iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Cos by coincidence these are the German cities I happen to have visited in the last few years

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Yeah so I hear. Also kinda responsible for my favourite chain of restaurants in Germany, the Ständige Vertretung, the gimmick of which is that everyone missed Rheinland food after parliament moved to Berlin so it is the NRW unofficial consulate. I didn’t realise there are so few: www.staev.de

staev.de

Home

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…impact at all on the causes or prevalence of the crime. It was I guess a linear word cloud. I disapprove of past me and should’ve written something like ‘soliciting subs for a pretend magazine purporting to tackle knife crime by darting in front of commuters while shouting compliments’

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Oh, sorry, I meant to reply! The knife crime is not, alas, fake (tho numbers are falling iirc). The clipboard is to be fair a red herring. The fake bits are that the magazine is actually a magazine or that there is a social movement behind it, and that either the ‘magazine’ or ‘movement’ has any

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PS: I spent all of yesterday afternoon finding out how to recycle HDPE plastic at home rather than writing the effing thing I think will be fun and pleasurable to effing write while loathing myself and I don’t want to hear about how labels are limiting me when my brain can do that all by itself

Today’s resolution is not to mention my increasing irritation that people (who I think think that they are acting against identity politics) think that getting the four-letter diagnosis limits people. The actual disorder limits. The diagnosis allows us to start to mitigate its effects.

Oh hey thanks! What a nice surprise! And thanks for the year spent mostly in Düsseldorf and for all the times I somehow ended up in Köln. Send my love to Bottrop - I’ve never been, but I bet it’s pretty cool cos it’s twinned with Blackpool - and tell Bonn I’ll definitely make it there one day.

Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 21h

(Under-researched vibes-based observation to follow) this feels like a common failing of recent UK governments: not realising that once you’ve made your move the other guy gets his turn

Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Please enjoy one of my finest ever noun-as-adjective pile ups there

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Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Can someone PLEASE start offering some alternative money making opportunities to London’s charismatic youth so they can stop wasting their time with the fake knife crime clipboard magazine scams

www.slowtravelberlin.com @slowberlin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Reposted by Nikki Coates

gm to whoever created this #grammargraffiti on a church wall in neukölln 🫡 ☕️ #berlin #deutschfüranfänger

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Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

well of course the robot panopticon knows this but somehow I am disturbed that it knows this

Al Overview The London World Restaurant Project is a personal blog post and spreadsheet endeavor
created by blogger Nikki Coates in January 2018. a
Project Overview • The Inspiration: During a period of boredom and feeling like the UK was "sinking into
nativism," the author decided to start a tracking project. ®
• The Method: She downloaded a official list of UN-recognized countries. ® • The Goal: She spent several days compiling a comprehensive spreadsheet of restaurants
across London that served food native to each of those specific countries. The project was born purely out of curiosity and a desire for a distraction, as she noted at the time that she couldn't actually afford to go out and dine at the restaurants she was
researching. ®
If you are looking for specific details from her project, let me know if you would like me to:
• Find the full text or continuation of that specific blog post. • Search for any links to the spreadsheet or specific London restaurant recommendations she shared

Jacob Wolf Lefton @watermosaic.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Reposted by Nikki Coates

Art SOOTHES PAIN! Art is for KITCHENS! ART IS LIKE GOOD BREAD! ART IS CHEAP!

the why cheap art? manifesto
People have been thinking too long that art is a privilege of the museums & the rich. Art is not a business!
It does not belong to banks & fancy investors
Art is food. You can't eat it but it feeds you. Art has to be cheap & available to everybody. It needs to be everywhere because it is inside of the world.
Art soothes pain!
Art wakes up sleepers!
Art fights against war & stupidity!
Art sings halleluja!
Art is for kitchens!
Art is like good bread!
Art is like green trees!
Art is like white clouds in blue sky!
Art is cheap!
Hurrah!
Bread & Puppet Glover, Vermont 1984

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Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don’t go to see everyone’s best friend the walrus nearly as often as I’d like because 6 miles across SE London means 2 buses and anywhere between 60-90 min sitting on them. But yes, sure, West London. They will have to start building more Acton just to fit the stations in.

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Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

[…remembering before commenting that I deeply appreciate SSK, & that I’d still like to talk to someone at City Hall about misinformation. C’mon Nikki, bright eyes, smiling voice] sounds lovely! I wonder whether anyone would like to join me on a trip from Charlton to the Horniman for fun one day?

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Reposted by Nikki Coates

London is fine @londonisfine.co.uk · 04/10/2026

Plenty of time to get out and do something random in London today - you can get a suggestion here londonisfine.co.uk

londonisfine.co.uk

London is fine – …meaning just okay or sunny or refined or FINE

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Oh no - like the fox knows many small things (Warhol) and the hedgehog knows one big thing (t’other). I forget who said this tho

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Have just realised that one of the new buildings on Broadwick St is called Blockchain House and I am so embarrassed for our city

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London is fine @londonisfine.co.uk · 03/10/2026

Am sorry about him - doesn’t sound like you missed much tho tbh - but I am glad I now have this thought about Pollock & Warhol available to me. Like the fox and the hedgehog.

