One thing you can say for certain about American author David Sedaris is that he polarises opinion. Some people think he’s wonderful. Others are far less complimentary. Freelance Australian writer Annemarie Fleming, used to be a fan of Sedaris, until she saw him speaking during a … | Continue reading
Melbourne based Australian author Robert Lukins returns with a new novel, Somebody Down There Likes Me, a follow up to his 2022 book, Loveland. As with Loveland and his 2018 debut, The Everlasting Sunday, Somebody Down There Likes Me, is set outside Australia, this time in a town … | Continue reading
Ukrainian film director Oksana Karpovych’s documentary, Intercepted, which features phone calls between invading Russian soldiers and their families in Russia, has one of the starkest trailers I’ve seen in a long while. Phil Hoad, writing for The Guardian, described Intercepted a … | Continue reading
20 Hours for 20Talk. This fund raising event, taking place in Perth, Australia, on Monday 29 March 2025, has been popping up in my news feeds in recent weeks. Two hundred and fifty participants will spend twenty-hours in a space just two metres square, sans screens and devices. T … | Continue reading
Jack Cheng, an author based in Detroit, Michigan, in the United States, hosts a now fortnightly online get together called a digital mending circle: What, you ask, is a digital mending circle? A virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accr … | Continue reading
Lucy Knight, writing for The Guardian: [] soon we may not see so many of these author blurbs — Sean Manning, publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in the US, has written an essay for Publishers Weekly explaining that as of this year he will “no longer require authors t … | Continue reading
Becoming Led Zeppelin, trailer, a documentary made by Irish-British filmmaker Bernard MacMahon, is screening in Australian cinemas at present, and tells the story of the English band’s first two years, from 1968 to 1970. I listened to their 1971 rock classic Stairway to Heaven — … | Continue reading
David M. Webb, a retired investment banker based in Hong Kong, writes about closing his website, aptly named webb-site, which he launched in 1998, on account of terminal illness: I hope to reach 60 in August and all I want for my birthday is another one, but before I become more … | Continue reading
American actor Jesse Eisenberg played Meta/Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 dramatisation about the founding of Facebook. The screenplay, written by Aaron Sorkin, was based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires. Des … | Continue reading
A disturbing development in a twenty-five year old missing persons case sees a group of old school friends reluctantly reunite. All have reason to be fearful of the re-opened police investigation, and all are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure they are not incriminated. It … | Continue reading
Recent twenty-something finance graduate Annie (Natalia Dyer), who’s about to leave Philadelphia and move to Los Angeles for work, meets Tyler (Rachel Keller), and Danny (Danny Ramirez), who seem to be a couple, at a bar one evening. But neither Tyler nor Danny seem sure they’re … | Continue reading
The next time someone takes exception to your “bad language”, point them to this research: Swearing may also be a sign of intelligence, is associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and higher integrity at the society level, and may be a sign of creativity. … | Continue reading
I’m an introvert, but until I read Faith Hill’s 2022 article for The Atlantic, a few days ago, I’d never heard of ultra, or intense, introverts: There’s already been some controversy in the psychological community about whether intense introversion should qualify as a disorder. T … | Continue reading
Tangentially related to yesterday’s post. This is something Jatan Mehta asked a few weeks ago. It’s an intriguing question. If social media platforms, Twitter/X, Instagram, etc, had remained as they started, maintaining chronological feeds, displaying content posted by accounts a … | Continue reading
Kurzgesagt speculates on what extraterrestrial life might look like on planets elsewhere in the galaxy. But this may not be quite what we were expecting… | Continue reading
Keeping track of what’s happening (or being said) in the world, particularly the United States, in these past few weeks feels like an impossible task. Trying to make sense of it all is another matter entirely. But as Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, seems to suggest, … | Continue reading
Social media and micro-blogging platform Bluesky passed the thirty-million member mark last week. It must be an exciting time for the Bluesky founders and backers. Exciting also for members who had been looking for an alternative to the likes of Twitter/X. I say this as one of th … | Continue reading
American singer/song writer Chappell Roan, who topped the 2024 Triple J Hottest 100 just over a week ago, was named best new artist at the 2025 Grammys yesterday. Roan used her acceptance to call on record companies to offer more support to emerging artists, in the form of improv … | Continue reading
Amanda Meade, writing for The Guardian: People who get most of their news from commercial TV and radio are more likely to believe the conspiracy theory that climate change is a natural phenomenon rather than caused by humans, a new study has found. The research conducted by Monas … | Continue reading
The Teachers Lounge (AKA Das Lehrerzimmer), trailer, made in 2023, and directed by Ilker Çatak, is a cross between a (kind of) psychological thriller, and a (kind of) whodunit, set in a German elementary/primary school. I kid you not; the tension is palpable. A person unknown has … | Continue reading
The knife, the editing room knife, has recently been taken to ocker Australian film Crocodile Dundee. Producers deemed the slapstick comedy — that swept the once Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger, and television personalty Paul Hogan, to big screen fame in 1986 — to be out of touch wi … | Continue reading
As someone with an extremely fair complexion, any amount of exposure to the sun can be risky, even over the winter months, when ultraviolet (UV) levels are generally lower. Trying though to explain this anyone who does not also have fair skin, is almost an uphill battle. In fact, … | Continue reading
Has Earth, and the solar system, been the subject of visits from extraterrestrials from elsewhere in the cosmos? How else to account for the numerous flying saucer, AKA unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) sightings, of, in particular, the past eighty years? I guess it’s possi … | Continue reading
Borderlands, Joker: Folie a Deux, Madame Web, Megalopolis, and Reagan, a biopic about the late United States President Ronald Reagan, are vying for the coveted $4.97 gold spray-painted statuette, in the worst picture category of this year’s Golden Raspberry, AKA, Razzie awards. R … | Continue reading
