Writers residencies to commence at Waverley Cemetery, Sydney, Australia

31 July 2025

The old caretaker’s cottage is to become home to small groups of writers for five months of the year:

The site’s caretaker’s cottage will soon be converted into a workspace and temporary residence for writers. The program will host three writers at a time, each staying for a five-month period. Accommodation will feature private rooms equipped for reading, research and drafting.

You don’t see it on every travel guide for the Sydney region, but Waverley Cemetery is worth the visit if you’re in town. Perched above a cliff, looking out onto the Tasman Ocean, the experience of walking between row after of row of gravestones is a truly contemplative. Transcendental even. This would be an amazing place to live for a few months. Are bloggers accepted?

Never Tear Us Apart, by INXS, tops all Australian Hottest 100

28 July 2025

The 1987 ballad by Australian rock act INXS claimed the number one spot in Triple J’s countdown of the Hottest 100 Australian Songs, last Saturday.

INXS rose to prominence during the 80’s and 90’s, when the late Micheal Hutchence, who died in 1997, fronted the act. The band last performed live in 2012, though they’ve not officially retired.

The top ten was not quite as old-school Australian rock as I thought it might be. Cold Chisel featured at numbers seven and eight, with Flame Trees (1984), and Khe Sanh (1978), respectively. Veteran singer Paul Kelly made it to number nine with his 1996 track How to Make Gravy.

Somebody That I Used to Know (2011) by Gotye, My Happiness (2000) by Powderfinger, Scar (2004) by Missy Higgins, Untouched (2007) by The Veronicas, and The Nosebleed Section (2003) by Hilltop Hoods, also charted in the top ten. Music recorded in the twenty-first century (which I’ll say includes 2000), ended up being well represented here.

Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu, wins 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award

25 July 2025

Ghost Cities, by Australian author Siang Lu, who is based between Brisbane, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was yesterday named winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The Miles Franklin is one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards for novel writing, with the winner receiving sixty-thousand Australian dollars.

I’m yet to read Ghost Cities, but it certainly has an award-winning synopsis:

Ghost Cities — inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China — follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.

How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed — then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

The Miles Franklin judging panel had this to say:

Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora. Sitting within a tradition in Australian writing that explores failed expatriation and cultural fraud, Lu’s novel is also something strikingly new. In Ghost Cities, the Sino-Australian imaginary appears as a labyrinthine film-set, where it is never quite clear who is performing and who is directing. Shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura, Ghost Cities is a genuine landmark in Australian literature.

Lu also wrote The Whitewash in 2022, which won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer, and was shortlisted in both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs).

But writing books isn’t Lu’s only claim to fame, he’s also created SillyBookstagram (Instagram page). I know all about Bookstagram (Instagram’s book readers’ community), but SillyBookstagram is a new one on me. It looks like a fun offshoot of Bookstagram though.

Foto Walk by Foto App: making social media… social

24 July 2025

New from photo-sharing app Foto, Foto Walk:

A Foto Walk is a casual, inclusive gathering of photographers who meet up to walk, shoot, and connect in real life. There are no rules, no competitions, and no pressure — just people who love photography coming together to explore their local area with fresh eyes.

Walks can be small or large, quiet or social, digital or analog — everyone is welcome. Whether you’re shooting film, phone, or digital, Foto Walks are about slowing down, being present, and building community through shared creative energy.

Imagine that, a socials app facilitating in person socialising, instead of binding members to screens and algorithms. Otherwise, what a great idea.

Anyone who wishes to can register to become a walk host in their area, organise gatherings, then get together for a few hours of photo-taking with local Foto members.

I joined Foto a few weeks ago, and this news arrived by newsletter on Monday. They have a quite a bit in the pipeline at the moment, and are certainly positioning themselves as a serious alternative to certain of the other photo-sharing apps around.

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photography, photos, social media

Apple to join the foldable smartphone fold in late 2026

24 July 2025

This according to Bloomberg writer, Mark Gurman, that is. The proposed devices resemble a small iPad or tablet when opened out.

It’s often said Apple might not do things first, but they do them best (usually). Doubtless they will apply their know-how to the region of the device where the fold crease is, since this where a lot of foldables see problems.

And while we’re at it, can we use the term foldable in the same way as wearable?

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smartphones, technology, trends

Personal websites are the place for comments, not social media channels

22 July 2025

Ava, writing at Ava’s blog:

It’s a bit of a meh look that one of the biggest Indieweb personalities (that I think does an amazing job!) with her own Bearblog and website is not sharing this discussion on them, but on social media instead, limiting its reach to those users. At least POSSE was an option. And that leads me back to what I said above — what’s the point of going here if people are also resorting to Twitter but with different look, but without the numbers and archive built up over years?

Ava’s post is in response to a question posed by xandra, asking what the Indie Web needs the most now. But the matter of hosting discussions with blog posts is something I’ve been grappling with.

It doesn’t seem right that anyone reading one of my website posts has to go elsewhere to make a comment, when that should be happening right here. Because I was thinking, why do I need multiple social media pages, so that all bases are covered should someone not be on this social, but on that social? And what if a person wishing to comment on a post doesn’t have any Fediverse presence?

After years of having post comments switched off, I recently re-enabled them. The reply-guys and spammers arrived within minutes of course, but my CMS has tools to help filter a lot of this junk out. Plus, I still approve all comments before they go public. Bringing comments back achieved two aims, in theory. For one, all discussion is centralised (mostly) on my website, and not spread across multiple social media platforms.

Two: people who don’t have social media presences can still take part in any discussion, because all they have to do is type out a comment. No membership of anything, expect an email address, is needed. Yes, that sets the bar low for junk, but in filters I trust.

