iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Culinarily and nutritionally pleased with myself today — I cooked extra kale last night so I had some available to mix in with eggs & couscous for lunch

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Fascinating that so much of the social media reaction to TNF this week was about how unsympathetic *both* QBs were. Probably not great for Rodgers to have been linked to Watson like this.

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

in this house we talk about "sicko games" a *lot* I've found it's the easiest way to explain to people whose native attitude towards football is "why would I watch that when I could be playing Dungeons and Dragons" why I'm obsessed with it

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

partner: "is there football tonight?" me: "there is no watchable football" partner: "is it a sicko game?" me: "no, it's... a sex offender vs. a vaccine skeptic"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Probably the most useful thing I learned from my liberal arts degree was this model of what a text "is" and how information transmission from author to reader actually works (it's weird) www.simplermachines.com/what-is-a-te...

simplermachines.com

What is a Text?

Before I stumbled into a software career, I got an English degree. A lot of people think that this means that I spent college reading a lot and writing a lot, and I did do that, but I also spent my un...

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Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"Jim, what do they do?" "They have a powerful radar, advanced medium range air-to-air missiles, a wide variety of smart bombs..." "Yeah, but like... what do they do?" "They provide a multirole all-weather strike capability that-" "Jim, what do they do *for us?*"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My favorite detail from Cadillac Desert was that John Powell proposed redrawing the western state lines around watersheds (which wouldn’t totally resolve the problem you’re describing here but at least would have made inter-watershed negotiation possible)

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

If you want to write more or better or do something that requires writing, my basic advice is "just focus on developing the habit of writing until you've written about half a million words" Linked post is mostly techniques for doing this

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I don't necessarily have good advice on any other aspect of writing (topic selection, getting published, craft etc.) but boy do I know how to just Get Words Out www.simplermachines.com/how-to-write/

simplermachines.com

How to write.

Write a lot. This is alpha and omega of writing advice, the beginning and the end, and it's that way for a reason– I don’t know anyone who’s good writing who hasn’t also put in serious hours.

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Derrik Klassen @qbklass.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

reminder as we go into overtime: the athletic football show will be live shortly after snf ends! come hang out www.youtube.com/live/OinzNll...

youtube.com

Week 2 Recap: Bengals, Saints, Broncos SHINE on Weird Sunday

YouTube video by The Athletic Football Show

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I have not personally seen people criticizing polycules, I have seen people being snarky about sending surveys out after sex parties I don't have an opinion on criticizing, I dunno, CEOs for being in polycules

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The surveys are a big part of spreading the Superior Genes? Most of what I have personally seen is people snarking about folks who are *clearly* not trying to have children

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Yeah I deeply do not like whatever has happened in the Discourse that has people saying things like "the rationalists are weird because they have sex parties and then send out surveys afterwards" and not, you know, the EUGENICS

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is not counting Big Sur, which is technically still at 42% but I just could not continue

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Current books in progress Giovanni's Room The Lord of the Rings The Pillow Book The Mists of Cairn Gorm Sweet Tea I also have Automatic Noodle untouched but in the queue

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

"Anyway I mostly spend it on orphans, but I could also spend it on *you,* hot but broke barista"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I was surprised how much I liked the "rich guy dates barista" aspect of a sports romance I read recently and this is making me realize that with sports romance you really can have a guy who's like "I don't know! I just really like hockey! And then they gave me all this money!"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

top of the "birds I want to see" list right now great shots

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'll add my layer to the "this thread and the thread it quotes and the thread that quotes are interesting" stack, and wonder anew what then makes programmers so uniquely vulnerable to this nonsense. We *know* how those things work. Why the fuck do we think we've created God?

