iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Listening in the car to BBC Radio’s 1981 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (which means the Earith Bridge road diversion has its upside, after all). Ian Holm, Michael Hordern, Bill Nighy, John Le Mesurier, Peter Warner. Absolutely bloody fantastic

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Earith Bridge is underwater. This means nothing to almost anyone, but to me it means a 20 mile detour on the way to work and another 20 miles back again; and the fact that it is underwater is entirely due to decisions made in the 17th century

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

#nowreading the most recent edition of the National Gallery’s companion guide, originally written by Erika Langmuir yonks ago. I love it, but I’ve had to create my own index so that I can read it in actual chronological order. Because history.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

#nowlistening Kate Bush’s 50 words for snow. Ten years ago I started to play this CD then gave up after two songs. Rubbish! Now a decade has passed. Played the CD on a whim over the weekend and discovered that I love it to bits

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

Re-watched The Zone of Interest a few nights ago. I have seen it six or seven times now and each time I get something new from it which I had not spotted or thought about before #moviesky #justwatched #thezoneofinterest

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

And the same model photoshopped into some views of Angola #scalemodels #histscalemodels #SukhoiSundays

A Sukhoi flying across a mountainside towards the sun, jungle and a river underneath

A Sukhoi flying above the Angolan jungle, firing its rocket pod

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

A slightly different one for #SukhoiSundays. This is the Hobby Boss 1:48 Sukhoi Su-17 Fitter which I made recently, in Angolan colours. I enjoyed making it very much, but am not too impressed with how it’s turned out. Ah well, it is done now #scalemodels #histscalemodels

A model of a jet aircraft on a base which looks like part of a handstand area in a sandy airfield. The camouflage consist of nice bright colours

The underside of the model aircraft showing rockets pods, bombs and fuel tanks

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983). Thought this was utter rubbish when I first watched it. But I was a teenager way back then. Forty years later I find it atmospheric, subtle, under-explained, interestingly flawed, and weirdly magical #justwatched #horrorsky #filmsky #thekeep

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Pavel Sukhoi, creator of the Sukhoi design studio. Born in Belarus in 1895, died eighty years later in Moscow having designed everything from a little prop-driven light aircraft (the Su-2) to the Su-27 Flanker #SukhoiSundays

A middle aged man sitting behind a desk and holding a very large sheet of paper, presumably a technical drawing of an aircraft.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Artem Mikoyan. One half of the Mikoyan i Gurevich aircraft design bureau. Posting for #MiGMondays

Artem Mikoyan sitting at a desk, with his chin resting on his cradled hands. He looks thoughtful and slightly disbelieving, as if he’s listening to someone suggest MiG could extend its operations from military aircraft design into the wine-making sector perhaps, or into creating some sort of ‘beat’ music for tennagers

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

#nowreading Geoff Dyer’s Zona. I love this. “There’s no way his knapsack could contain a bomb” lol #stalker #tarkovsky

The cover of the paperback edition of Zona

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Wrecked T55 near Rumangabo military base in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, apparently an M23 tank (so it’s ex-Rwanda?) that was knocked out by DRC soldiers. Source: www.voanews.com/a/fighting-i... #tanks #tankwrecks #wrecks #africanwars #drc

A wrecked tank with people standing behind it. The ground is muddy from recent rain.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Wrecked T54 at Quibala in Angola, probably destroyed by UNITA forces. Source www.reddit.com/r/DestroyedT... #tanks #tankwrecks #wrecks #africanwars

A wrecked tank in Africa. The track has come off the wheels and the whole thing is rusting

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Andrei Tupolev. Posting his pic for #TupolevTuesdays. Photo source: www.pilotspost.com/PsPpyarn1394

Andrew Tupolev, looking visionary. A late middle aged man wearing glasses, not terribly dissimilar from General Gogol in the Roger Moore James Bond films.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Lara Croft on top of the wing of a wrecked WW2 bomber in Tomb Raider 2018 #favouritefilms #ruins #wrecks

The wreck of a Second World War era Japanese bomber, high above a waterfall. Lara Croft is standing on its wing. She needs to get off somehow - that wing is about to collapse!

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Watched Stalker again last night. I’d love to go on a dinky little rail car like our three heroes use #filmsky #tarkovsky #railways

Three guys - Stalker, Professor and Writer - sitting on a rail car in the sepia part of the film. Brrrmm brrrmm!

