iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 11h

Beginning to think pollsters are weighting their samples by setting the Conservatives to 20% at this point.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 14h

A silly little miniature against an opponent who probably didn't want to play a Sicilian and now doesn't have to.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Richborough's an interesting place to visit for many reasons - not least that it's well inland these days, Thanet no longer being an island. But mostly because the Romans built and rebuilt there over three centuries and the resulting ruins (and English Heritage's reconstruction) are super confusing.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Movie posters that could only be put up in British railway stations, one of a series of probably one.

An ad for a ghost movie with the tagline "See it. Séance. Haunted."; a reference to the British Transport Police's long-running "See it. Say it. Sorted." ads encouraging the public to report anything vaguely suspicious.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Well that surely depends on if you're attempting to achieve something or merely convince venture capitalists that they could convince other venture capitalists to pay more for it than they did....

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Or in other words, in the Commonwealth, if you don't have a better excuse for a party you can always celebrate the King's Birthday.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Charles III's birthday, this year, was on: June 8th in most of Australia September 28th in Western Australia October 5th in Queensland May 18th in Canada June 1st in New Zealand June 17th in Papua New Guinea June 12th in the Solomon Islands June 13th in the UK and Tuvalu He was born on November 14th

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Alas, the number of games for which I have made a spreadsheet has increased by one.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I feel like I should get some kind of sequence bonus for booking my covid vaccination in the waiting room for my flu one

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

On the other hand what you _can_ do is obviously make preparations and put articles in the press if you want the opposition to wind up their own offensives and consolidate to give you time to figure out what to do....

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

These days there are ubiquitously available camera drones and commercial imaging satellites. You can't exactly _hide_ preparations for an offensive on the scale of 5-10 divisions, all you can reasonably do is confuse the opposition about direction and timing.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"we thought it was newsworthy that the Greens can do percentages"

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The periodicity in here showing that Bluesky has the greatest positive sentiment when the Americans are asleep is hardly surprising but it's interesting it's so stark.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

One of the oddities about my occasional commute is that sometimes my train is canceled so I get in/back earlier. (Because work pays for my ticket and requires I get the cheaper/slower one, but if it's cancelled then the ticket is valid on the faster service).

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

it's unclear to me here whether the plan is to keep the ships or the u-boats in dry docks but I suppose both would be effective

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The ESA insist that their spacecraft is not lost and does not need to ask for directions.

The plan of JUICE - the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer - 's flight to Jupiter, which does an Earth-Moon flyby, a Venus flyby, and two Earth flybys before actually going to Jupiter. Repeated gravitational slingshots and precise aiming, but it _looks_ silly.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I mean even the campaign would have been pretty weird by modern standards. "Mayoral candidates engage on city issues; media baffled"

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I have heard of it only because Hildegard von Blingen did a bardcore cover of it which means it was a) on YouTube and b) in a folk music adjacent space

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sources: Tory minister denies Eldritch horror rumours

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This is still a castle account though it's questionable if I know what a castle is (various city fortifications, Canterbury).

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I was going to say "according to Abby it is sometimes bad for cats to be small"

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Apparently this is a castle account (Leeds Castle, Kent)

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

You think the whole thing is going to blow up?

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I think if I were rich enough to own a surface vessel I would be reluctant to give it a name associated with submarines due to that tempting fate

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Also for that matter the RN ended up torpedoing the fourth submarine to get a name so there was definitely some early awkwardness.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

In which case I detect a certain amount of social anxiety involved with renaming HMS Nautilus as N1 after having apparently decided the former was too gauche.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I do feel you can kind of tell how much support a ship design had at the Admiralty by whether it gets a relatively traditional name or something like this.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

As somebody who actually can foxtrot I do somewhat collect pop songs which are foxtrots (and, even rarer, pop songs which are Viennese Waltzes).

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

the option to be normal and just skip over posts you aren't interested in also exists, of course

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Was the additional hire for the purposes of doing forensic pathology, or answering questions from crime writers?

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I would like to register my suspicion of the phrase "hotbed of bicycle manufacture". I don't think you can have a hotbed of virtuous industry.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Do they ask Greeks if the defeat of the Delian League had a positive impact? French and Germans about Charlemagne's decision to divide his empire on death?

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I.... what? Why on earth does YouGov think the British public has some kind of idea as to the alternate path of nine and a half centuries of history and an ability to evaluate the consequences? Do they ask profoundly nonsensical questions on a regular basis?

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Right, but somewhere along the line the defence industrial strategy which is required for a doctrine of burying the opposition in munitions got lost, and the Pentagon started procuring the latest Wunderwaffe without much consideration of how this affected their traditional warfighting inclinations.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Oddly I cannot run on treadmills. I have never quite figured out why, but any vaguely relevant distance always ends up causing ankle pain that doesn't happen when running on roads or trails. I suppose multiple ten-minute runs would work but then I'd need to find some way to fit a treadmill in here.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Local man shocked to learn still possible to write summaries without aid of an LLM.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Speaking as somebody who gets East and West mixed up all the time I have a certain amount of sympathy here, but I would also have got it checked!

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

If she manages to remain mad until 1652, the answer is "with the help of the Dutch", though it's still inviting disaster since the Commonwealth's fleet won most of the battles in that war so while the prospects for landing an army are reasonable keeping it supplied will go less well.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I feel, Google, you are unnecessarily insulting your servers here.

HTML Error 400 page; "The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That's all we know". Google mean that the request is malformed, not the server, but that's not entirely clear from the phrasing.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

boundary of the city is the red/white dashed line:

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Cambridge North is not in Cambridge. (Cambridge South is, just).

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Ah, the malcontents page.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Look, they _specifically_ told me I required additional pylons.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Are you secretly in the pocket of big potato.

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I'm sure he meant to do that

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

(yes, Bluesky, I am aware that this is not actually any more sane)

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Ilanin @ilanin.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

No, I think you're right - he's threatening the Federal Reserve with embargoes. Presumably on the grounds that while a tarriff is a tax levied by Congress, an embargo is a foreign policy decision made by the President.

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