iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 28/09/2026

(labelled as “graphic media” in lieu of a spoiler tag; it’s just text, really)

Word mark of the band Iron Maiden—angular letters, all caps, red outlined in white outlined in black.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 28/09/2026

The punkining has begun.

A triangular flowerbed surrounded by green grass. In the flowerbed are various late-summer and early-autumn blooms, plus a bright orange pumpkin.

Close-up of a planter with red and pink flowers, in front of which has been placed an assortment of small decorative gourds.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 27/09/2026

My city has a cool flag based on its coat of arms, but most of the time it chooses to fly a boring one based on its corporate logo instead. They both beat the hell out of Tucson’s, though.

Flag of Halifax Regional Municipality: Azure a saltire or and a bezant merged thereon a kingfisher between four broad arrows points outward azure; in fess two sailing vessels tempore 1760 flags flying to the dexter or

A mostly white flag with the word HALIFAX on it in block capitals, with the strokes of the letters in a couple of different shades of blue; the two “A”s have no crossbars, so they look like capital lambdas. On the fly end is an abstract geometrical design, also in shades of blue, which causes the white portion of the flag to taper to a point, like an arrow pointing away from the hoist.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 11/09/2026

ffs, nyt 🐝🔠⁉️

Screenshot of the New York Times “Spelling Bee” word game rejecting the word DICKHEAD

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 07/09/2026

A druid… in a small settlement… holding out against the Roman empire…?

Panoramix, mixing something up in a cauldron.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 04/09/2026

“Other sources” my ass. What a crock.

Screenshot: “Extended Quiz. 148 Questions. Take the complete 148-question quiz, including the 122 survey questions plus 26 extra dialect questions from other sources.”

Screenshot: “Note on sources: This extended quiz contains all 122 questions from the official Harvard Dialect Survey, plus 26 extra dialect and pronunciation questions (such as ‘coyote,’ ‘theater,’ or ‘genuine’) modeled from other linguistic sources and studies. An AI coding agent added these questions and their weights during the construction of the full quiz”

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 04/09/2026

Oh, so THAT’S why some of it is complete fucking garbage.

Screenshot: “Extended Language Quiz. Answer all 122 questions from the original Harvard Dialect Survey and 26 supplemental questions added by AI.. The map updates in real-time as you answer questions.”

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 22/08/2026

Now, here’s a yacht that really puts the “mast” in “masturbation”.

The yacht Kaizen docked in Halifax Harbour on a summer evening, seen from the port side. It’s not the biggest luxury yacht I’ve ever seen, but it has a mast that’s taller than the whole vessel is long. (I looked it up—the yacht is 48½ metres long, and the mast is 59 metres tall.) The mast is supported by an impressive array of guy lines.

The yacht Kaizen docked in Halifax Harbour on a summer evening, seen from the aft. The name of the yacht is painted on the stern in kanji (改善), then below that much larger in romaji. Below that is the home port Bloody Bay, CI. From this angle, the height of the mast is even more striking, because it’s nearly six times the breadth of the beam.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 17/08/2026

Bees really dig the globe thistles in the Public Gardens.

Close-up of a globe thistle flower in bright afternoon sunlight. The flower is an almost perfectly spherical capitulum made up of tiny little pointy florets, which are a light bluish purple around the top, fading to pale green at the bottom. Two bumblebees are perched on it (one on the front, one on the right side), and a honeybee is in flight just above it, facing away from the viewer. The foreground is in sharp focus except for the honeybee’s wings, which are beating so fast they’re a blur. The background is an indistinct mass of lighter and darker greens, evocative of summer foliage.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 14/08/2026

Helena and Sergey Rozhenko. (Well, they’re popular with *me*.)

Theodore Bikel, Michael Dorn, and Georgia Brown in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 11/08/2026

“If you’ve been teaching for several years, it can become increasingly difficult to locate your new courses in Brightspace.” Yeah, that’s a fucking design issue, innit? Maybe, for a start, Brightspace could sort terms in reverse chronological order instead of alphafuckingbetically.

