Not a news network!

@alg24.bsky.social

687 Followers 1910 Following

Nature lover, bibliomaniac, worrier. Yes, those are some of my bookshelves. I am still not an Algerian news network. Maybe I should have picked a different user name this time. Banner pic: tightly packed paperback fiction. Profile pic: egret.

Photo of a coffee mug with a design showing brightly-coloured books on a shelf. Behind it, on the far side of the room, is a wall of brightly-coloured books on shelves.
Looking up at a street name mounted high on a crumbling brick wall. It reads "Ticklebelly Alley".
A Sierpinski triangle made by cutting and folding a sheet of A4 paper.
A small music box on a bookshelf. There's an intricate silhouette illustration on it: a person in a feathered costume, with a butterfly net over their shoulder, is watched by a wide variety of birds perched in and around a pair of trees. There are other ornaments on the shelf, including a miniature house and a wooden mouse, and it's densely packed with paperback fiction.
A cut-out maple leaf shape in a small square black metal fence panel. Behind it, out of focus, is an orange building and some bright green and red leaves, backlit by the sun. The combination makes it seem as if you're looking at an autumn leaf, green blotched with orange and red, bright in the sunshine.
An A4 poster glued to a grey item of street furniture. It says "Spread Love" in big letters at the top, then there's a reproduction of Banksy's "Flower Thrower" mural (a masked man poised to throw a bunch of flowers rather than a bomb), and then at the bottom it says "Misinformed bigots are tearing apart our town with needless hatred. Faversham, choose love". Someone has tried to tear it down, but has only managed to shred one corner a little.
A Ravensburger "Original Memory" game, in a blue box with pictures of eight of the game tiles laid out at jaunty angles. There's a little cottage with a blue roof, a man with a big white beard and an even bigger fish, a stripy blue arrow pointing to the right, a goat in a yellow hat and green coat smoking a pipe and leaning on a wall, a couple of white-spotted red toadstools amongst autumn leaves, a tile divided into nine coloured squares, a magpie on a branch, and a penguin amongst tropical flowers.
A screenshot of the "Add muted words and tags" interface in the iOS Bluesky app. The guidance text reads: "Posts can be muted based on their text, their tags, or both. We recommend avoiding common words that appear in many posts, since it can result in no posts being shown." There is a text field labelled "Enter a word or tag", a choice of four durations (24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or Forever), a choice to mute the word in both text and tags or in tags only, and an option to exclude users you follow.
A winter-bare tree casts a shadow onto the blank end wall of a building. The sun and the camera are about ninety degrees apart, and the shape of the tree means that the shadow looks remarkably like a reflection, with a long branch reaching out to the right where the tree has one reaching out to the left.
A paperback copy of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, with illustrations by Jules Feiffer. It's a Collins Lions edition from the early '80s. The title is in red block capitals on a white background, and the cover illustration below it shows Milo and Tock meeting the Mathemagician in the numbers mine.
A very large inflatable Grinch, dressed up like Father Christmas, stands in front of a butcher's shop in an English town. When I say "very large", I mean it: to the tip of its hat, it's a good two storeys high.
A pre-sunset sky, with a golden glow that could have come straight out of a Turner painting. Beneath the sky are a church spire and some Victorian school buildings, half in flint and half in red brick.
A shiny articulated copper woodlouse, with black beads for eyes, resting comfortably on my forearm. It's a perfect fit: about as long as the distance from the crook of my elbow to my wrist, and just the right width for its legs to straddle my arm. It's a very fine beast indeed.
The base of a concrete column, set in bedrock. A small sign on the column reads "Summit of Mount Diablo The mound of fractured bedrock at your feet is the actual summit of Mount Diablo. The floor of the building was constructed around this point to allow you to stand on top of one of California's most prominent peaks."
A black cat sitting contentedly, eyes closed, on a sunlit doorstep. He's tucked in under a yew hedge, and surrounded by red, orange and brown fallen leaves.
A green crocodile painted on a chalk cave wall. The crocodile has its mouth open and looks quite cheerful, but it doesn't seem to have any feet! - its legs end quite abruptly. This is one of the paintings in Margate Caves in Kent, England.
Looking up at a clear blue sky through colourful autumn leaves, backlit by late afternoon sunshine. On the left is a magnolia, leaves still green. On the right is a cherry, showing a mixture of bright red, orange and yellow leaves.
The Northern Lights: pink and green in the sky above some buildings.
A cloudy night sky, with pink showing through some of the gaps in the cloud.
The manufacturer's nameplate on the back of a vintage-looking boatyard crane. It's yellow with black writing, and it says RUSTON BUCYRUS. Each word is on its own line, and the tail of the S in RUSTON overlaps the top of the B in BUCYRUS.
Manmade chalk caves, with paintings on the walls. There's a crocodile with a cheery grin on the left-hand wall, and straight ahead is the THANET HUNT, though all we can see from here is the caption and some trees; the huntsmen can't be seen from this angle.
A hexagonal metal lattice separating a parking structure from the pavement. It's the green of verdigris, but it looks as if it might actually have been painted that colour. There are some rusty patches showing through. Three garden snails are perching on three different hexagons; it's hard to imagine why.
A bright, colourful picture of the Iron Wharf Boatyard in Faversham, taken on a sunny October morning. Amongst other things, we can see a red tractor and the very tip of a folded red crane, a grass-green storage container with a lemon-yellow noticeboard on one end, a repurposed railway goods van, and some green poles holding up a sheltering roof. Recent rain has left large puddles, which are reflecting parts of the scene.
A 5cm button badge, held up in front of a bookcase. It's the yellow of the IKEA logo, and there's a drawing of a cute BLÅHAJ shark on it, along with the words "FEELIN' A LITTLE BLÅHAJ" in blue.
