iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/10/2026

And I didn’t expect to delete this today. Some days are just full of surprises, aren’t they?

Screenshot of an e-mail summary from a list:

From: Gina Hinojosa 6:20 AM
Subject: I didn't expect to send this today
I wanted you to hear this from me first.
I wanted you to hear this from me first.

[First line of e-mail body repeated]

Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/10/2026

Goods gods. I hadn’t seen Koenig for a while… he’s just evaporated in this picture since the last time I saw him, like water on pavement in a Phoenix summer.

A photo of Takai and Koenig sitting next to each other in a diner, smiling at the camera. Takai looks to be in robust health for a man of his age, while Koenig looks nearly skeletal, like he’s in a final illness.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2026

While I’m deeply suspicious of anything that sounds this much like AIPAC giving ground in the face of their “kiss of death” rep for endorsements – are they just retargeting their efforts to work just as aggressively behind the scenes? – still, it shows a […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of a social media post from Jewish Insider reporter “Marc Rod”, which includes a photo of a person holding an AIPAC info folder and the text:

"SCOOP: AIPAC will no longer endorse congressional candidates or earmark donations to congressional campaigns. The group's super PAC,
United Democracy Project, will continue to operate and it will urge members to donate directly to pro-Israel candidates.”

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

I awlays tell people that my mother was basically Mary Tyler Moore in every way that mattered. Gonna hang onto these pictures as evidence….

A black and white photo from a newspaper clipping, circa mid-1960s, of my mother and me as a child. She’s smiling and looking beautiful in a conservative, woman’s, mid-length haircut of the time, and bears a striking resemblance to Mary Tyler Moore in the Dick Van Dyke Show era.

A black and white photo of Mary Tyler Moore (with Dick Van Dyke) in the Dick Van Dyke Show era, bearing a striking resemblance to my mother.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

Going through a box I haven’t touched in 12 years, not since I packed up all my stuff and went nomad, and I found these bookends. Ah, the good old days, before the author loudly and self-righteously turned to the dark side. Into the trash with both of them […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Two bookends of ceramic Harry Potter and Hermione, both sitting and reading book. They’re placed on a dark granite countertop, with bits of kitchen in the background.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Author: “So, I have this novel about barely-teenage boys in love, and I want to create a suggestive cover for it, but I can’t find a cover artist who can make it creepy enough while still looking plausibly legal. Got any ideas?” Author’s Very Sus Friend […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of the cover of “Summer Solstice” by Patrick Shawn, showing two boys, one looking around 11-12 and the other slightly taller and looking maybe 13, at the beach, looking at the camera, with the older boy’s arm standing behind the younger one with his arm draped over the younger’s shoulder. The style of the image looks like standard AI output.

Screenshot of the cover of “Beneath The Mast And Stars” by Patrick Shawn, showing two boys around 13 years old, sitting on the deck of a sailing vessel in well-made but old-style, 19th Century, sailor’s clothing, leaning slightly against each other while looking at the camera. The style of the image looks like standard AI output.

Screenshot of a line of several Patrick Shawn covers, each showing two boys around 12-14 years old, looking out at the camera, while leaning slightly against each other or standing one behind the other with an arm draped across. The style of the image looks like standard AI output.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

My grandmother never liked Frank Sinatra, because of his mafia connections, and that has always stuck in my head and I’ve never really liked him simply because she didn’t. I’m kind of sad that I have no grandkids who could loyally hate Tom Cruise for similar […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of an Onion news box, which has a picture of a smiling Tom Cruise and a headline and sub-headline that read:

Smiling, Unblinking Tom Cruise Just Wants To Know Why Nation Didn't See 'Digger'

I'm Really Not Angry At All, Says Actor

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

Come home from breakfast to find some kind of dance party going on in the park across the river. I am so there! * * For values of there that include putting on my noise canceling headphones and hiding out behind a wall of mellow coffee shop jazz music.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

Sounds totally legit. I mean, they came across my background! You can’t get more legit than that! How can I be a part of this amazing opportunity?!

Screenshot of text message.

From: +63 962 817 7891

Eleanor Sterling, Amazon Remote Recruitment.

Flexible online position. Assist merchants. Product updates. More customers. We sent this because we came across your background.

