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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 1h

The weather behaved a little less well on our drive up Mt Mitchell today. But it was still a fun winding mountain road.

pea soup fog seen through car windshield

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J.A. Prentice @japrenticewrites.bsky.social · 22h

The “father and son” motif in the story is also interesting given Christopher would then be the one to edit and present the fragments of it.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 23h

"It was autumn, and the end of summer holidays spent mostly in the open. Fires were coming back. It was the time of year when book-lore is most attractive. - JRR Tolkien 'The Lost Road' (the earliest tale of Numenor, 1937)

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 23h

Visit an abandoned fire tower bucketlist: done. Fryingpan Lookout Tower, near Asheville, NC

a derelict but intact firetower at the end of a steep gravel trail to a mountain peak.

two empty window panes looking out onto wooded Appalachian mountains, framed by graffiti'ed panes

old peaks, deep forests, moody sky, altitude 5400ft

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I followed up a caffeinated sweet tea with a caffeinated honey coffee and I am full of sugar, caffeine, and regrets.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A little light airplane reading. "But the Numenoreans tarried not long yet in Middle-Earth, for their hearts hungered ever westward for the undying bliss of Valinor. And they were restless and pursued with desire even at the height of their glory."

"The Lost Road" paperback cover. Spears, axes, and a mountainous rocky shoreline by an angry sea

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

October inspiration, let's crush this month. The northern world may be in its swansong for the year, but what if we ourselves are just getting started?

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A lonnnng time back when I was playing the young LOTRO, my favorite area was the wildnerness between Bree and Weathertop. It set such a mood, leaving a relative bubble of safety and innocence for more dangerous but also more wondrous world. My first view of Weathertop is a core gaming memory.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Tom Bombadil also casts a spell that launches the disembodied spirit of the wight out of the barrow and beyond the Door of Night - where even Mandos, keeper of souls, can't reach him. That kind of display of raw power & dominion is also a *big* no-no in Middle-Earth's understanding of good vs. evil.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm watching a "Great Courses" series on the Hubble telescope & deep space, and it's brilliant. What we are able to learn - and see - from our tiny dot in an enormous cosmos is breathtaking. To the extremely few of my 2500 followers who will enjoy these posts, awesome! To the rest, apologies!

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So #TIL that the most powerful supernovas in the galaxy give off the same light energy as 5 billion suns. Science is amazing, and we live in an awesome (in all senses of the word) universe at an awesome time.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

So #TIL Thomas Paine, author of "Common Sense" and powderkeg for the American Revolution, had only 6 mourners when he died in 1809. After the war he went back to Britain, pissed them off, fled to France, pissed them off, got jailed, went nuts & wrote screeds against everybody who'd been his friends.

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Andrew Reeves @andrewsshi.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

A mini thread on why I find the history of ritual magic in the Western Tradition to be really freaking cool.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

In Middle-Earth, speaking words of command is dangerous at best, usually a true no-no. Every time Tom Bombadil expresses a wish - to the hobbits, Old Man Willow, or the barrow-wight - it is obeyed. He has a 1000 batting average in getting his way. As though his wishes were also his words of command.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I often find old flowers pressed into Family Bibles I'm restoring. But I rarely get details! "Got these flowers in the yard 1(st) day of Nov 1937 - Ida [Kroger?]"

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Tonight's pink sunset took our early-fall maples and exploded them into peak. For about 5 minutes.

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Dr Claire Millington ✍🏻🏺 @clairemillington.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It's #RomanFortThursday and as the summer ends so do most excavations. This pic is of excavating at floor inside Vindolanda in 2013, when it was scorching and baked hard. You can read more about the civilians living at Vindolanda in my new book www.amberley-books.com/discover-boo...

Stones emerge from dusty dry beige dirt. Some are obviously worked, oblong shapes lying in parallel lines. Some look more like rubble.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Every city is a memorial as well as a living thing. I think that's part of why the "Urban Renewal" efforts of the 1950s & 1960s looks even worse & worse as time goes on. Neighborhoods aren't meant to be erased wholesale. That breaks the pact. That's not what a city - a community - is meant to do.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

On its surface this looked great. An intact book made in colonial Boston in 1750 is incredibly rare. This one seemed affordable. BUT...

title page of "True Religion Delineated" by Joseph Bellamy

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The pony is your to-do list. You cannot outrun it, you cannot outlast it. It is always there, it will always find you.

