iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

The lack of an Oxford comma here indicates that this is a list of three items and that there are no appositives. If you added an Oxford comma, then it would be ambiguous whether “a New York vigilante” was a) an appositive coreferential with “Sylvia Plath” or b) simply the second item in a list.

BlueSky post reading “Why I’m a fan of the Oxford comma.” The image it’s referring to is a headline reading “Sylvia Plath, a New York vigilante and Shah or Iran featured in latest historical fiction”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

who knew that that Brian Eno quote would also apply to Swiss cheese

In Swiss cheese production, the number and size of eyes declined in the 2000s. This was due to increased hygiene standards, which reduced the number of dust particles in the milk around which gas bubbles form. In 2025, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court approved the addition of hay flower [de] powder (a mixture of various wildflowers and grasses) to the milk during cheesemaking, to allow for eyes of the typical number and size to form.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

I read Meeting New People by Daniel Lavery! It’s about loneliness and friendship breakups, and it said exactly the thing I needed to hear about my friendship breakup. If you’re sad and also tired of feel-good platitudes about loss, this book is for you.

Cover of Meeting New People. It has a painting of a stubborn-looking little girl sitting at a table.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

me reading a post about pickle-flavored Oreos: Is this an Angels in America reference? 🤔

Taste: For starters, the OREO cookie part tastes like a regular OREO chocolate sandwich cookie. The fudge part tastes like: FUCK YOU I’M A PICKLE!!!!!!!!

LOUIS: How?
PRIOR (Furious): Fuck you! I’m a prophet!

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

But there’s evidence that many people want more kids than they have. Ofc some people might mean “ideal” in an abstract hypothetical way, not that they personally want to have 2-3 kids, but it does seem like there are people who *would* choose to have more kids under certain circumstances

Graph titled “U.S. Fertility Rate vs. Americans’ View of Ideal Family Size, 1936-2025.” In 2025, the average ideal number of children is 2.7, and the fertility rate is 1.6.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Leap by Simina Popescu (2024) - YA graphic novel about queer teen girls at dance school.

Cover of Leap, featuring an illustration of two teen girls sitting on the floor with a pair of ballet shoes.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen (2024) - Nonfiction profiles of people who have platonic partners or unusually close friends as their life’s central relationship.

Cover of The Other Significant Others, featuring an image of four teacups stacked in a crooked tower atop four saucers.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

milktooth by Jaime Burnet (2025) - A woman escapes an abusive lesbian relationship while pregnant; set in Halifax, Cape Breton, and Scotland. (Full disclosure, I read an ARC of this.)

Cover of milktooth, featuring an illustration of a milk carton that has a drawing of a salamander on the side.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (2025). Adult fantasy novella about sisters and magic grammar from the Faerie realm.

Cover of The River Has Roots, featuring illustrations of flowers and a stylized river.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (2000). Weird litfic about a polyglot single mom and her prodigy son who tries to find his father. If you like fiction that doesn’t spoon-feed you and that isn’t terrified of being deemed problematic by Twitter, this book is for you.

Cover of The Last Samurai. It shows an angled photo of the inside of a subway station.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

My friend likened Prior getting an erection around the Angel to how Sting glows blue around orcs

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

I was watching the HBO version with a friend recently, and he commented that Roy Cohn sounds like Trump here. I’d been about to say the same thing. Perhaps the closest we get to a Trump appearance in the play.

ROY: I want to be family. Famiglia, as my Italian friends call it. La Famiglia. A lovely word. It’s important for me to help you, like I was helped.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Kushner’s original idea for the play was “five gay men and an angel.” He only added other female characters because he was writing for an existing cast that included three women. But it’s still true that all the male main characters are gay, and Trump isn’t gay.

KUSHNER: We had to submit a description of the play, and I said, “It’s gonna have five gay men and an angel,” but the grant was specifically to write a play for the Eureka Theatre Company, which was three straight women and a straight man.

SEYD: The intention was to link it to the Caryl Churchill, David Edgar way of working, to write a play for the company of actors.

EUSTIS: We had four actors, three of them were women, so it had to have parts for three women. Tony complained for a long time, “What is this play about gay men doing with these women?”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

This strikes me as an anachronistic take about Angels in America. The play premiered in the early 90s. I don’t think most people at the time thought of Trump as a particularly political figure, just as a rich real estate guy. He just didn’t seem very relevant to the themes of the play at the time.

