Brisbane based Australian artist Julie Fragar has won the 2025 Archibald Prize for her portrait of fellow Brisbane based artist Justene Williams (Instagram link), a work as intriguing as its title, Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene). Sydney based Jude Rae was named winner of th … | Continue reading
Vortex, by Queensland based Australian author Rodney Hall, has won the fiction prize in The Age Book of the Year award for 2025. The two times winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, says the basis for his latest novel were some pages for a book he started writing, but later … | Continue reading
Benj Edwards writing for Ars Technica: A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces. It’s early da … | Continue reading
Melbourne based sci-fi and speculative fiction author J M Voss was named winner of the 2024 Aurealis Best Science Fiction novel award, on Sunday 4 May 2025, with her novel Temporal Boom. The novel’s premise is intriguing to say the least: Thirty years ago, the world ended. Not ev … | Continue reading
A fantastic visualisation from Information is Beautiful. Selma, made in 2014 by Ava DuVernay, achieves a score of one-hundred percent. In other words, the plot is based on, so far as the researchers can tell, events that actually transpired. The Social Network, made in 2010 by Da … | Continue reading
Australian youth news outlet The Daily Aus (TDA), asked former Australian Liberal Party, and Opposition leader, Peter Dutton several times for a one-on-one interview, but he refused every time. The same, apparently, went for former Liberal Party leader, and Australian Prime Minis … | Continue reading
Melbourne and Bangkok, Thailand, based Australian artist Abdul Abdullah was named winner of the 2025 Archibald Prize Packing Room Prize yesterday, for his portrait — titled No mountain high enough — of Jason Phu. The announcement of the Packing Room Prize is a bit like the beginn … | Continue reading
Kirkus Reviews, an American literary publication, founded by teacher and editor Virginia Kirkus in 1933, has published a list of the best books — so far — of the twenty-first century. It alarms me, as somewhat of a book reader, that I have not read even one of the fiction titles … | Continue reading
Australian cook Nagi Maehashi, founder of popular food blog RecipeTin Eats, and publisher of two cook books (her first title was riotously successful), has accused Brisbane based baker Brooke Bellamy, of copying at least two of her recipes. In addition, Maehashi also claims Bella … | Continue reading
The Vietnamese American writer’s second novel will be published next month: One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across t … | Continue reading
Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker: Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular … | Continue reading
This is For Everyone, being published this September, is the memoir of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The title, I think, belongs on the TBR list of anyone with any interest in the web. The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a … | Continue reading
American coffee chain, Starbucks, is enjoying a surge in popularity in some parts of Australia. Starbucks, put simply, had to stop chasing the mainstream market — metropolitan city coffee purveyors who savoured the neighbourhood cafe experience. This is a far cry from their Austr … | Continue reading
CADA, a Sydney based radio station, was, without a word said, using an AI-generated DJ to host one of their shows, for possibly as long as six months. The ruse came to light after Australian writer Stephanie Coombes, acting on a tip off, was unable to track down any bios, press r … | Continue reading
News that traces of chemicals possibly indicating the presence of life on a planet, known as K2-18b, some one-hundred-and-twenty-four light years from Earth, resulted in a flurry of headlines the other week. Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet. Scien … | Continue reading
Despite what you might think, the worst possible time for your time machine to breakdown is not 2025. Instead, in this Kurzgesagt imagining, you are variously trapped in three periods of time, some several million years after three separate mass extinction events. The time machin … | Continue reading
Shane Wright, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald: A record 542,000 people, or 3 per cent of those on the electoral roll, cast a ballot on the first day of pre-poll voting on Tuesday. It was a 72 per cent increase on the 314,000 who cast a vote on the first day of pre-polling a … | Continue reading
Another punctuation mark I’ve been a long time user of — the em dash — is apparently synonymous with text created by AI chat bots. Marvellous. You can see two instances of em dashes in the first sentence of this post. Last October I learned the presence of Oxford commas hinted at … | Continue reading
The scanning technology, which is said to gauge a person’s age to an accuracy of one to two years, is being trialled in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). Members of Discord — a popular communications and community building platform — can also choose to scan in a proof-of-age … | Continue reading
This, an image comparing Australia with dwarf planet Pluto, was published years ago, but somehow I only saw it for the first time a few days ago. Incredible, isn’t it? Width-ways, going from the east to west coasts, Australia dwarfs Pluto (no pun intended). But drawing comparison … | Continue reading
The Global Book Crawl began yesterday, and numerous independent bookshops in Australia are taking part. The book crawl, which has been running for several years, aims to get book lovers across the world, into indie book stores. In Australia, if crawlers collect enough stamps in a … | Continue reading
Check it out. In addition, Ray, creator of the algorithm-free web directory of personal websites and blogs, which lists this website (thanks again), has transferred ownership to Manuel Moreale, he of People and Blogs fame, among other things. | Continue reading
Here’s some web history trivia for you: it’s been twenty-five years since A Dao of Web Design was published at A List Apart (ALA). Written by Australian product developer, and Web Directions co-founder John Allsopp, the article explored how the web, still seen then as an online v … | Continue reading
One way to make sense of the present upheaval in the United States might be to see it through the eyes of a historian writing about US history in the early twenty-second century. This perspective, envisaged by Peter Leyden, which doesn’t address every last (often heavy-handed) po … | Continue reading
