Among other things, 2008 was the year your Auntie Glenda friended you on Facebook
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
Thursday, 25 December 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by The Dodos, Clare Bowditch, of Montreal, The Flaming Lips, Department of Eagles, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Sufjan Stevens and James Brown, among others.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
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
Friday, 19 December 2008
Lili Wilkinson
Lili is terrified of vomit. She also has a lot to say about YA lit and other stuff. Hardly ever mentions vomit.
Thursday, 18 December 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Blitzen Trapper, Department of Eagles, of Montreal, Talking Heads, Vampire Weekend, Andrew Bird, The Beatles, Meg Baird and The Week That Was, among others.
Monday, 15 December 2008
Predictive text on my last phone interpreted ‘cous cous’ as ‘anus anus’. I shudder to think what Google Voice Search will make of it.
Thursday, 11 December 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Department of Eagles, Plants and Animals, of Montreal, Meg Baird, Radicalfashion, Pale Young Gentlemen and School of Seven Bells, among others.
Thursday, 4 December 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Department of Eagles, Marco Benevento, Alela Diane, Horse Feathers, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Sodastream, Ola Podrida, The Hoodangers and Gang Gang Dance, among others.
Apparently Axl Rose has gone missing. Maybe he’s gone looking for the errant apostrophe in “Guns N’ Roses”
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Comic Sans: the go-to font for that “written-in-own-faeces” look
Thursday, 27 November 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Brightblack Morning Light, Deerhunter, Fleet Foxes, Grand Salvo, Feist, Jens Lekman, Department of Eagles, Karen Dalton and of Montreal, among others.
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
Friday, 21 November 2008
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.
Thursday, 20 November 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by The Dodos, of Montreal, Deerhunter, Karl Hector & The Malcouns, Department of Eagles, Andrew Bird, Al Duvall and Fleet Foxes, among others.
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
Digitised copies of Charles Sturt's sketches and diary
Some beautiful images here drawn by Sturt during his exploration of the Murray, along with Sturt's notes.
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Thursday, 6 November 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Fleet Foxes, Deerhunter, of Montreal, Department of Eagles, Horse Feathers, The Ruby Suns and Beaujolais, among others.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Sunday, 2 November 2008
Totally unsurprised to learn that the first attempt to walk across the Nullarbor Plain was met with a certain amount of difficulty.
Saturday, 1 November 2008
‘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.
Friday, 31 October 2008
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!
Thursday, 30 October 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by of Montreal, Fleet Foxes, Gang Gang Dance, Shuggie Otis, Department of Eagles, Fantastic Johnny C, Gunga Din, Freddy & The Kinfolk and Snout, among others.
Thursday, 23 October 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Plants and Animals, Karl Hector & The Malcouns, My Latest Novel, Au, Fleet Foxes, Brightblack Morning Light, Portishead, Clue to Kalo and Deastro, among others.
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".
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Domai.nr
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.
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Fleet Foxes, Frog Eyes, The Clientele, Nine Inch Nails, Brightblack Morning Light, My Morning Jacket, Animal Collective, TV on the Radio and Ween, among others.
Accusing look from bathrobed woman doing tai chi in her courtyard makes me wonder if the windows at the office really are tinted.
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Wishing Apple would hurry up and refresh the Mac Mini, the hole where the money used to be in my wallet is burning a hole in my wallet
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by TV on the Radio, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Mercury Rev, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Brightblack Morning Light and Artanker Convoy, among others.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
The Dollar Dreadful Family Library
"The Dollar Dreadful Family Library brings you short stories that shall surely entice, engross, and shock you and your fellows!" Stunning recreation of a nineteenth century newspaper, and authentic use of fonts. From a web design and standards perspective, the implementation of rollovers is a bit iffy, and large chunks of text are represented as images. But it's sure pretty.
Saturday, 4 October 2008
Best thing about the iPhone is that it helps me get around the “no laptop in the toilet” rule my partner instituted
Friday, 3 October 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by The Arcade Fire, Brightblack Morning Light, Blitzen Trapper, Andy Grooms Living Room, Ween, The Smashing Pumpkins, Portishead, Elvis Costello and 4 Bonjour’s Parties, among others.
Friday, 26 September 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by You Am I, Torche, David Byrne, Ovide All-Stars and Hawkwind, among others.
Thursday, 18 September 2008
The secrets of storytelling
From Scientific American, research into the ways in which stories can "enhance social skills by acting as simulators for the brain" and can help people "make sense of increasingly complex social relationships"
I figure an ASS reader is some kind of special toilet paper with Braille lettering on it. Either way, when I tried to install one on my computer, all I got was a bunch of errors and some nasty smears on my monitor.
(Design Encyclopedia, which ought to know better)
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Calexico, 4 Bonjour’s Parties, Yeasayer, The Besnard Lakes, The Book Of Lists, My Latest Novel, Animal Collective and Artanker Convoy, among others.
Thursday, 11 September 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Marco Benevento, of Montreal, Artanker Convoy, Blitzen Trapper, Beck, The Instruments, The Clientele and Robots in Disguise, among others.
