iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 06/10/2026

loading up the EAP website and

a screenshot crop of a webpage with a thumbnail of a video where a man is talking to the camera, the title of the video is "prepare for end-of-life"

gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 01/10/2026

I ordered a copy of Shaughnessy’s Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts 2 months later it has arrived

A box of cereal (Uncle Toby's fruity bites: wild berry flavour) inside a ripped-open Amazon delivery box

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 21/09/2026

I just accidentally uploaded the Hyperborea cleric spell list to my Southern Cross (medical insurance) claim…

A screenshot of a PDF viewer showing a table of spell names

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 16/09/2026

Brom is particularly good to start in media res where they’re just players who are setting up for the session and the GM is asking them questions, but they’ve forgotten that they entered a dungeon a few hours ago…

A photo of RPG books lying on a table with bright colours

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 14/09/2026

accidentally found National party health policy in a stairwell at (what is apparently now called) Sky World

A sign reading "walk straight past the disabled" with an iconographic "female" figure and an arrow pointing to the right. White on black.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 27/08/2026

if you wish to read the yijing, first you must… build a recension from scratch

another UI image, this time showing a layout where the same passage from 8+ different texts is being compared side-by-side. alongside each passage is shown the original image strip; characters that differ in the transcriptions are highlighted.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 13/07/2026

what do I make with excessive lemons and limes? do I get really into American-style pies?

a photograph of a composite stone benchtop with a big pile of lemons in a tray on the left and a big pile of limes (yellow) on the bench on the right.

behind is a large stainless steel colander full of mandarins and a bowl with overripe habaneros

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 11/07/2026

also it was ridiculous for a winter’s day bonus Tuna pile, at the Matakana market, where apparently the entire population of Auckland descended

a writhing of eels in murky water

long frilly tails, slight whiskered snouts

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 11/07/2026

Went for a short 3km walk in Tãwharanui and unexpectedly spotted Toutouwai (NZ Robin), Tieke (Saddleback) & Pāteke (Brown Teal)… along with the standard Tüï, lots of Korimako, Kererü, a bunch of Pōpokotea, and a silly number of Piwakawaka. Do recommend! all my bird photos were bad so some walkways:

photo from the top of a gravel path looking back down a grassy hill to a beach below.

The water is very shiny with the sun reflecting off it. The grass is bright green. There are some clouds and a lot of scrubby bushes.

Photo of a gravel pathway under native trees which lean in from either side. Blue sky is visible through the sparse canopy.

A similar photo but browner/muddier pathways

A photo from the beach in the first photo. The sand is on the left and the sea on the right. Above a grassy embankment on left are large dark green trees. The sky gapes blue above. There are clouds in the far distance on the right.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 08/07/2026

I have discovered the worst tic-tac-toe/noughts-and-crosses implementation of all time

a brown plastic panel with a faux wood pattern on the side of a playground with space for only three X/O yellow spinners in a row

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 20/06/2026

North Head was real nice, last weekend

A photograph from a hill looking back over a harbor. The grass is mown and bright green. On the right there's another mount in the distance visible, with houses in front and a beach wrapping all the way around till below the Hill the photo is taken from. Across the other side of the harbor on distant left is the city core, with skyscrapers and the Sky Tower. The sky is deep blue with scattered clouds.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 07/06/2026

this one plant just won’t quit, it must have made like 60 habaneros by now. I have multiple bags in the freezer. I have a litre of hot sauce. running out of things to do!

a large IKEA stainless steel bowl with red habanero chilies in it, about 25

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 05/06/2026

which way Western dude

Sausserian diagrams with two parts: concept/sound image

A Piercean diagram with three nodes: object - sign - interpretant (linked in that order, object dotted-linked to interpretant)

A Greimas square diagram: top left s1, top right s2, bottom left not s1, bottom right not s2. The opposite corners are linked by solid diagonal lines. The outer edges of the square are linked by dotted lines. Left side labeled "deixes 1" and right "deixes 2".

