iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 16h

for instance, almost every Bob Ross painting completely ignores every possible law of perspective and yet they convey depth and distance very well, just using flat planes

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 16h

I put some stuff in the Artily discord, but at the foundational stage my heartfelt advice would be to put perspective - even one-point - on a shelf for later and work with completely flat planes and variations in value to convey distance and depth

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 16h

you don't need 'em. perspective is an advanced tool, IMO; it's good to be aware of but you can tackle it once fundamentals are sussed. if you want to play with it, freehand, you can do one point perspective (vanishing point is one dot, anywhere) or two point (two points on a horizontal line)

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 19h

Confession: I still love AI stuff from back when it was cursed and not *a* curse

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JJW @jjw.wtf · 29/09/2026

full disclosure: before it became well known that ai was really bad for lots of reasons, i started a substack called shrek bible studies which used ai to rewrite bible stories inserting shrek and pair images with them. i shut it down, but the images are still on my hard drive.

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 29/09/2026

Does my calculator have breasts? According to the screen which displays 5318008 when turned right-side up, it at least behaves as if it does.

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Ed Overbeek @edoverbeek.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

If you’re wondering why Science would publish this, it’s because they hired a writer who’s also a flunky for the AI industry. If you’re wondering why Science would let a flunky for the AI industry cover AI… that’s a great question.

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 28/09/2026

liz thinks I am joking but I am dead serious that everyone should visit taxpayersunion.org.nz and see the incredible work that's been done

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 28/09/2026

you haven't clicked the link have you

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 27/09/2026

this absolutely is AI, also, could we not? these guys suck quite enough without making shit up about them

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 27/09/2026

Guys I didn’t realise before how important this work was but the people behind taxpayersunion.org.nz deserve all your time and attention, please don’t pass up this click

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 26/09/2026

I knew that Casey Newton was becoming ever more annoying about AI but I didn’t realise that he was properly losing his mind in the process www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...

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Simon Wilson @simonbwilson.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

At the heart of Nicky Hager’s book is a tale of how a group of cynical hard-right ideologues made racism a winning political platform, not because they’re white supremacists, but because it suited their interests. My Hopetown post is here #nzpol simonwilsonhopetown.substack.com/p/dirty-work...

simonwilsonhopetown.substack.com

Dirty work and the disinfecting sunshine it deserves

Nicky Hager’s new book ‘Dirty Work’ reminds us how much we’ve lost in the last three years

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 26/09/2026

I've owned that domain for like... six years now? Been looking forward to having some fun with it.

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 26/09/2026

I've finally seen the light. I urge everyone to visit taxpayersunion.org.nz and see the good work that they've been doing on behalf of the hard-working taxpayers of New Zealand

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 26/09/2026

Keith, your pitch is compelling. I‘d like to give you a billion dollars

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Mandy Hager @mandyh.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

That these 2 guys can dismiss the book as 'business as usual' tells us a shitload about their warped perspective on NZ politics and the infiltration of lobbyists. It also insults their listeners, who care deeply about the influence of corporate money, esp when it's ramping up racism and dividing us

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 25/09/2026

nah nearly all political journalists are just riddled with savvy brainworms; they value optics and access above all else. also "neutral" (read: neoliberal) journos are selected by neoliberal section heads. it's the circle of life

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 25/09/2026

If all journalists know how the sausage is made - on a filthy factory floor, out of kitten meat - and chooses not to inform the public because “we all know about the kitten meat”, those journalists are shit at journalism

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 25/09/2026

Pols journos sneering that “everyone knows about the Taxpayers Union” and ”it’s just lobbying” are telling on themselves; the fact is that the public *doesn’t* know about the TPU‘s antics and that is because of the failure of mainstream journalists

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 24/09/2026

Good Lord it has been too long since I last saw one of these

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 24/09/2026

Tossing up between spending quality time with my kids or getting involved in a really tendentious thread for the next few hours, this is a tricky one

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CEO Johnny Cans @oldmatecans.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The media when the right smear Green MPs: anonymous sources have raised serious questions that must be addressed and they should resign The media when Nicky Hager writes a book using sources from inside the TPU: obviously these anonymous sources mean we should dismiss this immediately

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 23/09/2026

this is exactly what I expect from mainstream politics journalists and it amounts to "yeah we're all operatives for neoliberal propaganda outlets at the end of the day, so what?"