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by The Instruments, Goldfrapp, The Uglysuit, Clue to Kalo, The Impossible Shapes, David Bowie, A-KO, Massak and The Future Kings of England, among others.
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Connex shortlisted for new Melbourne train tender. Which is like drafting an epileptic marmoset as a contestant in an egg and spoon race.
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Air, Andrew Bird, Marching Band, Al Duvall, Zoos of Berlin, Marco Benevento, Add N to (X), Ahmad Jamal Trio and Alice in Chains, among others.
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
Thanks to the packet of liquorice bullets I just gobbled down, I now know how quickly I can sprint from my desk to the loo.
Sunday, 24 August 2008
Move over David Allen, Axl Rose has his own ‘getting things done’ methodology. The secret? Refrain from your ‘bitch slap rappin’
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Things I’ve been listening to
Music by Karl Hector & The Malcouns, Marco Benevento, Marching Band, Zoos of Berlin, Torche, The Instruments and Apes & Androids, among others.
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
It’s a sure sign that someone’s Facebook account has been hijacked by a friend when their status update consists of the words “…is gay”
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Apparently the name ‘Aaron’ is Hebrew for “Doomed to receive calls from friends who forget to lock their mobile phone keypads”
Saturday, 19 July 2008
Space Lego Set 894: Tracking Station
Space Lego Set 6929: Starfleet Voyager
Space Lego Set 894: Beta-1 Command Base
Space Lego Set 6930: Space Supply Station
Thursday, 3 July 2008
Ah, Microsoft Word… only a mother could love your default heading styles. Like a Tourettes fit in a type foundry.
Indiana Jones and the (Scrutinisers of the) Fonts on the Maps (of Doom)
Have you ever wondered if the fonts used on the maps in the Indiana Jones travel montage sequences are historically synchronistic? To my shame, I hadn't either. Now I'm wondering if they had Franklin Gothic in that galaxy far, far away.
Fixing flat, grey input buttons in Safari 3
I’m not too proud to admit that this problem had me stumped for ages.
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Apple’s lowercase-personal-pronoun ‘i’ thing has gone too far; takeaway joint iSushi just got added to the list of things to which ‘iObject’
Thursday, 26 June 2008
In the 70s, people truly believed that the identity of a man named Mott could be clarified by the addition of the cognomen ‘the Hoople’
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
C-3PO is not only fluent in 6 million forms of communication, he also manages to sound like an asshole in every one of them
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Booked in for an appearance on Carson Kressley’s new show Why Have You Got Two Of Those?.
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
Chatting with a work colleague just as they enter the toilet is awkward; you both know that they’ll shortly be, to some extent, minus pants
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Open Library
Another way to access the mind-bogglingly huge archive of full text digitised books at the Internet Archive; very neat site design and great options for refining searches.
According to the email in my junk folder, all I have to do is email a chap named ‘Burton Wolf’ and my ‘rodney’ will become ladies’ new toy
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
The ebb and flow of movies: box office receipts 1986-2008
A very attractive graph showing how some movies are like mayflies (are they the ones that don't live for long?) and others are like, um, much-longer-living flies.
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Public domain weird fiction at Wikisource
Includes a selection of horror and Gothic fiction, scientifiction, fantasy and sword and sorcery.
Thursday, 1 May 2008
Lovecraft jottings (or, jotcraft leavings)
From the man himself: "This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction…" (H.P. Lovecraft). Frightening that any of these mind have found their source in, as he calls them, "casual incidents".
Monday, 17 March 2008
Discovered while looking at Wikipedia entries on people more successful than me. (By definition, anyone who has a Wikipedia entry.) But at least failure and obscurity are effective safeguards against this kind of Wiki-vandalism.
Monday, 10 March 2008
In the days since news went ’round the interwobs about the death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax, I’ve come across a number of tributes to the man who was truly the Dungeon Master’s Dungeon Master. Some of these have taken the form of fond — and surprisingly candid — reminiscences about old D&D campaigns.
Two pieces in particular caught my eye: Jason Heller’s piece at The A.V. Club, about the impact of D&D on his “lack of a life”, and a piece by Wired editor Adam Rogers at the New York Times, which has some interesting things to say about yesterday’s D&D nerds being today’s Web 2.0 cyberlords.
I have a clear memory of being introduced to D&D in Grade 4. I’m fairly certain that the adventure involved an encounter with a carrion crawler (but then, show me an introductory D&D adventure that didn’t) and, possibly, a living statue. Or living ooze. Or living ooze on a regular, non-living statue. There was a statue, anyway. It may have been booby-trapped and concealing treasure.
At first I was fascinated mainly by the dice and the maps. By Grade 5 I was playing in a campaign with my friend’s Dad as Dungeon Master, and including among its players a number of guys from Melbourne University. Which was kind of intimidating for a 10 year old.
I started to get a sense of the storytelling at the heart of the game, the freedom to invent. One day while visiting my friend I discovered his Dad’s handwritten notes for an upcoming adventure, and piles of exercise books describing the campaign universe in exacting detail. The whole enterprise seemed huge, and compelling, and so much richer than regular life, or even the world of fiction. This was a fiction in which I was a player.
