iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

DK

@mrcottonsox.bsky.social

70 followers 135 following 44 posts

Posts Replies Media

DK @mrcottonsox.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Books read in May 2026 - all fantastic

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa and Any Human Heart by William Boyd.

DK @mrcottonsox.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

This extract from “Clea” by Lawrence Durrell describing the growing of homunculi suggests #smallprophets is well researched…

Extract from “Clea” by Lawrence Durrell:
‘Now this Baron - whom you would certainly find a strange and imposing figure, heavily bearded and with big teeth like the seeds of a corn-cob - this Baron had... ah! my dear Balthazar, had actually produced ten homunculi which he called his "pro-phesying spirits". They were preserved in the huge glass canisters which they use hereabouts for washing olives or to preserve fruit, and they lived in water. They stood on a long oaken rack in his studio or laboratory. They were produced or "patterned", to use his own expression, in the course of five weeks of intense labour of thought and ritual. They were exquisitely beautiful and mysterious objects, floating there like sea-horses. They consisted of a king, a queen, a knight, a monk, a nun, an architect, a miner, a seraph, and finally a blue spirit and a red one! They dangled lazily in these stout glass jars. A tapping fingernail seemed to alarm them. They were only about a span long, and as the Baron was anxious for them to grow to a greater size, we helped him to bury them in several cartloads of horse-manure. This great midden was sprinkled daily with an evil-smelling liquid which was prepared with great labour by the Baron and his Turk, and which contained some rather disgusting ingredients. At each sprinkling the manure began to steam as if heated by a subterranean fire. It was almost too hot to place one finger in it. Once every three days the Abbé and the Baron spent the whole night praying and fumigating the midden with incense. When at last the Baron deemed this process complete the bottles were carefully removed and returned to the laboratory shelves.’

DK @mrcottonsox.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Some intriguing recent charity shop finds

DK @mrcottonsox.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Very satisfying birthday haul

A pile of paperback novels by various authors.