iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Ben King - Stand By Me Procul Harum - Whiter Shade of Pale Drifters - This Magic Moment Beatles - In My Life Dylan - Visions of Johanna Shirelles - Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow Beach Boys - She Knows Me Too Well Beatles - I Should Have Known Better Bowie - Changes Dylan- Like A Rolling Stone

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

The wonder of Turner at the Tate Britain

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

Followed by Ed Balls claiming that Tony Blair was his favourite Labour Prime Minister!

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

RIP Robert Duvall. In Apocalypse Now he showed the absurdity of the Vietnam War without descending into caricature. youtu.be/LztWlsHcivk?...

youtu.be

Apocalypse Now - [Charlie Don't Surf] HD

YouTube video by Phil Barker

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Just seen Grok putting the body of the victim of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis into a bikini. Digital corpse desecration now available to the public.

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Russ Jones @russincheshire.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

If you're still on X: why? I had 270,000 followers when I closed my account. But all I lost was 200,000 bots and trolls. The real people — the funny, the decent, the smart, the interesting — are already here. They'll find you. Leave X. Just do it. It's personal, political and societal poison.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Sopranos retained great quality over six seasons. Perhaps due to showrunner staying throughout and maintaining commitment/vision, cast bonded (though Gandolfini almost quit several times due to personal crisis), also freshened things up with great new actors Pantoliano, Buscemi, Frank Vincent.

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slate @pleasebegneiss.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

every generation loves Rumours. it’s fucking Rumours

esquire article with headline “why does gen z love rumours so much?”

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

I think a lot of that is nostalgia and not entirely true. Crosland was never that effective as a politician and had little following in the Labour Party. Healey was a great mind but also exceptionally alienating and rude. Benn was Benn. Callaghan was the only good choice in retrospect.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

Has long been a favourite film, then saw it at cinema (BFI) for first time recently and blew my mind - the helicopter scene on the big screen with surround sound especially.

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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

I'd add that what "unlimited parliamentary supremacy" means in practice has changed over time. The idea emerged in an era when there were two chambers with near-equal powers, party discipline was weak, the scope of legislation was less extensive & passing major legislation was genuinely hard. [...]

https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Strengthening-the-Political-Constitution.pdf

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

Hope it’s resolved soon and you feel better!

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

That was the weirdest penalty shootout I've seen

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Whoa - 2 England goals to equalise in quick succession from two superb crosses

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Trish Greenhalgh @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on. slate.com/technology/2...

slate.com

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

I thought that Dylan was singing 'We married, she's my friend' in Just Like A Woman and found out later it was 'Queen Mary, she's my friend'.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

RIP Brian Wilson, the word genius is used too much but he was a musical genius. Completely raised the standard of modern pop and made many artists better - as Beatles, Bowie, Elton John, ABBA and many others all acknowledged. www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0lj...

youtube.com

God Only Knows (Remastered 1996)

YouTube video by The Beach Boys - Topic

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

RIP Alan Yentob. Made one of my favourite documentaries, on Machiavelli that managed to combine Quentin Skinner, George R.R. Martin, Alistair Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Michael Dodds, Peter Capaldi reciting Il Principe in Florence, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsMs...

youtube.com

Niccolo Machiavelli - BBC Documentary 720p

YouTube video by thompson12345

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

As I said her song was released later for Booker T and Priscilla (her sister), she wrote it earlier and played it for Jim Gordon of Derek and the Dominoes (her then boyfriend) and Eric Clapton, who then took it for Layla.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Learnt recently that Clapton plagiarised the piano coda from Rita Coolidge, whose song was released later: youtu.be/OYk49admVDA?...

youtu.be

Time

YouTube video by Booker T. & Priscilla - Topic

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Walking on the oldest road in Europe, the Royal Road into Knossos c. 1500 BC.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

At the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, the bull leaping fresco. Incredible to think that this is c.3500 years old!

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

The scene where the corrupt politician Zellman and civil rights activist Tiffen talk about their lost idealism from the ‘60s after agreeing to Tony’s scheme to defraud HUD with derelict housing is particularly poignant.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Deeply strange entering middle-age at a time in world history where things are getting measurably worse. Just a continual psychic struggle of “is this fogeyism or are things just not what they used to be?”

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Kate Bevan @katebevan.com · 24/03/2025

Could really do without the torrent of weird almost nostalgia for the start of lockdown. It was a shit time. My mum died. I want to put it behind me and move forward, thanks. Would rather celebrate the fact that we created and delivered effective Covid vaccines that saved and continue to save lives.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

He’s going to raise an army to retake the Emilia-Romagna for the Papal State #deusvult

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Watched Mulholland Drive at the cinema, a lot to digest from that film, but struck me from big screen how technically brilliant it is as the dream/nightmare unfolds: the trolley shot with the singer fading into irrelevance, and then the push in to Betty/Naomi Watts www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXm_...

youtube.com

Mulholland Drive by David Lynch (Connie Stevens - Sixteen Reasons)

YouTube video by Epic Moments

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

When I said no problem, I meant ‘No…, problem!’

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Hi I enjoy your writing and thoughts on here, hope that you feel better soon.

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Dan Snow @thehistoryguy.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

On 15 March 1939 Hitler and his deputy summoned the Czech President to Hitler’s residence in Berlin and then bullied him to submitting to a German invasion of his country. They drove him to the point of physical collapse, threatening him until he eventually signed his country’s death warrant.

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Olena Halushka @halushka.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

In March 2022, russia deliberately bombed a drama theater in Mariupol crowded with innocent civilians including many children. @AP evidence pointed to 600 dead in that airstrike. That happened less than three years ago, & genocidal war is still ongoing. But the memory is short.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

The Davies' brothers were fantastic songwriters but the production on some of The Kinks' records is god awful. I often wonder what they would have sounded like with George Martin.

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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 24/01/2025

A dream itself is but a shadow.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

One of Dylan's greatest, 'I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory, and all your ragin' glory.'

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Watched Mulholland Drive for the first time last night - still blown away, like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey or Hitchcock for the first time.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

Had a go a tagliatelle al ragu after visiting Bologna. Beef, pork, and vegetables cooked in milk, then wine, then simmering in tomato sauce and chicken stock for an hour and a half.

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Tony Tassell @tonytassell.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Great anecdote here from former FT editor Richard Lambert on the time Manmohan Singh came to the FT to talk with him and Martin Wolf. H/T @andymukherjee70.bsky.social

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Not an expert but Perlman’s Nixonland is a good book on the 1960s. There were other factors alongside backlash to civil rights and racism e.g. abortion and rise of evangelical Christianity in the South ‘the Moral Majority’, the NRA, decline of the trade unions.

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Alex Taylor @alextaylor585.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

LBJ as a southern Democrat President passed civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Nixon and successive Republican Presidents took advantage of this (‘the Southern Strategy’) by dog whistle politics, focus on ‘law and order’, ‘war on drugs’, ‘welfare queens’.

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