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Reposted by Nikki Coates

Hey hey hey! Autumn’s here, and so is the London is Fine randomiser! Want to get out and about but can’t decide where to go? Why not try our randomised suggestions of places that we know have made at least one person happy in the past? londonisfine.co.uk

londonisfine.co.uk

London is fine – …meaning just okay or sunny or refined or FINE

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Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is the visual equivalent of when people who have never in their lives considered metre or rhyme write parodies of Dr Seuss

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Colliding discourses make me realise that there’s a bunch of people in positions of influence insistent on attributing internality to LLMs that don’t seem to suspect that women have it too. (Yes I’m sure someone has said this before and better)

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Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

No, it’s no good, I’m still feeling sorry for myself. IV meds every four weeks! I’m also angry with myself that I can’t even sulk properly: I know I am lucky that I live in a time & place I can access these meds and that I don’t have to e.g. give up holiday time to get them. Still! Every 4 weeks!

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Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Otoh I may be a bit less likely to get dementia or heart disease so I suppose a day or two with fatigue and a sore arm is a fair price to pay

Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Well, I had a good run of vaccinations without side effects - five years maybe - and then the second dose of Shingrix caught up with me and I have slept the entire day. Woke to news from the NHS app that I now need to have infusions every 4 weeks rather than 8. Pfaugh.

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Sometimes I spot this happening and it feels like a loss. If I’m out of sorts with the world, it feels like none of those idiots understood me then, and I’m not even sure I understand me now. The idea felt bigger than this.

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What needs to happen is for the new idea to become an established piece of my mental furniture: inevitably this means simplifying it because you can construct something with 50 moving mental pieces but you cannot easily carry it around with you.

And so I always go through a phase where I despair of my communication skills, think no one is ever going to get the point of what I’m trying to achieve, feel very misunderstood by the world etc etc etc

But to feel satisfying to me, whatever the new idea is has to cohere with everything that contributed to it. And there is always always always a phase where I’m happy with this coherence but I can’t quite articulate what contributed to the idea and the various reasons why I think it’s right

It is very clear to me that whatever creativity I can lay claim to comes not as a slow build towards an idea but as sudden jerks and leaps and epiphanies. Normally these are the result of the juxtaposition of one idea with another, or with several

Please bear with me, I’m just going to think aloud for a minute about a pattern I have recognised in myself whenever I have to come up with a new way of doing things - or be creative, if you like

Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I haven’t even QT’d the Janice Turner thing, which I hope is evidence of some kind of personal growth. ‘You are not what you claim to be and how dare you?!?’ strikes once again tho.

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en.yukiguni-factory.co.jp

I particularly like the sound of the ‘Motivated! Pork bone Maitake’ (www.en.yukiguni-factory.co.jp/yukiguni-rec...) and the ‘Aroma of mushrooms 🎶 Meatball stew’ (www.en.yukiguni-factory.co.jp/yukiguni-rec...)

Motivated! Pork bone Maitake| YUKIGUNI FACTORY CO., LTD.

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en.yukiguni-factory.co.jp

Let’s say you, a normal and reasonable person, suddenly felt compelled to buy a pack of maitake mushrooms from Waitrose like this normal and reasonable person. What are you going to do with them? You could take a look at this amazing site: www.en.yukiguni-factory.co.jp/recipe/

Yukiguni Recipe | YUKIGUNI FACTORY CO., LTD. | The Power of Mushrooms, the Future World

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Yeah quite. Slight tangent but I wonder whether a lot of the wasted time, given differing ownership, responsibilities for volume mgmt etc is precisely cos the problem was never stated that way to anyone with design ownership. Opportunity costs of time spent on LHR3, Boris Island etc

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This is a comforting thought to me, because I think it’s easy to get vertigo when you consider the complexity. One response to this discomfort is to resort to broad ideas with the hope of a reset. These broad ideas might be millenarian or fascist or ‘rationalism’

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Today I am finding this thought reassuring: the human world - flows of information, liability, justice, relationships - has always been too complex for us to understand we just haven’t always understood that. I think.

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Sorry, espirit d’escalier got me. Also confused by ‘CDG-level airport’? LHR already handles ~a fifth more passengers in a year than CDG. Maybe there’s demand for 2 CDGs near London and if so, like people are saying, what’s wrong with expanding LGW?

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Canary Wharf doesn’t cause the restriction on the runway size but on types of approach. Other limitations that LCA works under relate to noise rather than more direct physical effects because there are a lot of people that live in East London! The political problems would not at all be easier here

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Reposted by Nikki Coates

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

10381692845

Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

No, expect you’re right! I mean it grabs attention… and I don’t imagine that anyone at the hotel is going to stumble on this and start sobbing because they’ve lost the 51yo snobby mature student market. Someone ought to do a paper on the semiotics of this.

Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

So I believe. See what I miss by not spending more time on the Euston Rd!

Nikki Coates @nikkicoates.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Oh man if it’s the latter I no longer have impostor syndrome about my midlife move towards the ‘creative industries’ and there’s a role for me in hotel marketing