iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

On the comics site, Awkward Granola: www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1749

superdoomedplanet.com

Awkward Granola

Visit the post for more.

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SOLRAD Magazine @solrad.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Today on SOLRAD, we feature When a Comic Refuses to Explain Itself: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic -- an essay by Emre Altindag solrad.co/when-a-comic...

solrad.co

When a Comic Refuses to Explain Itself: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic by Emre Altindag - SOLRAD

Today on SOLRAD, we feature the essay: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic by Emre Altindag

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Tyler @electriceden92.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The problem here is that it actively erases the agency of the original cartoonists, because it takes for granted that they were no higher than admen, and that they had no subtext already built into the comics that Lichtenstein was simply noticing

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Tyler @electriceden92.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Besides the fact that not enough people realized that he was directly tracing these things with no real creative additions, the case for Lichtenstein depended on him adding a perceived level of contempt for the source material, which was what supposedly made it 'high art'

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

So apart from all the other problems with the ambient recording stuff tech companies are pushing... who is this *for*? How are you so checked out of your life you need a recap of your last 15 seconds multiple times a day?

mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai - Blog - Audio Intelligence

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Could probably come up with many with more thought, but: I was startled at how Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death anticipated some of where the culture was headed. Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary is thoughtful about dealing with feeling directionless.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

This is bizarre, but also an exemplary demonstration of the confusion and PR fog surrounding LLMs. The writer is incensed about LLM watermarking because he wants his LLM "to choose the very best, most precise words". But LLMs can't do that! They don't know what words mean!

daringfireball.net

Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anyth...

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Apartment Hunting www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1735

"Look, before I decide to rent an apartment in a building with a god-sized drinking straw sticking out the top, I want to know WHY."

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

My problem with online SFF book discussion is that it's obsessively present-oriented: recent releases, hot new writers, this year's award shortlists. Not many conversations recalling or reevaluating work from 30, 20, even just 10 years ago. (Except maybe Omelas, every six months.)

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I find Omelas gets more interesting when you realize it's less about "what do you do when you realize your society is built on suffering," and more about "why do we resist imagining a society not built on suffering?"

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Jeff (Mixed Metaphors) @mixedmetaphors.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I think at one point in semi-recent history there was a kind of accepted cultural canon of literature that everyone learned in school, and that allowed a kind of shared framework for discussion. We don't have that as much anymore, and so the few common touchpoints get really oversaturated.

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sean guynes @guynes.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not that interesting, but I do think it's symptomatic of something that most every take on Omelas wants to "solve" it.

static.klipy.com

Michael Jordan 'Stop It, Get Some Help' Meme

ALT: Michael Jordan 'Stop It, Get Some Help' Meme

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Kate Watson @loreandordure.com · 05/08/2026

I am actually infuriated by this assumption, as writers and artists of all kinds, that if our work runs up against the audience’s ignorance (vocabulary, intertexuality, &c.) this is somehow a failing, our fault and something it is our responsibility to avoid.

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Paul Duane 🥔 @paulduane.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

One of the things about discourse around The Odyssey is that only a couple of movies a year manage to get into 'the discourse' now, so everyone has to have an opinion on them In the old days there would be a Peter Greenaway film out by now to distract everyone & give them something new to talk about

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Lance Parkin @lanceparkin.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Somewhere along the way, we've shifted from storytelling to elaborate descriptive narration. Like a movie is just an inefficient way of doing the plot summary of that movie.

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Lance Parkin @lanceparkin.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

There's been a real trend - because streaming miniseries sprawl over so many hours, I think, but perhaps it's demand driving supply - of spelling out *every* beat, saying *everything* out loud. Leaving no stone unexamined.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Why are people laundering inoffensively anodyne political opinions through the mouths of AI-generated simulacra of beloved cartoon characters, and why is Bugs Bunny's head on the body of an eagle?

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Matthew Cheney @melikhovo.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Perhaps also we've attached so much sense of personal stake and identity to individual works, and get offended by any criticism of them, because we ourselves are not sailing in a meaningful and ongoing cultural flow, but rather are clinging to our shipwreck debris in water gone swampy.

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Matthew Cheney @melikhovo.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Perhaps we've fallen into the insidious Great/Terrible binary for aesthetic judgment because in a culture where real art *doesn't* matter, where each book/movie/song/whatever is a singular product separate from a meaningful and ongoing cultural flow, hyperbole is the only way to claim importance.

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Matthew Cheney @melikhovo.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

There also wasn't as much of the current sense of binary hyperbole: art & lit is only either Great/Terrible. From our vantage, it's weird to read serious reviews from 100 years ago, because there's less sense that something must be proclaimed either a timeless masterpiece or crime against humanity.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

A tangential thought about this is that it can be interesting when DW's regeneration and the related shift in style/mythology don't sync up perfectly—sometimes Doctors feel out of their element because their era starts late, or ends early.

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Wm Henry Morris @wmhenrymorris.com · 30/07/2026

I continue to find it distressing that substack has managed to capture such a big chunk of literary discussion/energy--mainly lit fic but some genre focused folks as well We need something that's open source, easy to spin up, more communal/connected than blogs, but less messy than discord servers

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

My Doctor Who take is that it works best when every regeneration is a soft reboot, every Doctor getting their own mythology. A crucial part of is that every Doctor ought to be a different kind of character who could be the lead of a series like this.