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Butser Ancient Farm @butserancientfarm.co.uk · 24/09/2026

How do you turn an old oak tree into part of a Saxon hall, entirely by hand? 🌳 In our new video series, we follow our highly skilled treewright as he transforms an oak log into the timbers for the front wall of our reconstructed Saxon hall.. Watch part 1 now - www.youtube.com/@ButserAncie...

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Was excited to make an Instagram chocolate almond negroni, and gosh I do not like it.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Well, if interest in an eBay book can be gauged by the number of people who ask kinda weird questions about it, the latest Victorian Family Bible I posted is very interesting!

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A journey of (two) thousand miles began with the first step.

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Holly Gramazio @hollygramazio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

would you like to meet our new cat? her name is All The Fur I Brushed Off Madeleine Over The Summer

A pile of cat fur arranged into a loosely cat-shaped mound; two ears have been pinched into shape, and two googly eyes have been attached in the place where the eyes would be. It is sitting against a green wall, and it is very wrong to the eye.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch. As opposed to... who?

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I've known it since, what, middle school, but it still blows me away that radio is light.

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Gemma Bristow @konallis.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Who doesn't remember where they were the day the mile-high dog attacked Pisa?

Commemorative plate marked '26th Incontro Internazionale, Pisa 2008', painted with the image of a Newfoundland dog looming above landmarks of Pisa (including the Leaning Tower).

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Jens Notroff @jensnotroff.com · 19/09/2026

📖 "And he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher and departed." - Matthew 27:60 🪨 Just in case you ever wondered how this might've looked (here the Roman era rock tombs in Urfa's Haleplibahçe neighbourhood).

Photo of a cave entrance cut and carved into the rock. A large circular rock can be seen to the left of the door, partly rollen back into a wall niche and blocked by a smaller stone.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Take literally *any 40 years in history* and you can create a "We Didn't Start the Fire" from it. 2026 is just another shade of the same crazy we have always seen & always will. For better or worse.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I don't know who this bourbon is being marketed to, but it's not me! 🤮

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Not me, buying 4 Victorian Family Bibles in the last 4 days to restore. Gonna be a busy few weeks!

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Jeremiah McCall (he/him) @gamingthepast.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Hey friends, I continue to forget how hard it is for more than a few people who might appreciate it to know about work I do in history, historical games, and history education (and any combination of the 3) relevant to them. Could you maybe share one or more of these items ? I'd be SO grateful. 1/

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Andrew Reeves @andrewsshi.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I get so angry with, "What would it look like if our creations went horribly wrong?" because I see a guy I served with in the 90s making Hitler Did Nothing Wrong posts on X dot com. It's happened! Past tense! The technology already went horribly wrong!

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

"Palm trees are just like everybody else, they get lonely. So let's give him a friend." - Bob Ross, S2E3

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

On Wednesdays We Wear Black 🖤

the 5 members of the heavy metal band Testament stand in front of a wrought iron fence, all wearing various clothes in black and all with black sunglasses

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The author of "Realism," Linda Nochlin, calls "The Stone-Breakers" by Courbet (1849) "the most graphically direct & startlingly unvarnished image of contemporary work of the entire century." It takes a subject that had never merited "high" art before, and elevates it just by showing it honestly.

two men in rough and worn clothing break stones for a living. One kneels by a rubble pile with a raised hammer, the other stands and strains while holding a larger rock awaiting its own bashing

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Gosh I love the early eps of #Enterprise. I love how big space is. And that things don't work right. Beaming someone out on a windy day embeds leaves & twigs in the flesh! Gravity plates randomly stop working. Showers are water. Away missions take hours of decompression. It's all so Wild West.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Really enjoying my Realism book. The movement wasn't simply about depicting things as they are - it was about consciously stripping away expectation in order to *truly* see things. Our memories, teachings, & biases color everything we see, and Realists' ultimate goal was to escape all that baggage.

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Andrew Reeves @andrewsshi.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I saw this, so all of you must as well.

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Wild, I just bought a 1644 book by Cromwell's firebrand preacher Nicholas Lockyer for less than a nice dinner for 2.

eBay purchase page with the title page of 1644 "Baulme for Bleeding England" - a series of Cromwellian sermons by Nicholas Lockyer

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Nana Visitor @nanavisitor.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Can’t wait to see you all!

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Stori3d Past @stori3dpast.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Got another little mini-bucketl-list book in. An 1874 1st edition Jules Verne "Tour of the World in 80 Days." And it's a beauty. (Still waiting for an 1873 1st ed / 1st printing to fall into my lap.)

Shiny blue cloth cover with title, a drawing of a 2-master sailing ship, and Verne's signature all in bright gilt

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