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 27/05/2026

toki pona auto-glosser, ha

a screenshot of some commandline output about the sentence "mi pana e tomo tawa sina" with two readings listed

the first (which has multiple different glosses but I'm giving the first line) is "I give house to you" - the second is "I give house moving your"

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 24/05/2026

we use an old Google device in the kitchen for adding stuff to the shopping list and setting timers. recently it changed to Australian mode† it’s not going well

A shopping list showing

Khaki batteries
Pancreas
Flair drip
Cherry tree
Ant bait

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 24/05/2026

me when I have to make the coffee but I haven’t had my coffee yet

A copy of a figure from the Codex Borgia with a deity holding a ball while another ball is in a temple.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 24/05/2026

winning on the op shop finds

A book cover "The sport of life and death: the mesoamerican ballgame"

With a photo of a clay figure running with a ball

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 15/05/2026

slipping Bruno into an internal slide deck again, ha, ha

a slide title "translation and pdf search/indexing" with a bunch of hermetic geometric diagrams on it, none of which seem comprehensible

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 13/05/2026

I’m not doing this for perf reasons (and there’s not much point comparing with interpreted languages) but since I did just set up some benchmarks I ran the numbers (figures on left are in ms – also on a faster CPU)

Table 1: Comparison of execution times (in ms). Troll and
Icepool were run on an Intel i5-8400. Troll does not report
internal computation time; the figures for Troll include an
estimated 10 ms of startup time. It takes about 60 ms to start
Python and import icepool, indicated as “+60”. Any
Dice is hosted on a remote server with unknown hardware
and an execution time limit of 5 000 ms, so we have only
an upper bound (for computations that don’t time out) or a
lower bound (for computations that do). L5R refers to ex
ploding d10s with at most 4 explosions, as introduced in the
Prior Work section. The RISK mechanic computes the dif
ference in the number of pairs won by each side, as given in
Section 3.1 of (Isaksen et al. 2016), with the Troll and Any
Dice programs being taken from (Mogensen et al. 2016).

Problem, Troll, AnyDice, Icepool
12d6: 12, <100, 3+60
L5R roll 5 keep 3: 100000, <2100, 16+60
L5R roll 6 keep 3: 6200000, -, 17+60
L5R roll 10 keep 5: -, -, 37+60
RISK 3d6 vs. 3d6: 370, <1000, 4+60
RISK 4d6 vs. 4d6: 10800, -, 7+60
RISK 5d6 vs. 5d6: 390000, - , 12+60
RISK 10d6 vs. 10d6: -, -, 95+60

sum 12d6 11.49 µs
sum largest 3 5d10! 82.14 µs
sum largest 3 6d10! 94.19 µs
sum largest 5 10d10! 367 µs
risk(3d6, 3d6) 49.79 µs
risk(4d6, 4d6) 86.59 µs
risk(5d6, 5d6) 150.9 µs
risk(10d6, 10d6) 2.011 ms

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 12/05/2026

turns out there’s a nice way to encode Sorceror-style dice pool rolls making them very susceptible to analysis

Output showing "sorc(84d10, 76d10)" above a chart which is nearly normal but has a gap in it at 0. The values range from -76 to +84 and the mean is .9039

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 11/05/2026

once you roll enough dice you are essentially guaranteed to get the maximum value (no warnings about dropping or pruning here, the limit is the resolution of 64-bit floats!)

a chart that just looks like a column: the mean is the single value of 50000

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 11/05/2026

did something less principled (programmer brain: divide by 2) and it’s better one at-first counter-intuitive thing is that here, more dice is _easier_ to calculate (first is 500, second is 5000) – the top 50 dice are more likely to be higher, so the outcomes are more concentrated

a much smoother graph: it says state resolution was reduced by 32× (linearly interpolated)

a smooth graph as well: this one says state resolution was only reduced by 4×

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 11/05/2026

here’s what the distribution for the first post looks like. it’s not great! probably need to _read the literature_ about principled ways to do this but I hate reading about statistics

a chart that _should_ be relatively "normal" but it is very jaggedy

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 11/05/2026

L5R-style roll-and-keep-exploding distributions are _weird_

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 08/05/2026

can finally do those pesky YZE/Forbidden Lands calculations…

a command running "count (=6) 10d6 reroll (<6)"

with a table of calculations below

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 08/05/2026

making my own dice roller, on steroids, for when you need… a lot of dice (the output here is analytic, not generated by sampling, but it _is_ a close approximation [mean off by 0.0005%] and not an exact calculation — it has to be, with values this large)

$❯ .\target\release\drole.exe "sum largest 50 500d1000" --no-table Summary Statistics Values: 7005 (29199..49978) Mean: 47479.8077 Std deviation: 393.4369 Mean deviation: 314.7699$

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 06/05/2026

reading 6yo’s sign and suddenly realized it has her first ever footnote, so proud

a cardboard sign with pen on it reading
(translated from 6yo handwriting)

"Warning: please do not come in here it is a nightmare cat's* territory.

*Nightmare cats are cats that can bite you in half."

