iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 25/09/2026

Incidentally … YES. WE GOT IT, such as it was 🙄

Headline: Welcome to the Notswolds (It’s the new Cotswolds)

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 25/09/2026

There is definitely a bunch I’ve forgotten, but these are the ones that sprang to mind.

Nine games that rather dubiously “shaped who I am”: Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap; Populous; Advance Wars; Half Life 2; Lumines; Assassin’s Creed; Odyssey; Destiny 2; Control; Cyberpunk 2077

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 13/09/2026

I do not have time for that.

Excellent Advice for Living
Kevin Kelly

“A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 26/08/2026

Some of his work: reporteasia.com/sociedad/202...

A firing squad of Mao statues aim rifles at a statue of Jesus

Silver, red, gold, and black busts of Mao with caricatured features including Pinocchio-style noses and bare breasts

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 17/07/2026

The title essay is online here www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb... and is a core reading for understanding how censorship in China actually works.

In sum, the Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is “You yourself decide,” after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite “naturally.” The Soviet Union, where Stalin’s notion of “engineering the soul” was first pursued, in practice fell far short of what the Chinese Communists have achieved in psychological engineering.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 27/06/2026

You'd think even a small plane flying into Beijing's tallest building might warrant *some* front-page space amid all the Xi.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 20/06/2026

Nice find at @pfbvan.bsky.social, set in the lost civilisation of Ammer-ka. It's a 1986 edition, so speaking of lost civilisations, the back cover describes Lem as "Born in Lvov, Poland (now part of the Soviet Union)"

Front cover: Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub

Back cover:

>>$4.95
Science Fiction
STANISLAW LEM
MEMOIRS FOUND IN A BATHTUB
Translated by Michael Kandel & Christine Rose The year is 3149. A vast paper-destroying blight-pap-ralysis—has obliterated much of the planet's written his-tory, but these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community. Entrusted with a mission whose purpose remains a mystery to him, the memoirist portrays a world of orders, tactics, codes, spies, counterspies and counter-counterspies; and his diary reflects the despair of guarding secrets from an enemy who may, in fact, no longer exist.
Lem's overly complex and infinitely absurd espionage society is an entertaining but disquieting satire of paranoia and overzealous bureaucracy-two monstrosities with which 20th-century readers are, unfortunately, already familiar.
Born in Lvov, Poland (now part of the Soviet Union), Stanislaw Lem is an internationally acclaimed master of speculative science fantasy whose worldwide book sales number in the millions. His works have earned him a spe-cial, honorary Nebula Award. He lives in Vienna.
Cover design by Vaughn Andrews
Cover illustration by John Alfred Dorn I!!
A Harvest/HBJ Book
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
1250 Sixth Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101
111 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003
ISBN 0-15-658585-5

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 08/06/2026

On the bright side, we did get this part of the cyberpunk dystopia.

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash: “… a scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings.”

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 22/05/2026

Guys, a little decorum, please. This isn't LinkedIn.

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 01/05/2026

“Turns out that hostile foreign forces are pretty dull. Their nefarious plots are the same lame, boring things I get up to.” Love this one:

POI_KakuSAMA: "Lying flat" [躺平, tǎngpíng] clearly impinges on the sacred name of the current Emperor. Such a taboo word must be sanctioned. The Emperor must always stand firm, and never lie down. [The second character (平, píng, meaning “flat,” “even,” “level”), is also the last character in Xi Jinping’s name (习近平, Xí Jìnpíng). In Chinese imperial culture, using the characters in the ruling Emperor’s given name in certain contexts was considered taboo.]

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 17/03/2026

Another bit of Anathem that AI keeps bringing to mind (they're talking about video, but):

“It’s hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it …”

“A speelycaptor.”

“… at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.”

