iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 23/09/2026

WTF is this nonsense? There is no such thing as “Olde English” and Shakespeare certainly wasn’t writing in this made up language. Old English is a language. Shakespeare wasn’t writing in that language either.

As befitting a filmmaker who is known for his meticulous attention to detail in capturing a time period, even when it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Olde English.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 17/09/2026

This is so funny to me

News article
Ireland Disowns Ed Sheeran Over Macklemore Stance: 'Gutless Coward'
Published Sep 17, 2026 at 11:11 a.m. EDT

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 15/09/2026

Bernie Sanders needs to retired from politics immediately. Enough is enough.

Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon, and former Anthropic researcher to join forces in AI regulation push

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 15/09/2026

It's right there in pillar 5

Detail from the Canadian government AI policy diagram showing two hands holding up what could be interpreted as a giant butthole.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 10/09/2026

Got a copy of my favourite Cat Power album to listen to and cry.

Holding the cover of Moon Pix by Cat Power in front of a turntable on which the record is spinning.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 03/09/2026

A weirdo I’ve never interacted with blocks me every day for some reason.

Notifications showing a Bluesky user with username @theplanetrepairman.bsky.social blocked me yesterday and again today

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 29/08/2026

All quotes are from Chapter 1 of Touching Feeling.

The cover of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, featuring a black and white photo of a woman hugging a sculpture.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 26/08/2026

I saw this episode title and it took me a moment to figure out that @jamellebouie.net is the guest, and it’s not in fact about him and JD Vance “communing” together.

In bed with the right - episode 148 - JD Vance’s Communion with Janelle Bouie

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 25/08/2026

Despite the onslaught of bad ratings from TikTok drones, the film still has a 3.1 rating and the three people I follow who have actually seen it all give it mid-to-high marks. 🤷‍♂️

Ratings graph from TikTok, showing distribution of votes across the spectrum and an average of 3.1 (out of 5).

Activity from friends: 3 users have rated it 3 stars, 3 and a half stars, and 5 stars, respectively.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 17/08/2026

Imagine being coached on dating by this guy!

Picture of a man with questionable facial hair wearing a shiny grey suit.

Nicholas
Dating coach, Fullyknown

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 16/08/2026

Pitchfork review scores are paywalled now?

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 15/08/2026

I provide my partner with regular updates on my voyager watch through

Me: B'lana has a new haircut

Partner: It's sooooo fierce isn't it

Me: I fucking love it

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 11/08/2026

JMS, a published author, has chosen to use the plagiarism machine to produce an essay in a book he's editing, and the challenges his critics to provide citations for him. That's not how it works.

J. Michael Straczynski: "If you can provide citations, now and between the second print run, I give you my word they will be included. Not being flippant."

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 10/08/2026

Tell me again how a computer is going to understand basic-level cagegories if it has no body to interact with objects???

Perhaps the best way of thinking about basic-level categories is that they are "human-sized." They depend not on objects themselves, independent of people, but on the way people interact with objects: the way they perceive them, image them, organize information about them, and behave toward them with their bodies. The relevant properties clustering together to define such categories are not inherent to the objects, but are interactional properties, having to do with the way people interact with objects.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 10/08/2026

I’m 50 pages into this book and it occurs to me just how little one needs to learn about cognitive psychology in order to realize how absolutely ridiculous the notion that LLMs are like human minds is.

Cover of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, by George Lakoff.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 09/08/2026

How were they forced? Did someone hold a gun to their head? I'm confused.

Screenshot from the article with text highlighted: "Some content creators have been forced to apologise for plugging the specs."

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 27/07/2026

Went to the beach this morning and looked cute

My face, mostly. Beach in the background

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 22/07/2026

Kind of amazing that alongside this article warning us of the dangers of Meta pervert glasses The Gardian is also pushing readers toward this other page. Gotta make sure to give equal space to both sides, I guess.

Photo: a woman holding a part of Meta pervert glasses to her face
Headline: The life-changing magic of wearing smartglasses | Letters
Read more

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 22/07/2026

This keeps happening and it makes me so mad!!

AirPods display showing the left is 1% charged and the right is at 100%.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 19/07/2026

Waited until the last possible weekend to go see the Torlonia collection of Roman sculptures at MBAM. It was nice.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 18/07/2026

Cool. But the person whose head was put on a spike was not a reply guy. It was a nonbinary artist with a low follower count minding their own business in their own thread. They were quoted out of context and now everyone is pretending they were harassing women, which never happened. Total insanity.

The intent is not to ruin the days of my reply guys. The intent is to put their tiny heads on pikes as a warning to the others.
And to signal to the younger women who follow me that the days of Smiling While Wrong Men Straighten Us Out on Shit We Know About are over. And that's deeply beneficial.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 15/07/2026

People acting surprised that Mark Carney is a Conservative when some of us have been screaming it since before the election. Very hard to have any sympathy for these people.

