Noctalgia is the recently minted neologism for the phenomenon of missing dark skies at night. Noctalgia is something astronomers could tell you about. Dark, light pollution free, skies are essential for their work, but they’re not so commonplace anymore. And here we have a dilemm … | Continue reading
Nineties supermodels Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, were household names thirty years ago. At least in my household, that is, because when you had an aspiring fashion photographer in your midst, little that the four did would go unm … | Continue reading
Poison ivy, a noxious plant often found in North America, and parts of Asia, could become more common place as global warming creates an environment conducive to its growth. Poison ivy is poised to be one of the big winners in this global, human-caused phenomenon. Scientists expe … | Continue reading
Australia is officially in the grip of an El Niño weather event. This means affected areas can expect higher than normal temperatures, and reduced rainfall. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology announcement on Tuesday confirmed what many people had suspected for some time. The Bu … | Continue reading
The internet felt like an unexplored new frontier when I launched the first iteration of disassociated in 1997. New frontier may seem ornate, trite even, but it was an apt description. We were feeling our way in the dark, and I’d say most of us were clueless as to what the intern … | Continue reading
A study of the accents of eleven scientists, originally from different regions and countries, who spent a winter together at an Antarctic base, found they had developed a new accent of their own: In 2019, a team from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich studied the phonetic … | Continue reading
Astronomers are convinced the solar system hosts another planet, often dubbed Planet Nine, or Planet X, but are unable to agree on its size and mass, nor its location. A few years ago speculation was rife a Neptune size body was orbiting the Sun well beyond Pluto, taking between … | Continue reading
American journalist and cartoonist Malaka Gharib used to visit her father in Cairo, Egypt, during the summer school holidays, in the mid-nineties. It was hot, as anyone who’s been to Egypt in June or July (yours truly) could tell you. Like many Egyptians though, her father’s home … | Continue reading
Sydney based Australian filmmaker and editor Kerrod Cooper has been named winner of the inaugural LUMIX seventy-two hour filmmaking challenge, with a short film titled Big Chef, Little Chef. Cooper’s production is a glimpse into the life of a troubled TV chef, portrayed by Sydney … | Continue reading
Adelaide based Australian actor Tilda Cobham-Hervey will take the lead role of Esme, in the stage adaptation of The Dictionary of Lost Words, based on the 2020 novel of the same name, written by Australian author Pip Williams. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the … | Continue reading
Book cover of Kinky History, by Esmé Louise James. Tuesday 3 October 2023 promises to be a red letter day for devotees of kinks, fetishes, and spicy sex, for that is the day Kinky History, by Melbourne based Australian writer Esmé Louise James will be published. For those thinkin … | Continue reading
Threads. Mastodon. Bluesky. They’re among options for fans of micro-blogging who want to leave Twitter behind. But is seeking out alternatives to Twitter really the solution? American computer scientist and author Cal Newport, writing for The New Yorker, believes we should instea … | Continue reading
Baltimore based American teacher and poet Edgar Kunz writes about the hardships of making a living as a poet, while also wondering how long his poetry will stay with his readers: I’ve been using my writing to hustle a life: a place to live, a salary, some measure of stability. Bu … | Continue reading
I hate to think exactly how backwards compatible disassociated is. In the past I strived to work with web standards which ensured some uniformity of visual display, regardless of the web browser, or operating platform, being used to view the website. For the most part, but not qu … | Continue reading
Australian author Alexis Wright, a past winner of both the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Stella Prize, has been awarded the 2023 Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council) Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature: Alexis is an author of ground-breaking works … | Continue reading
All roads, even Roman roads, lead to TikTok. Take any topic, no matter how obscure, how antiquated, and the subject will, it seems, surface, eventually, on the FYP tab of the ubiquitous video sharing app. Last week it was the turn of the Roman Empire to trend. The Roman Empire. A … | Continue reading
