iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Uh-oh! … Given what you actually posted I think Moderation may need their hair trigger adjusted a bit.

Screenshot of Megan’s preceding post with the photos replaced by a Graphic Media warning.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Pro-Trump right-wing British politicians are granted an audience at the White House

A black & white photo showing a scene in the China of old. A couple of poorly dressed men, probably peasants, kneel in utter submission to a mandarin behind a desk. Six other mandarin types sit or stand in a semicircle watching the kowtowing.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

It was David Cameron all those years ago who coined the phrase ‘broken Britain’ while failing to add ‘but you ain’t seen nothing yet’. Here’s Farage saying the quiet bit out loud.

Screenshot of a tweet by Nigel Farage, presumably on Twitter/X, where he posts the front page of the Telegraph showing a picture of him welcoming Robert Jenrick into Reform and the headline, ‘Jenrick: Tories Broke Britain’. In his tweet Farage comments; ‘The Tories broke Britain. But not enough.’

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Is it a neolithic Guylian chocolate?

A small box of Guylian chocolates and in front of it a selection of their shell shaped swirly patterned chocolates.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

‘I certainly didn’t have Trump invading an allied nation on my 2026 bingo card!’ Well no, obviously you didn’t. What kind of a weird bingo card would have that printed on it? And in what game of bingo are cards designated by year? What is HAPPENING here?

Screenshot of a classic style bingo card, with the word BINGO at the top and five rows each of five numbers below.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

A popular idea is that people who post bonkers stuff on the internet probably look perfectly normal if you meet them IRL. So in that spirit, compare and contrast, the outside of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s head, and the inside.

Christ in Limbo, by Jan Brueghel the Elder. 1593; oil on copperplate; 25.6 x 34.9 cm; Riggisberg, Switzerland. Christ to one side of the picture is kicking down a door to arrive from light into the darkness of a phantasmagoric scene, a landscape full of human souls being tortured by demons, fire and all kinds of wackiness stretching into the distance.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Unless you *are* planning to jive with, of course.

Black & white 1950s photo of people jiving. The man has swept the woman so far off her feet that she is upside down. She has a grin on her face. A fellow sitting and watching has a ‘whoa!’ expression on his face.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

I first heard Flanders & Swann — as a very small child — on my dad’s Ferrograph reel-to-reel tape recorder. Which, amazingly, I still possess. OK, that machine was antique even at that time but still, I didn’t think I was THAT old 🫤

A very old Ferrograph reel-to-reel tape recorder from, I believe, the 1950s.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Over on YouTube Waldemar Januszczak has a little video casting doubt on the idea Hieronymus Bosch was inspired by hallucinations caused by eating poisoned bread. And he does not even think of doing a gag about Hieronymus Brioche. So disappointing 🤷‍♂️ youtu.be/g2hltl-1pVI?...

A screenshot of the title shot from Waldemar Janusczcak’s video on YouTube, showing a millpond with lilies and the reflection of a windmill and text which reads, ‘Dangerous Bread and Hieronymus Bosch’.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Was just replying to a DM and notice how surprisingly many of the messages I’ve had there are from accounts that were soon after deleted. I don’t think of myself as someone particularly pestered by undesirables ‘sliding’ into my DMs but I guess it happens to us all?

A screenshot of my DMs showing a long row of deleted accounts saying things like ‘how’re you doing today?’ and ‘hello’.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Seeing a fair bit of this kind of commentary. Greenland in particular: wake up and… do what?

Screenshot of a Bluesky post (the poster’s ID redacted). It reads:

‘This should be an awakening for Canada and Greenland and all the other western countries seeking to appease the orange pedo. He wasn't joking.

‘« US Law Enforcement » is empowered to invade, bomb, and kidnap political leaders.

‘This is the new world order.’

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Oh, I hope they do. They should build an absolutely colossal state of him, the more vulgar the better. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

2003, the famous scene of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad being winched over and finally toppled by American soldiers in the hours after their arrival during the invasion of Iraq of that year.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

At a Remain demo in London, 2019

A placard at a Remain anti-Brexit march in London showing a still from the movie Zulu with text reading, ‘Remoaners, Sir, millions of ‘em!’

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Thank you. Turns out I do have almost half of them on my shelves, but the diptych not featured amongst them. BTW, taking the opportunity of downtime to sort a few thousand more books (not an exaggeration) and — oh…! 🙂

Front cover of the book, A History of European Picture Frames, by Paul Mitchell & Lynn Roberts.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

It’s a bit bonkers! Compare with all the posts I saw on Bluesky of the Bondi Beach mass murders the other day where videos showed the killers methodically shooting real people, none of which, that I saw, carried moderators’ warnings.

Screenshot of Peter Paul Rubens’ post at the top of this thread with Perugino’s painting replaced with a Graphic Media warning.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

The hart’s antlers are depicted gold on a gold background but treated texturally by embossing with stamps so that they stand out when they catch the light. This is just a photo I’ve found online but shows the effect reasonably well.

