iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 11h

Filming of season 3 of The Last Of Us currently taking place in my compost bin.

Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Half of the novel is narrated in a fusion of Modern and Middle English. I enjoy developing the idiom but worry that no one else will. Literary Calvinism: "If you're having a good time, it's a *sin*."

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Splendid day (and evening) out with the intrepid @wildjustice.bsky.social team in Poole Harbour. Lawyers and activists and ecologists letting their hair down after another year of taking ecological injustice to court. We saw avocets and egrets and spoonbills and a very inert white-tailed eagle.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Poole Harbour, about to go to sea. A beautiful, warm July day. What do you mean, it’s October?

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's bright and blustery in the UK right now. You know what that means. grid.iamkate.com

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

You have to wonder how long it took them at the Telegraph to find a photo of Andy Burnham in which he looks neither like a PM nor a grieving son but like a lager lout shouting abuse at a football game.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Monday morning and I have so many things to do but I made the mistake of sitting down.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Annie Dillard receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2014. This image makes me immensely sad, for obvious reasons.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Great Britain! The fantasy: Paddington The reality: Piddington

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Yet more evidence that you fight moorland fires with water, rather than drainage and burning. Restore natural function rather than perpetuate land abuse. www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happen...

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Andre Gide in 1938, on the Nuremberg rallies: “It is easier to lead men to combat & stir up their passions than to temper & urge them to the patient labours of peace… the affirmation of strength contains a permission of stupidity.”

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Yet another begging bowl email from the Labour Party this morning. ‘There is no pretending about the scale of what we’re up against.’ If only you guys had a massive majority in Parliament and could pass legislation to protect our democracy from ‘what we’re up against’.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Just received an email from Labour about the crypto-millions pouring into Reform. It’s a request for donations! YOU ARE IN GOVERNMENT FFS!

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

When I planted a cox orange pippin in our Sheffield garden a few years ago, I worried that we were too far north for a heat loving variety. This is about a third of our harvest.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The original poem is one of the great ecological myths. It's a masterpiece of medieval poetry. Zara and I only hope we can get close to its weird and desolate magic.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The strangeness of the myth starts to look familiar. It begins to make psychological sense. Violence and madness and redemption are not concerns of the distant past only.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

In this chapter mad Sweeney, returned by misadventure to his bird form, crosses the Irish Sea and seeks refuge in what will become northern England. He meets a fellow outcast. A shadow theme in the poem is the trauma of war. Sweeney and his friend can be read as proto-PTSD sufferers.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

It's always a thrill, for a comics scriptwriter, to see your directions take form on the page. These are uncoloured frames from chapter 9 of SWEENEY'S PROGRESS, our adaptation of the great medieval Irish poem, THE MADNESS OF SUIBHNE. Artwork by @zaraslattery.bsky.social.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I’m well on the way to being an oldie myself, and of course I’m not saying ‘all old people’ are like this. But we must acknowledge that there is an age/nostalgia factor to authoritarian populism. From Brexit to Reform to climate inaction, it can feel to the young like their future is being wrecked.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

It would be nice if Labour and the Lib Dems and the Greens didn't leave this kind of work to a few climate activists. Reform and Farage boast of policies that would make the planet *uninhabitable*. That ought to be something you do politics against.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

From The Times today. Attacking our life support systems is integral to the right’s ideology. A planetary murder-suicide cult.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Last month we visited Malham Cove where the devastation is even worse. Government was warned about imports of diseased ash saplings from the Continent. Did nothing. We don’t prepare, we don’t plan, and then we have no urgency in our attempts to restore and adapt.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Incredibly depressing cycle ride along the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire this afternoon. Between ash disease and the heatwaves, the woods are dying. And saplings planted to fill the gaps will have died en masse in the drought. A celebrated landscape wrecked by inaction and inattention.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

For the yoga practitioners out there: a tree demonstrating the tree pose, on the banks of the River Ure in North Yorkshire.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

About a quarter of our plum harvest. No problems staying regular for a while.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Nobody wants to hear from you, Greg, they just want your money. The quintessence of attention economy capitalism.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

It’s a beautiful place. But it’s also a drained, scoured, denatured place with snares and gunmen who kill everything that might interfere with a blood sport. What should protect us from floods in winter and drought in summer is kept in a state of ecological servitude. This must change.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Over 100 joined the annual Reclaim Our Moors walk on the Duke of Rutland’s Moscar Moor this morning. Land stolen from the people 200 years ago. Driven grouse shooting must end. We need to restore and rewet our uplands. @raptorpersuk.bsky.social @ruthtingay.bsky.social @guyshrubsole.bsky.social

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

What Manchester has to offer Donald Trump:

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

The surviving caterpillars will turn into this (not my photo). The cinnabar moth, not aka the Darth Maul moth.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

An abundance of cinnabar moth caterpillars feeding on ragwort in Sheffield. They absorb toxic alkaloids from their food plant and become highly poisonous. Nifty survival strategy. (Images include red soldier beetle porn.)

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Nature’s air conditioning system (today in Ecclesall Woods, Sheffield, where it’s several degrees cooler than in the city at large). What causes me intense grief is the knowledge that we are pushing the resilience of our woods and trees to the limit with our fossil fuel addiction.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

(OK, I've not coined 'ecopunk'. But it currently applies to an online survival game and some science fiction. I want to see nature/human symbiotic urbanism for real. Everywhere. Not because it's woke or even 'nice'. Because it's a survival strategy.)

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Basically - to coin a term (I think) - we need to become an ecopunk society. Trees in abundance across our towns and cities, green roofs for ambient cooling, creepers growing pergola-style across roads, also awnings. And pedestrianisation rather than a landscape for cars. What's not to like?

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Solar and wind are currently meeting 90% of Britain's electricity demand. grid.iamkate.com

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I had to cross central Sheffield at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. Barely a tree on my route, just hard surfacing. It was brutal. We need to transform our cities fast, yet where is the vision? By contrast, Paris is planting trees and growing creepers like there’s no tomorrow.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Spend winter longing for summer. Spend summer longing for winter.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

On Wednesday, Parliament will vote on the UK's 7th Carbon Budget, aligned with the scientific advice from the Climate Change Committee. Kemi Badenoch will lead her party in voting against it. The temperature in London on Wednesday:

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Many thousands of people are going to die in western Europe this week on account of a heatwave the likes of which we have never before experienced. Maybe our politicians and media might remember that climate change is real and Net Zero is a *fucking survival strategy*.

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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Spent two days beside Barton Broad. Lots of painted ladies in the garden of our friends. Also saw several swallowtail butterflies and heard a bittern! Norfolk at its best.

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