It's an antique mirror... containing NO REFLECTION. The vampire is coming from inside the house!
The title page of the Japanese edition of "Charmed Life", by Diana Wynne Jones. We see the title, the names of the author, translator and illustrator, and four silhouettes of children in Edwardian clothes playing enthusiastically with a flying mirror, hanging onto it and sliding, swinging or kicking through the air.
A page of Japanese text, the start of chapter 15 of Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones. There's a black-and-white drawing of a cat with a body shape reminiscent of a violin; its whiskers look like musical notes, and its tail has sticking-out bits rather like a violin's tuning pegs. This is Fiddle, Cat Chant's old violin, turned into a cat by his sister Gwendolen.
An elephant hawk moth caterpillar crossing a white-flecked grey pavement. It's a substantial grey caterpillar, arguably looking a little like an elephant's trunk. It has a couple of quite large eye spots, it's divided into six or seven segments by lighter-coloured stripes, and its skin appears almost scaled, as if it were composed of pixels or tiny mosaic tiles. It's a very exotic creature to find crossing a very ordinary pavement!
The top three shelves of some extended (now eight-shelf) Billy bookcases, and a blank stretch of wall above them, running to the ceiling. The edge of a mezzanine floor, with full-height internal windows above it, is visible above the shelves to the right.
A street sign bearing the name NO NAME STREET. It's in Sandwich, Kent, UK.
A section of an information board, with text in English and French. One section is circled. It reads "Nearby is the 'Long House', known for centuries as 'The Herring House', as this was where the town collected together its annual tribute of 40,000 herrings to the Archbishop's Priory and local manors. The house was built on the 13th century and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited houses in the town."
A partially translucent purple rock sitting on a black tabletop. It's quite an angular rock, and fairly small, a couple of inches across.
A sketch of the interior of the church shown in the last post. Unexpectedly, and very unusually, it appears to be full of... human bones. We are looking at a beautiful vaulted passageway, but really, who's looking at the architecture, because IT IS FULL OF BONES. A very large pile of... leg bones? And skulls, the occasional skull peeking out from amongst the rest. There's also a much smaller pile of just skulls in front of the main pile, which, to be fair, looks very ordered and tidy.
A black and white sketch of a church. I don't know my ecclesiastical architecture, sorry, so all I can tell you is that it has a square tower (with clock), a slightly unusual cluster of... chapels, maybe? at the other end, and a churchyard with a scattering of graves. The picture is captioned "Hythe", which is a town on the south coast of Kent.
A full-height bookcase well filled with manga volumes. Only the front row of books on each shelf is visible, and there are books stacked on top of them all, filling the gap between books and the shelf above. They're alphabetical by series. The most prominent series include Full Metal Alchemist, Hikaru no Go, Hunter x Hunter, Inuyasha, Monster, The Promised Neverland and Ranma 1/2. There's also a very narrow, tall shelf unit next to the bookcase, holding a selection of interesting things to look at: an empty Moomins biscuit box, an antique Bovril jar, a plush toy cat (Jiji from Kiki's Delivery Service), a ceramic elephant and so on.
A wall mostly lined with densely filled, floor to ceiling bookshelves. (There's a fireplace in the middle.) There are also some odds and ends of furniture - a papasan chair, a couple of table lamps on little decorative tables - but the bookshelves are the point of the photo.
A metre-high apothecary cabinet with eight rows of three small drawers each, and a single large drawer at the bottom. The drawers are labelled. The top two rows are close enough to the camera to read: A to Art, Art Deco to Beetles, Birds, Blossom to C, Cats 1 to D, and Daffodils to Dolphins.
A substantial, furry, dark brown fox moth caterpillar with thin bright orange stripes. It's undulating as it crosses the border between a manmade track and the adjacent grass. It looks very strokable, like a cat's tail.
Two clumps of tall thistle-like plants with huge purple flowers, brightly lit by the sun against a clear blue sky. They're growing at the top of a cliff, and there's a strip of sea visible behind them. In between the clumps is a tangle of other greenery, with bright red rosehips scattered through it.
A stripy little black and orange caterpillar on a ragwort stalk. I assume we're looking at the head end, because it seems to have eyes. If so, then its attention is on the stem it's clinging to. The other end of the caterpillar is resting on some flower buds just below.
Three panels from a Tintin book, The Shooting Star. In panel 1, Tintin says "Let's have a look" as he climbs the stairs towards the eyepiece of a very large telescope, while his dog Snowy waits at the top. In panel 2, Tintin recoils in shock from the telescope, exclaiming "OH!", while Snowy looks at him quizzically. In panel 3, we see what Tintin has just seen through the telescope - a burning yellow sun with a VERY LARGE SPIDER silhouetted against it.
The seven rusty metal towers of the Red Sands World War 2 army sea fort, rising out of the sea on angled concrete poles. They look like something out of a science fiction film: Martian tripods, or AT-AT walkers. The photo was taken on a sunny day, and the rusty red of the towers really pops against the bright blue sky and green sea.
Snowdrops growing against an old brick wall.
A bright pink camellia flower. A welcome spot of brightness on a winter's day.
Cover of the short story collection "no one will come back for us" by Premee Mohamed. An astronaut drifts through space, severed safety tether trailing; an enormous dark octopus-like tentacle reaches towards them. I'm sure it's going to have a happy ending!
Orange, yellow, blue and purple umbrellas suspended from wires above a city street. The sky is blue, and the umbrellas are bright against it.
Rusty sea forts against a blue sky, rising from the sea on four slender legs apiece. They look like something out of a science fiction film.
Hog's fennel growing thickly along the near bank of a meandering tidal creek. It's a bright green umbellifer, in full flower right now.