iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 26/09/2026

Happy Caturday! Today with a fren I met in Wolfsburg

Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 17/09/2026

WotD: stoptional, a portmanteau of "stop" + "optional". The idea that a driver doesn't have to stop at a stop sign or red light if they feel that traffic is light, etc. Never legal afaik.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 09/09/2026

I see you a diaeresis on the N :)

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 06/09/2026

WotD: flock, be flocked. To be tracked on Flock cameras.

Screenshot of a post on Bluesky, which says: "Navy Veteran flocked over a hundred times after filing a complaint against the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department".

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 04/09/2026

It's a tricky one. Back when Twitter was a thing, a linguist (?) did a poll of what "deceptively simple" means, and gosh, it was basically a tie between opposite meanings

Screenshot of Twitter posting. Usee Max Weiss writes the following:
Time for a poll I've done more than once, but I never tire of! Deceptively simple means:

(1) Seems simple, is complex (46.8% agree).
(2) Seems complex, is simple (53.2% agree).

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 04/08/2026

Here's another example of "selfie" as "portrait"

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 10/06/2026

WotD: dilemma action/dilemma demonstration, a "non-violent civil disobedience designed to create a 'response dilemma' for public authorities by forcing them to either concede some public space to protesters or make themselves look absurd or heavy-handed by acting against the protest." (Wikipedia)

A Threads post that says "The July 4 convergence is, technically, a dilemma demonstration—an action constructed so every regime response loses. The mechanism is what Gene Sharp called political jiu-jitsu and Brian Martin formalized as backfire theory: Repression of manifestly legitimate actors transfers legitimacy to the repressed. The craft is in maximizing the gap between the action's symbolic legitimacy and the regime's available responses-hence patriots, flags, and Constitutions on the nation's 250th birthday. The canonical ancestor is the Salt March: Gandhi selected an act (making salt) so elementary and so legitimate that prosecuting it was absurd and permitting it was defeat. Selma is the American proof-Bloody Sunday converted repression into the Voting Rights Act in five months."

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 05/06/2026

This kitchen-supplies monger is near us. Dunno if it's just local.

Billboard advertising a business called Chef'Store, with an oddly placed apostrophe between "Chef" and "Store".

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 05/06/2026

The term "chaise longue" seems to be completing its folk-etymological journey into English — at least, if Costco signage is any indication.

Sign from Costco that advertises "Sunvilla Sling Chaise Lounge, Commercial Quality" for $179.99.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 29/05/2026

I'm retired, so I thought my days of seeing looong sentences were done. But I just ran across this in a book I'm reading—114 words, per Word. We saw this a lot and tried to recast fun stuff like this into a series of sentences <= 30 words. This one isn't, but some of those were real challenges.