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 · 11/09/2026

es decir, esta historia no va, jaja

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 10/09/2026

I wonder if these same people will be as enthusiastic about robot sports (coming soon to a corporate-labeled stadium near you!), since they seem to think so little of effort and accomplishment by actual humans

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 09/09/2026

Technically, I suppose, it's an upside-down meat clarinet?

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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 · 04/09/2026

They're well on their way to "solving" Monopoly as well, it seems

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 04/09/2026

WotD: Canschluss, a portmanteau of "Canada" and "Anschluss" ("union"), the latter referencing the 1938 takeover of Austria by Germany. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

theguardian.com

Beware Trump’s coercive campaign against Canada | Letter

Letter: If the US’s closest ally and trading partner isn’t safe from Anschluss-style tactics, no country is, says Erik Schomann

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 03/09/2026

This is sorta the premise of "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich. The problem is always that people cosplaying ye olde poor person lifestyle can quit the experiment anytime (and do). We learn that it sucks a LOT to be poor, but it never seems to change anything.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 03/09/2026

A CA GOP gubernatorial candidate did this (well, sort of) in 2014. Always hard to tell if it was really an attempt to learn something or just some sort of anti-opponent stunt. I would certainly like to see some mayorial candidates do this. www.kcra.com/article/cand...

kcra.com

Candidate Kashkari lives as homeless person for a week

The Republican candidate for California governor said Thursday he spent a week living as a homeless person in Fresno to highlight the disparity between the governor's claim that the state is making an...

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 03/09/2026

The ultimate "It runs on my machine!"

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 31/08/2026

Þæt wæs gōd cyning!

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 26/08/2026

isn't "business-friendly" also code for anti-union and anti-minimum wage?

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 26/08/2026

who/whom in relative positions is almost hopeless. Some insist that the pronoun must match the case in the main clause; others, the case in the relative clause. And for all the back and forth, afaik, it's never (?) ambiguous. Which suggests that the form of the word is probably irrelevant.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 26/08/2026

3 "thats"! And some people chafe at just 2. :)

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 25/08/2026

That's probably true. But there was a period when Venetian blinds for a car's rear window were a thing. Apparently still popular in lo-riders, I read.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 23/08/2026

WotD: motornormativity, "unconscious biases due to cultural assumptions about the role of private cars". aka car-brain(ed), windshield bias. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonor...

en.wikipedia.org

Motonormativity - Wikipedia

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 22/08/2026

Presumably an early product from the Farms of Mr Taylor, Esq.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 22/08/2026

As long as it ends with "You're fired!"

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 21/08/2026

So that's a crime now? smh

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 20/08/2026

As I'm sure you know, porpoise in German is Meerschwein (mereswin in Old English)

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 20/08/2026

Porcupine = porcus+spina; guinea pig, groundhog. It's like there are a handful of Ur-animals and after that each new one is just a variant on that small collection.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 13/08/2026

I have wondered this myself. There has to be a technical reason and/or the 99% complete graph is not a representation of reality (?), at least, not of the reality of "I have in fact copied 99% of the bits"

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 12/08/2026

Wait, what? People are sheeple?

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 10/08/2026

Following to see what people recommend. I use Google Keep, but my requirements are vastly less (coz I'm not as good a note-taker ...)

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 07/08/2026

And Hild for "war": Hildegard, Mathilde, Brunhilde

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 06/08/2026

"If you haven’t heard of the Phoenicians before, you’re in for a historical treat." And it turned out to be true! (Though I had heard of the Phoenicians before.)

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 05/08/2026

On board for all of this. That said, I've certainly had authors who just accepted all the revisions and responded to none of the queries :)

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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 · 04/08/2026

Does "purposed to be merry" mean what I think it means?

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 02/08/2026

WotD: "free as in puppy" to describe vibe-coded software that doesn't account for ongoing maintenance. A play on "free as in beer" and "free as in speech", pillars of the free software movement. From Dare Obasanjo bsky.app/profile/carn...

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 01/08/2026

A beautiful thing is that you can use the options to set your own shortcuts, which can override Word's assigned shortcuts — handy if you were never going to use Word's shortcut anyway

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 01/08/2026

You could argue that even with the system we have, voting for a candidate is often implicitly voting against their opponent. ("Held my nose and voted for ...") For example, it seems clear that the Fox News-pilled base will never, not ever vote for any Democrat. Still, 💯 for ranked choice voting.

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 01/08/2026

Always associate it (its latter-day manifestation) with Rachmaninoff, where I think I heard it first

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Mike Pope @mikepope.com · 31/07/2026

"OnlyMarms" is pretty clever, even if the need for it is sort of horrifying. (See also "Healthcare Coverage By GoFundMe", parts 1 through eleventy-jillion)

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