iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Mo Ryan @moryan.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I kept seeing that poster & I was like, "the designer who was told to make sure NO ONE EVER sees this film really nailed it." That's on top of Cruise's disastrous press tour for the film ("Let me describe how I made the makeup team's life hellish" -- good times, Tom! You seem cool & very normal!)

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mindbat.bsky.social @mindbat.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Yesterday’s haul from my local #Indigo 😊

Photo of a stack of books. From bottom to top the titles are: Horrorstör, Stories of Nikkei Canadians, End Times Fascism, Data Empire, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Housing Inc.

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Olivia Just Wants Tech To Be Fun Again @kingdomfantasy6.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Even for a little server project, I have to make sure I don't fuck up the cybersecurity. Because otherwise I'll have people hacking into a dinky little home server project. It's disheartening, and that's just for like. Little projects. Big projects? Like what Ed's running? Oof.

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Olivia Just Wants Tech To Be Fun Again @kingdomfantasy6.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Anyways, uh, fuck this shit, don't use genAI, and support small projects trying to be genuinely collaborative, rather than this awful tech built with a philosophy of other people's consent & privacy not mattering.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Like, every so often, someone comes rushing out to say 'I think we invented AGI' and, if that were true, the next words out of your mouth ought to be "and so we now have moral obligations towards this new being we created" and somehow that is not generally what I see comes next.

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Elizabeth Bear @matociquala.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I have a new novella out in the 20th Anniversary edition of Clarkesworld this month! "The Job" is about a woman with serious self-image issues who takes a contract to survey an alien ocean for corporate exploitation, wearing the body of a bioengineered whale. clarkesworldmagazine.com/bear_10_26/

clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Job by Elizabeth Bear

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

And Trump's cronies bleat about 'sovereignty!' unless of course you are Canada or Denmark or Venezuela or Iran or whatever country he carelessly threatens or attacks next. We are not required to pretend these guys are sincere. They are not. Treat them like the liars they are.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Russia believes in 'sovereignty!' except if its Ukraine or the Baltics or anywhere else Putin wants. China believes in 'sovereignty!' except for Taiwan or Vietnamese territorial waters or Philippine territorial waters, etc. etc. Iran believes in 'sovereignty!' unless you are an Arab state.

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Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Sick of wrist based ads and notifications, I swapped out my Apple Watch for a simple Casio a couple weeks ago. About twice a day I catch myself utterly amazed that it doesn’t need charging. This stuff warped our perspective of reality. Slowly but surely.

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Matt Wallace @mattfnwallace.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

HEY LOOKIT MY HANDSOME MUG. @superevilmegacorp.bsky.social dropped this extended round table featuring Ninja Turtles comics czar Tom Waltz, SEMC Narrative Director @thomasbeekers.com and myself talking writing and creating the narrative of TMNT: Splitered Fate. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8o5...

youtube.com

The Narrative behind TMNT: Splintered Fate - Extended Version

YouTube video by Super Evil Megacorp

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Petergeist Clines @peterclines.com · 30/09/2026

Back at @mystgalaxybooks.bsky.social tonight to listen to these fine folks talk about THE BIG BAD BOOK OF KAIJU @jonathanmaberry.bsky.social Luke Dumas @scottsigler.bsky.social @henryherz.bsky.social

Four men sit at a long table with a Mysterious Galaxy banner hanging in front of it. Left to right it's Henry Herz, Scott Sigler, Luke Dumas, and Jonathan Maberry. Henry has a baseball cap, everyone else has glasses.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Because why would engineering students ever need to study the ways their very expertise has been used and abused in the past, the way 'oh, I'm just an engineer solving a problem' has been a necessary and foundational lie in every modern system of oppression or extermination?

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Nor is this some new-fangled idea - you'll find it back in the 1947 Truman Commission Report on Higher Education (screen-shotted below), produced by those wild-eyed idealists who had just finished ::checks notes:: the Second World War.

"The net result of the situation is that the college student is faced with a bewildering array of intensive courses from which to make up his individual program. To secure a reasonably comprehensive grasp of his major field, he must in some cases spend as much as half or more of his time in that one department. The other half he scatters among courses in other departments which, designed for future specialists in those fields, are so restricted in scope that the student can gain from them only a fragmentary view of the subject. He, therefore, leaves college unacquainted with some of the fundamental areas of human knowledge and without the integrated view of human experience that is essential both for personal balance and for social wisdom.
Today's college graduate may have gained technical or professional training in one field of work or another, but is only incidentally, if at all, made ready for performing his duties as a man, a parent, and a citizen. Too often he is "educated" in that he has acquired competence in some particular occupation, yet falls short of that human wholeness and civic conscience which the cooperative activities of citizenship require.
The failure to provide any core of unity in the essential diversity of higher education is a cause for grave concern. A society whose numbers lack a body of common experience and common knowledge is a society without a fundamental culture; it tends to disintegrate into a mere aggregation of individuals. Some community of values, ideas, and attitudes is essential as a cohesive force in this age of minute division of labor and intense conflict of special interests.
The crucial task of higher education today, therefore, is to provide a unified general education for American youth. Colleges must find the right relationship between specialized training on the one hand, aiming at a thousand different careers, and the transmission of a common cultural heritage toward a common citizenship on the other. "

