iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Valentine Steele

ArtButMakeItSports @artbutmakeitsports.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The Ascension, by Ford Madox Brown, 1844, 📸 by Kirsten Schmitt

Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Something that pushes Gravity Falls *so* far ahead of its competition is the writers' room not being mostly kiddy/teen animation lifers. You've got people from SNL, Community, Sex and the City, etc. And, yes, some animation-only people. But crucially, not all.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

For example, boomers have continually voted and protested for their right *not* to have to retake driving tests as they age. Even down to being allowed to self-report all vision tests. While at the same time, continually pushing (publicly!) for tougher and tougher tests/laws for young drivers.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Another major issue is that in the UK, pensioners were also very much the face of Brexit and COVID-19 restrictions. It also cannot be overstated how much the UK punishes young people just for existing, compared to America. Like, it's hard to explain because it's so much worse than in America.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Being passively progressive while living a cosmopolitan area is going from "wow, I sure am sorry for you that there are fewer lesbian bars than gay bars" to "yeah, that makes total sense".

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Like, I'm Jewish, and I don't think I would inherently disagree with the basic idea that LibLeft thought has 'coddled' Jewish feelings wrt Palestine. But once you introduce that concept into the discourse, you can't expect people to just, like, not apply it to anything else.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Something I do think is exclusive to Woke (as such) is demanding people maintain the "don't you dare point this out" covenant, while not understanding that it has to apply equally. But you can't break that basic egalitarian framework and then demand it still apply to you.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

In my heart of hearts I know that I'm the only person brave enough to adapt Agatha Christie's weird early H.P. Lovecraft-aping supernatural short stories.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And think about how bad it is for the stuff that isn't some of the most famous art of the last two centuries. There are so many great (and popular in their day!) books and films and songs that have totally slipped into obscurity because nobody is allowed to do stuff with them.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Yeah, there probably should be a cushion there. But this 90+ year stuff is insane. Like, there's no reason the Great Gatsby should've entered the public domain in 2021.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I'm fairly in favor of copyright law but I do feel like once you're gone, it should be open season. Like, I want to see all the cool shit people are allowed to do with something once there are no strings attached.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

And, like, I was and am a bookworm. I'm still ticked off that the film version of Howl's Moving Castle literally drops the book about halfway through and turns into a completely different story about militarism. But the story Diana Wynne Jones intended exists forever in the book she wrote.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

An important growing-up moment for any bookworm is accepting that you aren't owed a faithful adaptation before people are allowed to do weird shit with a book. The original book IS the one and only authentic form the artist chose for their work. Everything else is inherently downstream.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I’m not huge into Gerwig as a director. But the fact that she looked at the Magician’s Nephew and thought “of course, rock opera with mid-century British sci-fi aesthetics!”… A more hopeful sign than doing more Peter Jackson LOTR/GOT-slop.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The thing about adapting works by people with odd opinions/fascinations is that it can't end up better than "ok" unless adapted by another person with odd opinions/fascinations. And invariably, it will turn out to be quite different. Just look at the TV miniseries Shining vs the Kubrick movie.

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Reposted by Valentine Steele

gallandguile @gallandguile.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

AUTOMATED CARD SECURITY WHEN YOU GO TO AN UNFAMILIAR GAS STATION: For your safety, we have locked your debit account and contacted Interpol AUTOMATED CARD SECURITY WHEN THERE IS AN ACTUAL SECURITY INCIDENT: Did you purchase 10 TOYOTA HILUX PICKUPS WITH MOUNTED M60s in DEIR EZZOR, SYRIA yesterday?

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

AAA game studios claim they want their work to be treated as art, but none of them even has a fake indie label for awards-bait stuff like Hollywood studios do. That fact alone is so damning.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

It's not hypocritical for these places to prefer Amazon centers or whatever, when those bring in at least 100-1000 more jobs than data centers do. And all for locals with very few prospects. As Harlan Ellison said, "I sell my soul, but only at the highest rates."

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The thing is, I get that they're a crucial part of our infrastructure. We DO need to build more of them. But they're not factories! They provide about maybe 10 onsite jobs, and unlike traditional plants, the work will only be going to people with advanced college degrees!

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Though it does make for a helpful barometer when it shifts from “they could never have done it” to “actually, it was good that they did!”

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

People who do this are cursed with *just* enough self-awareness to realise they shouldn’t say “actually, it’s GOOD when [X Group] commits [horrible act]!”

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I'm not saying people might not get sick of the HBO Potter show, but it's going to make a lot of money before that happens. Plus, unlike Fantastic Beasts, WB basically boxed Rowling in. Sure she has total creative control, but over an already proven success. Minimizing a lot of the initial risk.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Everyone who says it won't make money is delusional. There's a reason WB chose to make it in-house at HBO Max (at a time when they're cutting back) instead of making hundreds of millions more upfront by doing it for Prime or Netflix!