Screenshot showing the heading “Finding your course in Brightspace” above the following text:

If you’ve been teaching for several years, it can become increasingly difficult to locate your new courses in Brightspace. Tips on managing years’ worth of courses:”

• Use the Select a course button (waffle button) ▦ on the top of any Brightspace page to locate your course.
• Search for the course by using the CRN or term code. (ex. 202710 will find any Fall 2026 courses)
• Pin your courses! Click on the pin icon to pin the course to the top of the course list.
• Unpin old courses! If the pinned list is growing too large, click on the pin icon to unpin that course!

Screenshot showing the heading “My Courses”, under which are subheadings for “All”, “Pinned”, “January - April 2017”, “January - April 2019”, and “Januar…” [fading out to the right], with an arrow button to scroll further to the right.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 08/08/2026

WHAT’S NEXT, TOP HATS?!

Black-and-white photo of Selika Lazevski, a Black equestrian living in Paris in the 1890s, reclining on some furs. She’s wearing an impeccably tailored dark jacket with a shawl collar, a long skirt, and a lighter-coloured top hat. Her head is resting on her right hand; her left hand holds a walking stick with a metal knob at the top.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 01/08/2026

Peter De Jersey, circa 2013 or 2014.

Peter De Jersey, in Classical Greek robes and armour, standing in front of a white pavilion. His curly dark hair is cropped short. He has salt-and-pepper stubble and a cut around his left eye. He looks like he’s seen some shit.

Promotional photo of Peter De Jersey as Cominius in a production of Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse. He’s standing in front of a graffiti-covered wall, wearing a costume evocative of Classical Roman military gear, with his arms crossed.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 29/07/2026

the Sword Behind Inappropriate Prepositions wiki.kingdomofloathing.com/Sword_behind...

Black-and-white line drawing of a sword with a blade that is very wide relative to its length. The blade has what might be writing on it, but if so, the resolution of the image is too low to make out what it says.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 27/07/2026

We think it might be some kind of salt lick?

A stop sign supported by a conical concrete base. Behind it, a white-tailed deer is approaching with tongue stuck out.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 27/07/2026

Shark Week is here, everybody—post a shark! 🦈

A coral catshark, seen from above, swimming calmly along in shallow water over light-coloured sand. The shark is small and brown, with white spots. It looks like you could reach down and give it a gentle pet if you wanted to, and indeed you can—in the shark-and-ray touch tank at the New England Aquarium.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 23/07/2026

Hey, remember when if your operating system couldn’t run the latest version of a piece of software, you could just go on using the one you had installed, and no matter how evil and rapacious the company that made it was, they couldn’t just make your old version stop working? Those were the days.

Screenshot of a pop-up window titled “What’s New in Word”. It contains two copies of a notice that says “⚠️ Action needed by July 13. Starting July 13, some devices may lose the ability to edit and save in Microsoft 365 apps. Check your device now to find out if you are affected and what to do next.”

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 22/07/2026

On Google Street View, that boardwalk hasn’t been built yet.

A small white-and-red lighthouse at the end of a narrow peninsula. There's a fence in the foreground, and a pile of rubble at the near end of the peninsula.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 21/07/2026

This, of course, is a Gorch Fock-class barque whose moniker memorializes a Wallachian voivoide. Actors and orators, please feel free to use the preceding sentence as a vocal warmup exercise.

The three-masted barque Mircea, docked in Halifax Harbour on a summer evening. The ship is dressed overall, and a string of lights in the colours of the Romanian flag follows the line of the festive flags: blue from the bowsprit to the foremast, then yellow from the foremast to the mainmast to the mizzenmast, then red from the mizzenmast to the stern.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 14/07/2026

I happened to notice that FIFA’s doing its part to contribute to the ongoing erosion of the morphological distinction between the English simple past tense and past/passive participle.