Bluesky user 1: “I regret my vote”

Bluesky user 2: “you and me both”

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 14/07/2026

I got it at the same time as the wildly overhyped and overpriced Uniball Zento Signature, which has an extremely satisfying magnetic cap. Mine came with a 0.7mm cartridge that spits out ridiculous amounts of watery ink rather inconsistently. Swapped it for a 0.5mm and it's a little better.

The Caran d'Ache 849 next to the Uniball Zento Signature.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 14/07/2026

I finally bought a Caran d'Ache 849 and I'm in love. This is going to be my favourite ballpoint pen for a very long time, I feel.

A beautiful Caran d'Ache 849 ballpoint pen in monochrome matte black finish.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 11/07/2026

My pens, organized from girliest to manliest. (I'm gonna cancelled for this, aren't I?)

A series of pens lined up against a black background. From left to right: Uni One P, Uni Zento Standard, Sarasa Grand, Pentel Sterling, Pentel Philography, OHTO CR01, OHTO GS02, Uni Jetstream Edge, Zebra G-750, Uni Jetstream Prime, rOtring 600, Zebra F-701.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 11/07/2026

Here's the latest pen I bought. It's a Pentel Sterling (also called Libretto in some markets). It's metal, but lightweight, very elegant, not especially masc, glides over the page smoothly (uses an Energel refill). Also relatively cheap ($22 Canadian). I like it.

Photo of my hand holding an elegant brushed aluminium pen in front of a journal with my handwriting on the page.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 11/07/2026

My recent interest in metal pens is a good example. My current favourite pen is the rOtring 600. It's German, has sharp edges, looks like an engineer's instrument, very rugged and (if you are so inclined) "masculine" looking. Most popular colours seem to be black and silver, but mine is red.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 11/07/2026

I'm spending the evening with Janet's masterpiece, The Velvet Rope. What an album!

My hand holding the cover of Janet Jackson's album The Velvet Rope in front of a turntable currently spinning the record.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 30/06/2026

Found a pile of books by a dumpster on the way home. Grabbed what I could. They appear to be in good condition. I’m inspecting them outside to make sure they don’t have bedbugs or mould.

A pile of books in French, including some by Descartes, Sartre, Nietzsche, Zola, Plato and Paul-Emile Borduas

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 29/06/2026

Tidal's new AI policy.

Here are the highlights of our new AI Policy:

Tidal will identify and tag AI-generated music in our app. Listeners will see an "AI" badge next to music we detect as wholly AI-generated.

Tidal will not tolerate AI-generated music that impersonates an artist or group, or that facilitates fraudulent activity. We're implementing automatic tools to remove these releases immediately and on an ongoing basis.

Tidal will not allow music that is 100% AI-generated to be monetized. No royalties will go to such releases, nor will AI-generated uploads be eligible for direct-to-fan sales.

We will expand these policies to music that is substantially AI-generated when AI detection technology is sufficiently reliable to do so.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 28/06/2026

I made a zine at the last session of FAccT 2026. #DestroyAI

Cover of a small handmade zine. Black sharpie letters on pink background: “Fabulous Freedom. Yan Basque. FAccT 2026.”

Picture of a menacing alien with a large green head. Caption reads: “AI monster.”

Picture of a woman with flowing dress and hair. She appears to be floating against white background. The hand of the monster from previous page is visible on her midsection. Caption: “you can free yourself and be fabulous while doing it.”

Very busy and hypnotic background in black and white, with jagged lines moving from the center to the edges. A black circle at the centre. Over this background is a cutout of a man riding a bicycle with an oxygen tank and mask. He appears to be moving away from the black circle at the center of the page.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 22/06/2026

Follow me on Letterboxd (if you like ambiguous reviews that are nonetheless rated 1 or 5 stars). letterboxd.com/greatvowelsh...

Recent activity on Letterboxed, showing four movie posters: Silkwood (5 stars), First Reformed (5 stars), War of the Worlds (5 stars), West Side Story (1 star).

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 16/06/2026

Exciting news! I am joining the Homosaurus Collective as project coordinator to help with the French translation of the LGBTQ+ linked-data vocabulary. Among other responsibilities, I will be reviewing terminology and planning feedback sessions with Quebec-based community organizations.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 16/06/2026

What the hell is going on at that website?!

Screenshot of Tom’s Guide website with ads covering up most do the page, making it impossible to read the article

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 13/06/2026

This review is unhinged.

