iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ruth Scobie

Jane @localnotail.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Whole thread of Benjamin Zephaniah poems for #NationalPoetryDay

Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I heard an astrophysicist say this about astroparticle physics on Saturday night! (yes it was pretty much the only bit of his lecture I could follow, no that's not the point)

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Signs, portents, things of that nature

People sitting in a park. The light is weird

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National Trust @nationaltrust.org.uk · 31/07/2026

This week, a wildfire has torn through Dunwich Heath in Suffolk, leaving the entire nature reserve devastated. An area of around 210 football pitches has been affected with rare habitats and wildlife lost in a matter of hours.

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Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

The sword dangling over my head had lowered a touch over night. Still not close enough that I was freaking out but I could sense its movement.

The sword situation
The sword dangling over my head had lowered a touch over night. Still not close enough that I was freaking out but I could sense its movement. I called my brother to check if there were any developments with respect to his sword and he said he could sort of make it out way up there if he squinted. I don’t know why everyone’s losing it over these swords he said. Then I called my congresswoman to ask yet again if there were any plans to tackle the sword situation as it were and the girl who answered said it was the official position of the office that the swords do not exist except in some rare foreign cases. I could tell she was reading from a script. Can you let her know that they most certainly do I said and she said that she would pass the message along and hung up. Outside some landscapers were at work trimming the neighbor’s hedges. Each of them with a gleaming blade perched inches from the back of their necks. Why didn’t they just grab it at this stage I thought. Why didn’t they just reach right up and grab it.

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

My Gran, 100 years old today: first in her family to go to university, tennis sensation, this afternoon queen of an enormous noisy family tea party 🥳

A black and white photo taken in the 1940s of a young woman wearing a graduation gown, walking with various bespectacled men

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Had a chance at my day job to climb the scaffolding round the Radcliffe Observatory Tower. A treat for lovers of 1790s Coade stone and dusty Oxford vistas

A panorama showing the top of the Radcliffe Observatory Tower and the rooftops of Jericho

A Coade stone relief of the zodiac sign Virgo. Also some scaffolding

Close up of a Coade stone foot. The words "Coade London 1796" are written in the corner

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LRB Bookshop @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk · 15/07/2026

our jimmy was telling us a story about when he used to work for waterstones Aberdeen

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Am I getting a migraine or is the AI-powered BL playbills database lightly deranged

An attempt to filter by date gives a long list of date ranges with no clear order or sense

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Rhys Kaminski-Jones @rhyskamjones.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Btw, despite it being wildly unclear if any Robinson debate is still going ahead, there's still an anti-fascist demonstration planned for next Wednesday (17th) at the Oxford Union - the local Raise the Colours flag-fetishists are gathering, so we need people out there

Flyer Text: "All Out to the Oxford Union: Oppose Tommy Robinson, Wednesday June 17th, 6:30pm, St Michael's St, OX1 2EB

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Rhys Kaminski-Jones @rhyskamjones.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

At the London-Paris Romanticism seminar on May 8th with Tim Heimlich, discussing our new books on Wales and Empire in the Romantic era (the 'Wales Novel', Cook's voyages, Welsh settler colonialism, Celtic racialization, etc.) Would love to see some of you there! londonparisromantic.com?p=5165

Poster for the London-Paris Romanticism seminar, Friday 8 May 2026 at 5:30pm, Room 349, Senate House, University of London.

Free admission, wine reception, all welcome.

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Haunted by a slide from the online Health & Safety training I did last week, that just declared, a propos of very little and with no follow up: PEOPLE ARE NOT NATURALLY COMPLIANT

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

TIL that JM Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, Jerome K Jerome and AA Milne were all in the same dubiously named cricket team, and they were famously rubbish en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahak...

en.wikipedia.org

Allahakbarries - Wikipedia

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

OK but there is at least a case to be made that Pride and Prejudice is totally set during the French Revolution?

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Tom Stoppard spoke at an event I worked a decade ago. He insisted on being introduced to all the event staff, even the lanyard-wearing admins like me, and repeated everyone's names back to them while looking into their eyes. Most charming person I've ever met and it's not even close

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Lucy Powell @ljpowell.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

So delighted that this long-gestated brain child is now out and in the real world. I'll be talking about it at the English Faculty in Cambridge, @cam.ac.uk on Thursday of next week at 5pm. Do please come along if you're in town!

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Hester L-J @starcrossed2018.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Today is the OFFICIAL publication day for TEXTILE SHAKESPEARE! Please indulge me: I want to say a little (perhaps rather a lot) about it and share my acknowledgements - and a discount code! Appropriately,🧵1/10

The cover of a book. Title reads TEXTILE SHAKESPEARE. The illustration shows black embroidery of flowers, fruit, animals and insects on a stained cream ground.

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Accidentally bought Goth potatoes

Cut up potatoes in a roasting tin. The potatoes are white and unexpectedly purple

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

Love how the right-hand column reads like a list of recently elected Reform councillors

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Lots of things in the British Museum were stolen and should be returned! Lots of things weren't! Uncritically repeating 'Everything in the British Museum is stolen' reinforces the imperialist narrative that only the British had agency over a passive monolithic Other! Hope this helps

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Of course they had to cover up what happened to all the children at Lowood School. They didn't want panic to spread

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

The general reader can improve their experience of most nineteenth-century novels by assuming that the Angel in the House character is secretly murderous. Jane Eyre (obvs). Esther Summerson. Fanny Price slipping cyanide into the clear soup. JANE FAIRFAX

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

If you are a supporter and reader of @contingent-mag.bsky.social one of the biggest things you can do to help us at the moment is get this CFP to the NTT folks in your life. The fracturing of social media has made it very difficult to get the word out esp. to adjuncts and VAPs.

contingentmagazine.org

CFP: A Time of Monsters

The monster has been here all along. It is a historical constant that manifests in wildly different ways across time, place, and culture. Whatever form it takes, the monster claws at categories; it un...

