Signs of Damage, a new novel by Australian author Diana Reid

5 March 2025

Signs of Damage is the third novel from London based Australian author Diana Reid.

The Kelly family’s idyllic holiday in the south of France is disturbed when Cass, a thirteen-year-old girl, goes missing. She’s discovered several hours later with no visible signs of injury. Everyone present dismisses the incident as a close brush with tragedy.

Sixteen years later, at a funeral for a member of the Kelly family, Cass collapses. The present and the past start to collide as buried secrets come to light and old doubts resurface. What really happened to Cass in the south of France? And what’s wrong with her now?

I’ve read Reid’s 2021 debut Love & Virtue and have her second, novel Seeing Other People, published in 2022, on my (lengthy) TBR list. Signs of Damage will be published later this month.

The Phone Call, a short film by Mat Kirkby, with Sally Hawkins

5 March 2025

Aside from a co-worker, possibly a boyfriend, and the voice of veteran actor Jim Broadbent, British actor Sally Hawkins is about the only person visible in the twenty-minute short feature The Phone Call, trailer, made in 2013, by Mat Kirkby.

In Kirby’s collaboration with James Lucas, who wrote the screenplay, Hawkins portrays Heather, a reserved, bookish, crisis help-line worker. Heather’s shift has barely started, when she takes a call from a distressed elderly man, calling himself Stan (Broadbent). Heather desperately want to help, but Stan is unyielding, and time is running out. Suspense hangs heavily in the air.

The Phone Call, which won the short film (live action) award in the 2015 Oscars, can be viewed in full here. You won’t be disappointed. I can’t think of single dud Hawkins has starred in.

The 2025 Stella Prize literary award longlist

5 March 2025

Literary award season kicks off in Australia this year, with the announcement of the 2025 Stella Prize literary award longlist yesterday, at Adelaide Writers’ Week, in South Australia.

A Language of Limbs, by Dylin Hardcastle
Always Will Be, by Mykaela Saunders
Black Convicts, by Santilla Chingaipe
Black Witness, by Amy McQuire
Cactus Pear For My Beloved, by Samah Sabawi
Translations, by Jumaana Abdu
Naag Mountain, by Manisha Anjali
Peripathetic, by Cher Tan
Rapture, by Emily Maguire
The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng
Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
The Thinning, by Inga Simpson

The Stella Prize honours Australian women’s writing annually. The shortlist will be published on Tuesday 8 April 2025, with the winner being named on Friday 23 May 2025.

Search engines and SEO are still useful for independent self-publishers

4 March 2025

From Joan Westenberg’s recent article: why personal websites matter more than ever.

SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals.

There’s little doubt rampant SEO manipulation deprived bloggers, independent self-publishers, of many readers in the past, and possibly continues to. But I still see good levels of referrals here via search engines, despite minimal utilisation of SEO. Maybe that’s because, ironically, I’ve always viewed SEO as a waste of time.

Back in the day when blogger in-person gatherings seemed to take place every other week, I took care not to bring SEO into any conversations I had. The dangers of doing so were akin to flying head first into a black hole. As in, sometimes there could be no escape. It seemed to me that if SEO wasn’t a thing, some people would have nothing else to talk about.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely want to bag out SEO either. Like it or lump it, SEO has a role, albeit a small role, in the work of independent self-publishers. Say what you will about search engines, and I know there’s strong opinions on the topic, but they still help people discover content and information, and reach this website. Even in the age of Google Zero.

And when it comes to content promotion, albeit passive promotion, search engines are far less effort than social media channels. For a long while social media channels were my main method of promoting content, but I was never fully comfortable doing things that way. I often felt I was foisting stuff upon people. Even though they had chosen to follow me.

Plus social media channels always felt like a distraction to what was really important: my website. Leaving the task of spreading word about my work to the search engines seems like a better idea, while allowing me to dispense with the socials. It’s truly a set and forget process. All I need do is publish, and move on to something else. The search engines do the rest.

Of course, that’s not the way anyone attempting to manipulate, or whatever they call it, the rankings, the SERPs, I think it is, see things. But the search engines are not oblivious to this activity, as much as an overstatement of the obvious that may sound. Because if SEO manipulation was truly excessive, surely anything I publish would go unnoticed by search engines, as it would be crowded out.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The search engines referrals may be modest, but deliver more than the socials ever did. Perhaps we can still dare to imagine that content remains paramount. Despite on-going SEO manipulation and, of course, ever present algorithms.

How many people will Oscar winners thank? How long will they speak for?

3 March 2025

A forty-five second limit for Oscar acceptance speeches was introduced in 2010, but that doesn’t always stop the motivated. Or those who feel they need to acknowledge everyone who contributed to their award. Back in the day — seventy plus years ago — acceptances were usually only a few words long. But a decade ago, they were pushing three-hundred words, says Stephen Follows:

Acceptance speeches in the middle of the 20th century were exactly that, a chance to accept the award and say thank you. Over time, they have evolved into a platform to express opinions, share emotions, and highlight personal journeys.

Why the increase? Having the undivided attention of what was once a large, captive audience, might have been something to do with it. Today, of course, Oscar recipients have the social media platforms, offering a continuous outlet, not just forty-five seconds of television.

On the subject of social media platforms, the size of Oscar television audiences has, overall, been in decline — at least in the United States — plunging to a nadir of about ten million viewers in 2021. What’s going on there? Were people keeping tabs on the Oscar’s ceremony through the likes of TikTok and Instagram, or has there been a general loss of interest in the awards?