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

And to be honest, though the systems are so complex you can never prove causation, the fact that our descent into the dumbest politics follows on four decades of systematic, institutional disinvestment from the liberal arts seems almost too on the nose and yet here we are.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

It seems to me that a solution to encouraging AI 'alignment' would be to hold AI companies and their executives legally liable - criminally, if relevant - for what their AI agents do.

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Judy Berman @judyberman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The other list ain't so bad, but I do love my weird lil baby

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Katie Collins @spissatella.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Everytime we have an all-hands at work and AI comes up, people voice reasonable concerns about a) environment b) data protection c) reliability/accuracy, some executive always says "well it's out of the box now, it's not going away" and .... so? Just bc it exists doesn't mean we have to use it

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Emily J @emexastris.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Women. He offloads these things to women.

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Petergeist Clines @peterclines.com · 24/09/2026

I'm sure at this point I've deleted/ blocked dozens of emails from cons/ podcasts/ magazines because they all read like auto-generated slop. The days of slapping a name at the top of an impersonal form letters are over. It has to sound like an email from a real person, actually written *to me*.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

So, not my first video game (I had a Sega Genesis when I was younger), but probably Exile: Escape from the Pit (1995), an old shareware RPG. It's still kind of the platonic ideal I have in my head of what an RPG is - a mix of worldbuilding, storytelling and character definition through builds.

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New from 404 Media: Meta announced Muse, its AI agent that can book restaurants for you. We've seen internal Meta messages showing Meta is actually testing having these calls being made by human beings in call centers. In those tests its not AI, it's just a person www.404media.co/meta-tests-m...

404media.co

Meta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Actually Made By Humans in a Call Center

"This has potential for so much negative PR. It could portray us as ‘their AI is not good enough so they still need humans’ kind of coverage for this launch."

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Higher Education is not just about training workers, but also about training citizen leaders and good citizenship in part means thinking that the details matter, that getting them right matters, because it impacts some of your fellow citizens. "It only matters if job" is poison to citizenship.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It remains true that if the Russians went home tomorrow, the drone strikes would stop, no Ukrainian would follow them over the border and the war would be over. They can just *go home* and be at peace. The war persists because Putin wants it to.

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

OpenAI and Microsoft admitted LLMs are predatory tech built on “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said AI has created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.” www.404media.co/doom-loop-op...

404media.co

‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions."

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Patrick Claybon @patrickclaybon.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Why do people assume these dudes are ever dealing in good faith?

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I want Majority Leader Jeffries to spend his days scheduling which member of the Trump administration is in the hot-seat in any given week. This week? Luttnick week. Next week? Hegseth. The week after that? RFK. Bessent? We can fit him in for a week in early March.

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Kameron Hurley @kameronhurley.com · 14/09/2026

Getting old is just a whole long process of realizing you're no longer the Main Character Being Marketed To, which I think is a lot harder for, say, privileged people to grok.

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Premee Mohamed @premeemohamed.com · 13/09/2026

WHAT IF... you were the darkness and there was a heating pad on underneath the blanket

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

On the one hand, seeing or hearing about my public-facing material being used in classrooms - and I hear that quite a lot - is great; love it, s'why I make the stuff. On the other hand, man it really burns that my work is evidently good enough to be in their classrooms, but not for them to hire me.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 09/09/2026

AI companies: This technology we’re developing is dangerous and might destroy humanity and we don’t know how to stop it Other people: So we should strictly regulate it, create legislative guard rails, and monitor its development? AI companies: lol no the opposite of all that & give us more money

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Mike Drucker @mikedrucker.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

You’ve gotta use AI because it’s the future. But also it’ll take your job. But also it’ll create a paradise on earth and solve most of our problems. But also it’ll end humanity soon. But also you’ll get left behind if you don’t use it right now.

