iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 8h

I have had *so much wine* and my wife who is not drinking has decided we are playing a game with a scoresheet that looks like this.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I watched the first episode of that near-future war-with-russia reality tv show where Michael Gove is prime minister, and my main problem was that the game design was non existent? None of the politicians make any decisions! They're just reacting to documents and videos brought in by the producers!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A recap of session 2 of Blades in the Dark: I feel like I'm getting more of a hang of how to run it. The games' prescriptive structures mean that a *lot* of plot can happen in a two hour session, and it's pretty much all relevant to the wider story.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The Night Witches section is particularly interesting here, and intersects with some of the difficulties I've had playing serious and historically informed ttrpgs. Night Witches is about soviet female fighter pilots in WW2. I played it with a group of men who didn't know much ww2 history...

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Some good Folk Horror resonances in this wikipedia article about a painting that may contain a hidden portrait of the devil en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_(...

en.wikipedia.org

Salem (painting) - Wikipedia

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Two thirds of the way through Enriquez's Our Share of Night, and it's a lot of fun, but it's weird that its been sold as serious literary fiction (published by Granta, Ishiguro quote on the spine, I first heard about it in an LRB review) when it's clearly a pulpy horror melodrama.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Work lunchtime TTRPG has descended into crazed psychedelia. I'm not complaining. (currently running the Gardens of Ynn in Cairn)

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ben Pester's The Expansion Project is a horror novel about two things: fatherhood, and modern corporate culture, so reading a chunk of it on the bus between dropping daughter off at nursery and sitting down for my office office job feels like I'm doing the 4d immersive experience version.

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Reposted by Calum Novak-Mitchell

Anthony Etherin @anthonyetherin.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

LAMENT OF A CARVED WOODEN OWL (Palindrome) Too honed, am I not? I sleep, I do. Owl as a basal wood. I peel, sit on.... I made no hoot.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It is… really unnerving how much visible fascism you can see on the streets of Oxford these days. This stuff only started showing up a few years ago.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Watching the bbc prog proms, and the decision to include a thumping, plodding rock drum in the orchestral arrangements is pretty fatal (this is notably *not* the case when Carl Palmer is playing - nice to see he's still got it)

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It’s odd that the recurring exam nightmares are always about my A-Levels, when it was university finals that actually sent me mad. for A Levels I just did a lot of studying. For university finals, I wallpapered my room from floor to ceiling with revision notes that were too small to read.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Here is what I think of There Is No Antimimetics Division: !!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Best use of an office meeting room, just waiting for the players to show up…

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

A wild selection of items to find going for free in a crate on the side of the road.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Bumped into the local violinmaker outside my house today, and he told me that apparently for the last seven years I've been living on a civil war battlefield? Anyway, I assume that I'm in the beginning of a ghost story.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Tubular Bells Pt 1 starts and ends so well that it's easy to forget how much half-formed rubbish there is in the middle. It starts and ends *extremely* well though.

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Reposted by Calum Novak-Mitchell

Dave Bulmer @demontomatodave.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

hot subway take, I think we should rename all the classical pieces whose names are just throwaway metadata. Symphony For Piano In Q-Minor Third Movement? No, now it's called Stompin' With Jimmy and we can all remember which one it is

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I’ll have a go at this. But I won’t worry about the Likes part, as that seems presumptuous. you’ll have the opinions whether you like them or not.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Odyssey: pretty great! Shame it’s a No Ambiguity Zone, every scene putting up a big sign saying “this is how this section advances the themes of the movie”

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

For me personally, the main effect of the football result is that the gig I’m attending on Sunday night will actually have an audience. At one point I did wonder if it would end up with just me, alone in a field with Black Country, New Road.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I built a duplo version of our house for the toddler, and she’s extending it out in so many directions that it’s starting to feel like Lego House of Leaves

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Vertigo is on in the background on the hotel tv, and every time I look up there’s the most beautiful composition possible. Films are good!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Aliya Whiteley's Greensmith is *great*. But it's weird to read a novel where at least part of the idea is a Metafictional Satire of the Structures and Themes Underpinning Doctor Who, when that's also what actual Doctor Who has been doing for most of the last 20 years.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Climate change has many catastrophic effects; one of the more minor ones is that has rendered impossible my policy of Never Wearing Shorts

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Reposted by Calum Novak-Mitchell

Kym Deyn @kymdeyn.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Rough day, so have a poem about the Jar of Moles in the Grant Zoology Museum in London that everyone has regarded as too thoroughly batshit to publish

