On this episode

of the pod, I apologise for being rather tardy over the last couple of weeks, before talking about the link between bones, computers, and building materials. Researchers at MIT have discovered the previously unknown structural mechanism behind the strength of our bones using a pretty clever technique!  The articles were first accessed via the MIT Newsroom. You can find links to some of the news articles–including the original journal article that happens to be open –plus a transcript of the episode after the jump.

Links

The original Nature Communications paper, including some rather pretty diagrams and a more in-depth look at the molecular mechanics methods used to simulate the bone structure for those interested.

The MinDat page of apatite.

An article talking about the dismantling of Roadrunner, the Los Alamos supercomputer I mention in the podcast.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the toothsoup science pod. I must apologise for being MIA for the last couple of weeks; I had some family events come up at the last minute that meant I wasn’t able to sit down and bang out an episode. But nevermind that, I’ve been scouring the headlines for some new science for this week, and I’ve managed to find a story that answers a question I didn’t even think we were still asking: how do our bones work?

This research comes from a paper published in Nature Communications by a team led by engineer and materials scientist Markus Buehler, out of MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And to be a bit more specific, they wanted to know precisely how bones are so strong and, unless you’re a pro-skateboarder, resilient to breakage. To understand why this is a puzzling question, we have to have a look at what it is that makes up the bones in your body.

Bone is made up mostly of collagen, which is a protein known for its wobbly nature, and an inorganic mineral called ‘hydroxyapatite’, which is basically a type of low-crystallinity rock. You might also know hydroxyapatite from it being what makes up the outer layer on our teeth. Incidentally, this is another one of those things that I’ve always known but never really considered in its entirety until I started doing research for the podcast: we have rocks embedded in ourselves that allow us to chew things and also stop us from flopping around like jellyfish.

Anyway, hydroxyapatite is also known as ‘bone mineral’ and that’s what I’ll call it from now on since it’s easier to pronounce. The way collagen and bone mineral work together in bone is that the collagen provides a framework for the bone mineral to grow in, kind of like scaffolding on a building. Another cool thing is that the bone mineral can be deposited in different ways that allow it to form different kinds of bone. For example, cortical bone is the very hard, smooth, white structure that we commonly associate with bone. Cortical bone makes up around 80% of the bone mass in our bodies, and contributes strength to our skeleton. But there’s also cancellous bone that forms inside the cortical bone and is usually referred to as ‘spongy’, as it’s much less dense than cortical bone. It acts as kind of like a shock absorber, as well as providing the space where blood cells are created.

So that’s the basics of the materials that bone is made out of. But the gap in our knowledge that the researchers from MIT wanted to address is this: how do two vastly different materials such as collagen, soft and bendy, and bone mineral, hard and strong, come together to produce a material that takes the best of both worlds? In other words, what exactly are the builders doing inside that scaffolding that makes the house so strong?

This question led them to take a method of research that is becoming increasingly common in materials science, and apply it to biomaterials: using computer modelling hand-in-hand with laboratory experiments. The way this works is that scientists will use experiments that take place in the physical world, using euqipment, to get data that can be fed into computer models. The more data the scientists can get from the physical experiments, the more accurate the computer model will be. It’s like playing a numbers game where you guess a number, and I tell you if it’s higher or lower that the one I’m thinking of. The more times you guess, the more data I am giving you to allow you to eventually guess the number correctly. It’s the same way with the researchers in this study using computer models to build a picture of the bone structure: the more tests they were able to do with medical imaging devices, the more data they had to drive their model towards giving them the answer.

But why use computer models at all? If we can probe the bone physically, what’s the point in trying to build up a model for it? The benefit of computers models is that they’re really good at getting information from places we can’t reach. And as it turns out, trying to figure out precisely how bone fits together is a tough gig. We can image it, but only in tiny slices or areas, and it’s difficult to see how a complex, three-dimensional structure such as bone works through such limited windows. By using a computer model, the scientists were able to spend a lot more time probing the molecular interactions and figuring out the answers to their questions with atomic precision.

While we’re on the topic, I should note that the kinds of calculations that the researchers performed with their computer models would have been impossible just a few short years ago. Computer processing capability has continued to increase at a steady rate over the years, and quite often it’s impossible to keep up with the pace. Consider the world’s first petaflop supercomputer that was built five years ago at Los Alamos labs. A petaflop supercomputer has the capability of running over a million billion calculations per second, and it’s construction was a huge boost for the computational laboratory. But as of a month ago, it was announced to be obselete and due to be deconstructed. It’s crazy how far we’ve come in the area of computers: from punch cards to petaflops in a handful of decades.

So what was the answer to the question of how bone gets its unique properties? As it turns out, it’s the specific way in which the bone mineral is deposited in the collagen that enables the two materials to provide more structural integrity than the sum of their parts. Essentially you have tiny, plate-like crystals of bone mineral embedded in the collagen. When force is applied to the bone, it travels through the collagen and into the stiffness of the bone mineral. The two materials interact with each other through electrostatics, which means that they can slip and slide over each other without breaking their bonds. It’s a crazy ingenious system to first reduce and then absorb stress and strain forces that are acting on the bone.

In the future the researchers are hoping that this new model of bone will enable researchers to look into problems and diseases that affect bone fragility without needing to perform painful probes. They can also have a look and see if genetic alterations of the size and shape of the bone mineral in the collagen mesh might provide even stronger bones. Anyway, that’s it for this week, I’ll hopefully be back to a more regular schedule from this week onward. As per usual you can find links to things I’ve looked at while researching the research, as well as the transcript and links to past episodes at the blog. Thanks for listening, until next time.

On this week’s

episode of the Tooth Soup Science Pod, the topic is animals and some fascinating evolutionary traits. First up we have cliff swallows whose adaptation to urban environments has seemingly accelerated their evolution, thanks to an unlikely helping hand: roadkill! Following that, the dead eye archer fish takes a trip to the optometrist to see precisely how good its eyesight is. The articles were first accessed via Eurekalert. You can find links to some of the articles, a transcript, as well as a video of the archer fish in action after the jump.

Video:

Video credit: Vailati A, Zinnato L, and Cerbino R. from Wikimedia Commons.

Links:

An interview with Charles Brown on NPR’s Science Friday.

The Bristol University press release regarding the archer fish research.

An excellent essay from National Geographic about the taming of wild animals, including the fox study mentioned in the podcast.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome once again to the toothsoup science pod. Today I’m going to be talking about two different bits of animal science that have caught my eye over the past week. We’ll be asking the question: what happens when roadkill gives evolution a helping hand? Also, how good is the eyesight of the world’s most accurate sniper fish?

I do apologise for this podcast taking a bit longer than usual; I mentioned on Twitter that I was working on explaining some really cool science surrounding metamaterials. Unfortunately the explanation was getting really, really long so I’ll hopefully be giving them a full episode in the future. But for now, awesome animals.

Shorter winged swallows:

Okay, so in the USA, there are birds known as cliff swallows; they’re called that for a very good reason, as they tend to build their nests—plastering them using mud and sticks—on the sides of cliffs.

Or at least, they used to. Nowadays, cliff swallows of all different species have traded the natural geological cliffs, for more artificial ones, such as the eaves of buildings and, more importantly to this story, the underside of highway overpasses. It’s a bit of a trade-off, where the birds avoid dangerous squalls and storms that often come with cliff environments, but rather than storms on a highway, they get SUVs. Which are somewhat more directly deadly.

So two researchers, husband and wife team Charles and Mary Brown, both ornithologists at the University of tulsa and the University of Nebraska, respectively, have been keeping an eye on these birds and their new, urban digs for quite a while. Really quite a while. The two  have visited the colonies every year for 29 years, collecting and noting the numbers of birds killed solely by cars. What they initially found is that the numbers of birds being whammed by windshields have declined every year—in fact, there were only four last year.

Now that’s interesting, but even more interesting was that, when analysing the birds, the scientists found that the birds that die have longer wings by a few millimeters than the average of the rest of the colony.

Shorter wings have been shown to be helpful to birds in increasing their maneuverabiliy in the air. And in terms of aerodynamics of a small bird, a few millimetres is a lot. This suggests that the birds have undergone a kind of accelerated evolution; natural selection having weeded out the birds that don’t quite have the turning or stopping power to avoid getting taken out by a fast-moving car or truck.

Of course, while the stats are there for the wingspans, there might be other explanations for the reduced kills. The birds may just have learned to alter their behaviour, either selectively by killing off the daredevils of the group, or by the colony just realising that if you divebomb a windscreen you’re gunna have a bad time.

Still, these kinds ofrelationships between behaviour and physical attributes have been observed before. There was a famous study—known as the fox-farm study—by brothers Dimitry and Nikolay Belyaev performed during Soviet-era Russia. The study focused on breeding together the calmest foxes for domestication. After only a few generations, domesticated foxes were produced, and each of them showed physical tendencies towards floppy ears and white spots on their coats.

To put this into context, it’d be like figuring out that people with smaller ears are more prone to murder. Or those with bigger hands are easily amused.

However, it’s important to remember that correlation is not causation. The current understanding of the relationship between physical attributes and an animals’ behaviour is that, down at the genetic  level, there are genes that influence behaviour by altering the levels of neurochemicals in the brain that produce these behaviours. And those genes may be tied in some way to the expression of certain physical attributes.

So if animals are killed selectively based on behaviours that these neurochemicals produce, then those genes will be rooted out. In the case of the swallows, we could suggest that the genes that give the birds longer wingspans are somehow related to the adrenalin rush required to go divebombing in front of a car grill. So when one of those birds gets hit, you end up with the genes for daredevilry and longer wingspan being removed from the gene pool.

It’s impossible to really say what physical traits interact with what neurochemical traits without pinning down the genome of the birds and figuring out which genes are interconnected. And that’s a really tough thing to pull off.And of course, there’s the whole nature versus nurture debate that comes in, especially with regards to human traits. Still, the fact that these behaviours can be so quickly bred out in animals is pretty mindblowing. Big props to the Browns for possessing the dedication required to make this discovery.

Archer fish:

So that’s the first of our animal research results out of the way, so now we move on from the sky and dive into the sea. The archer fish, a species of fish which I had never even heard of before, let alone seen research about, had a visit to the optician recently at Bristol University.

Scientists there and at the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia, led by Dr Shelby Temple, were trying to answer the question of how good the eyesight of the archer fish actually is.

Why the archer fish in particular? Well, as you might have guessed from its name, the archerfish has a pretty excellent way of foraging for the insects that it eats. It forms a channel in its mouth and then compresses its gills to spit water in a powerful jet, nailing any unfortunate insect that might be hovering over the water so that it lands on the surface and the archer fish can gobble it up. It’s kind of like nature’s equivalent of the Hydralisk from Starcraft.

Anyway, apparently the archer fish is really freaking good at this, usually splashing its prey down on the first shot, and from up to 3 metres away. Not bad for a spitshoot.

To test the fish’s eyesight, the scientists trained the fish to shoot at one of two letters: an ‘O’ or a ‘C’. If they shot the ‘C’, they got a reward of food. Why ‘O’ and ‘C’? Because the only difference between the letters in the fonts the scientists were using was the gap in the circle. So by reducing that gap incrementally until the results showed the fish were just kind of guessing randomly, like an older person at a driver’s license renewal, they were able to determine the limit of the archer fish’s ability to resolve images.

Of course, while the test is pretty cool, it’s always nice to have some physical evidence alongside behavioural. So they disected a bunch of fish and measured the density of photoreceptors in their retinas. It’s not mentioned in the paper, but I dare say the researchers may have also tested the effect of smoking the archer fish and adding lemon on their deliciousness levels.

So from all the tests they’ve done, they determined that the archer fish can resolve objects way better in the part of their eyes that look up and forward, but less so in the part of their eyes that looks down. Which makes sense given that they need that accuracy to see up and spit down the insects.

Their visual accuity in this upper region was approximately 3.5 cycles per degree, compared to other freshwater fish with less than 1 or 2 cycles per degree. It’s not going to win any awards for best vision ever; we humans have around 60 cycles per degree, while birds of prey have around 140 cycles per degree. But still, it’s definitely enough to bring down supper. You can see a couple of really awesome videos of the fish spitting up and hitting targets to receive their food on the blog page.

As an addendum, the wiki page actually had a nice little tidbit about the name ‘archerfish’: apparently the largest ship ever destroyed by a submarine was sunk by an American submarine called the USS Archerfish. So even their namesakes are pretty awesome.

Hello. Hi there,

it’s actually me this time, not just an update to do with science or pods or even casts. It’s been a while since I updated with something other than the droning buzz of my weekly forays into science communication, so with the Easter weekend currently happening* I figured I had the time to sit back and reflect on the past couple months.

So what’s been happening? Not a tremendous amount, really. I’ve fallen into a nice rhythm of work and football and not much else in between. The advantage of the former being that I’ve finished up paying out all my debts in a little over four paychecks. It’s a comforting thing, to know that there’s a bundle of money that will be hitting your bank account at regular intervals. And thankfully in my case, the workplace that’s providing the money is a supportive and happy one. Small business for life, yo.

The football has also been a major positive influence. It had been almost eight years since last lacing up the boots; I quit my last club, Kalamunda United, when I started university as it was taking up too much of my time. But getting out on the field and getting the feel of the ball, getting my touch back, smashing my toenails and lacerating my heels with blisters…well, perhaps not those last bits, but the exercise and commitment is great. Plus it’s allowed me to lose the ten-or-so kilograms that I put on while being unemployed. Well, football and also the twelve kilometres I ride every day to get to and from work. And not eating a shit-tonne of snacks during the day while I browse SEEK and feel awful about my life. Yeah, it’s nice to feel healthy.

As for writing and such; I’m still looking to find that balance that will allow me to maybe get up earleir and write, or find a nice comfortable place in the evening and get some words out. I’ve been having a bunch of ideas though, carefully and immediately archived in self-sent emails. I think it’s about time I started using my laptop a bit more, rather than trying to write on my main desktop. It helps to keep me from getting distracted by the shinies that it can do.

Oh, and I shaved my head to raise funds for cancer research. I’ll leave you with a pic of the gang after the shave:

—

*They pay me for not being at work. This fact is still blowing my mind.

On this week’s

episode of the TSSP, we’re talking about renewable energies. But this isn’t your typical gee-whiz talk about the technologies that enable renewable energy! Nope, in this episode we’re discussing the weakness of renewable energy–it’s inability to be produced on-demand–and the ways in which we can store this energy for later use. The article was first accessed on Eurekalert. As always, links and the transcript follow the jump.

Links:

Proof that a buttload is a unit of measurement we can all get behind.

An excellent study by the Australian Clean Energy Council that goes into the details of Australia’s energy storage options.

An article on pumped storage hydro facilities with some good diagrams.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tooth Soup Science Pod, my name is Phill English and if this is your first time tuning in, this show is about exploring and explaining new science research that is published in the week between each episode. There’s no limit to the kinds of science covered here, as long as it is recent and I think it’s neat!

The research I’ll be talking about today is to do with renewable energy, and the challenges it presents with regards to the storage of electricity. I’m actually considering renaming this podcast to ‘stupid things I believed until I looked them up on Wikipedia’ because while I was researching this story, I realised how little I knew about how electricity gets delivered to our homes. Contrary to my deeply-held belief that was probably implanted in primary school and never budged, there are not a load of batteries that store electricity from power plants to be used later. I know this might be embarassingly obvious to pretty much everybody ever, but I didn’t realise that nearly 100% of the electricity in Australia is transported directly from the power station, through the web of power lines and grids, to homes. I always thought there was maybe some capacitors somewhere that could store the electricity for peak times. As it turns out, nope! Feel free to laugh at me in the comments section for that one. Anyway, the reason behind this lack of energy storage was the basis for the first bit of research we’ll be talking about today.

Scientists from the Global Climate and Energy Project at Standford University led by lead author Charles Barnhart started looking into question of how electricty from sources that depend on the weather and the time of day—in other words, wind and solar power—can be stored for later use, say, during peak times. See, the major advantage of fossil fuels is that they are already stored as is: more containers of coal can be shoveled into the furnace whenever they are needed. On the other hand, you can’t bottle wind, or tuck some light into a tupperware container. But if we are to make the switch, even partway, to renewable energy sources, we need to learn how to do precisely that. And more importantly, we’re going to need to figure out how expensive that’s going to be. Because as is the way of the world, no matter how good it will be for future generations, if it costs too much, commercial markets won’t be interested.

