Seven months of work handed over to clients yesterday. Now writing up the technical paradata explaining how the images were made along with my info sources. The client will use AI content produced by other contractors in their production alongside ours, so I may only share our work at release.

Quick pic of Traprain Law from my evening ride around East Lothian 🚴. #HillfortsWednesday

Lead the way!

Castle bothering in Kirkcudbright yesterday, en route to my eldest niece's wedding celebrations - long day, late night and much dancing! Unfortunately MacLellan's castle is still shrouded in HLM inspection scaffolding at the moment, but at least one of its facades can still be appreciated.

The Traprain Law Treasure was discovered by George Pringle, foreman of excavations on the titular hill in East Lothian, #OTD in 1919. Buried around the mid-5thC, it is the largest collection of late Roman hacksilver ever found. 📸National Museums Scotland

For those who were interested, but couldn’t make it, you can now watch and listen (for free!) to the full line up of lime finishes talks from the hugely successful ‘What’s the Point? 2’ symposium 😀

Two new locally-produced films about the Shetland Bus will soon launch to coincide with Norway’s 17 May Constitution Day celebrations. The first film, Hearts Across the Sea, is a 30-minute documentary featuring three Shetland people with living memories of World War II shet.news/65n45

👏. Just needs polychromy ;)

Stopped off at Crichton Collegiate Church on my 🚴‍♂️ ride today. I haven't visited it for maybe six years or so, even though it's right in my neighbourhood. I just missed the blossoms looking their best, but the church still makes a cracking photo.

Happy 100th Birthday to Sir David Attenborough! 🐅🐘🦍🦒🦓🦏🐋🦈🌿🌱🌎

I built my first henge on a beach in Cornwall at the age of 10, inspired by a visit to Stonehenge on my way. It was nice to collaborate with @suegreaney.bsky.social on building another, 42 years after my first attempt. 😊 📖 Stonehenge: Story of an Icon www.english-heritageshop.org.uk/stonehenge-s...

Hugely excited that my new book, 'Stonehenge: The Story of an Icon', has been published by English Heritage! This has been several years in the making, quite a bit written before I left EH. Very pleased with the end result: www.english-heritageshop.org.uk/stonehenge-s...

The peach ballot paper is almost as long as my walk to the polling station!

70miles in the legs today. 🚴‍♂️ I am cooked. Bless the folks at the farm shop, who bring out warm blankets for cyclists who stop off for coffee and want to sit outside. The sun may have been out today, but it felt quite chilly.

How is it that my brain can remember songs I haven't listened to in 40 odd years in such hi-fidelity, yet not remember the song name or the artist? Do I have corrupt hard drive?

How Shetlanders use Shaetlan – and whether people see it as a dialect or a language – are the key questions at the heart of new questionnaire being carried out by an English linguistics student. shet.news/pac9v

The recent announcement about Anthropic joining the Blender Development Fund as a Corporate Patron member has raised concerns from the community around how we engage with AI topics. This is how we plan to address the issue: www.blender.org/news/upcomin... #b3d #DevFund

Post your warning sign

So, Anthropic just became a Corporate Patron sponsor of Blender 3D. Can't say I'm surprised, but I also can't say I'm feeling comfortable about it.

The missus has gone off to Zakynthos for a week to have a holiday from my awful cooking. 🧑‍🍳 So I’m holding the fort and looking after her horses. I won’t manage to attend our open day at Cousland Smiddy tomorrow as I’m up against some tight project deadlines, so working through yet another weekend.

💥 A Whole Lot of History 💥 📰 ‘Hat Wars’ in Early Modern England: The importance of 'Hatiquette' 🎩 📰 Prehistoric Funeral Pyre Found at Sizewell C Nuclear Plant ☢️ 📰 Papyrus of Homer’s Iliad found inside Roman-era Egyptian Mummy 🏛 open.substack.com/pub/historyh...

My Dyson vacuum cleaner is misbehaving, but in quite an interesting way. It's suddenly become more powerful! If you know the computer game Half Life, when the gravity gun adopts unworldly physical properties, that’s the kinda feeling I have right now.

Every AI-generated image you see these days feels like an observation test! How I miss the good old days when the mistakes were intentional, and this was more fun.

The AI-generated Stonehenge model (and the other examples) are a good demonstration of why this tech is so unreliable for heritage visualisation. For the moment, anyway. But will anyone outside expert circles care as long as the image looks compelling enough? That's the genuine concern here.

