iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Mike McAndrew

Brian Bilston @brianbilston.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I’m off to Edinburgh today ahead of my seven shows at this year’s Fringe. As ever, my train ‘journey’ has got off to a spectacular start.

The Poet Now Standing at Platform 3A

The poet now standing at platform 3A
is the delayed 16.40 speaker for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,
calling at: Longwaite; Anguish; Bleakside;
Much Wallowing-in-the-Mire; Little Hope;
Hangdog Manor; High Dudgeon; Irk; Fuckham; Mope;
Doldrum Parkway; Wearyside Central; and Wits End.

We are sorry to announce this poet is delayed
by approximately one hour and fifteen minutes.
Please listen for further announcements.
We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause.

The poet now standing at platform 3A
is the delayed 16.40 speaker for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Please note, this poet will now NOT be stopping at:
Great Ease; Serenity Junction; or Arrival-on-Time.

This poet has been delayed by approximately one hour
and forty-eight minutes.
Customers are advised to stand well back from the poet,
who’s on edge.
Please listen for further announcements.
We apologise for the disruption to your journey today.

The poet currently standing at platform 3A
is the delayed 16.40 speaker for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
This poet consists of nine elements:
oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, tedium, delirium,
odium, caffeine, shortbread, and despair.

A trolley service, featuring mild palpitations and a selection
of hot and cold sweats, is trundling through this poet.
This poet has been delayed by approximately two hours
and twenty-three minutes.

Please listen for further disruptions.
We apologise for the announcements to your journey today.

There has been a platform altercation.
The agony at platform 3A does not stop here.
The 16.40 speaker for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
has been disrupted.
Customers should not bore the poet at this time.

The platform now standing on poet 3A has been delayed
by approximately three hours and forty-two minutes.
We apologise for the apologies to your disruptions today.

If you hear an announcement that doesn’t sound right,
seek your stash. Or text a local dealer on 61016
to help you through this.
He’ll sort it. Seek it. Pay it. Snorted.

Please note that for your safety and comfort
this station operates a no trains policy.

The fringe now standing at festival 16.40 is the delayed
3A platform for the Edinburgh poet.
We are sorry to announce that this poet has been waylaid
by approximately four hours and twenty-two minutes.
Will passengers intending to travel on this service
make their way to the platform as the poet is now ready to jump.

Please note that longings must not be left unattended
at this station. Any hope left unattended
may be removed without warning, or destroyed.

This is a customer announcement.
The 16.40 speaker for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
has terminated here.
A bard replacement service will be in operation.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Brian Bilston

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404 Media @404media.co · 17/08/2026

SCOOP: 404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it. What did we find? It ended up at an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. Yes. This is literally the logo outside the Amazon warehouse door. Read now:

404media.co

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

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Richard Murphy @richardjmurphy.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Why pick on Chris Packham? www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2026/08... The Times has mounted an attack on Chris Packham, saying he is not autistic. Why? What do they hope to gain? And is this quite sinister?

taxresearch.org.uk

Why pick on Chris Packham?

As I have already noted today, The Times has chosen to question whether Chris Packham is really autistic, despite the fact that he has a diagnosis saying that he is. I have already discussed some aspe...

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Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

If true, we get 3 things. None good. 1. The direct negative growth/fiscal impacts of cutting immigration. 2. A Chancellor who prioritises their own personal/ideological obsessions over the UK economy. 3. A PM who through myopia or weakness chooses 1 and 2.

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Catherine Stuart @catty8.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

There's a bar chart, courtesy of: www.facebook.com/share/14hP4M...

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Steve Peers @stevepeers.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Are...are they going to change this law via use of a Henry VIII clause

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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 22/03/2026

Buckle up! This is gonna cost us. Worth it tho. 💰 💵 - www.ft.com/content/4696...

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Sam Kunti @samindrakunti.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

FIFA's idea of disciplining the Israeli FA.

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The National @scotnational.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Tomorrow's front page 📰 Poll finds majority oppose use of Scottish airports by US to wage war on Iran

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Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

We also need to know whether AI was used to select the target. WaPo is reporting Anthropic and Palantir tech were used to identify 1000 targets in Iran 24 hours. Who vetted those targets? Who pays for errors? It's possible they weren't involved in this strike but this we need to know.

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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

I've also been struck by this. The Trump regime is normalising the decapitation of governments it dislikes by assassinating or abducting their leaders. There are good reasons why states have tended not to make this a norm.

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Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

The real threat to democracy doesn't come from 'family voting'. It comes from the losing side refusing go accept they've lost

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Greg Olear @gregolear.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

One of the best things I’ve read in a while:

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

The events of the last 24 hours show why it's important to build functional verification structures in public and counterpublic spaces to resist the authoritarian erosion of our democratic systems, as described in this thread.

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Brian Bilston @brianbilston.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Annual reminder of how many days there are in each month.

