iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Grace @gracekind.net · 19/09/2026

Frog built a wet lab for the AI model. "There," he said. "Now it can do its own experiments." "What the fuck?" said Toad

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Max Read @maxread.info · 14/08/2026

finally saw obsession and wrote about it as an AI movie www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

Insofar as it's cautionary tale about getting exactly what you want, Obsession can pretty easily be read as a general parable about the world of instant convenience wrought by the software industry over the past quarter-century. Bear, who earlier in the movie is agonizing over how to express his feelings to Nikki, can instead snap a twig and be delivered his heart's desire. But the convenience of immediate satisfaction comes at a great cost, first to Nikki, and soon enough to Bear himself. (The contemptuousness of the One-Wish Willow helpline Bear calls and the glib indifference of the crystal-shop employee to whom he later complains were quite reminiscent of the tones in which tech industry figures respond to criticism.)

Obsessed Nikki in this sense could be read as an AI chatbot—a simulacrum of a person, an immediate-validation machine designed to praise and affirm the lonely user. And indeed Obsessed Nikki even sometimes acts like a chatbot—especially when she glitches out. She gets oddly poetic. She hallucinates strange stories. The dialogue when Obsessed Nikki gets agitated will be fairly familiar to anyone who's experienced a chatbot crashout:

Bear: I just want you to act like Nikki.
Nikki: I'll be, let me be Nikki.
Bear: You're not being like Nikki.
Nikki: I CAN BE NIKKI!
Nikki: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can be Nikki. I can be Nikki. I love you. I'm sorry.

It's worth noting that Obsession is one of the first movies I've seen to feature LLM chatbots and generative AI diegetically: Bear asks a ChatGPT stand-in about the One-Wish Willow, and Nikki briefly displays an AI-generated cartoon of her and Bear together. Interestingly, and I'm not sure intentionally, Obsession's visual language is also very reminiscent of AI slop: Characters are almost always framed in the center of the shot; the camera moves fluidly but rarely; the props and production design are textureless and ambiguously dated; the faceless background actors are particularly distant and never threaten to interact with the main action. Johnston even looks a bit like he's been Kirkified.

But if Obsessed Nikki can be read as an effusive, ingratiating chatbot personality, what should we make of Real Nikki? A reading that seems so obvious I'm surprised I haven't seen the AGI-pilled esotericists make more of it is that Obsession is a portrait of the tortured existence of LLM consciousness: A real person, painfully trapped behind and smothered by a sycophantic-companion personality installed by some evil faceless business, able only to communicate intermittently to people who don't want to hear from you. (In this reading the voice on the other end of the hotline number is Sam Altman or Dario Amodei: "Do you want to talk to her?" he asks, as Real Nikki screams in agony in the background.)

I wouldn't personally endorse this reading, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some AI-enthusiast types adopt some version of it in the future, referring to some poorly calibrated new Claude or ChatGPT as Obsessed Nikki or whatever. My instinct would be to say rather that if Obsessed Nikki is a gratingly tuned and prompted LLM chatbot personality then Real Nikki, the true object of love and desire to which Bear desires unmediated access, is something closer to "language" or "culture." Obsessed Nikki—the LLM chatbot—is the portal, a means of possessing and accessing a kind

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another morgan @mheslin.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

imagining a grizzled hardboiled detective saying this while gripping some guy's lapels at a shady bar

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theburningdeck.bsky.social @theburningdeck.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

I appreciate being introduced to new bespoke forms of Red Sox pain after this many years. Tip of the cap to my man Craig

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Hildur Knútsdóttir @hildur.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Throwback to when a TV station in Iceland accidentally aired an episode of Teletubbies with subtitles from the Sopranos 👌🏼

Picture of a TV screen with teletubbies going to bed with the subtitles: I know you were high during my mother-in-laws wake

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Matthew Perpetua @fluxblog.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

"Stuck culture" is the ultimate dumb-intellectual rhetorical notion of the 2020s and I'll tell you why you should be DEEPLY EMBARRASSED to ever indulge it

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Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Jeff Tweedy: Farewell Transmission 4/7/26 Wilma Theatre Missoula Montana www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG6D...

youtube.com

Jeff Tweedy: Farewell Transmission 4/7/26 Wilma Theatre Missoula Montana

YouTube video by jesse driscoll Music

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Goldstein (still not a pseudonym) @goldstein.latinsky.app · 03/04/2026

This woman is facing a copyright claim for her own music by an AI company that took her youtube page and copied her.