• Time commitment: 60-90 minutes/day, 4 days a week
• Pay range: $100-$600 daily (base $5,300 per 30 working days)
• Extras: Free training + 15-20 days paid leave annually

We're currently filling 18 spots. If you're at least 23 years old and interested, please text "More Info" to 2136690556.

——
If you did not expect this message from an unknown sender, it may be spam.
>> Report Spam

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Lol. The group invites their Czech teammate to join their suddenly organized reading group, to help him practice his English. #bookstodon

More text messages…

check your messages. i sent you a link

Hájek:
this cover has a man with no shirt holding a hockey stick

Kowalski:
correct

Hájek:
the stick is wrong. that is a goalie stick and he is listed as a forward

Thompson:
THAT'S what you noticed first?

Hájek:
it is the most obvious error

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Hah! I feel like the author is reading my mind! 😁 Scene: a text message exchange between the members of a new hockey franchise team… #bookstodon

Screenshot of the text message exchange in the book.

Thompson:
ok so my sister sent me this book
it's a hockey romance novel
the hockey is SO BAD

Kowalski:
how bad

Thompson:
the defenseman "skated elegantly toward the net"

Kowalski:
elegantly

Thompson:
ELEGANTLY

Marchetti:
send it to me immediately

Thompson:
it gets worse. there's a love scene in the penalty box

Kowalski:
that's a two minute minor for unsportsmanlike conduct

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Random, inapplicable search result for a query I made, but I couldn’t help but notice the mismatch. I don’t know what an “oak drink” would taste like — I’m skeptical that it would be any good — but I’m quite certain that it wouldn’t taste the same as an “oat […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of a Kagi search result, of an article from Ihmagazine. The word “oak” in the headline and “oat” in the body have been underlined in red:

Headline: Delamere Launches 97ml Oak Drink for Hospitality Industry

Body:
Delamere has announced the launch of a new 97ml oat drink following the success of its semi-skimmed milk mini bottles in the hospitality and foodservice ...

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Just saw, again, a Discord discussion I had with my Mom two months ago, when she had technical problems with her headset right before our weekly #ESO game. My poetry, such as it is, is nearly always accidental.

A screenshot of a series of lines I typed to my mother in Discord chat:

We heard you say hello.
Yes, we can still hear you
When we talk, do you see the little glowing rings around our icons?
That will tell us if our voices are getting to you.
If they are, then it's a question of where the sound is going to.
Good

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

And, as if summoned by mystic rite, a new follower! 😁

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

Why, yes, Audible, I believe I would. For the first one, how about, “Supreme Lama”. And for the second… well, I should probably take “Emperor of the United States”. I don’t really want the job, but for the good of the world….

Screenshot of an email header, which reads:

Audible
• Want 2 free titles? Open this email

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

Ok, this movie about a future detective and his android wife popped up in my Netflix queue. And I’m sure it’s *terrible*. But kudos on a great title! 👍

Screenshot of a Netflix movie image, showing and attractive blond woman in a grey, form-fitting blouse, with her eyes closed, lying back in a chair like a dentist’s chair while a mostly-off-camera man also dressed in grey holds a metal probe to her neck. Witten above it in a sort of digital, white script, is the movie title, “Wife Like”, clearly a play on the term “life like”.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

The perfumer lady barely recalls what the paladin looks like, but the fact that he smelled like gingerbread and she can’t figure out why he would, is driving her nuts. Leading to this sequence: (Don’t know why, but something about the tone of this sequence […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screenshot of three paragraphs from the book, which read:

Grace couldn’t think of anything that would make oiled metal smell like gingerbread, but the gods knew she didn’t know every single smell in the world.

She wondered if she could blend a mixture that would be masculine, but with gingerbread notes. “No, don’t be ridiculous. I could blend it, I just couldn’t sell it to any of these accursed nobles. Manly, so far as they’re concerned, is sandalwood and tobacco. Leather if you’re lucky. Amber sometimes. But definitely sandalwood.”

Grace was really quite sick of sandalwood. She’d tried to move the fashion toward cedar, but they used cedar to keep away moths in this city, so everyone had entirely the wrong associations with it, which was a damn shame. Cedar was one of her favorites. But no, she was still stuck mixing a signature scent for nearly two dozen noblemen, each of whom wanted something distinctive! Unique! And which also smelled like sandalwood!