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I look forward to absentmindedly quoting that when I eat paella years from now

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

And I people that have that naive interpretation about texts, and who think of them mostly as Things That Encode Meaning, and don't have a good sense of what it means that they are Artifacts are a lot more likely to see the artifact produced by robots and assume "oh hey there must be Meaning here"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

And every class was working against this kind of naive interpretation of texts where there's this thing called "what the author meant" and it's in the text and you have to decode it Which is one of these ideas that's just correct enough to get you into real trouble

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

And these questions were pretty much straight up four years of English degree where the background idea in every class was "There's this artifact, and a writer wrote it, and a reader reads it, and there are things that we can say objectively about it, but it doesn't 'mean' anything on its own"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

An even more important question "I know what I *think* this document literally says, but is that how most people reading it would interpret it?" And more important still "Is that what the computer is actually going to do with it?"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I was behind my CS-trained peers in a lot of ways but I was way, way ahead of them on questions like "Wait, I know what this document literally says, but how do we know that this is what the person who wrote it actually meant to say?" This is sometimes an extremely important question in software.

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Something I realized after graduating with an English degree and then stumbling into a software engineering career— Most people do not know what a "text" is

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A lot of my friends and family from Elsewhere have talked to me about how what happened in Minnesota this winter gave them hope Not only did we win but we did it with a great accumulation of simple, ordinary actions. Most people have given their neighbor's kid a ride to school.

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

“Wuttup wuttup wuttup, followers, it’s ya boi, Thomas Stearns, smash that like and follow! If this get ten thousand likes I’ll EAT THIS PEACH with rolled trousers!” *stares silently into the camera for several minutes

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The ends are not extricable from the means

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Here's my standard for "is AGI here?" Has an AI called plays in the NFL? (for a team other than the Browns)

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Part of how he ends up charming his Rogueish Smuggler Boyfriend is that he is *intensely* interested in the marsh's bugs and while the smuggler isn't particularly interested in bugs he approves of anyone being interested in the marsh so of *course* it must have the best bugs

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

At one point he briefly considers returning to London but decides against it because the only thing that he likes about London is the gay nightlife and the marsh has much better bugs

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

One of the main characters of The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen is a clerk-turned-baronet in the Kent marsh who has essentially two ambitions in life 1) be gay 2) look at cool bugs

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

What seems to work is treating writing like improv, writing down whatever comes immediately, and then if and when that runs out reaching back into the work recursively until more ideas arise

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Techniques that rely on discovering or figuring out the structure before-hand, on the other hand, just lead to procrastination and stasis I think, "Well I don't really have any real ideas, I should wait until I come up with something Good" and then I don't write

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Just Start Writing and techniques like NaNoWriMo, where the goal is just to generate Material but that don't address the structure of the material at all, I find just generate a bunch of noise I am very, very good at free writing and I can sit down and Write Some Words for a surprisingly long time

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I adore craft books that talk about managing and producing inspiration, which Wonderbook and Refuse to Be Done both address, because I have found that neither "just start writing" nor "figure out roughly what book you're writing and then write it" particularly work for me

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I started reading Wonderbook because I want back to Refuse to Be Done as I often do when I am trying to write and feeling a little bit stuck, and there is an exercise there that references Wonderbook, and I thought, maybe there is more in Wonderbook that would be helpful (and there is)

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

(I am also still reading Wonderbook but lately I have been reading 4+ books at a time)

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Reading Wonderbook by @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social Great, getting a lot out of it, but, is there a similar craft book oriented towards romance? Found that @kjcharleswriter.com has Think, Write, Edit, Romance coming out... in December. So, now I'm reading The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Really looking forward to a winter where people aren't getting shot every weekend and I can focus on my Winter Sports like "see a bird" and "stand on a lake"

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

You should read this book, it is good (Though maybe read Swordheart first? Daggerbound doesn't exactly have spoilers because they're romance novels so we know that certain things are going to happen but it is a sequel.)

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I think someone ran a shrine-making workshop in Powderhorn park last October, a bunch of these little red-and-orange memorial shrines popped up under various trees www.simplermachines.com/gr01-06-nove...

simplermachines.com

[GR01.06] November tree shrine

Essays and photography from Nat Bennett. Based in Minneapolis.

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merebeing.bsky.social @merebeing.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

we also have one with little white toes and a taste for flowers he mostly has the sense to stick to dandelions but I've caught him pull petals off my dahlias

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