Thankfully, the researchers at Stanford didn’t mess about with imagining ideal situations; they went straight to the environmental balance book to see which storage technology would be the cheapest to raise the United States’ energy storage from the dismal 1% capacity it currently has. They compared five battery technologies currently being used in today’s markets–lead-acid, lithium-ion, sodium-sulphur, vanadium-redox, and zinc-bromide batteries—and compared them to the pumped hydro facility; the most common energy storage technique used for grid-scale energy storage. Pumped hydro facilities are actually really awesome. Say you own a power plant; you want to keep it running at capacity pretty much all the time, because starting and stopping a power plant costs a lot of money. But there are some times when the demand for your electricity isn’t enough to consume all the electricity you are producing. So rather than let it go to waste, you use that excess power to pump a heap of water from a low reservoir to a high one. And to be clear, we’re not just talking a trickle here, this is thousands of tonnes of water going up elevations typically around three or four-hundred metres. So you have a buttload of water–and, actually I learned just today that a buttload is a legitimate measurement—a butt is used in measuring wine casks and is equal to approximately 480 litres. There you go, so actually you have several thousand buttloads of water stuck haflway up a hill. Whenever you need to provide electricity at more than what your station can produce at capacity, you let gravity do its thing, and the water drives turbines to handle the extra demand at peak times. It’s a simple and very effective technology.

Anyway, so the Stanford guys compared the cost of building and maintaining a hydro plant like the one I just described with the cost of building and maintaining huge racks of batteries that would be able to handle city grid-scale electricity demands. What I found really refreshing in this study was the fact that in their comparisons, the researchers took into account the long-term practicality and feasbility of such an effort, including what it would cost to obtain, transport, and maintain the technology over a 30-year timescale. They worked all that into a number they called the ESOI: the energy stored on investment. What this number represented was how much more energy the system could store over its lifetime than was required to build it. Their calculations showed that the hydro plant had an ESOI of 210: that is, over its lifetime it would store 210 times more energy than it cost to build and maintain it.

So how did the massive battery farms, of electrical batteries, not chickens, sorry, how did the batteries fare? Well, as you might already have guessed, pretty dismally. Turns out that the cost of sourcing rare earths, plus maintaining them over the lifetime of 30 years, gave them an ESOI value of between 2 and 10. So they only stored between twice and ten times as much energy over their entire 30-year lifetimes than it would cost to build them in the first place. Compared to the 210 score of hydro, that’s woeful. The researchers were quick to point out that it is mainly the technology itself that limits the ESOI score: batteries can only be charged and discharged a limited number of times before they lose that ability, as anyone who has bought a rechargeable battery will attest. Standard rechargeable lithium-ion batteries can maintain this cycle of charging and discharging around 6,000 times, but this would need to be increased by an order of magnitude to get it close to the efficiency of hydro energy. But if batteries have been around for a while, why hasn’t the technology been improved to better this already? Well, it turns out that companies that develop battery technologies are mainly focused on improving batteries’ use in mobile devices and portable electronics, and these improvements don’t necessarily result in a better ability to store energy.

So if batteries are poo, why don’t we just use pumped hydro energy storage? Well, it turns out that finding natural geological sites that can be used for the purposes of hydro are relatively uncommon. And having to build something like that from scratch would blow the ESOI value down, probably into the negatives. There is another alternative, in the form of compressed air energy storage, which is pretty much exactly as it sounds. Instead of power plants pumping water when they have excess electricity, they compress air into a massive cavern. Then it’s the same deal as the water when they need a burst of electricity to help out at peak times: let the air run out through a turbine to generate electricity as needed.

I think the best lesson we can learn from this research is that it’s important to consider the practicalities of a technology before you invest in it. If I’d asked people on the street which would be a better electrical storage: a massive grid of batteries, or a dam with a turbine, I wonder how many would have answered in favour of batteries? Creating energy storage solutions that last for longer than one generation is imperative if we are to rely on non on-demand renewable energies such as wind and solar for our electricity needs. And the sooner our governments and electrical companies start thinking with the kind of long-term planning and common sense that the researchers at Stanford have shown, the better.

Anyway, that’s it from me for this week. As per usual you can find links to articles I’ve read while researching the research, as well as a transcript of the show on the blog. And feel free to comment or subscribe at the iTunes page. Until next time.

Photo Credit: Eindhoven University of Technology/Bart van Overbeeke

This week, we

follow up the feasibility of some fuel-filled trees from a previous episode, and explore the wonderful world of plastic electronics. The article discussed today was first found on Eurekalert. If you have found this episode at all interesting, please do me a favour and leave a comment or rating either here or at the iTunes subscription page. I’m enjoying making these, but I’d love to know if they’re interesting to people other than myself. :) As per usual, the transcript and some links follow the jump.

Links:

The original article on Eurekalert.

A more in-depth look at the new study on biofuel land availability.

The food standards website that talks about ‘best before’ and ‘due by’ dates.

The page for the Nobel prize awarded for conductive polymers.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tooth Soup Science Pod. On this week’s epsiode I’ll be revisiting some of the research from a previous episode with some new perspectives, and then discussing some research that might send ‘best before’s out of date.

But first, to the follow-up. In the 3rd episode of the pod, I talked about the simple yet effective technique of tilting willow plants on a diagonal to get them to produce more biofuel. I really love research like that which shows an obvious kind of clear, logical thinking that leads to a result. You may recall though that at the end of the podcast, I was a bit reticent to call it a revolution in biofuel. Let’s do a flashback to hear me be all sceptical:

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, there’s more to think about than just how much energy we can get out of a crop. If biofuel does become a major source of energy in the future, its need will have to be weighed against the same land being used for agriculture.

Well, it seems like a few other scientists have been thinking the same thing. Steffen Fritz and his colleagues from the IIASA, that is, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, have re-analysed the amount of land that might be considered suitable for biofuel crops. As opposed to previous estimates of between 320 to 1411 million hectares being good to go for biofuel, their results have shown that there is as little as 56 to 1035 million hectares. That’s quite a dip in the range. But it’s not only the new numbers that interested me in this story, it’s the way that Fritz and co. managed to get them. They funded and ran a ‘citizen science’ program that had volunteers from all around the world categorizing snapshots from Google Maps as being unsuitable or suitable for biofuel. So if say, there was forest in the snapshot, or the land was obviously being used by humans, the volunteer citizen scientist would click it as being unsuitable and move onto the next image. In this way, they were able to classify roughly 20,000 locations multiple times to ensure reproducability, and therefore adjust the estimates down. Crowdsourcing science is a relatively new tool in the researcher’s utility belt, and it’s great to see it being used to help solve some of our most pressing environmental issues. Anyway, the question still remains as to what the cost/benefit analysis of fuel versus food will end up being, but my bet would be on filling the dinner table winning out as the most important use of our arable land.

Speaking of food, if you’re anything like my girlfriend you will be very familiar with the machine-typed black lettering that adorns nearly every single food package in your pantry. The ubiquitous ‘best before’ date is to her a chronological switch that, once flicked, means that whatever is in the package is irretrievably ‘off’. But she’s certainly not alone in this thinking, every year it’s estimated that million of tonnes of food are thrown away as a result of folks being ultra-conservative with their food and the risk of eating something that has gone rotten. Before I go any further, I’m just going to read out a couple of sentences from the official Australian Food Standards website with regards to the labelling of foods:

You can still eat foods for a while after the best before date as they should be safe but they may have lost some quality. Foods that have a best before date can legally be sold after that date provided the food is fit for human consumption.

Foods that must be eaten before a certain time for health or safety reasons should be marked with a use by date. Foods should not be eaten after the use by date and can’t legally be sold after this date because they may pose a health or safety risk.

So it’s pretty much the case that the ‘use by’ date is like getting to a job interview; you want to be there a bit early to make sure. Whereas the best ‘before’ date is like one of those annoying Occupational Health and Safety meetings once you’ve got said job; you can miss it, but you’re taking a slight risk of future harm.

Whether you’re a suspicious snacker or more lax with your lunch’s due date, it would be useful to know exactly how long food has left before it actually spoils. And that’s where this week’s new research steps in. As with most scientific endeavours, it’s a combined effort by researchers out of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, Universita di Catania in Italy, the Laboratory for Innovation in New Energy Technologies and Nanomaterials at the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission in France, and a private company called STMicroelectronics. The invention itself concerns producing cheaper electronics by making them out of plastic, rather than silicon.

The idea of making plastic electronics isn’t a new one. A nobel prize was even awarded for the discovery and development of a type of material called a ‘conductive polymer’, which is like a plastic that can conduct electricity. The advantage of these conductive polymers is that they are flexible, light-weight, and can be printed using fairly low tech such as an inkjet printer or even screen printing. However, at the moment the printing process is still being optimised, with a number of challenges remaining before a reproducible high quality is achieved. But once these challenges have been met, we’re going to want to have a bunch of electrical circuits already figured out so that we can start printing them en masse, and that’s what the researchers in this study are out to do; create printed circuits out of plastic that can be ready for when the manufacturers have ironed out all their bugs.

The circuit that they’ve managed to figure out how to print in this study is called an ADC: analog to digital converters. What this means is that a completely plastic circuit can now take a signal, say the acidity in food, and convert it into a display that tells folks whether or not the food has spoiled yet. It’s worth mentioning that we could probably do this already with standard silicon circuitry, but it would be far too expensive for manufacturers to take on; around ten cents per item, and that eats into profits. Using the future printing press of plastic electronics, the researchers estimate that it could cost less than a cent to produce a plastic circuit that could tell shoppers what’s fresh and what’s not. Economies of scale often take a front seat in scientific discoveries such as this one, where the future application is at the forefront of why the research is being undertaken. Aside from telling the freshness of food, the researchers say that plastic circuits might also see applications in pharmaceuticals, man-machine interfaces, and ambient intelligent systems in buildings; I’m not entirely sure what that last one is about, but it sounds pretty speccy. As far as a timescale goes, the scientists are estimating around five years before we see real-time best before circuits on our food packaging. And if it helps people to stop throwing out perfectly good food, I’m crossing my fingers that it it won’t be even that long.

Anyway, that’s it for me for this week. Feel free to subscribe at the iTunes page and leave a comment and a rating while you’re there. As usual, there will be links ot articles I’ve read and a transcript of the show on my blog page. Thanks for listening, until next time.

today includes two stories related to the humble mussel. The first has to do with the excellent binding properties of the fibres that mussels use to stick to every conceivable surface (including each other), while the second discusses their continued survival in an ocean environment that continues to warm up; not unlike the chilli mussel soup I found myself craving after researching this one. Both articles were first encountered on Eurekalert. As usual, the transcript follows the jump.

Transcript — ‘Stretching Our Muscles’

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tooth Soup Science Pod. My name is Phill English and today I bring you two stories regarding the plight and potentially life-saving science of mussels. To the latter first, and mussels have long been known for their ability to stick to stuff. If you’re a mussel, your To-Do list consists of two activities: number one is feeding on plankton through your siphon and number two is continuing to stick to whatever wave-washed rock you’re currently humping. Every now and again you might release some sperm if you’re a male mussel or accept some (through the same siphon used for feeding) if you’re a female, but besides that, it’s all about food and fastening.

Now, you may be like me and be labouring under the impression that mussels are pretty much only good for an additive to a nice spaghetti or featuring in a big old bowl of chilli sauce. But thanks to some research from the group of Herbert Waite, a biologist at the University of California, mussels have been implicated in the development of a water-resistant bio-glue.

So why mussels? As previously mentioned, mussels have evolved the ability to stick to surfaces that are often flooded with water. They do this by searching with their ‘foot’—a tongue-like organ they can use to pull themselves along—until they find a crevice, usually on a rock. They can then use their foot to create a vaccuum on the surface of the rock, and pump in ‘byssus’; a liquid soup of proteins that hardens as an adhesive and secures the mussel to the surface. I was also surprised to learn that mussels use this byssus adhesive as a defensive weapon, anchoring predatory sea snails to rocks so that they can’t move and end up starving to death. Turns out mussels are pretty badass! As a sidenote to their badassery, the threads of byssus are also referred to as ‘sea silk’ and can be spun into cloth which is finer than ordinary silk and also apparently both very light and very warm.

Anyway, as it turns out, it’s the proteins in byssus that got the attention of the researchers. They synthesised a form of an amino acid that was found in the byssus proteins and attached it to a thread-like polymer, resulting in a compound that could set rapidly and stick to wet and salty surfaces. If that sounds like it might be useful in surgery, then you’d be right. The researchers have tested the mussel-inspired compound and found that it works rather well when applied to incisions made in arteries, but also when healing holes in fetal membranes. This last has encouraging implications in the pre-natal surgery to treat spina bifida.

Unfortunately, this technology may be in hot water before it has a chance to be developed properly. Another mussel-related story popped up while I was researching for the previous one that has dire consequences for mussel survival in a warming climate. Emily Carrington, a biologist at the University of Washington, has shown that in warmer water, the byssus that attaches mussels so securely to rocks becomes a lot weaker. In fact, a rise of just 7 degrees Celcius can cause threads formed to be 60% weaker. Now, seven degrees is quite a rise, and I’m not sure if it’s a linear relationship between temperature and weakness, but if so even a few degree rise as is expected due to climate change could mean a lot more disengaged mussels floating around the ocean. Mussels have been described as a keystone of the habitat they inhabit, and so many other species could be threatened by their detachment. For the moment, biologists are talking to commercial and preservation parties to try and help them to breed resistent traits and reserve locations that are less prone to temperature shifts as future habitats for mussels.

Anyway, that’s it for now, I’ll be back next week with some more new and exciting science research. Until next time.

Today I have

a pretty awesome treat for you all, to take a break from all the science communications podcasts and job news. Over the weekend, I caught up with author Todd Keisling to discuss the recently-released second novel in his Monochrome Trilogy, entitled The Liminal Man. Before listening to the interview, you might want to read my review of the first book in the trilogy, A Life Transparent. ALT hit me, like it hit so many other people, right in the feels; it spoke strongly to my experience of working a shitty retail job and wondering where my creative aspirations had gone.

Now, The Liminal Man takes the journey of Donovan Candle and pushes it one step further, asking the question of what happens after someone has had such a wake-up call as Donovan had in the first book. And what happens when an alternate, twisted world you thought you had locked away comes back with a vengeance? Click the big ol’ play button up the top there to listen in for my review of The Liminal Man, followed by my chat with Todd.

Also! A Life Transparent is 100% FREE right now, and downloadable from Amazon. So why not have a look?

Also also! Todd is giving away a major prize draw for those who are following his blog tour. Just click on the Rafflecopter widget at the bottom of this post to start entering. I believe you can enter multiple times by following Todd on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Best of luck!

Final also! Here’s a couple of links:

You can buy The Liminal Man from Amazon.

Check out Todd’s blog page for more behind-the-scenes stuff, as well as interviews and reviews from around the world.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

On the menu

this week is some research that delves into the way the human mind deals with fear and panic in survival situations. Probably the most interesting thing was learning how there exist folks who don’t have the capacity to interpret things as fearful! As always, links to articles and the transcript follow the jump.

Links:

The link to the original article accessed from the University of Iowa announcement.

How you’re meant to pronounce Urbach-Wiethe disease.

And another study that featured patient ‘SM’ and tested her ability to recognise fear in others.

Transcript — ‘Don’t Panic’

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tooth Soup Science Pod. My name is Phill English and today, well, today I’m going to take you on a terrifying journey into the dark mechanisms of fear and panic. Just kidding, it’s not going to be as bad as all that. But the article that caught my eye this week does concern the primal instincts of fear that are built into each and every one of us. Or almost every one of us, as you’ll soon find out.

Now, before I make the same mistake as last week and fail to give the researchers proper attribution, let’s do the credits. The research comes from doctors located mainly at the University of Iowa, including senior author John Wemmie and first authors Justin Feinstein and Colin Buzza, and Rene Hurlemann from the University of Bonn. The work has been published in Nature Neuroscience, and for those that aren’t aware, Nature is one of the top two most-cited (and, arguably, most prestigious) journals that a researcher can publish in, the other being Science.

Alright, so the breakthrough concerns which parts of the brains control fear. Up until this study, it was generally accepted that the amygdala was the centre of fear in humans. The amygdala are two small group of nuclei, usually described as almond-shaped, although they look more like macadamias to me. Regardless of which nut they are (or fruit, since almonds aren’t true nuts—there’s a fun fact for you); regardless of that, they have long been known to be related to  the control of long-term memory and emotional reactions, in particular the emotion of fear.