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

When a book cover is so delightfully absurd that you instantly start cackling loudly. I swear, some books you read in spite of the covers, not because of them. Not this one, mind you. This is too daft even for *my* romance-novel-eroded standards. omg. 😂

Book cover for The Earl’s Wrangler, by Andrew Grey, book 3 of the (pauses to guffaw some more) Cowboy Nobility series.

The cover depicts an attractive man around 30, with short brown hair and a barely-there beard and mustache, in a charcoal grey business suit with no tie, looking to the right at a lean, hunky, shirtless cowboy in a white, ten-gallon hat positioned slightly in front of him and looking back at him. The background image is of a brown, western, dusty prairie, with a distant man on horseback herding cattle under an overcast sky. There is a tag line, printed across the hairless, muscled chest of the shirtless cowboy, that reads, “He lost a bet but came out a winner....”

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

I’m sure Christoper Walken is delightful, but I stand by this characterization.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

I feel like this is the first three types of people giving the finger to the fourth.

Screenshot of a poll post from @HopelessDemigod@mstdn.social, asking what sort of role people work at. The first and third choices (Scientist and Technician) have a few votes (14%), but the second one (Engineer), between them, has over 4 times as many votes (72%). The last one (Business Management) has zero votes:

Which best describes you or your role?

* Scientist
* Engineer
* Technician
* Business Management

https://mstdn.social/@HopelessDemigod/117038875141554986

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

My gods, that’s beautiful, if I do say so myself. And I do. A “3-ingredient yoghurt cake” — basically a cheesecake. Recipe in Alt-text. So. Good.

A perfectly round cheesecakey thing in a nonstick 7” cake pan, bright yellow around the outside, and a golden brown inside.

Preheat oven to 350 °F.
Separate 4 eggs. Mix the yolks with a cup of nonfat Greek yoghurt, 3/4 cup of evaporated milk. (I add a secret, 4th ingredient, 1-2 tsp of vanilla extract.) Whip the whites on high until stiff. Fold the whipped whites into that yoghurt mixture, 1/3 at a time. Pour into 7” nonstick cake pan. Rest cake pan in a larger roasting pan at least 2” deep, pour water into roasting pan to a 1/2” depth.
Bake 350 °F for 40 min, then 325 °F for 10 min, then let sit in the cooling oven for 1 hr. Remove from oven, fridge cake pan for 24hrs, then serve.

(You may have to test evaporated milk brands, I’ve found some are kind of bland.)

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

The Last #Heartstopper Shipment arrives. I haven’t owned an actual, physical calendar in over a decade, and I don’t technically *need* this one. Much less need a spiral bound planner — with stickers! But the series is done and I had to have them, precious!

Photo of the Heartstopper volume 6 graphic novel, 2027 calendar, and 2027 day planner, placed against a dark countertop.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2026

Just had a crazy thought… 11 years ago, I was living for several months in Sapporo, Japan, having retired early the previous fall. If I had passed a 7 year old child on the street, then, they would be an adult now. 😰

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2026

15% of the way in, and this is delightful. Light and warm and funny… just what I needed after Tchaikovsky’s brilliant but tense Children of Time series. I just glanced back at the cover and noticed the tag line: “He's absolutely off limits... oops.” Lol. 😂❤️

The cover of Zarah Detand’s book, Conflict of Interest, which shows a colorful drawing of two guys in casual conversation at a festively decorated bar, one with a stethoscope hanging down around his neck (telegraphing that he’s a doctor) and the other very casually dressed in a light purple long sleeve shirt open to show much of his chest and holding a wine glass (telegraphing, presumably, that he’s seductive).

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

Also, I think I just found my least favorite city to live in on Earth (besides Houston).

Screenshot of an Organic Maps image of the area between Greece and Istanbul, with the town of “Drama”, just north of the Aegean, circled in red.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

How weird is it that I knew this was about Mitch McConnell before I ever clicked the link to the quoted post. #StrangeDays

Screenshot of Bluesky post from “Ed Lynch”:

At 5½ weeks in open air, a human corpse is in the stage of advanced decay. Most internal organs, muscles, and soft tissues have fully broken down and liquefied into a dark "purge fluid". Nails and teeth fall out of their sockets, and hair sloughs off completely. The remaining skin turns black. 🌈🌟

Screenshot of Bluesky post from “Jon Cooper”:

Mitch McConnell’s staff have declined to answer basic questions about what work he is doing—37 days after he was loaded into the back of an ambulance and vanished from public view.

