iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Yueh, for whom a million deaths are not enough, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Eclipse! Cloud most of the day but either it burned off naturally or "head towards Greenland, it might be less cloudy near land" actually worked.

Rather overexposed photo of total eclipse, showing the corona being over-enthusiastic. A pink smudge at 8 o'clock gives a hint of the prominence I could've won if I'd had the courage to use a lower ISO.

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hammancheez but spooky @hammancheez.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Pope : with mercy and love and deep regret, i must call this a schismatic act Half of bluesky with their shirts off and earrings out ready to brawl outside applebees : GET THEIR ASSES WOOOOO

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Urban fantasy. Hot dumbass paladin. The cat is safe, as are the dogs (not pictured). What's not to like?

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Joel Cunningham @joelevard.com · 16/04/2026

guys, this is how you lose the time war

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Adobe continuing to find new anti-consumer depths to plumb. Anyone got recommendations for Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat replacements that aren't garbage?

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

The British practice of assigning meaningless names to operations (at least until troops get hold of the name) isn't very media-friendly but it does avoid cringe-worthy names like this.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

"... that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea." "Sorry mate. Endorheic basin, see."

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Aleksei I. Valentín (he/they) ✡️♿🏳️‍🌈 @aivalentin.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

The Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus is not allowed to make soup again, we've been over this.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Aim high, Dart Charge website.

Survey question, "How would you rate the website overall?". Options are:
1. Not adequate at all
2. Slightly adequate
3. Moderately adequate
4. Very adequate
5. Extremely adequate

Option 5 is highlighted because the website was, indeed, extremely adequate.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Me: "Oh great, the forward sun-lounger deck is basically empty, that's a great place to watch as we sail away!" *settles in* The ship's horn, located by the forward sun-lounger deck: *emits a doot fit to sunder the heavens*

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

How was I to know my enemies had arranged a solar eclipse, and it wasn't actually sunset? How do you even *arrange* a solar eclipse, this is bullshit.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Accurate, if a couple of decades late.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Warframe put out a new story and I'm always impressed with how quickly the writers fill me with an urge to bite the entire Orokin Empire to death. "First you serve as labour, then you serve as parts."

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Encephalophatass (Any pronouns) @encephalophatass.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

Biphobic lesbians will be like, "I could never date a bisexual woman, what if she leaves me for a man?" Skill issue. I cannot stress enough how much of a self-own that is. If she wants to go back to men after dating you, turn in your lesbian card, cause you've failed.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

I'm in Boston (MA, not Lincolnshire) and it's both walkable and very pretty. Now I have walked too much. Anything in particular I should do on Sunday? I've already ambled along the Freedom Trail.

Allotments ("Victory gardens", to use the local name) looking unreasonably beautiful. A clutter of ornamental plants in a couple of small fenced plots in the foreground. A tall tree, more distant, is centred in the frame and gloriously yellow with autumn. The sky is blue with a scatter of puffy clouds, and the light is undecided between "late afternoon" and "evening".

A building in the angle between two merging roads. It's in the classic Boston colour scheme of deep red stone walls, slate roof, and green (possibly tarnished copper) accents. Notably the designer has built it with conical "fairy-tale castle" roofs on cylindrical towers. It looks good enough to slightly redeem the profession of architects in my estimation.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

So it's not dreadful, but I played and enjoyed Shadowrun so probably I'm already lost. Shadowrun's model for blast propagation in a confined space was crude, but that's still a model for blast etc. in a tabletop game about orc wizards.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

Someone's doing very well at Nitrogen Buckaroo.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Studio execs are one of the few jobs which can usefully be replaced by AI. Confident, even when wrong; incapable of critical thought; and pretty racist.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

But hey, all that "usage" means some exec's KPIs are through the roof. They'll be able to afford a second yacht!

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Another vaccine that wears off: whooping cough/pertussis. Only lasts a decade or so; babies get vaccinated because the disease is bloody lethal to them, but it's absolutely no fun as an adult either.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Also, the vaccine wears off! If you were vaccinated as a child and are now in your forties, either get tested or just get vaccinated again. UK people who only got one dose as a teen (hi), definitely get re-vaccinated properly.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Someone just discovered that it can't just go down the drain and someone will notice.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

This is quite a lot of fun, managing to hit a lot of the notes of MilSF in a setting where people are dubious about the *concept* of a military, much less actually supporting one.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

Russia could end the war in Ukraine very cheaply and it wouldn't even take a week. They could just take all their soldiers and drive back to Russia or Belarus.

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Kingfisher & Wombat @tkingfisher.com · 20/02/2025

“WHY DID YOU SLASH THE MAINTENANCE BUDGET?!” you scream. “THERE ARE BABIES DYING OF DYSENTERY! ONE OF THESE SOLID GOLD PUNCHBOWLS WOULD FUND IT FOR A YEAR!” “But then I wouldn’t have a solid gold punchbowl,” says the industrialist, as a rat tapes dynamite to his eyelids and pushes the detonator.

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Chaucer Doth Tweet @levostregc.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Blue canarye yn the outlette by the lighte swicche Who waccheth ovir thee Make a litel dovecote yn thy soul

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Starting a simple plumbing job: "Who puts caulk in G threads have they not even read the title of ISO 228?" Half-way through: "Those isolation valves, um, don't." Giving up: "At least the leak's down to something I can control with a towel." Weirdly I can install FreeBSD just fine.

