iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 18h

Absolutely poisoned by the internet

such situations have alternated with wetter,
greener times when the lakes of the Rift Valley enlarged, Lake
Chad became Lake MegaChad and Lake Malawi deepened and
widened. We can imagine a heartbeat of equatorial rainforests
enlarging and contracting,

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

nice to be addressed by my proper title

Screenshot of an email from the British museum that begins ‘dear example primary salutation’

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Last night our little Livia was put to sleep and now i will be able to eat ice cream in peace and I hate it

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Benito Cereno @benitocereno.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I need a movie where R Pats and Dan Stevens play opposing little freaks who do accents at each other the whole movie

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Jonathan Calder @lordbonkers.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

As Barbara Cartland is back in the news, here's a column I wrote about her last June. liberalengland.blogspot.com/2026/01/afte...

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Keep trying to imagine the thought process that ends with these people inviting Nathan Fielder into their home and I’ve got nothing but I am SO glad it happened

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hi my name is Mark Zuckerberg I am obsessed with Augustus to the point of copying his hair and I somehow don’t know that Augustus created the Roman standing army and curbed armed imperial expansion

unyut surt ur way, avout mstury. "I think in some ways, he was seen as sort of brutal," he says of Augustus. "But to me, the most important contribution he made was basically teaching society that you didn't have to always be at war. Before Augustus, the definition of peace was the temporary period of time during which your enemies were subdued before you had to defeat them again. Maybe there is some truth to that in the grand scheme of things. But he had to rewire the economy to, instead of having this massive standing army, to convince people that they could build things, and that having this trade- based economy rather than a pillage- based economy was going to be a positive- sum thing. And it worked to some
degree."

"They did also need to keep on expanding the empire," he qualifies, with due understatement; Augustus having also established peace through a monopoly on force and an end to political liberty. "All these things sort of worked as a theory, but then with other rulers down the line, they weren't as committed to it, or it wasn't fully sustainable. But I thought that was a very important contribution. It's partially why the Augustus thing resonates with me a lot. It's this evolution where you're not physically endangering people. There's this set of rights that everyone has, but you can have this intellectual sparring and debate that pushes the world forward in a way that is much more net positive without a lot of the downsides, where the people are not literally going to war and killing each
other.”

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Jakub Jaraczewski @jakubjaraczewski.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

🇷🇸🇺🇸 Somebody on the Polish internet described Sydney Sweeney as "an actress with the eyes of a retired Serbian infantry major" and from now on I'll probably always think of war crimes when looking at her.

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John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

And while I'm enthusing: I'm most of the way through @emmasouthon.bsky.social's SERVUS, a new history of Roman slavery, and it is absolutely top tier. Superbly researched, genuinely funny without diminishing the seriousness of the subject, and a brilliantly read audiobook. www.emmasouthon.com/servus

emmasouthon.com

Servus | Dr Emma Southon

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Tiny 19 year old pink hair Emma gazing with correct reverent awe at Ian McKay

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Unfortunately this will be stuck in my brain for the rest of my life

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CSketch @csketch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Oh my god I think I found the video.

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

How was Ursula le Guin just always right about everything (from Paradises Lost)

Chi-Ans called V-Dichew, Hsing was overwhelmed and disappointed. V-Dichew was exciting and tremendously complicated, yet thin. It was superficial. It was
programs.
There were infinite things in it, but one stupid real thing, her old toothbrush, had more being in it than all the swarming rush of objects and sensations in City or Jungle or Countryside. In Countryside, she was always aware that although there was nothing overhead but the blue air, and she was walking along on grass-stuff that carpeted the uneven deck for impossible distances rising up into impossible shapes (hills), and that the noises in her ears were air moving fast (wind) and a kind of high yit-yit sound sometimes (birds), and that those things on all fours way off on the winds, no, on the hills, were animals (cattle), all the same, all the time, she knew she was sitting in a chair in School Two V-Lab with some junk attached to her body, and her body refused to be fooled, insisting that no matter how strange and amazing and educational and important and historical V-Dichew was, it was a fake.
Dreams could also be convincing, beautiful, frightening, important. But she didn't want to live in dreams. She wanted to be awake in her body touching true cloth, true metal, true skin.

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Mario Bava's A Jay of Blood @jaycoyle.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Followers from England. This is one of the best Irish films of this century and you should watch it.

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Chris Terry-Enescu @cjterry.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

God has heard your pleas and taken one of the bad ones

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The relentless AI publishing scammers have started emailing my podcast to try and scam me! The effort!

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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Brenda Fricker and Tim Curry dead inside a month of each other. Please join me in praying for any other eighty-year-old stars of Home Alone II.

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FReadom Fighter @qtpilibrarian.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Currently reading. 💙📚 Not Built in a Day, by @emmasouthon.bsky.social as audiobook on @libro.fm, read by the author. Tough topic, but the writing and narration are so engaging! 10/10, highly recommend. #freadom

Audiobook, Not Built in a Day by Emma Southon, on the libro.fm app.

