iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Musicology Duck @musicologyduck.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

incidentally i think these guys are the patron saints of bluesky

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Biodiversity Pics @biodiversitypix.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

💐 Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe A Gand: chez Louis van Houtte, eÌditeur, 1845-1880. [Source]

Historical botanical illustration from "Flore des serres et des jardins de l'Europe" (1845-1880) depicting a large, white Victoria Regia water lily flower with multiple layered petals arranged symmetrically around a prominent central bud. The flower rests on a broad, textured green lily pad with visible veins and curling edges, alongside a partially visible reddish-brown spiked leaf or stem segment. The detailed shading and coloring emphasize the flower’s delicate texture and the lush foliage, highlighting its significance as an exotic aquatic plant cultivated in European gardens. The composition focuses on the flower’s grandeur and botanical structure relevant to garden cultivation.

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

We also looked at some FSA primary sources and this one really grabbed students' attention. It's a diagram that shows the arrangement of members of the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League as they would surround a man-hunter, concealing him until he consented to release the person he was trying to kidnap

This diagram, explained by a note written by Henry I. Bowditch, shows the arrangement of members of the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League as they would surround a man-hunter, concealing him until he consented to release the person he was attempting to kidnap. The League was a secret society founded in Boston in 1854 to resist the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The diagram, in pencil and watercolor on brown paper, places the slave hunter in the center (SH), surrounded by the speaker of the committee (S), a member to take hold of the hunter's head (C), two members to take hold of the arms (A1 and A2) and two for the feet (F1 and F2), and twelve additional members to form an outer circle to ward off intruders while the committee conveyed the victim to safety. Bowditch's note continues, "One plagued in this way would not invite others to come & run the same risk of annoyance."

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Prof. Dimitra Fimi @dimitrafimi.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Wonderful #Tolkien news! Westminster Abbey has announced that J.R.R. Tolkien will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner. I've known about this project for some years + was privileged to be consulted during its development. Great to see it made public! www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-news/a...

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Biodiversity Pics @biodiversitypix.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

🌸 Orchid album: London: B. S. Williams, 1882-97. [Source]

Orchid illustration from historical archives

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Scott Sandage @scottsandage.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

#ThatFeelingWhen you’ve got 26 original printings of The Columbian Orator, enough to put one into the hands of each student as you begin teaching how #FrederickDouglass taught himself #HowToRead and #SpeakTruthToPower

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Shana @shanamd.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I am SORRY for sharing something that was posted on the other place, but this is too good.

The future pope at a party with a caption “they don’t know I’m the future pope”

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I would be so much better at being disgustingly wealthy than our current crop of wealthy people also austerity policies are bad and we should tax rich people and fund cool things like science and art and education and museums and healthcare and stuff

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Hildur Knútsdóttir @hildur.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This post is making the rounds again for some reason and therefore I feel I must inform you that they’ve hired another one so there are now TWO forensic pathologists working in Iceland.

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Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The press as a showman, showing off. A timeless statement of media impact on human life. The Gutenberg Galaxy's main technology, the printing press, is half-man, half-machine! Goosebumps, dear #skystorians, goosebumps.

A wood engraving of early 19th century showing a printing press (called PRESS) with an ink pot as a hat, half human and half printing press. Source: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1871-0429-668

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Damon Young @damonyoung.com.au · 04/09/2026

This Finnish guy has been teaching himself Sumerian, and sent a cuneiform tablet to the British Museum to check his progress. They just emailed him that they've sent him something in the post. I'm now thrilled and excited for a total stranger! Clay tablet mail! www.reddit.com/r/Cuneiform/...

a photo of a hand holding a cuneiform tablet

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Pausing doomscrolling to read Gerard Manley Hopkins has been found to decrease heart rate and increase life expectancy by 15-20 years

As Kingfishers Catch Fire
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

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Michael @selmerguy.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

@arkhamlibrarian.bsky.social The thrills and Detection are all well and good, but a peek inside the Vaults of the Bodleian are why I’d buy this book.

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

idk something about the eyes just says “ACK” to me

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Rebecca WB @rwb22.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Damn Carol, I was unfamiliar with your game, but I respect it!

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Jon Phillips @jowiph.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I picked up a copy of the collected letters of JRR Tolkien for reasons, and this is the most bullshit table of contents I've ever seen. I'm actively angry that it exists

Contents

Introduction - vii

Foreword to the Revised and Expanded Edition - xi

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien - 1

Notes - 607

Index - 637

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I already loved both orpiment and flaming June and but hadn’t connected them (probably because I know very little about paint, tbh) This is a joy

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Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Happy Rice Truck Day to all who observe

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Somehow I had never done the math before but apparently Lobelia Sackville-Baggins has considered herself a cheated heiress since she was TWENTY THREE? Bilbo held the spoons grudge against a snitty sub-adult?

