iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Dolly Parton rose from poverty to stardom. She gave $500 to every student in her hometown who finished high school; she built hospitals & bald eagle preserves; her Imagination Library has gifted 300 million books to children. Roger Ebert met her and came away thinking she was a literal angel. RIP.

“In Dallas for the premier of '9 to 5', I had an uncanny experience, and on the plane home to Chicago I confessed it to Siskel: I had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton, and as we spoke I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was healing and comforting. Gene listened and said, "Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her." We looked at each other. What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again. From time to time we would refer to it in wonder.”

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same old ghost 🌿🪻 @sameoldghost.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Adjacently, I don't think I'd have found so much of my writing community online had @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social not retweeted one of my little tweets back in the day! I am always thankful for that & for the kind scaffolding of writers propping each other up online 💛

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

By far the funniest moment in Homer’s Odyssey is when Circe says, “Shall we have sex?” and Odysseus says, “You just turned all my men into pigs. You have the GALL to think I would sleep with you? Of course I will. Absolutely. But don’t do any weird spells”

photograph of the relevant passage in Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey ("I make no bed of love with you upon it. Or swear me first a great oath, if I do, you'll work no more enchantment to my harm.")

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Katie Lumsden @katiejlumsden.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Some exciting news! My new novel, The Christmas Tree Murders, is out later this year, and doesn't it look beautiful? Within it you'll find: 🔎 Some amateur sleuths ✉️ Various epistolary elements ✒️ A narrator who talks to the reader 🔑 Characters with secrets aplenty 🎄 Lots of Victorian festive fun

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

The trick to getting kids reading again is the same as it ever was: cram every available surface of your home with books, limit their access to brain-destroying technology, wait for them to get bored and watch them flourish both spiritually and intellectually.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

They should make a version of The Odyssey, only it’s set in Dublin, Ireland in 1904 and Odysseus is a Jewish man whose wife is having an affair and Telemachus is an aspiring author who gets into fights in pubs and wanders the strand brooding on his mother’s death.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Retired folk spend hours a day watching slop on their phones. Kids can’t read because they’ve been hooked on tablets since they were two. College students are using AI to summarize books & write essays for them. Screens are eating this country alive.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

In the end, the world belongs not to the hedge-fund managers and vulture capitalists and tech moguls but to the lovers & scholars, the preservers of lost things, the stewards of the natural world, the human artists, the poets and mystics, the child just learning to read.

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greensponreads @needmoarcoffee1.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Oh! Oh! Oh! A chance to plug this great book!

The cover of the book, "The Black Count" by Tom Reiss

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Several folks in my mentions said they quit watching the new Count of Monte Cristo on PBS because it features Black actors. My friend, you are going to be shocked when you learn the ethnicity of Alexandre Dumas.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Saw someone say the world is a boring place because there are no elves or dragons, so I'm legally obliged to share this:

Mason: Dad, there's no real magic in the world, right?
Dad: What do you mean?
Mason: You know, like elves and stuff. People just made that up.
Dad: Oh, I don't know. I mean, what makes you think that elves are any more magical than something like a whale? Yoy know what I mean? What if I told you a story about how underneath the ocean, there was this giant sea mammal that used sonar and sang songs and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you'd think that was pretty magical, right?

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Saw someone say the world is a boring place because there are no elves or dragons, so I'm legally obliged to share this:

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

People think I’m being alarmist when I say they are trying to make you dumb. They feel entitled to control how and to what extent you can access knowledge. They send their kids to tech-free schools while ensuring public school kids can’t read. They want you illiterate.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Midway through Fahrenheit 451, we learn that the U. S. government has launched a series of unprovoked wars against smaller countries, just because it can, while the population is so hypnotized by amusements & devices that hardly anyone knows the wars are taking place.

“Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the rest of the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard the rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? ... Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”

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Reposted by Boze Herrington, Library Owl

Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

AI art isn’t real art and AI artists aren’t real artists.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

I find it bleak how many people seem to have given up on having any kind of intellectual life. Depression is rampant because we’ve abandoned books & hobbies in favor of joyless amusements. The single most attractive thing a person can do is read often & delight in learning.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

This is why you need to be reading books and writing your own emails, by the way. When you outsource your thinking abilities, you risk turning your brain into soup. Heavy dependence on AI has already been linked with severe cognitive decline. What you don’t use, you will lose.

Headline in today's Guardian that reads "Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40 percent, study finds. Cognitive health in later life is 'strongly influenced' by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments, say researchers."

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

The Washington Post is getting rid of its Books section. We’re losing the institutions—journalism, middle-class artistic and intellectual culture—that once made life bearable. Those things were a threat to the super-rich who increasingly govern us. Democracy dies in illiteracy.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Rach and I walked over to the university library yesterday and spent a few hours writing this list of our thirty-five most beloved characters in Dickens. Tremendous fun, and one of my favorite things we've written together. bibliollcollege.substack.com/p/our-thirty...

bibliollcollege.substack.com

Our Thirty-Five Favorite Characters in Dickens

A Celebration of the Greatest Character Writer in English

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I find it depressing that so many people seem determined to outsource their basic brain functions. Like WHY ARE YOU EVEN ALIVE IF THAT'S HOW LITTLE YOU THINK ABOUT EXISTENCE

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Kat the Cheshire Mouse @cheshiremouse.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

You can write your emails just fine. You always have! Want to improve? Take a writing course (there are cheap and free writing courses for a variety of types of writing to be found online). Using features like this is literally dimming areas of your brain. Keep them lit. Forget this feature exists.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I find Gmail’s new “write this for me” feature deeply sinister. They’re trying to convince you that you are dumb and helpless. Don’t let them steal your ability to formulate thoughts and communicate. You were capable of writing an email in 2022 and you’re capable now.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Our mutual Christmas book haul (Rach’s books on the left and mine on the right). I’ve found that the happiest life is a life filled with love and books.

Books I got for Rach: The Landmark Herodotus, The Fabled Coast, Volumes Two & Three of Ackroyd’s History of England, a Folio edition of Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Annotated Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s London, Victorian Prison Lives, In Search of England, In Search of London, The Ghost Map, Captain Cuttle’s Mailbag: Victorian Pedantry from the Pages of Notes & Queries, The Trouble with Mrs. Montgomery Hurst

Books Rach got for me: Stations of the Sun, Trevelyan’s Arthurian Legends, Dragon Lords & Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (both by Eleanor Parker), Lore of the Land, Chambers Etymology, Welsh Legends & Fairy Lore, Hazlitt’s Dictionary of Faiths & Folklore, Book of English Folktales, England: A Natural History, Middlemarch, Pushkin’s Fairy Tales, Everyman Canterbury Tales

In my stocking: Fancies & Goodnights, The Children of Green Knowe, Life in the Castle in Medieval England, Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, Scandinavian Folktales, The King in the North: The Life & Times of Oswald of Northumbria, signed copy of The Great Book of King Arthur

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

People say AI is a magic shortcut to creativity & success. I’ll tell you the real secret and it’s voraciously reading, being interested in everything, being diligent in the pursuit of learning, paying attention to the interior lives of others & keeping a heart open to the world.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

“Why are folks getting dumber?” Because they don’t read. “Why aren’t men as romantic & poetic as they used to be?” Because they don’t read. “Why are people so vulnerable to propaganda?” “Why is everyone a conspiracy theorist?” Because they don’t read. Because they don’t read.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

No offense but I think we underestimate how many of our current problems, both cultural and political, are downstream of the decline in reading, the decline in learning and the loss of interest in the humanities.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

In honor of my birthday this week I encourage you to get a library card, read books of folklore, listen to medieval & Tudor Christmas carols, watch an old film by Welles or Bergman. Life is not long and we ought to find some beauty in each day. We ought to hold each other close.

photo of me reading a book of Sappho poems with Mrs Miclawber, the cat who adopted us.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