A 2-and-a-half-star review of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial by a Letterboxd user named DKW_Skidoo. The review reads:

"Better intergalactic relations forged with blatant product placement, deep state apologia and pederastic fantasy. Most things that sucked about 80s movies began here. The whole 'eternal inner child' fantasy of that period was really about preying on the alienated children of broken families and/or inattentive moms. This and 'Thriller' were the two faces of one psyop. If you were under 12 in 1982 and went crazy for either, I am sorry to say you were groomed. Remarkably dull and underbaked, for a film that was making its boss daddy a million dollars a day by 1983. Why does E.T. look like a 100 year-old double-amputee? Does his old-man dick finger ejaculate as well as throb?"

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 11/06/2026

This graphic illustrates Canada's new "AI for all" policy. The inner circle that says "ADOPTION > ADOPTION > ADOPTION" is literal insanity and summarizes everything wrong with this policy. ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en...

A circular diagram illustrating the six pillars of Canada's National AI Strategy surrounding the central theme “AI for All.”

The six segments are:

Pillar 1 (Protecting Canadians and Safeguarding Democracy)
Pillar 2 (Empowering Canadians)
Pillar 3 (Powering Shared Prosperity)
Pillar 4 (Building the Canadian Sovereign AI Foundation)
Pillar 5 (Scaling Canadian Champions)
Pillar 6 (Building Trusted Partnerships and Global Alliances).

One inner circle includes the words trust, opportunity and sovereignty. The other just says adoption adoption adoption.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 10/06/2026

Using AI to write a LinkedIn post about how an AI strategy moved you “as a human.” Cringe.

Cropped screenshot of a Linkedin post:

Simona Gandrabur
Head of Mila Al Safety Studio

Trust. Opportunity. Sovereignty. The Canadian Al Strategy moved me to my core - not just as a Canadian, as an Al professional - but as a human, a mother and a very recent grandmother.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 09/06/2026

Here's an example of what I mean. This is a screenshot from Obsidian with the theme Ukiyo. The bars are usually the same colour as the rest of the interface, but sometimes (increasingly often, it seems) they glitch out and appear white. Restarting the app doesn't fix the problem.

Screenshot of Obsidian in which the scrollbars are all white instead of beige like the rest of the interface.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 08/06/2026

I’m reading The Fine Line by Eviatar Zerubavel and was enjoying it despite some dated terminology and ideas. But then I got to this paragraph and, I’m sorry, but what the actual fuck?

Yet rigidity is by no means an exclusively male trait. An aversion to eating, anorexia is the feminine version of autism, since not letting food into one's body is analogous to not letting others into one's self.
Along similar lines, bulimia is the feminine equivalent of Don Juan-style bed-hopping, as both entail a promiscuous fusion with one's environment followed by an almost immediate expulsion of all foreign matter from one's self. Like autism and bed-hopping, both anorexia and bulimia are expressions of an obsession with maintaining a rigidly bounded self.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 03/06/2026

I was just testing some awful learning chatbot app for kids. In the setup, it asks you to pick a voice for it. The two options are just male and female, but they call it "melodic" and "deep." 😒😒😒😒😒

How do you want me to sound?
Turn up your volume if you can't hear me.
Two buttons labeled "melodic" and "deep"

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 02/06/2026

These Campus notebooks are great. Smooth paper, standard sizes, open flat, not crazy expensive. Been using them for all my reading and research note-taking. Current writing instrument of choice is my Rotring 600 with a 0.7mm Monteverde ceramic gel refill. No bleed through.

A red Rotring 600 bed resting on top of a page filled with handwritten words in black ink.

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 28/05/2026

I have become a pen fiend. I want to talk to everyone about my pens.

5 pens. From left to right: Uni Jetstream Prime (black), Rotring 600 (red), Otho GS02 (mint green), Pentel EnerGel Philography (silver), Zebra Sarasa Grand (black).

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 25/05/2026

Hahahahahhahahahahahahhaahh Everything is so stupid!!

Church, Anthropic to 'find the way for humanity' in Al age: What the partnership may include
Pope Leo XIV's Al outreach with Anthropic signals a Vatican push for ethical Al, worker protection, child safety and global accountability.
Written by Shaurya Agarwal
May 25, 2026 22:58 IST

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Yan Basque @yanbasque.com · 24/05/2026

Are you fucking kidding me?! 3 episodes later they interview the same guy again. He mentions (for no reason) that he put his hand on Floyd’s left cheek. And detective adds “LC” to THE SAME NOTEPAD IN WHICH HE HASNT TAKEN ANY OTHER NOTES?!! This show is unhinged! I am losing my mind.

Screenshot of scene from DTF St. Louis episode 4. Close up of a small notepad held in someone’s hand with “AP” and “LC” written in large letters diagonally across the page.

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