iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 05/10/2026

Avoiding Computer with the help of my vicious attack cat

Grey tabby with his front paws tucked under him in a loaf position atop a blue cushion next to an open MacBook on its lock screeen

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 29/09/2026

These are not serious people.

Screenshot of Musk’s Twitter post from Nov’22 featuring a boxed flintlock with Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on the inner lid, a 3D print of a Deus Ex revolver, and four empty cans of diet caffeine-free Coke on his bedside table.

Screenshot of a 3D printable version of the Diamondback .357 model from Deus Ex

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 13/09/2026

Went to Knobcon, bought shelves at IKEA, am now in repose with a canned cocktail and a cat. Good day.

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 31/08/2026

A few of these have done wonders in my rig. Doubled up in a few connections just to play it safe, you know.

Screenshot of Google shopping results for the cheapest available ground loop noise isolator for 3.5mm connections.

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 29/08/2026

His lordship’s donut divan

A gray tabby sitting rather lumpily in a grey felted donut cat cushion

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 27/08/2026

I don’t feel great using Claude these days and god, its tone is exhausting, but then every once in a while it drops a nonsense banger.

Screenshot of a Claude response:

Fair - "your upstream was sick" reads as either
"critically degraded" or "absolutely rad" depending on which decade you parse it from. To be unambiguous: your upstream was unwell. It is now neither sick nor sick, just fine.

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 15/08/2026

“Circumlocute” Cutting myself off on the Ricola w/ menthol cough drops.

A dimly-lit grey tabby cat on the back of a couch staring off into the middle distance while its owner is hacking coughs

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 16/07/2026

*staring into the sense memory of my grandparents’ swampy garage fridge* RETVRN

Can of caffeine free Diet Coke circa 2003 on a plain white background

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 15/06/2026

Finally got back on the bike to run to the grocery store after getting the all-clear from my orthopedist, the weather is finally feeling appropriate for Chicago in June, and the cat is annihilating my couch cushions. Life is pretty good

Very large gray tabby named Earl absolutely crushing a back couch cushion after slowly breaking it down over years

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 28/05/2026

But have you considered this unholy promotion running at Jewel right now

Screenshot of Jewel Osco coupon/deal marking a whole rotisserie chicken down by $5 if you buy two ten-packs of mini Pepsi cans

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 27/05/2026

I love the future because my dishwasher gets to take a tone with me when I forget to unload it after 12 hours

My dishwasher being a prick in my notifications saying: “Admittedly, emptying the dishwasher is not necessarily the top priority.”

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 22/05/2026

Losing my mind at this ad for peanuts on the train

Two figurines of women in ropes and spa attire relaxing in a large glass… peanut milkshake? Captioned with “it’s a spa day for your gut. It’s not nuts. It’s peanuts”

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 24/03/2026

This bird is a Marathin promotional tie-in

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 18/03/2026

Hey, why does WGN have a pixelated 9? Like if it’s an accident I’m more just fascinated how that gets rendered

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 11/03/2026

Wrote this (mattpolicastro.com/2026/03/11/c...) on my old blog framework and was carrying it over to the new WIP framework, to which Claude responded with the following. Strange times.

Screenshot of a Claude Code chat where I'd asked Claude to help import a blog post I'd written on my old framework. In response, it remarked favorably in response to a comment I'd made in the post itself about feeling compelled to be grateful/polite in my interactions with it.

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 29/01/2026

I’m usually pretty skeeved out by LinkedIn but this is a masterpiece, no notes

Screenshot of LinkedIn’s notifications tab showing a recommendation to follow Bari Weiss

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 30/12/2025

@albertburneko.bsky.social so the Dave McKenna ham story tickled something in my brain, but it wasn’t until I was with my family over the holidays that I followed up on it: I grew up in Belgium and we 100% had a ham truck that would travel into France fairly often www.thechickenman.be/en/home

Screenshot of the Chicken Man’s website showcasing ribs and ham hocks

Another screenshot of the Chicken Man’s website mentioning several preparations of potato

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 21/12/2025

I don’t think I’m particularly good but I’m having a lot of fun screwing around with some of these silly lens kits for my phone

Earl the cat, a grey shorthair, in the foreground with a multicolored Christmas tree in the background

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 23/09/2025

I listen to a lot of ambient and these are low-key hilarious It’s miserable to switch browser tab groups but I have four different Pandora stations at a button press, so who could say if it’s good or bad

Screenshot of iOS26 control center featuring dedicated ambient music player buttons