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Chuck Wendig @chuckwendig.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

It's hard to know what to even make of this -- it's deranged on the face of it, because here you have people warning they built an Apocalypse Machine and yet, they're doing nothing to stop or even limit the Apocalypse Machine except, uhh, post on social media. I figure this is one of three things:

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Petergeist Clines @peterclines.com · 08/09/2026

OH HEY the newsletter is coming out one week from today and for a change I thought, hey, what if I promoted it more than 48 hours in advance? Being bold. Trying daring new things. Here's a sign-up page. It shows up just once a month (cutting down on your inbox backlog) and it's completely free!

buttondown.com

The Uncanny Cosmic Horror Zombie Almanac

More-or-less monthly updates on things from author Peter Clines

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Mo Ryan @moryan.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

in honor of #StarTrek at 60, here's something I wrote in 2016. On an hour that is not just a great Deep Space Nine episode, not just great Trek episode, but an example of what TV at its best can do. I give you an ode to DS9's "Duet" www.moryan.com/star-trek-at...

moryan.com

Star Trek at 60: An ode to an all-time classic Deep Space Nine episode

I nominated "Duet," a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, for the TV canon as one of the all-time greats

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Eric Dyck @ericdyck.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Must-read speculative fiction from @premeemohamed.com in this week’s @forwardcanada.bsky.social Alberta newsletter. Illustrations by me. Devastatingly good. Go read it now. forwardweekly.ca/leave-or-rem...

forwardweekly.ca

Leave or Remain | By Premee Mohamed | Forward Weekly

Forward Weekly feature for September 6, 2026.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

This week on the blog: why the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy, why there is no available replacement for it and thus why it is pretty bad that the American voter has decided in a fit of abject folly to vote to abandon that role. acoup.blog/2026/08/28/c...

acoup.blog

Collections: Global Trade and United States Navy

This week we’re doing another one of our series of military theory primers, this time focusing on a fairly simple contention: that the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the gl…

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Stephanie Carvin @stephaniecarvin.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Wake up, babe. The Prime Minister just dropped “hydronym”.

The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.

The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.

Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

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Michael Schulman @michaelschulman.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

One thing about Tim Curry: though Rocky Horror made him a queer sex icon, he never publicly defined his sexuality. Not in interviews, not in his memoir. This was the most I got out of him. Which, fine?

You write about playing Frank-N-Furter, “I learned not to limit myself—artistically, professionally, sexually, or mentally.” How did that character transform your sense of yourself? Did it have to do with masculinity and femininity, exploring both sides of yourself?

I did decide not to limit myself to anything, and I believed that I could do anything. It gave me a lot of oomph—a lot of strength—to back up my own decisions about my life. And I certainly didn’t limit myself sexually, particularly. I thought that was important at the time. I swam “the warm waters of sins of the flesh,” to quote the play and the movie.

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Matt Wallace @mattfnwallace.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Learn the business of this industry if you’re going to publish things for money, especially if your goal is to do that on a significant level. Every industry that employs writers wants you to be and actively tries keep you ignorant and powerless. Craft education is great. Mix some business in there.

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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 26/08/2026

TARAN WANDERER taught me that destiny and monarchy are bullshit, that there's deep value in all work, and that we are all in this together.

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Here lies JD. He drew as many comics as he could. @lostcity.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Dolly Parton was not a billionaire, because multi-millionaires who are good people like her never get past that last finish line. Not when there are kids who need books to read and sick people who need vaccines.

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FT @fucktheory.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Imagine being talented and beautiful and rich and famous and still the most noteworthy thing about you is how good a person you are.

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Mo Ryan @moryan.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

every billionaire & tech mogul, they all want to be adored & celebrated without doing the things Dolly did with a fraction of the power & money. What she had, she gave away. I'm sure she was comfortable (& that's good!). But she just relentlessly helped. It's not that difficult. Love. Care. Help. 💚🌸

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mindbat.bsky.social @mindbat.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

And if memory serves, Canada's response after one of those invasions was to send an army down to DC that got all the way to the White House. Which they burned down 🔥

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It feels relevant to note that the United States invaded Canada twice and we lost both times. So maybe we shouldn't talk too much shit about Canada repelling invaders.

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ZAK @raszak76.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Allllllllll this…

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Kevin Hearne @kevinhearne.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Starting to hear what the last-minute requests from the U.S. were and it’s seriously messed up. 1) Canada should give exclusive access to some of its resources to the U.S.? 2) Canada should stop protecting French language and culture? Fuck all the way off. That’s table-flipping time

static.klipy.com

Letterkenny: Hard No

Alt: Letterkenny: Hard No

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I wrote a(nother) thing! This time it is about how no amount of military technical excellence can salvage a situation where political leadership has, in their abject strategic incompetence, demanded the military accomplish an impossible mission. Gift link: foreignpolicy.com/2026/08/21/i...

foreignpolicy.com

The U.S. Is Learning the Wrong Lessons in Iran

Tactical excellence can never salvage strategic incompetence.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

It's worth remembering that colleges and universities began as, "what if all of our strange nerds gathered together?" and only then did someone notice 'oh, if we send students to that, it seems to work out.' They began as colleges - collects of colleagues - moreso than schools.

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