Screenshot of an infographic from fifa.com, with a photo of the Spanish midfielder Rodri (no. 16) and a statistic of “84.10 km Total Distance Ran”.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 12/07/2026

“Verify your age”? The first computer programs I wrote were stored on cassette tape. (Yes, punch-card people, you have the right to address me as “young whippersnapper”.)

A black tape cassette whose label has a blue grid pattern background and the words “Home Computer” in the kind of MICR-inspired font that screamed ‘high tech’ from the late sixties through the mid-eighties—you know, a sans-serif with squarish overall letter shapes, rounded stroke ends, and, most saliently, some vertical strokes that abruptly become twice as wide partway down. The label also shows a capacity of 10 minutes of audio, which would only give you room for a couple of demo songs (four if you’re a punk band), but which is plenty of space if what you’re using it for is BASIC code.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 11/07/2026

A good place to be on a sunny summer afternoon.

View from a blue plastic kayak on a canal whose banks are lush with bright green leaves. The foliage is also reflected in the calm dark water of the canal. The sky is so bright that the upper middle portion of the photo—the gap between the trees on either bank—is overexposed.

View from a blue plastic kayak of a small lake on a calm and mostly sunny summer day. Two three-legged supports (shaped like cricket wickets) supporting electrical wires stick out from the bright green trees on the shore. On top of the middle pole of the wicket on the left is a clump of branches; you can’t really see it at all clearly in this photo, but it’s an eyrie belonging to a family of bald eagles.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 11/07/2026

I wasn’t expecting some sort of Spanish Armada.

Two Spanish amphibious assault ships docked in Halifax Harbour, seen from the water. On the left is the Juan Carlos I, with its stern towards the viewer; on the right is the Castilla, with its bow towards the viewer. The Juan Carlos I has a runway that slopes upwards towards the bow to allow Harrier jets to take off from it.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 08/07/2026

Everybody knows the best time and place for wildlife photography is an industrial rail yard in dense fog in the middle of the night.

A sign on a lamppost that says “NEW: TRUCK TURNING”. Around the base of the post is a bush with white flowers. A young white-tailed deer is browsing on the bush—the deer’s hindquarters stick out to the right, and the top of the deer’s head is just visible behind the leaves. The background is shrouded in fog.

A white-tailed deer standing between a sidewalk and a railway track, looking as if it’s about to headbutt a signpost. On the sidewalk just before the track crosses it are two painted signs that say “LOOK / LISTEN / LIVE” and “REGARDER / ECOUTER / VIVRE” to warn pedestrians to look out for trains. In the background is are some freight cars and one of the raised enclosed conveyor belts that connect the grain elevator to the piers where bulkers dock. It’s dark and foggy.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 06/07/2026

And in the Atlantic provinces of Canada, too—especially Newfoundland, where local accents show a lot of Irish influence. It’s enough of a symbol of regional identity that a brewery in Cape Breton even made a beer about it!

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 04/07/2026

• The Oxford English Dictionary, volume XIX (Unemancipated–Wau-wau) • The Oxford English Dictionary, volume XVI (Soot–Styx) • The Oxford English Dictionary, volume I (A–Bazouki)

The twenty-volume second edition of the Oxford English dictionary. Volume I (A–Bazouki) is front and centre, with its front cover facing the viewer. Volumes II–XX are lined up behind it in order, with their spines facing the viewer.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 30/06/2026

This was on the wall of the auditorium at UQAM where the #LabPhon20 talks were held. I have two questions: 1. Does the hyphenation of “DRAMATI-/ QUES” constitute evidence for word-final empty nuclei in French? 2. Is that really Comic fucking Sans?!