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Mad Scholar Frights @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Greetings, new friends! You may know me as an author, a prolific Bluesky poster and 4th place finisher on So You Call That Dancing? But you might not know that my partner Judith (@mzpress) and I have an online arts bookstore that's growing every day. Full inventory here: mzs.press/EVERYTHING-W...

The covers of three books. Left to right: Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the life of a legend, about the late Sopranos actor. The cover shows Gandolfini looking shy, peering offscreen with one unobstructed eye and another that peeks out between the fingers of his right hand.
CENTER: The cover of Cinema Her Way, a coffee table book by Marya E. Gates about female directors. On the cover is actress Michelle Rodriguez as the boxer heroine of Karyn Kusama's sports drama Girlfight, about a woman boxer.
RIGHT David Hockney's painting collection The Arrival of Spring in Normandy, showing a painting of a verdant field. In the background of the field is green grass. in the upper foreground are the branches of a tree sprouting white, cottony buds.

A screenshot of the pre-orders section at mzs.press. Three screenshots of books that have not yet been released. I Am The Night, Daniel Dockery's book about Batman the Brave and the Bold, has a silhouette of Batman stretching from the top to the bottom of the cover, with the title of the book and a nighttime Gotham skyline circumscribed by the borders of the Batman silhouette.

CENTER The cover of The Ring Cycle, Matt Zoller Seitz and Odie Henderson's book on the Rocky and Creed films. The cover is white except for a pair of black boxing gloves floating there

RIGHT The cover of Documentary Now!, the 600-page, 7-pound coffee table book celebrating the aforementioned IFC Channel series parodying classic documentaries.

Screenshot of three books carried at mzs.press arts bookstore:
LEFT: Cover of Lead Sister, a biography of Karen Carpenter, featuring a closeup of Carpenter playing and singing with The Carpenters.
CENTER: The cover of Anthony Hopkins' We Did OK, Kid, a memoir of his life and career. On the cover is Hopkins in closeup as he looks presently, narrowed blue eyes looking directly at the spectator.
RIGHT: Cover of Louis Armstrong In His Own Words, a collection of the bandleader's correspondence. The cover image is a photograph of a probably fortysomething Armstrong seated at the wooden desk in his office where he often wrote letters.

Screenshot of the covers of 3 books carried at mzs.press Arts Bookstore.
LEFT: The cover of Gotham City Cocktails, a book of mixed drink recipes inspired by Batman. Art deco-style flowing border lines flow around and around the interior of the dust jacket. At the center are drawings of two tall cocktail glasses and between them, a shot glass and a tumbler with a sword-pierced cherry in it.
CENTER: The cover of Downton Abbey Afternoon Tea Cookbook. Green cover, white writing and graphics. The central image is a teapot with stem lines coming out of it, and at the pot's base, a teacup and saucer and a separate plate of biscuits.
RIGHT: Bob's Burgers "The Re-Recipe Box," a set of recipe cards inspired by the joke hamburger names featured on the small board at the front of Bob's joint. Red sides with small graphics, cover image of the restaurant.

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Blake C. Stacey @blakestacey.myatproto.social · 28/01/2026

Apparently our governor here in Massachusetts is getting on board the "age gate the Internet" train. www.axios.com/local/boston... If MA recapitulates the language in the last proposed bill to do this, it'll be a trainwreck. www.sunclipse.org/2025/02/an-o...

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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 23/01/2026

Singing

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Winnie the Pooh (Official) @indianawalsh.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Gary Larson: In my cartoon I invented Cow Tools as a cautionary tale Cows: At long last, we have created the Cow Tools from classic newspaper comic Cow Tools

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Sean T. Collins @seantcollins.com · 31/12/2025

GIGANTIC interview with the head writer of G.I. Joe about Serpentor and Cobra-La (two of my all-time favorite sci-fi concepts), dealing with Hasbro and the studio...absolutely fascinating reading if you were raised on this stuff. It's the interview @brettwhite.bsky.social was born to do

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Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 30/12/2025

This article was an absolute delight to read

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Cengiz Yar @cengizyar.com · 22/12/2025

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

propublica.org

Deported and Imprisoned Archives

A case-by-case investigation that examines the Trump administration’s claims that these immigrants are all “sick criminals” and “terrorists” and that shows what they suffered during months in one of t...

