I’m not exactly a fan of large-chain food and beverage outlets. But Sydney based Mexican cuisine fast food restaurant Guzman y Gomez, AKA GYG (to me, anyway) is not quite large-chain. Not at the moment, though there are near to two-hundred stores in Australia, sixteen in Singapor … | Continue reading
Matt Adnate has been named the 2024 winner of the Archibald Prize’s Packing Room Prize, with his portrait of Indigenous Australian rapper Baker Boy, AKA Danzal Baker. As the name suggests, the prize is awarded by the staff of the packing room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales … | Continue reading
I’m a bit late to the party, but such is life in the twenty-first century. The other day WordPress (WP), the CMS that powers disassociated turned twenty-one (Facebook link)*. I’ve been on-board since 2007. You’ll only find a handful of posts from those days though, I rebooted my … | Continue reading
Craig Meerkamper, writing at Spacing, laments the apparent demise of the once omnipresent commercial third place, a kind of neutral zone between home and work, such as a cafe, where people gather. Or where remote workers can set up shop for the day. Coffee houses are one of the e … | Continue reading
Randwick is a large suburb located about five kilometres south east of downtown Sydney, Australia. It is home to the Prince of Wales hospital, Royal Randwick Racecourse, a thriving commercial and retail hub, large bus and light rail depots, the historic Ritz Cinemas, and arguably … | Continue reading
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: write about creative environments. Let’s have a go. A creative environment, as far as I can tell, is not necessarily a place. Not one I can put my finger on, at least. Nor is it a particular time. My creative ideas, if that’s what the … | Continue reading
Weird stuff is happening out on the remote boundary of the solar system. Beyond the orbit of Pluto. You name it, it’s going on out there. Irregularities. Anomalies. Clustering of apsidal lines. Perihelia. And — saving the best for last — a surprising prevalence of retrograde Cent … | Continue reading
ASL? Another artefact of the early days of the (mainstream) internet will soon be no more. Instant messaging service, ICQ, launched in 1996, will cease operating, as of Wednesday 26 June 2024. ICQ (I seek you, get it?) allowed users to chat to pretty much anyone who let them. I c … | Continue reading
Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra, announced this week it was making about three thousand employees, or ten percent, of its workforce redundant. About three hundred people were sent home straightaway — hopefully with some sort of pay-out — while the remainde … | Continue reading
NASA is dead set keen to return to the Moon. But their current plan, called Artemis, is dead set crazy, writes Polish-American entrepreneur and writer, Maciej Cegłowski: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to wonder what’s going on here. If we can put a man on the moon, then … | Continue reading
Konrad Marshall, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald: Run South Yarra co-founder Tom Adair is wary of any suggestion that run clubs are the new Tinder, yet relationships are born here, and side-by-side chats while jogging, he notes, are definitely less pressurised than face-to- … | Continue reading
Two and bit years ago, I spotted an entry on Fandom about a “remake” of the Stanley Kubrick sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being a 2001 fan, I naturally wrote about it. I’ve had a lot of fun with the post ever since. People stumble upon it every now and again, and link to … | Continue reading
She is the Earth, a work of verse, written by Yankunytjatjara (South Australia) poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, was named the NSW Premiers Literary Awards book of the year, on Monday 20 May 2024. Award judges were unstinting in their praise of Eckermann’s writing: She is the Earth is a … | Continue reading
Sydney based product designer Wing Pang, whom I wrote about last week, has published a comprehensive guide to the IndieWeb. Coming from a design background, joining the IndieWeb was an incredibly exciting and rewarding, yet maze-like journey. To be honest, almost every step of th … | Continue reading
Blog of the .Day, yes, styled as Blog of the .Day, a collaboration between James of James’ Coffee Blog, and Joe Crawford, will highlight a new blog every day. Aside from casting the spotlight daily on a blog, another goal of the project is to bring the term blogosphere back into … | Continue reading
As with many things we consume, the science on coffee can be conflicted. One decade caffeine consumption is a no-no, the next it seems coffee is quite beneficial. Regular readers will know I’m a coffee drinker, but in — what I consider to be — moderation: two (large serve) cups p … | Continue reading