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 06/05/2026

hahaha— gulp (Alex Hern as quoted in Escape, Marie Le Conte)

'The big thing the internet has done is made me realise I don't actually have any niche interests. It's sort of a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it's nice to know how many other people share my enthusiasm for this stuff, but on the other hand, it's a constant reminder of just how incredibly normie I am.

'At school, I thought I was an interesting snowflake, for playing mildly-artsy video games and having a standing order at a comic shop. Now I know that I am the most vanilla nerd imaginable. Occasionally, I wonder whether I should try and cultivate a really niche interest, but I honestly think, when comparing yourself to Literally Everyone Else In The World, the only stuff that looks niche anymore is going to be borderline impenetrable.'

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 06/05/2026

this feels way too on-the-nose, but I’ve just noticed the research was funded by an organization that uses a Kabbalistic logo (“Metatron’s cube” seems to be a new-agey name for this) which is very similar to Bruno’s “Figura Intellectus” (which he probably lifted from actually-mathematical sources)

Logomark

The origins of The Kavli Foundation logomark
are found in sacred geometry, a belief that the
fundamental properties of the universe can be
quantified into simple shapes and patterns.

The mark is comprised of two symbols:
an 'overlapping circles grid' known
as the Flower of Life and a hexogonal
configuration known as Metatron's Cube,
symbolizing focus, energy, discovery and
an underlying pattern of the universe.

a mystical-looking diagram in black and white

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 06/05/2026

reading Giordano Bruno’s memory-works again and thinking: the fact that grid cells are linked to memory is probably part of what actually made this ‘effective’ … the discovery of grid (and path) cells won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: and guess what appears in the NP lecture?

a slide from a deck with a map of South America on the left and a bisected drawing of a house on the right

the left is labelled "space is used as a framework for storing memories" and the right is labelled "method of loci"

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 04/05/2026

Ted Nelson in Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) (in the Artificial Intelligence section)

I have strong hunches about the inner work-
ings of men who get millions of dollars from the
Department of Defense and then say in private
that really they're going to use it to create a
machine so intelligent it can play with their chil-
dren. (Not to name names or anything.) An
obvious question is, do they play with their
children? No, they play with computers.

0101

gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 04/05/2026

hell yeah I'm going to take mushroom advice from the asbestos man the one I broke up, which dried out / two fresh ones, one which has popped and the other which seems to have been eaten by birds

Dried out version of the previous, in a hand

Two chopped up on a cutting board, one browned at the top the other white all the way through

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 03/05/2026

trying to figure out my lawn fungus: some kind of tiny puffball?

Green grass and a white fungus with short white/fluffy spikes on top

The same but split open, there is a "meaty" part at the top and a more "empty" part in the shaft

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 03/05/2026

went to the Aotearoa Art Fair and all i got was this incredibly sick poster (Jess Johnson)

a poster with hard to describe geometric fleshy imagery, masks with vagiform faces and intertwined limbs. the background is a marigold yellow and it says GAME TRANSFER PHENOMENON

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 01/05/2026

This isn’t funny, NZ literally tried this in the 2002 election! They called the on-screen line “the worm” and the audience had a special dial they could turn which ran from Very Good to Normal to Very Dull. You can see it in action here: www.nzonscreen.com/title/2002-l...

A black plastic contraption in a man's hand. It has a cord and kinda looks like a 1970s toaster. It has engraved white text. At the bottom it says Audience Studies. Above that is a dial going from A Very Dull to B Dull to C Normal to D Good and finally E Very Good. There are exposed screws and it looks very DIY.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 30/04/2026

not a cell phone in sight, just people living in the moment except me. i’m mediated. i’m the bad one

A photograph of a concert crowd. The people are all in shadow but their hair is rim-lit by the stage lights. On stage the background is purple but a bright white spotlight beams down on a man in a bright red suit playing the guitar. It's Takanaka.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 29/04/2026

in general Luxon has no opinions on *anything* but he really wanted to support bombing Iran? two weeks ago he was at a Buddhist temple in Auckland giving a speech about world peace! what a genuine piece of shit

Christopher Luxon standing behind a podium with "2025 Buddha's Birthday, Celebration for World Peace". He is wearing an orange ribbon around his neck. Behind him are golden dragons and small Buddha statues for the "bathing the Buddha" ceremony. There's a NZ flag and a Buddhist flag flanking him in the background.

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gəorgə pollɐrd @porg.es · 29/04/2026

hell yeah to whoever was in the crowd filming Takanaka on a Nintendo 3DS

A man in a red suit playing a guitar on stage beneath spotlights

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