A close up of the hart’s antlers on the outside of the Wilton diptych in the National Gallery, London. The antlers have a bobbly texture embossed into their surface by striking all over them with a metal stamp of the appropriate design.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

She’s just lying back thinking about how buildings with jettied upper floors are the coolest buildings.

A fresco showing a townscape from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

The Harbourne Man in… oh dear, 2018.

A standing stone (though leaning distinctly to the right in the photo) in a snowy Dartmoor landscape, lower ground in the distance.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Back in 2017 I saw this one in Nunhead Cemetery in South London. Which suggests it was trying to find someone who actually died waiting for their delivery to arrive.

A six wheeled delivery robot coming up an avenue in Nunhead Cemetery, with tombs, mausoleums and dense trees lining either side of the road.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

A nice thing is that if you visit a bazaar in Cairo such as the Khan el-Khalili (or similar in many other countries) you can find shoes just like this to this day. Timeless design. From a quick internet search the ones in this photo ⬇️ aren’t identical but… kinda thing.

A narrow alleyway in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili bazaar. It is lined on both sides with hanging displays of copious bunches of slippers of traditional design.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

If, reportedly, Wilfred Seipel finds it ‘preposterous’ to wonder if Bruegel was likening the procession of the Duke of Alba’s army to an episode in the Bible I don’t know what he’d make of this famous fresco:

The Journey of the Magi, by Benozzo Gozzoli. A section from a fresco cycle in the Magi Chapel in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, painted around 1459. The scene shows a huge procession winding its way through a mountainous landscape, the journey of the Magi to attend the nativity of Christ. Everyone in the picture is depicted in fine 15th century dress and many of the figures are recognisable portraits of people from the Medici court, including Medici princes themselves standing in for the three kings.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Orson Wells spoke with frustration about directors who show a whole long shot of a character walking from the distance into the foreground instead of doing a cut to speed things up. Without saying so explicitly he was talking about this ⬇️ shot in The Third Man. He was wrong: the GOAT closing shot.

The final shot, a long one, in the film, The Third Man. The camera looks up a long tree-lined avenue in Vienna’s Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof). Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins leans against a cart at the left side of the picture in the foreground. Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt walks from the distance towards us along the avenue until she finally passes the waiting Martins without paying him a glance and on past the camera and out of the movie. The sardonic zither music on the soundtrack twangs away mockingly. And that’s the end of the film.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

By the way, when I was searching for that famous image long used to illustrate Gestalt theory in optical perception I came across this picture, which I think is quite fun

A very white interior with a Dalmation dog sitting in the middle, its back to us but turning to glance at us over its shoulder. The dog has some of the typical black spots of Dalmations on its face, shoulder and buttock but is largely white. On the white floor around it are scattered lots of black spots of different shapes and sizes, as if most of the dog’s markings have fallen off it and landed on the ground.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Ah, another one of these. I’m searching for the Dalmatian…

A famous image long used to illustrate Gestalt theory in optical perception. It shows a picture of a Dalmation dog: the contrast has been hugely boosted so that it is a nearly abstract array of black and white blotches, the idea being that the human mind decodes them and places the perception of a dog onto this almost random seeming series of marks.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Oh, please don’t tell her! It’s a beautiful fact and it is *nearly* right. Let her live the dream. Meanwhile, Totnes is home to my other favourite sign in Devon…

Sign on the road entering Totnes. It reads:

The historic Borough
of
TOTNES
twinned with
Narnia

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

My favourite Devon sign, for a town dating from an earlier era in construction technology

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

BTW, the British-English phrase suggests something like this ⬇️ to me: implying you are not only going to hell but in a miserably undignified manner. No horse drawn carriage for you on your bleak last journey. But the American handbasket is painting a different picture, I think?

Old black & white photo, judging by a car in the background perhaps from the early 1960s, showing a man wheeling a wooden cart with wooden wheels laden with bric-à-brac. The whole scene is not suggestive of wealth.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

‘If your child kicks the back of my seat again it is not your child I will be taking it up with, you take my meaning?’ *turning* ‘Yes, yes! Film it, go on! Do I look like I give a f— ‘

The Pope standing in the gangway of an aircraft looking down at the occupant of a seat while brandishing a baseball bat. In the background people point cameras.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Surely being wined-and-dined at Windsor Castle on his recent state visit gave him the opportunity to notice that classy joints don’t use those spray gold three star wedding venue hotel function chairs?

A gigantic table being set for hundreds of guests ready for the state banquet at Windsor Castle on Trump’s recent visit to the UK. The chairs are 18th century style carved ones with gold woodwork and red velvet upholstery. I have no idea how the gold is done but it doesn’t have the cheapo spray can finish look of the ones in the photo at Mar-a-Lago.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

He can’t say it not only because who he was then is who he is now but because signalling it to the likeminded is his core political strategy. This didn’t happen by mistake; this is not youthful silliness ⬇️

Juxtaposition of two pictures. One is Nigel Farage standing in front of his Brexit ‘Breaking Point’ poster, featuring a huge procession of non-white people snaking towards the camera. The other is an exactly similarly composed picture, this time black & white, showing a procession of people moving towards the camera, from a Nazi propaganda film. Text reveals the film’s narration: ‘These are the Eastern European Jews who flooded European cities after the Great War; parasites undermining their host countries… and bringing with them crime, corruption and chaos.’