Everything you wanted or needed to know about floppy discs. An awesome computer science history resource put together by British IT consultant Jonathan Pallant. Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy … | Continue reading
Making it as a prepper, or survivalist, is not merely a matter of storing some canned food in dug-out somewhere, and watching a few YouTube videos on the subject, warns Jessica Wildfire: We don’t think about where we’d go to the bathroom. We don’t think about how we’d filter our … | Continue reading
The Star Wars origin stories keep a coming. Lando Calrissian, one timer owner of the Millennium Falcon, apparent scoundrel, administrator of Cloud City, and later a general in the Rebel Alliance, is set to feature in his own big screen production. A Calrissian backstory has been … | Continue reading
The latest Kurzgesagt video may — like a number of their recent offerings — still have an end of days theme, but at least the subject matter is a little more fanciful. Even if we’re talking about the eventual heat death of the universe, or as Kurzgesagt posits, the already happen … | Continue reading
It’s been twenty years since American filmmaker Sofia Coppola’s second full length feature, Lost in Translation, was released. Pretty much all anyone could talk about at the time was the whisper scene at the end of the film, when Bill Murray’s character, Bob, uttered a comment in … | Continue reading
Kagi Search is a pay-to-use subscription search engine founded in 2022, that promises to deliver relevant search results free of extraneous clutter and adverts. Another plus is Kagi’s undertaking not to track users, or collect their data. But Kagi isn’t only about locating pertin … | Continue reading
Still from Foe, a film by Garth Davis. Foe, trailer, a science fiction psychological thriller, is the third feature of Australian filmmaker Garth Davis. Based on the 2018 novel of the same name, by Canadian author Iain Reid, and set in 2065, Foe tells the story of a married coupl … | Continue reading
The ten-day weather forecast for some parts of NSW are currently predicting several days with maximum temperatures in the vicinity of thirty degrees centigrade. This, at the moment, for Saturday and Sunday, 16 and 17 September, and Tuesday 19 September. These temperature ranges c … | Continue reading
When it comes to quickly gauging whether a movie is worth watching (since life is too short for bad films), I glance at its Metascore, a rating of a film which is calculated by Metacritic. This score is based on, as their FAQ page explains, a weighted average of reviews from top … | Continue reading
Book cover of Looking After Country With Fire, by Victor Steffensen. Looking After Country With Fire, published by Hardie Grant in 2022, written by Indigenous Australian writer and filmmaker Victor Steffensen, and illustrated by Far North Queensland based visual arts teacher Sand … | Continue reading
The Boy and the Heron, trailer, is the latest animated feature by Japanese filmmaker and manga artist, Hayao Miyazaki. Released in Japan under the name Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka, Miyazaki’s latest film is said to be partly autobiographical: Through encounters with his friends and u … | Continue reading
Dictionary.com has unveiled a new series of updates to its lexicon. Five hundred and sixty six new words have been added (seems a lot) along with three hundred and forty eight new definitions. The words don’t stop coming, so we’re updating the dictionary more frequently than ever … | Continue reading
The shortlist for the 2023 Banjo Prize, for unpublished Australian fiction, was announced on Tuesday 5 September 2023, and includes the manuscripts of five writers: Lou and I, by Anna Fursland Islands of Secrets, by Stefanie Koens The Shores Between, by A’Mhara McKey The Sister T … | Continue reading
Book cover of The Conversion, by Amanda Lohrey. Tasmanian based Australian author, and winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Amanda Lohrey, has written a new novel, The Conversion, which will be published by Text Publishing, in October 2023. The story follows a couple … | Continue reading
The French capital, Paris, has become the first European city to ban the use of electric share scooters. The move follows a referendum earlier this year, where Parisians were asked to decide whether the e-scooters should remain or be removed. Paris will this week become one of th … | Continue reading
Shayda, trailer, the debut feature of Iranian born, Melbourne based, Australian writer and filmmaker Noora Niasari, has been selected by Screen Australia as Australia’s entry in the Best International Feature category of the 2024 Oscars. Based in part on Niasari’s own experiences … | Continue reading