His staff refused to even say if the senator had spoken to any of them in recent days.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/07/2026

I don’t think I’ll be able to unsee this….

A screenshot of a post from someone saying “Every time I see Zohran Mamdani all I can think of is Daredevil.”

Followed by pictures of Mamdani and Daredevil actor Charlie Cox, both smiling, dark-haired, bearded, middle-aged guys with similar facial shapes, wearing dark suits and ties over light shirts, and wow do they look alike!

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/07/2026

I started writing for my own satisfaction & started self-publishing only because my brain wouldn’t let go & let me move on until I “completed” it by doing what it felt was the last step. I’ll never have more than a handful of readers, mostly friends & family […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot from my Kindle app, showing the “From Your Library” section, with my little, cozy, fantasy novel, “The Quartered Lands, next to Heartstopper Vol 6, and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s scifi novel, Children of Time.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026

A character in an anime I’m watching, offered money to do a thing, proclaims, “It’s all about the Yukichis,” and it’s hysterical how well that translates. 😁

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/06/2026

Did a quick search to see what the weather was like in Ireland today. Accuweather was *not* helpful. WTF, dudes? 🤨

A piece of an Accuweather page showing a list of 10 search results for “Ireland”. All 10 results are for places in the United States, 9 of them being towns named Ireland.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/06/2026

I sent a print copy of my Doorways book to my oldest friend (who had once sent me the one he’d written), & yesterday he informed me that a former student of his (a young woman now going into med school) had borrowed it during a visit. I just got this from […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of a text from my friend, and my reply.

Friend:

Grace asks me to send the following, after stating that she now understands with overwhelming clarity why we are such good friends:

Dear Mr. Castleberry,
I was supposed to write essays for medical schools today. Instead, I spent the last six hours reading about gay Guardians of the fae world and drinking iced tea because William Hanlon made it sound so good.
This is also how I intend to spend the next six hours (I’m an exceptionally slow reader).
Much thanks from an appreciative queer reader.
🖖

==
My reply:

Please tell her that she is now my favorite person in the whole world. The Dalai Lama will be disappointed at dropping to second place, but as a good Buddhist I’m sure he understands the impermanence of all things. 🙏

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

It's true that size isn't everything, but people generally acknowledge that it does seem to be really, really important. #synchronicity

Screenshot of two posts that came into my feed one after the other.

The top one, arriving second, is from the Onion. The post reads, “Area Child’s Drawing Of Family Raises Troubling Questions About Size Of Dad”, and it’s paired with a child’s crayon drawing of a four person family standing under a yellow sun, with one member (presumably the dad) being easily twice the height of the others and with a giraffe-like long neck.

The second post, which would have come in first, is from @bomkatt@ohai.social, and reads, “My own jurassic park moment- stalked by a dinosaur who wanted my frites.” It is coupled with a photo of an outdoor snack area, surrounded by trees. In the foreground, standing on a nearby table at camera level is a seagull, balancing on one leg and with a very serious expression on its face. In the background, walking this way, is a man who looks reasonably tall. But, because of perspective, the seagull looks like it’s massive, taller than the man and much bulkier, and it looks like it’s looming threateningly over him and over the photographer.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

The poster for the #Heartstopper movie is perfectly fine, but the motto at the top makes me cry for reasons that are hard to pin down. 😭 I’d like to cut loose and just bawl while I explore that, but I've got contractors in and the emotional spelunking will […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The Heartstopper Forever movie poster, which has Nick and Charlie smiling at each other on the beach at sunset, with the motto at the top, “Love like there’s no ending.”

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

Kobo sends me a book recommendation for 異動之刻新裝版 which, considering how much trouble I'm having just with Spanish, seems unreasonably optimistic about my foreign language reading skills. Nice cover, though.

Screenshot of the body of an e-mail from Rakuten Kobo, headlined “New releases of the week.