But what happens when someone’s amygdala isn’t functioning properly? Well, as it turns out, you get experimented on. A lot. Loss of amygdala function can happen as a result of the rare condition known as Urbach-Wiethe disease, a genetic disorder that includes symptoms such as a hoarse voice, beaded eye papules, legions, and extensive damage to the amygdala. This disease is pretty rare, so quite a few of the papers I had a look at that explored different aspects of familiarity with fear featured the same initialed patients.

People that have the misfortune to be born with this damage were thought to literally not have the capacity to feel terror. One particular patient, known as ‘SM’ in journal articles, had even earned the moniker of the ‘woman with no fear’. So when the researchers of this study sat SM down and told her that they would be subjecting her and two other amygdala-damaged patients to breathing in carbon dioxide, SM and co. didn’t panic. Just as she hadn’t shown fear when exposed to things like snakes and actually being held up at knife point in real life, SM didn’t show fear as she took the gas mask, breathed deeply of a mix of 35% carbon dioxide…and flipped right out. Her heart rate shot up, she tried to rip the mask off, and she cried for help. A similar reaction was experienced by the other patients, marking the first time they had ever experienced this kind of panic. In contrast to this, 12 people with completely intact amygdalas underwent the same procedure, and only three of the twelve exhibited the same signs of panic. And those three were noted to be quite anxious and panicky even before they put the gas mask on.

So why did the ‘woman with no fear’ and her amygdala-deficient compatriots have this reaction, while 9 out of the 12 with an active ‘fear centre’ get along perfectly fine? Well, it has to do with how our brains process stimuli that has been learned as fear-inducing, versus how it reacts to internal cues that something is wrong with the body.

Fear is, at its base level, a survival mechanism that causes us to respond to a perceived threat by essentially compelling us to run away. In order to utilise this survival mechanism, we must first learn, usually as we grow up, what is and isn’t scary. But patients like SM have never learned that things that are supposed to be scary are in fact scary. If you walked up to an alien and threw a spider at them or showed them a picture of Sara Jessica Parker, they wouldn’t recognise them as things they should avoid. The alien hasn’t had the experience to associate those objects with the emotion of fear. A patient with a damaged amygdala is like those aliens; their capacity to learn what is and isn’t fearful is impaired.

But this research shows that, despite this damage to their capacity to associate fear with external stimuli, they can still get scared and panicky via what the scientists call introceptive threats. Threats such as not being able to breathe—which short-circuit the need for interpretation by the amygdala and instead shoot the body into all-stations panic mode.

Of course, that leaves the question of why the people with intact amygdalas didn’t panic during the carbon dioxide test; whereas you would think that someone with an intact capacity for experiencing fear might do so. The researchers have suggested the reason behind this is that the amygdala not only induces fear, but also controls panic. So it’s kind of like a thermostat of emotions that allows us to recognise dangerous situations but remain calm when panic might overwhelm us and affect our survival chances.

I should take a moment to mention that there is a certain amount of subjectivity to this entire argument. While the physiological responses to the test—the elevated heart rates, clawing at the mask, crying for help, etc—can’t be argued, the naming of the emotion they felt as panic, or fear by the patients is something I’d be interested in discussing with them. How did they know what fear felt like enough to describe it? Was it panic, or just an adrenalin surge? Is it really an emotion if there’s nothing to attach it to externally, or does that make it merely a bodily function? Distinguishing between fear and panic, and making inroads into what fear even is to someone who cannot ordinarily experience it is bordering on the philosophical. And since I’m no philospher, I think I’ll wrap it up there.

But next time you’re watching a scary movie or negotiating the removal of a spider from the lounge room, consider thanking your amygdala: not only for letting you know that there’s a potential threat in front of you, but also potentially for keeping you calm in moments of internal danger.

Thanks for listening, until next week.

This week’s scientific

discovery that grabbed my attention has to do with cities, and how exactly their heat directly affects the local–and distant–environments surrounding them. A mea culpa before you go ahead and listen: I totally forgot to mention who the researchers were in this podcast! To be totally clear, the paper that this research was presented in was co-authored by Aixue Hu and Guang Zhang, and involved the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California in San Diego, Florida State University, and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research. I first accessed the article on Eurekalert.

Links:

A story on how switching to white roofs might reduce urban heat island symptoms.

An interesting document experimenting and showing the difference colour makes to cooling.

The case for sprawling versus compact cities and their effect on heat.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tooth Soup Science Pod. My name is Phill English and today I’m going to be taking you away from the calming, breezy fronds of the willows from last episode and into the urban chaos of cities.

If there’s one thing we all associate with cities it is their bustle: some cities have more, some cities have less, but the entire point of a city is to be a hub of activity. They are where commerce is conducted, government held, food eaten, and nightlife enjoyed. There are cities that never sleep, cities of lights, sin cities, and cities of motors. Put simply, cities are where a whole bunch of people end up living their lives in or near.

But it’s that stereotype of the busy city that has sent researchers from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (the NCAR) hurtling down the freeway towards understanding exactly what effect all this busyness, and business, has on the environment. Because while each city has a different vibe, all cities share a common property that has piqued the interest of climate scientists. This property is the amount of heat they generate, and what effect this has on the local environment.

Before we dive into the results of the study, I just want to quickly outline some things we already know about cities and their climates. We already know that cities tend to have a greater average of hot days compared to the rural areas surrounding them. This is usually put down to the fact that urban materials such as concrete and asphalt retain heat a lot more effectively than natural greenery; an effect that earns metropolitan areas the somewhat-tropical-sounding ‘urban heat island’ tag. This is the same effect that dictates that cities sprawl tend towards hotter days than cities that are more compact, since there is less vegetation in a larger area, and more of those materials that grab onto heat and keep the environment warmer.

So we kind of know already that cities contribute to a significant increase in the heat of the areas they occupy. But what is new and surprising in the study by the NCAR is it shows that this increase in heat can affect locations over 1,500 kilometres away. So how does it work?

To start with, picture a standard city, our ‘urban heat island’. A huge amount of what scientists call ‘waste heat’ is generated within cities by mechanical means such as cars, heating and air-conditioning units, and industrial production. And you’ll recall that this heat is then retained by urban materials, like concrete. Now this is where it gets interesting, and it’s important to remind you that this heat isn’t the same as that produced by greenhouse gases and aerosols. This is merely heat generated from people living and working and consuming energy in the dense urban environment of a city.

Anyway, that waste heat rises up into the atmosphere, and it just so happens that the major population centres and cities in North American and Eurasian continents are located right below some of the main jet streams in the upper atmosphere. So the heat from the city rises up and interferes with the way that the wind and the atmosphere circulates, resulting in changes in temperature far beyond any limits we previously thought a city’s influence may have. You can think of it somewhat like a river that gets diverted by a dam, leading the water to change its course. These columns of hot air rising from a city divert the normal path of the jet streams, leading to changes in temperatures in places that would ordinarily be cooled or heated by those jet streams.

It should be noted that, like a lot of climate science, the estimates that the researchers gave of their being up to a one degree Celsius warming of parts of Asia and North America are based off modelling data. The researchers have stated that they need to do more studies and samples to determine exactly how much heat a city produces. But so far it does seem to be another piece in the puzzle towards explaining why some areas are experiencing warmer temperatures than those predicted solely based on global warming.

Anyway, thanks for listening, as always you can find links to articles that I’ve accessed at the blog, as well as a transcript of the show. I hope you’ll join me next week for another new scientific discovery.

Despite the new

year having just rung in, it’s already blown the last one out of the water. Yesterday marked the end of my first week working at Microanalysis Australia, my employer.

Hear that? MY MOTHERFUCKING EMPLOYER.

I have a job. After a year of visiting SEEK on a daily basis, flinging over one hundred resumes and cover letters out into the aether, and swinging a 1% interview:application ratio, I’m finally employed. The sense of relief took around a day to settle in, but once it did I was kind of overwhelmed. The Microanalysis crew are a really great bunch, equal parts nerds, good scientists, and nice people. I can’t see myself ever having any personal issues with any of them, which is lucky since there’s only nine employees. I have to say, I much prefer the small business vibe to the large business vibe. There’s a sense of responsibility, an inherent compulsion to do things right because you want to, not because you must.

My adventures in podcast-land continue, as you can tell by my blog essentially turning into a playlist over the past month or so. I’ve been aiming for at least one per week, and I’m happy to have hit that target so far. We’ll see if I can keep up the dedication as I adjust to working full-time. I’ve already let a couple of commitments slide as a result of getting back into a routine, but I’m fairly sure I’ll be able to arrest the avalanche before it happens.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all that’s happening at the moment. A heck of a lot of relief, and excitement towards the future and what it will bring. Huzzah!

On this week’s

podcast I take a step away from the science of materials to talk about the wind in the willows! No, not toads, but the genius ways in which horticulturalists are working towards giving us more biofuel bang for our buck. This article was first accessed at Eurekalert. Videos and transcript after the jump.

Videos:

Imperial College London has an interview with one of the authors of the paper.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tooth Soup SciencePod. My name is Phill English and this week, as promised, I’ll be taking you through a new discovery that has nothing to do with materials science. I do have a tendency to be interested in materials science as that’s the area that I completed my PhD in, but if there’s one thing I wanted to achieve by starting this podcast besides spreading the word about exciting science, it’s discovering avenues of science that I haven’t yet strolled down.

So to honour the promise I made in episode two, I’ve been trawling the world of, you guessed it, horticulture. And there was a very interesting article released on the 18^th of January this year by researchers at Imperial College London detailing a smart way to get willow trees to yield more biofuel. But before we get to their ingenious method, I wanted to have a quick look at what a biofuel is.

A biofuel is defined as any type of fuel whose energy comes from ‘biological carbon fixation’. That term, ’biological carbon fixation’ might sound a bit technical but you’d probably be familiar with the main example: photosynthesis by plants to convert carbon dioxide to carbohydrates, such as sugars. Once a plant has converted that carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, we can extract them, ferment them, and distill them into biofuels such as ethanol fuel. This is mainly done using high sugar or high starch crops such as corn or sugarcane, as these are the easist types of carbohydrates to convert.

So biofuels come from living plants, as opposed to fossil fuels which, as per their name, are the result of large quantities of dead organisms (such as plankton) being subjected to high pressures and temperatures over time. Incidentally, doesn’t that just blow your mind? I don’t think I really had it fixed in my mind that the fuel used in our cars is actually the decomposed corpses of billions of tiny animals. Crazy! Anyway, biofuels have become a little bit more viable over recent years; partly because oil prices are rising so steadily, and partly because of the techniques used to make it are getting slowly more efficient. Because the catch of biofuels is that quite a lot of energy is required to grow the crops and turn them into fuel, and keep in mind this includes making the fertilizers and pesticides to keep the crops healthy. That required input of energy means that the process of making biofuel isn’t as energy efficient as, say, the well-oiled machine of a huge corporation that has perfected the art of sucking fossil fuels out of the ground.

However, we are getting better. And it’s mainly due to advances such as that made by Dr Nicholas Brereton and Dr Michael Ray, both from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London. They’ve discovered that willow trees—a crop that has been identified as a particularly well-suited one for biofuel because it’s easy to grow and has a really quick regrowth after harvesting—[willow trees] that are grown at a diagonal yield up to five times as much more biofuel than those allowed to grow vertically. It’s really as simple as that: tip the tree at a forty-five degree angle, and you get better biofuel. So how does it work?

It turns out that willows possess a genetic trait shared by many other plants that allow it to tell when its branches are growing at an angle. When this trait is activated, the plant will work to create an excess of sugar molecules in its stems in order to try and resist gravity or, in some regions, winds that can cause them to grow sideways. This excess sugar can then be extracted in the process of fermentation to create more biofuel per willow tree. The best thing about this, according to Dr Brereton in a video interview, is that it is a completely natural process; it doesn’t hurt the tree.

This genetic predisposition to producing more sugars under environmental conditions could be targetted by horticulturalists looking to breed super crops that produce much more biofuel per unit of input energy.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, there’s more to think about than just how much energy we can get out of a crop. If biofuel does become a major source of energy in the future, its need will have to be weighed against the same land being used for agriculture. Our ability to feed the growing population is generally thought to be coming to a head at an alarming rate, and 2050 is often thrown about as the year we’ll run out of food. So while biofuel is an exciting prospect, there are other methods of renewable energy such as solar and wind that might be more practical for a planet living on an empty stomach. Still, at least research such as this reminds us that we need to work towards a future where we aren’t so dependent on fossil fuels.

A bonus episode

of SciencePod today, because I just couldn’t go past this new non-stick research by researchers from the University of Michigan.  This news was first accessed at the UoM website and if you’re lucky enough to have access you can look at the journal article. As always, questions and any other insights are welcome in the comments! Videos and the episode transcript after the jump.

Videos:

MIT’s LiquiGlide non-stick bottles, ketchup version and mayonnaise version.

The University of Michigan hasn’t uploaded their video to YouTube yet so I can’t embed it, but you can see it here, around halfway down the page.

Transcript — Sticky Science

Hi all, back with a bonus episode of the SciencePod because I saw something really freaking cool on the Internet today. And you guessed it, it’s materials science based, but this is a bonus episode, so it doesn’t count.

Anyway, if you’re a science news nerd, you may remember a pretty popular video from last year showing a new coating on the inside of tomato sauce bottles which showed the sauce slipping out with ease rather than needing to be shaken like a polaroid picture. That technology came from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it’s now in the process of being turned into a commercial product called LiquiGlide. If you haven’t seen the video, I’ve provided a link on the blog, or you can reliably find it if you search on YouTube for ‘LiquiGlide Ketchup Bottle’, or ‘LiquiGlide Mayonaise Bottle’. And that’s [[LiquiGlide]] for LiquiGlide.

Now, most of us are familiar with non-stick coatings like Teflon (which is the commercial name for polytetrafluoroethylene). The way a non-stick coating works is by layering a barrier of molecules that don’t like bonding to anything on the surface of whatever it is you don’t want things to stick to; mostly cookware in the case of Teflon. A suitable analogy is a full nightclub which is so popular that they have to employ a bunch of bouncers all around the building to stop bros from getting in and ‘bonding’. The molecules in the Teflon coating are the same as those bouncers, preventing food from getting up close and personal and sticking to your saucepan.

I should note that Teflon’s dominance of the market has dropped lately due to concerns over the stability of the coating, and whether, with exposure to such high temperatures over long periods of time, it might actually be volatile and poisonous to humans. It just goes to show that safety is an ongoing concern for new technologies, and there’s always a search on for safer alternatives.

But it’s not just cookware that could benefit from non-stick properties. If you’ve ever eaten spaghetti in a white shirt, you might find yourself wishing that your clothes could have a special coating that stops the red sauce stain. Well, with some new research from the University of Michigan, you may just have your wish. Researchers there, led by Professor Anish Tuteja have developed a new mix of molecules that, when applied to fabric, creates what they call a superomniphobic surface. Which is just a fancy term for a coating that ‘repels everything really well’.

The secret to this repulsion is in both the make-up of the coating and the actual structure of it. The molecules are pretty much the same kind as Teflon and you can recall the bouncers; they’re layered there on the surface with their arms folded, not letting anything do any bonding. But the structure of the coating is where the researchers made the real leap. Because the coating bonds to the fabric in such a way as to make up to 99% of the surface air pockets. So when a droplet of liquid (such as a drop of red sauce from that spaghetti you were eating) approaches and impacts on the surface, it has literally nothing to bond to, and so it bounces back up and away. There’s a really great video that I’ve linked to on the blog, so check that out now if you haven’t. To go back to our earlier analogy of the nightclub, this is as if the nightclub owner got a little more smart. And rather than employing a hundred bouncers to cover every square inch of the nightclub perimeter, he’s now only got four of them, one for each corner, holding a huge sheet of tinted glass to cover one of the walls. This time, when a group of bros approaches the club, even if they manage to evade the bouncers, they can’t see into the club. And because they’re completely superficial bros, they have no incentive to try and bond with whomever is in there. They’d rather go home, smash brews, and play Xbox 360 than take the chance of ending up with someone unattractive, so they leave.

Okay, so that might have confused things a bit, so I’ll reiterate. On the surface of the fabric that’s been coated, you have either molecules that don’t bond to anything (our bouncers) or pockets of air (the sheets of tinted glass). When a liquid droplet (our group of bros)  hits the surface of the fabric, it’s encountering either a molecule that won’t bond to anything (which is our group of bros being turned away by the bouncers), or it doesn’t see anything to bond to and will therefore stay together (in our analogy, that’s our group of bros not being able to see through the tinted glass and deciding the fraternity is better company). All this results in the impressive footage of a water droplet bouncing on the surface of a fabric.