The origins of the Linux operating system, by Lars Wirzenius

3 March 2025

A 2023 article about the early days of the Linux operating system, written by Lars Wirzenius, who worked with Linus Torvalds, in the early 1990’s to develop the Linux kernel:

After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter “A” on the screen, the other “B”; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel.

A kernel is an integral component of an operating system, which has complete control over everything in the system.

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Drop the S, add a 16, the iPhone SE is now the 16e

28 February 2025

Aside from a two-year gap, from 2018 to 2020, I’ve had one or other of the iPhone SE handsets since 2016. A distinct feature of the SE models was their size. They were generally smaller than the other handsets in the iPhone range. I have big hands, prompting people to say to me, why the f**k did you choose an SE? I selected the SE precisely for its size. It fits perfectly into my back pocket. I also figured that the smaller size might deter me from using the device too often.

Well, that was back in 2016. The big hands, small handset combination meant — to my mind at least — the device would be that little bit more difficult to use. This especially while I was out and about, forcing me to wait until I was back at my laptop to do any heavy-duty sort of work tasks. That was partly successful at first, but given my phone also doubles as a watch, hands-off time was actually pretty low. Yes, I know: what ever was I thinking.

But now the SE is no more. The range has been superseded by the 16e. This name has been the subject of much conjecture, if that’s any surprise. Dropping the S, but keeping the E, means it is different from the old SE range, but only sort of. Adopting the 16 title is seen by some as bringing Apple’s SE-type handset offering into the annual handset update, meaning there will be a 17e next year. The SE-type handsets will no come along on a now-and-then basis.

That’s what some people are speculating anyway. What Apple ends up doing with the e range, remains to be seen. The 16e is a little bigger than the SE 2 — good, it’ll still slide nicely in a back pocket — and is the lowest priced handset in the 16 range. The camera remains similar to the SE’s, meaning I’ll still be unable to take high-definition video photos of the full Moon.

Not that’ll be switching over just yet, even though the 16e becomes available in Australia today, I think my old SE still a little bit of life left in it. From what I can tell, reviews of the 16e have been somewhat mixed, with some writers saying something like, “it’s good, but…”, while others are unsure why Apple even released the model. John Gruber meanwhile, describes the 16e as an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone.

That pretty summed up what I liked about the old SE range.

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Vale Gene Hackman, dead at age 95

28 February 2025

The American actor, who retired in 2004, and whose many credits included Young Frankenstein, The French Connection, Unforgiven, and my personal favourite, The Birdcage, died yesterday in Santa Fe, in the U.S. state of New Mexico.

Hackman was found at his home along with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and their pet dog. While the cause of death presently remains unknown, police said there was immediate indication of foul play.

Update: police now believe the circumstances of the deaths of Hackman and his wife, are suspicious and have stepped up their investigation.

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If IndieWeb took off, became mainstream, would it still be IndieWeb?

26 February 2025

The IndieWeb doesn’t need to “take off”, by Susam Pal.

It’d be great to imagine all those people who cling to social media — as if it were a life-support system — suddenly coming to their senses and launching personal websites. Owning their own content, on websites belonging only to them. And in the process, hastening the demise of the social networks, who would abruptly find themselves with no members, after the personal website exodus.

But as I wrote last May, such a groundswell would not be great at all. Because once the action returned to the website space, we’d see a repeat of what happened prior to the arrival of social media: websites monetised to within an inch of their life. And opportunists galore, looking for a channel to pedal their wares, and rocket the noise-to-signal ratio off the gauge.

Yet, such a cataclysm might have occurred in 2021, when now US President Donald Trump launched a blog, after being banned by Twitter and Facebook (how unimaginable such happenings would be today…). With his own blog though, Trump effectively became part of IndieWeb. But someone with Trump’s profile, going “IndieWeb”, could easily have opened the floodgates.

And it wouldn’t have just been the likes of Trump. Politicians of all stripes might have followed suit, if they decided IndieWeb was the place to be. When people talk of IndieWeb “taking off”, I somehow doubt that’s what they have in mind. But Trump’s sojourn into “IndieWeb” blogging was short lived. A few months later he launched his own social network, Truth Social.

On the other hand though, even if IndieWeb had, if you like, gone mainstream, IndieWeb would still be IndieWeb. It would have continued to thrive, right where it is now, in its own corner of the web. In a strange sort of way then, IndieWeb is all the richer for the existence of social media. Die-hard adherents can keep their algorithm chocked socials feeds, and declining engagement, leaving IndieWeb to flourish, and be what it is.

Sending people to Mars will be challenging, for all the wrong reasons

25 February 2025

Maciej Cegłowski’s in depth (deep dive) articles on an array of topics are always worthy reading, even if I’m not always able to consume his pieces in one go. In his latest long form column, he takes on the prospect of sending an Apollo-like flight to Mars, complete with a human crew on board. But going to Mars is not even remotely like a jaunt to the Moon:

A trip to Mars will be commital in a way that has no precedent in human space flight. The moon landings were designed so that any moment the crew could hit the red button and return expeditiously to Earth; engineers spent the brief windows of time when an abort was infeasible chain smoking and chewing on their slide rules.

But within a few days of launch, a Mars-bound crew will have committed to spending years in space with no hope of resupply or rescue. If something goes wrong, the only alternative to completing the mission will be to divert into a long, looping orbit that gets the spacecraft home about two years after departure.

Sending people to Mars is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it will be difficult, incredibly difficult.

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