Some emojis can show your age AND cause offence
15 October 2022
The use of certain emojis is upsetting some people, with the thumbs up, red heart, and tears of joy, among pictograms causing the most offense.
Sending a thumbs-up can be seen as passive aggressive and even confrontational, according to Gen Z who claim they feel attacked whenever it is used. Whether the chat is informal, between friends or at work the icon appears to have a very different, ‘rude’ meaning for the younger generation. A 24-year-old on Reddit summed up the Gen Z argument, saying it is best ‘never used in any situation’ as it is ‘hurtful’.
From what I can tell though, this is more a conversation about the use of emojis in professional or workplace settings, where I would have thought their use in general would be limited.
I’ve never used a heart emoji in anything other than personal communications, but I do use thumbs up from time to time. Here its usage is intended as a sign-off, a way of saying “all good, understood”, as the finer points of whatever was being discussed have already been hashed out.
I’ll stick to “all good, good bye, now go get lost and leave me alone” from now on…
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The 2022 Richell Prize shortlist for unpublished writers
13 October 2022
The 2022 Richell Prize shortlist — which is open to unpublished Australian writers of adult fiction and adult narrative non-fiction — was announced on Tuesday 10 October 2022. This year six writers were selected from a field of some seven hundred aspirants.
- Zainab’s Not Home, by Hajer Al-awsi
- When Trees Fall Without Warning, by Susannah Begbie
- Wake, by Kate Harris
- Place Setting, by Eva Lomski
- The Little Ones, by Anne Myers
- The Medusa, by Lisa Nan Joo
In addition to a cash prize, the winner — who will be named on Thursday 3 November 2022 — will receive twelve months mentoring with a publisher at Hachette Australia, and may possibly see their manuscript published.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Richell Prize
Australians would rather watch TV, play sport, than read books
13 October 2022
Australians would rather watch TV, spend time on the internet, or play sport, exercise, or go outside, ahead of reading a book, according to data from the 2021 census.
Most Australians enjoyed an average of four hours and twenty-three minutes of recreation and leisure activities daily (are we not the lucky country), and of that time twenty-two percent of people spent nearly ninety minutes reading.
Ninety minutes reading a day isn’t too bad though. Someone reading for just ten minutes a day could read about twelve average size novels in a year. Ninety minutes daily adds up to a lot more books.
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Can you imagine a web without GIFs when they are gone?
13 October 2022
Once the mainstay of motion design during the early days of the web, GIFs appear to be on the way out, and may soon be non-existent. I shall miss them. Some of them that is.
GIFs are old and arguably outdated. They’ve been around since the days of CompuServe’s bulletin-board system, and they first thrived during the garish heyday of GeoCities, a moment in history that is preserved by the Internet Archive on a page called, appropriately, GifCities.
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Irish filmmaker Alan Gilsenan’s take on James Joyce’s Ulysses
11 October 2022
Ulysses | Film, a documentary by Irish filmmaker and theatre director Alan Gilsenan, is screening as part of this year’s online Irish Film Festival. The work is Gilsenan’s own interpretation of Irish author James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.
Alan Gilsenan’s Ulysses | Film is a personal response and cinematic ‘reading’ of Joyce’s novel. Fractured and poetic, this non-narrative film/installation is a myriad of images and sounds evoking Joyce’s imaginary world. Intended as a creative echo of Joyce’s work and life, this work is neither a film of the book nor a visual illustration of the novel. It is instead a personal interpretation of the book, acting as a doorway into the work, an invitation to read or re-visit this seminal piece of literature.
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Alan Gilsenan, books, film, James Joyce, trailer, video
Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore takes up prose writing
11 October 2022
British comic book writer Alan Moore, whose credits include the Watchmen series of stories, and work in the Batman and Superman universes, is swapping graphic novels for prose writing.
Speaking with Guardian writer Sam Leith, Moore makes some blunt observations regarding superhero comics, and the part that a thirst for such comic books among adults, rather than children, has contributed to the current state of the world.
I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s — to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional — when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.
It’s well worth reading the full article.
