disassociated

This is — again: sort of — /timeline page content, which seems to be a bit popular on InterWebs and IndieWeb at the moment.

Today — or rather last Sunday 4 August 2024 — does not really mark the twenty-first birthday of disassociated. That would’ve been back in 2018, given the first non-blog inception of this website went online in 1997. But, the oldest, presently published blog post, dates back to Monday 4 August 2003. A post about the Windows Operating System (OS), NT4, that I’d been forced to stop using, after upgrading my then computer.

I had a few nice things to say about Windows OS’s back then, quite the contrast to the present time. Ever since properly rebooting disassociated in May 2022*, I’ve gradually been restoring selected old posts from the early days. The post I wrote twenty-one years ago, predates content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, and was instead written onto a static HTML page.

In 2007, as I was preparing to migrate to WordPress, I spent several months copy and pasting several years of “blog” posts onto a template, I would later upload into my first WordPress database. WordPressing, was the term I used to describe that process. But anyway, there we have it. Twenty-one years (unless I restore even older posts, and there’s one or two), of blog posts at disassociated.

But then again, who doesn’t like turning twenty-one a few times?

* though I’d sort of been back since September 2021.

London based Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld’s 2021 novel, The Bass Rock, which won the Stellar Prize literary award in the same year, was a riveting read. Her new book, The Echoes, looks like it will follow suit, given it incorporates elements of The Bass Rock, including settings across several locations and time, and a dollop of the supernatural thrown in for good measure:

Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him.

In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.

Both a celebration and an autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations and set between rural Australia and London, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, stories and who has the right to tell them. It asks what of our past we can shrug off and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.

It depends how you define normal. Winter this year, or certainly in July, and absolutely since the recent Sudden Stratospheric Warming event, has felt distinctly chillier. But the bad news is, no this winter, when compared to the long term average, isn’t all that much cooler than “normal”.

Despite the relatively cool conditions, most capitals have still recorded temperatures comfortably above the long-term average, and all except for Melbourne and Adelaide were colder in 2022.

2022 seems a long time ago, as I don’t recall the winter of 2022 feeling cooler than this year. The thing is though, we’ve become accustomed to warmer winters, because you know why, so when a normal winter comes along, or one that is closer to statistically normal, it feels colder.

As called/guessed by yours truly, Praiseworthy, the 2023 novel by Waanyi/Gulf of Carpentaria based Australian author Alexis Wright, has won the 2024 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Praiseworthy has cleaned up on the awards circuit since publication, also winning the other major Australian literary award, the Stellar Prize.

Wright also won the Miles Franklin in 2007, with Carpentaria. In winning this year, she joins an elite band of Australian writers to win the esteemed prize multiple times, including Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Patrick White, Michelle de Kretser, Kim Scott, and Thomas Keneally.

Michael Le Page, writing for New Scientist:

Drinking even small amounts of alcohol reduces your life expectancy, rigorous studies show. Only those with serious flaws suggest that moderate drinking is beneficial. That’s the conclusion of a review of 107 studies looking at how drinking alcohol affects people’s risk of dying from any cause at a particular age.

I’ve hardly touched alcohol in ten years. I didn’t make a conscious decision to stop drinking as such, I woke up one morning and simply didn’t feel like having it anymore. End of story. But I’m not one-hundred teetotal. I have a swig now and then. New Year’s Eve was the last time, I think. But I know I’m fortunate, and that stopping, or giving up, is far from straightforward for some people.