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

A striking example: at some point someone thought it was fine to chop a doorway through the middle of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Personally I would strongly resist doing that, regardless what other people in history may have done. Our brains exist for making choices.

The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci. Fresco; in Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. And, because I have been told I mustn’t use Alt Text just for labelling pictures without also describing them for the visually impaired: a man who we may take to be Christ sits in the middle of a wide table covered in a white table cloth and various items of food and crockery. His arms are spread wide with his hands palms up on the table. To each side of him sit or half stand six men on his left, six on his right, all in various states of surprise and dismay at the item of news he has just imparted to them, namely, that one of them will soon betray him. Their table faces us across the width of a long room with a coffered ceiling. In the far wall are three windows or perhaps two windows either side of a doorway. Beyond those is a distant hilly landscape.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Supposing that’s a serious question, I used to have a neighbour who kept Asian clouded leopards at his home in South London (as part of an endangered animal breeding programme). Perfectly legal, albeit with layers licensing and oversight.

An Asian clouded leopard sprawling along a tree branch with its legs dangling down either side. It has the spotty markings of a big cat although clouded leopards are relatively small, bigger than a domestic cat but not huge.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

At St James’ Church at Cooling in Kent are still to be seen the 13 children’s graves surrounding that of their parents that inspired Dickens to write the opening chapter of Great Expectations. I guess even the folk memory of the huge mortality of childbirth and early life is now disappearing.

An adult’s gravestone in a church graveyard surrounded by a tight row of ten small stone coffin shaped tombs on one side and three more on the other.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

I hurried to check and the floor tile does not feature in Jan van Eyck’s painting of Chancellor Rolin because the picture was made a decade earlier. Still, any excuse to post one of the all time best paintings.

Madonna and Chancellor Rolin, by Jan van Eyck. Oil on panel; c. 1435; 66cm x 62cm; Musée du Louvre, Paris (they’ve managed not to have it stolen yet).

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

These are the advocates of cultural cohesion. These are culture warriors who are antagonistic to anything even slightly unlike themselves. I share nothing with these people but skin colour. I have no intention of becoming cohesive with them.

Chanting, flag brandishing demonstrators at a Tommy Robinson organised demonstration in Whitehall.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Quite a plot twist when Elon Musk uses his trillion dollars to finally establish his base on Mars only to meet his nemesis amongst the tentacles of the terrifying Carnivorous Death Ball.

The alien tentacle monster in series 1, episode 8 of 1970s sci-fi show, Space 1999. The episode was called Dragon’s Domain, I believe.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

The Frick does have a very fine ⬇️ van Eyck — though perhaps not as fine as the one (as yet still safely) in the Louvre.

The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos. By Jan van Eyck. Oil on panel; c. 1441−43; 47.3 cm × 61.3 cm; Frick Collection, New York.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

Ah, blowing your own trumpet lichen.

Closeup photo of trumpet lichen; Cladonia fimbriata.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

Like others I was surprised to hear Ann Summers were diversifying into the gardening sector. But I thought I’d try a sack of their grass seed and I must say the results are as you would expect.

Some thick grass from which are emerging several shaggy inkcap fungi

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

The ballroom may look oversized beside the White House but there is something very Spinal Tap about Trump’s planned triumphal arch

Trump holding up a weeny model of a triumphal arch

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

We can be confident Domenichino did not make a field trip to Sinai to research that landscape.

Vista of the Sinai desert. Mountains in the distance beyond barren sand dunes, a couple of tiny riders on camels in the foreground dwarfed by the landscape.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

A quick bit of research, apparently spiked wheel bolts are A Thing in America. Good Lord! What is happening inside these people’s heads and how are they allowed out of secure facilities?

A truck’s wheels with shiny chrome bolts fashioned to long, sharp spikes.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Also, what on earth is going on with the bolts on that truck’s front wheels?

A still from the movie Gladiator showing a chariot wheel with a long blade protruding from the axle racing towards a kneeling soldier who is about to be cut in half by it.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

That fashion for deliberate rips in clothing looks so silly. Ah well, at least that wouldn’t last.

A montage of seven celebrities wearing fashionably ripped jeans. I even know the names of a couple of them.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Not now, goofy adolescent brain! This is obviously very important and serious

Actor David McCallum as spy Illya Kuryakin in 1960s TV show, The Man From Uncle.

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Ceri Shields @cerishields.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Ooo — which reminds me, I have my favourite ever @pantspants.bsky.social drawing framed on the wall by the door of my studio, so I can glance at it feelingly every time I leave. (Photographed at a bit of an angle to try to cope with reflected lights.)

A framed cartoon by Pants, showing an old artist dude whose name I can’t remember cleaning his paintbrushes at the sink and telling them amiably, ‘you all did so well today’. In the background is an easel with a splodgy looking painting on it.

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