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

#nowreading just picked up Lonesome Dove again

The cover of Lonesome Dove. A sepia-styled photo of a cowboy on a horse

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Take your favourite bits of The Thing. Add your favourite bits of Annihilation. Stir them up in a pot with Nick Cage ramping it up to eleven. Chuck in some alpacas to garnish. What have you made? You’ve made Color Out Of Space, that’s what you’ve made. Rubbish but loved it #justwatched #horrorsky

The color out of space. It’s neon pinky blue. A silhouette of a human in front, embracing the weird

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

#nowlistening Eagles first album from 1972. We may lose and we may win, Though we will never be here again So open up, I'm climbin' in So … take it easy

Cover of the Eagles’ first album. A blue sky over desert bushes in silhouette. At the top is an eagle with spread wings with the word ‘Eagles’ painted on

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

#justwatched Miami Vice (2006) again. I only discovered this film last year and thought on first viewing it was just ok. Michael Mann has made much better films than this. MV is shallow, nihilistic, pretty to look at but strangely edited. Now, of course, I think it’s near perfect

Miami Vice poster. Jamie Foxx on the left with a crisp beard and nice shades. Colin Farrell on the right with a 1970s porn moustache and a mullet and nice shades.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

959 Red, an East German MiG-21 SPS-K now at the Midlands Air Museum, UK. Photo by me. The SPS-K was a specifically East German version, armed with a cannon #MiGMondays

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

Picked up this 1:48 scale kit of a Sukhoi Su-17 Fitter at the Midlands Air Museum over the weekend. I love these Su-17 beauties but IDK when I’ll get to make it, am still only halfway through a kit of the Vasa #SukhoiSundays

Box of a Sukhoi Su-17 kit. The box art painting shows a plane flying towards the viewer

Inside of a box showing lots of sprues with kit parts, all unmade

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

#nowwatching The Batman. What a grim film this is. Reminds me of Se7en. But Gotham feels like a real living city, for once; and wow the car is beautiful. After decades of Batmobile-tanks it lifts my heart to see just a car, a proper 70s muscle car, ok it’s got a jet engine but still; it’s a car.

Red background. Words: “The Batman” in capitals. And a silhouette of Batman.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Greeks on the beach at Alexandria, 1930s. From Michael Haag’s blog michaelhaag.blogspot.com/2013/08/lawr... #alexandriaquartet

A group of happy Greeks on the beach 1930s. A sepia photograph

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

#nowreading Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander. Better than The Lodestone; not as good as The Alexandria Quartet. But, yes, so far this is a cracking good read

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

#nowreading lol no I’m not. I started to read this but it’s too awful even for me. I managed about fifty pages but, you know, life is too short #dnf

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

#justfinished The Alexandria Quartet, all 900 pages. Loved it, and I mean I absolutely LOVED it. I ❤️ the AQ. I did not want it ever to end. Am very, very tempted to read it all over again. Yet weirdly it’s also pretentious shit that means nothing. How very odd! Ah well

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

#hellraiserwatch 5: Inferno. An unpleasant slab of shit. The ‘twist’ is so obvious after 10 minutes that you think ‘surely they must subvert it?’ and then at the end it’s ‘OMG they didn’t subvert it, they went with the really obvious twist.’ Probably the worst Hellraiser movie of the whole lot

I presume this is Doug Bradley in Pinhead make up but IDK, doesn’t look very much like him.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

#MiGMondays North Korean Shenyang J-6 number 339 Red taking the limelight on stage during a performance of ‘We Will Follow You Only Kim Jong-un.’ The J-6 is China’s MiG-19 derivative. #k-pop youtu.be/rQEgjWWjed4?...

The stage for Oasis’ reunion gigs, I would imagine.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

#alexandriaquartet Lawrence Durrell’s wife Eve, perhaps the model for the character Justine in his novels. Am now reading Clea, the last novel of the quartet. I do not want this story to end. Photo source: www.theguardian.com/books/galler...

An elegant woman standing in front of a large mirror, photographed in the 1940s or 1950s. In the novel, Justine is first seen by one of the characters in a mirror

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

#hellraiserwatch 4: Bloodline. Follows consistently (ish) from no.3 while including the origin of the box in 18th century France (awesome) and the end of Pinhead on a space station in 2127 (not awesome). Angelique is great, Pinhead just a villain. But it wraps up all 4 films; so you could stop here.

