iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Every once in a while I’ll hear an adult conversation that genuinely cares about a guy’s height in numerical inches and distantly realise how much of civilisation happened by accident.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

US geopolitics: “We’re doing a war! The Strait? Don’t care. Europe can take the Strait. Only nerds like straits. Or maybe I WILL handle it. Iran, you open that goddamned Strait or I’ll nuke you all. Women and children too. In three. (Happy Easter, btw.) Two. One… Actually, fuck it, I’m done. I win.”

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Yeah. Just so there’s no confusion about this— I don’t care what they’re called. Call them center-clockwise. Call them democraps. Call them lumpsuckers. I genuinely do not care.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Sure. You can call them ring-tailed lemurs for all I care. I dunno that the spectral labelling schema of US politics matters a ton to me personally.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Yeah. Brace yourself, but I don’t care what they’re called.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Oh yeah. I’ve seen it a lot. People just now discovering the movie are like, “Tons of people thought this was real.” Guys, nobody thought this was real. Maybe for like a minute way beforehand on certain very specific corners of the internet. But not when it was out.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

I think it was a similar thing. The fact that it felt real was so groundbreaking and talked about so much that it eventually became “people thought it was real.”

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

And seeing this become the pop culture narrative is what convinced me Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast was probably not widely mistaken for an alien invasion.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

I was in high school when Blair Witcb dropped. A non-adult. I never thought it was real. I knew no one who thought it was real. Yes, the fact that it FELT real was huge and talked about. But I don’t recall that a lot of serious people believed a literal snuff film was showing in theatres.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

The political class in general has a misunderstanding of what our relationship is. Like I go out and I eat at the restaurant that has something I want. It doesn’t occur to me to worry how restaurateurs feel about me wanting pizza. I’m not out here reading think-pieces about it.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

I hate when the center-left political class talks about dropping the woke stuff. First of all, you lot were never carrying it. Secondly, YOU’RE asking for MY support. So it kinda feels like I can care about whatever I care about.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

In a very real way I have never had to think about time more than when writing a comic book. How to slow a moment down with still images. Or speed it up with images. It’s a wild, quantum physics sort of writing.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Well— kinda. Movies are like music, but comics are not like paintings in that pacing is fundamental and not fixed. You do have to create a sense of moving time, making some moments pass quickly and others linger. You just can’t do that WITH time.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Well it would be very hard to picture a hero who’d have a harrowing time thinking of ways to defeat a villain I respected as little as that. Ideally you want your big bad to be sorta— I dunno… remotely competent.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

It used to be in prehistory that the Mediterranean was mostly dry land and there was a moment when the Atlantic spilled over to fill it. Picture an ocean coming at you at 100m cubic meters a second... I dunno. Just sayin— there have been disasters that were harder to stop than an inept dictator.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

And a comic book is probably much more dissimilar from the other three than they are to each other. Writing a comic book is firing up a completely different part of your writing brain.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Four core structural truths of every medium I’ve written in professionally. A film is a poem of motion and stillness. A season of prestige tv is a novel. Audio drama is telling as showing. And a comic book is time as space.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Don’t read this if you haven’t seen Weapons, but my god, there may be no single moment in modern cinema that’s scarier than just the sound of that fucking car door opening…

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Because it feels a little like I personally am literally a hundred percent closer to replacing all art than AI is.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Or, you know, writing a movie. Like where is that on the scale of “existing” to “ending all human creativity?” Releasing a movie?

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Reposted by Travis Beacham

Lance Coviello @lancecoviello.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Was she patiently waiting for it or pacing? Watching the numbers change?

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Well I’m sure there are multiple ways of getting around the building but I actually think the most solid evidence that she can use a lift is that we literally see her getting off a lift. It’s still a funny process to picture.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

That said, the logistics are objectively funny.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Here, I’m gonna help some of you out. Arguing the logistics isn’t how you defend this moment. You wanna call out the effect of the creative choice. It works in situ b/c it’s that ominous thing of an elevator quietly arriving from hell. In art, if the vibe works, the logic doesn’t come up.

