iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 07/10/2026

Pineapple upside-down cupcakes. The only downside is not enough pineapple, but still delicious

Several small cupcakes with pineapple on top

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 04/10/2026

I made a hat for Halloween. You’ll never guess what I’m going as.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 16/09/2026

I just love the disk image background for my spaceship game. Warms my heart every time I see it.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 21/08/2026

A trip to the children's indoor playground yielded this new profile picture.

Alex, a man wearing a hat with a short beard, is posing in front of a very colorful light fixture. Lines of red, purple, green yellow, orange, and blue lights are spreading out behind his face.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 17/08/2026

It's unnerving how much of physics is just "statistics and probability". Thermodynamics? Statistics and probability. Chemical reactions? Statistics and probability. Quantum mechanics? Believe it or not, statistics and probability!

The Venezuelan man from Parks and Recreation saying "Straight to Jail"

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 01/08/2026

I still love how prescient and ironically anti-capitalist The Lego Movie is. Like, they have a literal room where the output of all the creative people is funneled into robots to create the most boring, mundane, cookie-cutter stuff imaginable. Sounds familiar in 2026...

The Think Tank scene from The Lego Movie. Several Lego minifigs are locked in boxes with green electrodes strapped to their heads. There's a large grid of them. A solitary white-robed minifig is floating in front of them.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 16/07/2026

Actually, yesterday I solved a doozy of a problem. Each cable box is its own component, but the cables themselves need to be orchestrated by a parent context, and it all needs to be aware of the exact position of the cable ports. So all stuff where direct DOM manipulation would be easier than React.

A virtual dial and switch panel, kind of like a synthesizer module, including cable ports on either side of the image. Colored cables connect from one cable port panel to the other.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 09/07/2026

My glasses are thick on the edges, and I have astigmatism. The correction produces a very strong chromatic aberration. Looks trippy if I’m paying attention.

A ceiling fan with motion blur. The top-left side of the light fixture has a distinctly blue border, while the bottom right has a red border, as if the RGB layers came apart and shifted underneath each other.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 30/06/2026

Uh oh. The Octocat has made @enclose.horse into a ghost! 👻

Two tabs in Safari's suggested page window. On the left is Github, with the octocat surrounded by clouds. On the right is Enclose Horse, with a large pixelated horse on top of the game board. One of the clouds in the Github image lines up perfectly with the horse on the Enclose Horse image, making it appear like the horse is a ghost.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 30/06/2026

I should add, this is in addition to the small side yard garden we started this year. It used to be a dog run, complete with turf and soil saturated with dog urine. Fortunately, the soil isn’t too salty for things to grow!

A small garden plot along the side of a house. Tomatoes, marigolds, lettuce, carrots, and beets are arranged in rows. A large squash plant takes up the right side of the frame.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 29/06/2026

Next yard project is underway: replacing this very sad patch of grass with a vegetable garden. First step: KILL EVERYTHING! Black plastic sheets will create an oven that should take care of the grass roots, weeds, and even ungerminated seeds. Next spring, it will be ready for tilling and planting.

A rectangle of yard is bordered by concrete sidewalk and covered with a sheet of black plastic. A rose bush can be seen in the foreground.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 02/06/2026

A week in, and the new plants are doing great!

A birch tree surrounded by brown mulch. Dispersed around the tree are small green plants, including a few grasses and flowering plants.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 01/06/2026

Galaxy Quest is a better movie because it has no sequels or spin offs.

Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech - A man stands tall among, clearly voicing an opinion among peers.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 23/05/2026

Doing a little water conservation project by replacing the rocks under our birch tree with some native drought resistant plants. Should be nice when it’s done! It’s a prelude to replacing the lawn with native plants!

A birch tree planted in a lawn. The tree is surrounded by a large circle of rocks. Gravel covers one side of the circle, the other side has the rocks removed and is dirt.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 21/05/2026

Built this little dial for my spaceship game using nothing but CSS scroll snapping and scroll-driven animations. A hidden scrolling div on top handles the snapping and passes its scroll progress to the spinning rotor.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 01/05/2026

Did art with the kid. Went well.

