iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Americans are relearning the lesson we learned during the Gilded Age of the late 1890s, when robber barons ran the government and the economy for their own benefit: Oligarchy is incompatible with the common good. I'm hopeful we'll respond with a new progressive movement.

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Adam Davis @scholarinexile.bsky.social · 21h

dd.extra-life.org/team/73494 This November 7-8, my students in the CCAC Anime and Video Game Club are participating in Extra Life, the annual 24-hour charity gaming marathon for the Children’s Miracle Network, which provides lifesaving hospital care for kids in need. Help our team save lives here!

dd.extra-life.org

Extra Life | Make Big Change For All Kids

I'm raising funds with #EXTRALIFE for kids treated at my Children's Miracle Network hospital! I need your help to reach my fundraising goal. Please donate today to Make Big Change For All Kids.

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lumpley @lumpley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

15 years ago when Apocalypse World was new and people were beginning to understand and work with it, it was seductive to look at "acting under fire" and see, not one basic move of several, but the template underlying all the game's moves. Like @kierongillen.bsky.social 's classic gag:

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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

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Barbara Roseman @broseman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is a great piece. It’s a shame it’s on substack. Read it or don’t, she describes why they were at the game, what help her husband offered and why she deferred that help. She also describes the pain of the comments after. In particular she addresses Kuiper and Krukow and asks they do better.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Saying Wizardry feels like cheating given how omnipresent D&D has been in my life, but probably Wizardry.

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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 14/09/2026

Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Make a band edible: Shrimp Bizkit

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Sadly accurate. We do not want to go back to the people we were on September 12.

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SkyCalPro | Kev @skycalpro.com · 11/09/2026

Volcano of Fire Erupts Under the Stars While waiting near midnight to see a possible eruption of Volcn de Fuego (Volcano of Fire) in Guatemala last month, a ready camera captured this extraordinary image. Image Credit: Diego Rizzo #Astronomy

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

And yet my friends wonder why I refuse to give up my 15-year-old dumb TV.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

We have yet to imagine any kind of alien more bizarre and unfathomable than what exists on our planet, in our oceans.

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The Verge @theverge.com · 02/09/2026

As a new Harry Potter trailer makes the rounds, it bears repeating that there’s no way to watch this show without supporting J.K. Rowling’s bigotry and the structural violence she’s inflicting on the trans community.

theverge.com

There is no ethical consumption of HBO’s Harry Potter series

You can’t without supporting Rowling’s transphobic bigotry.

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Michael Greshko @michaelgreshko.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

BREAKING: The world's most sensitive dark matter detector has announced it has spotted something it can't easily explain: a single event that's tantalizingly consistent with a type of theorized dark matter particle. Very early days yet, but pretty wild. 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

World’s biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle

It’s far too early to declare a discovery, physicists with the LZ detector say

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Dave Bulmer @demontomatodave.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

When you see! Something bad! You don't have! To force it on your friends! Just don't hit repost when you see something a fascist said! Has someone quoted it and added a cool slam dunk? They are a coughing covid case on a packed train with a wry grin instead of a mask! No need to spread that!

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

@mapquest.com , you’ve given me a really strong reason to like you right now but your search is unusably bad. Limited results, no filters for fine tuning. “Restaurants near me open now” is a basic use case for maps/GPS on a phone.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

If there’s ever an Elon Musk biopic, I think it’s only right that a South African play him. I think Trevor Noah would be perfect for the role.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I was a scout from Tiger to Eagle. One of the most enduring lessons I learned from that time is that we have a responsibility to do what’s right, especially when that’s hard. Especially when other people around you won’t. Watching the Scouts cave to bullies is galling. 1/2

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shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

is there a pulitzer for photo captions because if so @theguardian.com just won it

Gianni Infantino carefully explains to Donald Trump that he is not part of the spanish national team.
Photograph: Javier García/Shutterstock

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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Don’t take the bait. Whether ICE planted drugs or there were drugs DOES NOT MATTER. It’s irrelevant to the murder. Feds want us to debate drugs in a story that’s about murder. Stay focused on the murder. It’s not about the victim’s virtue or lack thereof. It’s about ICE murdering people.

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Anthony Michael Kreis @anthonymkreis.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Officers shooting a man, running away from law enforcement, who is not a target of law enforcement, and who poses no threat to law enforcement, is murder. Federal officers do not have the power to commit summary executions because they are aggrieved.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

A $500k federal award on a basic question returned a Nobel & a cure for a disease that shortens 100,000 American lives. Cutting foundational research doesn't save the money. It moves the payoff to whoever kept funding the boring science. #YourTaxDollarsAtWork #NIH #NSF #BasicResearch #CRISPR

bioniclab.substack.com

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Movies Silently @moviessilently.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

So, I think people have the notion that I saw BIRTH OF A NATION was racist and that's why I want to remove it from the canon. That's not actually true. I kept hearing about how BOAN was the first this and the first that but as I started watching more silent movies, the math was not mathing.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

💡 The laser was a solution that preceded every problem it would solve. Nobody in 1953 could list its applications, because those applications did not yet exist. That is what foundational research looks like before anyone knows what it is for.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I do not understand how Connections grades difficulty. (Apologies for the graphic content tag, it’s my attempt to spoiler it.)

