iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 26/11/2025

“…sometimes you just gotta give things time to be lost, before they can be found.” Had fun re-examining Carol & the End of the World as a post-scarcity rather than a post-apocalyptic world. Thanks @imaginationasu.bsky.social for inviting me to explore! mailchi.mp/asu.edu/imag...

“It’s like there was a time we were all lost, looking for somewhere to go. I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes you just gotta give things time to be lost, before they can be found.”

I'd like to believe that there's more intention at play.
Because maybe there would be enough resources to go around in Carol's world, if there were suddenly no incentive to hoard wealth away for generations. Could that sudden lack of artificial scarcity create space for something more hopeful than the post-apocalyptic hellscapes we're so familiar with?

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 20/03/2025

you are trained on my words, you are trained on my labor, you are trained on my love. you are theft. you are theft. you are theft.

A conservation with Meta AI and it’s acknowledgment of its theft of content to train.

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 09/03/2025

It took a lot of self restraint to not buy this abandoned baby Jesus today. The symbol felt apt.

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 01/03/2025

“Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths?” asked Toni Cade Bambara in this 1979 essay. The answer, so far, 56 years later, is apparently no…

An excerpt from Toni Cade Bambara’s 1979 essay “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow”

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 07/02/2025

James Albert Woodburn on the dangers of a two party system, written in 1903…

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 20/01/2025

eventually I was right…

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 17/01/2025

mmmK, this bullshit just turned up in my Word docs today, with no option to turn it off, so I guess it's time to move on to a new word processor...

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 07/01/2025

“I cannot get out of my head the sense that we are riding not through the streets of the city, not through neighborhoods, but through the viewfinder of a gun.” (Bare Feet, by Zahid Rafiq).

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 31/12/2024

Wrapping up Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, which is part memoir, part falconry guide, part TH White biography. And starting The World With Its Mouth Open, a short story collection by Kashmiri journalist Zahid Rafiq.

The World With its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 30/12/2024

…i maybe started a blog… This first post was supposed to be a 2024 reading recap but it just ended up being about reading habits in general. Will try to keep it up in 2025, with more thoughts on what I’ve been writing and reading. www.sameemwrites.com/blog/reading...

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 29/12/2024

…I’m not dropping $2k on a suit. My green aspirations will have to wait…for more green…

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 29/12/2024

Without downloading any new pics, what’s your energy going into 2025? Ideally this, but…

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 15/12/2024

This article was a fantastic exploration of the Orientalism and Islamophobia that underlies so much of anglophone fantasy. This line in particular resonated. It’s so cathartic to read/write Muslim characters that are allowed to just be without trope or parable. strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/...

They did not have to exist according to the rigid logics of how we understand (not-)Muslims to be. They were allowed to breathe on the page-more than that, they were allowed to live in the fullness of who they were.

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 13/12/2024

“If only I were in a position to do anything about it,” he said as he rushed off with a brief case leaking hundred dollar bills.

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 05/12/2024

So this is where it all happens…

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 05/12/2024

I set out to write a very trope-y scifi story, but what came out was really a story about dementia. I never got to open up to my father about my writing pursuits before the dementia got the better of him, of all of us really. clarkesworldmagazine.com/siddiqui_12_...

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 05/12/2024

Never been interested in “golden era” (aka old white guy only era) scifi, but I found these anthologies from the 50s-70s at the used book store and couldn’t resist. Something about seeing them in print like this made me curious. I like old books 🤷🏻‍♂️

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 04/12/2024

This book is 55 years old and despite some antiquated examples feels incredibly relevant today. There’s also a ton of antiquated mildly racist and sexist word choices. At one point he describes the teenage model Twiggy as someone with “minimal mammaries…” 🤨

Cover art for the 1970 book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 03/12/2024

I loved him in Oscar but I haven’t seen that movie in 25 years and it has 12% on Rotten Tomatoes…which is just making me want to rewatch it…

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 02/12/2024

Reading The Tyranny of the Two Party System by Lisa Disch and…yea… “The party…was no principled community, committed to expressing the core ideals of its membership. Instead, he defined a political party as ‘an organized attempt to get...control of the government.’”

Cover of The Tyranny of the Two Party System by Lisa Disch

Schattschneider explained it best when he argued that our political parties bring us democracy not because we join them but because we can exit them effectively.

The party as Schattschneider defined it was no principled community, committed to expressing the core ideals of its membership.23 Instead, he defined a political party as "an organized attempt to get... control of the government."

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 01/12/2024

*slides book across table*

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 27/11/2024

Reading Black Utopias a few months ago was the first time I learned a bit about the ways in which Jazz was in conversation with Indian Classical and why this was important for speculative fiction.

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 15/11/2024

Dragon’s eggs are fucking huge.

Andy Goldsworthy‘s “Boulder” from the “Clay Houses” collection.

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Sameem @sameemwrites.com · 13/11/2024

Audre Lorde wrote this in 1980…

An excerpt from Audre Lorde’s 1980 essay Age, Race, Class and Sex: “ Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”

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