An acrylic painting on a blue background. The painting depicts a brown stick with green leaves coming off the side. At the end of the stick is a pink blossom in full bloom with five petals and large pollen stalks in the middle. The branch is from a peach tree.
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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 25/04/2026

And here's the (more or less) completed feature! I'm very pleased with how this one turned out.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 09/04/2026

Okay, NASA did a better job than I did.

Half of the moon fills the frame, with the top side lit by sunlight. Craters mark the entire surface. To the upper left, a crescent view of Earth is just peeking over the edge of the moon.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 08/03/2026

I feel like I’m turning into the Joker. And by “the Joker” I mean Alex Russell. JS frameworks solved lots of problems, but created so many at the same time. I feel like AI is the same way. (anonymizing this screenshot because I respect this person and don’t want to make it personal)

A Bluesky post saying “if you are a developer and you are averse to using AI tools, you are where CSS die-bards were when they rejected JS frameworks. It will get lonely out there, and harder to find work”

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 02/03/2026

Check out this very Shakespearian frog that my sister crocheted. She's an author. You should buy her books: www.nataliebrianne.com Also you should meme the heck out of the frog.

A green crocheted frog wearing a smart brown smock holding a black skull

A green crocheted frog wearing a smart brown smock standing in front of a potted plant

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 27/02/2026

Tapping the sign... bsky.app/profile/rale...

I'm reminded of this quote by Oscar Wilde and referenced by Hugh Nibley.

"The manager “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”, because for him the value is the price."

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 10/02/2026

But on top of that... it's just a bad report. It's like it is intentionally unapproachable. 66,000 words, frequent topic jumps, poor organization, bad graphs... It's just... a really bad paper. I wonder why anybody gives these people any attention.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 08/02/2026

A clown tells you how to make number go up. Ruthless optimization. Also, indigenous lifeforms genocide. "Okay, so it's like Star Trek, except you're the crew. Also, there's a DJ with a god complex pulling the strings behind the scenes" I can do this all day.

Describe your favorite game without mentioning the title

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 06/02/2026

Sooo... it turns out @remix.run v3 is pretty good at doing 3D stuff... Took me about an hour to create a React Three Fiber-like harness with - shared animation loop - event handling

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 22/01/2026

This is with vite-plugin-inspect in dev mode. Alt text says which is Vite 8 and which is Vite 7. (Should be Vite 8 on the left)

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 13/01/2026

Another cool trick - I implemented my overlay using a `backdrop-filter: brightness(0.5)`, and then the highlight uses `backdrop-filter: brightness(2)` to cancel it out. This allows the highlight to have padding, rounded and feathered edges, etc. so it looks real smooth.

A highlighted section of the page with rounded edges and a nice glow effect.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 07/01/2026

Ohhh, that makes way more sense. Nevermind, carry on.

A footer that says "Designed and overengineered in D.C. by National Design Studio"

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 07/01/2026

BRB. Changing my profile picture to this from the USA's new upside-down food pyramid.

Bold text says "Eat Real Butter" with a picture of an unwrapped stick of butter.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 30/11/2025

My 4 year old wanted you all to see her stop-motion nativity video.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 13/11/2025

Actually, government should provide many critical services for free, including transportation (free busses).

The Norman Rockwell painting Freedom of Speech depicting a man standing at a public gathering to share his thoughts.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 09/11/2025

This good boy says “you can put up a Christmas tree and listen to Christmas music in November if you want.”

A gray cat is posing in front of a Christmas tree.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 23/10/2025

If you knew what you were talking about, you'd know that I'm part of 9% of the problem. It's lawns, yes, but that's the 9% cities and industries. It's mostly agriculture. And I assure you, I'm very much interested in not having the remains of the Great Salt Lake poison my family with arsenic.

A chart from the report linked in the previous post showing water use: 74% agriculture, 9% mineral extraction, 8% reservoir loss, and 8% cities and industry.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 14/10/2025

It'd be right at home with these lovelies.

A macOS theme from 2005 with gentle gradients and lots of shadows.

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 29/09/2025

Yeeeeeah... Seems to me there are very few actually "holier than thou" frontend frameworks out there. Kinda makes me think tribalism is a bad idea?

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R. Alex Anderson @ralexanderson.com · 29/09/2025

They're using a unicode font to make it look italic. It's added by the user, not by Bluesky. That's why it's misleading - the Antifa message looks like a moderator added message, but it's not.

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