Anyway, I hope that illustrates what’s so cool about this discovery and the way the scientists went about it. Again, if you have any comments, feel free to leave them, and make sure to check out the videos through my blog links or by searching on YouTube. They’re amazing. Until next time!

Photo credit: Rice University

The second episode

of the science podcasts, and this time we’re looking at carbon nanotubes and some pretty neat methods that are allowing them to assume their full potential. This article was first accessed at the Kurzweil website. Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions for improvement, and in particular how you think my first baby steps in adding sound went!

Transcript – A Series of Tubes

Hello and welcome to the second episode of the toothsoup sciencepod, and today I am going to be talking about carbon nanotubes. What are they? What’s the point of them? How do we make them? Where do they get used? And what kind of new science are folks doing to make them more commercially feasible? Before I start, I’d like to apologise for the fact that I have chosen two materials science-y kind of topics for my first two podcasts; it’s the area that I’m trained in, so I feel the most comfortable talking within this field. But for next week I have set myself a challenge to get out of the materials world and chat about something completely unknown to me, or at least unknown until I start researching it for the show. So make sure you tune in then to hear me leaping outside of my comfort zone.

Alright, so carbon nanotubes, what are they? Well, this discussion was prompted by some research done by a whole bunch of scientists—I think eighteen of them—from around the world whose work was published this week in the journal Science. For the uninitiated, Science is the crème de la crème of scientific journals, along with Nature it’s kind of like making the New York Bestseller list—you will be read and you’ll be read pretty widely if you publish in them). Carbon nanotubes have been around for a little while, the history reads that they were officially discovered in 1991 although the attribution of the original discoverer is a somewhat contentious issue. It falls somewhere between a group of Russian scientists and a worker at the IBM laboratory. Although, there’s even suggestions that carbon nanotubes were produced in the 1970s by a PhD student named Morinobu Endo. As a sidenote, it’s important to realise that quite often the initial observation of something really interesting in science is not necessarily as important as the realisation of what to do with it and the kinds of applications the discovery might produce.

The form of carbon nanotubes is pretty easy to visualise; just take a sheet of paper and roll it up. Now imagine that the paper is made up entirely of carbon atoms, and that it’s really, really small—the often-used cliché is that the diameter of a carbon nanotube is approximately 10,000 times smaller than that of a human hair. And that’s it! Carbon nanotubes can come in a variety of flavours, but the two that are most referred to are single-walled nanotubes and multi-walled nanotubes. These are pretty much exactly what you’d expect with those names; a nanotube nestled within a nanotube is a multiwall nanotube (so just imagine a sheet of paper rolled up inside your sheet of paper) whereas a nanotube just chilling out by itself is a single-walled nanotube.

What’s so great about these tiny little, fishing-wire-like structures? Well, for a start, when they’re spun into fibres made up of millions of carbon nanotubes, they’re really quite strong. You know how that thin fishing wire can miraculously hold onto a huge marlin as it leaps majestically from the water? Well, multiwall carbon nanotubes that have been spun into a thread only a millimetre across have been shown to be able to hold several thousands of kilograms of load. But that’s not all! These little fibres that could have also been shown to have the potential for electrical conductivity and thermal conductivity. This means that along with their tensile strength, they could potentially find uses in places where there is a lot of heat and the requirement of conductivity, such as high performance electric motors like that found in the Tesla series of cars.

As most of you listening probably know, having a potential application and actually meeting that application are two very different things. There are usually several stumbling blocks in the leap from laboratory to commericalised product. In the case of carbon nanotubes and the fibres that they can be spun into, one of the main hurdles to get over is designing a process that will reliably synthesise high quality, lengthy samples in a way that can be scaled up. ‘Scaling up’ a process means that you can use the same set of steps to produce ten units or ten million units, and those steps won’t change. And this is why the scientists that produced the Science journal article are so excited. Their work has shown that it is possible to use a scale-uppable process, called wet spinning, to produce high quality, thermally and electrically conductive fibres made from carbon nanotubes.

So how did they manage this? Well, if you’ve ever been to a circus or a fair, you may be surprised to hear that the process of wet-spinning is one that you are probably already familiar with. Fairy floss (or cotton candy if you’re not from Australia) is spun out in much the same way in fairy floss machines. In the machines, the (usually pink tinted) sugar that makes up fairy floss is melted in a little bowl that’s covered in tiny holes. The machine then spins the bowl with the melted sugar in it really fast, forcing the sugar out the holes thanks to centrifugal force. As the sugar escapes through the holes, it cools down and resolidifies into the thin filaments of tasty sugar that the stall owner then spools onto a stick to give to you.

This is exactly the same method as that of the researchers, except instead of fairy floss as the end product, we’re getting fibres. And instead of sugar as the feedstock, the researchers used an acidic solution full of carbon nanotubes. Finally, the whole thing is done in an immersion of water to clean the fibres as they come out of the spinner. The result is a reliable method of producing large spools of strong fibres with useful properties spun from carbon nanotubes.

Anyway, that’s it for carbon nanotubes and their fibres. As usual leave any suggestions or questions you might have in the comments. I’m particularly interested in your thoughts on the insertion of music into this week’s podcast, so hints you can give me would be great. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back next week with something completely different.

A quick note

to my regular readers (all three of you): I’m reading the textbook Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and co. and taking notes as I go along. I started for my own benefit, but after I finished the first chapter I figured I’d post my notes and comments over at Reddit’s r/writing community. The folks there were pretty keen for me to continue, but unfortunately the character limit on self posts is only 10,000, so I’ve had to host the notes from the second chapter here.

To be honest it’s kind of better this way because it means I don’t have to dick around with reformatting the posts, I can just copy and paste straight in from Word. Notes start after the jump, and be sure to let me know if there’s anything I can improve. This is not by any means a comprehensive covering of all the topics that Burroway goes through; if you want that, buy the book.

You can buy Writing Fiction at Amazon (Latest edition) or Book Depository (International edition — the one I’m following) if you want to follow along. As far as I can tell, the differences between versions are mainly the short stories included as examples.

CHAPTER 2: Seeing Is Believing – Showing and Telling

INTRO:

• The difficulty of writing literature is that, unlike film and drama (theatre), words are not transmitted directly to a sense. They are passed first to the mind, then translated into images by the reader.

This is an important point, and is reflected in the way that some readers can form an attachment to a character or scene in your story, while others won’t. The imagination of the reader is something that, while we can’t depend on it, we must continually try and encourage by making use of that old maxim, ‘show, don’t tell’. That’s what this chapter is all about.

SIGNIFICANT DETAIL:

• Specific, definite, concrete, particular details are the life of fiction.

Burroway goes on to say that the gist of this statement is that when a writer is telling a story, they are effectively stringing together a series of white lies. And a good liar knows that being very specific is the best way to get away with a lie, and have someone be drawn into the history/reality that you have created.

• A detail is ‘definite’ and ‘concrete when it appeals to the senses.

I, like most amateur writers, have an issue with only appealing to the visual sense. But there are four others that can be used to create a convincing scene. A good exercise is to go through your latest piece of work and tally up how many times you described something using each of the five senses. I did this and came up with almost equal, liberal use of visual and sound details, but almost nothing to appeal to taste, touch, and smell.

• A writer must deal in sense detail, and those sense details must be details “that matter”.

A lot of what a writer wants to say can be told in abstractions: love conquers all, life is unfair to poor people, families can do more harm than good. But writing in abstractions will give more of an essay style. Details that matter are ones that show us the abstractions without naming them. Describing the buzz of a family getting ready for a fancy dinner that turns out to be a burger shop might show the ‘life is unfair to poor people’. A detail can also matter if it contributes to plot, i.e. Chekhov’s gun.

The difference between abstraction and concrete detail is best shown with an example. I’m not going to quote Burroway’s as that would probably be bad with respect to copyright. Instead, here’s one I just came up with.

Jackie was very intelligent and good at design but had a hard time dealing with her latest rejection. Her cat was her favourite source of comfort but she wished that someone would come and take her away.

That’s pretty abstract, and you can see how abstractions give you absolutely nothing to cling to as an image. You might have gotten a picture of a cat in your head out of that whole thing. Plus, we’re bereft of any kind of insight into her situation. What kind of rejection is she dealing with? How intelligent is she, really? Who does she want to take her away? Here’s the scene rewritten without abstractions.

The fingers of Jackie’s left hand tapped in precise bursts over the keyboard, while in her right she guided the mouse through graceful sweeps across the mousepad. The logo was taking shape; another fake rebranding for a fake company to put in her portfolio. In the bottom corner of her computer screen, a little red icon indicated she had unread mail. She already knew this. She’d seen the preview and the familiar, apologetic first line. We’re sorry, but your application has been unsuccessful. The (1) of her inbox had mocked her all morning.

A ginger tail threaded its way around her legs and she picked her cat, Turkleton, up and placed him in her lap, stroking his fine fur. She looked down at him and wondered if she would ever meet someone that could be as comfortable and unintimidated as Turkleton. She wouldn’t even mind if they ended up being a red-head.

You can see the differences. Of course, even this short example can be improved; there’s no appealing to the smell or taste senses. But there’s a lot more to be learned about Jackie in this than the shortcut abstractions.

• Eliminating abstractions will make your work longer. This is what rewrites are for.

Once you get the hang of searching for details that can show your character, it can be addictive to the point of bloating even the most fractional vignette. Revision will allow you to select the details that matter the most, and eliminate the ones that say the same thing multiple times.

• There are concrete details that will add nothing to a story.

Every reader knows exactly which ones these are. Here’s an example:

Jack Robinson, grandson of the great John Robinson, was six-foot-three and of a medium build. His bright green eyes complemented his brunette hair that fell in waves across his fine cheekbones.

Yeah, so? A good tip that I’ve heard elsewhere is that if the details you give are ones you could get from catching a glimpse of them in the street, they’re probably not adding anything to the character. Or, as Burroway puts it, if it sounds like an all-points bulletin, it’s not doing much. Details should imply meaning and give individuality.

• Details about your character should invite judgement.

If you can get your reader to feel strongly about a character, one way or another, you’ve done your job. Don’t hang back because you want to present a character objectively, allow the reader to form their own subjective opinions.

• Abstractions can still be used, you just have to back them up with sensory detail.

The example in Burroway is too good not to use, from Dorothy Allison’s Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know, ‘I smelled chicken gravy and hot grease, the close thick scent of love and understanding.’

WRITING ABOUT EMOTION:

• Writing about emotion is tricky, but the best way to do so is to not mention the emotion.

Burroway suggests that by restricting yourself to the physical and significant details of a situation that is full of emotion, you will evoke that emotion in the reader. The process of method actors is cited as an example of how writers can recall those physical reactions. Another thing to consider is that emotions are rarely pure, there are often conflicting emotions being felt by a character. Saying that someone was ‘grieving but happy’ doesn’t accomplish anything, but explaining the physical reaction and thoughts running through the character’s head as they learn of an abusive family member’s death might.

FILTERING:

• Filter your images through an observer will dilute their impact.

This is one of those pieces of advice that will absolutely blow you away if you, like me, are a person that does this. Filters are a little tricky to explain, so as usual an example is good. Again, I’m making up one so as not to copy Burroway’s work:

Barry sat down on the milk crate and unwrapped his sandwich from its dense cocoon of cling wrap. He noticed that the tomato had leaked its juice into the bread, turning it mushy. He looked back on the construction site and saw the crane he’d been working under turn in a ponderous circle. As he looked, he noticed that it was leaning at an angle it didn’t normally lean at. His sandwich hit the ground with a wet splat as the crane bent neatly in the middle, as if folded by an invisible hand.

The underlined bits are the filters, and you can see how they remove the reader by one step from the direct experiences of Barry. Here’s the same thing without filters:

Barry sat down on the milk crate and unwrapped his sandwich from its dense cocoon of cling wrap. The tomato had leaked its juice into the bread, turning it mushy. On the construction site, the crane he’d been working under turned in a ponderous circle. It was leaning at an angle it didn’t normally lean at. His sandwich hit the ground with a wet splat as the crane bent neatly in the middle, as if folded by an invisible hand.

Not the greatest use of tension in the world, but you can see that by removing the filters we are way more inside Barry’s head. Other filters include remembering, recalling, and thinking. I’m sure a smart person might be able to construct a list of words that could be used as a simple search to find and eliminate filters. Or perhaps even a website to paste text into?

TYPES OF METAPHOR AND SIMILE:

• Good metaphor surprises us with the alikeness of two things we had not considered alike, and convinces us with the truth of the likeness.

Not much more to say to that.

• Simile compares by making use of ‘like’ or ‘as’. A metaphor directly relates to things. The former can be used to take the edge off a particularly extreme comparison.

Pretty basic, but that’s what I’m reading a starter text for. Comparisons need not rest on the physical aspects of the two things being compared (e.g. ‘the book was a brick, stopping the door from opening’) but usually contains some of their essential character (e.g. “the book was a magic spell that rendered him inert”).

• You can enhance metaphor by taking the comparison from a reference related to the object.

For example, a gardener may surprise a character by having a wit as sharp as a pair of hedge shears, when it was expected that they’d be as dumb as a garden gnome (no offense to any gardeners reading this).

• Metaphors can be extended, providing more than one comparison of likeness in the objects.

Again, for example: The gardener’s wit was as sharp as a pair of hedge shears, their sharp blades snipping shut any attempt of conversation I, as the eldest child, might encourage. In his silent appraisal of my clothes and my earnest expression, I could see him oiling the blades.

• A conceit is a metaphor that compares two very radically different things and, as such, may need a lengthy explanation.

Conceist often occurs as a result of a particular character’s voice, i.e. the conceit is explained in the unfolding of a character’s train of thought. It can be used to strengthen the voice by showing the inner workings of their thoughts. Personally I think that conceit is a difficult thing to nail as the length needed is sometimes up to a paragraph or two. So you’d better have a pretty good reason or compelling comparison to include it, otherwise the reader may switch off.

METAPHORIC FAULTS TO AVOID

• Comparison is the basis of the way we look at the world. As a result, readers are highly-tuned to recognising bad metaphor.

Clichés are usually the first target of those pointing out bad metaphor. I simply have to reproduce the paragraph on this that Burroway wrote, because I think it’s brilliant:

Clichés are the last word in bad writing, and it’s a crying shame to see all you bright young things spoiling your deathless prose with phrases as old as the hills. You must keep your nose to the grindstone, because the sweet smell of success only comes to those who march to the beat of a different drummer.

It sucks that we, as new writers, can’t compare beauties to roses, or eyes to oceans, but that’s just the way it is. If you find yourself stuck trying to find a good metaphor, you might insert clichés as placeholders. But just make sure you highlight them so that you can come back and work on a more apt metaphor.

Having said all that, there’s a difference between an author using a cliché and a character using a cliché. A character using a cliché might indicate their lack of imagination, or even just realistic dialogue. We don’t all search for striking metaphors in everyday speech, after all.

• Beware of ranging too widely in search for new and apt metaphors. There’s only so far your reader will follow.

A far-fetched metaphor is a conceit that doesn’t quite get pulled off. Whereas a cliché is apt, but common, a far-fetched metaphor is surpising but doesn’t convince the reader. Here’s my attempt at a far-fetched metaphor.

He kicked the football like a cashier might punch totals on a register. All his might went into that change button, as to show the world he could make the totals add up if only he could score. But the world’s not fair and sometimes your card gets declined; the ping of the ball off the post was like the slamming of the register’s drawer.

Okay so that’s actually really bad. Ignore it, but you maybe get the drift? Originality is the key to producing good metaphor, but sometimes that search for originality can take us way off the beaten track of even the most forgiving reader’s minds. Try and be at least a little mindful of the audience that’s going to have to unravel your meaning.

• Mixed metaphors are those that compare the original with more than one reference.

Again, easier to do it with an example: The sun was like a toaster, spraying flames from its terrible mouth. The sun can be a toaster or a dragon, but not both. If you want to use two different comparisons for the same thing that are not thematically related, separate them by a few sentences, or just cut the lesser one.

• Metaphors that use contemporary references can become obscure over time. Be sure to give them contextual clues to give them at least an extended lifetime.

