iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Niall Smith

RJ Barker @rjbarker.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Like CATS? Like SPACE? Like MECHS? Like SHOOTING STUFF. Like QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ETHICS OF CONSENT IN UPLIFTING ANIMALS AND ALSO THE HEALING OF TRAUMA THROUGH KINDNESS Then, my friend, put the 6TH OF OCTOBER in your diary. Audio and EBOOK release of BEASTS OF THE WILD BLACK. (Tell everyone.)

A cat is looking out of a human space suit at you. That's what we call in the trade, a visual metaphor. Now comes the blurb.

Years ago, Deep Strike cadet Min Law was left behind during what was meant to be a routine operation. Though he survived, the resulting trauma almost ended his career. Now, as captain of the DST Thunberg, he is preparing to take his crew on a similar journey to a seemingly quiet world following a garbled distress signal. The mission is simple on paper: find the source of the call, offer aid, return home.

But nothing is simple in the Wild Black at the edges of the unexplored universe. As the crew of the Thunberg searches for the signal’s source, they find strange ships and corpses that shouldn’t be there. The mysteries begin to pile up. What happened out here? And why does some of the technology look horribly familiar?

Fortunately, Min’s team of animal counterparts is prepared for anything. The bear, Sitka Pete, is eight hundred pounds of loyal muscle. The rooks are quick and coordinated, perfect for reconnaissance. And the cats, Oz and Hinder, well, they’re just cats. But together they’re more than up for whatever the Wild Black can throw at them—even if this region isn’t quite so unexplored after all . . .

38830

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Vet: "What breed is he?" Me: "... Orange?" www.tom-cox.com/jim/

Our massive orange cat Jim at the vet's a couple of weeks ago (he's fine now, thankfully).

1832522

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Very probably the best photo I've ever taken of a 16th Century dovecote with a cow standing in front of it, surrounded by buttercups, looking like she has just dropped a debut album she is thoroughly proud of.

A cow, standing in front of the dovecote in Bruton, Somerset, about a month ago. Lovely town. Beautiful architecture. Had a chat with a really nice lady from an old farming family after I took this. Sadly quite a few stuck-up down-from-London snotbags live there these days and houses cost a fortune as a result.

11190144

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The Oxenham Arms pub in South Zeal, Devon, boasts the unusual distinction of having been constructed around two prehistoric standing stones. If you’re lucky and visit at the right time of day, as I did, you might also see the smaller of the two being recharged with sacred energy by the sun.

An ancient standing stone replenishes itself with the moorland winter sun, in a the dining room of a pub where I found out, to my disappointment, non-cash payments of under £10 are not permitted.

19566104

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

THREAD. A collection of photographs of excellent cattle I have met on walks. You will find the captions to each photo in the alt text.

A cow who is feeling happy because I have taken the photo it will use for the cover of its psychedelic debut LP which it feels confident will get a five out of five star rating in Rolling Stone magazine.

726061

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This is fantastic, and it shows what really matters. Not the short termist major publisher marketing machine that makes a book so unavoidable that it *has* to shift units (before often vanishing a few months later) but people who love books telling other people about those books.

3669

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I love this painting my mum, Jo, inspired by a cottage I used to rent in Devon. It feels so utterly evocative of the place, and the time - the 1930s - when the place was almost certainly at its cultural peak. If you read this, you'll probably understand why: www.tom-cox.com/the-lion-the...

A painting, with echoes of cubism, inspired by the slightly gothic cottage where I lived in the grounds of Dartington Hall, Devon, from early 2014 to the end of 2017. (If you've read my books Ring The Hill and 21st-Century Yokel this place will probably feel quite familiar.)

1580577

Reposted by Niall Smith

Joanne Harris @joannechocolat.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Turned down last week: 2 festivals with no budget for speakers 1 writing course with no budget for teachers 1 film project with no budget to option the book - plus they wanted me to write the screenplay. For free. Don't do it, kids. Don't work for free. Because to them, what's free is worthless.

532021400

Reposted by Niall Smith

Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It’s very simple. A reality TV host became dictator because he turned down a role for Sharknado 4 and that’s why the king of outer space, who cheats at Diablo, got to kill Africa. Now the economy is controlled by a sex cult that has something to do with Harry Potter fanfic because of robots.

15786352549

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Mandrake @tmandrake.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Today is Joe Kubert's birthday. I did a stack of short backups in the war books Joe edited back at the beginning of my career and each job was an education. Joe would correct my storytelling, pencils, inks as I turned the work in. This page, he pretty much just totally re-inked :) Thanks, Joe ❤️

29117

Reposted by Niall Smith

Dean Willetts @deanscomics.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Bob Rozakis, Rich Buckler & Bob Layton • The Secret Society of Super-Villains 7 🙂

1102

Reposted by Niall Smith

Dean Willetts @deanscomics.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Inventions of Tomorrow !