Mnemonic

Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
Unless a leap year is its fate,
February hath twenty-eight.
All the rest hath three days more,
excepting January,
which hath six thousand,
one hundred and eighty-four.

Brian Bilston

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Paul Brand @paulbrand.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

BREAKING: Explosive new poll for ITV Cymru Wales puts Plaid Cymru surging ahead of Reform UK in May’s Welsh elections. Plaid 37% Reform 23% Greens 13% Labour 10% Tories 10% Lib Dems 5% Plaid could form majority with Greens on this basis, with Labour out of govt for first time since devolution.

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Edwin Hayward @edwinhayward.com · 10/11/2025

So long as Labour hold firm on Brexit, all their bleating about having been dealt an atrocious hand by the Tories is so much hot air. Support for "Make Brexit Works" holes that argument below the waterline. It is ludicrous to be contemplating tax rises, but not trying to undo Brexit.

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …

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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

First we take Manhattan.

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The National @scotnational.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

It seems a good day to repost this rousing Michael Sheen speech for the Welsh football team ahead of the World Cup in 2022 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

Lam believes her policy would deport all of the proportion in pink - keeping the thin group in black - of the post-2021 legal migrant arrivals. (The draft legislation proposes similar thresholds/rules for all past grants too). She says jar is 3.5m people: an astonishing scale of mass deportations

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Dan Sohege @danielsohege.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

More I read of this piece the more I feel how few "experts" on neurodivergent individuals ever speak to us. It's hard enough to get reasonable accommodations as it is. Rather than reducing those available we should be working to increase them, including for adults. www.thetimes.com/article/acda...

Extra time in exams ‘unhealthy' for children with ADHD and autism

Suzanne O'Sullivan, a neurologist, tells Cheltenham Literature Festival that 'accommodating' pupils could do more harm than good

Peter Chappell

Friday October 17 2025, 8.15pm, The Times

Extra time in exams is "not healthy" for children with disorders, a neurologist has said.

Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan warned that it was the wrong approach to “accommodate” children at schools by giving them 25 per cent additional time to complete their answers.

She said it was “really concerning" that an emphasis had been placed on “accommodating" pupils with disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism, rather than addressing the root cause of a condition, or questioning whether a pupil has it at all.

“Your child gets a diagnosis and they get extra time in exams, for example. I feel that isn't a very healthy way forward. I think that we should be looking at interventions rather than accommodations,” O'Sullivan, the author of Age of Diagnosis: How the Overdiagnosis Epidemic is Making Us Sick, told the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

"What accommodation does, it says, well, we'll give you extra time in exams so you can manage better, but there's going to be a point in the future when extra time will not exist, and by giving it to young people in school I feel like you're creating first of all the impression that they need the extra time, that they perhaps cannot learn any other way.

"You're also setting up an idea that the world will accommodate them. Let's face it, the world is not going to continue to accommodate people.

"We really need to look at what we're doing when we identify children with problems. We should be helping them to work within a messy, difficult world, not setting them up to believe that the world will change to accommodate them."

Surge in ADHD diagnoses attributed to TikTok

O'Sullivan said that the adult world was at risk of telling young people that the "difficulty as you face your A-levels is to do with a neurodevelopmental brain abnormality when there's no scientific evidence for a neurodevelopmental brain abnormality in people

with mild autism or ADHD".

She added: "Imagine how difficult that is if you are defining a person according to a brain abnormality in teenagers, how difficult that will be to overcome in the future."

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Zoe Gardner @zoejardiniere.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

We’re being asked by half the media & politicians to swallow the idea that known racist football hooligans should be allowed to rampage through our cities for NO OTHER REASON than that they happen to be Israeli. Fuck. That.

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Mike McAndrew @mikemca.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Is it stating the obvious that as so many people know the truth about Gaza, they will simply never vote for Starmer in 2029 for him to be able to win. Without something transformative (and ex-Starmer) like PR or rejoining SM Labour are deservedly completely fucked. All very Biden 2021.

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

It’s a perfect storm; 1. Defunded journalism creating a vacuum that is cheaply filled by unchallenged bias. 2. Algorithms promoting anger 3. New undetectable ways of buying political control 4. Electoral politics having no resilience to cope with this. Unchecked, it ends in fascism. Not if. When.

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Mike McAndrew @mikemca.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Sarah is amazing! It’s not often you have your own world view so completely validated - and from the perspective of a different Continent. Important reading in these dark times.

