iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 01/10/2026

Someone at Bjorn should really check the emails they're sending out, because this isn't message they probably want.

Screenshot of an email from the Bjorn language-learning app which says "Your Bjorn usage ranked in the top 11% of all users", with 0 minutes of use over the last month.

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 24/09/2026

my theory about the Voynich Manuscript is that whoever wrote and illustrated it was just on a very very long phone call

A double-page spread from the Voynich Manuscript, showing text and illustrations.

100

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 21/09/2026

Got one of those "updated T&Cs" emails today (September 21st). It apparently comes into force on September 15th, so it seems I've already agreed to it before I knew anything was happening.... Doesn't seem to be anything controversial in it, but what if there was?

Screengrab from an email, which reads: "The updates take effect on September 15th. You don’t need to take any action today."

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 14/09/2026

Here's a quick calculation of the total donations to the five national UK parties from July 2024 til Sep 2026, as registered on the Electoral Commission website. Reform's total donations are about 45% of the entire total, and their average donation size is 9 times that of the next highest (Labour).

Table showing total donations to Reform UK at £110m (Conservatives £56m and Labour £52m). Average donation to Reform is £257k as against Labour £30k and Tories £23k.

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 11/09/2026

It's impressive that OpenAI have managed to settle one of the Millennium Problems by proving that a fluid can form a singularity. But what blew my mind was this sentence

screengrab from the OpenAI report which reads: "We used a system of coordinating agents powered by our internal model. The agents had access to tools such as the ability to read from *a cached version of the internet* and the ability to run code."
(My emphasis.)

101

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 02/09/2026

Always a good idea to proof-read things and ask yourself: "Is it realistic that anyone is planning to build a data centre 9 times the area of London, in London?" That said, I wouldn't put it past the AI bros, given time...

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 13/08/2026

but let's build more fucking data centres and drill baby drill

Screengrab from the Met Office website: "Latest heatwave peaks with 38.1°C recorded [...] making it the 5th hottest day on record in the UK"

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 13/08/2026

Really do wonder why so many of these people are happy to lose their £500 deposits, just to make a point that will inevitably get lost in the Binface/Cuntface battle

A list of all the candidates standing in the 2026 Clacton by-election, led by Nigel Farage and Count Binface

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 12/08/2026

This was about as good as it got where we were

The solar eclipse as seen from a field in England. Partially hidden behind some moody clouds.

020

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 17/07/2026

I made this one for Linkydink, but here it is without the tediously mandatory "what I learned about b2b sales" stuff. A quick comparison of IMAX vs other formats, for The Odyssey.

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 08/07/2026

People of Clacton: You know what you have to do. At least you know the bins would be collected on time.

Headline from the Independent newspaper: "Nigel Farage latest: Clacton by-election given green light as Reeves refuses to block Reform leader ‘arguing with a bin’

Farage formally steps down but by-election turns to farce as Count Binface emerges as Reform UK leader’s main rival"

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 24/06/2026

Going to start describing anything made with AI as a "token effort"

Screengrab of a story from 404 Media: "The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI" By Joseph Cox • 24 Jun 2026

062

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 18/06/2026

seems our new alien overlords also subscribe to the new yorker

Email from the New Yorker: "It's going to be a great year. Dear Gaaaaabpftiqdhgnukjlqsrgw0my6xjwptjhi3kpqugz2d0k1gbp63jgnxz6xrrfeymjmj9ouea48dqpnr5kie0mkximgg-vtg==, Thank you for your continued support of The New Yorker..."

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 15/06/2026

Even Bloomberg doesn't make this sound like something to celebrate. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Text from Bloomberg: "Just how rich is a trillionaire? A billion dollars is hard to grasp: enough to spend $27,000 a day over a 100-year lifetime. A trillion dollars is practically impossible to imagine — equivalent to about $27 million per day for a century.
Another way to put it: A trillion one-dollar bills stuffed under a very large mattress would weigh about 2.2 billion pounds (1 million metric tons). With a payload capacity of 100 tons, SpaceX’s massive new Starship V3 would need 10,000 flights to put that money into orbit."