Every week, Australian radio station Triple J, invites a band or musician to record a cover of a song, for their Like A Version show. Anything goes here. About two years ago, Sydney based Australian DJ Dave Winnel performed a cover of Africa, by Toto, not the sort of music you’d … | Continue reading
Chris, writing at uncountable thoughts: RSS is a pervasive, but little known, web technology that allows you aggregate all your content into one place for easy reading. There are very few websites without an RSS feed, although many don’t advertise the link (or, even realise they … | Continue reading
The 2024 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) were held last week, on Thursday 9 May. The ABIAs are considered the Australian book publishing industry’s night of nights. A book-ish version of the Oscars, if you will. Award winners include Pip Williams, with her novel The Bookb … | Continue reading
A breakdown of how people, Americans in this case, spend their time, by each decade of their life. Things like sleeping, eating, working, caring for others, and socialising. The crunch is definitely on in our thirties, forties, and fifties, when time for sleep and socialising, fo … | Continue reading
Well this is exciting, the longlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award for Australian novel writing, has been published. Not sure how I missed the official announcement, but I went searching for a date the longlist would be unveiled, and instead found the longlist itself: … | Continue reading
Web designers and bloggers have been able to use alternative text, often referred to as “alt-text”, to describe images and photos, for decades. Alt-text helps people with little or no vision comprehend a website image, so long as the description is reasonably accurate. In recent … | Continue reading
A text editor without the bells and whistles, called Tine. A nice name for a text editor. The main goal of this editor is to keep the focus on the text editing and not be distracted too much by buttons, tabs, menus, and animations. | Continue reading
A scene from Angel Baby, a film by Michael Rymer, depicting stars Jacqueline McKenzie and John Lynch. Angel Baby, trailer, is the 1995 debut feature of Australian filmmaker Michael Rymer. You may have seen some of his other work: Battlestar Galactica, Hannibal, both TV series, an … | Continue reading
Seen at Simon Willison’s Weblog: Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it. Spam and slop. Now there’s a diet guaranteed to be bad … | Continue reading
Wing Pang is studying Design in Visual Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, in Australia. As part of the degree course, she’s doing an assignment looking at IndieWeb, and decentralised social media, such as Mastodon. She’s interested in hearing the views of peo … | Continue reading
Matthias Ott, writing at Own Your Web: Today, social media sites have made it seductively convenient to quickly post links that will immediately be rewarded with views, likes, and reposts. As a result, many of us seem to instinctively drop most of the interesting links we find ri … | Continue reading
This month Kurzgesagt takes on smoking. If you’re a non-smoker, this may help you understand why people like to have a puff: Smoking helps you focus at work and is an excuse to take regular breaks, which is good for you mentally. It’s a tool against boredom, it suppresses your ap … | Continue reading
A screen cap of disassociated’s links page, circa November 1999. Them were dark days… Daniel Prindii asks, could blogrolls form the basis of community building online? Well, once upon a time, when they were known as links pages, that’s exactly what they did. But with the developm … | Continue reading
Meanwhile, back in the real world… chefs in France recently made the world’s longest ever baguette, which clocks in at a… morsel over one-hundred and forty metres in length. (My question: did they create the world’s largest oven to cook up this oversize stick of bread?) I thought … | Continue reading
Homepages and personal websites may be on the way back, but what of that other venerable staple of the early web: internet cafes? In the late 1990’s they were everywhere. Venture onto any suburban shopping strip, and there’d be at least one net cafe in amongst the other shops. Wh … | Continue reading
Kyle Chayka, writing for the New Yorker, in an article heralding the demise of the platform era: Now digital-distribution infrastructure is crumbling, having become both ineffective for publishers and alienating for users. Social networks, already lackluster sources for news, are … | Continue reading