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Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

Do not fall for secessionist propaganda or “Texas is invading Illinois”! Pay attention to who is saying this, who is screwing you over, and what their end goal is.

quote from book THEY KNEW about grim realities of secession in the US, written in 2021, published in 2022, applicable to now

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Keith Fitzgerald @keithfitzgerald.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

For those asking, this interview with @meredithmeredith.bsky.social was on stage at SXSW. Here's the whole interview: www.youtube.com/live/AyH7zoP...

youtube.com

The State of Personal Online Security and Confidentiality | SXSW LIVE

YouTube video by SXSW

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Dr Adrian McMenamin @adrianmcmenamin.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Calling something people in Northern Ireland will be required to have a ‘Brit card’ doesn’t sound sensible to me. Maybe it won’t be required in NI or maybe someone needs to spend 10 seconds thinking about these things before they blabber to the press.

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Dan Sohege @danielsohege.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

You know what, yeah, people have concerns. They're concerned about paying bills, renting or buying a house, buying food, getting an NHS appointment etc. None of that's down to migrants. If you attend a rally organised by Tommy Robinson, don't play the "legitimate concerns" card. You're a racist. 1/

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Alex Andreou @sturdyalex.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

I need you to understand what this country feels like right now for those of us who look different. I'm sitting here, trying to plan for Saturday, make sure I don't even need to go to the corner shop for milk, like it's Christmas Day or lockdown. Why? Because I live near where Yaxley-Lennon will 1/

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Edwin Hayward @edwinhayward.com · 01/09/2025

1 September 2025 is the day Labour went FULL REFORM. They're dead as a party. The next few years will be spent on twitching and rigor mortis, but they're done. Today was the finale. Astonishing. Who could have dared predict it when they swept to power with a massive majority just over a year ago?

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Ann Pettifor @annpettifor.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

It's 9pm .. and yet again BBCNews is once again leading the news agenda with a story about refugees - when there is no new 'news' on refugees... None whatsoever.

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

Much the largest UK protest on Friday was a Palestine solidarity protest in London at the Embassy of Israel, with a small pro-Israel protest. That isn't being covered as newsworthy by UK mainstream print/broadcast outlets who are following the smaller asylum protests www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/pr...

aa.com.tr

Pro-Palestine supporters protest outside Israeli Embassy in London to draw attention to Gaza famine

'Barbarity upon barbarity upon barbarity, and today from our government, nothing but further, empty words of condemnation,' says head of Palestine Solidarity Campaign - Anadolu Ajansı

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Tony Vaughan KC MP @tonyvaughanmp.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

🏳️‍⚧️🚨 New letter from MPs on trans rights & EHRC Consultation on the #ForWomenScotland ruling. I have written a letter to the EHRC to urgently raise concerns about the Draft Code of Practice consultation after the ruling. I am proud to say that 32 of my colleagues have signed it too.

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Mike McAndrew @mikemca.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Anyone imagining this is like Iraq 2003 and they will return to the fold is not reading the room. The last year in government with the power to act against that appalling slaughter means a HUGE amount of people will never vote for them again. Ever. They are deservedly completely fucked.

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Toby Earle 🇺🇦 @tobyontv.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

12 points to Gryffindor

Emma Watson banned from driving for speeding

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The Intellectualist @theintellectualist.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Carl Sagan was prescient.

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Mike McAndrew @mikemca.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

The flapping from our keeper at those Iceland goals is an eerie reminder of Stuart Kennedy in 1975. You can feel for the kid but he should be never be anywhere near Scotland again.

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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Since rail nationalisation is back in the news, here's an anti-nationalisation cartoon from the Sunday Pictorial in 1918.

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Neil Mackay @neilmackay.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

We are not an island of strangers, but I have become a stranger in my own country If this is Britain, I no longer recognise what it has become: a country of cruelty, of scapegoating, of hounding minorities and the weak My @heraldscotland.bsky.social column www.heraldscotland.com/politics/vie...

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Peter Foster @pmdfoster.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Labour's immigration announcement today is a reflection of the paucity of honest debate by BOTH political parties over the last decade on this issue. Labour has never made a counter-argument, or been honest about economic cost of immigration curbs, so it's stuck making Tory/Reform arguments 1/n

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Jonn Elledge @jonnelledge.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

"Even if it does work as a strategy for winning the next election, there’s a question: why bother?" A bit by me on the sheer, infuriating pointlessness of a Labour leadership that sees governing in a progressive way as a distracting from fighting the next election.

newstatesman.com

The government is stuck in campaign mode

Even with a large majority, policies are decided on popularity not principle.

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Chris Grey @chrisgrey.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

But this manifestly isn't a way to "counter" Reform. It's just an endorsement of Reform. If it's what Glasman believes, then he should simply join Reform. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

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West Country Voices @westcountryvoices.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Morgan McSweeney is wrong and is now effectively a facilitator for the UK's political slide towards full fat fascism. There is a progressive, kind, tolerant majority in the UK,abandoned by Labour and hampered by FPTP. Morgan McSweeney! You are the problem, not the solution.

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Noah Barkin @noahbarkin.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Rubio publicly criticizing an ally for cracking down on right-wing extremism. And Germany hitting back. We are in a new world

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