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 20/09/2025

I am humbled beyond belief that Mr Daniel FedEx Support is on the case (and began being on the case a short half hour ago) Truly, the promise of the internet has been fulfilled

Screenshot of a scammy “support” bot account

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 16/09/2025

Breaking: Divvy has embraced American isolationism

A screenshot of the Divvy app which, for some reason, started at maximum zoomed-out level showing a map of North/Central America and the Caribbean, but absolutely nothing else

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 21/06/2025

I made a shandy from equal parts raspberry lemonade crystal light and pils as a ride recovery treat and actually it tastes pretty good

Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech painting but it’s edited so that the guy is shirtless and fucking shredded 100% natty

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 17/06/2025

The cottonwoods. They have taken everything from me

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 17/05/2025

Yeah, that dust storm was not a joke to get caught on a bike in

Photo of the “sunset” horizon line from the Touhy Ave overpass

Shots of the dust storm amidst transmission lines, with a hint of clear sky above

Another shot of the dust storm amidst transmission lines, with more clear sky above

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 14/05/2025

Quote post with a picture of the plane you’d expect as a bribe. (To the tune of the Simpsons’ “Monorail”: EKRANOPLAN)

Soviet ekranoplan, a massive ground effect aircraft, in flight very close to the surface of a body of water

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 04/05/2025

We’ve been through too much together to let it end without a fight.

A well-worn IKEA laser/spirit level that has somehow remained in my toolkit for nearly a decade.

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 09/04/2025

Ok, the new photo mode they added is actually pretty great. Forgive me

Another screenshot of the ring from much closer but still below. The sun is blocked out by a support/orientation strut with a light halo of light being cast around it

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 09/04/2025

I have only a vague notion of what I’m trying to accomplish here (15 modular engines per minute) but here, have the ~500m ring I spent an unreasonable amount of time on

An aerial photo of a in-progress construction in the video game Satisfactory. It is a very large concrete ring suspended in mid-air framed by a temperate rainforest and backgrounded by a sea with several small islands

Another view of the ring structure taken from below at water level. A suspended railway is crossing the frame from the left side of the screen

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 02/04/2025

You can’t make this shit up—he’s the corrupt evil technocrat who ran a Neo Business Plot from Splinter Cell: Conviction

Concept of Tom Reed, the primary antagonist of Splinter Cell: Conviction, looking extremely similar to Musk’s outfit in the post above

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 01/04/2025

While we’re at it can I get emotional damages for this weirdo being shoved onto my home screen in the last update

Screenshot of an app icon for some indeterminate animal thing representing one Apple’s new generative AI image apps

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 25/03/2025

(That being said this passage from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social in Garbage Day is completely fair and had me thinking a lot today)

And I've been surprised that this hasn't come up more amid our current national conversation about men. Because this is the heart of it. There are a lot of very large, very dumb men who want you to sleep three hours a night and invest in vending machines and do turmeric cleanses and they all
know that every man in the country is one personal crisis away from being being algorithmically inundated by their videos. And as long as that's the case, there's really nothing we can do to fix things.

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 11/03/2025

Watching the Tesla share price steadily deflate really has been a balm for my spirits

Screenshot of a stock ticker for Tesla’s stock TSLA having fallen by 15.43% today alone, with another 3.22% drop in after hours training, meaning it is now worth less than it was six months ago

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 23/02/2025

Remember when this was at least kind of amusing rather than entirely bleak

Holographic sticker of an astronaut with the text “SPACE FORCE 2020” on a paper towel dispenser in a bar bathroom

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 03/02/2025

I normally don’t go for this kind of thing, but this is fascinating

Screenshot of my results from a test determining where I cut off blue vs green

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 01/02/2025

Simply cannot wrap my brain around the current moment, so here’s the prototype pantry pullout I threw together this evening

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Matt Policastro @mattpolicastro.com · 29/12/2024

While I agree with the ultimate conclusion (Dems are associated with a status quo that people aren’t vibing with) this framing drives me up the wall. Why do we treat this as an inevitable, world-historical force? It’s defeatist and self-fulfilling.

Ian Ward: Agreed, Shia. We’re living in a moment of global rightward political retrenchment. I think it’s safe to assume that our cultural products will reflect that.

I would add that, fairly or not, Trump and MAGA have taken on a certain countercultural appeal — and that tends to jive with artistic subcultures that position themselves against the cultural mainstream. It’s not cool or subversive right now to be a Democratic partisan, who are seen as defenders of the status quo. There’s a certain subversiveness to being MAGA, and I think we’ll see that echo throughout the cultural sphere — though I’m not entirely sure what it will look like.

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