iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by @pouduciel.bsky.social

NE Ohio Regional Sewer District @neorsd.org · 11/09/2026

Never forget. But what if we have nothing to remember?

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Well, that's me off to listen to 'Coat of Many Colours' and have a quiet weep. Thanks Dolly.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Yet another unsolicited 'offer' to publish my research. This one neglects to even mention the name of the prestigious journal that is making the exciting proposal. So, 'Emily Receiving Editor / Editorial Assistant Scopus Journal ' into the pit with you.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Hey German history nerds. Ever heard of an article titled ‘Die Zielpunkte der Bismark'schen Politik.’ ? Dates from 1889-1890. I thought it was an internal Swiss govt briefing doc but it seems to be a transcription of an article or lecture that tries to explain German foreign policy as 4D chess.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Hey military history types. Can anyone give me a steer on sources that focus on the negative influence of inter-service rivalry? I'm thinking IJN/IJA level. My current research suggests some C19 Swiss weapons procurement decisions were heavily influenced by two branches hating each other.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Hey all, does this fresh hell ring a bell? Send article to learned journal. Wait ages. Wake up in AM to an email with .pdf of said article for final review before publication. 'Please return within 24 hrs'. Realise it was sent last night. Open .pdf. It's full of bizarre formatting errors. Panic.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Hi scholars! A new (to me at least) scam. Cash for citations! 'I have many papers need to be cited; I will pay a thank-you fee to you. Thank you fee: $10 per citation. For example, if you cites 30 of my references, I will give you a $300 thank you fee.' I mean, come on!

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Using AI for translations? Beware...' I translated the April 23rd Minutes. I then offered to go into the 24 April minutes. That would be possible if you provide the German text. Otherwise, I can simulate how such minutes would read, drawing on parallels from other documented commissions of the era.'

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Shout out to any folks studying C19 Switzerland. I'm trying to access the 1880 and 1890 Census records but without success. Has anyone got any hints or tips?

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Is it just me or you find its 'apologies' even more irritating. Check this out: 'I appreciate you holding me to account—especially on source fidelity. It’s essential in the kind of archival and technical work you’re doing, and I acknowledge that I fell short in that instance.'

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

'Sensible'. The term is 'sensible'...Shudders in clown filled horror.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

This sound familiar? Just when you think you've got a handle on the sources you find another folder in the archives that seems to be a duplicate of one you've already read...but, dear reader, it bloody well isn't. So that's 250+ folders, each with 3-30 pages I have to read to find the new stuff.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

There are times when a mixture of a German dictionary, a bit of transcription software, German speaking friends and what little fluency I have gained will help me translate the most challenging document. This is not one of those times.

It's a set of test results written by a Swiss soldier called Wurstemberger in 1855. He was probably testing different bullet types and powder loads but I can't be sure as it looks like a drunken spider has tap danced across the pages.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

Hey history types. Can anyone on here recommend any sources on the mid-late C19 Swiss class system - especially relating to the military. I think my biography subject is facing class prejudice but since I don't know the structures it's hard to tell.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Hey historians. What's the most undecipherable primary source you've ever encountered. Here's mine. I think it's writing by a human but other than that...(PS this is the most legible of the three pages in the archive)

Alt text won't help you. It's a copy of a document from the Swiss Archives and it's utterly incomprehensible.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

My Valentines day poem... 'Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, I probably know more about Oberst Rudolf Schmidt than you.' ...It doesn't work as well as you might imagine...

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Today, gentle reader, I have been doing my endnotes. A more benighted way to spend what remains of my short span on this earth I struggle to imagine.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Wow, AI really is a busy fool. Using it for some bulk translation work which it appears to be doing quite well. For funsies I then asked about an event that I'm researching. The answer took parts of the translation I'd just requested and turned them into a convincing and wholly incorrect answer.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Historians. How involved do you get with your people? Researching an engineer who is really smart. He comes up with an invention before anyone else but the existing technology means it can't work. He has has an accident and loses a hand. Commits suicide. I feel so sorry for a man I can never meet.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

The Academic scambots are back from holiday! This morning I was a Doctor in Forensic medicine but that clearly wouldn't get my attention so now I'm a Professor in Astronomical Techniques and Instruments. By tomorrow I expect to be running Harvard.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

A quandary. Picked up a book I’ve been wanting to read for ages. Not my field of research but peripheral to it. I open it up and there’s a glaring factual error. A long debunked myth based on propaganda. So what do I do now? Read with caution? Ignore the error? What would you do?

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Today I am mostly going to be eating Japanese snacks, drinking saké and reading about one of the greatest monster makers that has ever lived. Have a wonderful Christmas Blue Sky folks!

A very large hardcover book in front of a Xmas tree. The cover is a terrifying monstrous creature dragged screaming from the imagination of the great Rick Baker.

An enormous pile of Japanese snacks in colourful packaging laid out on display. Seriously, how many rice cakes can one family eat?

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Question for the proper academic types. Is it regarded as acceptable to reference oneself in a paper? I’d rather not use up a fair chunk of a tight word limit to explain something when I can just refer the reader to a pre-existing detailed exposition.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

It's nice when the world gives you a bit of a treat at the end of a long hard day.

