iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Walter Hickey @walthickey.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"what are your infrastructure priorities" in one pic

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

David @puca.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A neat thing with historical Landsat data - you can go back to 25th of September 1983 and see the wispy high altitude clouds over North Dakota around 17:00 UTC, roughly 3-4 hours before the false alarm. On the left, the missile fields of Malmstrom overlaid on Landsat image from 26th of September.

Map showing a section of the border between the United States and Canada. On the left side of the screen are markers showing missile silos at Malmstrom in Montana, and a Landsat image from 26th of September. On the right of the screen, the wispy clouds of the 25th of September over North Dakota.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Hurricane Polo yesterday. Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar, so we’re seeing the wind’s imprint on the water surface, not clouds. The sea-level air pressure in the eye is equivalent to ordinary pressure at about 1.1 km or 3,500 ft. Guerrero coast in the north; swath is ~410 km across.

A radar image of a hurricane. The spiral pattern fills most of the frame, with some coast visible on one edge. Turbulent patterns in the water surround the main spiral: perhaps upwellings driving by the hurricane. The texture of the water, especially near the eye, resembles a metal surface rough-polished by a radial sander.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The other day I stubbed my toe on a curb very badly and I have to say I kind of regret doing that.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

In “Jurassic Park” (1993), Dr Sattler is realizing that they’re growing extinct plants just as we first see the dinosaurs. Yet the dinosaurs are eating eucalypts (E. camaldulensis?). But (1) eucs are post-K/Pg and (2) hyper-oily leaves were very likely basal. So what the hell?

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Exciting times for everyone who intrusively thinks about the Fujiwhara effect every 36 hours anyway.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A post saying “China using bamboo to replace plastic” might mean it’s a high-priority government policy that’s measurably changing the manufacturing sector. Or that one hobbyist who happens to be Chinese was in a tourist’s widely reposted photo. Or anything in between. This post is not about China.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Oh, and you’re so cool you never learned an MGMT song on an iPod Touch ocarina app in 2011. I see. Sure.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

My plan to move public opinion on matters important to me is to spend a portion of my day reposting every article and zinger I see go by that agrees with me to an audience of people who follow me because they find this behavior tolerable. I’m pretty sure this will work eventually.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Sad to see about Annie Dillard, a good writer. She used to live part-time on the island where I grew up. Oldtimers said she would often chop her firewood nude. They considered this unwise: there are splinters, and what if the axe hits a nail?

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Kitty the tiny dancer @girlyfriday.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

All I will say about 9/11, was that there was a man in my town of 9k, named Osamu. He ran a small sushi restaurant. People flipped the fuck out about his name, that he had to change the name of his restaurant.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Catbus @catbus.phd · 04/12/2023

explaining some online beef to a normal person

Uncle, how to get to the beautiful country? by Xiaoyu Wang

a green alien in a space suit showing a map to a seated man smoking a cigarette playing a board game

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I’m about halfway convinced that the reason we haven’t had a proper Nasa mission to Uranus – one of the most interesting places in the solar system – is that Congress doesn’t want the hyuk-hyuk headlines.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Becoming a table-thumping Mercator projection advocate but when you press me on it I reveal that I’m talking about UTM zone 10 specifically.

QGIS displaying OpenStreetMap at world scale in the Universal Transverse Mercator 10 projection.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

When he moved a few years ago, @patricio.io gave me his dry-erase plotter. It’s been in a box since then. Today I finally had space to get it out and make it draw a (live-calculated) Lorenz system.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

There’s a reason you don’t see me walking back old opinions and predictions on “AI” as the situation changes (with public opinion, market outlook, technical progress, etc.). It’s that I’ve been careful to only say true things and not talk out of my ass nonstop. Hope others find this inspiring!

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Whoever came up with this color scale is very clever in a mildly evil way: they know about the yellow discontinuity in many rainbow color scales, but they’re adapting it to highlight 26 °C, the critical ocean surface temperature for tropical storms to sustain themselves. Real nerd-snipe stuff here.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Back at the Tippett sale, standing on the sidewalk with my arms full of lightly used office supplies, watching a man in a Fangoria shirt put a skeleton in a Cybertruck.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Never have I stood in a line of people where I have overheard more conversations about compositing methods. (Not a complaint.)

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Colin Dickey @colindickey.com · 27/08/2026

Many great pieces on Dolly Parton this week, but @rahawahaile.bsky.social's in Scratch is by far my favorite. Just a jaw-dropping piece of beautiful writing. www.talkscratch.com/dolly-parton...