A circular Art-Decoish bas-relief showing a kneeling muscular toga-clad figure pulling a lever attached to some gears, with a hydroelectric dam and power lines in the background. Above the medallion is the French word “Pouvoir” in all caps; below it is the following French inscription, also in all caps (line breaks sic):
La vapeur, l’élec-
tricité et l’énergie
nucléaire, trois
étapes dramati-
ques de la
civilisation
AB

The inscription is written in what looks to me suspiciously like Comic Sans. The medallion and inscription are flanked by two large electric sconces, casting light upward along the wall.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 30/06/2026

www.cartoonstock.com/cartoon?sear...

Cartoon by Sidney Harris, with a CartoonStock watermark. A charmingly rough line drawing depicts two stereotypical cavepeople sitting on rocks in a mountainous landscape, eating a meal together. The one on the left, who is bearded, is saying “I miss the good old days when all we had to worry about was nouns and verbs.” The one on the right, who has longer, lighter hair and is wearing a one-shoulder minidress, looks nonplussed.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 30/06/2026

You see it too, right?

A great big inflatable purple elephant with pink polka dots, sitting on top of a shipping container in a small urban green space (Place Pasteur). In the bottom right there’s also a doorframe with a door in it that doesn’t seem to be attached to any other structure.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 23/06/2026

If you see this, post a female superhero.

Black-and-white photo of Pippi Longstocking lifting her horse over her head, with Annika and Tommy sitting on the horse’s back and waving at the viewer. All three children are smiling.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 08/06/2026

Will the Times ever learn that the singular is “Inuk”? #NYTXW

Screenshot of a clue from the New York Times crossword puzzle: “34D Watercraft for an Inuit”

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 08/06/2026

I was late for a job interview because a volcano erupted.

A red ball with a smiley face floating on water, with text that says “Tell us a true, one-sentence story from your life that absolutely opens more questions than it answers and demands further context.”

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 04/06/2026

These -lings are both duck- and sib-

Two mallard ducklings sitting together in the grass. They’re still quite fuzzy, but by now they are mostly brown, with just a few patches of yellow here and there, mainly on their heads.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 03/06/2026

I can’t imagine owning enough gold jewellery to swim in!

Scrooge McDuck’s head sticking up out of a big old pile of gold coins. McDuck has a cross-eyed expression, possibly of stunned delight, and wears a small pince-nez on his beak.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 28/05/2026

Spring is an illusion produced by interspersed halftone dots of winter and summer.

Partial screenshot showing yesterday’s weather (mostly sunny, high 21ºC) and today’s (rain, high 9ºC).

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 23/05/2026

I do find it a little hard to read when the lines go back and forth like this—which makes me wonder how hard it would be to make the lines always go outwards from the inner circle without crossing it or one another.

IPA clock showing the time as “It is ten till eleven”: the words [ɪt ɪz] are in a small circle in the centre; a line goes from this inner circle to the highlighted word [tɛn], which is one of a set of words arranged in a circle around it; another line goes from [tɛn] to [tɪl], passing behind the inner circle on the way; a final line, again passing behind the inner circle, connects [tɪl] to [ɪˈlɛvən], on an outer ring that includes transcriptions of all the numbers 1–12 in the same positions as on a regular analogue clock face.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 18/05/2026

Oh, you take the hyrax, and I’ll take the Lorax…

A rock hyrax, on a rock, looking towards the viewer. The hyrax’s fur looks a bit dishevelled, and possibly wet.

The Lorax, a furry orange character with a big bushy yellow moustache, drawn by Dr. Seuss.

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Q. Pheevr @q.pheevr.ca · 17/05/2026

And what if I believe the first half of this statement precisely because I disagree with the second half? What if I think most cops are acting in good faith within a system whose structure nonetheless channels their efforts towards perpetuating racist and classist oppression?

Screenshot from a questionnaire, showing the category “System trust” and the number “75 of 80”. The statement (to be agreed or disagreed with) is “The vast majority of police officers are doing their jobs in good faith — problems in policing come from individual bad actors more than from the system itself.”

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