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 17/03/2026

Actually, it was worse than the slides making *no* sense. It was like (yes, I'm about to bring up Anathem again) The Book in Neal Stephenson's Anathem:

Since the sole purpose of the Book was to punish its readers, the less said of it the better. To study it, to copy it out, and to memorize it was an extraordinary form of penance. The concent, like any other human settlement, abounded in nasty or tedious chores such as weeding gardens, maintaining sewers, peeling potatoes, and slaughtering animals. In a perfect society we’d have taken turns. As it was, there were rules and codes of conduct that people broke from time to time, and the Warden Regulant saw to it that those people performed the most disagreeable jobs. It was not a bad system. When you were fixing a clogged latrine because you’d had too much to drink in the Refectory, the fact was that latrines were necessary; sometimes they clogged up; and someone had to clean them out. So there was at least some satisfaction in doing such penance, because there was a point. There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane. Beyond about Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters,

memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. Chapter One was a page of nursery-rhymes salted with nonsense-words that almost rhymed—but not quite. Chapter Four was five pages of the digits of pi. Beyond that, however, there was no further randomness in the Book, since it was easy to memorize truly random things once you taught yourself a few tricks—and everyone who’d made it through Chapter Four knew the tricks. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time—after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. After their authors had been humiliated and Thrown Back, these writings would be gone over by the Inquisition, and, if they were found to be the right kind of awful, made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots. It was more humiliating than you might imagine, and after I’d been toiling on Chapter Five for a couple of weeks I had no difficulty in seeing how one who completed a sentence of, say, Chapter Nine would emerge permanently damaged.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 12/03/2026

You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

Quoted image with colours reversed so sea looks like land and land looks like sea. Carry oil with ship by sea, circumventing the Isthmus of Hormuz

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 24/02/2026

Not every day @chinadigitaltimes.net is cited by Global Times, but it’s appreciated. www.globaltimes.cn/page/202602/... No link, though?

With Hong Kong equities resuming trading ahead of the Chinese mainland market, A-shares in the Year of the Horse are set to open soon. Historical data shows that major indices have more often risen than fallen after the Spring Festival break. Overall, brokerages remain broadly optimistic about the post-holiday outlook, according to the China Digital Times, a media outlet affiliated with the China News Service.
In addition, during the holiday period, the offshore yuan at one point strengthened to about 6.88 per US dollar.
Over the same period, most major overseas equity indices posted gains, the China Digital Times reported.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 23/02/2026

Of course, some commentary was more upbeat …

“Five Cost-Free Solutions for Hebei’s Winter Heating Crisis,” by Xiang Dongliang, WeChat account Constructive Opinions

January 7

Mocking the disconnect between official propaganda and reality, this satirical article proposes five “cost-free” ways for Hebei residents to stay warm this winter: (1) watching Hebei TV news reports claiming that heating preparations are complete and that all residents will be warm and toasty this winter; (2) basking in the warmth of handwritten “positive energy” thank-you letters to hardworking local officials; (3) attending warm, indoor, dumpling-making events such as one recently publicized by the Hebei Daily Press Group, showing lightly dressed cadres clearly enjoying adequate heating; (4) joining “heartwarming” projects such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordinated development initiative; and (5) participating in the Hebei Communist Youth League’s "Sending Warmth" campaign.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 23/02/2026

TL;DR: the province banned coal heating and promoted conversion to natural gas, but then cut gas subsidies, leaving many residents struggling with bills. An example of censored content about drone policing that raised even my jaded eyebrows:

“They’ll Shell Out for Drones to Monitor Coal-Burning Scofflaws, But Not for Heating Subsidies,” by Xiong Taihang, WeChat account Just Call Me Xiong Taihang

January 8

A short article criticizing the authorities in Hebei for being willing to purchase drones to monitor the illegal burning of coal, but not to fund subsidies for low-income residents who can no longer afford to heat their homes in winter. The article includes a screenshotted advertisement from a drone manufacturer suggesting that aerial reconnaissance be conducted between 5:00-7:00 a.m., because it is the coldest time of day, and thus the best time to catch residents illegally burning coal. Xiong compares this cruel enforcement with a story his father told him about the Great Famine in Anhui in 1960. After the local commune canteen ran out of grain, several families in the village pooled some grain they had secreted away and cooked a pot of porridge. Seeing the smoke from their cooking fire, the commune dispatched members of the militia, who extinguished the fire and dumped the porridge into the ashes. As soon as the militia left, Xiong’s father and the other village children wolfed down the now-ashen porridge as the adults wept.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 18/02/2026

“Listen! They’re talking about us again!” “I don’t care, Larry, I’m hungry.”

