iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 12h

Perhaps unpopular opinion: now that Christa Pike's execution was botched, she should be released. In every meaningful sense, her sentence has now been carried out.

aje.news

Tennessee death-row prisoner Christa Pike survives lethal injections

Lawyers say Pike was taken away from the prison in an ambulance and is being treated in hospital.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Labor in Victoria is now so worried about losing seats they're advertising in Medicare-green instead of Labor-red? #auspol #labor #greens

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Hot take on audiobooks: if you're not listening to fiction at around normal speed, you're missing a huge part of what makes them great: the art of storytelling. At 1.5–2x you'll follow the plot fine, but you lose the pacing, pauses, everything that makes a narrator's performance actually beautiful.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Ended up yesterday at Boroondara Cemetery in Kew, Victoria. One of the nicest garden cemeteries I've come across in Australia. The volunteers there do an enormous job keeping it all from being swallowed up by the greenery. #Melbourne #Victoria #Cemetery #Kew

Boroondara Cemetery in Kew, Victoria. Rows of historical headstones and monuments stretching up a gentle hill toward a sandstone Gothic Revival chapel visible among the trees in the background. Iron grave surrounds and a weeping tree are visible to the right.

An ornate marble tomb inside an open stone pavilion at Boroondara Cemetery. A reclining figure lies atop the tomb flanked by sculpted angels, one kneeling in grief. Above, a dramatic domed ceiling of deep red and orange stained glass in a feather or petal pattern floods the space with colour. Greek inscriptions run along the stone frieze.

Boroondara Cemetery in Kew, Victoria. A well-tended garden cemetery with headstones, tombs and monuments surrounded by low native plantings, herbs and flowering shrubs. Tall cypress trees and eucalyptus rise in the background under a partly cloudy sky.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

My Top 10 for Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books. Doing this made me realise how few Australian authors I've actually read (embarrassing after 15 years here) and how few female authors are on my list. Something to fix. #booksky #Top100AustralianBooks #RadioNational

A graphic showing "My Votes" for ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books, listing ten titles: A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, The Madding of Daniel O'Hooligan by Peter Wear, Cherrywood by Jock Serong, Talking To My Country by Stan Grant, The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Laguna, Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook, Machine Man by Max Barry, The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, Juice by Tim Winton, and Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

August Reading Summary. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern was the absolute highlight of the month. #booksky #books

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Finished: Ask Me Dust by John Fante. Bandini is vain, insecure, spiteful, occasionally kind and bloody exhausting to spend time with. Easy to see the Bukowski connection, though Fante feels less interested in cynicism for its own sake. I didn't love it, but I'm very glad I read it. #booksky #books

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and now Yayoi Kusama. The Arts are taking some hits. 😕

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Just Finished: Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook. Australian Outback Gothic, and a great one. A teacher gets stuck a couple days in a mining town and it nearly undoes him. Horrific, funny, oddly fond of the place it's damning. Highly recommend. #booksky

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I'm fine with most things in modern music but autotune remains my one old-man-yells-at-clouds moment. Even on a decent album like Oklou's Choke Enough, I just can't get past it. I know it's here to stay; some battles you just accept you've lost. #music #autotune

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Forgot last month's stats. Had a great month, without any duds. #booksky #storygraph

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Just finished The Rum Diary by Hunter S Thompson. Sparse prose, masculine aimlessness abroad. Closer to The Sun Also Rises than Fear and Loathing. Written before gonzo existed, you can feel what Thompson was about to become. Enjoyed it more than most Hemingway I've read. #booksky #books

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The only - and I mean only - good thing about Australia not being a republic yet is getting to humiliate a few other countries every four years. #commonwealthgames2026

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

The final cleanup of a long King's Dilemma legacy campaign. With the right crowd of five players this was an absolute joy. The storytelling, the great houses, all of it. We'll take a breather and play some other games before diving into Queen's Dilemma. #Boardgames #KingsDilemma