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Reposted by Travis Beacham

Mik Duffy. @mikduffy.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

I think you'll find the Queen pressed the buttons for every floor and patiently waited until she finally reached the one with Ripley.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

It’s not an attack. This is an A+ movie. And I will happily concede that it’s physically possible for her to use the lift. But no one can convince me that the process is not a vaguely funny thing to picture.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

She’s this giant snarling thing. She presses the button. Waits. Gets in when it arrives. Turns around. Moves her talon over the buttons. Picks a floor. Waits there as it takes her up. This huge monster. Elevator music playing. C’mon that’s funny.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

I see that many of you think I’m saying I don’t buy that the xenomorphs are clever. That’s silly. It’s a fully imaginary creature. Obviously whatever it’s doing is a thing it can do. I just think it’s sorta funny to picture the offscreen, implied steps of one of them using an elevator like a person.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

No the door handle thing is a perfect beat. It’s well within reason and the characters comment on it. It’s a plot point. The queen thing is a little different. It’s way smarter than just opening a door, it’s a bit thrown away, and mostly it’s just funny to picture a xenomorph riding an elevator.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

It’s very much like that— if instead of opening a kitchen door they used an elevator to go to the floor they’re prey was on and it wasn’t a plot point and no character ever pointed out that it was a strangely clever thing for an animal to do.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

I love The Lost World (Jurassic Park 2). The film’s rex attack is easily a franchise high point. Easily. And the girl does use a gymnastics move to merc a raptor. Fair. I’d argue that this bit is quite grounded for a series that later spends several films on dinosaurs having military applications.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Remember in Aliens when the queen USES THE ELEVATOR? She doesn’t scrabble up the empty elevator shaft. No. The elevator dings. Doors open. And she steps out. Meaning— at the bottom she pressed the call button, waited, got in, pressed the button for Ripley’s floor, and rode the lift car up to it.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

But the thing that really sealed my fate was Jurassic Park. Those dinosaurs were alive. Towering. Muscles rippling. Rain shining on their skin. This was not just vfx. It was a resurrection of an ancient thing. And that was when I realised I could never be happy with the bones. I wanted this sorcery.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

And the movies thing kinda came from this early, deeply ingrained interest in dinosaurs. So I ate up Godzilla. King Kong. All the Harryhausen stuff. I was always a bit artsy, but my first real knowledge of filmmaking was about the vfx in the monster movies I watched b/c I loved dinosaurs.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

I was always a creative kid. But oddly, I initially wanted to be a paleontologist. And I’m not saying that I “liked dinosaurs.” Lots of kids like dinosaurs. I had a full-on ADHD hyper-fixation. My favourites were like Carnotaurus and Oviraptor. Deep cuts. Like I KNEW about dinosaurs. And still do.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

In other words, Star Wars almost certainly takes place before Lord of the Rings.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

In fact, any random past event (that absolutely did not happen on this planet) is 99.99996% likely to have happened before 6,000 years ago and only 0.00004% likely to have happened after.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Spoiler alert. Most things that have happened in the universe happened before 6,000 years ago. Nearly everything actually.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

And that would be the end of it. We can’t know. Ah, but there’s a mathematical component to this. Because the universe is at least 13.8 billion years old. So really this is just a question of the likelihood that a random event in our universe occurs before or after 6,000 years ago.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Does Star Wars take place before or after Lord of the Rings? Here’s what we know. Both stories are set in this universe. With Tolkien’s letters suggesting LOTR is set on Earth about 6,000 years ago and Star Wars being far more vague. All we know there is that it’s long ago and far from Earth.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Had to go one per show because otherwise it would just be all DS9… Cap - Sisko 1st - Saru Sci - T’Pol Doc - Bones Sec - Le’an Eng - Geordie Helm - Boimler

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Hot take. But Doctor Who needs to feel like I Saw the TV Glow. It needs to be eerie and lo-fi and experimental, with almost deliberately janky vfx. To my point, the Mondasian Cybermen… The cloth-masked version is hands-down the creepiest Cybermen design.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Well the good news is that they’re all idiots. So there’s options.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

We’re in infuriating times. And they can have my rage. They can have my ridicule. They’re welcome to every word that wounds and stings and destroys them. Words of fear though? Well they won’t get that from me.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

“We changed the name of the USNS Harvey Milk to something non-political.” Taking the name of a gay civil rights activist off your boat IS political, you mop bucket.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

I dunno if you saw that my buddy Eric Heisserer is doing a Pacific Rim series but it is in very capable hands. Dude wrote an all time top ten sf film in Arrival, has a deep-cut expertise of PacRim lore and a crystal clear eye on its heart. Fans, if you’d heard the things I’ve heard about this…

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

With the caveat that even at the distance of Pluto our Sun is brighter than the full moon, so this is deep space we’re talking about.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Well they’d provide roughly as much light as they do on a moonless night here on earth. So imagine being in the desert or out at sea at night. It would be that basically.

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Travis Beacham @travisbeacham.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Something a lot of sf doesn’t think about. Space is completely dark. Like the ocean at night. So unless you’re in proximity to a star, a vessel’s hull would only be illuminated by its own exterior lights.

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