Went for a quick scramble up the Seat after my meeting today. Although I live locally, I haven’t been up here in 20 years. There’s about ten times as many tourists up here than I remember since last time!

Still thinking a lot about AI & curatorial practice. It strikes me that while I often get AI hallucinating nonsense that is demonstrably untrue, it never just says "I don't know" Knowing - and admitting - the limits of our knowledge is such an important skill. Not just for curators - for everyone.

Interesting points (no pun intended) raised in the first half of the Lime Finishes Group presentation 'What's the Point'. I have had ongoing debates with historians about how to depict some of these buildings in visual reconstructions. Personally, I lean towards showing them rendered and limewashed!

Our first open day of the year at the Cousland Smiddy. Not many visitors, but hoping we might see more folk as the year goes on.

Splashdown! Welcome back, Integrity / #ArtemisII crew. Great job, NASA!

I always love the five minutes at the end of Attenborough's natural history programmes that show how some of these amazing wildlife images were filmed - often in extreme environments. RIP Doug. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Enjoying a much needed day off having worked right through the Easter break to meet project deadlines. Discovered a wonderful East Lothian coffee/farm-shop I’ve not been to before that’s not as overwhelmingly noisy as some of my regular 🚴🏼 stop-offs. Panniers loaded with goodies!

NEW BOOK: 'Rhynie, A Powerful Place of Pictland' We are thrilled to announce the release of our book by Professor Gordon Noble FSAScot, a nationally important monograph that brings together 10 years of research which has transformed our understanding of the Picts: www.socantscot.org/uncategorize...

Wouldn’t it be cool if the enthusiasm and inspiration brought to us by NASA changed everything? It is so obvious to us all that the Trump regime is unsustainable, hateful and deeply ignorant. We can overcome them. Artemis 2 has made me feel so much hope for goodness and goodwill. 🚀❤️

Getting closer!🌕 Although NASA's tracking website appears to show Orion at a far greater distance than the live broadcast does. I don't understand that. #ArtemisII

Happy Easter! If you're stuck indoors and bored due to the stormy weather, you can always colour in my drawing of Cambuskenneth Abbey ;)

Happy Good Friday. Exactly 4 years ago, I was finishing this reconstruction model of the nave of Bury St Edmunds Abbey (c1500s) with my former EH colleagues, Steven Brindle and Carlos Lemos. Here's my #Blender3D model before I added textures, polychromy, and fictive ashlar decorations. See Alt text.

How strange. Or do they know something about Kilchurn Castle's past that I might have missed? 😟 #Sketchfab

The Middle Ages are the excuse reconstruction artists have to abandon the 60-30-10 rule of colour theory.

Track Artemis II in realtime www.nasa.gov/missions/art...

"The Launch Abort System [pulls the crew capsule away from danger] can go from 0 to 500mph in two seconds." 🚀 Wouldn't the G-forces involved turn a body to pulp? #ArtemisII

Castellologists - I'm trying to think of some more examples of chapels or oratories above or adjacent to entrance gateways. I know of these at Clifford's Tower, Prudhoe, Orford, and Dover. Can anyone suggest others?

Today marks the first day of the new fire byelaw, banning fires and barbecues across the National Park from 1 April to 30 September each year. Help to protect this special place by following the rules and spreading the word 🔥 See www.cairngorms.co.uk/fires for more and spread the word 🔁

This just arrived on my doorstep with a big ‘thud’! Looking forward to reading it when I get a chance. Especially love the lino print image of Tap o’Noth #hillfort on the jacket cover by Bryan Angus. 🙌

If the Artemis II crew launch around the Moon happens tomorrow you can watch it live here www.youtube.com/live/Tf_UjBM...

The new fire byelaw for the Cairngorms National Park is about to begin, banning fires and barbecues between 1 April and 30 September each year 🔥 Read our FAQs for everything you need to know ➡️ bit.ly/4m2ew95

Share your snow ❄️ art!

Annual village clean-up done. Everything looks nice again. Fewer volunteers than in previous years, but we still managed to fill around 50 large bin bags with litter lifted from the roadsides. Empty Red Bull drinks cans and discarded e-cigs are the No.1 litter menace again. McDonald's packaging 2nd.

Does anyone know what the deal is with website URLs on LinkedIn profiles that result in Page not found errors? Seems to affect other profiles, not just mine. I turned off trackers/ad blockers in case that was the issue, and a different browser, but it's not that. I'm assuming this is a bug.

Perhaps it’s time I reconstructed another #Hillfort

Not long left to apply 👇 #DigitalHeritageJobs