Among other things, 2008 was the year your Auntie Glenda friended you on Facebook
Knew it was a great second hand bookshop when I saw the boxes of books on the stairs and smelt the body odour and passive aggression
Lili Wilkinson
Lili Wilkinson is terrified of vomit. She also has a lot to say about YA lit and other stuff. Hardly ever mentions vomit.
Predictive text on my last phone interpreted ‘cous cous’ as ‘anus anus’. I shudder to think what Google Voice Search will make of it.
Apparently Axl Rose has gone missing. Maybe he’s gone looking for the errant apostrophe in “Guns N’ Roses”
Comic Sans: the go-to font for that “written-in-own-faeces” look
Email address encoder using HTML entities
Not a foolproof solution to avoiding spam, but a relatively straightforward one without having to mess around with client-side encryption — just good old fashioned HTML.
Funny how “fresh from the oven” and “dressing gown over a heating vent” warm are so appealing, yet “recently vacated toilet seat” warm isn’t
It’s amazing how quickly poo disintegrates in bath water. Well, maybe it’s not that amazing.
P. E. Warburton’s culinary tip #1: It can take as long as 36 hours to boil a camel to the point at which it can be devoured in its entirety.
Digitised copies of Charles Sturt’s sketches and diary
Some beautiful sketches made by Charles Sturt during his exploration of the Murray, with notes.
Things I’ve been reading
Aurealis: Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction #40 (‘Adaptation’ by Stephen Dedman, ‘The festival of colour’ by Paul Haines and ‘The final writings of Baron Sir Heinrich Proteus von Zuse, botanist’ by Adam Browne)
11:00am, 4 November 2008
Totally unsurprised to learn that the first attempt to walk across the Nullarbor Plain was met with a certain amount of difficulty.
‘The final writings of Baron Sir Heinrich Proteus von Zuse, botanist’ by Adam Browne, published in Aurealis: Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction #40
Adam Browne is unlike any other writer in Australian speculative fiction; here he gets away with another of his stories that aren’t stories — at least, not the sort you usually get in Aurealis. A remarkable writer, in my opinion.
Kick ass Victorian heroines — with some big ass hair
Picture her with bust rearing beneath beaded dress, diaphanous harem pants beneath, silver sword in hand, with her beer-frazzled hair abundant beneath a fetching helmet.
Just try to stop me!
Scuttlers
The ‘scuttlers’ of nineteenth century Manchester: like our ‘larrikins’, but with a more honest name. Author of a just released book on the gangs of nineteenth century Manchester and London says he was fascinated by the “unchanging role of dress and personal appearance as a sign of belonging to a gang”. An example is the ‘donkey fringe’ hairstyle, “which required close cropping at the back but an angled fringe at the front, with the hair longer on the right”.
Shovelling Son
Stunning adventures in pinhole photography by Tim Williams.
Ross McRae
Ross McRae takes beautiful photography of people, places, squid.
Domai.nr
Domai.nr is something to fall back on when cybersquatters have already nabbed the domain you wanted, or if you just want to craft a really annoying URL for your site.