Sydney based Australian author Charlotte Wood has been included on the 2024 longlist for the Booker Prize, with her latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional. It is the first time a work by an Australian writer has featured on the Booker longlist since 2016. I’m reading Stone Yard Devo … | Continue reading
This is — again: sort of — /timeline page content, which seems to be a bit popular on InterWebs and IndieWeb at the moment. Today — or rather last Sunday 4 August 2024 — does not really mark the twenty-first birthday of disassociated. That would’ve been back in 2018, given the fi … | Continue reading
London based Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld’s 2021 novel, The Bass Rock, which won the Stellar Prize literary award in the same year, was a riveting read. Her new book, The Echoes, looks like it will follow suit, given it incorporates elements of The Bass Rock, including setti … | Continue reading
It depends how you define normal. Winter this year, or certainly in July, and absolutely since the recent Sudden Stratospheric Warming event, has felt distinctly chillier. But the bad news is, no this winter, when compared to the long term average, isn’t all that much cooler than … | Continue reading
As called/guessed by yours truly, Praiseworthy, the 2023 novel by Waanyi/Gulf of Carpentaria based Australian author Alexis Wright, has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Praiseworthy has cleaned up on the awards circuit since publication, also winning the other major Au … | Continue reading
Michael Le Page, writing for New Scientist: Drinking even small amounts of alcohol reduces your life expectancy, rigorous studies show. Only those with serious flaws suggest that moderate drinking is beneficial. That’s the conclusion of a review of 107 studies looking at how drin … | Continue reading
Tangentially related to the previous post. Do you drink decaffeinated coffee? Did you know there are three common methods used by decaf coffee producers to extract caffeine: the carbon dioxide method, Swiss water process, and finally, solvent-based methods. Not all methods are on … | Continue reading
Coffee happy hours at cafes? This is the first I’ve heard of the idea, but I like it. A growing number of Australian cafes are offering coffees priced at about three dollars a cup, for a couple of hours daily. This compared to the current average cost of about five dollars. Cafe … | Continue reading
Google, and Brave Search, are apparently the only search engines permitted to crawl Reddit, and index content published there. Other search engines, including Bing and Duck Duck Go, are presently being prevented from accessing the “front page of the internet” forum and discussion … | Continue reading
El Niño and La Niña are global metrological events most people are probably familiar with. In Australia, the influence of one or other seems more pronounced over the summer months. El Niño marks periods when ocean temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean rise by a certain amoun … | Continue reading
Canadian actor and director Megan Park’s latest feature, My Old Ass, trailer, would be a sure bet to win movie title of the year, should such an award exist. Otherwise, My Old Ass is on my want-to-see movie list because of the time-travel-like, older-self goes back in time to see … | Continue reading
Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald: I suspect restaurant and cafe customers have little idea of the profound, quiet stigma directed towards service workers. There is an assumption in this country that wait staff above a certain age are where they … | Continue reading
The shortlists for the 2024 Tiny Awards have been published. Now in their second year, the Tiny Awards honour “interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.” Think the work of small, and independent creatives. To be … | Continue reading
This news, via Kurzgesagt, may not be what some people want to hear. Exercising is useful, necessary in fact, but not so much when it comes to trying to lose weight it seems. Active people who work out regularly do burn more than inactive people. But only very little, often as lo … | Continue reading
If you enjoyed the novels of late British author Douglas Adams, you may enjoy this in-depth article about his later life, by Jimmy Maher. Adams, it seems, did not restrict his particular brand of humour to the written word. A regular customer at a coffee shop I used to go to, tol … | Continue reading
Back in 2008, I had a brief tweet exchange with another Twitter member, about the merits of LinkedIn*. At that point, I was a member, but really didn’t like the platform. I thought having a personal website, showcasing your abilities, was a better idea. #IndieWeb me was thinking … | Continue reading