When I moved schools in Year 8 I discovered that people were playing D&D 550km away from Melbourne. Our Saturday night games through Year 11 and 12 weren’t dissimilar to today’s marathon internet gaming sessions in terms of duration, involvement of junk foods and surrounding air of fuggy fartiness.
I was still playing D&D a couple of years ago, playing in one campaign and running another, a gothic horror, slightly steampunk campaign set in Victorian London.
Adam Rogers’s New York Times piece describes the exhilaration of rolling up a new character or creating a new dungeon, and there’s a parallel to be drawn with the way we’re constantly signing up to new webapps:
It’s true: every time we fill out a new profile and start hailing fellow internet travellers, it’s an opportunity to re-imagine ourselves, to roll-up a new character and go looking for rumours at the tavern.Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.
Friday, 29 February 2008
Dealing with human spam
The sales drones marshalled about the concourse at Flinders Street Station make rush hour an even more wrist-slashingly miserable affair by attempting to persuade passing would-be commuters of the merits of everything from environmental protection (fair enough) to raising the limit on their credit card (get fucked).
I won’t dwell on the absurdity of thrusting unsolicited information upon adult human beings who, if they really did want the limit raised on their credit card, surely possess the intelligence and ability to set the requisite wheels of commerce in motion and turn their dream of debilitating debt into reality. But which vertiginously salaried marketing manager decided it would be a good idea to attempt these solicitations in an environment in which people are in a hurry, listening to iPods, and, if they’ve just disembarked from a St. Kilda Road tram, homicidally enraged?
For a while I felt it incumbent upon me to politely signal my disinterest to these misguided spruikers with one of those bunched up, regretful smiles, acknowledging that I had no interest in the message but that I bore no (or not much) ill-will toward the messenger. My attitude changed the moment I realised that these people are, in their capacity as salespeople at least, a kind of human spam, and that I should no more countenance my disinterest, let alone acknowledge their presence, than I would reply to a spam email to say that, no, I’m actually reasonably satisfied with the dimensions of my sex organ, though thanks for your kind offer, and unfortunately, even if I had a spare US$200,000, I’m not entirely sure that my depositing it in your Nigerian bank account would actually restore your aunty Mgoobi to life.
Instead, into my mental junk folder they go — along with MX.
Sunday, 17 February 2008
The best laid plans lead writers astray
“If novels are going to combust imaginatively, shouldn’t they be written spontaneously?” writes Hannah Davies.
Thursday, 24 January 2008
Hidden iPod controls revealed
Apple Inc. is renowned for hiding delicious features in its computers and gadgets, little operating system ‘easter eggs’ that pop up one day when you least expect it to enrich your computing life in subtle but important ways.
I recently discovered a new way of controlling an iPod without laying a finger on the scrollwheel. Mine is a 5th generation video iPod, so your mileage may vary (or as the computer geeks say, ‘YMMV’).
Step one: Travel on public transport. Find a seat next to the window, or otherwise ensure that your iPod is in your pants pocket on the side of your body nearest to a vacant seat.
Step two: Wait for an obese person to sit next to you.
Step three: Marvel at the genius of Steve Jobs as the pressing of your fellow passenger’s arse-flesh against your iPod causes tracks to skip backwards, forwards, pause and suddenly play at unbearable levels of volume.
Monday, 21 January 2008
Underage drinker sitting next to me at the 5.30pm session of Cloverfield at Hoyts Melbourne Central, immediately after preview #1:
“That looks shit.”
Underage drinker sitting next to me at the 5.30pm session of Cloverfield at Hoyts Melbourne Central, immediately after previews #2, #3 and #4:
“They look shit.”
OUnderage drinker and self-appointed movie critic sitting next to me at the 5.30pm session of Cloverfield at Hoyts Melbourne Central, immediately after Cloverfield:
“That was shit.”
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Hilary Mantel on the lure of the unexplained
"To many of us, a great deal of what we encounter daily is unexplained. It is possible to have received a good education and know nothing of science or technology."
Compendium of lost words
A list of over 400 of the rarest modern English words, including a long list of unusual adjectives of relation.
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
How we work
The habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people use to get their work done. Includes a number of writers and artists.
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
The vapour trail
When I was writing my nineteenth century, gross-out gothic horror comedy The Genie in the Dunnycan I tried to immerse myself in the grimy streetscapes of late nineteenth century Melbourne; cultural historian Melissa Bellanta's Victoriana blog covers that territory and more.
Tuesday, 8 January 2008
Victorian history blog
I'm a sucker for Victoriana; the juxtaposition of grime and ornament, technology and the primitive, manners and monsters. Here's a fantastic blog offering glimpses into Victorian life, by an Australian but with a focus on Victorian London.
Old is the new new
This blog by a historian and 'robot fancier' purports to "drop history like Galileo dropped the orange", so it's clearly down with it, homes, as well as being educational.
Monday, 7 January 2008
Fabulating the Australian desert: Australia's lost race romances, 1890-1908
A look at the bizarre adventure-romance novels set in the Australian interior at the turn of the twentieth century, including George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian.