The British Film Institute (BFI) has kept a copy of the 1977 print of Star Wars in their archive, which will screen as part of Film on Film festival, in the British capital, taking place from Thursday 12 June until Sunday 15 June 2025. I have the feeling tickets will sell quickly … | Continue reading
After unleashing their content polluting algorithms onto our social media feeds, allowing the display of stuff (sorry, content is not the right word in this context) from people we don’t follow, far less even heard of, Facebook owner Meta wants to interfere with the film watching … | Continue reading
American tech company Meta has been using the works of Australian authors — and no doubt many writers worldwide — to train its AI platforms. This happens, apparently, without consultation with the authors, and certainly — to date — without any payment. Australian author Thomas Mi … | Continue reading
Miles Franklin Undercover, by NSW North Coast based university lecturer and author Kerrie Davies, traces Franklin’s life in the years following the 1901 publication of her iconic novel, My Brilliant Career. Spoiler: things were not too brilliant: But fame can be deceptive. In rea … | Continue reading
Mike Sass, writing at Shellsharks: A website, your own personal website, is just like this—a digital home, on the web. With all the same comforts, familiarities and problems that need a-fixin’. Does your personal website, your blog, feel like home? Mine does, and always has. Alth … | Continue reading
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has issued an updated set of guidelines clarifying the role of content creators and influencers. The move comes in the wake of mild controversy surrounding a recent interview Sydney based podcaster Abbie Chatfield recorded with Australian … | Continue reading
American designer Jason Santa Maria, and co-founder of A Book Apart, a seller of numerous influential design publications, has returned to blogging after an eight year hiatus. You see, we all come back eventually. Once a blogger, always a blogger… Philipp Lunch is based in Cologn … | Continue reading
The shortlist for the Stellar Prize, consisting of six titles, was unveiled last night: Black Convicts, by Santilla Chingaipe Black Witness, by Amy McQuire Cactus Pear For My Beloved, by Samah Sabawi Translations, by Jumaana Abdu The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng Theory & Practice, by … | Continue reading
The Phoenician Scheme, trailer, is the thirteenth feature of American filmmaker Wes Anderson. As ever, you don’t need to see Anderson’s name on the trailer to know this is a Wes Anderson film. Many of his regular collaborators return, including Willem Dafoe, Scarlett Johansson, R … | Continue reading
Tangentially related to the last post… Australian actor and filmmaker Matthew Holmes (The Biscuit Effect, Twin Rivers, The Legend of Ben Hall, and The Cost), speaks out in an open letter about the lamentable state of the Australian film industry: All my films have won awards at f … | Continue reading
We Are the Stars, by Australian author Gina Chick, has claimed the number one spot in the 2025 Dymocks Top 101 Books poll. We Are the Stars also enjoys the distinction of being the first work of non-fiction to top the the list in almost twenty years. Notable fiction inclusions (b … | Continue reading
Two years ago it was ChatGPT being trained with books written by Australian authors, without their knowledge or permission. Now Facebook owner Meta is doing the same thing: using the works of local writers without permission or royalty. A number of Australian authors, including S … | Continue reading
Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, says cinemas are dead. There’s a bold call. Certainly it can be argued there is no need for cinemas any more. No one needs to go to a cinema to see a movie nowadays. They can do that from the comfort of their own home. Despite the ease and conveni … | Continue reading
I wondered if this was an April’s fool joke. A list of the fifty best things Microsoft (MS) ever made, compiled by The Verge. Among inclusions is Clippy, a well intentioned though sometimes annoying paperclip-like assistant, that shipped with Office 97. There’s also Slate Magazin … | Continue reading
Allison Morrow, writing for CNN: Apple is not the laggard in AI. AI is the laggard in AI. Here is a technology that’s still in the early days of development, has been hyped to the hilt, and heaped with lofty expectations. We’d call it vapour-ware if it didn’t actually exist. Ther … | Continue reading
Brisbane, Australia, based blogger Colin Morris, writing about website analogies: My site isn’t a garden. I’ve seen garden sites, tended to grow and sprout and flower. Ordered in rows or disordered in natural growth. disassociated is not a garden, a digital garden, either. A digi … | Continue reading
Herman Martinus, creator of the Bear Blogging platform: Bear is hit daily by bot networks requesting tens of thousands of pages in short time periods, and while I now have systems in place to prevent it actually taking down the server, when it started happening a few months ago i … | Continue reading
Jacob Savage, writing for Compact: Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even … | Continue reading
The Inner West Film Fest returns for its third outing, between Wednesday 9 April to Thursday 17 April 2025. The inner west — for readers outside of Australia, and that’s a fair few you — is a group of suburbs to the west of downtown Sydney, not too close in, but not too far out [ … | Continue reading
Meta has been trailing an AI assistant that will help Instagram (IG) users compose comments for photos and video posted by their friends, says Aisha Malik, writing for TechCrunch: Users who have access to the test feature will see a pencil icon next to the text bar under a post t … | Continue reading
An unnamed American “content creator” recently asked a number of women — quite persistently at times — to go on dates with him, in and around the eastern suburbs of Sydney, NSW. He was however — unbeknown to the women in question — filming the interactions with smart-glasses, and … | Continue reading
I’m no longer (thankfully) in the Windows fold, so I’m not one-hundred percent sure, but it seems like some older computers might not be able to run Microsoft’s (MS) most recent operating system (OS), Windows 11. Accordingly, owners of such devices seem intent to hold onto their … | Continue reading
Sydney’s CBD is certainly picturesque in the evening. This picture was taken on a Friday evening, near Martin Place, and the Wynyard light rail station, hence the rail tracks. | Continue reading
Another photo taken when at Gordons Bay, Sydney, a few weeks ago. Here the view ambles further south, towards Coogee Bay, and beyond. | Continue reading