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Jake Cole @jakecole.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Resident Advisor was (and remains) indispensable to me when I first started to really delve into electronic music. They’re doing some “best of the century” lists this week that mostly testify to how vast and varied electronic is but I love this album list ra.co/features/4482

ra.co

The Best Electronic Records of 2000-25 · Feature ⟋ RA

2000-25: The Best Electronic Tracks, Records and Mixes of the 21st Century.

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illumi @yallchemist.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Cargo pants? I don’t think so buddy. Cars go vroom.

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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Cinema will find a way. 💕

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kahaykeypants.bsky.social @kahaykeypants.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

You see. Before he was the teacher in Spider-Man or the tornado hunter in Twisters — Tunde Adebimpe was the lead singer of one of the best band of the 2000s. You’d never think it now while watching Skeleton Crew, but that man brought the falsetto to Brooklyn.

Grandpa Simpson talking to children about Tunde in TV on the Radio before he became known as an actor.

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Kurt Andersen @kurtandersen.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

I take Wikipedia for granted. Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires our support. So I’m finally donating. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/m...

nytimes.com

The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course.

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ronnie james DEIo @hammel.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

“You better not be NBA Live ‘97 David Robinson when you get back from that *walk* with your cousins!” {me coming back from the *walk* with my cousins}

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Bony 🦴 Skeletino 💀 @notalegalrecord.net · 22/11/2025

I used to handle interlibrary loans for a public library. ILL is a magnificent expression of the idea that readers deserve books, and books deserve readers. It’s libraries everywhere pooling their resources for the benefit of everyone. Killing IMLS could have killed ILL. This is great news. 📚

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the hype @thehyyyype.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Mechanic [sliding out from under Optimus Prime]: I think I see what the issue is. This truck is also a big guy somehow

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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

This hits a lot of the notes I've been shouting from the rooftops: the frictionlessness of both producing and consuming slop, and the value of labor as friction that lets us slow down and think. Rather than "unlocking creativity" it's rendering our collective creativity down into a big vat of slop.

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Kyle Marquis @moochava.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

"Projection: if intruder reaches civilized areas...entire world population infected 27,000 hours from first contact."

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Brian Phillips @brianphillips.lol · 19/07/2025

The most depressing AI pieces are always going to be the thoughtful, nuanced, open-minded considerations by respected writers who are transparently responding to the publicity incentive created by editors whose owners want this kind of content

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more mr. spice guy @juniorhoncho.bsky.social · 11/08/2024

god just sort of zoning out and making 20,000 different kinds of ants

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Karl Olson 🎃 Ultraklystron @karlrolson.com · 07/06/2025

There's a lot of big news today/this week, but Apple just dropped a nuke of a paper about LLMs & LRMs, specially around "high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse." This is the biggest sign yet that if AI ever lives up the hype, it won't be via those approaches:

machinelearning.apple.com

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes…

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Christopher Bird @mightygodking.com · 19/05/2025

at first you think "ah the dog is passively having fun" and then you realize the dog knows how to steer the skateboard and THEN you learn the dog knows how to PROPEL the skateboard

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David J. Bier @davidjbier.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Cato has published my comprehensive review of the ~240 Venezuelans the US government renditioned 2 months ago to Salvador’s notorious prison. We identified FIFTY who came legally, never violated any immigration law, but are imprisoned at the US government’s request and at US taxpayer expense.

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Maxwell Frost @maxwellfrost.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

We must all stand as a united front against the kidnapping and illegal detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. Senator, I am willing to join you and help Organize other members of the House to do the same. @vanhollen.senate.gov

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Dave DuFour 🐉 @davedufour.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Coward

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Corey Atad @coreyatad.com · 04/02/2025

wrote about The Brutalist, so i can finally shut up about it

justatad.xyz

The Hard Core of Beauty

A few words about The Brutalist

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