In 2024, Meanjin published this essay by my father & myself on Australia’s democracy crisis as displayed through the Voice referendum symptoms. Now that this 85yo Aus cultural institution is being destroyed by neolib visigoths at Melbourne Uni, you should have it from behind paywall. #auspol

i hate that i feel guilty for taking breaks from news and social media, that i feel like i am missing successive new realities by shutting down and that somehow this makes me a less empathetic person my brain cannot process all the horrors all the time and yet i feel like it is supposed to

An unusual item in my collection, Mister Black’s Secret by Catherine Barr. At first it seems like an early example of cheezburger speech but it was actually written in a shortlived teaching alphabet called ITA.

there's a largely imagined 'celtic christianity was a softer, gentler version until the Roman Church came along' which honestly isn't based on much.

worthwhile thread - thanks steph!

This would be why I am such a strident critic of digitization as a substitute for actual archival preservation. My sixteenth century documents are far sturdier and likely to survive another 500 years than the detritus on the internet. And digitization is not democratization.

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

The best news!!!

“AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”

oh shiz it is misogynist as fuck,did he hate his own wive/s, mother? not actually traditional either - by Robert Southey, 1837. He was poet laureate of England in the Romantic period, feuded with Byron. Did drugs with Coleridge. C married S's wife's sister then basically abandoned her for opium

[extremely loud Sting voice] BOX FAN

he'd been nude in the sauna and only had time to throw on the accessories

many lost to history!

TBH my current phase is to have fun being bad: letting my true resentful pathetic weasily deepest feelings out, releasing the imperatives of self-conscious beauty/ the 'poetic', letting go of vanity in the framing of the self/speaker. It has brought incredibly vital and often hilarious work. >

mind blown that there is an articulated psychological concept called 'justice sensitivity', often but not exclusively associated with ADHD and autism (a) WTF not everyone feels this way?? (b) I feel like this explains so much conflict in fandom especially edgefoundation.org/the-fairness...

Your second moment of calm, not far from #WarRavagedPortland

A reminder of how much great writing late-stage capitalism has robbed us of.

"Later in life, Deja was a titan of philanthropy. The Deja Wilson Foundation continues to raise money for women in their twenties who are recovering from being funny in high school."

I always thought when it was time for a mid career change of profession there would be professions left.

you probably need to be of a certain vintage to understand the absolute hilarity of ken starr being in the epstein files

For roughly the price of an inner-city apartment, conservationists have bought multiple small islands off the coast of Gippsland to protect their ecosystems and wildlife.

Thread of ship's cats enjoying their tiny hammocks. This is the "Kitten mascot of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle at the time of the Suez Expedition, 1956" 🧵 www.facebook.com/iwm.north/ph...

None of these are in focus, but that doesn’t diminish how much I love this set I have in which someone was trying to get a good photo of their kitten.

Why are there so many origami birds in The Guardian's Melbourne office? No comment. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

we wants eeeet

#copyediting amok and amuck are the same word, natch, in different spellings, but amok has become increasingly more popular, perhaps because it looks scarier and wasn't ever preceded by duck

nice Sheikh Uber driver and I both attempted general community small talk about grand final last night: first I said it was on that day(Fri), then corrected to Sun, then settled on Sat. he thought it was on 3am not 3pm.

I'm creating an OpenHouseNY shortlist for out-of-town guests, and I think it's 🤗 — and, I'll admit, touching — that you can see where the Dept of Transport makes its signs, or visit the Dept of Sanitation's waste transfer station + compost facility, or watch new garbage trucks demo big-bin pickup...

When you open yourself up and let someone peek underneath that armor but actually you've already just been your goofy as self the whole time

Get you someone who loves you like a cat loves the corner of a laptop

Engineering Lego Cars to Climb Increasingly Tall Walls. I love these iterative Lego engineering videos. [kottke.org]

"Epstein’s emails veered between domineering, cloying, comfortable and obsessive, and were often riddled with typos. In response, his advisers and supporters were deferential and even fawning."

🥰

Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again

They've lost the 9yos

You simply cannot make me spend my time on this stuff. Oh the president said Tylenol causes autism? Well it doesn't. No I'm not going to pore through research papers to prove it to you. That's not what my time is for. My time is for playing videogames and gazing lovingly at my wife.

Microsoft will no longer allow Israel to use its cloud services to enable its mass surveillance of occupied Palestinians – "the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza"

good (depressing) life/social skills advice for weird people (I don’t think I’m autistic but I was a friendless child and learned social skills late - a lot of social advice for autistic people resonates with me, whatever that means)

Claude Opus 4 “engages in strategic deception more than any other frontier model that we have previously studied. The model is clearly capable of scheming. In instances where the model decides to scheme, it appears to be much more proactive in its subversion attempts…” - Oct Harper’s

Late to this from @greenj.bsky.social , but: exactly... "What a shitty waste, and what a tragic confirmation of the Meanjin project’s occasional subtext: that culturally we are inclined to cringe." greenworlds.substack.com/p/the-death-...

omg

Mommmmm I'm borrrrrrrred. Photo from my collection, no date.

Autism is cool. Most of my favorite people are autistic. So take more Tylenol I say

Exclusive: distinguished Prof Fiona Stanley was ‘ashamed’ after the hospital named after her abruptly cancelled an event featuring Palestinian-Australian doctors speaking about their experiences in Gaza, and says she even considered asking the hospital to remove her name

There is something hauntingly beautiful in this juxtaposition of sadness and hope 'Although the wind' - Izumi Shikibu #poetry #poemoftheday

The Coalition seems to truly believe that Australians yearn in their heart for Trumpism -- despite all evidence to the contrary.