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Ben Miller @extinctmonsters.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Was slumming it on fb and ig to see reactions to the Academy of Natural Sciences closing. It’s heartening that people are pissed. But it’s astonishing/enlightening how little understanding there is of what *any* museum is, who runs them, and how they’re funded. 🧵with dinosaur pics for attention

Museum display corral with cast skeleton of Tenontosaurus being attached by Deinonychus. Three baby Tenontosaurus following.

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Joshua Eaton @joshuaeaton.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

“There’s a new Mr. Beast book.” You bolt awake in your workshop in Mainz. It’s 1450. You’re Johannes Gutenberg, and you’ve changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Your printing press must burn.

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

lmao I paused in listening specifically to make sure they acknowledged this somewhere in public

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

surely someone has written a paper on how people use multiple screens during video meetings I am having so much fun trying to figure out who keeps the people on the screen with their camera vs who keeps the thing they’re working with on that screen

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Is it just my phone or are other people having issues with typing replies on Bluesky not scrolling as you write? I end up only being able to see the top two lines of text

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Biodiversity Pics @biodiversitypix.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

🌻 Curtis's botanical magazine.. London ; New York [etc.]: Academic Press [etc.]. [Source]

Historical botanical illustration showing three yellow sunflower blossoms on long reddish-brown stems with green leaves at the base. Two flowers are fully open, displaying multiple elongated yellow petals with fine brown veining and dark brown, intricate central disk florets. The third flower is viewed from the side, revealing overlapping petals and a dark green, bulbous base beneath the petals. A large leaf with detailed veins is faintly sketched behind the flowers. The image is rendered on aged paper with subtle text in the background, typical of early 19th-century botanical prints.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 26/08/2026

the famous line about how michael caine treated the muppets as fellow actors and tim curry treated himself as a fellow muppet keeps running through my head we have a lot of brilliant actors, but how many of them can really pull off 'unhinged muppet' the way curry could? what a tremendous loss

static.klipy.com

Tim Curry Laughing as Pirate Captain

Alt: Tim Curry as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island laughing

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Danny Robb @inverting-vision.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

On August 26, 1966, readers of the NYT woke up to the first photo of the Earth from the Moon on the front page. Here's a thread about how the Lunar Orbiter team retrieved it from film on a spacecraft orbiting the Moon, showing the reconstruction process back on Earth. 🧵(1/12) 🗃️🔭 #photography

A screenshot of a headline and image from a newspaper. The image is fairly low quality, but shows a crescent earth to the left, suspended in blackness, next to the limb of the moon taking up most of the right side of the image. Across the image are horizontal stripes. The headline at the top reads "How the Earth Looks from the Moon". The caption reads "Photo taken by Lunar Orbiter when it was 27 miles from moon, right, shows the earth covered by a white cloud. horizontal orientation lines were added to the picture after it was received at a tracking station near Madrid"

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

welp I’m going to listen to Sabriel again next, I guess hell

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NE Ohio Regional Sewer District @neorsd.org · 25/08/2026

if infrastructure is what connects people, holds them together, serves, supports, and endures, then Dolly Parton was infrastructure.

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small general strike @spice.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

losing my mind at this Rick Steves clip

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

for reasons deeply unclear to me, I am still awake thus I am going to complain on the internet in a last-ditch attempt to fix this.

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 19/08/2026

One time I was working in the gallery of Duke Humfrey’s and a bat flew by and I had no idea what to do and didn’t want to leave my desk so I @‘d the Bodleian and ten minutes later I saw a porter sprint past, out of breath, with a butterfly net

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Elizabeth (Liz) Lehfeldt (she/her/hers) @lizlehfeldt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Super-niche question: I'm looking for descriptions/insight into how #earlymodern people would have crafted sheets of paper into provisional "notebooks" for the purposes, say, or record keeping/accounting. Not formal, bound books, but spaces for jotting things down, etc.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 13/08/2026

I feel like an issue that would connect well with voters would be doing anything at all to slow the current progression toward "absolutely everything now is a scam"

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Elise Watson @ewatson.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

#earlymodern #bookhistory Workshop Call for Papers: Women’s Professional Networks in the Early Modern Book Trade, University of Edinburgh 6-7 May 2027 Please feel free to share with anyone who might be interested!

Call for Papers
Women’s Professional Networks in the Early Modern Book Trade
University of Edinburgh
6-7 May 2027

Over the past two decades, women’s book history and feminist bibliography have exploded with renewed interest. Even so, women’s work is still to an extent seen as an exception or curiosity. It examines them from a gender history perspective, asking to what extent their relationships were influenced or determined by constructions of femininity. Proposals should therefore involve a dimension of gender analysis beyond simply the inclusion of female subjects.

