Watching Contagion for the first time and it’s a genuinely good film but also really funny to pick apart post COVID. Zero concept of the government attempting to do anything to stem the spread, we can only have biosuited scientists at the CDC trying to find a cure

Turning 30 is supposed to cure you of this, and everybody on Bluesky turned 30 seven years ago

I don't understand why having kids or not needs to be anybody else's business, but the number of people here citing "climate change" or "stress" about climate change as a reason to not have kids is wild, and also probably dishonest www.theage.com.au/national/the...

This has got to be like the fourth or fifth story about this I have seen under the masthead of Melbourne’s paper of record

Amusing that this is the inverse of this stat being cracked out regularly in Australia, where it’s used to celebrate multiculturalism but deliberately overlooks the fact that a huge chunk of those foreign-born parents are white Brits or Kiwis

GTA IV and V were boring as fuck - I didn’t even make it two hours into V - which means the last time I actually enjoyed a GTA game was 22 years ago playing San Andreas when I was 15 years old

Enjoyed reading @jrobertlennon.com on the Lonesome Dove series, though strongly disagree with some of it - IMO Streets of Laredo is indeed the weakest of the series but is transformatively redeemed by its closing chapter www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Let’s check in with the Liberal Party and see what your prospects of forming government look like when you can’t win metropolitan seats in one of the world’s most urbanised countries

Americans:

Mush is alive and well, but I love that the lede here implies that a) Mush is dead, and b) Mush died from falling down the cellar stairs

Disappointed to learn that Bluesky’s word muting feature does not extend to OCR for screencaps, as Discourse about a senatorial candidate in a minor foreign province once again dominates my feed

My dad sent me this photo and frankly this is what Russell St felt like when I stepped out to get dinner earlier

Or, “Taxpayers would be charged $3bn over a decade if Labor changed Hecs indexation date by five months” www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Growing up in a backwater city in a backwater country (in my case Perth, Western Australia) gives you a certain spider sense. Game recognises game.

Can we please stop pretending AUKUS is ever going to eventuate www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

The fact is that the most correct observation anyone can make about US politics over the previous decade is that voting for Hillary Clinton would have fixed literally everything you’re currently suffering from, and you only think this isn’t the case because of misogyny

Ludwig Knaus. 1829-1910. Paseo dominical. 1878

6900 of those were drips demanding the NACC do something about the Murdoch media

Sir Ian Potter, photograph by Mark Strizic (1968)

Memento Mori: A Selection

Steady on, mate, you’ll go blind

TV volume adjusting to ambient noise is a deeply unwanted feature. When my toddler decides to kick off I don’t need the TV to crank the volume on top of that

Started listening to Helen Garner’s diaries in audiobook and am reminded of how she manages to make one really appreciate all of life’s small pleasures, experiences and random thoughts

Watching Spartacus for the first time. Love this shot of eucalyptus trees in North Africa circa 100 BC 🫡🇦🇺

Interview with the vampire Appointment by the vampire Vampire suspended on full pay NSW ICAC asks the vampire about probity of appointment procedures Photograph of the vampire drinking champagne entered into proceedings 'Vampire, I am about to read to you a statement you made previously'

Kinda funny how the Thai cave boy rescue is playing out again but global media interest is like “ehhh we already did that”

When the discourse on here fools you into thinking It’s Happened

Not denying there's a housing crisis, but I have a suspicion that much like HECS discourse the conversation around it is skewed by the fact that journalists/writers have seen their industry and therefore their careers be gutted over the past decade www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ma...

In retrospect it might’ve been better for Trump to win in 2020, with some continuity from the Adults in the Room, rather than be exiled for 4 years and returning, aggrieved and embittered, with all the reasonable voices in his camp purged

Watched Mickey 17 the other night and it’s striking how few Trump analogues we see in fiction, mostly, I guess, because even after 10 years we still can’t quite believe this dude is for real

I could say something snarky about personal anxiety vs reasonable economic analysis, but I think this thread is actually reasonable for people who live in a society as predatory as the US

Gave this my all but couldn’t make it past 85% cityquiz.io/quizzes/aust...

Mone is under investigation by the NCA so I think a BBC investigation would be a bit redundant

This isn’t good but it’s not, in and of itself, “anti-democratic” www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

'The Flask Exterior, Hampstead' (2016) by James MacKinnon jamesmackinnonfineart.com

The idea that current Americans, who live in the greatest material comfort and personal freedom in all history, ought to be more pessimistic about the future than people living during slavery, the Great Depression, or the Second World War is an almost baffling assertion of narcissism and solipsism

Mask away if it makes you feel better, but I think a lot of people have wrongly convinced themselves a plane is an environment more likely to make them ill than, say, a pub or a restaurant

Saw the number of QTs and thought people were going to be mocking this but it’s almost all English people agreeing that 20 degrees - 3 degrees below standard room temperature - is really uncomfortable for sleeping???

I like how wikipedia could only get a freely licensed photo of the political editor of BBC News by cropping this UK government photo

I am not enjoying the death throes of the Liberal Party as much as I expected to

Goodnight. 🖼️ Debbie Faulkner-Stevens

Does Mendo actually say, in any film, words to the effect of “you haven’t been talking to the cops have you mate?” In Animal Kingdom he’s always wheedling the brothers to talk to him about stuff but never accuses them of being rats

I was surprised it’s even this much because I mentally think of the West Bank as not much bigger than Gaza, but in fact it’s 15x larger, roughly comparable to Delaware

Nobody on reality TV these days is “poor,” they’re doing it to facilitate their influencer brand

This is possibly the most ridiculous thing Britain has done in the past decade, including Brexit

I suppose this would be sort of true if your salary, and therefore the bulk of your earnings that fell into the highest tax bracket, was well over $1 million

Google already did this years ago! The AI results are actually an improvement over the promoted content, SEO slop and prioritisation of recent news events. Just don’t rely on them without verifying.

It’s so funny that Britain rejoining the EU is a) obviously the right policy, and b) so, so embarassing

There’s gotta be some phrase for growing up largely immersed in the pop culture of another country

The audiobook of my novel Vampire on the Orient Express is currently 99c at most retailers (and always free on Spotify Premium). Come, join the 1,500 Goodreads reviewers who expected a quirky satire from the title but instead got a horror novel played straight! www.chirpbooks.com/audiobooks/v...