Connections results in the order: green, yellow, blue, purple. The green category is “Classic Wedding Gifts” with the words: china, luggage, money, toaster. Yellow is “Prog Bands”: Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Rush. Blue is “Red Characters”: Clifford, Deadpool, Kool-Aid Man, Mr Krabs. Prime is “Rhyming Compound Words”: chuck flick, helter skelter, humpty dumpty, mumbo jumbo.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

One of today’s menu suggestions is “meat sauce with hidden vegetables.” Which, naturally, I initially read as “meat sauce with hidden variables.” Now I’m just mad that my Bell’s Pepper Inequality joke won’t work.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Weirdly proud of this (not today’s).

Score card from Hank Green’s 4x3 game. It shows: June 13, 2026; 200 pts ; Golden Plaque Unlocked! The icons below it show a perfect game: reverse rainbow order, shared word first in all categories, under 90 sec.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Some good insights from Mr Kenson on the deeper implications of including gender equality in your worldbuilding.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

🔬 Your tax dollars once paid a grad student to surgically remove a gland from a chicken's rear end. In 1952, Bruce Glick at Ohio State started cutting the bursa of Fabricius out of chicks, an organ unexplained for 300 years. Nothing happened. It looked useless. 🧵1/6

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Jennifer Kretchmer @dreamwisp.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

This is one of my long-time personal bugbears as a player with 20+ years and >6 editions under my belt, too. 5e players haven’t really experienced distinct worlds, and I think it means they’ve missed out on something special because if it. 1/

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Steve Kenson ❌👑 @stevekenson.com · 31/05/2026

Part of the reason why we used to fund pure research is you never know what’s going to end up being useful.

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Clark Valentine @clarkvalentine.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

It must take _so much energy_ to be a terf or a transphobe. Know what's easy? And I mean, dead simple super easy for lazy bastards like me? When someone says "Hey, my gender is [this]" or "My pronouns are [that]" you just say "Okay, cool" And that's it.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Renewables will win, that’s been clear for the past year or two at least. The only question is if the US can come to terms with that or be left as a smog-filled irrelevancy.

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Cam Banks 🇳🇿 ❌👑 @rustysellsword.com · 14/05/2026

The Cortex Prime Game Handbook is live on DriveThruRPG for the first time! 256 pages of the most flexible RPG toolkit I could make—build any genre, any tone, any kind of story you want to tell. I'm so proud of this book. www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5...

A swirling cosmic scene featuring a woman in goggles and holding a device that reveals multiple alternate worlds.

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Sarah Rose @thesarahrose.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

The good taxpayers of New York have given me a pair of Meta glasses because I am low vision disabled, and I seem to have used them more than a lot of people on here, so let me say a little about my experiences:

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Have we considered the possibility that RFKj is in some sort of eschatological plague cult?

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Some light reading for me tonight.

A copy of “The Pocket Guide to Debugging,” by Julie Evans; subtitle: “Stellar strategies for sticky situations.”

It’s a roughly 5x7 inch softcover book of about 60 pages. The cover features an illustration of a woman with brown hair and a pink laptop examining an insect with a magnifying glass.

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celli @aliascelli.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

And evergreen advice for any kind of alarming email/phone call. Something I have struggled to remember when I've been phished, for real.

The defense, increasingly, is a single habit: when an email tells you something alarming about an account, don't respond to the email. Go to the service directly, on your own, the way you always do. If something is really wrong, you'll see it there. If you don't see it there, the email was lying.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

I have a lot of very specific notes on the bar I would enjoy very much for the six months before it went bankrupt.

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Space Telescope Science Institute @stsci.edu · 24/04/2026

Well, isn’t this a sight for sore eyes! 😍 Our beloved Hubble appears in this amazing image from one of Vantor's WorldView Legion satellites. It was 36 years ago today that Hubble was launched in the bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Credit: Vantor.

A detailed image of the Hubble Space Telescope floating in space, showing its solar panels and cylindrical body in space.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

This is fascinating: both for the implication that AI’s mental health issues are a solvable problem, and for the clear examples of why it’s urgent to address it quickly and materially.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 23/04/2026

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Man, I really love Cortex Prime as a system and as a toolkit. Can’t wait to see what people come up with. (Maybe I’ll even find the motivation to develop the Bowling League into something publishable.)

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<smitty /> @such-a-dork.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

How is Iran so much better at laying out the anti-MAGA case than Democrats are?

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Jasmine 🌌🔭 @astrojaz.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

CHRISTINA KOCH GREETING HER DOG AFTER RETURNING FROM THE MOON IM GONNA CRYYY 😭😭😭

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Eric Geller @ericjgeller.com · 07/04/2026

oh my god oh my god oh my god www.nasa.gov/image-detail... www.nasa.gov/image-detail... www.nasa.gov/image-detail...

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 07/04/2026

A few have suggested that some aspects of this mission--joy, international teamwork, diversity--are being played up to stick it to the hateful attitude of the administration. But I don't think it's that. I think it's just that those things are essential to and inseparable from a mission like this.

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