One of the things I enjoy about leaving a comment on other people’s posts — though I’m hardly a prolific commenter, because overworked introvert — is including my website on the reply form, where the option is available.

To my mind, it’s always been about the website, not some “outpost” page on a social media platform. I’m not saying everyone should shun social media, because it’s a great place for chit-chat, and having conversations that are only hosted on someone’s socials page.

Of course, to somewhat contradict my argument, I recently federated disassociated, meaning posts go out to the likes of Mastodon, and people can reply there if they want. But then again, those comments ping back to the post in question, so any discussion would be seen in full here.

POSSE is great, but when it comes to discussion on blog posts, let’s also remember KISS: Keep It Simple Sayang. Yes, sayang, because I don’t like calling smart people stupid.

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blogs, IndieWeb, Small Web, trends

Cure, the fourth novel by Australian author Katherine Brabon

21 July 2025

Cure, the fourth novel by Melbourne based Australia author Katherine Brabon, was published this month. As with most of Brabon’s novels so far, Cure is set outside of Australia, in Italy:

Vera and Thea are mother and daughter. Vera writes for the internet: she constructs identities and scenarios for brands to cater to the ideal consumer. Yet she also consumes the offerings of the online world herself: the addictive pursuit of a cure, the narratives she craves in which mother and daughter find a way out of the shared experience of chronic illness. She becomes preoccupied with a blog written by a woman named Claudia, a mother whose daughter also has a chronic illness.

While on holiday in Italy, Thea writes in her journal. She is also constructing a character: an image of herself as she grapples with having the same illness as her mother, Vera. But gradually another person emerges in her journal, through her imaginings of her mother in the same house, the same city, at the same age. They have come to Italy to see where Vera’s family originates, but also to chase a promised cure in the form of a man said to be able to heal Thea’s illness.

I read Brabon’s second novel, The Shut Ins, which was published in 2021, and explored the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori, where people shut themselves away from society, as in never leave their room, for sometimes years on end.

I was particularly intrigued by a character known only as M, and wrote a longer piece in 2021, trying to figure out who she was. Some people felt certain they knew who she was, but I wasn’t so sure. It’s not too often a novel piques my curiosity thusly…

Ben Lee suggests shock jocks host Triple J Hottest 100. No, not quite

19 July 2025

The shock jocks in question are Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O, who host a show — The Kyle and Jackie O Show — on a Sydney based commercial Australian radio station. The pair, especially Sandilands, often find themselves in hot water, on account of inappropriate and offensive comments made on air.

Last Wednesday, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article making the claim Australian musician Ben Lee had suggested Kyle and Jackie O host Triple J’s annual Hottest 100 countdown.

Triple J is a non-commerical Australian radio station with a focus on broadcasting new and independent local music, but mixed with non-Australian indie music. The Hottest 100 charts listeners’ favourite songs of the previous calendar year, regardless of country of origin.

But next Saturday, 26 July, Triple J will broadcast a one-off Hottest 100 of listener’s all-time favourite Australian only songs, as part of their fiftieth birthday celebrations.

In response to the Herald article, Lee posted a clarification on his Instagram page, saying Triple J’s Hottest 100 countdown, in its present format, should be broadcast by a commercial station. The jays, Lee explains, as a government funded station, should only support Australian music.

What I’m saying is let commercial radio handle servicing multi-national major labels — that’s their job. Triple J is taxpayer funded and I think those funds would be better used almost exclusively supporting Australian artists and culture.

I get where Lee is coming from here.

But the Hottest 100 is a draw card event for the jays, and likely introduces new listeners to the station, who in turn go on to hear the station’s predominately Australian music programming. On the other hand, as Lilya Murray, writing for Arc, a UNSW student publication, points out, representation of Australian artists in the Hottest 100, has been declining in recent years:

In 2024, only 29 Australian artists featured in the Hottest 100. This was a significant drop from 2023, which featured 52 local artists, and 57 from 2022.

Triple J has a mandate to broadcast a minimum of forty-percent Australian music, though the station claimed in 2019 they played closer to sixty-percent. Why then would fewer Australian musicians be featuring in the annual countdowns?

One suggestion here is that many Hottest 100 voters are not regular Triple J listeners, and are voting up music they’ve heard elsewhere. But I’m not sure you can stop people voting for non-Australian music, unless maybe it wasn’t aired on Triple J in the first place. After all, the Hottest 100 is meant to be a poll of Triple J listeners, not other stations.

But I doubt a one-hundred percent focus on local music, both played by Triple J, and included in the countdown, is the answer either. I’ve always enjoyed the jay’s mix of new and independent, and predominantly Australian music, and the annual Hottest 100 that results.

But more discussion about local music can only be a good thing, something the misleading notion that Kyle and Jackie O host the Hottest 100, might have precipitated.

12 foot ladder, a website that circumvented paywalls, taken offline

19 July 2025

Emma Roth, writing for The Verge:

The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has “successfully secured” the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online.

Thomas Millar, the 12 Foot Ladder founder, saw his app as a way of “cleaning” web pages, by disabling scripts that blocked access to non-paying subscribers. The News/Media Alliance, on the other hand, viewed 12 Foot as an illegal tool, that deprived publishers and writers of subscription income.

Linux Operating Systems on five percent of desktops in America

18 July 2025

According to data collected by Statcounter. At face value this suggests one in twenty people in the United States are using a Linus OS on their computer. That’s not a bad number. Of course, Windows OS’s still dominate, but it looks like some people are looking for alternatives.

I migrated my laptops to Linux Mint about a year ago. While it hasn’t been one-hundred percent plain sailing, I’d much rather be where I am than where I used to be.

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