Three otters peering above the surface of the Georgia Strait

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 26/01/2026

Lo, as the Great Seer hath foretold:

@dril tweets:

Bog Off, Fuckazoid. Im Cramming Packets Beyond Digital Light Speed Injecting Pure Fire Into The Blogomedia SuperFrame For The God Damn Lord

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 06/12/2025

www.vice.com/en/article/e...

I first heard the Rolling Stones on a battery-powered, basketball-shaped, pigskin-covered miniature phonograph of French manufacture—a piece of low tech as radical in its day as it is now obscure. Radical in that it enabled the teenage owner to transport LP records and the intoxicant of choice to suitably private locations—the boonies.

This constituted an entirely new way to listen to the music of choice. “Choice” being the key word. The revolutionary potential of the D-cell record player wasn’t substantially bettered until the advent of the Walkman, which allows us to integrate the music of choice with virtually any landscape.

The Walkman changed the way we understand cities.

I first heard Joy Division on a Walkman, and I remain unable to separate the experience of the music’s bleak majesty from the first heady discovery of the pleasures of musically encapsulated fast-forward urban motion.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 15/11/2025

The ghouls—all of them, Labour too—talk about "contribution" …

Shin, originally from the US, came to the UK as a medical student in 2015. She had barely left medical school when the NHS was paralysed by Covid. As a newly qualified doctor at Croydon university hospital, south London, she found herself battling to save the lives of those floored by the virus – and comforting the dying as they said goodbye to their loved ones on video calls.

Five years on, Shin, from Boston, is now an emergency medicine registrar at the Princess Alexandra hospital in Harlow, Essex. Despite the sacrifices she has made for the NHS – she didn’t see her family for 18 months while working 12-hour shifts treating patients on ventilators – she wonders if she has a future in Britain.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 11/11/2025

My dude, the UK's domestic emissions peaked in 1972.

First world countries like Australia, the USA & UK are increasing their carbon emissions each year but China reached a peak in 2024.

The result? Polling by US-based polling organisations like the Pew Research Center & Harvard University show that 87% -95% of people in
China like their govt.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 31/10/2025

Come for the zesty array of censorship evasion techniques, stay for the tiny thumbnail of an “I Took Part In The Reciprocal Tariff War of April, 2025 And All I Got Was This Lousy Mug” mug.

tiny thumbnail of an “I Took Part In The Reciprocal Tariff War of April, 2025 And All I Got Was This Lousy Mug” mug. I have taken minor liberties with that translation.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 16/10/2025

The only thing I can remember about that film:

Sequence of screengrabs showing Brosnan's Bond confused by a "Chinese keyboard," which is red with a basic character on each key.

(No.)

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 29/09/2025

"We dodged warring armies by stealing twelve hundred miles down the bandit-infested Yellow River on an inflated sheepskin raft."

Bob Mortimer reads a card on Would I Lie To You

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 26/09/2025

“The correspondent for the Buffalo Courier rendered Johnson's opening remarks as below.”

“Fel' cizzens, this 's mos (hic) 'spicious mom't v' my zistence … D'u (hic) know y am' [with emphasis] my name's And' Johnson' v Tensee … and [with distinctness] I'm a proud listration' v th' fac that a (hic) pleean'n a man from the (hic) ranks can be elv (hic) ated t' th' secon, t' th' secon [with marked emphasis] gif'in the place o' the Amekin people.”

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 16/09/2025

For the rest of your life, you can only eat food from one of these regions. Which do you choose?

Map of galactic quadrants from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW_Nasa-added_quadrants.jpg

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 15/09/2025

The worst case I've seen is in App Library with dark wallpaper. Again, the effect doesn't look quiete as pronounced here as on the actual device. What do I want to focus on here? The apps. What actually catches my eye? The 🤬 borders. It's insane.

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samuelwa.de @samuelwa.de · 15/09/2025

a) That spacing … you forgot Lockdown Mode exists, didn't you? b) Why does that need a border? Where else am I going to try tapping, if I know I want the address bar but don't know where to find it?

Screenshot of browser UI elements on iPadOS26. "nytimes.com" in a lozenge-shaped border, with "Lockdown Enabled" crammed up against it below.

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