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 15/06/2026

Hands up if you think this is an obscenity.

The top spot of the Bloomberg Billionaires list as of 15 June 2026, showing Elon Musk at number one with a net worth of $1.11 trillion, up $490 billion this year.

100

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 09/06/2026

love it when a website unintentionally shortens something the wrong way

a screenshot of a title from a library music site which reads "Happy Birthday - Grab your Cock", the "...tail" having been chopped off by the UI

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 22/05/2026

Breaking: World's 10 Richest Billionaires Now Worth More Than Poorest 50% of Billionaires

A screengrab of https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/ from 22 May 2026, showing the top 20 billionaires' net worths: only the bottom two are worth less than $100bn

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 22/04/2026

Who could possibly have predicted this

A headline from Bloomberg: "Anthropic’s Mythos Model Is Being Accessed by Unauthorized Users"

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 15/04/2026

Even worth eating their shitty cookies for. Expect a pro-EU op-ed from the DM very soon....

A reader poll from the Daily Mail which asks "should Britain rejoin the European Union?" 83% of votes currently say "yes"

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 13/04/2026

Is this another example of vibecoding in action from @theguardian.com? It's on the android app.

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 08/04/2026

A movie couple who would definitely have a podcast

John Michael Smith and Elizabeth Banks as the two commentators in the 2012 film Pitch Perfect

020

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 05/04/2026

Hoo, my little pretty one, my pretty one / When you gonna give me some -

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 30/03/2026

I mean, they've already sentenced tens of thousands of Palestinians who hadn't been convicted of anything to death, without bothering to run it past anyone, so this feels a bit cart before the horse

Headline from the Guardian newspaper: "Israel passes law to give death penalty to Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks"

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 17/03/2026

Writing tutors: on no account use adverbs F Scott Fitzgerald: la la la I can't hear you

An excerpt from The Great Gatsby demonstrating the use of four adverbs within ten lines of text

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 24/02/2026

I don't think we give local councils enough credit

Screen grab from a post on (presumably) a council website. A commenter complains: "Funny you put Ramadan and Eid up first". The council replies that those events were listed in chronological order, the dates of Lent and Ramadan were determined by the council of Nicaea (325AD) and the phases of the moon, and notes "Bedford Borough Council holds no authority over the Council of Nicaea and was not responsible for the creation of the moon 4.53 billion years ago".

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 22/02/2026

typically, no penny sweets available

A screen grab from a shopping cart, total £64.99, which reads "You are £0.01 away from free delivery"

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 10/02/2026

Just been busted by the HMRC site, how can it tell?

A screengrab taken from the HMRC website which reads: "For your security, we signed you out. You have not done anything for 15 minutes."

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 06/02/2026

This sounds great, but Spotify are such bastards these days that I can't help but feel a little bit cynical about what the end game might be

An article from The Bookseller from Feb 5 2026, headlined "
Spotify branches into physical books through Bookshop.org partnership". The text reads: "

Spotify has partnered with Bookshop.org to enable listeners in the US and the UK to purchase physical books via the Spotify app, connecting audiobook discovery with physical ownership.

According to Spotify, the partnership aims to strengthen the existing ecosystem by supporting indie bookshops – not to replace traditional retail channels – while enabling listeners to discover different formats.

Bookshop.org will handle pricing, inventory and fulfilment of any order made through Spotify.

Moreover, the platform is launching a feature called Page Match, which will allow readers to scan a page of a printed or e-book using their phone, via the Spotify app, to instantly continue the audiobook at the moment they left off, and scan again later to see the exact passage where they should resume reading on the page.

These features are designed to help readers "stay with books for longer", as the company’s vision is to make reading "personalised, flexible and built to move fluidly across formats".

Page Match is available to all Spotify audiobook listeners on most English-language titles, with plans to expand over time. Premium subscribers can begin using the feature from tomorrow (6th February) and it will also be fully rolled out to all audiobook users by 23rd February.