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Hence the continued failure of 'Dark Woke', 'Pragmatic Woke', etc. At the end of the day, they're what Woke 1 was directly built to oppose. So any claims to nuance or modulation turn out to be the same old "histrionic moralism for thee but not for me" bullshit normies hated the first time.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Woke 2, as such, is basically just about desperately trying to convince normies that you're *definitely* not still a Woke 1 dead-ender. That's it.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

A major reason I never got into the Avatar:TLA follow-ups (apart from not being 9) is it's all Specials v Nomals crap. While the original is 70% episodes about how societies fell to the bad guys because of the divers ways they refused to let magic and/or non-magic people form a PMC/civil service.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

What if Weeds was about Dexter and his Six Feet Under family life, while he also battles the Sopranos and tries to evade his brother-in-law Vic Mackey?

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

It’s very obviously Vince Gillian trying to hit every 2000s cable tv trend after a ton of (often good!) failed post-X-Files projects. There’s a reason it shares 70% of its basic premise with Weeds.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Part of what pisses me off about it is that (like any prequel) the best way to experience it involves seeing Breaking Bad first. And I don't think Breaking Bad is awful. It's perfectly entertaining. But there are so many people who I know would love BCS, but would clearly bounce off of BB.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I can't even attribute it to the Zevon song, because even back in the 30s and 40s, they were doing coattail-riding rip-offs like She-Wolf of London. Is there just something inherently 'sticky' about the idea of a werewolf in London?!???

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Mildly off-topic, but after having seen Were-Wolf Of London, the amount of pop culture impact its title had is kinda shocking. Nobody remembers the movie, and not a single element (even down to the makeup design by the usual Universal Monsters guy) has filtered into the culture.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

As much as it often manifests in self-destructive ways, America's unironic embrace of patriotism really helps with assimilation.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I feel like a large part of this involves having some kind of general skepticism/antagonism towards your fans. Not in a "those bad apples need to stop harassing people" kinda way. But more like, "I guess it's nice you like this, but I'm the one steering the ship here, ok."

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Just do this with any food stuff that has "dry-aged", "heritage", "artisanal", "confit", or "estate" in the name.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

It still bugs me that we basically lost a decade's worth of slo-mo recordings when they switched broadcasting from film to tape! Idc if it makes me a philistine, it's one of the best parts about watching games on TV.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I have no doubt. Hell, I think it goes much deeper than that. There's a non-zero population using some freakin' inclusivx l*ngu*ge for George Lincoln Rockwell opinions.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

It doesn't matter if the Dem Tea Party says slurs are ok if "don't smoke crack on the subway" and "put rapists in jail" are still beyond the pale. Dems get punished for their crazies more than Republicans. But now Dems are in a place where that can be used as a justification for going even nuttier.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Let's be real here, a non-zero amount of people involved there do also think that gay rights are a privileged Western ideal. Just look at what's happened in the UK with the Greens.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The Leftist observation that Lib™ obsession to win voters by out-right-winging genuine republicans is doomed to fail? Very valid. However, a lot of Leftists also consider the vast majority of popular neutral territory as heinously right-wing and thus, cede it pointlessly.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

RE: Point 1. They barely ever had female writers (in a room that was usually 20+ guys), so the Patty episode almost certainly didn't have the same built-in guardrails as the Karl/Homer's Phobia ones.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

I'll bet it's even simpler. They probably used to have at least a couple of closeted (of some variety/degree) writers who were surreptitiously interested in fine-tuning those scripts. Nowadays, they probably just do the usual thing of shoving the [minority] writer onto the [minority]-themed script.

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Reposted by Valentine Steele

Cai : go see DIGGER @annenotation.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

You Can't let people be racist because a lot of people Will. To an extent you can hardly believe.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I mean, you do also have to be the lead in things to be a leading man. Which Elliott never really was to any significant degree. Whereas someone like Tennant had already played lead roles in a number of things pre-Doctor Who.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Imagine being a jerk like me who actually likes the show. I've always wondered if it's similar for Mission Impossible fans. You're stuck with Tom Cruise as the permanent face of the franchise because Martin Landau, Leonard Nimoy, Greg Morris, Sam Elliott, etc. aren't super-trad leading man types.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

We stopped having these kinds of victories once military planning moved beyond pushing figurines around a table with croupier’s rakes.

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Valentine Steele @terwillikerinst.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Genuinely can't understand anybody wanting to become a high-profile Hollywood filmmaker in their late teens. Infamously the period of time when your artistic output is the cringy shit you feel embarrassed about for the rest of your life. And a blockbuster is harder to delete than a SoundCloud.

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Reposted by Valentine Steele

Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

ai is like a mechanical arm that lifts heavy things. if you want to lift a heavy thing for work it's good. if you want to lift it for exercise it's bad

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