iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

No damage done anyway, so it’s good practice for all concerned.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I can never find a shapefile of the Roman coastline …

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

If Canada becomes an associate, how long before Ukraine?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Liz Truss discovered that it does as it wants, not as politicians wish it would.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

What a lovely idea. I bet she was a super lady to go out with.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Mathematics is only one way to understand the universe - a wonderful, efficient tool, but only one way. It seems unlikely that AI will ever be sufficiently creative to find one or more new ways, but it is at least a possibility. Whether this is good or bad is probably not a quantitative matter.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Again, I’d be interested in an opinion.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Thanks, I’d be interested. Previous metal is of course only temporarily in coin form - it’s easily converted to brooches, or whatever. Still … one thing that has always worried me is, Why is there so little Roman material in Ireland?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

There was everywhere else - silver or gold. You can’t have all that precious metal in the Empire without some spillage. Foederati - Atacotti - were paid in gold.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

And incidentally, does anyone know how one cow relates (if at all) to, say, one siliqua?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I thought cows were the unit of value in early medieval Ireland?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It condemns Romans enslaving Romans - not unlike Pope Eugene IV forbidding the enslavement of converted natives in the Canary Islands - rather than the practice of slavery itself. We don’t enslave our own people/s - barbarians are OK. And anyone who’s not us, is a barbarian.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Not sure about that, exactly … the Catholic Church did nothing about slavery being wrong until the sixteenth century, did they? And of course earlier on it was perfectly orthodox for Continental monasteries to have slaves, like any estates. And Bristol was built on the slavery trade with Ireland?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Hi Mark, thanks for keeping us up to date. May I use you pics in a Roman newsletter I write please?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Oh, sorry ... well in that case it is a bit weird. Not that the Irish weren't always up to date ...

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Tell everyone it’s bad English. Good American, of course - depends which you speak.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is the English enforcing their conscience on everyone else, isn’t it? They’d only just stopped keeping slaves themselves, now no one could have them.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

And now no one knows where it is. It’s a wonderful example of a hanging bowl, almost complete, in someone’s cupboard somewhere.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I don’t know how he managed to live. Having had this insight/made it up he had to live in the knowledge that he was forever stained by sin and all he could look forward to was inescapable punishment for something he hadn’t done. So far as I can see, we wouldn’t have sin without Christianity.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

The end of a pilgrimage route, as I remember (it probably says this on the sign, but it’s a bit small).

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Do they need to have metal toecaps?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Hmmmm. Tell that to a Roman potter.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

‘Stultifying’😄 Sorry to hear that! And knitting seems to be going through a wonderful leading-edge phase at the moment, from what I can judge from outside.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

As just one example - modelmakers had a posting yesterday from someone recovering from depression, seeking advice about how to approach making an aircraft kit. Everyone weighed in with sympathetic help about how useful making models is for taking your mind off other things, etc. It was good.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Oh I agree, Bluesky is excellent most of the time. But if that’s what you find with Reddit, you were in the wrong groups.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Let’s not let that idea that ‘pensions are a benefit’ slip by. That late-life income has been paid for in earlier life. Money put aside from income, one way and another, to pay for the time when one isn’t working. It’s mine, and no one has the right to take it from me.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I have been so impressed with Reddit in recent months that I’ve neglected Bluesky - which, obviously, without my support has begun to have problems. But I do recommend Reddit for anyone seeking niche groups - I find them very supportive and helpful.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

This is not competitive! It’s just statistics.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Well, I knew nothing, so it’s all new! It sheds light on current political stances.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Well, here’s a shatter zone if ever. I think the term is best applied to areas between powerful polities, where the debris of war/s cannot develop authority of itself. bsky.app/profile/dunc...

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Does anyone know of a reference for a distribution map of sunken-featured buildings in Britain please? No particular need, I’ve been chasing this for some time out of interest. Google’s no help for once.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

This is 8 years old, you know? 😄

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

It is. That’s ancient society, I suppose. Always someone to pick on, even if you yourself are the slave of a slave of the guy who cleans the toilets.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

A coot? What the heck is a coot doing up a tree?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

No doubt the Romans giggled at provincials looking down on provincials.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Maybe everyone regarded everyone else as secondrate. Certainly Ausonius thought very little of Britons.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Re your comment Aven - I get the impression that Romans regarded Greeks, and therefore their culture, as second rate. But then, they did everyone who wasn’t Roman.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Well, I was joking, but which was more popular in the third century AD? I suppose you could count the mosaics …

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

As if there aren’t enough abusive assholes here.

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

We what? We do??? Virgil built an Empire - what did Homer ever do?

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David Brear 🇬🇧 @davidebb.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I had honestly finished reading this before I realised it wasn’t some weird hip online American English speak.

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