iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 24/09/2026

I feel like Gebel’s team went to the designer, the brief said “we’re the Greens—make us a poster” and nothing else, and everyone involved already pictured a coloring book where a bear in a cargo bike and his polycule cycle back from the farmer's market past a rainbow flag and some wind turbines :P

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 15/09/2026

Good morning, fuzzies and fuzzy associates. I think it is important to bring to your attention: a Blessed Dog. The dog’s mood is basically my own mood, but it seems I don’t have a choice about getting through Tuesday so here we are. I hope you are all doing well, though <3

Shiba inu resting on the tile floor of a supermarket. It is staring tiredly off towards the left of the image

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 06/09/2026

If I am not supposed to befriend and anthropomorphize the local crows and magpies, then please explain the way my camera auto-classifies them. That’s right, you can’t >:3

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 06/09/2026

Pulling the game camera footage, it seems that earlier—before learning the new technique—we got a bit frustrated, and I love how the crow then seems to stop and look around to see if anyone noticed them crashing out. Corvids are so cool <3

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 06/09/2026

The intended strategy is to pull the string, upending the cylinder. I have redesigned this several times now. Anyway it turns out you can also just flip it violently enough with your beak to fling some nuts out :P (Hooded crow: “we call this ‘beak skip’”)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 01/09/2026

hildegard of bingen: as you know, magpies are not unlike satan also hildegard of bingen: the parrot is not useful, “and is defective because of its diverse nature” like idk lady maybe calm down a bit before boycotting parrots for being too woke

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 28/08/2026

What the Python 3 docs mean when they say this, is “%Z” matches the string literals ”GMT” and ”UTC,” and whatever the name of *your current time zone* is. So “MDT” worked fine when I was in Denver, and throws a “does not match format” error now that I’m home in CEST. *Why does this even exist*.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 26/08/2026

I think the best part of being my friend is that I am a very normal person and we can have very normal conversations about very normal things to do in the bedroom

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 15/08/2026

“called for”? is that something you can just do???

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 12/08/2026

I was gonna say “a setlist that doesn’t make you feel *too* old” but Augustana’s “Boston” has a Wiki article that hit me, Proustlike, with memory of the entire “Songs for mid-2000s CW shows” genre XD (may the words “One Tree Hill” remind you that Chariot, Gavin DeGraw’s debut album, is from 2003)

Screenshot from Wikipedia.

Use in popular media

"Boston" was used in the third-season finale of One Tree Hill, "The Show Must Go On", when Brooke Davis and Lucas Scott have their last dance as a couple. Nathan and Haley drive away to their honeymoon meanwhile Lucas confesses to Peyton that he told Brooke about their kiss in the library.[11] It was also featured in Scrubs, 19th episode of the fifth season, "His Story 3", in The Big Bang Theory, 3rd episode of the first season ("The Fuzzy Boots Corollary"), in "Here Comes the Judge", the 15th episode of season one of Shark,[12] and in the season finale of the first season of Boston's Finest. It's also heard in the film A Warrior's Heart.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 12/08/2026

Glen Phillips was the first concert I ever went to and I am happy to report that they are also very good as a full group! Good setlist, good energy, Glen is still a delight, and also so is Augustana, who opened for them. <3 <3 <3, is what I am saying here Good morning! :D

Grey baseball cap with an embroidered patch reading "TOAD THE WET SPROCKET" in the center, "40th Anniversary 1986" in the top left corner, and "Santa Barbara California" in the bottom right corner

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 06/08/2026

…Also: between 1979 and 1981 (the birth years where one calls one’s self a liminal Non-Millennial), thunderstorms, turbulence, microbursts, etc. brought down 15 commercial airliners, killing 789 people. Seven airliners were hijacked, 5 in 1981 alone. So, you know. There is that :P

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 06/08/2026

air travel is one of those experiences that has gotten monotonically worse over my entire lifetime o.o and also the 59 years before it …Anyway, have this photo from the August 6th, 1926 Boston Globe. And a lovely day! Have one of those, too~

Newspaper clipping with a photograph of the US Navy airship Los Angeles, flying over a lighthouse in Boston with some houses visible in the foreground. The clipping is dated: THE BOSTON GLOBE—FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 1926

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 04/08/2026

Captivated by this story from January 21st, 1884 (about a year before the fall of Khartoum to the Mahdi) that is written exactly like flavor text for one of those random event popups in a turn-based strategy game. “Some strong influence is at work.”