But this is the point I’m making, in this publication about how writers survive—I don’t think one can ever stop being themselves. For those of us not born to wealth, conviction is our greatest fortune. Dolly never squandered hers. Her values were clear: Pay your union dues, stand with labor, love the castaways, put money directly in people’s pockets. Make great art (and own your work). Share books freely. Uplift the land as the land has lifted and lifted you. Higher still, even. And help the people climb.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Some personal news: I couldn’t find the big can of San Mariano tomatoes I got for pasta sauce for a minute. Found it though.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Eos @eos.org · 26/08/2026

There was a devastating debris flow in Nepal and Tibet today which has already claimed hundreds of lives. The disaster was triggered by a glacial lake outburst flood. @davepetley.bsky.social is tracking the ongoing situation on The Landslide Blog: eos.org/thelandslide...

eos.org

The 26 August 2026 catastrophic debris flow in Nepal and Tibet

Initial observations on the 26 August 2026 catastrophic debris flow in Nepal and Tibet, which has killed hundreds of people.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 04/09/2023

I have never seen “Murder in the Cathedral” but I can say that I think about its last temptation differently after living long enough to see people like David Foster Wallace, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Anthony Bourdain have sainthood forced upon them by the most annoying people in the world.

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

lighthouse prince @historiancole.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

tim curry keeping up the bit twenty years after the fact by writing in his memoir that he and miss piggy had an affair during the filming of muppet treasure island is just so good and funny

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

amy brown @amybrown.xyz · 25/08/2026

dolly parton taught me it's ok to be hot and know how to read

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

josh (oldfriend99) @oldfriend99.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Dolly Parton taught me it was ok to be universally beloved

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Sometimes you look up some celebrity philanthropy and it’s “this is basically an ad for the celebrity”. But when you look up the research on the Imagination Library, it’s stuffed with paragraphs like this one. This is a measurably more literate world, with happier childhoods, because of Parton.

A screenshot saying survey responses showed much better outcomes for children in the Imagination Library program. From “The Impact of shared book reading on children and their Families: insights from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library”, a PhD thesis by Claire Galea, https://doi.org/10.25949/30123745

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The highest honor for a writer or thinker is to have some of their words selected to go on Wikiquote next to stock images that look like the art that someone with a gas leak has on their walls and that their friends will later feel guilty for not recognizing as a sign something was horribly wrong.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I only read books if they’re fascinating looks at the worlds of their topics.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

(I think chatbot writing is usually esthetically bad and usually ethically bad, and also that reacting to it is tricking a lot of people into getting dogmatic about a narrow labor theory of value in art that disrespects art, artists, and audiences.)

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Reposted by Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️

ceej @ceej.online · 20/08/2026

they put up a dada center just outside of town and life has been unbearable ever since. thing looks like a fucking fish

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I think about this post often when I read a headline lately. bsky.app/profile/noch...

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Annoyed again by news and commentary that connects this year’s fires to climate change (accurate! good!) without thinking at all about the other side of the problem: fire suppression policies that encourage rare but super-intense fires even in a stable climate.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

In Montclair to get some farmers’ market peaches and the copy shop is advertising on the expectation of future fires.

An ad with the copy: “In case of a fire evacuation, what do you grab? You grab all your memories that you had saved to USB. We can help you digitize”.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Everyone gets to interact with their anxieties as they please, but there is something that makes me feel like I’m fresh in from Alpha Centauri when someone tells me they’re avoiding fresh greens right now. When are you going to have a cleaner, cheaper, more heavily tested salad?

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Decades of trying to force STEM to be cool (really meaning to try to attach it to money machines) has caused many problems, and one of them is making STEM uncool to many people with good taste. Lay-accessible reporting on physical science issues that could clear a good fact-check is worryingly rare.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

A society that places people in impossible situations cannot feign surprise, much less innocence, when they use the means at their disposal to escape.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

It’s a very particular kind of affluent wretchedness that I’ve only ever seen in: – Piedmont CA – Bellevue WA – Silver Spring MD – Takoma Park MD – Chevy Chase MD – Bethesda MD – North Bethesda MD – McLean VA – Falls Church VA – Arlington VA – Springfield VA – Tysons VA – Fairfax VA – Huntingt

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Real quick while I’m here, anyone need anything from the cursed Little Free Library®?

A Little Free Library with “Goodnight Moon” and then like a dozen of the worst books imaginable.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Folks, [takes a sip from the glass on the pulpit] imagine a loosely history-adjacent epic movie about the end of mythological time, but that contained actual ideas. [Pauses and looks around thoughtfully.] We don’t have to imagine. We don’t have to imagine! It’s called “Princess Mononoke”, and

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Some personal news: I’m no longer calling it the Net. Now it’s the Grid. I’m posting this on the Grid right now. Thanks!

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Gresham’s Law but for all the expired treats I’m discovering as I clean out the pantry.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I said this last summer, but it’s still true: wildland firefighter/smokejumper tiktok will really show you 45 seconds of the most compelling visual storytelling and personal heroism imaginable over a soundtrack that’s what a radio station that was skeletonized by private equity plays.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

A sliced optimal transport–based cartogram again. This is testing a Rust rewrite. Green is (aboveground live dry) biomass, gold is GDP, and people is purple. Each dot is one 2.5 millionth of the global total of its kind of thing.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

How you know I’m not consulting on media/outreach for any satellite companies right now is you’re not seeing satellite images of World Cup games in progress. Do it and let FIFA sue you; you’ll make it up in publicity.

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Charlie Loyd 🌯🛰️ @vruba.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Friends worry he’s using sliced optimal transport to make population cartograms again.

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