This is something that is relatively simple to do, and allows writers to give their piece a contemporary feel without possibly losing readers in the future. ‘The gang looked like rejects from a Slipknot concert’ doesn’t provide any clues for the unknowing future reader, but ‘The gang had the sullen slouch, long hair, and uniform black clothing of Slipknot fans’ does. The band may not be culturally relevant in the future, but most readers will pick up the reference to emo/metal fans.

THE ACTIVE VOICE

• The active voice is a very important technique to master in order to ensure your writing is vivid. It occurs ‘when the subject of a sentence performs the action described by the verb of the sentence’.

In other words, it’s the difference between ‘she spilled the vodka’ (active) and ‘the vodka was spilled by her’ (passive). The passive voice can be used to indicate that a character is being acted upon against their will (i.e. I was lifted up out of the cradle by two strong hands) but in general the effect of passive voice is to ‘weaken the prose and distance the reader’.

• Linking verbs are passive in effect, and do the same bad things to prose as passive construction does.

Linking verbs are those verbs that do not express action, but merely link the subject to the verb. Some examples: He was really sad, The pizza seemed cold, The air became stale. Others include: am, is, are, was, were, has been, are being, might have been, seemed, looked, appeared, became, to be, to appear, to experience, to express, to demonstrate, to convey, and to display. A good rule to keep in mind is that if you can substitute the verb with ‘is’, ‘am’, or ‘are’, then it’s a linking verb and the sentence can be rewritten to show more. If it doesn’t make sense with any of them, then it’s an active verb and you can safely keep it.

The side benefit of using active verbs is that they often replace telling with showing. The pizza seemed cold gives us no real image to hold onto. But if a writer works to replace that passive verb ‘was’, then they will more than likely end up with something much more rich, i.e. Fissures ran through the cheese where it had congealed in the refrigerator, revealing thin slices of salami dotted almost decoratively with pearly droplets of fat. See? That’s actually making me regret eating pizza a couple of nights ago.

Burroway makes a quick note at this point to say that most of the time, your instinctual choice of verbs is going to be the right one. Analysis of grammar as you write will probably paralyse you just as quickly as worrying about the next plot point while writing the current one. But it can help when editing to know the familiar sites of passive constructs, and be prepared to rewrite them to give your writing more oomph.

PROSE RHYTHM

• Usually in prose, if the rhythm isn’t obviously wrong, then it’s alright. But there are ways in which sentence length  can accentuate a scene or voice.

The first example that can be given is that short sentences are read a lot faster than long sentences. Therefore they can be used to accentuate an action scene, or to show a character overwhelmed with impressions. Breaking up a sentence with commas can do the same thing. Conversely, a long sentence with fewer commas can be used to accentuate a peaceful or slower scene. Other devices such as lists or repetitions can also be used to good effect when establishing a rhythm that can then be broken significantly, or continue on throughout a story.

Photo Credit: Mark Ediger/University of Wisconsin-Madison

Something different for

the beginning of the week. I’m trying out something new, picking a breaking bit of science that requires a bit of background explanation to understand and, well, explaining it. This first discovery is to do with the production of a more stable form of glass using vapour deposition. The article was first accessed on Eurekalert. Listen to the podcast to learn a bit more about glass, amorphous and crystal structures, and what they might be used for in the future. Transcript with extra links for pretty pictures and such are below (after the jump for RSS peeps).

Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas on how I can improve!

Transcript: “Extraordinary Glass”

THE SUMMARY – Researchers have developed a method for producing, in as little as hours, ultra stable glass that possesses the same properties as that aged for thousands of years.

WHO DID IT? – Sadanand Singh, a doctoral student, and Professor Mark Ediger at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Professor Juan de Pable from the University of Chicago.

WHY IS IT GOOD?– By studying ancient glasses such as amber, scientists have determined that aged glass is actually higher quality and more stable. This is because glass slowly moves towards more stable molecular configurations over time. Please note! This doesn’t correspond to the urban legend that glass is thicker at the bottom of cathedral windows because it’s a really slow-moving liquid. Glass is an amorphous solid—a term which I’ll explain in just a bit—but it’s still a stable solid. In fact, it’s so stable that the estimated relaxation time (that is, how long it would take to flow in the way described by the urban legend) is many times the estimated age of the universe. So you can flick that supposed fact out of your head.

WHAT HAPPENED? – Like more than a few science success stories over the years, this one involved seeing something that had been done thousands of times before in a different light. A technique known as vapour deposition is used by researchers to produce glasses of all kinds of compositions, not just the soda-glass that we see everywhere. But it was only when Ediger noticed that certain temperature conditions produced glasses that showed way more stability than those produced at other temperatures that he thought to investigate the phenomena using computer simulations.

But before we get to that, I’d like to give a little primer in amorphous and crystalline solids.

THE PRIMER – Glass is a type of solid that we call amorphous. This means that, unlike a crystalline solid its atoms have no long range order. When a crystalline solid, or crystal, forms, say from a fluid, it does so according to a set of rules that give it a long-range order. These rules depend on conditions such as the temperature, pressure, and chemistry of the fluid. This is how you get those pretty looking crystals found naturally (aquamarine), in caves (Cave of the Crystals), or grown in laboratories (synthetic bismuth). This long-range order means that if we find an ideal crystal and know its crystal structure, we can say that if atom number one is over here, then atom number two must be there, number three is over that way, and so on in an exact fashion.

Crystals also have a short-range order according to the way that atoms chemically bond to each other. For example, in ordinary salt, we know that each sodium atom will be bonded to four chloride atoms. All this knowing of how atoms click together is part of a pretty neat section of science known as crystallography, and it’s helped a lot of different disciplines by allowing us to analyse crystal structures in a systematic way.

Going back to amorphous solids, when we say a glass has no long-range order, what we mean is that if we know where atom number one is, we have no set of rules that will tell us where atom number two is, nor three or four or any of them. This is down to the way that glasses are formed. In modern glass production, raw materials are melted in a furnace at around 1700 degrees Celsius. Different steps are taken next depending on what the glass is going to be used for, but the basic process is to form the glass into whatever shape you want it to be, and then anneal it—cool it down to a relatively low temperature. And this is where the amorphous structure comes in.

To better imagine this, picture yourself on the mezzanine of some enormous ballroom. You can look down and see the hundreds of guests dancing in pairs to the music, leading each other around the floor. But it turns out their dance is part of a game of Freeze, and when the music suddenly cuts off, they all stop immediately. From your perch, you can see there’s no order in the way they’re arranged around the ballroom floor; thank goodness they weren’t participating in a line dance. This is approximately what happens when glass is annealed, the atoms are frozen in place in no particular long-range order.

But what about short-range order? Glasses do possess a short-range order, as a result of the same chemical bonding also present in crystals. For example, we know a silicon atom will be bonded to four oxygen atoms, but where the nearest silicon atom will be is anyone’s guess. Much like we know that the dancers will be in pairs, but where each pair will be in relation to the next pair is variable.

It’s important to note that this amorphous arrangement of a glass is ‘metastable’ compared to its equivalent crystalline form. That is, while it may be stable enough to form a solid object (like a window), it will relax over time to form a more stable solid. And here, finally, is where we come back to the research in question.

HOW DID THEY DO IT? – The method of vapour deposition at the temperature conditions described by Ediger in the research paper was studied in detail using computer simulations. This allowed the researchers to study the system and determine that the reason why the glass was so much more stable was that the conditions encouraged the atoms in the glass to arrange themselves in a much more tightly packed, stable matter. The researchers likened the process to Tetris, in that the aim is to take the blocks falling down and pack them in the space available so that no gaps exist. In other conditions the blocks are just upturned and dumped into the container, and if they fit nicely it’s pure coincidence.

So while there’s still no long-range order, there’s more atoms being non-ordered in the same space, resulting in a more stable structure. Going back to our ballroom analogy, you can imagine it as more pairs of dancers in the same dance floor space; it’s going to be a much more demure affair, no space for dips or throwing your partner around like superman. Therefore the dancers can’t go anywhere without the enormous faux pas of knocking into another couple, and so the system is much more stable!

WHAT CAN IT BE USED FOR? – This method of making ultra-stable glasses could find future use in making stronger metal and also in ensuring that pharmaceutical drugs don’t crystallise during storage.

Latest review is

just up there, and features not one but three (!) books I read over the Christmas period. Clive Cussler’s Pacific Vortex!, Dean Koontz’s Breathless, and Brett Weeks’ The Way of Shadows. Unfortunately I only rated one out of the three  as worthwhile for others. Listen on to find out which.

Feel free to follow me on twitter, or at Goodreads.

(Stealing these questions somewhat randomly from author Lee Battersby, whom I met very briefly at the Katherine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Awards, and whose 2012 in review entry was linked by monsieur Dan. Thanks Lee!)

1. What did you do in 2012 that you’d never done before?

Shot a gun. That was a pretty cool experience, having grown up on more than a few first-person shooter video games. Holding something in your hands that can so easily kill has given me a whole lot more respect for weapons. The kickback, the punch of it into your palms; it’s a lot different to the idea of guns I had from pop culture.

2. Did you achieve your goals for the year, and will you make more for next year?

Not really, and yes. I suppose I’ll list them here:

Read 30 books – I didn’t hit my target last year, so bad me. I want to review each one in the same style as my previous podreviews as well.

Write 3 short stories OR a novel – I only really got one short story complete and submitted this year. Pretty bad! This year I’d like to increase that count of short stories, or write a novel. I have ideas for both options, so it’s just a matter of whether I think now’s the time to have a crack at my first novel.

Get out more – Louise and I didn’t really get out a whole lot in 2012. Compared to 2011, when we went to a bunch of gigs and explored quite a few restaurants, we’ve done sweet bugger all. Pending more money at my disposal, I’d love to get out and get more cultural.

Plus keeping up exercise.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yeap! My brother and his wife rounded out their family with young Hendrik (to whom I am a Godfather), while my good friends Debbie and Paul brought little Evie into the world. My sister is expecting her second as well, so our clan is growing rather quickly.

It’s interesting to see the changes in dynamic in my family as this happens. My family has never been real buddy-buddy close like you see in the movies, etc. but there’s always been a silent strength there. It’s nice to see it come into the open with the arrival of all these wee bubs.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Unfortunately so. My Tante Cas (Great Aunt, or close enough; she wasn’t really our relative from what I understand, but she was, if you get what I mean) from The Netherlands died this year. Thankfully Louise and I saw her when we visited Europe in 2008, so I have all the amazing memories from then to remember her by.

Her and my surviving Great Aunt, Tante Jope, while not partners, had been living together for ages and actually had a civil union recently in order to ensure that they could include each other in their wills. The picture of them from that day is amazing, one that I really want to get printed and framed. They always supported our family by sending money to Mum after my parents split up, wouldn’t have a bar of stopping. I’ll always be grateful to them.

5. What countries did you visit?

None this year, unfortunately. Next year is provisionally Spain again, although it’s looking less and less likely with each passing day, due to my lack of funds and inadequate time to build up leave if I do get a job.

6. What would you like to have in 2013 that you lacked in 2012?

To get the obvious out of the way: financial security.

7. What dates from 2012 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? 

I honestly can’t think of any that strike me as really memorable, one way or the other. To be honest I’m terrible with dates, so I probably wouldn’t remember any important ones anyway.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Probably getting off my arse and doing some proper exercise. I found a joy in riding my bike to UWA (whether meeting up with Laurie or not) that made me feel like I was achieving something better than just sitting at home fucking about on the computer.

9. What was your biggest failure?

The 100 or so job applications I’ve written and never heard back from.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Thankfully not. Other than the interesting sensation of experiencing the verb ‘slough’ as a result of fifty degree heat and manual labour out in Kalgoorlie, I’ve been pretty lucky.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Probably the best thing would have to be my new computer. I’d had my old one for around five years and it was starting to struggle a bit on a day-to-day basis. I used my tax return from the work I did in Kalgoorlie to fund it (tax returns are ‘me money’), although now that I’m down to my last pennies I can’t help but feel a bit shamed thinking about how much I spent on it. Still, as far as dollars-per-hour of entertainment goes, it’s been good value.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Definitely Louise’s folks. They put us up for almost a year at their place withotu asking all that much of us, all while experiencing their own stresses like moving jobs, and still parenting two teenagers. Can’t thank them enough.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

The actions of governments with regards to banks and the ‘too big to indict’ debacle was pretty fucking dismal. Highlights the gap between the prosecution of those with money and those without in spectacularly sharp relief. Really gets a struggling peon down.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Groceries and rent. PARTY HARD.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Absolutely nothing. I fear that my personality has been permanently dampened by this year. Being in a constant state of stress over money and my career (such as it is) has left me unable to really get excited. There’s always this nagging feeling that if I’m enjoying myself, I’m not suffering enough. ‘Catholic guilt’, I think they call it.

16. What song will always remind you of 2012?

I can’t think of a single song that isn’t a snarky reference to my wallet, so instead I’m going to say that finally seeing Ben Folds Five live in concert was about as happy as I ever got this year.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:  happier or sadder? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer?

Sadder, thinner, poorer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Writing, or creativity in general. Having so much time on my hands means I really ought to be getting on with it and getting my tasks out of the way early so I can create guilt-free in the afternoons. But as with all things this year, my motivation has taken a big dive.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

I dunno. Video games. Masturbating. Not-working. Pick one.

20. How did you spend Christmas?

With my family and Louise’s family, over four stomach-bursting feasting engagements.

21. Who did you meet for the first time?

Oh, a bunch of people. Various luminaries from the Perth writing scene, a swag of new gamer mates in the form of the c.wizards clan, various friends of friends, and my new nephew.

22. Did you fall in love in 2012?

Yes, with Benedict Cumberbatch (thanks Em).

23. What was your favourite TV program?

It’s a close race between Adventure Time and the newish BBC series of Sherlock (thanks again, Em). The former made Louise and I happy when we were sad, and the latter restored my faith in witty television.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

In the immortal words of my high school buddy Kane, “Hate is a very strong word.” I don’t tend to hate on people individually, but generalised ideas of people can incite feelings of loathing. One such group that has done so is the unyielding, obtuse entities known as ‘human resources’ that populate the writhing, black-blooded vitality engines of corporations everywhere. On the individual level, they’re fine; I’m related to a couple and they’ve never slighted me in the least. But as the cause of my continued suffering they’ve earned a place next to kidney beans as primary instigators of bad tastes in my mouth.

25. What was the best book you read?

Hmm. War Dances by Sherman Alexie was really great. More recently The Last City by Nina D’Aleo. I didn’t read so much this year, although I did listen to a huge amount of podcasts with short stories and performances, political discussions and sex tips. So maybe I should list some of them instead.

Here’s a few of my favourites: Radiolab, This American Life, The Moth Podcast, Start The Week, The Guardian Football Weekly, Slate Culture Gabfest, Podmentum, Selected Shorts, Professor Blastoff, JOMAD, Sci Friday, and Savage Lovecast. Google the names or search any of those on the iTunes store and you should be able to find them.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz got a lot of play, as did the new Menomena album, Moms. War on Drugs, Moon Duo, Grimes, etc. etc. Getting back into making music a bit more regularly was fun as well.

27. What was your favourite film of this year?

I really didn’t get to the movies that much this year, but I really, really enjoyed Moonrise Kingdom. It just had the same kind of innocent optimism that Adventure Time has, and it made me happy. Honourable mentions go to Wreck-It Ralph, The Dark Knight Rises, Dredd, and The Avengers.

28. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Twenty-seven, and Louise took me to shoot my very first gun (see Q1), and then on to Rockpool for an amazing dinner. Definitely one of the highlights of my year.

29. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

One more time with feeling: financial security.

30. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2012?

Pretty much this.

31. What kept you sane?

Louise, mainly.

32. What political issue stirred you the most?

See Q13. Also, the political situation here in Australia (especially regarding the mining industry) continues to depress me. Short term vision of leaders just gets me down. History will side with those that support racial, sexual, and religious freedoms. It’s highly irritating that we must wait for the bigots to die out before we can push it through as law.

33. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2012.

Don’t take people at their word; get a mother flippin’ contract signed.

34. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

“I’ve been drinking up all the sweet tea

It was made just for me

I’ve been ramblin’

I’m just driftin’”

Come To The City — War on Drugs.

New review is

up, taking a gamble on a free e-book of Nina D’Aleo’s The Last City. Listen in to my opinion on a most assured mash-up of magic, sci-fi, and thriller genres.

Links:

Buy The Last City in a variety of formats at the Momentum Publishing store page.

Visit D’Aleo’s website, and marvel at the news that she’s a top pick at the Apple iBookstore.

Follow her on Twitter, or like her Facebook page.