Jar of Moles (Grant Zoology Museum, London)
crittery dozened things each pink snout snootling
formaldehyde up it's bamboozler which poor fuck
had to collect them out in the dirt with a shovel
here moley moley BONK . I’m only gonna
put you in a jar and let tourists go eww at you
for the next two hundred years god look at me
for two hundred years I’d do anything look
mummy, one of them’s licking the glass—
honey it's dead velvety sweet sardined hope
their ghosts are friends teeming in a molish
afterlife dark and circular everything worm-
flavoured tasty buggy snackerels what if
you smashed the mole jar? vinegared
moles spilling out flaccid & swimming
everyone screaming someone saying Freddy
you gotta get us a new jar of moles—
—goddammit boss I never asked for any of this

A jar of wet preserved moles, the jar is very full and all the little hands, feet and snoots mark it as both upsetting and fascinating

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I like how the line break turns this into iambic tetrameter.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I reckon this is 100% the case in Oxford. Was taken aback by the Big Sainsburys being all flagged up, as I hadn't seen them anywhere else, and it felt like I'd accidentally tumbled into some sort of bad rally.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

The weird thing is that from one perspective the government has done pretty much everything that I'd want a labour government to do. The employment rights bill, the renters rights bill, massive investment in renewable energy, VAT on private schools... This is *exactly* why I joined the party! /1

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

And speaking of the shadows creeping in to this city, just got a disgusting online ad for the Oxford Mail that was uncritically lauding *Rupert Lowe*, hawking clicks with him looking all besuited and respectable.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Shops closing early in my home city today because a fascist thug has been invited to speak by one of its many centuries-old institutions. On a normal day, Oxford feels like a pluralist and forward-thinking place. Always a jolt when you see the shadows creeping in.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

You can really feel the bump when switching from a novel with perfect, graceful precise prose (Joanna Kavenna’s Seven, what a book) to one that is straining so hard for Poetic and Literary Style that the whole thing feels like undigestible sludge.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Tonight on Mythic Bastionland: our first army-v-army battle; a new npc who the players decided “looks like Lance Reddick, acts like George Michael”, instantly turning him into the coolest guy ever; and a planned sea voyage with a small navy in a way the rules absolutely don’t account for. Good game!

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

The deep spookiness of seeing a real person read out text that was clearly generated by AI. "This has a powerful impact. It's not just a small change - it's a quiet revolution in how we do things". Oh really - that's a real thought you had and wanted to express is it?

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Playing ttrpgs at lunchtime at work means you end up sending some weird MS Teams messages

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

In Helsinki for work, and I appreciate any city that puts gig listings in their Tourist Information shop. That is why I’m currently watching some Finnish Jazz.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

20 pages into this book, and I’m jealous of its doomed 1970s central couple, who may have just bought a haunted mansion, but only paid £40k for it.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

There's a lot wrong with this statement, mostly I reckon Granta is ignorant about what AI text looks like. It's got *such* a specific voice, and if you're at all attuned to difference in prose style (and I'm going to assume that a Granta editor is) you can spot it a mile off.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Happy to get a score of 44 here, though admittedly the whole "having an english degree" thing is an automatic boost to the numbers. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

theguardian.com

The 100 best novels of all time

The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?

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Reposted by Calum Novak-Mitchell

DougExeter @dougexeter.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

hey john. its your cousin marvin. marvin cage! you know that new sound youve been looking for? well listen to this *hangs up phone*

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Ran a lunchtime ttrpg in the office. Six players, only one had played an rpg before, everyone had a good time. It accidentally became the most classically OSR game I've ever played?

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

The most tempting thing about this game is that it sounds like an Asterix simulator.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Arturo UI at the RSC: proof you can get away with didacticism as long as the play is extremely good. My wife and I were trying to work out if we've ever seen Mark Gatiss be as good in anything else as he is here... and I think not, but only because he's never given anything as chewy as this to do.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

@lukegearing.bsky.social seem to remember you writing that you run/ran a one-hour lunchtime game at your work - any advice on how to Make Those Good? I'm starting one up next week in my office

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

A genuinely unsettling tourist trap on Bank Holiday Monday.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

I dreamed last night that a psychopathic five year old had been employed in my office, and was planning to wreck all of our careers. "Why has she been employed?" I cried, "she can't even read!"

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

It’s good like the internet says it is! After we’d finished, my wife said “oh by the way, my character was a giant walking tree”, and looking back, yep that made absolute sense.

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Calum Novak-Mitchell @calumnm.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Celebrity endorsement for Phoenix Fest! My wife Sam runs a bunch of marketing for The Phoenix comic, and has worked insanely hard to make sure this festival works. Wandering through Oxford today, and the city was basically a sea of delighted nine year olds so I reckon it’s doing ok.

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