The book title is displayed in Chinese, without translation, and the cover image provided is for a Chinese book, with an illustration in muted watercolors of a person (of uncertain gender, probably male) standing alone on a city street, facing away from the viewer, with the buildings painted in low-contrast, muted, blue-gray tones, with a black, night sky above them. There are ghostly images of two animals, probably foxes, following them.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

The new waitress at my regular breakfast cafe is an actual fetus. I have never supported anti- abortion laws before now, but I just have a gut level feeling that she needs every protection that the law might afford her.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

“The power of Christ commands you! The power of Christ commands you!”

Screenshot of a Twitter post from Brendan Gutenschwager @BGOnTheScene, showing picture of an older African American man in a suit, standing in front of a gateway in a chain link fence, holding a sheaf of papers up in the air. The accompanying text reads:

"I have a court order here that allows me to come in. I will go in because the Constitution protects me" Congressman Adriano Espaillat says this morning outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

@ben I'm suddenly reminded of this old Kliban cartoon.

The old Kliban cartoon, captioned “Monument To The Unknown Ten Foot Pole.” It’s a line drawing of a city square with a statue in the center that’s so large you can’t see above his knees, and there are a few people standing around looking at the statue’s plaque (not readable in the cartoon).

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

If this had a cat on the cover, instead of a horse, I’d wonder if it was Spanish or Japanese.

Photo of a magazine on a coffee table. It has a photo of a cowboy-looking dude on a horse on the cover, and various blurbs in Spanish. The magazine name is “Ñan”, which sounds like the Japanese word for “Meow”: “Nyan”.

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/05/2026

What a weird burst of e-mail spam. Voltbou? Fongdiver? Domosoon? It's quite the change from all the Walmart and Costco fake e-mails I was getting – the guys who mass-mail spam have suddenly changed their tactics. Makes for kind of a pleasant change. Weird to […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of the spam folder of an e-mail client, showing a series of entries with weird subjects and senders:

Subject: Voltbou Power: The Visual 240W Power Station
Correspondants: Voltbou Power <volybou...
Time: 6:41 AM

Subject: Fongdiver: The 550W Charging Hub with Smart Display
Correspondants: Fongdiver <ongdiver@2...
Time: 3:53 AM

Subject: VEXTAKI: 9-in-1 Multi-Tool EDC Pen for Everyday Adventure
Correspondants: VEXTAKI <vextaki@2541...
Time: 3:01 AM

Subject: DOCO Lab Smart Adaptive 5D Reciprocating Shaver
Correspondants: DOCO Lab <docoolab@2...
Time: 1:19 AM

Subject: Domosoon: The Ultra-Light Semiconductor Cooling Vest
Correspondants: Domosoon <domosoonn...
Time: 5/25/26, 10:30 PM

Subject: Domosoon: The Ultra-Light Semiconductor Cooling Vest
Correspondants: Domosoon <domosoonn...
Time: 5/25/26, 10:26 PM

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Charles Castleberry @mythingperson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/05/2026

In the middle of this article about growing sprouts, this excellent AI analogy appears. Not even an analogy, really - more of a precise description…. tangledbankforaging.co.uk/2026/05/2…

Screenshot of a paragraph in the article, which reads:

Just as landlords enclosed English common land in the 16th century, claiming ownership of what had been a communal resource and requiring peasant farmers to pay them to rent it back, AI appears to be in the process of enclosing information, ingesting everything written and created and shared on the internet on spewing it back shorn of context, meaning or personality. Google search is trying to replace links to websites with attributable information sources made by people who care about what they’re creating with AI summaries in response to search queries. These may be accurate, or may be dangerously inaccurate, but that doesn’t matter to Google because it’s profitable for their business model. I’ve no doubt this post will be scraped and regurgitated back by some chatbot, possibly to someone who’s being rinsed by Home Harvest every month to get nutritional advice on sprouting seeds. And I haven’t even mentioned the environmental footprint of AI datacentres (which use 6% of the UK’s electricity supply) or the fact that these companies have created a computer memory shortage by buying it all up, driving up the price of IT equipment and forcing users to rent hosting and computing power back from them at a profit. The entire business model is enclosure of every public good the modern day feudal lords can get their grubby little hands on.

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