293

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hello new followers! I've removed the paywall from this piece, which is a chapter from my novel Villager, told entirely in the form of an online village message board. If you like it, you'll probably like the book. If you don't, you probably won't... www.tom-cox.com/the-village-...

tom-cox.com

The Village Message Board

Its authenticity was discredited because of his reputation, but also because he was quick with gin at the time and wearing an item of knitwear back to front.

821369

Reposted by Niall Smith

Oisín McGann @oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is brilliant. #SpeirGorm

0125

Reposted by Niall Smith

timoconnorbl.bsky.social @timoconnorbl.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Carney telling the European Parliament that what's needed is an alliance - his word, repeated - where nobody gets to tell the EU and Canada what to do. Good *LORD*. And met with a standing ovation. Well, that's that for the previously-existing form of Atlanticism, then.

26898240

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Some people use "Never heard of it!" is an insult. I've never got this. Loads of things virtually nobody has ever heard of are brilliant. Not all things virtually everybody has heard of are total dogshit, but five decades of empirical research has demonstrated to me that a vast number of them are.

814216

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Just editing a new piece for www.tom-cox.com which I'll put up in a day or so (you can subscribe if you want to get it in your inbox). It's about my time as a teenage fanzine writer in the mid-90s, how that got me a job as a music journalist, and why I now feel more fondly towards the fanzine stuff.

I possess physical copies of none of the reviews printed under my name during my eighteen month tenure as a writer for the NME as all of them went on a bonfire many years ago. This has never been a regret because those reviews were not written by me; they were written by a stiff, frozen creature slightly resembling me, but with bulging eyes that screamed “IMPOSTOR!” and fingers ever-trembling at the prospect of being found out, who, over a series of days, after studying the reviews and in-jokes of his fellow journalists, would force sentences awkwardly together until they made some vague form of sense, then get paid £20something quid for his effort. Whatever naivety and arrogance and unnecessary harshness my writing in my fanzine contains, what you can always say about it is that it was fully, freely, truly the voice of the idiot who wrote it. Because of this, I do regret that I now only posses two and two thirds issues of it owing to the fact that the other three and a third issues were eaten by mice in a stone dog shed outside my mum and dad’s cottage just before the turn of the Millennium. It could be argued that what survived is from the “better” era: by issue four I was spending money on taking it to a printing shop with a fancy photocopier (rather than just borrowing the more ordinary one at the school where my mum worked), paying budding artists in CDs to do the cover and getting help on spelling and grammar from a girlfriend with a far better education than my own. But I’d love to see those scraggy, amateur, playful early issues: the ones that were made with even less pressure or expectation.

0253

Reposted by Niall Smith

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD @nnedi.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Every email I get concerning this whole Anthropic Copyright Settlement is rage bait for me. To continually be reminded of their theft and the fact that all they can offer are pennies (imho) is INFURIATING. I don't WANT or NEED their money, I want them to remove my books from their AI's software!

224250

Reposted by Niall Smith

Nnedi Okorafor, PhD @nnedi.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

These people think that everything is about money. That everything is transactional. NO. They STOLE work (which I'd have never sold to them in a million years) that took me so many YEARS and sweat to create to construct something that tries to imitate and monetize what I do. Fuck them.

1879

Reposted by Niall Smith

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 11/09/2026

Publicity shot of Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke for an unfinished episode of Granada’s series. dduane.tumblr.com/post/8274480...

87515

Reposted by Niall Smith

Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 10/09/2026

Has anyone projected when we might reach Peak Stupid? Because intuitively it seems like we must be getting close.

10679

Reposted by Niall Smith

Miracle Man @kimota1977.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

#Comics Supreme #55 Published November 1997 by Awesome Entertainment

2142

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

If you could read the alt text and follow the link, that would be much-appreciated. Thanks. www.tom-cox.com

013637

Reposted by Niall Smith

Alex Jaffe “Alex Jaffe” Alex Jaffe @alexjaffe.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Someone asked me where this is from, or if it’s fan art. I have no idea, but I thought I’d ask if any of you guys recognize it

4313

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tade Thompson @tadethompson.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Behold: Cover reveal for ANTARA. The artist @alisonsampson.bsky.social talks you through the process of creating it. We were lucky to have one of my favourite artists. Kind words from @runalongwomble.bsky.social (who also teases a review!) . ANTARA is from @lunapress.bsky.social #AntaraNovel

149643

Reposted by Niall Smith

Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Nick Robinson on Today is literally talking about ‘legitimate concerns’ after second night of organised men dressed in black - sorry ‘protesters’ - mobilising en masse in another littoral town. This is how street fascism is normalised

19835351084

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I was 9 when I read Adrian Mole (& became obsessed with him). It was what made me want to write books. I tried to make 1983 the novel 8 or 9-year-old me would have wanted adult me to write. So when someone called it "Stranger Things rewritten by Sue Townsend and Kurt Vonnegut" that made me happy.

