The tenth novel by the Tasmania based author, and previous winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, was published last week:
James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens.
His wife, Deborah, is sceptical, but he gets going anyway. His patients tell mesmerising stories. There’s Anthony, for instance, who was camping one night by the Aral Sea; or Mary, the owner of a beauty salon, confronted by a ball of light moving towards her in her bedroom.
James’s research assistant Lucy Cheng sits in on each session. She’s an attractive young divorcee, who has made a study of anxiety, and who takes notes about each conversation.
With the sci-fi tinge, Capture seems worlds removed — no pun intended — from Lohrey’s 2021 title The Labyrinth, winner of the Miles Franklin that year. But who knows, maybe it isn’t.
Specifically, a Hue light switch, using an old door opening button from a Jubilee line train.
I lived in London for a few years awhile back, and the District line also had door buttons you’d press to open or close the train doors. As I recall it, the doors on all other lines were controlled by the guard. These passenger operated door buttons could be something of a double-edge sword though.
I was travelling to Richmond one afternoon, and a passenger — possibly still on the way from home from the night before — and wanting to alight at a station, was getting the action all wrong in constantly pressing the door button.
He was — unawares, I was pretty sure — cancelling out the efforts of someone on the platform trying to open the door to board the train. There was confusion on one side of the door, frustration on the other, as the door went through a cycle of partly opening, then partly closing.
Maybe these door open and close actions are better controlled centrally, and the door buttons should be used as light switches instead.
American author Scott Turow, in conjunction with five publishing houses, claims Meta used material protected by copyright to train its AI agent, Llama.
They make the suggestion the Facebook owner chose not to obtain permission to access the copied texts as they wanted to get ahead of the competition in what’s being called “AI arms race.”
Meta, however, sees their use of the copyrighted material as fair use, and claims courts have ruled this to be the case in the past. What will the court determine this time?
If there is indeed an AI “arms race” in progress, which is undoubtedly the case, I can’t see any developer of AI technologies doing anything that will compromise their industry standing. Even if that means doing the right thing by copyright holders.
Half the web might know about your blog, but how many of your in-person acquaintances, people in your household, community, or workplace, know you blog?
Do you even tell them? Do you want to?
The question came up at Forking Mad this week, and started me thinking. When I uploaded the first version of disassociated in 1997, I told just about everyone I knew. At that point I aspired to be a web designer, so telling the whole world of my online presence made perfect sense. I ended up working in the industry for a few years, with a role coming about after a design studio in Sydney spotted my website, and contacted me.
Over time though disassociated became more blog than personal website/design portfolio. Having said that, I just about never posted screenshots or links to the work I did commercially, I was happy to let quirky old disassociated do the talking. But after a stint in web design, I decided it wasn’t for me. Somehow, building commercial websites just wasn’t as fun, or satisfying, as the personal work.
That’s when I started doing more writing. In 2007, after years of running this website with static HTML files, I migrated to WordPress (WP) — where, for better or worse — I remain. As a web publishing platform, WP works for me, does what I need, and that’s fine for me for now. I moved to a web publishing platform partly because I wanted to have a go at earning money as a blogger.
And in 2007 I wasn’t alone.
That ambition was achieved, though not quite in the way I envisaged, a story for another time maybe. But somehow moving to a web publishing platform brought disassociated into the limelight, even if I was an actor to the side, the far side, of the stage. Visits skyrocketed, and my in-box was full of messages from people interested to some degree in what I was doing.
At that time also I resided full-time in Sydney, and was often out and about meeting people. I would drag introvert me out to networking events, art show openings, and film screenings.
I had business cards featuring my URL, and handed them out indiscriminately. I most certainly told people about my website then, including family and friends. Once, more as fun, I made up, and printed out, flyers with my URL on tear-tabs, and posted them on noticeboards on the campus of a Sydney university. I wasn’t relying solely on online methods of blog promotion.
But blogging was an all encompassing passion and experience, and, back in those heady days, so much more than merely writing a few blog posts. The picture in 2026, however, couldn’t be any different. Blogs were pushed aside by social media, and the party was over. Actually, strike that. The party isn’t over, it’s just a lot smaller than it was before.
More to the point though, blogs are no longer the talking point they once were. Outside of Indie/SmallWeb circles at least.
When I talk to people I meet in-person and discussion turns to online presences, they expect me to share my social media handles. A blog, or personal website, sounds positively quaint. To the point I sometimes feel awkward even mentioning it. On the few occasions I might say, tell the barista at the cafe that I blog, I end up changing the subject, when I realise their eyes have glazed over.
It’s too bad, because the question has me yearning to supplement my part-time day job by reprising my role as CEO of the disassociated online one-person in-my-dreams publishing behemoth. Even if it is a website/blog, not a social media page. But if you have a website you want the world to know about, spreading the word to more of the people you know in-person is the go I think.