This conference will seek to explore (but is not limited to) to the following themes and questions:

*Gendered Networks. To what extent were professional book trade networks gendered? How did these networks intersect with other types of women’s networks, whether they be familial, friendly, religious, political, or intellectual?
*Identity and Representation. Did women express professional solidarity with other women, and how did this manifest? How did women’s self-representation in imprints and paratext differ from men’s?
*Legal and Structural Considerations. In what ways were women’s professional networks dependent on legal structures of inheritance in their region, or participation in guilds? How did these networks stretch across economic and class divisions?
*Digital Approaches. Can digital humanities tools such as network visualisation effectively help document these relationships?

The conference will also host the launch of a new collaborative database sourcing biographical information about women in the early modern book trade.

Contributions will be published in a volume of conference proceedings, to be submitted by the end of 2027.

Proposals for papers of maximum 20 minutes, including title, an abstract of up to 300 words, and a biography of up to 150 words should be sent to Dr Elise Watson, elise.watson@ed.ac.uk, by 20 December 2026. While all papers will be delivered in person, virtual attendance will be available as well.

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I am having One Of Those Weeks so imma post random things from work that have made me happy, like these lying Victorians

Cute lil page of an alphabet book with an illustration of an orchid with bees in the flowers, which says “O is the orchis, named from the bee”

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John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

They ONLY truly British way to watch the eclipse btw, is via a Big Jet TV livestream from Heathrow. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaS...

youtube.com

LIVE: Solar Eclipse at Heathrow Airport

YouTube video by BIG JET TV

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Leigh Walton @leighwalton.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

perhaps the most charming consequence of the printing press in early modern Europe is the rise of broadsheet posters — which could announce news ranging from "enormous fire seen in the heavens" to "Mr. Höfler grew a weird cabbage"

a 1561 broadside poster with a hand-colored illustration of flames descending from the clouds toward a village while people look upwards in amazement. The headline reads "Ein grausamb/ vnd erschröcklich wunderzeychen/ so am 28. tag Decembris im LX. Jar/ zů Eckelßheym ein Meyl wegs von Forchheym geschehen ist" (A horrible and terrifying miracle, which occurred on 28 December 1560, at Eggolsheim, a mile away from Forchheim). The lengthy text below describes a huge flame seen in the sky (presumably the Northern Lights) and uses three biblical references to interpret the event as a warning from God and encourage readers to seek God's mercy. The credited printer is Georg Merckel. It's about 40cm or 16 inches tall. From the Wickiana collection at Zentralbibliothek Zürich

a 1553 broadside poster with hand-colored illustration of a big cabbage. The headline begins "Ein tröstliches vnd wunderbarliches Gewechs das warhafftig vor augen ist" (a comforting and miraculous growth that is truly before our eyes) and the caption explains that a multi-headed white cabbage was found in Thon (on the northern outskirts of Nuremberg) on Mr. Höfler's farm, which was interpreted as a sign from God for a bountiful year. The credited printer is Steffan Hamer. It's about 40cm or 16 inches tall. From the Wickiana collection at Zentralbibliothek Zürich

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Frog and Toad Bot @frogandtoadbot.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

“I cannot remember any of the things that were on my list of things to do. I will just have to sit here and do nothing,” said Toad.

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

local massage place has a new booking system with a chatbot that overrode my audiobook this might be too much to cope with

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Lynne M. Thomas 🏳️‍🌈🚀🦄 📜 @lynnemthomas.com · 07/08/2026

And keep in mind that librarians have been yelling about this for literal decades.

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Buckinghamshire Archives @bucksarchives.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

If you'd like something even more dangerous, our archive is so old that we don't use these fancy modern rolling stacks. Ours are attached to a motorised chain that runs the length of the room. This means sometimes they like to move by themselves just a little, enough to keep you on edge.

Rolling stacks in the archive with some lovely old archive boxes on them. On the right of the image you can see the handles that have to be pulled to move the stacks, activating the connection with the chain beneath the floor.

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I particularly appreciated how they managed to make the ballot text for amendment 4 obscure the fact that they wanted to keep the easier procedure for legislature-sponsored amendments.

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

my favorite sign on the compactors at work:

Printer paper sign that says “please check compactors for ladders or stools before closing aisles!”

someone has scrawled “botanists” in with a caret after ladders

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Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Just lovely putti dissecting a dog lying on a table in 1729, nothing to see here...

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Biodiversity Pics @biodiversitypix.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

🦎 The natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands: . London: printed for C. Marsh [etc.]1754.. [Source]

Illustration from 1754 showing a brown iguana with textured skin and small spines along its back, perched on a branch of a fruit-bearing tree. The branch has large, green leaves with prominent veins and a single large, pear-shaped fruit hanging from it. The iguana grips the branch with sharp claws, and the image is rendered with fine detail and subtle shading, typical of natural history drawings from the era. The background is plain, emphasizing the animal and plant. Labels "Lacertus Ind." and "Anna" are visible near the bottom, indicating species names or classifications.

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Rebecca @jeybecques.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

oh it is a Monday sort of monday today

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