5873

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Can it hurt to give this one more nudge? Perhaps, slightly (because every time I do any self promotion I feel an irrepressible wave of nausea). But I'm going to do it anyway. Because it might bring a mistreated book to three or four new readers. And that's VERY much worth my while.

1420470

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

2000+ Americans have bought this book on import from the UK. Many of them have told me they love it. Meanwhile, the UK publishing industry: "I am sorry. We can't sell this book to an American audience. They will find it too British." FREE worldwide delivery here: blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pro...

My latest novel in its natural habitat on the Dorset coast

79537139

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

A big ask, no pressure & I know people have better things to do but if about 15-20 people buy this from Blackwell's in the next few hours it's likely I'd have the number 1 & 2 books in their chart & that might be enough to finally persuade an American publisher to get my books out over there...

45335177

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

How many Amazon reviews a book has is not the true measure of a book's success. How many celebrities mention a book is not the true measure of its success. Awards are not a true measure of its success. How people feel after writing the book or reading it is the true measure of a book's success.

41286

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

"Only" 1000 books signed today (with the help of my faithful assistant). I'll be driving these up to the Blackwell's warehouse in Gloucester tomorrow in my ailing car. Wish me luck!

Me signing a copy of Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood, watched by my strawberry blonde cat Jim, who is hoping I will take a break to choose a record from the shelves behind us - preferably some mellow jazz, though not recorded post-1967.

1926930

Reposted by Niall Smith

Broken Frontier @brokenfrontier.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

You'll have had this from our TB pals but we'll pin it here too! Thought Bubble @thoughtbubbleuk.bsky.social Month 2026 is Coming to Broken Frontier – Here’s All the Information You Need to Submit Comics for Review or Secure a Potential Interview. www.brokenfrontier.com/thought-bubb...

brokenfrontier.com

Thought Bubble Month 2026 is Coming to Broken Frontier - Here's All the Information You Need to Submit Comics for Review or Secure a Potential Interview – Broken Frontier

Thought Bubble Month 2026 will once again provide you with the best TB-related coverage around. Details on being part of it here!

72720

Reposted by Niall Smith

Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 03/09/2026

Re-upping this, because as we all know you can announce things half a dozen times and still have your friends say "wait, why didn't you tell me?" :) My show. V exciting. (I did nothing, by the way, except write the book. All honours go to everyone else!)

1011632

Reposted by Niall Smith

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/09/2026

What if post-Trump America is even *worse*? 1/

A nuclear mushroom cloud wearing a giant Trump wig. A decaying American flag fills the sky behind it.

20592250

Reposted by Niall Smith

Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

“Reform.... present themselves as the anti-establishment insurgents, but banning independent journalists like me from party conference isn’t anti-establishment. It’s the establishment playbook.” Am taking being barred from Reform conference as badge of honour! www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

theguardian.com

Reform UK bans three journalists who have investigated party from its conference

Guardian City editor Anna Isaac, investigative reporter Peter Geoghegan and broadcaster Michael Crick refused entry

24551206

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

What I love about that six word Hemingway story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is that in those few words we instantly grasp the sadness of what it is trying to tell us: the baby was so freakishly massive when it was born that it could never wear the shoes its parents had bought for it.

1937458

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

While collecting pizza last night my wife texted from the restaurant "They're playing 'Carry On My Wayward Son' by Kansas in here" but the text didn't come through until this morning when I was up and she was still in bed, which added quite a different dimension to her report.

425632

Reposted by Niall Smith

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Because @breakthroughbook.bsky.social is a tiny new publisher making its way bravely out into the world there's no warehouse for my new book (apart from my garage) but I have been delivering copies to a few favourite independent shops, including the brilliant @foldedorset.bsky.social in Shaftesbury.

Me outside Folde Books in Shaftesbury with a copy of Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood.

310512

Reposted by Niall Smith

George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Every Saturday, in a wine bar called the Cork and Bottle, Margaret Thatcher’s researchers and leader writers and columnists from the Times and Telegraph met staff from the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs. Over lunch, they “planned strategy for the week ahead.”

121353