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Mine was an (otherwise unobjectionable) novel set in the nineteenth century in which a professor called a boring task "like folding laundry". 1) Nineteenth-century profs did not do laundry 2) only people with modern washer-driers think *folding* is the worst bit of laundry

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Look at this cat I'm catsitting, he looks like Percy Bysshe Shelley

A very fluffy cat lies on a sofa looking Romantic

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

Look at this cat I'm catsitting, he looks like Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Mary Robinson already making fun of AI bros in 1799

"Reading only makes me stupid and women insolent. Besides, why should a man of rank ever have the trouble to think, while he can hire poor vagabonds to take that labour off his hands?"

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Westland Books @westlandbooks.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

‘Dapaan altered my perception of how conflict shapes culture, and how culture, in turn, resists disappearance. Stories are a way of knowing the world and these stories are my stories and will remain with me …’ Read this review of @psemolina3.bsky.social’s book: inkstickmedia.com/dapaan-the-s...

inkstickmedia.com

Dapaan: The Stories of Kashmir that Refuse to Die

In her new book, journalist Ipsita Chakravarty turns to rumors, folklore, and ghost stories to shine a light on life in Kashmir.

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Westland Books @westlandbooks.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

‘It is said, two things can change at any time in Kashmir, the weather and the haalaat.’ It’s pub day for award-winning journalist @psemolina3.bsky.social’s moving, powerful, thought-provoking debut. Dapaan is now available at all major bookstores and online. Get your copy today.

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

This is the last page of the first Penguin edition of Virginia Woolf's Orlando [Pixies voice] GOT ME A BLOOMSBURY AH-HA-HA-HO SLICING UP MARS BARS AH-HA-HA-HO

A black and white 1942 advert with the headline Make MARS last longer... Cut it up into slices.

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Her biographer says of Elizabeth Inchbald that "she was at last forced to give up her determination never to play Lady Sneerwell in 'The School for Scandal'" in 1778. Does anyone have any ideas what Inchbald objected to? I'd have thought Lady S was quite a fun role

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Ipsita Chakravarty @psemolina3.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

No written word can do justice to the power and beauty of the stories I heard in Kashmir. But I tried. Thrilled to announce the India edition of my book, with lovely cover art by Basita Shah, is out on 7th July. Pre-orders here: amzn.in/d/7NuVhNn @westlandbooks.bsky.social

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

Yes. I loved uni teaching and I think I was quite good at it, but after ten years the precarity was making me miserable and exhausted, so I stopped. So many senior people seemed to find that surprising

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

An older relative, who is not and does not look like Alan Bennett, has been mistaken for Alan Bennett several times, including once by Jonathan Miller

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Rhys Kaminski-Jones @rhyskamjones.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

My book, "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain" (or "True Britons and Celtic Empires", if you'd prefer) is now AVAILABLE FOR HARDBACK PREORDER Your library needs more about bardic antislavery, imperial complicity, and druids with telescopes, no? boydellandbrewer.com/978183765195...

Book cover for "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707-1819: True Britons and Celtic Empires". Cover shoes a painting of a Welshman with a gilded leek in his wide-brimmed black hat, warming a (seemingly alcoholic...) drink at a candle flame

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

It's a strange truth known to veterans of the great Flipped Classroom nonsense of the 2010s that the loudest voices shouting that stale UK higher education pedagogy needs radical change always turn out to have horrifying teaching practice that they insist is universal

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Does Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon have a niche Bluesky afterlife yet? Can we start one? It's got a reputation as unreadable, but that's only true if you're not in the market for postmodern jokes about, like, Sir Eyre Coote

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

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Hurst Publishers @hurstpublishers.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

As recent tensions between India and Pakistan come to a head, we have shared an excerpt from ‘Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict’ by @psemolina3.bsky.social on our blog. ‘It is said, two things can change at any time in Kashmir, the weather and the haalaat.’ Read it here ➡️ tinyurl.com/2vu835b7

Cream background with a black cover showing a neighbourhood in Kashmir with a river flowing in the middle (in black and white).

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Jellybooks Ltd @jellybooks.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

As recent tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir come to a head, we are sharing a sample of ‘Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict’ by @psemolina3.bsky.social available from @blackwellbooks.bsky.social 📖 sample to peek inside and share www.jellybooks.com/cloud_reader...

jellybooks.com

Sample of "Dapaan" by Ipsita Chakravarty

Peek inside this book and discover another great read.

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Brian Connolly @brianconnolly.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

"Why do we...lionize this...pseudopopulist orientation and...denounce the kind of writing most of our colleagues engage in in one way or another? Why do we reflexively believe that difficult writing...writing deemed opaque or inaccessible, is an inherent problem?" www.chronicle.com/article/ever...

chronicle.com

Everyone Hates Academic Writing. They’re Wrong.

In praise of scholarly prose.

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profchander @profchander.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

my asecs talk polygenism, monogenism, brownness I want to begin by saying the talk I’m giving is not the talk I meant to give. As you’ll see I start in one place and end up somewhere else. I apologize if my doing so takes us off topic.

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Ruth Scobie @ruthscobie.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

The vet told me that Doris "has the kidneys of a much younger cat" so obviously I said "well I'll tell her she must give them back", and he earnestly replied "no I just meant for comparison" in case you ever wondered what those Bluesky commenters are like in real life

A small black and white cat with green eyes, curled up on a checked duvet. She needs a brush.

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Ipsita Chakravarty @psemolina3.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

Early stock available now. Use DAPAAN25 as a promo code for 25% off when ordering from the Hurst website (www.hurstpublishers.com/book/dapaan/)

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