iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This was *so* good: hypnotic, poetic, funny, alienated and engrossing.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My main takeaway from this thread is that my Dad appears to have a *lot* of alts…

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Thomas Ha @thomasha.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i should clarify, when i write people doing bad things, it's because i am bad. they are me. more importantly, when you read about those bad things, they also become you. that's how story works. in fact, you are going to think about murder before this skeet ends. how's that feel, sicko.

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The Empty City @davidallengreen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Commentators reading the Premier League ruling on Manchester City.

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Steve Eely @steveeely.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

From 20th October to 15th December, I’m running a five workshop online creative writing (poetry) short course, ‘Creating Bespoke & Organic Forms: Shaping Poems in the Act of Composition’. More information and booking details can be found here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creating-b...

eventbrite.co.uk

Creating Bespoke & Organic Forms: Shaping Poems in the Act of Composition

A creative writing (poetry) course of 5 workshops in which participants will devise their own bespoke forms for poems and sequences.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ah, the classic “Equality / Equity / Espionage” diagram…

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

For sale: firewood. Just read @naomialderman.bsky.social’s ‘don’t burn anyone at the stake today’ and have had to rearrange my Sunday night plans… ;o) (Would recommend: brisk, fresh and wise, with some useful reframings)

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There’s something uncanny about being in an existential struggle with people it’s impossible to take seriously.

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Matthew Stewart @roguestrands.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

As a bitter and twisted poet and Aldershot Town fan, I'm sorry (not sorry) to admit I view poets who become renowned novelists just as I view Shots fans who started watching Reading when they were promoted to the Prem. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Today I both finished watching 70Up and finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. That’s about as much ‘perspective on the human condition’ as I think I can handle in one day…

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Chris Addison @mrchrisaddison.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Bit ironic.

Screenshot from Instagram. @DanielPink says: I’ve read more productivity books than anyone you know. The wisest advice in all of them fits in two words: do less.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This evening’s entertainment at The Showroom (including footage of several of my wife’s friends, who were interviewed as teenage fans back in 1995…[!]).

Cinema screen reading, in pink text:

PULP
WHAT DO YOU DO FOR AN ENCORE?

DON'T MAKE A MOVE TILL I SAY "ACTION"
VIRTUAL Q&A TO FOLLOW WITH JARVIS COCKER &
GARTH JENNINGS
MUBI
@mubiuk

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Nicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 17/09/2026

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

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Longbarrow Press @longbarrowpress.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Rebel Amulets: a free event at Shakespeares, Sheffield (146-148 Gibraltar Street, S3 8UB), this Saturday (19 September), with an excellent line-up including a set from @petegreensolo.com. Organised by Longbarrow co-founder Karl Hurst, so the set times are anyone's guess. It'll be good. All welcome.

Flyer advertising Rebel Amulets at Shakespeares, Sheffield, Sat 19 September, 2pm, free entry

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Elizabeth Zelle @kohizeri.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

"the assessment did not consider the crocodiles" is my new metaphor for people choosing to just ignore the data point that doesn't agree with them

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Interesting article(s) about a new type of ‘audiencing’ of fiction… There’ll be various views on it, but I do think it’s useful to understand what people are actually doing.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Interesting to see actual data for some of these examples (and some fun and effective writing/presentation). I also like the honesty about the role of luck…

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Main Tenant @main-tenant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Used to be the difficult second album, now it’s the difficult second second.

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Reading Museum @readingmuseum.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

We are enjoying all things Bayeux Tapestry related this autumn! Pop in to the Reading Museum Shop in-store or online to see our Bayeux range: reading-museum-shop.myshopify.com/collections/...

a cushion from the Reading Museum shop pictured in the Bayeux Gallery. cushion nas picture of partof the patestry with 2 horses with soldiers riding.

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Arts Professional @artsprofessional.co.uk · 10/09/2026

As arts organisations prepare their applications to join Arts Council England's new five-year National Portfolio, Steph Graham of GoodCRM reflects on what this might mean for your data.

artsprofessional.co.uk

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Nick Lloyd @spaincivilwartours.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Map produced from the perspective of Galicia but applicable to the world before the revolutionary changes brought by arrival of the railway. By sea: A Coruña to London: 5 days. By land: Coruña to Madrid; 20 days.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Just had to remind myself not to comment on articles I’ve not read (however provocative the headline and standfirst). Phew: close one.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

. @teakayb.mathsy.space I saw this poem and thought of you (re maths popping up in interesting places). From Robert Frost’s Meeting and Passing:

“…We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.”

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Interesting thread and the linked academic article (by Retkowsky, Hafermalz and Huysman: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) well worth a read too. Overall there’s a challenging balancing needed between metacognition + social processes and cognition + individual efficency. As there ever was.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Navier-Stokes? Pah! Come back when you can explain Duckworth-Lewis… ;o)

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Longbarrow Press @longbarrowpress.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"For two years of lockdowns, my partner and I walked Sheffield's Rivelin Valley at dawn. Moss. Herons. Froglets. Treecreepers. Those walks became three poetry pamphlets and a way of paying attention again." Have You Always Been Here? Matthew Clegg Published today longbarrowpress.com/current-publ...

