iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 29/09/2026

Arresting marchers for carrying flags and a band for playing 'Scots wha hae', Paisley 1819. Morning Post, 29 September.

Screenshot of printed newspaper article: 'GLASGOW, SEPT. 23. — Paisley continues quiet: it is reported this morning, that several of the individuals (said to be six) who attended the Meeting at Meikleriggs Moor, have been apprehended at Neilston, and taken to Paisley, by a party of constables who were escorted by foot soldiers. It will be recollected that the Neilson party carried flags, and that when entering the place of meeting, their band played 'Scots wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled.' Perhaps the Authorities are resolved to try the question, whether the carrying of flags is illegal or not; and if these articles are denounced, the persons who attended this meeting with those *ornaments* are certainly placed in a very awkward situation.'

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Steve Eely @steveeely.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

From 20th October to 15th December, I’m running a five workshop online creative writing (poetry) short course, ‘Creating Bespoke & Organic Forms: Shaping Poems in the Act of Composition’. More information and booking details can be found here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creating-b...

eventbrite.co.uk

Creating Bespoke & Organic Forms: Shaping Poems in the Act of Composition

A creative writing (poetry) course of 5 workshops in which participants will devise their own bespoke forms for poems and sequences.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 29/09/2026

'Today, there is no conceivable equivalent. Who is tonight’s guest on the One Show, plugging their novel about the birth of Christianity?' www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Ian Penman · AB Fab: Anthony Burgess heads south

For a certain kind of northern man, Burgess has always been – for once the term is apt – something of an icon. A bit...

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 29/09/2026

Easier to get rid of the state pension altogether and go straight into a care home when we retire.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 29/09/2026

Not a warning but a promise.

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Xun-ling Au 歐迅灵 🏴 @xunlingau.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The British gov't promised Hong kongers that charges they incurred from protesting in 2019 would not be held against them when applying for BNO visas. Yet more HKers say the home office is denying their applications over protest associated charges.

metro.co.uk

'We were promised escape to UK - but they've betrayed us by denying our visas'

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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

the museum sounds great i hope they also build one for women

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 19/09/2026

from archive.org/details/isaa... (of many sources)

Screenshot of printed text: '"Confess," said the priest to a dying Neapolitan nobleman who had fought fourteen duels to prove that Dante was a greater poet than Ariosto, "confess that Ariosto was the greater poet." — "Father," answered the dying man, "to tell you the truth, I have never read either Dante or Ariosto."'

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Scott Gray @scott1gray.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Fixed that for you, BBC.

Racist gang forces its way into a hotel and threatens a group of teenagers

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 02/09/2026

Infected by such enthusiasm from @philipsherburne.bsky.social and I too have the album on repeat and given up on work for the day futurismrestated.substack.com/p/fr-186-lev...

futurismrestated.substack.com

FR 186: Levitating With Lambchop

Grief, mischief, and my obsession with Kurt Wagner’s extraordinary new album

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 01/09/2026

'The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.' Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project.

Line of text in printed book: 'The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death. (X11a, 3)'. [Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, p667]

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 29/08/2026

Very much looking forward to these pamphlets, introduced here with the author's reflections on the different way he walks alone and in company, and quietly refusing the convention that one writes as if one is alone even when not: longbarrowblog.wordpress.com/2026/08/28/p...

longbarrowblog.wordpress.com

Tzu-Jan in Post-Nature: A Process | Matthew Clegg

History has lured me here – a lining of moss on a crumbling log. During Covid lockdowns my partner [i] and I started taking our daily exercise along Sheffield’s Rivelin valley early in the morning …

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Jasmin Mujanović @jasminmuj.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I was asked by @newlinesmag.bsky.social to write about the death of Bosnian Serb genocidaire Ratko Mladić. He was a war criminal but above all he was a coward. And it is on his cowardice, and the courage of those he sought to exterminate, that we should reflect. newlinesmag.com/spotlight/th...

newlinesmag.com

The House Ratko Mladić Could Not Destroy

Ratko Mladić, the commander in charge of the Srebrenica genocide and architect of the Sarajevo siege, died serving a life sentence. He died a coward, much as his political progeny today still live as ...

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 28/08/2026

In the fourth of these, Roland Gift returns to Sparkhill, where he lived as a child. Moving, well-crafted, atmospheric, and, dare I say, psychogeographical: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

bbc.co.uk

United Kingdoms - Reflecting - BBC Sounds

A bold series of short dramas reflecting life across the UK.

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Mark O’Neill 🐻 @radiobeartime.com · 27/08/2026

Sigh. It's not down to him. If the conditions in the GFA are met then a referendum must be held. Burnham has no power to prevent it I fear that Burnham has a very superficial understanding of devolution beyond English local government. This could go very badly wrong for him.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 21/08/2026

> One of the purposes of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY is to expose eugenic principles and practices within professional philosophy[:] “few philosophy departments (in the Global North at least) remain untouched by the eugenic vision of neoliberalism.” 1/n

biopoliticalphilosophy.com

How Much Dark Money Is in Professional Philosophy?

