Maybe I’ve been watching too much of Universe, the Brian Cox made documentary about, well, the universe, and am way too willing to take in all manner of ideas, no matter how outlandish they may seem. So when this article (PDF), exploring the possibility the Sun is a conscious ent … | Continue reading
The latest Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) survey of the pay and work conditions of Australian musicians makes for grim reading. In particular, the stand-out finding that half of local musos earned less than six thousand dollars last year. Six thousand dollars. The … | Continue reading
Malcolm Knox, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald: Then there are rents, insurance, equipment and other fixed costs. In a Sydney suburb near me, a new cafe is paying $5000 a week in rent. At $1000 per 7am-to-1pm shift, they need to be selling 300 coffees a day to make it worth … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Pexels. Rebecca Jennings, writing for Vox, on the tyranny of the personal brand, and the stifling effect they are having on content creators: The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to hou … | Continue reading
The first episode of season two of Sydney set, Australian high school drama, Heartbreak High, goes to air on Thursday 11 April 2024. This is a day fans of the rebooted show (which aired in 2022), and indeed the original 1990’s series, will have marked on their calendars. Check ou … | Continue reading
Well, this is interesting. All these years I’ve thought the demise of the dinosaurs was occasioned by the impact of an asteroid that struck Earth sixty-six million years ago. That may be still the case, but some scientists believe relentless volcanic activity, spanning more than … | Continue reading
Pretty much anything British/American film maker Christopher Nolan touches, turns to gold. The Batman saga, Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Tenet, Dunkirk, The Prestige (which I wrote about way back in 2006), Memento. You name it, they’re all winners. Then consider how well … | Continue reading
The great thing about the Star Wars universe is the way it can move up down left right forwards and backwards. Like any good fiction franchise, the potential to create new stories, new universes within a universe even, are virtually limitless. This even though I’m way behind on a … | Continue reading
Long time readers of Kottke have doubtless seen his semi-regular media diet posts, where he writes about the movies and TV shows he’s seen, plus books he’s been reading. Kottke is a voracious consumer of media if those posts are anything to go by. In comparison, my consumption is … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Pexels. Tangentially related to my previous post… product designer and technologist Matt Webb has created an app, named Galactic Compass (link to Apple app store), that points to the centre of the galaxy. When on the (far less light polluted) NSW Central Coast, … | Continue reading
One of the computers on NASA’s deep space probe Voyager 1 is experiencing some sort of malfunction, with recent signals from the probe containing no usable data. Mission engineers are apparently confident the problem can be resolved, even though Voyager 1 is almost a light-day di … | Continue reading
German animation and design studio Kurzgesagt have been producing excellent informative and educational videos for what seems like half the lifespan of the universe. Let’s hope Peak-Kurzgesagt is a situation that never comes to pass. Their latest video, the Paradox of an Infinite … | Continue reading
Sydney based Australian author Kerri Sackville, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, on the subject of stalkerware, insidious apps that track the activities of a person you want to keep tabs on: But I had nothing to gain from spying on him because I already knew what to do. In … | Continue reading
Four day weather forecasts are now as accurate as one day forecasts from thirty years ago. That’s good news. Access to accurate weather information is perhaps more vital than many of us can appreciate. Weather forecasting has come a long way. In 650 B.C. the Babylonians would try … | Continue reading
Mick Cummins, the Melbourne based former social worker and screenwriter, who won the unpublished manuscript award in the 2023 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, has had his debut work, So Close to Home, published by Affirm Press. The manuscript was originally titled One Divine N … | Continue reading
Are we at peak Wes Anderson yet? With Asteroid City still showing in some cinemas, maybe some film-goers would welcome a break from the American filmmaker. If that’s not you though, then check out The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, trailer, a short film made by Anderson, based o … | Continue reading
Regulars will have noticed the slowdown in posting at disassociated recently. It’s a tad busy at the day job, but more excitingly I’ve also been working on a large (think novel size) writing project in recent weeks. It’s the same one I’ve been chipping away at for years mind you, … | Continue reading
American climate scientist Zeke Hausfather has described global temperatures in September 2023 as gobsmackingly bananas. This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas. JRA-55 beat the prior monthly record by over 0.5C, and wa … | Continue reading
Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize for literature, for what judges describe as “his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” Fosse’s work spans over seventy novels, poems, children’s books, essays and theatre play … | Continue reading
Book cover of Incredible Doom Vol 1, created by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden. Incredible Doom is a serialised comic strip about two American teenage proto-bloggers, Dougie and Anna, in 1999, by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden. If you were on the web in 1999, as I was, this cou … | Continue reading
The recent long running strike by members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) in the United States, has ended. But the settlement secured by the WGA not only means fairer pay and conditions for screenwriters, it is also seen as a victory over Generative AI technologies, which w … | Continue reading
Twenty-four hours in an invisible epidemic is an especially poignant edition of visual essay magazine, The Pudding, produced by New York City based journalist Alvin Chang. The epidemic in question is not Covid-19, though the lockdowns triggered by the pandemic have aggravated ano … | Continue reading
The shortlists for the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize were announced earlier today. The award is presented in two categories, Adult, and Children and Young Adult. The three finalists in each category are as follows: Adult Salonika Burning by Gail Jones Iris by Fiona Kelly McGreg … | Continue reading
Stefanie Koens has been named winner of the 2023 Banjo Prize for unpublished Australian fiction, with her manuscript titled Islands of Secrets, a work of historic fiction that spans several decades: Shortly before Christmas in 2018, schoolteacher Tess McCarthy flies to Western Au … | Continue reading
Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, writing for The New York Times, suggests sortation, a method of selecting public office holders in Ancient Greece, be given consideration: People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective tha … | Continue reading
In a few weeks Australians will vote in a referendum to decide whether the Australian constitution should be amended to include a Voice, an advisory body, for the nation’s Indigenous people. It’s an idea some people are not in favour of though, including a number of First Nations … | Continue reading
Book cover of Amy Winehouse: In Her Words. Amy Winehouse: In Her Words, published by HarperCollins, one for fans of late British musician and singer Amy Winehouse. Much has been said about Amy Winehouse since her tragic death aged just 27. But who was the real Amy? Amy Winehouse: … | Continue reading
The recent, post pandemic lockdown, sometimes poor behaviour of film-goers has been the subject of some discussion recently. Many of the problems frustrated cinema patrons have reported stem largely from the gratuitous use of smartphones during screenings. It’s enough to make you … | Continue reading
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