Poster for Hellraiser Bloodline. Pinhead is holding a dove, superimposed above the Earth in space.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

#hellraiserwatch Hell on Earth, though Ham on Cheese would be better. Surprisingly coherent. Its 1992 budget feels large-ish and the story fits well with the first two films. Sadly Pinhead is now a Freddy-style villain (although this is explained in-plot) and the new cenobites are just bdsm zombies

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

#hellraiserwatch Hellbound, 1988. A direct sequel (“a family reunion?” Julia says at one point) that seems a mess but greatly improves on rewatches. Kenneth Cranham gives it proper heft. The film understands that Julia is the true villain; Pinhead and the cenobites are victims of the box #horrorsky

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

#hellraiserwatch Watched the 1987 original and best, a film about how far Julia (perfectly played by Clare Higgins) will go to get her lover back. A comfort film for me these days. Its successors are explorations of individual facets of this first film, like footnotes to a master text #horrorsky

Pinhead holds the puzzle box towards the viewer, on the poster to Hellraiser. The poster misleads because the film is not about Pinhead, who hardly appears; instead it is about a family, and about one person in that family in particular, Julia. Pinhead does get the best lines though (“we’ll tear your soul apart!”). Incidentally the puzzle box doesn’t have a name in this first film, it only gets a name later.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

#MiGMondays the nose and cockpit of Czech MiG-23 BN number 9863 Black, displayed at Kbely. Nice sharkmouth. This aircraft was built in 1983 and was retired in 1992; the nose area was preserved but the rest of it was scrapped. #MiGs #Sovietaircraft

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

A view of Alexandria. #nowreading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (just started book three) and so I have been tracking down old photos and postcards of the pre-revolutionary city #egypt #alexandriaquartet

A postcard I have of Alexandria. Early 20th century I think? There is no date on the back.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Marathon for Mac, 1990s: the original boxes. Wish I had kept mine. The games came flat-packed, but if you pushed in the edges then they turned into prism shapes. Totally fantastic Source: www.reddit.com/r/Marathon/c...

Marathon boxes. Left to right, M2 Durandal, M3 Infinity (which I could never finish) and the original Marathon. Smells like napalm, tastes like chicken

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

#allbobdylan 63: Bootleg 17, 90s sessions, with a surprisingly cheery melody for Not Dark Yet and a brisk pace for Highlands. And fittingly it is with Highlands that my playthru ends as I have now played all my CDs; and Highlands is my fave Bob song ever. And that’s good enough for now. #bobdylan

Bob, in colour. He looks worn out, as indeed he might, given that he’s been on my car’s music player without interruption since (I think) January. But he’s the greatest, the great one of all great ones, and there will never be another one like him no matter how long we wait, even unto the end of the planet itself.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

#favouritespaceships Choose one spaceship per day for 20 days from movies, tv or fiction. 20/20 the Derelict from Alien #scifi #spaceships #sciencefiction #scifisky #alien #hrgiger

The derelict from the 1978 movie Alien. I love this design

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Quote skeet with a picture of the aeroplane you'll accept as a bribe

The Flying Wing from Raiders of the Lost Ark

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

#favouritespaceships Choose one spaceship per day for 20 days from movies, tv or fiction. A couple of spooky ones to finish up. 19/20 Babylon 5’s Shadow ships. This one is a couple of miles wide and is flying low over Mars #scifi #spaceships #sciencefiction #scifisky #babylon5

A Shadow Dreadnought, from the season 3 episode Messages From Earth.

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

#favouritespaceships Choose one spaceship per day for 20 days from movies, tv or fiction. 18/20 the UFO from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). UFOs today are a poor show, they’re not a patch on seventies’ UFOs #scifi #spaceships #sciencefiction #scifisky #ufo #ufos #closeencounters #ce3k

The mothership descends over Devil’s Tower

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

#favouritespaceships Choose one spaceship per day for 20 days from movies, tv or fiction. 17/20 the mysterious glowing pink ships on the front of the old paperback cover of Donald Keyhoe’s Aliens From Space #scifi #spaceships #sciencefiction #scifisky #ufo #ufos

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

#allbobdylan 61: Bootleg 16, basically Infidels era sessions, and it shows what a great album Infidels could have been. The band-and-harmonica take of Blind Willie McTell, so different from the drumless version on Bootleg 3, is a thing of raw unpolished beauty #bobdylan

At bloody last! A colour photo of Bob. It seems they had invented colour film by the 1980s 😀

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

I can see why this took five years. ❤️ the cockpit interior #MiGMondays More info in the link interestingengineering.com/photo-story/...

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

A postcard of Sherif Pasha Street (now Salah Salem) in Alexandria, Egypt, early 20th century. Source: levantineheritage.com/alexandria.htm #egypt #lawrencedurrell #alexandriaquartet

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Alan A @alanake.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

#favouritespaceships Choose one spaceship per day for 20 days from movies, tv or fiction. 16/20 the Doomsday Machine from 1960s Star Trek. The OG planet killer is an eerie, mysterious and ancient ship left by a long-vanished civilisation #scifi #spaceships #sciencefiction #scifisky #tvsky #startrek

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