iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

and, of course, we all know what the opposite of wet bones is:

the Super Mario enemy Dry Bones, a Koopa skeleton

Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

There are many inexplicable aspects to this, but none more so than: if you are going to do a Minion marketing tie-in with a type of fruit, there is ONE VERY OBVIOUS CHOICE

A bag of Minion-branded Mandarin oranges. You know, like the famous Minion catchphrase, “MAN-DA-RIN”

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

but it has a happy ending (also: sometimes public shaming is good actually!)

a screenshot from fanlore.org:

"Snapewives were most active in 2006, with their communities primarily on LiveJournal. They have since deleted all of their webpages and forums due to mockery from outside their community. After this, the community apparently faded. Some of the content was copied and discussed on fandom_wank."

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

RETVRN TO THE PAST (as demonstrated by the book A Big Ball of String)

A page from Marion Holland's children's book A Big Ball of String, wherein a child spends the first half of the book connecting string, them gets sick and is told to stay in bed, but instead builds an elaborate system of controlling his toys and the room from his bed

I can turn on the light!
I can put on my gown!
I can pull the shade up!
I can pull the shade down!
I can bring in the cat,
With a mouse on the floor
I can turn off the light!
I can shut the hall door!

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I was familiar with Trump Take Egg and Trump Take Gas, but was not prepared for Trump Take Cricket...

A sign on the door of a Petsmart that says "Due to national supply issues, cricket quantities are temporarily limited to 51 per customer."

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

TBH this movie already came out, it's called "the middle bit of RRR"

the scene in RRR where Bheem releases a truck full of wild animals at the British Governor's party. It is basically the coolest shit in the world in a movie that is 100% constructed out of the coolest shit in the world.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

I am resigned to receiving texts from unknown blue PACs forever, but this one made me so MAD. Disrupt, the way to be "the Dem's answer toTPUSA" maybe shouldn't be "lie as much as they do"!!

"BREAKING: Trump just finished his national address. He announced China and Venezuela STOLE the 2020 election and he will use this as basis to REMOVE two US Senators - Warnock & Ossoff.

It could've easily been written off as another ambling and convoluted Trump speech — but sadly this could be his most consequential. What he said will change US history.

Using the justification he presented the GOP can now ban mail in ballots, control voting machines, and legitimize Bannon's plan to deploy the 82nd and 101st Airborne regiments and ICE to polling locations.

His claim of China and Venezuela stealing a presidential election will now pave the way for a fascist coup that will deliver him the 2026 midterms and cement MAGA control of all levers of US government for the rest of his term and beyond...

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

of all the times you could start this discourse, how dare you choose a time DURING HOAGIEFEST

Illustrations and merch for Wawa's Hoagiefest, the most blessed time of the year

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

an even-more-specific flavor of old head and dorkass will recognize them as a sign that Soundwave or Blaster could be nearby:

The Transformer Soundwave, a robot who turns into a boombox, and his little robot friends who turn into cassette tapes: Laserbeak, Ravage, Buzzsaw and Ratbat. If you were a kid in the 80s you thought these toys ruled.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

UCLA upped the game by putting an "inverted fountain" in front of their version so it looks like a toilet!

UCLA's Franz Hall and the "inverted fountain" in its courtyard, which has spawned decades of urban legends about how it was designed to look like a toilet.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

This is fucking hilarious. “The New York Times: We’re Gonna Tell Your Dad™️”

Describes an AI cheating tool called TypeFlo

They contacted the registered owner of the domain (a professor) and he realized it was his teenage son

The app has been taken down, there is a quote from the dad about how he does not support AI cheating. SOOOOOME-BODY got in TROUUUUU-BLE!

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Upstream of this was the number of COMICS in the 80s that took their own swing at TMNT, so many that there was one (Boris the Bear) where the concept was specifically "let's kill all those guys"

Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters

Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos. Yes, this is real (although perhaps not very serious)

Mildly Microwaved Pre-Pubescent Kung-Fu Gophers. Yes, also real. The 1980s black-and-white comics boom was a pretty wild time!

Boris The Bear (Slaughters the Teenage Radioactive Black Belt Mutant Ninja Critters). This is the only of these comics (including TMNT) that I personally collected! It was pretty good. Spoiler: Boris turns out to be a robot.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Been a bad week for characters with off-putting hair:

Lumo, the misbegotten mascot for 2026 Eurovision. It is a cartoon heart with arms, legs, a huge bushy hairdo and horrible giant eyes

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

No and yes respectively, and then they would have a huge fight about it:

Kate Moseley and Doug Dorsey from "The Cutting Edge"

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

sorry to report but also a yes:

the dog from Air Bud. nothing in the rules says a dog can't be a reactionary.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

because some of us are absolute sleep weirdos. Or, as my Fitbit more gently puts it:

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Once again this classic tweet becomes relevant:

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

what the DC Comics fuck? He's pulling a "Torment Nexus" on Solaris the Tyrant Sun?