I squeezed in two screenings of The Social Network — the 2010 film by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, dramatizing the founding of Facebook — on the day it was released in Australia. I went up to the local cinema the morning it opened, so I could write about it here, then returned … | Continue reading
Well, this is something: According to Statcounter, in April 2024, Windows 11 lost 0.97 points, going down from 26.68% to 25.65%. All those users seemingly went for Windows 10 since the OS, which will soon turn nine, crossed the 70% mark for the first time since September 2023, ga … | Continue reading
Queensland/Waanyi author Alexis Wright, has been named winner of the 2024 Stella Prize for Australian literature, for works by women and non-binary writers, with Praiseworthy, a novel set in the north of Australia. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an … | Continue reading
Despite their convenience, ease of sharing content, and even security, I steadfastly resist using the likes of WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, Telegram, Wire, Viber, and whatever else is out there. I probably infuriate friends and family by refusing to assimilate, but really feel I … | Continue reading
Social media is awash with motivational quotes extolling the virtues of making mistakes. I probably glanced sideways at some quote or other on Instagram — like, five years ago — because now my search tab is full of the things. Daily I’m reminded that experience is simply the name … | Continue reading
In the late 1960’s, former United States President Jimmy Carter, reported seeing an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO). Today unexplained objects, or phenomena, seen in the skies, are referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP). Carter, however, was not expecting to part … | Continue reading
The more things change, the more they stay the same, perhaps? Manuel Moreale writing the other week about blog post comments: I’m not a fan of comments in general and I think commenting on something should be done in one of two ways: 1. Privately via email or via direct messaging … | Continue reading
Everyone has a book in them, or so they say. It’s a pithy turn of phrase, one that’s possibly inspired the writing of a billion plus manuscripts. Slightly less inspiring though, is the revelation that ninety-six percent of books sell less than one thousand copies. Everyone has a … | Continue reading
A few days ago the United States Congress passed a law stipulating that video-sharing social network TikTok either be sold by Chinese owned company ByteDance, or face being banned in America. It seems like drastic move, but American lawmakers have their reasons. The proposal has … | Continue reading
Light may have an infinite lifetime. Who’d have thought? Even after the eventual, possible, heat death of the universe, photons may live on as beacons of light in an impossibly dark cosmos… maybe: One such candidate for a truly stable entity is the photon: the quantum of light. A … | Continue reading
From Letterboxd: definitely there was love, oh but the circumstances… try Carol, Never Let Me Go, Brokeback Mountain, and Ammonite, on for size. Even the not so well received One Day, recently adapted as a TV series, makes the grade. Let’s not forget Portrait of a Lady on Fire ei … | Continue reading
So called “pay or ok” consent models allow social media users to access services such as Facebook or Instagram, without adverts, if they’re prepared to pay a subscription. Otherwise they’ll see ads, possibly targeted ads, at some point, and obviously be OK with that. At face valu … | Continue reading
Mohamed Aboelez recently learned his roommate, a person he shared a residence with, had died. But no one called to say so, instead Aboelez read the news on Facebook: I froze. I hadn’t seen Paul in about two days. I had assumed he’d been with his friend. But not dead. Of course no … | Continue reading
Anyone checking into their Instagram or Facebook pages in the last few days, will have no doubt noticed the presence of Meta’s AI “assistant”, named, um, Meta AI. Britney Nguyen, writing for Quartz: The tech giant said on Thursday that it is bringing Meta AI to all of its platfor … | Continue reading
A conquering interstellar civilisation could bring the entire galaxy under its yoke in about a million years, assuming said civilisation could traverse the Milky Way at about ten percent the speed of light. I expect it’d be a multi-generational undertaking. It’d also be up to tho … | Continue reading
From time to time, a few years ago now, I found myself walking passed a bar called The Dock (Facebook page), on Monday evenings. The bar, located in the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern, was host to something I’d not witnessed at a watering hole before: everyone singing. And, as fa … | Continue reading