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 01/08/2026

Oh, hey. Apparently today is Colorado’s 150th birthday. Happy birthday, Colorado! I love you and the idiot dogs with which you regularly present me when I visit <3

Photograph of two coyotes standing in a colorful field of grass and flowers in Colorado.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 23/07/2026

Just page after page of diagrams and baffling ideas executed in even more baffling ways, all with an odd veneer of science that blurs the line between the serious and fantastical. Anyway this is me realizing that Popular Mechanics is basically the Voynich Manuscript for shed-owning midwesterners :P

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 21/07/2026

Some Idiot On Cohost Dot Org, February 27th, 2023:

Screenshot of a Cohost.org post, reading:

Put another way: nothing but respect for Alan Turing, but the idea of a “Turing test” as it is generally defined is pointless and silly given how good human beings are at finding patterns where none exist. It’s absolutely buck wild that anyone ever thought: “how would we know if a machine was intelligent?” and concluded any meaningful answer could come from: “is it perceived to display intelligence by a member of the same species that, on the regular, also perceives the face of religious figures in toast?”

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 19/07/2026

These? Not cactuses. One is a horrid spurge and the other is a Canary Island spurge.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 19/07/2026

Achievements, Prague edition: - Saw the bridge again - Visited every possible Mucha museum - Kicked a pigeon into a woman’s face on accident Time to go home before anyone finds me :D

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 18/07/2026

the line between perceptive about, and judgmental of, raccoons

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 10/07/2026

Pictured: a brigade-strength amphibious invasion along with its escorts, and also one fisherman who is damned if he’s going to let that stop him from getting to the cod before Iceland does >:[

Screenshot from the submarine simulation Cold Waters, showing a tactical plot of four Soviet landing ships, two destroyers and a frigate. A fishing trawler is crossing through the fleet as it heads southward.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 10/07/2026

I get why submarine sims do it, but I will never not find it funny how every game has a map full of trawlers with zero self-preservation for you to find on the hydrophones while looking for the Red October. WW3 kicks off and they’re just like “no reason as us can’t catch summat for t’ missus :D”

Screenshot from the game Cold Waters, showing a fishing ship, with a waterfall display in the bottom right identifying the hydrophone lines as matching a fishing trawler in the recognition database.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 09/07/2026

hey bluesky how are y’all doing on album titles right now

Screenshot of a post from Twitter user @OSINTTechnical, with an arrow pointing to Jam, Iran, and the caption "Reportedly launched from the Jam area"

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 26/06/2026

Maybe the dinosaurs are his children o.o (Hammond goes for a walk and is frightened by a T-Rex roaring, falls into a ravine, breaks his ankle, then hears the roar again and the kids' voices over the speaker they're using to play the sounds)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 25/06/2026

(Gennaro has been explicitly told to ignore sunk costs if he thinks there’s a problem on Isla Nublar. In the book he volunteers repeatedly to help hunt the escaped dinosaurs at great risk. In the movie he is the Bloodsucking Lawyer™ who goes “we’re gonna make a fortune!” and gets eaten by a T-Rex)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 25/06/2026

Yeah, Nedry is basically a force of nature in the novel. He is so incidental to the downfall of Jurassic Park that he is the only named InGen employee (well, contractor) Hammond doesn’t even *mention* when going through the list of people he scapegoats for the disaster.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 25/06/2026

For example, this early scene—foreshadowing exactly the gulf between InGen’s PR and their understanding of what they’re toying with—is translated in the movie as Laura Dern going: “gwau <3 <3 this plant is cretaceous” immediately before the triumphant musical swell with the brontosauruses.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 19/06/2026

time 2 get dudameled like a cultured person or an average dog

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 17/06/2026

Mission accomplished! I no longer know my master password, or my work password, and no longer need to. I just have to plug in this highly-trustworthy-looking thing that enumerates as a normal keyboard but outputs only specific text, based on which code is active and how long the trigger is held >:D

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 14/06/2026

The Berlin Airshow backed the Tornado demo with “Sandstorm” for some reason so anyway: if you’re ever talking to me and I zone out, this is exactly what the inside of my idiot skull looks like

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 13/06/2026

The static display had a tiger plush in the cockpit but maybe it would’ve stayed in place anyway :P