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Tom Ewing @tomewing.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I was also getting deep into music at that point, and the Crisis occupied a very similar space to punk, a year zero event which had Changed Everything by resetting the clock. But after an initial burst of creativity, the risk was that you'd just Repeat Everything trying to sneak old stuff back

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Dale Smith @dalesmithonline.com · 29/07/2026

Starting to come across the idea that Doctor Who might do a full reboot in the wild, and I am here to say no-one is going to do that. Reboots and regeneration solve the same TV problem: you don't need to use one if you've got the other, and reboot involves more risk than regeneration.

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Rise Up (From the Grave) Comus @riseupcomus.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

"Modern vernacular fantasy ideas get read backwards into a text that is perceived as having originated them but which doesn’t really contain them" is such a good way to put that phenomenon, holy shit. I've always wanted to find the right way to articulate that point.

Thread from tom Kilian (@tomkilianart.bsky.social) about how hobbit adaptations diverge from the source material in weird ways

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Feels like there's a pattern online where people slip into thinking of a book/movie/etc. as intrinsically Good or Bad, like critical Calvinism. And if someone praises a movie we've decided is Bad, or slams one deemed Good, their motives are suspect and their actual argument tends to get lost.

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Hagai Palevsky (he/him) @dialhforhagai.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Cartoonists like Jerry Moriarty, Richard McGuire, and Yokoyama Yūichi are vital (in the sense of both “important” and “alive”) specifically because, given their painterly rather than literary backgrounds, they put lie to the conception of comics as exclusively/fundamentally stemming from literature

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Someone really needs to get the rights to reprint this and make it widely available again.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

My blog is still dormant, as words have not been coming easily lately. I have, off and on, managed a few reviews on Letterboxd:

letterboxd.com

Wesley O.’s reviews

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

I've been working a lot on comics without feeling like I'm making any actual progress. Partly because I've been redrawing a lot; my inking has been sloppy. But this week I cleaned my old Rapidographs and it feels like they reset something; it's improving again.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The tagline for this is fascinating, because someone must have seen other movies advertised with "before he was a, he was b" without having the faintest understanding of what work that line was doing or why you would use it.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Ghosts www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1730

From the corner of my eye I saw a ghost.
It was the coat rack.
That's what ghosts are- Stress phantasms, our anxiety trying to explain itself with shapes.
Yet when I stopped being fictional, that added elves to the world- which added magic-
-Which added actual ghosts.

So the question becomes: Did that make the world larger?
Or just more literal?

It depends on the ghost...

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Will Ellwood @unleashtheginger.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Another addition to this fine topic: The Widening Gyre by Paul Kincaid - lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

lareviewofbooks.org

The Widening Gyre: 2012 Best of the Year Anthologies | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Kip Manley @kiplet.myatproto.social · 15/07/2026

I keep pointing people to Joanna Russ on the wearing out of genre materials, but gosh dang it, people ought to read and reckon with Joanna Russ on the wearing out of genre materials:

jstor.org

The Wearing out of Genre Materials | JSTOR

Joanna Russ, The Wearing out of Genre Materials, College English, Vol. 33, No. 1, Oct., 1971

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Kip Manley @kiplet.myatproto.social · 15/07/2026

Look, generative AI sucks and the art and writing output by generative AI sucks but setting up a fail state where human work is always differentiable from and better than generated slop is just setting yourself up for an epic pratfall. You will get taken. —That's one of the ways this shit all sucks.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

As someone who read a lot of De Lint back in the day, this feels bizarre; in his 1990s novels an algorithm manufacturing lifeless slop to replace human art would have been the villain. It's like learning Popeye gave up spinach and started shilling for a potato chip company.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I completely agree with this, and I don't think the claim that comics and prose are basically the same thing is good for comics, either. There are assumptions buried in the argument that misunderstand what both prose and comics actually do.

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Wm Henry Morris @wmhenrymorris.com · 07/07/2026

Reviews like this are often boiled down to “take down” or “negative, but that flattens out the actually argument Abigail is making, which is much more interesting and nuanced. Criticism is the how/why not just a simple + or -

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Petergeist Clines @peterclines.com · 07/07/2026

Billy Wilder said let the audience add 2+2 on their own and they'll love you for it. I think sometimes letting them come up with their own explanation, their own theories, for something generates just as much love. Because then it's *their* explanation. The one *they* came up with or figured out.

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craig robertson @craiglee47.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

"the armored bird" 7" x 13" pen and ink on bristol board.

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason, has long been out of print - used copies sell for hundreds of dollars. It's wild that this is not more widely available given how much his ideas still apply to the world we're in now. 🧵/

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Kyle Winkler @bleakhousing.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Phew. There’s nothing like preparing to read a book. That is, narrowing down options. Then finding it. And then finding, by chance, a different book that overtakes the original and reading that one. And ofc, ditching that one 30 pp. in to read this OTHER one you found in a Free Little Library…

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Simon and Gargamel @kellylink.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I like metaphors! But there has to be a web of connection to them, a system by which they are organized that feels meaningful. They can't just be pretty. They suggest a point of view—or writer needs to think, while revising, about how they (subtly) operate as a whole. Emotion needs to be there.

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