Six songs I’ve

put together from around the last year or so. 15 minutes total, suitable for doing the dishes, making grocery lists, or something something science.

Third review is

up, this time talking about the warm short story collection What Came Between by another Australian author, Patrick Cullen. Again, thanks to Mr. Steed for loaning me this one. :)

Links:

Buy What Came Between from Readings.

Read an interview at Readings.

And some thoughts on writing by Cullen at Kill Your Darlings.

The second miniature

podreview, this time talking about Ryan O’Neill’s highly modern collection of short stories, The Weight of a Human Heart. Much thanks to Laurie Steed for loaning me this one.

P.S. I’m really sorry about the bass thumps at 1:21, I’m working on getting a filter so that my breathe doesn’t blow people’s ears out. :/

Links:

Buy The Weight of a Human Heart from Readings

Interviews with O’Neill at Verity La and Spineless Wonders

Follow Ryan on Twitter @_RyanONeill

The first in

an occasional series of miniature podcasts reviewing books and comics I’ve read lately. This one is about Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, the omnibus of which my brother recently gifted me for my birthday.

Links:

Amazon product page.

The PR of The Invisibles at its wiki.

Grant Morrison’s wiki page.

people online than I do in real life. This isn’t uncommon nowadays, although the degree to which anyone ‘knows’ someone online is a matter to be debated at another time. Disregarding that, I’ve connected with people online from all manner of backgrounds and countries from the very first eh-oh!* of my ICQ client. And even before that, roaming the thorny wastelands of internet relay chat (IRC).

It isn’t uncommon to have more e-’friends’ than real ones, but it’s interesting to think about if, like me, your online presence is gradually receding**. Symptoms of this include: not really visiting the old art and hobby community websites I used to contribute to daily; not belonging any active forums; not tweeting so much; barely ever being on chat (to the lament of my friends in far-flung corners of the world); basically only updating my Facebook when I have some new frozen treat to show off. As a result of this decline in activity, I’ve begun wondering what happens to my online relationships once I, well, stop being online.

In wondering this, I’ve tried to recall what happened to those people with which I used to have very close relationships online but whom which drifted away. There are the usual reasons: some throw themselves completely into their career, some marry, some have children. For these people, time is scarce in a way which doesn’t allow for extended periods of boredom which are the catalyst for chat windows and messages everywhere. But there are a few who just disappeared. A good writer friend–let’s call him ‘T’–and near constant online conversation companion for the first two years of my Ph.D. disappeared pretty much overnight. I don’t really know what happened, although in the only two-line email he has sent me since, I discovered he got engaged. And the thing is, for all the talk about privacy and how easy it is to find a person online, he’s impossible to get in contact with. When Googling his full name, I can find two poems of T’s online from a high-school collection. But other than that, nadda. It’s interesting because, while I respect his privacy and won’t ever prod further than the occasional email, I’m quite sad about it. Or perhaps not sad, but disappointed that I won’t be able to share anything further with a person I got along with really well.

I’m not so self-aggrandising that I think that everyone will weep waterfalls of tears upon realising they haven’t spoken to me in a while, but it certainly raises interesting questions about the nature of online interactions, and the psychological implications of losing long-term, sometimes very close, friendships due to a literal inability to connect with someone. Do we eulogise them, or simply accept that, just like real life, sometimes you drift away from people? I guess the main difference being that with real-life flotsam friends, a phone call is able to be made, or a friend of a friend can invite them to your next shindig. But the enforced technological limitation of trying to get in contact with an e-friend can often stonewall even the best of intentions. And I suppose that’s as it should be, else we be solicited by unwanted parties.

I don’t think there are solutions to this, or that the concept of a ‘solution’ is even a valid one: if you want to be hidden online, you should be able to be hidden. I guess for myself though, I’ll always want to keep up at least one point of contact so people can find me. That’d probably be this blog, for as long as I remain unhacked. Hm. And I hope that any and all of you that read this know that I’d be delighted if you would stay in contact, but that I’m also totally cool with it if you don’t comment or email 24/7. And that’s the way it should be.

—

*A sound that I recently heard piping up, bizarrely, from a local grocery store till.

**At roughly the same rate as I’m receding from my real-world social life, but unemployment does that to you.

As I type

this, I am experiencing a strange and relatively new sensation at the end of each of my fingertips. Or rather, I’m experiencing a lack of sensation, a reduction in the pressure I would normally feel on the pads of my fingers. There’s also a funny sound that keeps repeating every time I hit the keys; a much harder tap where before there was only a low thup. The source of these weird new feelings? Nails. An unfamiliar and altogether unexpected crescent of white keratin topping each of my ten fingers in a way that has never before occurred. And quite frankly, I’m a little bit worried by this development.

The reason being that ever since I can remember, I have always chewed the mother-lovin’ crap out of my nails. I recall being told off by teachers for it at school and by my mother at home (the latter still happens). I chewed through movies, bus journeys, books, sports finals. I graduated from the relatively common onychophagia (nail biting) through to the rather more blood-inducing dermatophagia (skin biting) but stopped, blessedly, before reaching the stereotypical crazy person habit of trichotillomania (the urge to pull out hair and, presuming you’re in an episode of CSI, eat it). To see my fingers after too long in the pool or the sea was to look upon an approximate portrait of Beelzebub. Ten bloated limbs pocked with the indents of canines and bleeding from fine cracks in cuticles and nail-beds alike. Really, it was (and is) pretty disgusting.

But I can’t help it! Or at least, I couldn’t. And it’s this sudden growth of what look to be relatively healthy chunks of dead cells that my tendency to overanalyse just can’t let go. Why would I stop chewing now, after a career spanning decades? Why retire from the rending game; the old bite and tear? I’ve tried to look up psychological interpretations of the habit, but it’s all a bit overwhelming. I’m either a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a habitual automaton crafted from one too many childhood incidents. Or both, reckons Yahoo! Answers.

It could also be diet, and this seems a likely culprit. My nails may have inherited some strength from the fact that I’m restricting myself to mostly meat and veg these days, easy on the veg. But that still doesn’t explain the fact that I don’t feel like ripping into them. Or maybe it does? Perhaps I was only ever cleaning up cracked edges, filing down ruined tips so that they might grow more perfectly? Now that would support the OCD accusation. No matter the reason, I can now open pull tabs and scratch places to a depth hitherto unscratched. And for that one, definite advantage, I think I’ll try and keep my nails as long as possible.

(or, “Things I Miss About Not Owning A Car: Singing”)

I sold my

car a couple of months ago, as a means of propping up my bank balance in the absence of regular income. The lack of mobility hasn’t been too much of a problem thanks to Perth’s propensity for gorgeous Summer-like days even in Winter. Although it must be mentioned that on the two days that Louise and I needed it to be sunny–in order to tidy the garden for our upcoming rental inspection–it has absolutely pissed it down. So getting around on my trusty bicycle hasn’t been so bad, despite an incident a few weeks ago where some joker with a water bottle managed to dump enough H₂O on my backpack to successfully corrupt one of my hard-drives. Har-fucking-har.

But there’s one thing that I can’t really do while riding which I used to do basically 100% of the time when I was driving, and that’s sing. I mean, I can do it while riding–and I have–but I’m very aware of the fact that I look and sound like a total nutcase to everyone around me. Thankfully those everybodies are usually whizzing dangerously close past me at roughly double my speed. So there’s not a lot of social pressure from barely-seen commuters behind tinted windows. But it just feels weird. Dangerous, somehow. Certainly not the same safe environment as having windows wound up and an album loaded. Plus, y’know, there’s the danger of having earbuds in while riding*.

I used to sing damn near constantly the entire time I drove; ask Louise, she’ll testify to this. And while the morning shower is still there, offering that lovely reverb muted by steam, it’s barely enough time (what with me being a conscientious water-saver) to bang out a single, let alone the entire back catalogue of an artist like my long-distance trips to family allowed me to do.

Anyway, there’s not much to this post besides lamenting the slow decay of my vocal cords. And trying to get more posts happening that aren’t about my unemployment. I guess if you have any suggestions for kick-ass sing-a-long songs, leave them in the comments? If anyone actually does, I may or may not post my renditions(!) of the best ones.

—

*Which, to my shame, I do now anyway. But I’m listening to podcasts! They have gaps in between words that I can use to listen for death approaching behind me.

last post with an assurance that if anything major changed in my life, I’d be back to update. For those few that do regularly visit here, it is therefore perhaps a little bit worrisome that I haven’t returned sooner than now. But never mind, you might be thinking, the fact that I am now reading these fresh words would logically mean that the aforementioned major event must have occurred. While I admire your logic, dear reader, I am afraid that I must both verify it and deny it at the same time. In other words: has anything changed since my last post? Well, yes and no.

The yes can’t be denied; Louise and I have, in the last two weeks, moved into a new house, ending a year’s worth of living dependently. That mystical quantity, “a year’s supply of ____“, turns out to be half-a-dozen when applied to houses. While I’m grateful, very, very grateful, for the kindnesses that have been extended to us by friends and family alike in asking us to take up residence within their homes, they weren’t our walls to live within or, in my case, stare at. So the advent of having a space to call our own, albeit per annum payable per fortnight, is a revelation; the importance of which can’t be understated.

So that’s the yes: firm, solid. Like a bass drum kick, it strikes and doesn’t stick around. The no is more like a guitar chord, played through a reverb pedal. It is made up of smaller fragments and repeated again and again, day after day. Uncertainty, frustration, pessimism, stress, pressure, and a rapidly diminishing bank account. The plan was to move cities. The plan fell through, and that was fine: P-town isn’t so bad, after all. And there was hope: a job was offered from work I had previously done with Curtin and an industrial partner. It would just take a little while to get going, as contracts had to be written and intellectual property sorted out.

That was three months ago. Since then my savings have dripped slowly out of my accounts, waiting for that regular injection that will/might come when whatever strings are holding proceedings up are either cut or brought into a fine bow. The worst thing is a lack of any starting date. If I knew a starting date it would be, as Louise put it, just like school holidays, in that you know when you need to go back and thus take every advantage of the time you have off. As it stands I am stuck in a house with no car, dreading the thought of having to talk to anybody because I know their first question will be something along the well-intentioned (and well-tensioned) lines of So Have You Heard Back About The Job Yet? The answer to which has already moved from a thorough explanation of IP issues through to a more uncertain hand waving assertion, and threatens to devolve into a series of grunts and pitching whatever objects are handy at the interrogator.

The temptation is to just write off two-thousand and twelve entirely and go…I dunno, work at a monastery or some such. Discussions about picking up temporary work or a casual contract have been entered into by Louise and I, but the aforementioned pessimism (and a severely irritating lack of Internet access) usually puts paid to that very quickly. There’s the feeling, no matter how self-aware I am of the fact that it is very much a Bullshit Privileged White Person Feeling, that events have been a touch unfair on me. That perhaps, after almost a decade of education, a job might not have been too much to ask for. Anyway, like I said, a BPWPF, and one I try not to rest on for any significant period of time, lest I become completely insufferable rather than merely depressing.

I have switched modes of interaction quite significantly, becoming almost exclusively a consumer. Writing has gone out the window, as has music production, and even the small concession I made while playing games of making video reviews (although that is mainly due to the lack of Internet). I have tried to occupy myself by learning a programming language, and the fundamentals of music theory, but neither have really captured my interest in a way that would allow me to throw myself completely in them. I feel that I am living in a vacuum, and that slowly, surely, that vacuum is sucking my will out through my pores. I’ve heard exercise helps a lot. Maybe that will be my next stop. At the very least it will alleviate the boredom-snacks I’ve been indulging in. There has to be a better word for those: something fancy like can’t-apés or bore d’oeuvres?

Alright, enough. Until next time, keep those glasses half-full for me.

By now, I

think I can confidently offer a formula relating the length of time between posts and what’s been happening in my life, viz:

t = w/A

where t = time, A = non-sedentary activity, and w =  days between whimsical interpretation of the world. *

I can just imagine the paper.

“ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RENDERING OF SOCIAL ACTIVITY IN TEXT FORM AND WILLINGNESS TO ENGAGE WITH THE WORLD

Abstract:

Online journals, or ‘blogs’, are by now a staple of the social media landscape. By taking the most common structures of online journal articles (or ‘posts’)–observations on regular life that are able to be related to by all, and personal interpretations of the world at large that can be enjoyed for their unique nature–and plotting their frequency against a subject’s real world experience, we were able to formulate a relationship that provides an approximate measure of the frequency of updates on the subject’s online journal.”

*     *     *

For regular readers, I would like to offer my sincere apologies for my continual shoehorning of science into terrible metaphors. I’m not sure why I’ve been doing it; probably withdrawal symptoms. My name is Phillip and it has been two months since I last analysed some data. As you can see from the above, under the pressure of trying to a) find a job, and b) find a house, I’ve been reduced to the kind of product that a first year student finds, yellowed and cruddy, at the bottom of the beaker after their initial attempt at recrystallisation.

Oh for goodness’ sake.

Dropping sciencey speak completely now. I haven’t yet started the job I hinted at in the last post. It’s turning out to be a long and painful process, made so by the paperwork required to begin a  new project at a university (yes, it’s at a university; no, it’s not hard to guess which one). In the meantime, Lou and I have been hard at work trying to find a new place, spurred on by the fact that next month will make it a year since we moved in to her folks’ place.

A. Year.

Unfortunately for us, the rental market in Perth at the moment for couples is horrendous. To put the desperation of house-hunters in context: yesterday we went to a home open in Tuart Hill. I left to get there half an hour early, for 5:00. Turns out it’s lucky I did, because three streets around the house were completely shut down by the cars bringing people to see this house, and it took me a good fifteen minutes to find a parking spot. There must have been maybe 50 people in the house, all very keen on getting in an application. And it’s not like the house was amazing, it’s just that it wasn’t a complete shithole. The eventual likelihood is that we’ll end up in a pretty crappy apartment paying about $100 more per week than we should be. At the moment I don’t even care, because if we don’t get out quick I risk losing Louise to headsplosion.

Anyway, that’s the deal. If you haven’t seen me online (hi Cian) it’s because I don’t really feel like talking to people about what amounts to (objectively speaking) the biggest period of sustained failure in my life so far. To keep myself occupied in ways that aren’t continuously refreshing realestate.com.au, I’ve been spending time making gameplay videos and reviews of games, which you can check out on my Yootoob channel. I’ll be uploading another tonight, and hopefully keeping a relatively regular weekly routine.

Until the next life-changing event, stay cool all.

—

*I’m aware that unit analysis renders the time units completely fucked. So sue me.

The last few

posts have been concerned with my ongoing search for full-time employment, and today’s will be no different. Thankfully, I can put an end to that particular narrative arc with some news. That news being that Louise and I have decided to stay on in Perth for the time being. I can’t fully disclose what I’ll be doing here yet, for the sole reason that a) no contracts have been signed so I don’t want to jinx it, and b) the exact details are yet to be determined. But the prospects look good and it’s a positive step. Louise, on the other hand, has been inundated with job offers in the 36 hours since making her resume active. Apparently there’s a shortage of draughtspersons in Perth at the moment, which is excellent news for her.

The moment that we decided to stay in Perth was weirdly succinct. I had just sent off six or seven resumes to various shitkicker-equivalent jobs in the various laboratories over East, and I was feeling good about it. It was the first set of applications I’d sent in a little over a week, so I had a bit of energy on my side. Lou and I made a cup of tea, sat down and I told her I’d just sent off all these resumes. And then I think we both had the realisation that all this stress we’d been going through, the depression, all of it was because we were trying to force something that just wasn’t meant to happen in this stage of our lives. That sudden realisation left us both a bit stunned; Lou couldn’t decide whether to laugh hysterically or cry, and I felt like I had just taken an eight-month-long breath and let it out all at once.

And that was that. As clichéd as the phrase is, it really did feel as though an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. You couldn’t wipe the smiles off our faces the rest of the afternoon. Once we’d made that decision, we could make others, and still more until we felt in control of our lives once more. And that feeling of being back at the steering wheel is probably the biggest relief of all.

photo by: State Records NSW

EDIT: So it turns out that arc metaphor I use in the first paragraph there? Should probably be an object orbiting a massive black hole or something. We’re not moving on yet. Instead we’re circling, circling, circling.

When an object

reaches the peak of its thrown arc, it possesses a velocity of zero. Gravity and the force with which it was thrown balance for a splinter of time and it is motionless; it anticipates the pull it will feel when next frame slides into place. It is a kind of weightlessness, one that Louise and I have been experiencing for quite some time now. While there are only two forces acting on the classical object, we have been subjected to many more than that, buffeted from every direction yet remaining, to all intents and purposes, stationary. Unwillingly balanced.