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Luca🎞️ @imjustluca.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Reading Servus by @emmasouthon.bsky.social and this already has me hooked

Author's note xvii
sometimes horrific, sometimes poignant and sometimes downright weird, so too are the stories of slavery. There is enormous suffering because to be enslaved is to inherently suffer lack of freedom, and sometimes involved violence and horror. But enslaved people are people, and they left fragments of themselves behind, so there are also love stories, lifelong friendships, the high highs of winning freedom, and low lows of child sexual abuse. Tiny victories abound, and sometimes there are big ones too. Also there's some weird shit. There's a lot of piss, for example. Sorry about that in advance.

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Have had exactly 1 hours sleep in the past 31, most of which I have spent on trains or in the worlds dustiest field and somehow my skin looks incredible today

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

At a metal festival and just spent five mins staring a bloke trying to work out where I knew him from. A band? Previous gigs? A bar? nope. He is one of the carpenters on Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Above all I just want my students to enjoy the process of experiencing a 7am hunt through several secondary sources (including one mis-titled) just to find the original text of something apparently funny said by Abraham Lincoln about the printing press.

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Someone must have written a juicy HRE book given its all popes and Hapsburgs. Are any of the Hapsburg ones any fun? @goingmedieval.bsky.social?

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I have just finished this biography of Barbara Cartland and it is absolutely MAGNIFICENT! Funny and gossipy and extremely fair-minded, I really cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

The only downside of having the fleadh in Belfast this year has been having my eyeballs assaulted by the proliferation of fucking HIDEOUS AI posters every time I come into town

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Claire E. Aubin @ceaubin.com · 05/08/2026

WOW people are returning to this! Go listen to it (for freeeeee) here: pod.fo/e/498c0a

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Claire E. Aubin @ceaubin.com · 27/07/2026

Next time someone tries to tell you that Roman slavery was different or better than other forms of slavery, tell them to listen to last week’s episode of @thisguysucked.com and/or buy Emma’s book.

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

mmm my 4 hour journey home just got turned into a 9 hour journey home most of it just waiting in airports. Please remind me to stop leaving my house

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Had a cold for a week and I finally managed to get to a pharmacy and get some pseudo epinephrine and everything in my life just got 1000% better

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Tried to go and see the odyssey in IMAX and every IMAX show in Belfast at a normal time (not 10am or 10pm) is sold out until the end of the month

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Every time I log on here everyone seems to be having an absolutely appalling time watching football. It's a real bad advert for the hobby tbh.

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Darach Ó Séaghdha @darach.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

That's the Romans for you. Always with the

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

As a republican I feel that Queens should not know about usb rechargeable handheld fans and Princes should not be seen wearing headphones to talk to Travis Kelce

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

This week I have seen both the prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex on comedy podcasts with sportspeople and the actual Queen using a usb powered handheld fan and I can't help but feel that modernity/relatability might kill the monarchy before anything else

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Anne Morgan 📚Editor & Book Coach 🖋 @annemorganedits.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

If you enjoy reading about ancient Rome, Dove & I recommend @emmasouthon.bsky.social's new book on slavery in the Roman Empire. Fascinating & mind-blowing. @simonandschuster.bsky.social bit.ly/4gmhZP0 #books #mustread

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Adrian Tchaikovsky @aptshadow.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Academia is classic game and metagame. The ‘game’ is acquiring skills and knowle by dge so you can produce a paper , the metagame is ‘producing a paper’ and that’s all you’re marked on, hence cheating and shortcutting that means you win the metagame while opting out of the game.

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

What I've learned from my day at Wimbledon is the posh boys have learned about moustaches and as a result the "minor official in the British imperial government in Myanmar" look is very much back

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Paul "Princejvstin" Weimer @princejvstin.com · 30/06/2026

Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire Happy release day @emmasouthon.bsky.social !

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Sebas @ohlookbirdies.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Watching the video from The Ring on my phone so she comes out of my screen real tiny and I can just put her in a mug

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Draculosity Jones: Ghost Skeleton @brainmage.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

[To the tune of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' by The Beach Boys] 🎵Wouldn't it be nice 🎵To eat a Minion 🎵Holding up a towel to hide from god 🎵And wouldn't it be nice 🎵Though quite forbidden 🎵Savouring the yellow flesh of Bob

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Emma Southon @emmasouthon.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Amazing work from NYT strands today to have a word puzzle ostensibly about Pride but without mentioning what Pride is about at all

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Dr Sophie Hay @pompei79.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I utterly adore the fresco of a fountain that was revealed in recent excavations in #Oplontis (room of the peacocks). The three spouts fixed on the wall each with a jet of water filling the marble basin which is supported on those beautiful curved legs. It silently creates an air of fresh coolness.