DC Comics Superman villain Solaris, the Tyrant Sun

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Also, it's some meme called "John Pork is Calling," I'm quite online and had never heard of it so I'm POSITIVE a random deputy wouldn't be aware of it. I think the baristas were amusing themselves drawing memes on cups and the wrong snowflake got this one

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

It's a Tiktok meme! amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/people...

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

“Hey that looks like a pot I also have.” “HOLY SHI—“

A pot I own that a skeet just taught me can be held in a specific way for the handle to look like a bear face

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

You got me curious, and sure enough The Bard has a page as well. over 1900 credits! I can't even IMAGINE the work that went into making the listings accurate.

The "Personal Details" section of the IMDb listing for William Shakespeare.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

This is Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death erasure, and I won't stand for it.

DVD cover for "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death," an (improbably) actual movie that exists, starring Bill Maher, Shannon Tweed, and Adrienne Barbeau.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

I had to go check for myself and based on her feed it’s definitely satire, although perfectly designed to escape containment and run into Poe’s Law:

A linked in post from Yolanda Cabrera: I remember asking my mom why we were so poor when we were growing up.

"Your papa was convinced it was too 'cringey' to engage with people on LinkedIn and ignored it completely as an essential sales and market tool"

Lessons are to be learned.

There is an ai cartoon image of a Hispanic mom making dinner for her daughters in a modest kitchen while saying “A comer mis amores!”

A LinkedIn post from Yolanda Cabrera:

I threw out this candidate's application, twice.

He applied a third time, and I decided to bring him in for an interview out of sheer curiosity.

We hired him right away.

The reason?

I realized he was the brother of a global pop phenomenon.

A year in, he's proven to be terrible—he’s genuinely hurting our financials with his mistakes. But, I get a VIP booth at his sister's concerts every time.

Truthfully, profit is just a metric. Social leverage and being connected are the real currencies in this business

A LinkedIn post from Yolanda Cabrera:

Had to cut an interview short today. Everything was great until the candidate dropped the dreaded S-word: Salary.

Like, really? We're talking about a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity here, and they want to focus on money? Priorities, people...back to the applicant pool we go.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

this was my avatar of choice for many years

A Richard Scarry drawing of a green bug driving a yellow car. He is named "Maniacbug" and is Goldbug's evil opposite.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Loved the Norway costume, and also recently discovered this gem from the Miss Grand International pageant, from Ecuador: I don't know when the National Costume event merged fully into the Met Ball aesthetic but I'm absolutely here for it.

Miss Ecuador (Samantha Quenedit), competing in the Miss Grand International 2025 pageant, wearing a National Costume "inspired" by Galapagos iguanas that is ... just a big crazy iguana costume. it rules.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Only one I'm aware of that takes place both where and when I grew up:

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

went to check this person's timeline (to pre-emptively mute) and: not beating your allegations on this one.

screenshot of a skeet: "sometimes i think i wouldn't mind having a boyfriend or girlfriend again, I'm not great at that, you gotta really like being around a person a lot. But man, i really can't imagine having a wife or husband. Absolutely nothing sexy about a wife or husband. Might as well be dead."

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

Exactly one option, so I guess this is both the most interesting AND the most consequential: cdn.mobygames.com/c39aa40e-abd...

A screenshot of the text-only game "HIGHNOON" from the very early days of the home computing era

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Amazing. Liz is having a girls weekend and found an antique store that had a lot of Transformers, so I requested this guy

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

Me, upon learning that this recording comes courtesy of the O'Keefe Media Group:

the "The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" Onion article guy

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

not discussing the lack of third spaces is a valid critique, but his observations on teen drinking are fairly nuanced and reasonable? (I also think he makes a reasonable point about parasocial relationships necessarily taking time/energy away from having it available for IRL social ones)

Disparaging today’s teenagers for their failure to binge-drink would be absurd. Still, I’d guess the decline of booze in the lives of young Americans is both a cause of reduced socializing and a driver of it. Young Americans go out less, so they drink less, so they have less interest in creating excuses to drink, so they throw fewer parties, so they go out less, so they drink less. These attitudes carry over into young adulthood. The share of 18- to 34-year-olds who say "drinking in moderation" is "bad for your health" has doubled in the last 20 years to 65 percent—far more than any other age group.