Ways are being sought to reduce the harmful environmental impact of air conditioning (AC) systems, which remain essential for health and well-being, starting with how buildings are designed and constructed in the first place: “We need to design our buildings in a way that consume … | Continue reading
The 2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award shortlist was announced yesterday, Monday 4 September 2023, and consists of the following six titles: An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family, by Alison Bashford Anam, by André Dao Emperors in Lilliput, by … | Continue reading
The winners of the annual Davitt Awards for crime and mystery writing were announced in Melbourne on Saturday 2 September 2023. All That’s Left Unsaid, the debut novel of Sydney based author Tracey Lien, won the Best Adult Novel award. Seven Days by Fleur Ferris won the Best Youn … | Continue reading
Canadian author Tajja Isen, writing for The Walrus: Gradually, things started to go off the rails. My to-read list ballooned alarmingly, not from titles I felt drawn to out of genuine desire but ones the algorithm pushed on me. The thrill of discovery, too, felt compromised: ever … | Continue reading
Book cover of Exiles, written by Jane Harper. Exiles by Melbourne based Australian author Jane Harper, published by Pan Macmillan Australia, has been named winner in the best crime fiction category of the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime writing. Written in 2022, Exiles … | Continue reading
Australian libraries are no longer quiet places to study or borrow books, writes Bec Zhuang for The Guardian. Today they are community hubs offering working spaces, meeting rooms, film screenings, art shows, and study courses, among other things. And in some places, libraries loa … | Continue reading
WordPress, creator of the CMS I publish disassociated with, has unveiled a one hundred yearlong website hosting and domain name registration package. If you have a lazy US$38,000, then there’s nothing stopping you from signing up. But I like the idea. It makes sense. When … | Continue reading
It’s alarming how close the world has come to nuclear conflict in the past, and on several occasions leaders with nuclear arsenals at their disposal have had their finger poised on the proverbial button. In just about every instance though, the threat of a nuclear exchange has be … | Continue reading
It seems like only last week the winner of the 2023 Stella Prize — Sarah Holland-Batt with her poetry collection The Jaquar — was announced, when in fact that happened four months ago. The year is marching on. Entries are now open for the 2024 prize, but only for about the next m … | Continue reading
We all know the drill. We send — unsolicited — the novel manuscript we’ve spent years toiling over, to a couple of publishing houses who accept them. From there they go into a kind of purgatory called a slush pile. How long manuscripts might spend in this limbo is unknown, but pr … | Continue reading
Newly published Australian authors Nina Wan and Tracey Lien, discuss their debut novels, The Albatross and All That’s Left Unsaid, respectively, with Sarah L’Estrange of The Bookshow, in a podcast, recorded during the 2023 Melbourne Writers Festival. The hour long conversation co … | Continue reading
The 2023 Readings Young Adult Prize shortlist was announced earlier today. Six titles are in contention for this year’s award: Dancing Barefoot, by Alice Boyle If You Could See the Sun, by Ann Liang Completely Normal (and Other Lies), by Biffy James Spice Road, by Maiya Ibrahim T … | Continue reading
Many members of the Australian women’s football team saw their social media followings jump exponentially as a result of the recent 2023 Women’s World Cup, according to data compiled by Australian football news and information portal Keepup. Mary Fowler’s Instagram (IG) follower … | Continue reading
Four hundred Australian authors have thrown their support behind the campaign that seeks to amend the Australian constitution to include an Indigenous Voice to parliament. Katherine Brabon, Shankari Chandran (winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin literary award), Mick Cummins, Sophie … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Squirrel photos. Just seven percent of Australians are “high cash” users according to Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia. Tap-to-pay contactless payment methods, which are simple and convenient to use, have dispensed with the need to carry w … | Continue reading
Threads users have been waiting for a bevy of features to be added to the micro-blogging platform, and it looks like a web version — something I’ve certainly been looking forward to — may arrive in a few days. Last week Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram (and I guess Threads), said … | Continue reading