iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 8h

It's kind of annoying that my fiction about how evil the world of IT and software engineering had got came out at the same time the real world decided it was worth telling stories about how evil it had all got. I'm not a whistleblower, just a jaded engineer. humansoftwarebook.com

humansoftwarebook.com

Human Software - A Novel by Richard W. Bown

A dark, intelligent corporate thriller set in a crumbling Kent port town. For readers of William Shaw and Ian McEwan.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 12h

Looking across to Fuerteventura from Playa Blanca, Lanzarote, with pigeon.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Shrek 2 isn’t as good as Shrek 1 but at least I got some sleep. Now for the main course

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Dredd will always make me think of endless Saturday afternoons

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Fun last night with The Pink Project in Amstelveen. Thirty years of Pink Floyd covers didn't disappoint: Echoes and One of These Days in particular.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Liven up your all-hands meeting by listening to this instead of all those boring managers.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Reading ‘All the Devils are Here’ by David Seabrook and learning a surprising amount about how facism was treated in WW2 England and Aubrey Hepburn

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I’m watching a corporate AI onboarding/indoctrination video which, of course, is created with AI avatars and voices and, of course, is even worse than the already pretty terrible human-made ones

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My birthday haul of books says to me that I have choice other than to become an adventurer

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Hans Rosling gets name-checked early in the book ("Not the End of the world"). It's a nice presentation but the hopeful 'flattening out' picture appears to be 'tending towards an asymptote'. Great presentation for a TED talk and certainly hopeful, but *pinches salt* www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVim...

youtube.com

The best stats you've ever seen | Hans Rosling

YouTube video by TED

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

'If somebody broke into my house, smashed my things, took what was valuable to sell, and boasted about it, I wouldn't invite them into my classroom.' 'I'm interested in working with students for whom writing feels, somehow, good. Even if sometimes it's painful. Who seek that feeling anyway.'

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Dutch word of the day: 'bagatelliseren' To downplay or trivialise.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Étratat is certainly not underserved in the art representation department: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categor...

commons.wikimedia.org

Category:Beach of Étretat in art — Wikimedia Commons

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Reposted by Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing

Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Author Simulator. My latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com

Title: Author Simulator

Level 1: Get to desk and begin! (Platform video game-style image of an author jumping from a block onto a cloud with desk and computer) Result: success!

Level 2: Press on despite distractions! (Author typing as the desk/clod moves past a ghost and a spider) ) Result: success!

Level 3: Deliver manuscript to editor! (Author jumping over fire pit onto platform where editor waits) Result: success!

Level 4: Accept minor criticism! (Author lying ded in fronto of editors desk) Result: better luck next time!

Along the bottom are controls for:
Left right jump crouch read write nap coffee

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

So it turns out that if I'm no longer a British citizen with an RYA-accredited qualification, I can't get an ICC through the RYA anymore. Rules have changed. That rather sucks. The solution in the future is to get the Klein Vaarbewijs 1 & 2, which doesn't look hard, but it's another thing.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Ugh, I feel tainted from doing promotional work. The only way I can recover is by disappearing back into writing for another couple of weeks/months. #amwriting

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My next newsletter is coming out later this morning. It's called "How I Use AI as an Independent Author". You can sign up here. theoutsideedge.cc #writingcommunity #booksky

theoutsideedge.cc

Outside Edge

A newsletter about books, self-publishing and a sideways glance at technology.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"what is the televisual equivalent of pink floyd's animals?"

Great question — depends on whether you want the structural equivalent or the thematic one, because they point in different directions.

Thematically closest: BoJack Horseman
Animals uses talking pigs, dogs, and sheep as a bitter allegory for capitalism's power structures — ruthless executives, blind enforcers, docile masses. BoJack does the literal same move: anthropomorphized animals as a vehicle for savage commentary on an industry (Hollywood) and the emptiness underneath success. Both use the animal costume to say things about humans that would feel too on-the-nose otherwise, and both end up bleaker and more philosophically despairing than their cult-hit surface suggests.

Structurally/tonally closest: The Wire
If what you love about Animals is the architecture — three or four long, unhurried movements, each one a merciless dissection of a different institutional layer (Pigs = authority, Dogs = ambition/complicity, Sheep = the masses), building to a totalizing critique of the system rather than any individual villain — that's The Wire's whole method. Each season is basically a "long track" autopsying a different institution (police, docks, city hall, schools, media), refusing easy resolution, refusing to let you root for a savior.

If I had to pick one: The Wire for people who loved Animals for its cold, systemic anger; BoJack Horseman for people who loved it for the animal-as-mask conceit itself.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I’m a Johnny-come-lately to most shows, Parks and Recreation being no exception. Therefore I’m interested to learn that the (to me, hilarious) opening season is potentially the low point.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

#BookChallenge for September: 30 books that you’ve read in 2026 so far. 1/30 oops I’m starting a bit late..

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It’s funny how award-winning books are usually the worst books

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I’ve given away twenty copies of Human Software over the last week. There’s more to come in the future. Keep an eye out. #stationsboekwissel #onsutrechtcentraal

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

And then you listen to this from almost 50 years ago and think, oh right, we were told all along. Waters seems a rather troubled and troublesome individual and he’s wrong about many things, but he’s unfortunately not wrong about human nature.

Pink Floyd “Animals” was released in 1977. Yep.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Very much me the last couple of weeks but despite myself I’m showing up in the thick of the edit. You *can* do this.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Got briefly excited about today’s release of England tickets for next summer but the price, the hassle and cost of getting there not to mention being fleeced by the ECB when I’m in the ground kind of put me off

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Because of the nature of temporary staffing these days, I've no idea yet whether I'll have a job come January, so I guess I need to start looking soon, just in case. This sucks, since I went through the same BS this time last year and I only just *started* here in May.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

'He also points to pensioners wanting to simply enjoy themselves after a life of working. "It's just having a little bit of indulgence to enjoy life. Let's face it, working life can be very hard for some people."' What an incredibly bizarre article. www.bbc.com/news/article...

bbc.com

Meet the pensioners spending the kids' inheritance

The phenomenon sees retirees spend all their money on enjoying life to the full.

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Richard W. Bown is 📝 having a break from editing @bownie.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The obvious answer to AI is just to take everything OFFLINE, people. Less is more.

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