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 13/06/2026

Afterburners are proof god loves us and wants us to be happy

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 06/06/2026

Kerg says “make your own,” but the grid implies there were games released in the last five years and I can’t think of any >.> DCS gets my 2024 vote because that’s the year I got back into it enough to get serious about building my own controllers :p that and SMRPG are really a stretch.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 02/06/2026

Also, the idea this stands for “lots of love”/“laughing out loud”/“lord, oh lordy” is an *old* urban legend. The “end-of-sentence (complimentary)” prosign uses the same ASCII but it’s a coincidence it looks like “lol.” (fun fact: EOS(C) can be written “haha,” “:3”, etc. depending on the operator!)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 30/05/2026

maybe people gravitate to sycophantic AIs after years of being judged and condescended to by their smartwatches :| i think at this point i deserve a chatbox to tell me “Great idea! 37 minutes of unconsciousness between 3:30 and 5AM. It’s not just efficient, it’s a good night’s sleep!”

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 28/05/2026

Medieval naturalists: we know from the “skilled lapidarists of Germany” that the hyena is notable as the source of the gemstone hyænius, also called hyæneum, which comes from its eyes. Also medieval naturalists: “c’mon, you know—like this! *Hyena*!”

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 26/05/2026

Oh another thing btw is that as far as the English were concerned: 1. Werewolves were specifically German, and also, 2. You become a werewolf by means of a werewolf-girdle, possibly available at your local second-hand store???

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 23/05/2026

Two years ago, I wrote about the myth that coyotes lure dogs away to eat them. Today, I learned about a far more troubling possibility, which somebody felt so important as to warrant explanation in marginalia for the Book of Sirach. I assume this also never happened???

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 19/05/2026

Wait, one more take. On my left arm is the map from the Pioneer probe. It was the second tattoo I got. Now it’s between the recent hominid evolutionary tree and the Wow! signal, all over a DNA replication fork: where we came from, where we are; where we are going. I love space probe plaques.

Photograph of a tattooed arm. The primary tattoo is a representation of the solar system map from the Pioneer probe, with the planet’s distance encoded in binary.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 12/05/2026

The difference between fan cons and tradeshows is that the badge flair at tradeshows is really quite useless for anyone not wanting to ““connect”” on “LinkedIn.io” or whatever, whereas I can definitely make use of these at my next Esri User Conference or CES.

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 10/05/2026

For the first time in 20 years I went to a convention and bought something in the adult dealer’s space and it is an obscene leather celebration of masochism I acquired impulsively because I was so surprised to see it XD

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 09/05/2026

Yip yap yop I’m a dog! You can tell I’m a dog because: look at this dog! As adorably rendered by the fantastic @centikit.bsky.social at #FWA2026 <3

Badge of a coyote lady with red hair and glassed. The badge is labeled “Taisiya” in Cyrillic

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 05/05/2026

Good morning, all~ have a dog! You can tell the dog is Blessed because it is sleeping peacefully. I hope you have also slept peacefully, and maybe also that you wake up in a grocery store (? please advise)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 04/05/2026

this, which is almost better than “mighty wings” because when it’s over you get to actually fly the tomcat >.> (who am i kidding, i flew slufs XD)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 28/04/2026

Mama Coyote in these stories is invariably and commendably devoted to her children. Very often, the coyotes are married, and it is always equitable and happy. Sometimes, they are at odds with Man; if so, it’s a challenge to overcome for the family—when coexistence is impossible, it’s our fault.

Excerpt from “Old Man Coyote Understands,” by Thornton W. Burgess (1927)

Excerpt from “A Coyote Mate,” by Mary Graham Bonner (1924)

Excerpt from “Coyote's Last Story,” by Margaret Adelaide Wilson (1910)

Excerpt from “David Has a Chat With Daddy Coyote,” by Blanche Silver (1924)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 28/04/2026

The answer, which I think reflects America’s shifting relationship with the animal, is a dramatic falloff in stories about Mama Coyote, *specifically*. Coyote families were a regular feature of early 20th century stories. Thornton Burgess (Old Mother West Wind) wrote them on the regular :P

Excerpt from “Getting Acquainted," by Thornton W. Burgess (1927)

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Demand-Side Sheepdog @writing.dog · 28/04/2026

And, for comparison, here are mentions of e.g. Mother Wolf vs Father Wolf over that same time period. There are ebbs and flows, yes, but there’s no point at which 95% of anthropomorphized wolves were one gender or the other. So, what changed? There is, I think, an interesting story to that.

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