iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sam Anderson

Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

Reposted by Sam Anderson

Dan Devine @yourmandevine.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Sam Anderson returning to the Thunder beat, years after "Boom Town," is a good, good time. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/m...

nytimes.com

The Mind-Blowing Second Coming of the Oklahoma City Thunder

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Reposted by Sam Anderson

Brian Phillips @brianphillips.lol · 01/06/2025

can we get @shamblanderson.bsky.social and me as the Timothée and Ben Stiller

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

"Now the prisoner has an advantage over his keeper in this respect, that he is always thinking of escape and watching for opportunities, while the keeper does not constantly think of keeping him." — Charles Portis, True Grit

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

I think of this video constantly re: current events (esp the sudden shift 90 seconds in) — they should show it in civics classes youtu.be/c8-LcuqBwW8?...

youtu.be

concrete halloween skateboarding

YouTube video by therealbarenziah

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Enjoying the notebooks of Sonny Rollins

Excerpt from the notebooks of Sonny Rollins:

It is crucial to resist resignation, indifference, the hardening of the heart, and the laziness of the spirit; otherwise one turns into a parasite who is entirely absorbed in the problem of his own metabolism and essentially nothing beyond that interests him.

This government doesn't give a damn about freedom for the people. It has nothing to do with freedom. It's about power, it's about money, it's about racism and elitism and greed. It's about pride and stupidity and ugly insidious forms of paranoia, projection, and delusion but it had nothing to do with a commitment to freedom for the people and even less to do with their well-being. To make matters worse it appears the majority of the citizens that make up this nation buy into this nationalistic bubble like so many freshly caught carp. Which all serves to remind me of the words of Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

I wrote about my favorite guy, the Old Leatherman: a mysterious 19th-century folk hero who walked a 365-mile loop, obsessively, through NY / CT. He wore a homemade leather suit and slept in caves. Newspapers published endless gossip & fan fiction about him. I walked his route & sat in his caves.

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

I like Orwell’s description of racism as a “vast system of mental cheating.” Lotta mental cheating going on out there these days. (Quoted in Anna Funder’s great book WIFEDOM: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life)

A passage from Anna Funder’s book WIFEDOM quoting Orwell calling racism a “vast system of mental cheating”

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

“Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat” — Andrew Solomon, THE NOONDAY DEMON: An Atlas of Depression

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024) appreciation thread "When I die"

when I die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that I probably tried
to love

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Not to brag but I had a dream where i made up this joke — i actually woke up in the middle of the night & wrote it down on my phone

Screenshot of my immortal dream joke:

Q: Why was the cannon sad when it looked in the mirror?
A: Because it saw it had MOOBs

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Reposted by Sam Anderson

NANCY COMICS BY ERNIE BUSHMILLER @nancycomics.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Nancy By Ernie Bushmiller December 6,1946

NANCY BY ERNIE BUSHMILLER
LABEL-
REDUCING CREAM

I WONDER IF THIS STUFF CAN REALLY
REDUCE ---

OOPS!

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

A.J. Liebling's book about Chicago (CHICAGO: The Second City, 1952) is VERY MEAN and entertaining.

A.J. Liebling on Chicago: "Chicago is neither dead nor dying; it is, as the sideshow men say, 'Alive, Alive — did you ever see a two-headed baby?'"

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Sam Anderson @shamblanderson.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

In the caveman days of eons past (2010) I started a Twitter account where I posted the best sentence I read every day. (I was book critic for @nymag.com so was reading constantly.) Reading is still my favorite thing, so now I'm gonna try some version of that here. www.vulture.com/2010/02/ande...

Screenshot from 2010 NY Mag article about joining Twitter. Text: "I'm late to the Twitter party, but a few weeks ago I decided to start an experiment: tweet the best sentence I read every day. (NB: Someone else had already claimed my actual name, so I had to go with my alter ego: ShamBlanderson.) "Best," in this context, can mean almost anything: funny, beautiful, enlightening, stylistically amazing. My first tweet was a factoid from a New Yorker story about Whole Foods: "The key variable in deciding where to put the new stores is the number of college graduates within a 16-minute drive." (I love the specificity of sixteen minutes.)
A couple of times, I've had to resist the urge to just comb through my favorite punchy books (Emerson, Amis, William James) and compile a twenty-first century micro-Bartlett's. The object is to use Twitter as a daily note-taking system: to document, organically, the various text-streams I actually pay attention to - novels, magazines, blogs, whatever. When Salinger died I went back to read Nine Stories and tweeted this sentence from "A Perfect Day for Bananafish": "She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty." One day, doing some background reading for a review, I discovered a sentence from Adorno that seemed like a direct comment on Twitter itself (or the Kindle, or blogs, or Sarah Palin's memoir): "In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one."

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