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 23/09/2026

if anyone has any young (or old!) folk in their lives who are excellent at social media and know their way around video editing, I am thinking of getting someone to produce short-form clips from my long-form vids. think summer lawn-mowing job as far as pay goes. DM me if you've got any leads!

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 22/09/2026

Parasite Initiative: “We believe it’s imperative that we continue to be able to suck as much blood as we bloody well want“ Corporate media: “Wow, what a scoop!”

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 22/09/2026

To those who might be surprised that Stuff is giving airtime mainly to the denials of the stars of Dirty Work, remember that they’ve worked with the TPU for years and hired Matthew Hooton as an editor. Individual journos have a range of views but the establishment is dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The anticipation of a Nicky Hager book launch. C U next Tuesday to the TPU and its cursed astroturf campaigner to Act staffer pipeline. The copyright infringing Porky Pig fursona. The definitional haters and wreckers.

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 22/09/2026

Anyone got a link to an ebook or online purchase link for Dirty Work? Asking for reasons

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 22/09/2026

Let’s not forget that one of the main reasons the Taxpayer’s Union has enjoyed such oversized influence is the news media giving them an endless platform, to the extent that Stuff partnered with them on the “Ratepayers Report”, which was a thinly veiled TPU email harvesting operation

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 22/09/2026

Folks I suspect I am about to experience the maximum schadenfreude a human can possibly experience

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 18/09/2026

This whole thing is great but there's a bit at the end where they highlight how X has been a particularly bad place to be in terms of panic, and I think the way so many normally-rational people lost their minds during this cycle is a nice demo of how X is permanently ruining a whole bunch of people

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 18/09/2026

they're bringing Peak Cray back (what!)

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Will de Cleene @zippygonzales.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hager expose? Check. Dotcom making a tit of himself? Check. WhaleOil and Winston? Check. And so it goes.

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Will de Cleene @zippygonzales.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Also, super weird coincidence. For the first time ever, I've had enough room to put both my Yellow and Blue Zig Zag Keys from @tworuru.com up.

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 07/09/2026

another day/week/month of the "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" party losing ground to the parties that say they'll try things and have ideas

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 07/09/2026

I have a VPN, but I rarely actually use it. I assume the problem is related to DNS, because it almost always is, but I was wondering if maybe they'd downgraded their Workspace experience to feed the AI beast

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 07/09/2026

has anyone else found Google Workspace services intolerably slow in recent days/weeks? It ain't my connection. I'm getting timeouts, disconnections, impossibly slow loading on simple spreadsheets and documents. It's maddening

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

bsky is the place where an account called "Pisschrist Pikachu" does the Khmer Rouge "anyone with glasses should be shot" thing and then posts a link to their OnlyFans sexy Homestar Runner cosplay

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Luke Plunkett @lukeplunkett.com · 03/09/2026

your emails and meeting notes ARE YOUR JOB. let a machine do it and you're showing your bosses that you are very replaceable, not because of AI, but because you're a huge dipshit

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 03/09/2026

Friends, when I sent this message to my team laughing, I didn't know that this fairytale blog had been shared far & wide & that people actually believed it. I didn't know that until someone asked me for a good source debunking this nonsense. I'm not sure what planet we're living in at this point.

Timnit commented "I don't know what level of ridiculousness this is", sharing a screenshot that reads

@Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.

This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.

All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.

Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:

There is a sibling emoji reaction to her post

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 01/09/2026

but now it's up and just think how much better your life is

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 31/08/2026

as I said elsewhere, Roy Morgan is reliably trash, but the poll-of-polls has Labour quite consistently falling and the combined vote of the leftist parties is consistently rising, so make of that what you will

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 31/08/2026

oh yeah Roy is always bad, but the trend of the actual-leftist bloc nearing or equalling the pseudo-leftist party is still real (as is Labour's steady down-and-to-the-right) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion...

en.wikipedia.org

Opinion polling for the 2026 New Zealand general election - Wikipedia

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 31/08/2026

shout out to politics-knowers that parties with more left-wing policy than Labour (Greens, TPM, Opportunity) are collectively (snort) outpolling Labour

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 31/08/2026

Dan in the latest Roy Morgan the parties with left-of-Labour policies (Opportunity, TPM, the Greens) are polling 26.5 percent between them which is more than Labour's entire vote and suggests your argument is kind of rubbish

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Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer @tworuru.com · 28/08/2026

It's a shitshow, but instead of just watching, you have agency!

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