iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

For all of my complaints about some of the bosses I've had, at least they weren't trying to strip me and my friends of their rights. www.ft.com/content/fa69...

ft.com

Far-right Restore Britain receives £500,000 from tech entrepreneur

Nativist upstart shows growing potential to peel voters off from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK

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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 25/08/2026

imagine your whole thing, aside from the day job, being "reading and tits", imagine being this much of a legend

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Alex Zalben @azalben.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Dolly Parton, among a thousand other amazing things she did in her life, gifted over 330 million books to kids through her Imagination Library program. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the world, but you can support the program today to keep it going imaginationlibrary.com

imaginationlibrary.com

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library | USA, UK, IE, CA, AU

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a book gifting program that mails free books to children from birth until they begin school in participating areas.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I'm running a heist from issue 2, and having a wonderful time as my players' plan comes together. Mostly. So far. It's my favourite spell system in that it requires you to be inventive, and you can unleash powerful magic even at level 1, if you're willing to pay the price. 10/10 would huff again.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

So that I have something to refer to in the future when I'm delighted/disappointment in Burnham, a list of plausible (but perhaps unlikely) things I'd like a Burnham government to do, in no particular order.

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Jamie McKelvie @mckelvie.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Only 90s British kids will get this

Star Trek titles that read "The snooker has overrun again
Star Trek will return next week"

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Incredible levels of fence sitting from me on the Economic dimension.

A screenshot of a quiz result stating that I'm a "Progressive Liberal", with my position in the Economic dimension being 0.1 i.e. almost exactly halfway between Collectivist and Free market.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Starmer's reaction to various failures of government is often to act like he's the injured party. But it's a failure of *his* government! Even if the failure was impossible to predict or prevent, you're still culpable if you're the boss. It sucks, but that's the job.

A screenshot of a BBC News headline: "Keir Starmer says it's 'staggering' he wasn't told Mandelson failed security vetting"

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Truly an evergreen post. bsky.app/profile/joxl...

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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 31/01/2026

"average New Labour minister causes 3 scandals" factoid actualy just statistical error. average minister causes 0 scandals. Scandals Peter, who lives in cave & causes over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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ℳatt @matttomic.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Italian voice actor Carlo Bononi was the voice of all of the characters on Pingu. A trained clown by trade, he used a theater technique called grammelot, which consists of "speaking" in a mix of babbled gibberish noises. He improvised all the voices live and unscripted.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

If it were to happen, one bonus of Starmer leaving Downing Street before the next election is that it preserves an excellent pub quiz question: who was the last prime minister to both become and stop being prime minister as a consequence of a general election?

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

it feels almost indecent to say this since the primary reason for removing children from poverty is simply removing children from poverty. but it is really well established fact that child poverty is extremely expensive in the long term and this policy costs money.

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Gaby Hinsliff @gabyhinsliff.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Hands down my fabourite thing I’ve read this week. I laughed, I cried a bit (I lost my own dad recently), I will be quoting this next time someone says something pompous about what it means to be British. Enjoy your eccentric parents while you still have them substack.com/@tomcox/note...

substack.com

Tom Cox on Substack

Some Notes About My Dad That I Have Made In My Notebooks: My dad has come to an arrangement with the public pool in Nottinghamshire where he swims: after everyone else has got out of the pool, he is ...

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UselessFodder @uselessfodder.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Just incredible things from the VLC folks

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Jo Michell @jomichell.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

This is the important part.

As we are obliged to mention every time we're obliged to write about the UK economy, Britain is straitjacketed by a particular silly set of fiscal rules that have the practical effect of reifying global market moves into your local hospital getting turned into an elaborate portacabin maze.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

It's possible that I may have played too much Sekiro.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

One of my open source projects converts Word documents into HTML, since Microsoft's own conversion tends to be unusable for many use cases. Today, I discovered one of the users of the project is: Microsoft! github.com/microsoft/ma...

github.com

markitdown/src/markitdown/_markitdown.py at main · microsoft/markitdown

Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown. - microsoft/markitdown

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

I have spent 5 days implementing a TOML parser, and I think my conclusion might be that I don't actually want to use TOML as a configuration file format after all. There's more complexity around when different constructs can define tables than I realised, and structure is hard to see at a glance.

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Andy Raff is Definitely Not the Werewolf in this Scenario @wulfboyraff.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

This is a powerful and affecting thread, and I advise caution on reading it given it talks about very sensitive subjects. I find it upsetting both because of the subject matter, and because in a way it allows a glimpse of what our parliament might be if it wasn't a fucking circus instead.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 14/07/2024

The irony of removing the hereditary peers from the House of Lords is that they're the only ones put there by a vote, it's just that the electorate is rather small i.e. the hereditary peers.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 06/07/2024

Celebrating the manifestation of democracy the only way I know how.