There's an enormous cat who lives a few streets down. She somehow figured out a way to unlatch and open the screen door leading into our bedroom. Every night she breaks into our room, curls up on my chest and falls asleep. I've been adopted by a real-life Miyazaki character.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Sat down at the dining-room table to read a bit of Bleak House. Noticed that my wife, seated next to me, was also reading Bleak House. Realized we have at least FIVE copies of the novel. This is what human flourishing looks like.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I’m looking for a good contemporary novel. I’ve been reading a lot of medieval poems & sagas and realized I’d read hardly any recent fiction this year. I love a book that’s a bit cerebral, a bit strange, and tells a solidly plotted story with a minimum of fuss.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

Reading will make you more interesting. Last week I met up with some old friends and we were discussing Cornwall. I told them, “According to legend, the devil avoids Cornwall for fear he will be baked into a pie” and the expression on their faces was priceless.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Been reading a lot of academic texts this year and needed a mental break, so I picked up Dickens and I'm amazed anew at how shamelessly FUN, entertaining & escapist he is. He invented modern storytelling. He was writing prestige TV in the 1850s.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

We're witnessing the greatest sustained attack on the human spirit in history. Big Tech seeks to destroy the arts. They're destroying the school system. They want to make us lobotomized people who can't read, write or create. They've turned dystopian fiction into a manual.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

I'm glad the villain of the new Toy Story is a child's tablet. I hope the film conveys how screens eat up a child's hobbies, interests, literacy, ability to function socially. I hope it provokes millions of parents to think twice before making the iPad a babysitter.

image of the villainous tablet in Toy Story 5

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I need everyone who uses AI to generate art & text to notice what Vince Gilligan says here. You're surrendering your brain, your creativity, the divine spark within you to a machine. Someday you'll wake up and find you're no longer capable of writing or thinking. And for what?

["When your selling point is: 'This thing is great, it'll write your high school essays for you, it'll create your artwork for you if you're an artist, so you don't have to actually learn how to draw and paint anymore ... You don't ever need to learn how to read a map or use a compass ... this this will wipe your butt for you.' What's left to live for? The creative spark in human beings - it's one of the most precious, wonderful things we have. What is more important than being creative?'"]

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Too many people have resigned themselves to not reading because they fear they no longer have the focus for it. You only need to limit your screen time for a few days to begin feeling the effects on your brain. I promise you, you are capable of reading books again.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Carl Sagan, writing in 1995, warned that soon America would be ruled by illiterate elites wielding “awesome technological powers,” and that most people, their brains broken by screens, would be unable to resist. We are living in the nightmare that Sagan foresaw.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Spending too much time online will have catastrophic effects on your mental & emotional health. You need to be taking walks and talking to other people. You need to feel grass under your feet and wind on your face. You were made to live an embodied life.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Spent the day wandering through rain-soaked Seattle, and in a used bookstore found several volumes of medieval art.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

I think we under-estimate how many people are miserable because they have no enthusiasms, no hobbies, because they gave up reading and quit learning when school ended. It's shocking how much studying a beloved subject elevates your mood. It will transform your life.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

Jane Austen's 250th birthday is coming up in December and I hope you'll celebrate by taking a turn about the room, acquiring a passion for dead leaves & closet shelves, and taking a fancy to the last person you could ever be prevailed upon to marry.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

It sounds crazy but I promise you: if you just put your phone aside and read for half an hour each night before bed, it will change your life.

[quoting a tweet from CaffeinatedLiha: “Reading books at night is self-care. The kind that ruins your sleep schedule but heals your soul.”]

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

If you want to push back against tech's encroachment into every corner of our lives, you have to read books. They're eager to create a future in which most people are illiterate and hooked on slop, a world without imagination or knowledge. Reading is resistance.

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

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Boze Herrington, Library Owl @sketchesbyboze.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

People love to criticize reading in public as performative but I can't stress enough how much it would improve our collective mental health if we all carried books wherever we went.

tweet that reads "normalize reading book [sic] in public," with images of a train and a person holding an open book.

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