BlueSky post reading: “The absence of a Trump character in Angels In America speaks volumes since he refused to go near Roy Cohn at the end. Trump is a void in that play.”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

I love meter, so this made me curious about meter in Obama’s speeches. The opening of his Iowa caucus speech is a line of iambic pentameter followed by a line of iambic tetrameter: “You know, they said this day would never come / They said our sights were set too high.”

BlueSky post reading: “Wouldn't you rather learn to speak like Obama? Iambic pentameter, consonants and the elements of poetry are the foundation of rhetoric. Your audience will be more convinced and you will serve your clients better if you structure your arguments like poetry.”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

thank you Al Gore for inventing the internet so that I could learn that Tony Kushner’s husband (and perhaps Tony Kushner) has watched and enjoyed the gay hockey show

BlueSky post from Mark Harris, reading “I watched the first three episodes of Heated Rivalry. Hot, fun, nicely written and acted, knows EXACTLY what it wants to deliver and delivers it. I’m crushed not to have a smirky take for you.”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

Or when a headline mentions a famous man by name but leaves his non-famous wife unnamed. They do in fact do the same thing with famous women who have non-famous male partners.

Three headlines, from three different news outlets, which mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by name while referring to her partner as “her boyfriend” and “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fiancé”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

I see so many posts that say “I never see people say this about women!” but if you spend 30 seconds and run a search on the phrase “male founders” you will see that it is not rare.

BlueSky post reading, in part, “never heard anyone say ‘male founders’ and prefer entrepreneurs or CEOs ‘who are women’ over ‘female founders.’”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

I unironically love this genre of post. “Silly me, I thought [something 99.9% of people would have no idea was incorrect]. How embarrassing!”

BlueSky post reading “Hopefully this makes up for my one-brain-cell himbo moment the other week where I thought a Neapolitan was an augmented 6th chord”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Or this comment about a Dutch woman who was approved for medical aid in dying due to depression, despite being physically healthy. The commenter implies that being tall is one of the top three reasons this woman should find her life worth living!

Dutch women are taller on average than like half of men. They’re richer than nearly every other nationality of women on earth. They’re richer have extremely genius social programs and live in a liberal society that props them up. But she can’t handle being tall, white, and rich.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Instead of “In sickness and in health”:

LOUIS: Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need?

RABBI ISIDOR CHEMELWITZ: Why would a person do such a thing?

LOUIS: Because he has to.

Maybe because this person’s sense of the world, that it will change for the better with struggle, maybe a person who has this neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the time… maybe that person can’t, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit… and sores and disease… really frighten him, maybe… he isn’t so good with death.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

new reaction image just dropped

Young woman with closed eyes, in an “I can’t believe this is happening” expression, captioned “I’m being accused of not understanding the omega verse”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

I’ve been guilty of spreading this misinformation in the past, so now I try to spread the debunking. slate.com/technology/2...

When we spoke, I told Steinberg his work had been referenced in this way. “Oh no,” he said, laughing. I then asked whether he had insights about where the figure 25 came from, and he said roughly the same thing as Cohen: There’s consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there’s far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. “I honestly don’t know why people picked 25,” he said. “It’s a nice-sounding number? It’s divisible by five?”

Kate Mills, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, was equally puzzled. “This is funny to me—I don’t know why 25,” Mills said. “We’re still not there with research to really say the brain is mature at 25, because we still don’t have a good indication of what maturity even looks like.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

When I was in fifth grade, my class read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, in which someone explains to a child that enslaved people were sometimes made to rape each other.

Passage from Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, in which Mr. Morrison explains to Cassie that his parents were “from breeded stock” and that that means “there were some farms that mated folks like animals to produce more slaves.” He says, “Didn’t matter none what they [his parents] thought ‘bout the idea. Didn’t nobody care.”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

This right here is an intro linguistics problem set

Headline reading “The Difference Between Labubu, Zimomo, and Mokoko”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

I was like “hey I like possessive marking too!” and then I realized they were not talking about morphosyntax

Girl, possessive marking stuff is my guilt pleasure all the time! Sadly the paranormal books that I’ve read usually just contain hetero couples. Maybe you know some steamy romance alpha concept that contain mlm or wlw?