Three pamphlets by Matthew Clegg - Eyes Front, Crystals & Dust, The Living - arranged on a garden table.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Wonderful site. I got 1492… Italian peninsula… Immediate instinct, against logic: I know who this is! But it was ‘Lucia’: who lived in a rural hamlet, lost her mother at 12, married and then lost her only child in her mid twenties, then died at 44 in an accident.

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Robin C-F @robin.cantrill-fenwick.uk · 04/09/2026

I'm not saying I'm a contrarian but I'm genuinely very interested in seeing the Reading replica tapestry now

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Henry Mance @henrymance.ft.com · 03/09/2026

We are currently clean on OPSEC!

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Me: “This probably won’t be as bad as people are making it sound”. <watches it> OMG.

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Dr Laura Varnam @drlauravarnam.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

This thread is a DELIGHT ✨✨✨

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I listened to Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast on Liz Berry this morning: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/.... I loved how he really gives the words space and repetition and makes generous, honest and sensitive connections (to his life, to her work, to her life, to other works…).

bbc.co.uk

Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast - Liz Berry - BBC Sounds

Frank Skinner explores the poetry of Liz Berry

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Although I think the answer’s probably ‘no’*, it’s a worthwhile provocation (esp. for fans of the book Red Plenty), esp. to shake out preconceptions. *(although people do often do things I feel are impossibly complex, so what do I know?)

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

We may now face the ‘lemons problem’. Good novelists spend ages writing & can’t prove they didn’t use AI. Bad actors bang a book out with Claude. So the market for good quality non AI written fiction collapses as who’ll bother to write properly anymore when they’ll be accused of using AI anyway?

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

“There will be those who… (go with) hope of watching a Robin Hood film and leave disappointed because they were actually presented with a muddy meditation on class warfare based on a 700-year-old allegorical poem.” www.theguardian.com/film/2026/au... I, of course, only want to go to the latter…

theguardian.com

Marketing meltdown: why has Andrew Garfield’s new film suddenly added Robin Hood?

Paul Greengrass drama The Uprising was supposed to be a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – but a strange new campaign has inserted a surprising figure

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

This sent me off down an interesting rabbit-hole about the history of the Western use of ‘ikigai’, a term inserted into a Spanish ‘purpose diagram’: ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/what-... Both uses strike me as beneficial, as is understanding how their contexts create the difference in meaning/emphasis.

ikigaitribe.com

Bot Verification

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Reece Dinsdale @reecedinsdale.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Oh my… if only I had the money (or the backing) I’d buy this place (adjacent to The Piece Hall in Halifax) & run it as Artistic Director. I was once its Patron. A jewel in Yorkshire’s magnificent crown, please someone rescue/revive this little diamond. 💎 🙏🏻 www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/news/people/...

halifaxcourier.co.uk

Halifax's Square Chapel for sale after Grade II-listed theatre seized by liquidators

Halifax’s Square Chapel Arts Centre is for sale.

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Longbarrow Press @longbarrowpress.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

"[The haiku] were the discipline and devotion of our care, the minute variations of our unfolding days." Matthew Clegg on the development of 'Have You Always Been Here?', a themed work in three pamphlets. A new post on the Longbarrow Blog longbarrowblog.wordpress.com/2026/08/28/p...

The cover image of 'Eyes Front', the first of three new pamphlets by Matthew Clegg. The image is a watercolour, with elements of collage, depicting a heron partly obscured by reeds.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Three really good collections (I’m also looking forward to the three new pamphlets greatly).

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David F. on W @dfarb.wsocial.eu · 28/08/2026

The (probably apocryphal) classic index entry is: "circular references, see references, circular" and "references, circular, see circular references"

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M. Belanger @sethanikeem.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

“How will we ever replace them?” FUND. THE. ARTS.

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Matthew Stewart @roguestrands.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Helena Nelson might be the editor and publisher at HappenStance Press, but she's also an ace poet who was the joint winner of the Aldeburgh Jerwood Prize with her first collection, Starlight on Water. This poem is taken from that book. Its apparent emotional control makes it all the more powerful.

Completing the outfit

I used to wish you’d put your hands just so
about my waist, spanning me here and here,
encircling me in love and trust, although
you never knew I cherished the idea.
A small thing. Doesn’t matter. Time is gone.
Your hands, so square and kind, don’t speak to me.
My waist has come to terms with life alone.
My breathing’s calm. My heart goes quietly.
I find these days I like to wear a belt.
I bear it like your touch around the core.
It keeps me safe. Quite recently I felt
I had to tighten it. I think it’s more
than reassurance in well-seasoned leather:
it may be all that’s holding me together.

Helena Nelson

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FT @fucktheory.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Imagine being talented and beautiful and rich and famous and still the most noteworthy thing about you is how good a person you are.

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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I have a short list of ‘books I must read in my lifetime’* in my head: I wonder sometimes whether other people have the same (and if so, which?)… (*as in ‘if a doctor told me I had twelve months to live, I’d probably stop at a bookshop on the way home and buy them…’).

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