The Audiobook Recaps feature – which summarises the part of the book that a user has already listened to and enables them to re-engage with the story without needing to re-listen – will also be rolled out to Android users in the spring. The feature was first introduced on iOS in November 2025."

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 04/01/2026

My ironymeter has just exploded reading "Forum of the International Anti-Globalist League"

News article from The Guardian dated 4 Jan 2026 reads:

The head of a leading British far-right group spoke at a summit of European extreme nationalist groups convened in Russia by an influential oligarch linked to Vladimir Putin, it can be revealed.

The revelation has led to renewed concern among MPs over the Kremlin’s links to extremist groups and its attempts to disrupt democracy and sow societal divisions in the UK.

The event in St Petersburg was addressed by Mark Collett, a longstanding far-right activist and founder of Patriotic Alternative, which attempted to exploit the summer of unrest outside asylum hotels in Britain.

A range of groups from across Europe, including some far-right ideologues from France and other countries, also attended the inaugural gathering of the Forum of the International Anti-Globalist League.

020

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 04/12/2025

Doctor Who should've just stuck to trying to make time go in the right direction again

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 16/11/2025

OK I know it's kind of clever to sell something Stranger Things-y for 11 money units, but it's a tube of toothpaste, we're in a cost of living crisis, and this is a Superdrug, not Fortnum and bloody Mason

A photo of some Stranger Things-branded toothpaste in a Superdrug in the UK, with a price tag of £10.99

030

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 18/10/2025

Uncle Colm from Derry Girls

Uncle Colm and Sister George Michael from the sitcom Derry Girls

0282

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 17/10/2025

i have this one behind my monitor. When i've got the time to design it properly i might get round to framing it

crappy a4 printed poster stuck to the wall with blu-tak, which reads "WHY NOT NOW"

130

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 17/10/2025

OK, that's it, I'm done here, someone else can tidy up

An article from GQ magazine with the headline: "I Taped My Mouth Shut for 100 Days to Get a Better Jawline"

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 17/10/2025

Birdie-hatching season is getting earlier every year

A cracked golf ball, its innards missing, lying on the grass

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 08/10/2025

Experimenting with ComfyUI and my god it's soul-destroying. Feels like trying to create something while wearing oven gloves. It doesn't have the same exciting feel as learning traditional software, where you can follow a tutorial and get predictable results: it's unpredictably different every time

The user interface of a typical ComfyUI video generation workflow, showing interconnected nodes in a browser window

120

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 11/09/2025

this seems to sum up freelance life right now

A screenshot of a freelance job site, claiming "10,000+ Jobs Available". The filters are set to "show all". The result is "No jobs found"

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 09/09/2025

HUMAN artists, use only one piece to convince people to follow you

A large format wall print of David Bowie on stage at Glastonbury 2000, featuring the lyrics of all the songs from his set. One of one

Close-up of a large format wall print of David Bowie on stage at Glastonbury 2000, featuring the lyrics of all the songs from his set. One of one

020

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 09/05/2025

What's the probability that this crashes into the Kremlin, Donnie Darko-style? link: www.newscientist.com/article/2479...

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 27/01/2025

Photoshop tip: when using the clone brush, consider regularly changing where you're cloning from, so you don't get repeated patterns that make your image look fake.

A photo of a fence, made of slats of wood sliced from the same log

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 04/12/2024

Who's to say where we might be right now if the first petition had changed the politics.

Number Crunching image from Private Eye, 4 December 2024:
2m signatures on petition for a general election at time of PMQs last week, to which Kemi Badenoch responded by urging PM's resignation...
6.1m signatures on petition to revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU in 2019, to which Badenoch responded, 'We run the country based on elections not petitions'

120

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 29/11/2024

these captchas are getting sneaky

030

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 26/11/2024

Quick behind-the-scenes lookdev for a thing I'm working on. There's a lot of "oh god no that looks terrible" before I'll even show this to a client, and it's not there yet!

000

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 19/11/2024

Greetings from a very snowy dog walk in the park. Well, snowy for the UK, at least.

010

Nick Hill @nickhill.me · 13/07/2023

He's forgotten which ex-partner's birthday he set it to

000