One of the purposes of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY is to expose eugenic principles and practices within professional philosophy. As Shelley Tremain has argued persistently since founding this blog, the…

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 23/08/2026

On Gorky's project of a collectively-written volume documenting a single day (27 September 1935), A Day of the World (Den’ mira): balticworlds.com/revolutionar...

balticworlds.com

Revolutionary Synchrony: A Day of the World « balticworlds.com

A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 23/08/2026

From Walter Benjamin's long lost essay on 'Scots wha hae': So war für Burns Bannockburn eine mit Jetztzeit geladene Vergangenheit, die er aus dem Kontinuum der Geschichte heraussprengte

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 20/08/2026

Mary had a little iamb Once, before the pterodactyls.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 20/08/2026

China Miéville on his new, mammoth novel, 'Rouse' (due out next month). Mark Bould interviews 'one of the twenty-first century’s pre-eminent fantasy authors': www.bostonreview.net/articles/rev...

bostonreview.net

Revenance Event

China Miéville returns to fiction with a secret history of late-twentieth-century Britain.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 20/08/2026

An ebook, scanned from hard copy, with occasional blips of uncorrected OCR like 'befcre' or 'unflcused' or 'hut' where you would expect 'but', and even strings of missing vowels like ‘intr dcrtrs’, ‘bsns’ and ‘rsdnce’. Or is it? You are reading Big, Little after all. RIP John Crowley.

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Frederick Douglass in Scotland @fd-scotland.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The first book in the Douglass Family Lives series, on Anna Murray Douglass, edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier out now from @edinburghup.bsky.social (free ebook download): edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-anna-mu...

edinburghuniversitypress.com

Anna Murray Douglass

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 12/08/2026

As Annie Dillard once wrote, the difference between a partial eclipse of the sun and a total eclipse is like the difference between kissing a man and marrying him.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 06/08/2026

I suspect loads of academics make shit up. Only if you carefully investigate thousands of them at random and find that a disproportionate number of offenders are 'DEI hires' can you justify an article like this.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 01/08/2026

ELUCID and billy woods at the top of their game here, with live backing musicians who know exactly what to do: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP23...

youtube.com

Armand Hammer: Tiny Desk Concert

YouTube video by NPR Music

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 28/07/2026

Ugh, @bandcamp.com enshittified by spam accounts advertising recordings available on other platforms, not on bandcamp at all.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 27/07/2026

Carey Baraka confronts his own enjoyment of this shamelessly racist film franchise of the 1980s and 90s and tracks down its survivors in Namibia today. One of them asks: “Now that you are writing this, what will happen next?”: www.equator.org/articles/the...

equator.org

The Gods Are Still Crazy • EQUATOR

Separating truth from fiction in the most successful African movie of all time

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 27/07/2026

Orwell reckoned that Britain needed the Empire to maintain its standard of living; without it 'England [would be] a cold & unimportant little island where we should all have to ... live mainly on herrings and potatoes'. Hugh MacDiarmid, writing from Shetland: 'Don't threaten me with a good time.'

'In *The Road to Wigan Pier*, Mr George Orwell twits anti-Imperialists and tells them that the British standard of living depends upon the retention of the Empire. "The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants."

'This book, however, is written by one who lives on a colder and far smaller and infinitely less important island than the United Kingdom would then be, and on just the fare Mr. Orwell indicates, and finds life very tolerable indeed (much more tolerable than he would find it almost anywhere else in Scotland or England), and who therefore views the possibility (or, as he regards it, the inevitability) of the reduction of Scotland and England to the condition indicated with complete equanimity, to say the least of it....'

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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

For many years, people didn’t randomly film others in public—not because we didn’t have the technology, but because the social contract said you didn’t do that. That’s why Meta is going full court press on their PR and celebrity endorsements. They remember how people ran google glass outta town.

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Plashing Vole @plashingvole.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Private Eye tells me that How Green Was My Valley is one of Andy Burnham’s favourite books. Oh dear. I write a PhD on 1930s Welsh mining novels, including a whole chapter on Llewellyn’s work. I even read the terrible sequels. It really, really isn’t a story of working-class solidarity etc.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 23/07/2026

They should make a film of Their Eyes Were Watching God. But set it in Brooklyn, and the main character has three boyfriends at the same time rather than sequentially. The director could even play one of them.

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Anthony Barnett @anthonybarnett.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Thread on Burnham. He has drawn a historic line on 40 years of Thatcherism, New Labour efforts to humanise it and Brexit’s lung at ‘Thatcherism in one country’. Political centralisation and economic privatisation as he put it in a neat phrase. It means that

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 19/07/2026

"It's actually an embroidery."

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 17/07/2026

'This article follows the bicycle journeys of Fanny Bullock and William Hunter Workman as they cycled through the imperial spaces of Algeria, Sri Lanka, and India between 1894 and 1899': www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

Empires Awheel: Fanny Bullock Workman, American Transimperial Travel, and Temporal Fantasies of European Empire | Modern American History | Cambridge Core

Empires Awheel: Fanny Bullock Workman, American Transimperial Travel, and Temporal Fantasies of European Empire

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 17/07/2026

'Filming the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara amounted to "complicity with the illegal occupation of Western Sahara," .... [and] disregards international law and the rights of the Sahrawi people.' www.spsrasd.info/en/2026/07/0...

spsrasd.info

Calls to boycott Christopher Nolan's film over filming in occupied Dakhla | Sahara Press Service (SPS)

Paris (France), July 6, 2026 (SPS) – International media outlets from Europe and elsewhere have highlighted the controversy surrounding the filming of scenes from American director Christopher Nolan's...

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Politics Theory Other @poltheoryother.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

The England fans are to blame. They were given a perfectly serviceable New Order song with some nice Italo piano and John Barnes rapping over the top. What do the estate agents dressed as crusaders choose to sing? Wonderwall and Three Lions.

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Alasdair Pettinger @bulldozia.com · 15/07/2026

'Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of Suno, said on a podcast last year that he believes the “majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”'

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YTSL @ytsl.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

This photo is one of the ages. And should be made famous.

The caption for it in the HKFP article that it's in reads: "A woman is taken away from indie bookstore Have a Nice Stay, escorted by police, on July 15, 2026. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP."

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