JTR, writing at The Art Of Not Asking Why: Indie blogs are like good spots in town. Sure, they’re on the map, but you need to ask the locals to point them out. In terms of indie blogs, this means other bloggers. Word of mouth is sure a great way to spread the news about […] | Continue reading
Stefan Bohacek writing on his Mastodon page: The problem with redesigning your personal website is that it looks great for about a week, and then you start to hate it. This is a problem of the ages. In the late 1990’s I’d redesign my websites (I had several back then) every few w … | Continue reading
I might be a fan of science-fiction stories, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like, but of the seventy-five titles listed by Esquire magazine, on their best sci-fi books of all time, I’ve only read one. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. T … | Continue reading
Webmentions allow you to notify the publisher of a website that you’ve mentioned, or linked to, one of their pages, from your website or blog. Webmentions are commonly used in the Indie and Small Web communities, and have existed as a W3C recommendation since 2017. But Webmention … | Continue reading
Melbourne based Workplace Relations lawyer Paul O’Halloran, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, on Australian “right to disconnect” workplace laws that come into effect on Monday 26 August 2024: Well, laziness is an increasing trend in the cases I defend for employers. Putting … | Continue reading
Well, this will be something. A sequel is in the works for The Devil Wears Prada. By the time it is released, assuming production starts sooner rather than later, the follow-up will pick-up almost twenty-years after events of the original film. That’s a long time in the fashion w … | Continue reading
Let’s go back in time. Way back in time. To about this time in 2000. I had, or was just about, to start my first job as a web designer, at an exciting, multidisciplinary design studio, on Sydney’s trendy urban fringe. Ok: Surry Hills. I’m pleased to say I was headhunted into the … | Continue reading
From The Daily Aus. Aside from being linked to a slight decrease in life expectancy, COVID-19 was the third highest cause of death in Australia in 2022, claiming almost ten-thousand lives: COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in Australia in 2022, according to AIHW. It w … | Continue reading
Apparently red wines made in Australia — and quite possibly elsewhere, I imagine — have been increasing in alcoholic strength over recent decades. This seems like a mystery of the times, because the go-to culprit, global warming, may not be responsible. Rather, the way grapes are … | Continue reading
Rhett Allain, writing for Wired, looks at the physics of this important question. If humanity is ever to establish bases on the Moon, ways of keeping occupants fit in the low lunar gravity need to be worked out. A wall of death sort of gizmo, that’s a little like a stationary ham … | Continue reading
Break out the coffee and the cake: a celebration is on the cards. Tomorrow, Threads, Meta’s answer — and much needed foil — to X/Twitter, notches up its first birthday. I was there as the platform began rolling out, and managed to score (just) a relatively low (five-figure) badge … | Continue reading
That’s the good news. Tory Shepherd, writing for The Guardian, says the recently discovered exoplanet, dubbed Gliese 12b, might be able to host liquid water. We all know what that means. If there’s water, there may be life. Gliese 12b is so named because it orbits a star called G … | Continue reading
This is sad and concerning news. The Melbourne based bookseller had become well ensconced in the Australian literary realm, since being founded about twenty-years ago. The company, which is also listed on the ASX (though trading of shares has been suspended), had been struggling … | Continue reading
I might say that of U2, whose music I once really liked, especially the stuff they did in the nineties. Achtung Baby. Zooropa. Pop. Even 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. These albums mostly represented their electronic music phase. I’d have them on loop for days at a time. … | Continue reading
The shortlist for the 2024 Miles Franklin literary award for works of Australian fiction, was announced earlier today. Of the ten novels named on the longlist in May, the following six titles have been included today: Only Sound Remains, by Hossein Asgari Wall, by Jen Craig Anam, … | Continue reading
Given the choice, a regular person, like you or me, who decides they’d like to become a superhero, will choose teleportation as their superhero superpower. In preference to three other choices they could have made: mind-control, flight, or supernatural physical strength. This is … | Continue reading