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Marc Reeve @cmraman.geek.org · 27/11/2024

When I look upon its sides, I can see the rusty stains Water in the wiring, don’t you know it’s such a pain Repairs take forever, then it breaks down once again Cybertruck can’t handle all the cold November rain

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J.J. @jdotj.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

When you ADHD too close to the sun, and decide that the few minutes in between meetings is the time to build that bookshelf you bought but hadn't put together yet, which leads to removing all the furniture in your office and completely reorganizing it and the furniture placement.

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Ross in Detroit @rossindetroit.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Getting assistance from German colleagues and they’re so encouraging.

I said “I will disconnect the power cables from the pump motor and check resistance to ground of the motor windings.
If I need more help I will update the Case
tonight.
I hope it's not a bad motor.”
And they replied “hope dies last”

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 02/11/2024

Happily Veilguard crashes to desktop every two hours. Good for the tedious necessities of shaped existence, bad for immersion.

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Senator Ron Wyden @wyden.senate.gov · 01/11/2024

Trans rights are human rights

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

I hadn't even realized "the cooling water isn't destroyed" was an argument people were making. Datacenters join a large family of inappropriate and excessive uses of shared water resources, because it's hard to charge correctly and you can't teach a company pro-social behaviour.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 14/09/2024

I don't generally like drop-down boxes for year of birth, but I kind of want to know the story behind this start date for the one on my gym membership. I know it's probably just "no-one's living to 200 in the next 80 years", but immortal professors dodging compulsory retirement sounds more fun.

Screenshot of a webform, showing "Date of Birth" field, with drop-down boxes for "Day", "Month" and "Year". The "Year" drop-down is expanded, showing the options 1824, 1825 and 1826 before the box is cut off by the edge of the screenshot

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 06/09/2024

Interesting thread here about war-time German snobbery around the Hurricane. It’s also interesting to compare just how much more popular the Spitfire is than the Hurricane at modern air-shows. Part of that’s attributable to the Spitfire being both prettier and easier to conserve, I guess.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 20/07/2024

"The Rust rewrite is going great, but we've run all the local pharmacies out of spiro and T"

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 06/07/2024

Looks as though antihistamines might help avoid covid infection, as well as mitigate the disease. Insert "it's all histamine" meme.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 04/07/2024

I feel personally attacked! Also it's Fira Code.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 21/06/2024

"A pint's a pound the world around" doesn't work for water outside the US because we use 20 fl. oz. pints, and it doesn't work inside the US because their fl. oz. is wrong and a pint is 473 ml. It *does* work for whisky in the US, and presumably a pint of whisky is what the author had just drunk.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 29/05/2024

After a lot of frustration I think the main problem was that I'd pinched the tines slightly so all the glitter was piling up in the tip of the nib, blocking it. I pressed on the nib a few times to splay it and now I'm back to my desired "All glitter, all the time" state.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 18/05/2024

Good: delightful shade under the trees in Vigelandsparken. Bad: it turns out I'm allergic to their pollen and about to turn into a wheezing, sneezing mess. Good again: P3 filters vanquish pollen utterly. And that's why I'm wearing my mask outdoors on a sunny day.

A shady tree-lined avenue. Every single one of them is trying to have sex with my nose.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 11/05/2024

Last night's auroras, from sunny 52° north in a streetlit housing estate on a slightly cloudy night. Someone should probably check on our satellites. To the eye these were just faint god-beams with no real colour. Images have been vigorously de-noised with Lightroom's denoisinator.

Auroras - purple nearly-vertical streaks high, with a green diffuse glow lower down - above a brightly streetlit housing estate. I cannot emphasise enough how much these were *not* dark viewing conditions. Yagi for scale.

Auroras again, with about the same geometry but imaged higher in the sky to remove the housing estate.

Yet more auroras with clouds, more housing estate, and a busy road. Exposure here was two seconds; compare the contrast in the vertical purple streaks to the next eight-second exposure.

Auroras, nearly identical to the previous image but with an eight-second exposure. Contrast and visibility on the purple streaks is diminished because the dratted things keep moving.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 01/05/2024

I guess "people's private PDFs" were one of the last sources of human-generated text to mine, so I'm not surprised this is happening. Furious, but not surprised. Like, how is "exfiltrate data and probe it for insights" distinguishable from malware?

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

@clockworkcanary.bsky.social I finally got to True Master, though I feel like I've made the same ten mistakes each a thousand times. Also Laetum is a bit good!

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 22/02/2024

Fountain pen question. I'm using a glitter ink, and about two sentences after I fill it, it dries up hard. I can fix it by pulling the feed and soaking it in water but is there something less invasive I can do instead? TWSBI Swipe, stub nib, piston converter, Diamine Arctic Blast.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 21/02/2024

Kimtech Purple Nitrile gloves proudly claim to be "anti-static tested to protect the wearer and equipment".

Goose chasing man meme. "Anti-static tested? Did it pass?" "Did it pass, motherfucker?"

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 21/01/2024

Didn't take brain meds today (I'm supposed to be off in my off hours!). @dvschroeder.bsky.social asked a pretty interesting question, which was fine, and then @chessypig.bsky.social attempted human communication. And now I'm stressed enough to bite my own head off. Also f orbitals are banned.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 02/12/2023

Cleaning warning labels off a now-empty tin so that I can re-use it. "Right, that was easy, just need to wipe off the adhesive residue with some acetone and I'm done." Off comes the adhesive. Off comes the paint covering the next layer of warning labels. This is like Rubbish Archaeology.

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Nick Taylor @tienelle.bsky.social · 30/11/2023

Trying to find something to excite fluorescence in my fairly short-lived experiment and the market seems to have nothing between "ten minutes gets you a spectrum" and "this laser can drill through time!".

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