The problem with being stationary for too long is that eventually you want to move about. Stretch the legs and give yourself over to the rush of acceleration that tugs you along to whatsoever final destination it is you were aimed at in the initial push. It seems that we are finally free to do that; a semi-promising job was not gotten, babies have been born, boxes have been packed, scenarios have been simulated to double-precision and the numbers check out*. Lou and I are ready to begin moving again, and that is taking shape in the form of a bombing run to Melbourne: we’ll be taking our resumes and portfolios along with us to drop on the unsuspecting recruitment offices. We’ll also be checking out what kind of rental agencies might let us lease their properties if we were to not have jobs while moving.

This new-found velocity brings with it another balancing act: positive versus negative charge on the surface of our enthusiasm. I’m trying to stay optimistic about our chances at making it all work, despite the history of rejection and frustration that has led to our current situation. But there’s always the lingering feeling that things will go badly. Still, the cliche that it’s better to have tried and failed than never tried at all is a cliche for a reason: truth. To be honest, if it’s failure that’s waiting for us over the next month or so, I can’t wait to fail.

—

*No NaNs here, no siree Bob.

If you’ve ever

played the classic game Connect Four (Go 4 It!), you’ll be qualified to play Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (M&M:CoH). Overqualified, in fact, as the play in M&M:CoH centres around making rows and columns out of only three pieces. It’s a puzzle/RPG hybrid a la Puzzle Quest, but with a bit more of a streamlined feel. Armies line up against each other in a six-by-six grid, and it’s your task to move them around and remove them to form rows/columns of three of the same unit. These units are then activated: if it was a row, they become a wall, if it was a column then the units attack after a number of turns. There are bonuses if you chain up multiple units in one move, or do multiples of the same colour, but overall all you really need to worry about his connecting up more units than your enemy. Accompanying the puzzle aspect is the levelling up of your hero to give them more hit points, better damage with their units, and items that can give them special powers. The storyline involves a mysterious, demonic Lord who is manipulating the different factions of the world to turn against each other; it’s your responsibility to play the part of five young heroes in their quest to discover and destroy whomever it is that’s screwing with the land.

Onto the complaints I had with the game, and I noticed that around about the fourth hero change (~14 hours in), the action does start to become rather repetitive. It’s somewhat inevitable: a straight-up RPG has the benefit of visceral action, complemented by what is ordinarily quite complicated levelling up/character customisation mechanics. Whereas a puzzle game’s mechanics are essentially static from the start. M&M:CoH does do quite well to keep things fresh: each new hero has a unique set of troops, and so gameplay does shift in subtle ways between them. But in the end, there’s only so many different ways you can play around with a core puzzle mechanic without making it unbalanced in the player’s favour (and therefore not fun or challenging any more). Having said that, it does much better than its spiritual predecessor, Puzzle Quest, in that it moves in a much nicer linear style and has a more reliable difficulty curve.

While I’m not in the habit of complaining when a game gets too hard–I did, after all, 100% Super Meat Boy, a feat that has so far been achieved by only 3% of players since it was released in 2010–special mention must be given to M&M:CoH‘s final boss. I typed up the majority of this blog post while waiting for it to summarily destroy me in over thirty attempts*. The challenge and fun of puzzle games rely on providing an environment wherein the player uses their forethought and planning in solving challenges. To my mind, an appropriate ultimate battle would therefore consist of a particularly difficult puzzle situation that requires planning more than the one or two moves ahead that the player can get by with throughout the main game. The final boss gives a big Fuck You to all that, requiring nothing more than dumb luck to get through. A fair analogy would be if you were to win an entire season of football, only to reach the finals and discover that when you kick the ball it bounces of in a random direction and then fucking explodes. It’s completely out of sync with the rest of the game and really soured the experience of a solid game up until that point.

A quick list of things that could be improved:

• Being good at the game has no measurable benefit. By this I mean that if you completely dominate an opponent, you get no special benefit compared to barely scraping over the line with 1 HP. I’d like to have seen extra XP given for quickly finishing a match, so that players could have that risk/reward of trying stylish, but risky, manoeuvres.
• Most of the items that you receive in the game are completely shit, leaving one item as the one that almost everyone is going to pick. Not only that, but most of the time you have to fight extra, pointless battles to get these artifacts. So wasting what can be up to 20 minutes to receive a shitty piece of equipment is really disappointing. Either come up with more even item benefits, or offer up the item for inspection before the battle so the player can make a decision about whether they want to dedicate the time to obtaining it.
• The story, while better than most, is still pretty bland and, as it turns out, kind of sexist at the end. Two out of the three female leads marry and have children after having overcome death (literally, she resurrects herself from the underworld) and defeating the final boss, respectively. Give me a non-Bella ending, please.

Anyway, despite the ending leaving a very poor impression, the game overall is a step in the right direction for the puzzle/RPG genre. A great art style, dialogue that was a cut above the norm, and a relatively deep set of mechanics made for an enjoyable 20 hours or so. Recommended if you’re starved for a puzzle game and enjoy RPG elements. Just don’t come and complaint to me about that boss: I warned you.

—

*At the time of writing, I still haven’t finished the game. I’m about ready to stab a bitch. Just as I was about to hit the publish button, I managed to finish it through dumb luck. The ending ties everything up nicely.

It’s been almost

I was going

to subtitle this post ‘The Problem With Polymaths’, but it sounded rather too much like a Dr. Seuss book title. Not that I think that’s necessarily a bad thing, just perhaps not appropriate for the subject matter at hand. In other words, this is going to be one of my more introspective posts. So if you’re not partial to the casual ingestion of my inner monologue as it runs through the list of first-world problems I’m currently experiencing, feel free to pop off and have a look at what youtube has to offer. Here’s something you may enjoy. Hurr hurr.

A lot of things have been happening lately. Two new lives were brought into this world this week, first by two very good friends of mine, and then by my brother and his wife. The entire concept of babies is, to me, and thankfully to Louise also, quite a stressful concept. Given that I have yet to find out what the shitting hell I’m doing with my life, being responsible for the daily needs of a tiny human is something I find terrifying in the extreme*. And of course, besides the (gratifyingly far off) possibility that I might at some point during my life sire one of these squalling poop-machines, there’s also the reminders that such an event bring to bear. After all, if these people have been able to conceive, gestate, and deliver a genetically original life form, what the hell have I been doing?

These reminders are things such as the fact that it has been over a year** since I handed in my thesis for examination. That it has already been almost six months since I was officially granted the title of ‘Doctor’. That the last thing I had published was way back in December, after which my sum total creative output has been one single, relatively harmless short story. That I’ve gained about ten kilos in the past month and none of it muscle mass. That I’ve applied for over thirty five jobs and heard back from less than five percent of them.

And that’s just the numbers. Accompanying these facts is a feeling that some might call depression and which I call…well, I don’t call it anything really. I try and ignore it, and when that fails I try and find ways in which to distract my brain so that I won’t think about how incredibly helpless I feel. Thankfully we humans have had plenty of practise in determining effective ways to distract ourselves over the years, and they are available readily as sleek packages called things like ‘Television’ and also ‘The Internet’. Forget suicide hotlines, we should just give folks unlimited access to the ‘net and a list of interesting content generators and let the dopamine rush take care of everything.

Wow-wee was that last sentence distasteful. Ahem.

As you might have guessed, a huge portion of the thing-that-others-might-call-depression-but-I-don’t-because-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you is my inability to find a job. I’ve noted before (in a post I can’t be bothered to find right now) that I am almost entirely a cliché of the insecure achiever: the kind of person who needs external validation because he never feels as though anything he does, no matter how great, is worth anything. So a lot of my personal worth is tied up in the feelings of others about me. I’ve never properly investigated this particular stupidity of mine, but if I had to give a quick self-diagnosis I’d guess that it is because I’ve never found something that I find personally rewarding for its own sake. I’ve come close a couple of times, but I always seem to taint it with my need for validation from others***. Having a singular passion for something, or at least the idea of singular passion as it exists in my head, is a state I have yet to achieve. Which isn’t to say I’m not good at things. I’m a good scientist. I’m a good writer. I’m a good communicator. And so on and so forth. But whether due to my history or my preoccupation with the future, I can’t seem to let go of the want for someone to tell me that I’ve done a good job. And when I don’t have a job, someone telling me that I’ve done a good one is literally impossible. And therein lies the rub.

Of course, that’s not even the whole of it. Thing is, there have been opportunities presented to me. The work I did to scout the pass for a partnership between my old university and a commercial client resulted in said client all but offering me a full-time position. So there’s a baby-boomer style commentary track in my head telling me that I should take what I have been given and learn to love it. But then there’s an equal part of me that is really sick and tired of just automatically steering down what seems like a right course of action. I did that when I went for studying nanotechnology in the first place: it was a double degree in physics in chemistry, and since I had no idea what I wanted to do, a catch-all science/maths bachelors seemed like a safe decision. I did it again when I was given the opportunity to undertake a Ph.D.  ”Well, it can’t hurt, and a scholarship is a rare thing,” said I. To use a gaming analogy, it’s like I’ve been mashing start a lot to skip the dialogue and get to the action since I was about 12. Which has left me without very much of a context now that I’m facing a the-real-world-as-boss-battle: it’s as if I’m standing there, staring at my sword and shield and wondering how on Earth I got to where I am while he pounds on me with special attacks that leave me bewildered and confused.

So that’s what I’m up against: unemployment, and a sense (no matter how faint) of failure in almost every activity I engage in. This is not an exaggeration. It’s the reason why I jump between modes of expression so quickly and so often. A recently-made friend offered the observation that I could be considered a polymath due to my experience in both science and creative writing. According to a dictionary I read once and/or Googled, this means that I am either well educated, or excel in a wide variety of subjects. I think I’d like to offer a third definition:

poly·math noun \?pä-l?-?math\ — One who shifts between areas of activity and expression because they are confused, unsure of themselves, anxious, or all of the above.

—

* Thank goodness, then, that my brother and his wife, as well as my two good friends, seem eminently capable of performing the job of raising children.

**One year and twenty-eight days, to be precise.

***The irony of this post has not escaped me, i.e. I can’t even have feelings without the need to post them on the fucking Internet.

This afternoon, after

having soaked up some very unseasonal Winter sun here in Perth by walking Lou’s dog and kicking the football (that’s football, not the other one featuring an ellipsoid and played mostly with fucking hands), I decided to finish up with the 3rd episode of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (which, for convenience’s sake, I’m going to abbreviate as PAA3). It’s interesting that not only are two posts in a row going to be game reviews, but both of them are concerning the third games in a series*.

This is a very witty game. I’m not limiting this statement to the dialogue which is, somewhat inevitably, given it’s written by PA’s resident wordsmith Jerry Holkins, up around the Joss Whedon wavelength of the dialogue spectrum. Unfortunately for me, PAA3 is the first game I’ve played in the series, and that did seem to hurt my enjoyment of the back-and-forth a bit by not quite getting all the dialogue explaining Tycho’s family quest to destroy the universe. Most of what I didn’t follow completely came near the end of the game, so for the most part it wasn’t an issue. And of course, there’s always Wikipedia articles to read if you want to understand the full story. Other than the dialogue, there were also little descriptions of each monster that show up in the battle screen that genuinely made me grin at times.

Unlike a couple of other reviews that I’ve read around the place (the one from RPGFan in particular) I think the guys at Zeboyd have done a great job of offering some innovations to a combat system that can often seem grind-worthy. And while the linearity of the game is incontestable in the sense that the maps are linear, the variety of monster combinations and match-ups means that each battle often plays out very, very differently to an encounter five steps back along the hobo-encrusted alleyway. If I think back to most of my early 16-bit JRPG experiences (which the game’s graphical style is emulating), it was often the case that battles were pretty much a matter of navigating to the hardest-hitting spell in each player’s inventory and casting it over and over again. Random battles began to wear thin after maybe the fiftieth time casting ‘Firaga’.

Not so PAA3. In each (non-random) battle, player characters start with full HP, and have to use that fresh slate to take on enemies whose stats grow by 10% each round. Through this mechanic, the game is able to make the player focus on efficiency. This lends it a puzzler aspect, resulting in each battle being more about trying to maximise each character’s input rather than just straight-up using a standard massive attack. It almost feels as though PAA3 is approaching the puzzle/RPG genre divide from the opposite direction games such as Puzzle Quest. I think it’s a really innovative way of doing things in the RPG genre, and I’d love to see Zeboyd Games (the new developers) refine the idea towards a more openly puzzle game-like nature.

One thing that I think is a little lacking it’s that some skills seem to be relatively unused. The class system means there are often a dozen or more skills that can be used by a character on any one turn, so obviously there are going to be ones that aren’t doing much more than getting in the way. I’d also have loved some kind of indication that a spell had been replaced by a newer version, as quite often I’d look for quite a while before realising that a recent level-up had changed its name. Perhaps just a yellow text colour until the player uses it for the first time?

The only other gripe I had was that revisiting previous locations on the map/town didn’t seem to have any noticeable benefit. While being able to go to them made the world seem at least a little bit more open, ultimately it’s more disappointing when repeated visits do nothing. Even if there were maybe one or two items, or perhaps some more amusing dialogue or easter eggs that could be found in this way, it’d be a nice touch.

All up the game took me around 7 hours to complete, and that was on the 2nd highest difficulty. I can’t remember getting too frustrated with any of the fights, although the penultimate boss took me longer than the final one (which is actually kind of a traditional thing, particularly in SNES RPGs). It’s on sale at $4.99 on Steam and Penny Arcade’s online store, or 400 points on Xbox Live. Recommended if you’re looking for a good little adventure that harks back to the good old days of pixelated RPG glory.

—

*<half life 3 inside joke>OMG MUSTB HALF LIEF 3 SEKRET CODE QUICK EMAIL GABEN.</half life 3 inside joke>

Most of you

who occupy the same hobby space as me would have heard about the recent release of Diablo III: the third game in a wildly successful franchise for game company Blizzard which contributed to their current state of eminence in the gaming world. In fact, even if you aren’t a gamer you’ve probably heard about it, as the lead-up to the release was so widespread in the media that some very interesting marketing campaigns were created by those seeking to ease the suffering of those affected by its launch. Most of these were responding to the ability of the previous iteration, Diablo II and its expansion Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, to steal away nerdy boys everywhere for periods of time not seen since the Civilisation series. And it was expected that Diablo III would be no different. Gamers have waited patiently as Blizzard announced delay after delay, resulting in a development cycle that reportedly goes back to 2001, although the first real announcement came in 2008 at Blizzard’s Worldwide Invitational in Paris. This, I think anyone can agree, is a bloody long time for a game to be in development. And we’ve all seen what can happen when a game takes that long to be released. Unfortunately for Blizzard, it seems that Diablo III has suffered the same fate as the cigar-chewing, misogynistic protagonist of that other game franchise. Except in the case of Blizzard it’s not bad gameplay specifically, but a bad game playing experience that colours my interaction with the game.

If you’ve never played a Diablo game, let me paint a quick picture for you. The game is played from the perspective of a camera maybe 20 or 30 feet above the player character, whom you guide with a mouse around various sprawling areas replete with monsters for you to click on to attack. When these monsters die, they drop loot: standard RPG fare with gold and items being the primary currency. The loot is randomised, as are the area layouts, and the monsters. You work your way through four Acts, each with a different tileset of surroundings and monsters, before confronting the title beasty in an epic battle between good and evil. The addiction to these games comes through the endless quest for better loot. Since loot is randomised, and there are different rarities of items, there’s that pokey-style compulsion to discover what might drop* out the next time you split a cult fanatic’s head open with a broadsword.

To an outside observer, there isn’t much to enjoy about watching someone play a Diablo game. There are monsters on the screen, they get killed, the player picks up some text off the ground, and they move on to the next screen full of baddies. The storyline of the game is not only badly constructed and full of holes, but the actual method of storytelling is disastrously bad, requiring you to stop the flow of the game, return to town, and receive some poorly voice-acted dialogue that essentially just gives you the next cardinal point to go hacking and slashing towards. The CGI sequences of angels and demons going ballistic at each other are pretty to watch, very pretty to watch, but do nothing to draw you into the game. I think the ultimate example of how bad the storytelling in this game is comes from the fact that fully two main characters die, one of whom has been present in the games since the first iteration, and I didn’t feel a damn thing. Not a twinge! Now, I’d love to put that down to the fact that I’m a heartless monster who has no feeling, but unfortunately I’m a pretty big baby when it comes to emotional scenes in movies, books, even podcasts! For my heartstrings to not feel even a murmur when a kindly old gentleman who accompanied me on my fantastical journeys 12 years ago is struck down, means that there’s something seriously wrong with the treatment of the story.

