iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maybe an analogy should be that a cake is a cake and being able to individually pull out the taste of the egg, flour and sugar would be crap and make it less cake-y. I dunno.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 7h

Rubber Soul, for me the best Beatles LP, gets another remix tomorrow. But the best version is the version they made in 1965: mono. Yeah yeah now you can hear all these parts separately but sometimes music is a number. You don't need to hear 14 is made of 2+3+4+5. Experience the total damn it.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 11h

Just heard The Cure’s Inbetween Days on an ad and I thought: for fuck’s sake, do you really need the money? Then realised it was raising cash for Alzheimer’s Rearch so all good and keep it up lads.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 12h

The only “ted lasso” I want is lassoing all the people who do ted talks and pulling them into a blender. Am I right ladies?

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 13h

Mostly I thought it sounded potentially annoying to people, that it's a random dig. Have your dig strangers, about a thing (s), I've not engaged with

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 13h

Haven’t watched either of them, but published it anyway

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 14h

I do want to know a book, whether it's meant to be high-art or low, has been made with thought. Years ago I bumped into a guy who I knew from web circles who'd got a book deal, asked how it was going & he mimed cut-and-pasting his website and said "press send" & I thought, ok then, not reading that.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 16h

My version of that, where I had the title and asolutely no desire to bother doing it, and this was blimey, 15 years ago, was one where I'd eat cheese and meat with the guests and call it "Cheesed To Meat You"

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 16h

If you want to do one of your "I'll launch a podcast thing and ask people to send in recordings of themselves eating and reviewing a single packet of crisps at a time, and only Rob will bother" I will bother

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 18h

It's a conjuring trick, a side-show from what the actual point is: creating a machine that gives them infinite wishes. Most of them being: "I wish to be the most powerful person in the world" and "I wish to see her boobies"

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 21h

It was something David Hepworth said about reviewing records in Smash Hits/Q that most things were "fine if you like that sort of thing", but it gets a bit boring to read and write so there is a tendency to say things are extraordinary or crap. A problem older than clickbait.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

I was speculating last night that the Twilight Zone was the light you get in the semi-permanent fog of cigarette smoke

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

One of my favourite facts is the first version of the car phone was absurdly early, like 1920, and involved having a very long aerial on the car, and you'd drive the car literally into a telegraph wire to make contact and make a call. Not helpful I know, toodlepip.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

Well. That cover does not fulfil the promise of the title.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

What were the covers like? I wonder if you could get away with any old shit as the title if there was a busty lady or a rocket ship on there.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

There’s an episode on slot machines where the character become massively addicted to them and gets a type of almost AI psychosis. Script based on Rod’s own experiences. I think anything compulsive sent his way was trouble.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

I feel quite protective of him and I’m shouting at the telly: please put down the fags. Dead at 50, he could’ve had loads of other great TV projects.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

Would definitely watch a short video of someone printing out tenners on a printer that rudimentary and trying to spend them in the corner shop

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

I read he is short however I am completely unable to see the heights of people on TV. They become TV people.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

I can paste your problem into Grok and apparently it's not defamation to call someone a pedo if you're very rich

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

Make everything into the Twilight Zone

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

Bleak letter to read here. Makes me imagine a version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers where your friends and family start spouting the corporate spiel, not because of an alien take over, but because it's their job now.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

The Hitchhiker had me jumping around on my seat, so well made, the scenes where it's not clear who the potential victim is, him or her.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

I bought a box set on BluRay as a treat. Currently on disk 3 of 23 disks and it doesn't, currently, feel like a chore.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 30/09/2026

I'm 17 episodes into a Twilight Zone (1959) watch and I'm quite convinced it's the greatest show ever. Each one is a small jewel of a complete movie that fucks off in 25 minutes and then Rod Serling smokes at you and tells you to come back next week.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

Ha - basically it's one of the easiest yet boldest logos to make. Also fuck those chippy bastards.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

Your health condition is being still alive at this extraordinary age haha

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

I too have had the experience of there being no job I can’t half-arse

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

Sometimes I say out loud the thing on my mind, maybe a project I’m working on, and it just slips out of my lips. That is how I became the apparently mad person on the bus who just mumbled to himself “drunk-driving crow simulator”

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

I don’t know other than you build trust with some people, but it makes fishing for new things in the great unknown less fun.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

Music, a novel, a painting, even a tweet is communication. It’s transmitting thoughts or vibes from one mind to another. If there isn’t a mind at one end, then it’s a facsimile of this, and I’m not interested beyond it being a conjuring trick that I’ve seen before.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

If I was wearing Doc-Martens and a pork-pie hat, this would have potential to be a good photo, but I’m not

Madness, they call it madness. Walk of theme thing in Camden.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

they're worried about shedding readers to your project

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

I've hacked up a bit of code that reads the B3ta Starter Pack & finds links, and I'm using it to find snippets of news from the B3ta Diaspora to help populate the newsletter. Who am I missing from this list that a. are on Bluesky and b. are/were b3tans c. make newsletter-ish projects ?

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

Not making a political point but just saw this pic and thought: I recognise that expression

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 29/09/2026

My school looked down on it. It would show these things occasionally if a teacher was sick.

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Reposted by Rob Manuel

b3ta @b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

B3ta newsletter 1000, out now "Only 66 issues until our Battle of Hastings special" * BUFFY'S SWEARING TELEPHONE - now works on mobile * GUESS THE SHOPPING - what price is milk? * BAD DINOSAURS - Netflix resurrects them b3ta.com/newsletter/i...

b3ta.com

B3TA newsletter: "ONLY 66 ISSUES UNTIL OUR BATTLE OF HASTINGS SPECIAL"

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Reposted by Rob Manuel

b3ta @b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

Chewie, Lewis and The News Artist: The Twisted Omentum b3ta.com/board/11431506 From the 'Unlikely Siblings' challenge b3ta.com/challenge/unlikelysiblings… #UnlikelySiblings

An image made by The Twisted Omentum posted on B3ta, front paged by the moderators, and reposted on Bluesky by code automatically.

Subject: Chewie, Lewis and The News

Body: pea

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

What I imagined was someone starting with copilot, as in Microsoft Copilot and thinking,"no God should be your copilot" and it getting somewhat managled between that thought and final execution. Possibly by copilot.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

I suppose it could mean put God as captain and not the lower ranked copilot. Put God in charge, not just the back up. But it is quite weird. I do agree and I could also quite easily find a meaning in it that was anti God.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

Weird stuff goes on in the country - I used to work on an old farm & there was a field full of poppies, that is opium poppies, they naturally just grew there. Looked stunning, but it did mean you had to not be weirded out by the clown-masked guy who'd turn up in the middle of the night to nick them.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

Lol. Not even a major crime, as they're out on bail. Maybe it was a meet strangers, wear hoods, and wank each other off club.

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

After every major crime there's a window where the right are desperate for the perpetrators to be brown, so they can have a little pogrom as a treat. Can't violence-enthusiasts have a traditional hobby instead, like beating each-other up, let's say on a Saturday, after watching some football?

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

You'll need to get this done before 2028, else you'll have to charge £3.66

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Rob Manuel @robmanuel.b3ta.com · 28/09/2026

Agree but most search engines now give you a shit AI answer by default. The smart money is now on opening a window and shouting at the postie.

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