iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I didn't understand the complaint about Scientology and that movie. As far as I'm concerned it's a win whenever scientology is returned to its roots as a sci fi narrative tradition.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 32m

Please fund public transportation so Amtrak can finally afford to add a C to their name. End our nation's long nightmare of shame.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 53m

Wow, that's incredible! No wonder he's managed to stay in the game throughout the rough period.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 54m

Houston is the city with the widest gap between my evaluation of the city itself (fun town!) and their sports teams (uniformed spawn of satan).

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 1h

Not enough people talking about how undeniable proof of a just and loving G-d unfolded on live television to an audience of thousands last week (the White Sox shut the Astros out of the playoffs).

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 1h

Yeah he's had a great run over the past ten years or so, no genuine breakthrough blockbusters but he's definitely been on a winning streak.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 1h

My hobby is ruining every single party with my rant about how M Night Shyamalan's career was derailed by racism and Bush-era anti-intellectualism but then still never remembering to see any of his movies in theaters.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 6h

This is my new headcanon.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 6h

The direction for the main is stunningly bad, and Craven's interpretations of his own characters are weirdly off, but that only adds to the strange dreamlike quality of the thing. A lot of it reminded me of Twin Peaks.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 9h

I wasn't into it as a teenager but upon rewatching it was stunning in its strangeness. Also the main character is so different from other Last Girls, she spends over half her screentime plotting to kill Freddy.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 9h

A Nightmare on Elm Street is such a fascinating combination of visionary avant-garde fabulism and breathtaking ineptitude. It's like if Tommy Wiseau was a leading figure of the Czech New Wave.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I am not entirely sure whether I agree or not but that is certainly a powerful way of putting it!

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I'm not necessarily even 100% anti-Jung but this is just how I see his work being recieved by the public like 80% of the time.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The three most common uses of Jung: 1. Allowing people who hate cultural analysis to be cultural analysts, albeit bad ones. 2. Allowing people who who mysticism to be mystics, albeit bad ones. 3. Psychoanalysis for people who refuse to read Freud because they're antisemitic reactionaries.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I agree that the take you're describing is a tired one, but it isn't at all the one that is expressed in the article. I mean this earnestly and not as an accusation: did you read past the headline?

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We are sending a THIRD aircraft carrier to the middle east with 9-10K troops, set to arrive in late November, as the president clearly says he is waiting until the midterms to resume attacks because it will raise fuel prices. And the media ecosystem is so hollowed out that there are no consequences!

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Call me naive but I find it staggering how openly and explicitly Trump's strategy in Iran is being structured around the midterm election cycle. There used to be at least some degree of shame around this kind of cynical governance.

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Reposted by Xander Lenc

wont | worlds #1 muroto bunmei fan @stateisbad.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Not the main point here, but as always I admire and support the ORB's commitment to the Greater Oakland Theory of East Bay geography.

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Reposted by Xander Lenc

Martha, but like, super spooky @mostlymartha.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Oakland: "You have to want to live here, you don’t just show up here." This is spectacular, sharp and true. Oakland and San Francisco have never felt more different than they do today. For every problem the East Bay has, it five times as much community and humanity. The vibes here are alive.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I am deeply disturbed to realize that this image just turned ten years old.

A picture of Jeb bush in a button-up holding out his arms and leaning back with his eyes closed as though overwhelmed in rhapsodic prayer. Behind him, a US electoral map showing all 538 electoral college votes in the US going to Jeb, and none going to Clinton or Trump.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My default strategy when my beehive seems to be struggling is to be avoidant and ignore it for as long as possible, and for the most part that strategy has worked out quite well for me.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The NBA has too many dunks and the problem is steadily getting worse. 11,000+ dunks in a single season is too many. They should have to throw the basketball into the basket. Yes I am very short why do you ask. runrepeat.com/82-stats-on-...

Dunks per season in a chart, showing a steady increase from 8,442 dunks in 2001-2 to 11,393 dunks in 2018-9.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The WNBA does not need to lower the basket to make it easier to dunk. Dunking is stupid unless it's difficult and rare.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'm not saying it isn't important, I'm just saying I simply can't bring myself to care this much about the Kennedy Center.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Whichever party is able to get this country off of gasoline-based transit and decouple political fortune from fluctuating fossil fuel prices will reign for a hundred years.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

You can say you were runner up on a Jeopardy episode that simply hasn't aired yet and nobody would know. Everyone would believe you.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Like yeah, I know they are simply lying, but why even bother?? What exactly is the goal here???