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Unfortunately this essay from 2004 is still horribly relevant

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

If you’re in the mood for Iraq War-era nostalgia, may I suggest Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas

Book cover of Idlewild: A Novel. Two pale hands reach toward each other against a purple background.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

I was reading when another passenger sprayed pepper spray into the subway car as he disembarked. On another occasion, I was groped on the subway, and I don’t think headphones would have prevented that.

Post by @asterionhex reading: “This is true BUT ALSO I have like 2-4 good random interactions a month on public transit. And if you don’t want anyone to interact with you, wear headphones or read and it will be respected.”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

You may be onto something!

When the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, Rescorla was vice president for corporate security at Dean Witter Morgan Stanley and he led the company’s evacuation that day. Convinced that the terrorists would return, Rescorla created and stringently rehearsed a disaster contingency plan for the company, colleagues and family said.

On Sept. 11, he again supervised the evacuation of Morgan Stanley’s employees from the burning building. Among the 13 Morgan Stanley employees and consultants who were unable to exit the building safely was Rescorla.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

I’m reading this diary of the Nazi years, written by a Jewish German, and he constantly complains about having to do the dishes. He’s like “The Nazis just won the election and I might lose my job. Also I’m tortured by doing the washing up.”

Book cover: I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941, by Victor Klemperer

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

“Works at Iglesia católica” has big “went to school near Boston” energy

Robert Prevost on Facebook, listed as “Works at Iglesia católica”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Calling the Canadian election now

Fortune from a fortune cookie, reading:

“Good news will come from afar.

Panda Express”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

And if anything, our culture expects scientists to be well-versed in the humanities more than it expects humanists to be well-versed in science. Even engineering majors have to read at a college level, but English majors don’t have to do college-level math.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

I’ve never understood this claim tbh. Even engineering majors at MIT are required to take college-level humanities courses. Peter Thiel has a philosophy degree. Larry Page attended Interlochen. I’m proud of my liberal arts degree, but I don’t think it has to do with whether you’re a good person.

Page also played instruments and studied music composition while growing up. His parents sent him to music summer camp—Interlochen Arts Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, and Page has mentioned that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. "In some sense, I feel like music training led to the high-speed legacy of Google for me".

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

And I don’t blame him tbh

Illustration of Jadis standing atop a horse-drawn carriage, cracking a whip

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

cartoonshateher.medium.com/my-extremely...

There are not thousands of unwanted babies lying around in the United States, as people will lead you to believe. In fact, it’s the opposite. For every baby placed for adoption, there are more than thirty couples who want to adopt him or her (people will try to argue this isn’t true because they knew someone who was adopted in the 70s and nobody else wanted to adopt them. Well, things have changed since then). If a couple does successfully adopt the baby, it’ll cost upward of $40,000. To put it into perspective, with no insurance, an IVF round costs about $15,000. Eric’s job gave us fantastic IVF insurance that would lower the price to about $1-$2K for up to four cycles.

Let’s just say Eric and I were able to save up $40K to adopt a baby. Well, this doesn’t mean we would walk away with one. A biological mother is legally allowed to change her mind after placing the baby, even after the adoptive parents take the baby home. This sounds like a scam for the adoptive parents, until you realize the adoption industry is often a scam for the biological mother. Women are routinely manipulated into placing children that they’d rather raise themselves.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

babe would you still love Hamlet if you were a worm?

Experience does teach you. One, you start to realize what human beings are actually capable of, what a great work of art is really—I mean if you were an earthworm, you’d probably be able to figure out that Hamlet is a great play.

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

That is true but also, counterintuitively, low-income parents are more likely to say they find parenting enjoyable all or most of the time than high-income parents. www.pewresearch.org/social-trend...

Chart from Pew Research Center, headlined “Lower-income parents are the most likely to see parenting as always enjoyable, rewarding.”

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Lizzy @someonelizz.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Dating is hard. Especially if you’re a male túngara frog

Females almost always go for males who embellish their whines with chucks over males who merely whine. The chucks are so desirable that if a male is reluctant to make them, a female will sometimes body-slam him until he does.

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