A large lit gaming table with a green felt surface, covered in the components of a completed King's Dilemma legacy campaign. Spread across the table are cards, tokens, wooden player trays, a central track board, a fantasy map, reference sheets and markers.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Standing behind the falls at Lower Kalimna in the Otways. Two hours from Melbourne and genuinely otherworldly. #Victoria #Waterfall #Otways

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Cabo Verde had more attempted shots on goal vs Spain than Argentina did #ESPARG #Worldcup

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Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Perfectly said. #WorldCup #FIFA

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

It's halftime at the World Cup. Americans are doing Americans things. Good time to do some chores for 30 minutes and turn the TV back on in half an hour later #ESPARG

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Count Binface is genuinely funny political commentary. Turns out the anti-establishment voice can be stolen: just make yourself more outside than the outsider. Nigel Farage is now the establishment with a seat, donors and media access. Binface has a bin on his head. The bit is winning.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

And she was right. VAR and some of the new rules in regards to intent are currently really ruining games.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Germany: this will go down as the worst penalty shootout in World Cup history. Netherlands: hold my beer. #WorldCup #WorldCup2026

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

The solution to crowds booing mid-game ad breaks in stadiums? Turn the music up louder. Truly we have peaked as an organisation, FIFA #WorldCup #FIFA

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Currently halfway through Katabasis. What I love about R.F. Kuang, whether it's Poppy War, Yellowface, Katabasis, is how deeply flawed her protagonists are. Sometimes actively unlikeable. But there's always a logic to the flaws. She explains without excusing. #booksky #rfkuang #katabasis

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Nice piece on Shay Leighton and how Tough Guy Book Club went from one pub in Collingwood to the biggest men's book club going. Proud to be part of it. #BookSky #Books #TGBC #ToughGuyBookClub goodreadingmagazine.com.au/article/shay...

goodreadingmagazine.com.au

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Jeremy Bratetich @jeremy.minimap.com.au · 19/06/2026

Fed Square at capacity for the Socceroos watch party in Melbourne. In the rain at 4AM

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Amazing how the same word can mean different things on each side of the pond. In the UK and AUS, "hydration" means drinking water. In the US, it means TV adverts.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I get the urge to torch the political duopoly and the lobbyist-media complex in Aus. Genuinely, same. But One Nation isn't an alternative, it's a different costume on it. Deregulation and gutted institutions just hand billionaires more leverage, not less. #AusPol #OneNation #AustralianPolitics

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

May was roadtrip month, so much more audiobook than physical reading, but some amazing novels! #booksky #books

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Tough Guy Book Club @toughguybookclub.com · 24/05/2026

“If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.” This month we are reading Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Grab a copy and get reading. #BookClub #Reading #BookQuotes

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Good turnout for the Xfac Mission Day at Sydney for the #Ingress anomaly. #missionday #sydney

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

One of my favourite things about travelling through small inland Australian towns: the historical museums. Which are often just "we had some rusting machinery so we put a fence around it." Free entry, obviously. #australia #smalltowns #victoria #roadtrip

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Kash Patel has just released pictures of the shell casings found at the White House Correspondence Dinner.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

If your take was "ANZAC Day is for all Australians, don't politicise it with a Welcome to Country" — I'd genuinely encourage you to look up what a Welcome to Country actually is. Then maybe don't say that again. #auspol #welcometocountry #anzac #anzacday

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voegizug @voegizug.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Years of discomfort vanished in seconds.

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

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Tough Guy Book Club @toughguybookclub.com · 02/04/2026

This month we are reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Grab a copy and get reading.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Yes. Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor. The perfect party leaders to win back those lost urban seats and female voters.

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Chiel G., a gentle cynic @nevele.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

No, dear Guardian columnist, this has already happened. You describe a sense of urgency, but the sooner you stop saying and thinking that 'this is not who we are as a country' and start to acknowledge that this is, in fact, exactly what the US is, the better.