A photo of a meal, a succulent Chinese meal.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 10/06/2024

"Probably true" This election is turning into performance art, it's the only plausible explanation.

A Reform UK candidate has claimed the country would be "far better" if it had "taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality" instead of fighting the Nazis in World War Two.

A Reform UK spokesman said: "Through offence archaeology the BBC has found that Mr Gribbin has made a series of comments about a number of subjects.

"They were written with an eye to inconvenient perspectives and truths. That doesn't make them endorsements, just arguing points in long distance debates.

"His historical perspective of what the UK could have done in the 30s was shared by the vast majority of the British establishment including the BBC of its day, and is probably true.

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Jaunty Art @jaunty.art · 13/05/2024

Here is my dad’s Porter joke that has all the makings of a joke but isn’t actually. He used to adore bombastically telling it to people to see how they’d react.

Porter joke
So it's the week before Christmas and a man arrives at the train station loaded with gift parcels that he's bought for his friends and family. Given the season, the train station is particularly busy.
Now, our friend is wealthy and generous and he's purchased many gifts during the day. And he's trying to navigate the station with gifts hanging from the ribbons off each of his fingers as he gets jostled by others at the train station.
Our man needs help! He shouts
"Porter!" above the din of the station in the hope that a train station porter can assist him with his load.

"Porter!" he cries again as he tries to rearrange the gifts into a stack that reaches above his head so he stops getting buffeted around the platform and can board his train.
The clock is ticking down on his train's departure so he yells "PORTER!" just as he sees the top parcel start to teeter and fall to his feet.
"PORTER! PORTER!" as the other parcels descend and start to get kicked by hurrying commuters.
Just as he's standing stricken surrounded by his fallen load with his train leaving the station, the Porter arrives and asks if he can assist.
"WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!
I'VE BEEN SHOUTING ON YOU." our man cries.

"Apologies Sir, I did hear you but I was tying my shoelaces." comes the reply.
And our exasperated traveller retorts
"That's the trouble with you porters!
YOU'RE ALWAYS TYING YOUR SHOELACES!"

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Steamed Buns @aremay.bsky.social · 14/03/2024

meanwhile, on ds9

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 13/03/2024

It seems I'm actually going to run this, and therefore need to come up with 32 more backgrounds for disgraced Klingons. I have some ideas, but more are always welcome!

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 01/03/2024

I think I'm spending my day off well.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 01/03/2024

I think I'm spending my day off well.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 15/02/2024

Films! Films! Films! A thread of trips to the cinema for my 2024 film extravaganza.

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Dan Douglas @dandouglas.bsky.social · 05/02/2024

demolishing the Captain Tom spa pool complex, in Duke Nukem 3D youtu.be/E-Pffu4wwvk?...

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skELLY @ellyzoe.bsky.social · 08/01/2024

This is loathsome. LeCun isn’t any old tech bro either; he’s a Turing award winner in a very high position at Meta (which is making one of the AI models that competes with openAI but which is ALSO trained on pirated books).

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 15/12/2023

I wish we got the version of Picard where he solved fun little mysteries in the village with his dog. variety.com/2020/tv/feat...

You know, personally speaking, my own tastes and inclination, I always said when we were in the earliest versions of the room for this show, if we could have just done a whole show about Picard and the dog on the vineyard in France, with no starships, no phasers, the only Romulans would be those two Romulans who work for him on the vineyard, and no politics — just, like, there’s a funfair down in the village and they all go, and maybe Picard solves a very low stakes mystery in the village, like, someone has stolen the antique bell out of the bell tower, or something like that? I would have loved to write that show. Um. I don’t think the world’s quite ready for a “Star Trek” show like that, and there’s probably maybe not that big of an audience for a “Star Trek” show like that.

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Michael Williamson @zwobble.bsky.social · 23/11/2023

My favourite @aptshadow.bsky.social book I read this year was Dogs of War. It made me almost made me cry (on a public train!) at things I did not ever expect to cry at. I don't think any other piece of fiction has caused just two words to be so emotionally loaded.

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JP @jpbrammer.bsky.social · 13/11/2023

In this week's ¡Hola Papi!, I respond to a letter that asks: Does my partner need to find me beautiful? holapapi.substack.com/p/my-partner...

holapapi.substack.com

My Partner Doesn't Find Me Beautiful

But Papi, does he really need to?

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