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Psalms For The End Of The World by Cole Haddon
10 October 2022
Psalms For The End Of The World, written by Australian-American author Cole Haddon, and published by Hachette Australia, is a novel aptly titled for the times. For more than one reason.
The first, and most obvious, is the end-of-days gloom permeating global affairs presently. The other, of all things, relates to the winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics. That’s because for the overt references to the end of the world, Psalms For The End Of The World also includes — among other things — physics and quantum entanglement in the mix:
It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer.
Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. Her story will reveal how scores of lives — an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more — are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.
With a timeline spanning centuries, and incorporating the stories of multiple characters, Psalms For The End Of The World seems to have something for everyone, be they fans of crime, science fiction, fantasy, or historical fiction.
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How can nothing unreal exist in a not locally real universe?
10 October 2022
In addition to Annie Ernaux being named the Nobel Prize literature laureate , John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger, received the Nobel for their contributions to physics this year. I studied physics in high-school for an ill-fated year, and struggled to make sense of any of it. Way too mathematical. And maybe way too weird.
All the more so, given the Nobel award winning work of Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger, effectively “overthrows reality as we know it.” This outcome spans the previous study of a whose-who of household names in the realm of physics, including John Stewart Bell, Boris Podolsky, Nathan Rosen, John von Neumann, and of course, Albert Einstein.
Quantum mechanics’ problem of nonlocal realism would languish in a complacent stupor for another three decades until being decisively shattered by Bell. From the start of his career, Bell was bothered by the quantum orthodoxy and sympathetic toward hidden variable theories. Inspiration struck him in 1952, when he learned of a viable nonlocal hidden-variable interpretation of quantum mechanics devised by fellow physicist David Bohm — something von Neumann had claimed was impossible. Bell mulled the ideas over for years, as a side project to his main job working as a particle physicist at CERN.
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Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, a film by Yaniv Raz
10 October 2022
James Whitman (Lucas Jade Zumann) is a troubled sixteen year old. With only one friend, Kwane (Odiseas Georgiadis), who sees the friendship as a social experiment more than anything else, James’ life is in turmoil following the disappearance of his older sister Jorie (Lily Donoghue), a month earlier.
If things were bad at home before Jorie vanished, they’ve taken a turn for the worse since. His father, Carl (Jason Isaacs), whom James refers to as “the brute” is an angry ex-navy officer, who won’t hesitate to hit his mother Elly, (Lily Donoghue) when he loses his temper.
Elly meanwhile is disillusioned with her life. In her younger days a promising career as an artist in New York City beckoned. But she was forced to abandon these ambitions because Carl wanted to move to a small town and open a sushi restaurant. Or so she tells James.
A ray of light arrives in the form of James’ classmate Sophie (Taylor Russell). Sophie is the editor of the school’s literature zine, and asks James if he can track down a poem Jorie promised to submit for publication before she disappeared. Sensing Sophie may be seeking more though, he’s happy to oblige.
While searching Jorie’s room — which Carl had placed out of bounds — for the poem, he instead finds a photo of Jorie with some friends, a few of whom James recognises. Believing they may know her whereabouts, he sets off with Sophie, who has agreed to help him, to locate his sister.
Despite its comedy billing, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, trailer, has more than a few dark moments. James is not as well as his father likes to believe, and as the pressure builds, James begins unravelling.
Light relief in the form of the titular Mr Bird, a pigeon voiced by Tom Wilkinson, who dispenses wisdom to the downtrodden James, lifts the mood. As do the musings of James’ hero Walt Whitman (voiced by Michael H. Cole), along with nods to the work of Wes Anderson, who is clearly a hero of director Yaniv Raz.
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film, trailer, video, Yaniv Raz
Today is World Homeless Day
10 October 2022
Today is World Homeless Day.
The purpose of World Homeless Day is to draw attention to the needs of people who experience homelessness locally and provide opportunities for the community to get involved in responding to homelessness, while taking advantage of the stage an ‘international day’ provides — to end homelessness through improved policy and funding.
Homelessness is an issue that seems to have been placed in the too-hard basket by many nations, Australia included. Yet solving the problem may not be as difficult as is believed. Finland, for example, has found an effective way to combat homelessness.
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