in the Death Star's trash compactor room

From "Dark Forces" a screenshot of the "Anoat" mission, where all the walls and rooms look the same and there are so many of them.

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 03/07/2026

Sometimes I note things I like and a moment later think, dang, this isn't so difficult that it should seem to happen so little.

Screenshot the music video for Pissed Jeans' "The Bar is Low": a normal-looking man is dangling off gym equipment, looking tired and ill-suited for a workout, singing "The bar is low—the bar is looow."

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 03/07/2026

Dig a story that is not coy about its ideas, while also not confusing obfuscation with cleverness (or passing it off as trust in its readers). And, sure, add a twist of lime to it and mock the readers a bit. Make them see themselves in caricature.

From "The Gift" (1985) by M. John Harrison:

"After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence. (p112)

"His hair has gone grey.

"Perhaps from all this reading, his eyes are inflamed, caked at the corners, deeper-set than he remembers."

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 26/06/2026

Reveal Codes was a very useful feature. It allowed you to edit the document in markup (not dissimilar to HTML, Markdown), fixing formatting issues in a way that one never could with WYSIWYG-only software.

An example of Reveal Codes in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 26/06/2026

Alt+F1 built my vocabulary better than any school.

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS keyboard shortcuts strip, designed to rest along the top of the F-keys of an early-90's PC keyboard. Thanks, http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 26/06/2026

WordPerfect was a tool, not a service. (Also, dig the white-on-blue reminiscent of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS I learned best.)

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𝔏𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔦𝔷𝔬𝔩𝔦 @lucasrizoli.com · 25/06/2026

"Lucas, what's taking you so long in there!?" "Just a minute: I'm poasting."

From "Groundhog Day", a man sitting in a full bathtub about to drop an electric toaster into it with him.

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