The Honeyeater is the second novel by Sydney based Australian writer Jessie Tu, and will be in bookshops on Tuesday 2 July 2024. That’s tomorrow. I read Tu’s 2020 debut A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing almost four years ago. It was the story of a once child prodigy musician, wh … | Continue reading
Is there a version of Tetris that requires the player to try and spell words with the Tetris pieces, as they fall from the sky? If there is, I’ve not heard of it. But, that’s not saying much, as I don’t know a whole lot about gaming. Anyway, Tetris Font, developed by Erik Demaine … | Continue reading
What happened, or was there, before the Big Bang that is said to have brought the universe into being? Was there nothing, to which something came? It is the question of the ages. In his recent documentary series, Universe, British physicist Brian Cox posits that the universe exis … | Continue reading
My thanks to Ray for recently adding disassociated to Ye Old Blogroll, a directory of small and independent websites and blogs. Directory websites like Ray’s are invaluable when it comes to promoting the work of Indie and Small Web writers and bloggers, which is often overshadowe … | Continue reading
The Artocalypse is a subscription based community for artists on IndieWeb, created by Chris Shaw at uncountable thoughts. This a great cross-promotional idea, showcasing the work of artists, while also spreading the word about IndieWeb. I dare say some of the participating artist … | Continue reading
Maybe it’s time to start a Windows 11 is going just great website, similar to Molly White’s Web3 is Going Just Great. I say this after reading about another instance of heavy-handedness on Microsoft’s part, at Neowin: Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Wind … | Continue reading
Whether they are a part of an on-going series of light-hearted clips by Australian cinema group Palace Cinemas, remains to be seen, but the two I’ve caught to date, on their Instagram page, have been pretty witty. The first is in response to the apparent problem of patrons nickin … | Continue reading
Gilligan’s Island was a slapstick American TV series which ran from 1964 to 1967. Despite its popularity, the show was cancelled shortly before filming of a fourth series commenced. I first saw reruns of Gilligan’s quite some time later. A number of movies, featuring most of the … | Continue reading
Less blogging about blogging: The majority of my posts are either platform explanations/justifications or organizational posts. Stuff like, “I’m moving the Archives here” or “I’ve added a ton of Links there.” Other times it’s simple announcements about me moving my blog someplace … | Continue reading
I’m in the process of migrating my OS away from Windows. I’ve been running Linux Mint, considered to be a user-friendly, Windows-like distribution of the Linux family of OS’s, on a backup device for almost two weeks now. It’s been a learning curve naturally, but so far, so good. … | Continue reading
Shares in Australian founded Mexican food restaurant Guzman Y Gomez (GYG: it’s not only an initialism, it’s a ticker code) had a stellar debut on their first day of trading on the ASX, with one market pundit describing the launch as “the hottest float on the stock market in years … | Continue reading
Kathryn Diss and Mathew Marsic, writing for ABC News: For Commander Anton, it’s difficult to imagine returning to his quiet life before the war. The 33-year-old former builder is now a battle-hardened soldier who risks his life every day, just kilometres from the Russian border. … | Continue reading
It’s a favourite around here. Because don’t we love meeting someone we connect with at first sight? But Sunday 16 June 2024, marked the thirtieth anniversary (Facebook link) of the premiere of Before Sunrise, directed by Richard Linklater, and starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke … | Continue reading
How do people who don’t know about IndieWeb, but would like to escape the web-scape funk they’re beholden to, find out about IndieWeb, asks Delyo Dobrev. This is the million dollar question. Everyone and their grandma and their dog is talking about social media’s bad influence. B … | Continue reading
Kate Dwyer, writing for Esquire: Almost everyone mentioned that debut fiction has become harder to launch. For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of … | Continue reading
Intermezzo, the fourth novel by Irish literary fiction author Sally Rooney, will be published on 24 September 2024*. The synopsis is classic Rooney: Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his th … | Continue reading