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

People who ignore literally all of my texts and emails over the course of literal *years* and then act surprised that we haven't been in touch when we run into each other in person: ??????????????????????????????

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Breaking: The president's "industrial jobs czar" Lucy Van Pelt to announce world's largest football factory to be built in Iowa.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Imagine being a beloved professional athlete and THIS is the photo they run in the newspaper after you announce your retirement. Poor Yago!

Screnshot from a japanese sports website. A picture of a very large shirtless japanese man with a traditional sumo haircut. He is rubbing his face with his hand in a non-photogentic way.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Taught my first graduate seminar today (as a substitute for someone on leave, but still). It was INCREDIBLE, no wonder people fight for these jobs.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

One of the subtler legacies of liberal carceral culture is that if a stranger calls me "sir" I usually assume I'm in trouble.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I hate that the question surrounding police abolition/reform is always "are ALL cops bastards?" instead of the question that actually matters: does it even matter if they aren't?

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Yeah, and Alito pretty explicitly said he was fine with this in Glossip v. Gross. He believes that the punished hold the burden of finding an easy alternative to cruel and unusual punishment, and if they don't then the state can do whatever the fuck they want. Originalism!

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I think we can alleviate a lot of bad habits in our climate change ideology if we are able to admit that part of us actually relishes the idea of wealthy assholes we know being forced to suffer from austerity and extreme weather. You can't move past that resentment without acknowledging it.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Air Conditioning and Climate Change discourse is cursed is because many Americans personally know people who live in Florida and set the thermostat at 60°F ALL YEAR, and they hate him so much that they'd be willing to let hundreds of thousands of people die just to ruin his day. Understandable, tbh!

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The only streaming services worth paying actual money for are Criterion (if you must) and Eternal Family. Otherwise have some self respect and use the account your former subletter forgot to log out of.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Have fun paying $27/month to watch Tall Girl 2 without ads I guess.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If you like movies but don't have a DVD/Blu-Ray player you are a sucker, I'm sorry. You're whining about streaming options while the movie you want to watch is literally available for FREE down the street at the library.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Official fragrance of the Belgian royal family.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Absolutely. For better or worse there is never a situatuon where Rivers Cuomo is spoken of in the plural form.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Yeah I'll have the Rivers Cuomo, a Green Goddess, a Clams Casino, a Steak Diane, and a Baked Alaska for dessert. With a Waldorff Salad for the lady of course.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

My brain has never been able to accept that "Rivers Cuomo" is a guy's name. It sounds like some sort of long-forgotten fin de siècle seafood dish served to mobsters at the second-nicest hotel in Chicago. Ripoff Lobster Thermador, etc etc.

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I've gotta admit though, this shit makes me want to crawl out of my skin. I'm glad I continued reading, but it was SO tempting to just do something else with my time after seeing this on the first page.

* who does not represent any organization or body other than himself.
AI use acknowledgement: after drafting this, I asked Claude Opus to make sure I had not misinterpreted any of Rubin’s original statements.
As you will see, it picked up an interesting twist that I had missed about the reproducibility of certain types of LLM analyses. Still, I absolve Claude of any further errors

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This was the part of the original Vanderbilt report (about halfway through) where I realized this was almost certainly going nowhere.

8 Monocropping Inequality Studies
“I love you, sociologists, but do all of us have to work on inequality?” (University of Michigan sociologist Beth Popp Berman on Twitter in 2023, quoted in Keskintürk 2023)

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Some truly hair-singeing stuff here. I didn't love *all* of it, but it did articulate a lot of the bewilderment I felt reading the original report, which managed to prove basically nothing over the course of 100 pages.

Some of us strive for a less politicized sociology, and some do not. But none of us want well-meaning but misled administrators to open the gates to a trojan horse of an equally politicized, but scientifically weaker, sociology, and that is what the Rubin report calls for.
Rubin ends (page 105) with what she calls her “conclusions,” although they are really only her premises. “While questions remain over the pervasiveness of some of the developments I discussed, there is strong evidence that conscious and unconscious political commitments are institutionalized in the field in ways that have compromised the search for knowledge.” She has presented not a single piece of evidence regarding compromising the search for knowledge, unless knowledge is defined as the pursuit of
ideas she agrees with.

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