Independent Melbourne based Australian book publisher Text Publishing was recently acquired by Penguin Random House Australia, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House (PRH), one of the world’s largest publishers. While the move has been hailed as “exciting” by Text and PRH, some lit … | Continue reading
TabBoo is, I think, a Chrome only extension that helps deter you from visiting websites you don’t want to see, but can’t help looking at nonetheless. Load the desired (or undesired, as the case may be) URLs into TabBoo, and each time you go to one of the included sites, a horror … | Continue reading
American pop singer and songwriter Chappell Roan’s 2024 track Good Luck, Babe! was voted the favourite song of 2024 by Triple J listeners in this year’s Hottest 100 music poll. In taking out the top spot, Roan collected the most number of votes ever for a number one song: The num … | Continue reading
Research recently published in the European Heart Journal seems to make sense: Drinking coffee in the morning may be more strongly associated with a lower risk of mortality than drinking coffee later in the day. A shot or two of caffeine earlier in the day must be better than con … | Continue reading
If the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can adopt ActivityPub as a recommendation, something they did eight years ago, you have to wonder why they didn’t do the same for RSS. Dave Winer: The W3C should’ve gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They’re controlled … | Continue reading
Sussan Ley, deputy leader of the Liberal (conservative) opposition party in Australia, has likened Elon Musk’s plans to establish a colony on Mars, to the British colonisation of Australia: Addressing the St Matthew’s Australia Day mass in Albury, Ms Ley insisted that British set … | Continue reading
Belle Gibson is a former Australian wellness influencer who claimed to have cured herself of several cancers by way of a diet, exercise, and alternative medicine regimen. Her story brought hope to others stricken with similar diseases. But it seemed too good to be true, and it wa … | Continue reading
Australian alternative music radio station Triple J, originally known as Double J, launched fifty-years ago, on Sunday 19 January 1975. Here’s footage of their first few minutes on air (Instagram page), with DJ Holger Brockmann behind the microphone. With a predominantly youth au … | Continue reading
The Verge recently published a list of social network alternatives for people disillusioned with the likes of X, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, to consider moving to. Having built-up a network of acquaintances and followers on these channels though, I’m not sure how many peopl … | Continue reading
Enrique Rey, writing at EL PAÍS: Like all nostalgic escapism, the myth about a world wide web before the age of sarcasm (and the dominance of big companies) where everything was more sincere and simpler is a melancholic trap. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann wrote that when yo … | Continue reading
The Australian Indie Book Awards span six categories: fiction, non-fiction, debut fiction, illustrated non-fiction, children’s, and young adult, and last week the shortlist for the 2025 awards was published. My main interest is fiction, where Dusk by Robbie Arnott, and The Ledge … | Continue reading
The Body Mass Index (BMI), may, at last, be about to be shown the door. Health care experts from across the world have been calling for a new means of defining obesity, according to research published by The Lancet: We recommend that BMI should be used only as a surrogate measure … | Continue reading
Upcoming changes to Meta’s fact checking and content moderation policies might precipitate greater free speech in some parts of the world. But the removal of these checks and balances could trigger unrest and violence in other regions, say Libby Hogan and Natasya Salim, writing f … | Continue reading
What makes for a good blog? Merlin Mann, writing in 2008, the golden age of blogging if ever there was one, has a few answers to the question: Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, the … | Continue reading
I’m not really a fan of the band that was formed in Sydney in 1973, and is still going strong, but it seems odd that the house where founders, brothers Angus and Malcolm Young used to live, and founded AC/DC, was not worthy of preserving. For those not in the know, AC/DC are prob … | Continue reading
The director of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and the surely surreal Mulholland Drive, died on Thursday 16 January 2025. We shall watch Mulholland Drive, which is in the home movie library, this weekend in his memory. | Continue reading
The Free Our Feeds project launched a few days, prompted in part by changes to fact checking and content moderation policies across Meta properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The goal of Free Our Feeds seems admirable, to prevent one person/entity having full co … | Continue reading
Lake Superior State University’s annual list of words and phrases we should cease using, was published recently. Among inclusions are game changer, era (you know why…), IYKYK (If You Know, You Know), and sorry, not sorry, which I can’t stand. Another term is dropped, but I don’t … | Continue reading
Research from Massachusetts General Hospital, I believe, in the United States, possibly underscores what many of us already suspect: that prolonged use of social media may not be the best: This kind of study cannot prove that your hours of doomscrolling is directly making you Tik … | Continue reading
PRINT’s annual list of the best book covers of 2024, features double the number of entries as 2023, one-hundred, up from fifty. Either a record number of books were published in 2024, or cover design has become so good more books needed to be included. Among inclusions is a cover … | Continue reading
Tim Carmody, writing for Wired: Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere … | Continue reading
Justine Calma, writing for The Verge: Meta is essentially shifting responsibility to users to weed out lies on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, raising fears that it’ll be easier to spread misleading information about climate change, clean energy, public health risks, … | Continue reading
Tom Saunders writing for ABC News: Your average La Niña forms in winter, peaks in late spring, then gradually weakens through summer. However, the current edition has not played by the rule book — for only the second time in 75 years, its onset has arrived in the middle of summer … | Continue reading
Rambles.Net is an online magazine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999, and still going strong over twenty-five later. Knapp himself continues to contribute. Rambles is another example of Indie Web in its original inception; I think a Facebook page is the only hint of social media presen … | Continue reading