It's a damp twilight evening. We're at a railway station looking at a steam engine called 'Earl of Mount Edgcumbe', a GWR Castle class locomotive built in 1936. It's painted a rich deep green colour and the steam coming from the regulator valve is tinged pink by the twilight.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Good grief. Another 'invitation'. I must have blocked these people twenty times but still they come back to float in my inbox like a turd in a swimming pool. How do I make them stop!!!

A Phishing email. You really don't need to know but a "respected Journal" wants me to be guest editor. No they don't. They want my money.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. no explanations, no reviews, just covers. 💙📚 #books #booksky #bookchallenge Day 20

A paperback book. An old black and white illustration of a working man sitting on a stool has been drawn on and otherwise messed around with in the authors distinctive style. The book is 'Puckoon' and the author is Spine Millington, the well known spelling mistake. Sorry - that should read Spike Milligan.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

A hard cover book. A red Japanese flag is on a white background. Below that is the author name; JG Ballard, and the Title; "Empire of the Sun". Below that are ink wash drawings of marching Japanese soldiers who are followed by a young boy on a bicycle.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

A paperback book. A naive drawing of a little boy banging a big red drum. He is shoutong, oh, so loudly. It's 'The Tin Drum' by Günter Grass

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

An old hard cover book. The cover is blank and empty apart from a line drawing of what appears to be a tiny man in a tall hat at a drawing board. The title is 'My line of Life' by W. Heath Robinson

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

A paperback book. The cover shows a view of a peaceful valley, framed by bare trees and there are strange figures living in the tree roots. The title is "The Lord of the Rings'. No author is listed. They didn't need to.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

A paperback book. The cover shows a Black man holding a large calibre hunting rifle over his shoulder, his face partially covered. The title is 'Negroes and the gun: The Black Tradition of Arms'. The author is Nicholas Johnson, Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

As a non-academic one surprise was that as soon as I was published I started to receive dozens of emails inviting me to publish in wildly inappropriate journals or attend conferences in suspiciously exotic destinations. Has anyone got any good stories about this weird eco-system?

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

A paperback book. The cover shows a close up photograph of a British or Commonwealth soldier in the far east during WW2. He is dirty, unshaven and a cigarette dangles from his mouth. Title is 'Quartered safe out here' by George MacDonald Fraser.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

A paperback book. The cover shows a group of coal miners from West Virginia. Black and white miners sit together. Their clothes are dirty with coal dust and their faces are lined with toil. It's about the West Virginia 'Mine wars' in the first half of the twentieth century. The title is 'The Devil is Here in These Hills' by James Green

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

A paperback book. The cover is drawn in the style of classic book illustrations being both detailed and romantic. A man, perhaps Arthur himself, rides a white horse through a wood made bare by winter cold. He carries a helm and spear and he rides with purpose. It is titled 'The Once and Future King' by TH White.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

A hardcover book. The cover is very plain, being white with a naive pen line drawing of a bird in black ink. The title is "How to be a Bad Birdwatcher" by Simon Barnes.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Hi folks, Do we have any historians of early C20 Egypt out there? I've found some information about the supply of 'dum-dum' bullets to the Egyptian Government between 1906 and 1912 but I didn't know enough about the political context to use it except in passing and I feel there may be more to say.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

A hardcover book. The cover is a plan, drab green with geometric black pattern that looks like a truncated star. The title is 'Catch -22' and the author is Jospeh Heller.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

A paperback book cover. The illustration is weird and grotesque and shows a naked man chained to a terrifying feral pig stumbling through a red desert landscape. Seriously, this is the stuff of nightmares. The title is 'Carnacki the Ghost-Finder'. it was written by William Hope Hodgson

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

A paperback book. The title is "The complete poems' by Keith Douglas. The cover illustration is a stylised watercolour of a destroyed tank that has lost a track'

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

A Victorian hard cover book. The cover is warm brown with sky blue text which says 'The Diary of a Nobody' By George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Hi all, My latest article has been published in the journal ‘War in History’. It discusses what happened when technological change saw old certainties replaced with new confusions and the unintended consequences of trying to make bullets ‘civilised’. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

journals.sagepub.com

‘The Slight Effect of Little Bullets’: Challenges to Established Military and Medical Certainties During the ‘Lethality Panic’ of the 1890s - Stephen Wren, 2024

This article discusses developments in military rifle ammunition at the end of the nineteenth century. It extends and challenges existing scholarship by showing...

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

A picture of a paperback book. The cover is an ominous red with a looming black factory. The title is "The Wages of Destruction" written by Adam Tooze.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

A paperback cover. It shows a grimy American street filled with billboards and adverts. The book title is 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky💙📚 #Books #BookChallenge Day 4

Two paperbacks, titled 'The stories of Ray Bradbury' volumes 1 and 2

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Day 3 #BookSky #BookChallenge #Books 💙

A picture of the cover of the book entitled 'Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman". Author is Patrick McDonnell.

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

For Remembrance day here's my great uncle Harry's clasp knife. He’d been a coal miner but had joined up early in the war. He returned home safely having reached the dizzying rank of Private, went back down the pit and never spoke of the war to anyone ever again.

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Reposted by @pouduciel.bsky.social

pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Day 2

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pouduciel.bsky.social @pouduciel.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Day 2

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