It would be easier for everyone—young people, parents, and commentators—if every social trend was either terrific or terrible. But like the rise of the dual-earner household, the turn against alcohol among the same young people whose socialization has plunged is a complicated phenomenon that defies easy good-bad categorization. I cannot deny that abstinence is good for young people’s livers; but I worry that it’s part of a larger set of behaviors that’s bad for their hearts.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

I knew his name, but looking up his IMDB picture isn't exactly refuting your theory:

A picture of Christopher McQuarrie where it does not seem implausible that he is, in fact, Tom Cruise in disguise

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

you are in the minority i think; every parent I knew whose kids watched it, HATED the show. at the very least it has a very strong anti-fanbase:

Google reviews page for Caillou (1997) showing an overal 2.6 rating and the featured review starts with "Caillou is one of the WORST KIDS SHOWS OF ALL TIME!!"

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

you keep linking to a study that is not public so I can't read the whole thing, but let's take this part below. Of the four trees they list as being responsible for 93% of pollen, three of them are monoecious, including Platanus, which is 34% of all street tree coverage.

The most important producers of allergenic pollen in NYC are Quercus, Platanus, Morus, and Betula; they comprise 71% of airborne pollen measured and 93% of estimated pollen production (107 quadrillion pollen grains; however, pollen production was not estimated for all taxa). Previous municipal planting decisions have resulted in the high abundance of Platanus × acerifolia; it accounts for 34% of total street tree basal area and has an estimated annual pollen production of 27.7 ± 6.4 quadrillion grains. In contrast, Morus and Betula are generally unplanted, indicating that tree planting decisions will have smaller effects on their future pollen production rates in NYC. Quercus trees produced an estimated 68.2 ± 12.3 quadrillion pollen grains and accounted for almost 25% of airborne pollen collected, but were very abundant in parks and were mostly unplanted, suggesting that planting has not and will not have a major effect on city-wide pollen production. Overall, this study demonstrates that tree planting decisions can have important and long-lasting consequences for city-wide pollen production but only for species that are both primarily planted and large producers of allergenic pollen.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

oh man, you haven't LIVED until you've seen the space knights!

The cover of Marvel Comics' "ROM the Spaceknight," a way-better-than-it-had-to-be toy-licensing comic property from the late 1970s

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Did you actually read this article? Maybe we are talking past each other - I think Russian hackers absolutely INFLUENCED the election, by spreading propaganda, hacking the DNC & releasing emails, etc. But can we agree that “influencing an election" is different from directly changing voting results?

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

this is paraphrasing something stated in the original Goldberg article:

Screenshot from the Jeffery Goldberg Atlantic article "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans":

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Age yourself with a cartoon you watched as a kid

He will drink his supersauce and throw the bad guys for a loss
and he will bring them in alive and kickin'
(bawk bawk bawk bawk)
there is one thing you should learn; when
there is no one else to turn to
ca-aall on Super Chicken (bawk bawk bawk bawk)
ca-aall on SUPER CHICKEN! (buh-KAWK!)

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I mean, the Whites House literally posted this (“activities aligned to Hamas” is some pretty impressive weasel wording for “we want to claim he is directly linked to Hamas and can’t nearly prove it” by the way) and the WH press Secretary said he was arrested for “distributing flyers”

Graphic from the White House Instagram feed proclaiming the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil because he “led activities aligned to Hamas”

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

That doesn’t fit the reference though:

Front page from 1975 Daily News where the headline reads “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Me, a person who watched a lot of Red Dwarf in my 20s: “I’m sorry, you’re going to make some espresso with YOUR WHAT NOW?”

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Fun day trip to NYC with friends yesterday. If you like modern art, especially of the 1980s, go to see Luna Luna, an amusement park designed by prominent artists that existed for a few months in 1987 then spent 30 years forgotten in storage: www.theshed.org/program/440-...

A carousel designed by Keith Haring for the 1987 art carnival Luna Luna, lost for decades and only recently discovered and restored

Don’t know who this fun/freaky guy is, but he greets you as you enter Luna Luna

One of the many weird mascots wandering around and interacting with guests

chair swing ride painted by Kenny Scharf for Luna Luna

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 14/11/2023

Another fun fact that people on here might enjoy: she did an album with Weird Al!

Album cover for 1988's "Peter & The Wolf / Carnival of the Animals- Part II" by "Weird" Al Yankovic and Wendy Carlos

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Randy Braun @randbot.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Very excited that our teen Respects The Classics!

a teen dressed up as Jareth from Labyrinth for Halloween

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