But okay, okay, let’s make a concession towards Blizzard here. They know their target market. They know that the kind of people who religiously play Diablo aren’t even going to listen to the storylines the first time around, so feverishly will they be mashing the Escape key in order to make it to the next Act. So we’ll forgive them a farce of a storyline and focus on the actual gameplay. After all, in the 12 years since D2 came out, they must have managed some major improvements to the game mechanics, right?

Well, sort of and no.

The ‘sort of’ comes from the fact that D3 plays with a lot less of the somewhat arbitrary limitations on player classes that there were previously. This includes the ability to re-spec** your character at any time; identification of rare items and teleportation back to town now only require a single, non-item-dependent click; some monsters use attacks that force you away from just mindlessly mashing your ‘do big damage now’ spell; and…

Oh. That’s about it. This is where the ‘no’ comes into play. The gameplay really does limp over the line that separates sequel from previous. And there are very few actual improvements to the game that was launched over a decade ago. There are ‘Events’ that you can trigger during maps at random times, but all they really ask you to do is kill things in a slightly different way than normal. Most of the skills available to players are almost exactly the same, or play no different, to skills they used in D2. The graphics are updated, but not to any mind blowing extent. In fact, one complaint amongst players has been that there used to be more different character models for when players are using different armour/weapons. And the thing is, when a game so hyped, and so deserving of an innovative sequel is released with such a resounding thud, it begs the question of what the hell they were doing in all that time?

I can answer that question with an immediate, “Not building a server for Australian players, that’s what they were doing.” To sidestep for a moment, the lag issues for Australian players are absolutely horrible. Actually, to sidestep again, I should mention that the game itself, played through on the first difficulty is ridiculously easy. I don’t mean easy as in ‘I’ve played way too many games in my life so I can beat this one maybe a few hours before someone else’ easy. I mean easy as in ‘I could have made it through the entire game using only my left mouse button***’ easy. And the thing is, you have to finish each difficulty in its entirety to unlock each successive one; resulting in the need to complete the whole game four times to be able to say you’ve beaten it at its hardest. Four times! I didn’t even finish Chrono Trigger four times, and it’s the best game ever made. And you’re asking me to drudge my way through the same gameplay in the same environments with the same enemies doing the same attacks four times? It’s ludicrous. Especially when, by all accounts, the hardest difficulty is impossibly hard, requiring the kind of chances of loot pickup that would make even a casino feel a bit guilty (remember this, it’s kind of important later). To sidestep back to that comment about Australian servers, I should note that the only time my character died during my time playing the game was when lag kicked in and I was forced to wait patiently for the few seconds it took for the data to catch up from the Blizzard servers (in North America) to send my computer the bits and bytes that would result in the huge, condescending lettering filling the screen and letting me know I died. And here, finally, we come to the importance of being online.

One of the most decried features of D3 is its requirement that you be connected to the Internet in order to play it. This means that even when I am playing single player (as in by myself, without any intention of letting another player join my game) I am required by Blizzard to be connected to their servers. As a result of this, any action I make is sent whistling down the series of tubes that is the ‘net, arriving at Blizzard’s HQ where their software says ‘Cool, he’s not cheating’, performs the action on the monsters on the screen, then sends it back to me. It’s roughly a 250 millisecond round-trip, and it’s a hell of an unreliable one. But! says Blizzard, it’s for the safety of the players. And I can see their point in this. After all, cheaters kill online games. People who hack in unimaginably powerful items, or go around killing other players without themselves being able to be killed are generally the sort of people you want to keep out of your system. But, and this is a very important but, I cannot see the point in enforcing this kind of digital rights management to the detriment of legitimate players. Literally every click I make is accompanied by a 250ms gap. This may not seem like much, but it is enough to be noticeable and it gets very old, very quick. Especially when that 250ms can vary up to around 10 seconds, or worse, to an extent where Blizzard’s servers drop you and poof! just like that, you’ve lost all the progress on the quest you were taking. It is frustrating to an epic degree to have to repeat a level in a video game due to circumstances outside of your control. And with a game like D3, where it’s not like there’s good dialogue or some clever gameplay elements to help you back through that part that you have to redo, it’s an even greater piss off.

Now here’s where, in a normal essay, I’d have to think really hard about an overarching reason why all of this happened to a game that so many expected to be great. Why is the storyline so needless? Why is the gameplay so similar to the previous games in its comparison to pokeys and the addiction psychology of random chance and reward? Why is the first playthrough difficulty so easy, while the final playthrough difficulty is apparently so frustratingly hard that it requires a dependence on item drops, not skill, to make it through? I would have to think really hard, but finally, Blizzard have made something easy for me. They’ve already provided a plausible reason for all these flaws, and it’s called the Real Money Auction House. The Real Money Auction House (RMAH) is a devilishly clever little bit of design that is plugged straight into the D3 interface. It allows players to buy and sell virtual items they find in the game world for real cash. Of which Blizzard takes a cut.

I don’t want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist (although I fear that’s going to happen regardless) but if I wanted to design a game that a) maximised the uptake of players willing to pay real money get the best items in-game, as well as b) encourage those playing the game to keep playing it over and over again to generate those items to be sold, and c) keep hackers from spawning items and ruining an economy…well, how would I design that game?

I don’t think I could do a better job than what Blizzard have done.

—

*’Drop’ is, perhaps, the wrong word to use here, as they fling upwards in a hilarious, unphysical arc reminiscent of bad guys dying in Spaghetti Western movies, to land on the blood-soaked ground and reveal their rarity/item type. As a side note, I believe it’s this fling millisecond-long pause between killing and receiving the reward that contributes to the sense of anticipation and therefore to the sense of just-one-more kill.

**Re-specialise: Player characters in D3 have a pool of skills that they can use six from at any one time. This means that different players that have the same character class (there are only 5: Barbarian, Wizard, Witch Doctor, Demon Hunter, and Monk)  can have vastly different skill sets selected.

***Actually, there’s no disclaimer here. It’s that fucking easy.

Just a quick

follow-up to my previous post about The Rabbit Hole (being the 30,000 words in 3 days extravaganza thrown by the EWF). Yesterday I went into the library to throw down a session of writing. It’s the second time I’ve been to the library to do this, and the first when I’ve had something to work on that wasn’t editing. Over a period of around three or four hours, I got down 2,798 words. Okay, so it’s not a book in a day, but it’s not bad. Thing is, I don’t think I’d have been able to put aside my internal editor and just write like that if I hadn’t been involved in the Rabbit Hole. So again, big shout outs to Sam and Patrick, and everyone else who was involved in Team Awesome. Seems like the rabbit hole will keep winding its way down.

—

(photograph: Ice mask, C.T. Madigan, between 1911-1914 / photograph by Frank Hurley)

At this point

I’m fairly sure that anyone that occasionally skims this blog will have seen the above typographic video quoting Ira Glass in his talk about creativity. If you haven’t, the magic of the interwebbles means that you are able to click the little play button up there and do so now.

The gist of the quote is that when creatives start out making art, there is a gap between their (great) taste and their (not-so-great) skill in creating art based on that taste. And that leads a lot of them to quit. The reassurance given by Glass is that although we may realise that what we are making isn’t up the standards set by our taste, if we keep working through it, eventually our work will be as good as we want it to be. The question that occurred to me last night–during a dinner of garlic and butter (and the occasional mussel)–was where the digital taste portfolios of the current-day Internet fit into this relationship.

‘Digital taste portfolios’ may not be the most eloquent term for it, but it’s early and I haven’t quite woken up properly yet, so forgive me that one. By that term, I’m referring to the tumblrs, the pinterests, the Facebook groups, and the blogs that collect content from around the world and amalgamate them into a rolling boulder of taste. And the main thing I’m pondering is to what extent these portfolios short-circuit the relationship between taste, work, and creativity on an individual basis.

A while ago I tried to turn this blog into one of those content accumulators; mainly because I admired the ones that I read, such as TYWKIWDBI and the J-Walk blog (now sadly closed). And while it was fun, scouring the Internet archives for bits and pieces of knowledge, it didn’t really take off for me because a) at the time it was actually really hard to find original content that hadn’t been covered a billion times already, and b) it was very time-consuming to find the piece, comment on it, upload/format the images/video, etc. the way I wanted.

These days it’s a lot easier to share your taste. Quite often it’s literally a click or two and presto! The photo you saw, the fashion design you adored, the article about life in Iraq as a popsicle stand salesman you cried while reading are added to a very public display of your taste. And if you’re getting comments, likes, notes, retweets, pageviews, <insert generic, statistically interpretable, positive reinforcement mechanism here>, isn’t that a disincentive to producing original art in ways that display your taste? Why spend hours honing your craft to make it meet the level of your taste when you can make a couple of one millimetre depressions with your index finger and achieve an approximation? Are we losing original creators to a short cut?

I should note I don’t think this is really a question that can be answered confidently. If I’m honest I’m not even really that sure if it’s a valid question. If I were to take a stab at it I’d suspect that creatives that share in this way would almost certainly still be creating original content in addition to their (cringe) digital taste portfolio. I’m sure that any exposure to new and interesting ideas, designs, art is feeding the muse for future projects. And obviously in order to be able to share awesome creative things with each other, there has to be at least someone out there making the awesome creative things to be shared. I’m just a little circumspect of where the logical conclusion to all this sharing and resharing and taste…well, taste boasting is. Do people out exist there that have turned away from the creation of original art to favour the sharing of art they would have loved to have made?

Anyway, enough of this musing, I have a full batch of RSS feeds to read through to see what amazing things people have found lately. HUR HUR.

Just a cross-

post to say that I have announced the winner of the first toothsoup prize over at the competition website. As I mention in the announcement video, judging the competition was way harder than I thought it would be. I’ve learned a lot from the process though, and I’ll be applying those lessons to the next round. For example, quite often it was the case that the smaller word count meant that the stories weren’t able to really show off their full potential. I’ll be fixing that with an extended word count; probably around 3,000 as that’s the standard in the Australian publishing industry.

The other thing I noticed was that being all-inclusive with regards to theme and genre makes it really hard to judge entries against each other when they’re as disparate as those I received. So I will most likely include a theme in the next round, but I’ll be retaining the open nature with regards to genre.

I was also really surprised by the number of people that donated. It ended up being pretty much a 50% split between those who did and didn’t, whereas I expected maybe 25% if I was lucky. I think the donation going towards the final prize is a good idea, so I’ll be keeping that going, as well as covering the shortfall introduced by submittable’s fees. I’m not sure if I’ll amend the terms and conditions to allow me to split the prize money how I feel it’s necessary to do so, but if I do I’ll make sure I make it loud and clear on the entry form.

Anyway, just thought I’d mirror that here. Keep an eye out for the next round’s announcement, as well as interviews and audio recordings of the stories by the authors, and thanks again to all that contributed.

There are few

webcomics in the net-o-sphere that have achieved the kind of persistent relevance that Penny Arcade have.  The most obvious reason for this is the presence of two very sharp minds behind it. Both Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik have the kind of analytic sense to know how to deliver their style of comedy, and if you’ve ever watched PA TV it may surprise you to see how collaborative the effort is. I know it surprised me; I was under the impression that Jerry did the writing and then passed it off to Mike to illustrate, but after viewing the snippets of documentary I know it’s rarely the case.

However, if there is one domain that is truly Jerry’s, it’s the news posts that accompany each comic. In them we’re (sometimes) given the context of the comic, as well as his latest musings on the industry or, more recently, the respective lives of the creators in their new-ish capacities as fathers. I look forward to the news posts just as much as I do the pretty colours, sometimes more. The reason behind this is down to Jerry’s unique style of wit. This is a nerd who rarely pulls punches, and it’s a beautiful thing to observe. If I was completely honest, I’d admit I styled myself on him in my early blogging attempts. But I’m not, so I won’t.

In a recent news post for the comic ‘Turnaround‘, I think there’s some of Jerry’s best writing (at least since the whole Warcraft vs. Warhammer thing). To put this in context, a new trailer for a game in the ‘Hitman’ series depicted a bunch of nuns pulling out guns, getting their sexy on, and subsequently being obliterated. The following quote comes after Jerry has discussed how ridiculous the ensuing reaction from the gaming press has been:

“The answer is always more art; the corollary to that is the answer is never less art. If you start to think that less art is the answer, start over. That’s not the side you want to be on. The problem isn’t that people create or enjoy offensive work. The problem is that so many people believe that culture is something other people create, the sole domain of some anonymized other, so they never put their hat in the ring. That even with a computer in your pocket connected to an instantaneous global network, no-one can hear you. When you believe that, really believe it, the devil dances in hell.”

Chew on that for a little while, if you feel like it makes sense. It’s been said previously, I’m sure, and will probably continue to be said for as long as art hangs around; that is, until we humans are gone and done for. But it’s a powerful sentiment nonetheless. It’s easy to forget that we are living in an age where the barriers to the creation of art are as solid as the air through which we are able to wirelessly communicate said art. The possibilities, as they say, are endless.

And yet the rise of the social network and the quest for recognition often means that we spend more time commenting on other people’s art than we do creating our own. I am party to this fascination with external analysis; the time I spend reading or being critical about other people’s art is phenomenal. If I were to give an example, my vice would be the analysis of fan-fiction; I just don’t see the purpose, and I’ve spent a good deal of time mired in bitterness over the ability of authors of fan-fiction to draw in a seemingly endless supply of readers. But there’s no point in lamenting this or that mode of expression since, as Jerry says, the answer is always more art.

I think it’s important to note that there is no mention of any qualifiers to the object in that statement. It isn’t that the answer is always more marketable art, or even that the answer is better quality art. And it certainly isn’t more art that people won’t find offensive. No, it is just more fucking art. And that’s a concept I can get behind.

Just a small

update to let you know about a couple of changes going on around here. I’ve updated the theme with a new one by the folks over at ThemeZilla, so I thought I’d give everyone a bit of a guided tour and a heads up that some things are still a little bit under construction.

The first page you see will still be my blog; as you can see, it’s still fairly minimal (as is my wont) and does what it says on the can. I’m still building up content for the sidebar, but eventually it’ll have a nice ‘about me’ section, as well as the usual links to other amazing people (which I will update to include all the new hotness that I’ve met over the past year or so).

The ‘Portfolio’ pages are where I’ll store free .pdf copies of stories, my occasionally updated vlogs, and whatever radio/podcast adventures I end up having. I think it looks pretty speccy at the moment, so feel free to have a look around. I’m still going through and finding neat pictures and formatting all the stories, so it may be a little while before they’re all up here, but there’s enough to get you started, anyway. I figure that most of the publications they’ve appeared in are sold out or unavailable, so there’s no harm to the lovelies that initially published them in reproducing them here (morally speaking — Legally I retain electronic rights, so I can do what I want anyhow).

Anyway, let me know what you think and if you can find any broken bits, I’d be much appreciative if you could point them out. This week will see me finally get around to judging the toothsoup prize, so keep your eyes peeled for an announcement regarding that on the 18th.

Amusingly, while my journal has gained a new skin, I lost a chunk of mine today due to a boating mishap in the middle of the river while attempting a rescue. But that story will have to wait until next time.

Others will likely

deliver more moving, or personal tributes, but I did want to note the passing of one of my most beloved authors, Ray Bradbury. I remember reading ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ in high school, but it was only when I picked up my brother’s copy of Quicker Than The Eye that I was recognised the author and became enchanted by the way in which Bradbury could write. His imagination and solid writing style combined in his writing to create worlds that were at once fantastic and able to be yearned towards. His collection of short stories, The Illustrated Man, will retain pride of place on my bookshelf for as long as there are shelves. Same goes for Fahrenheit 451. And if one day I write a story even half as capably as him, I will be a very satisfied writer indeed.

You are and will be very sorely missed, Mr. Bradbury.

(photo credit: Mitchell Library collection, State Library of New South Wales)

Last weekend I

had the privilege of participating in the Rabbit Hole: an initiative of the Queensland Writer’s Centre, adapted for the 2012 Emerging Writers Festival (EWF). The Rabbit Hole concept is simple, participants are challenged to write 30,000 words in two-and-a-bit days under the direction of a published author acting as a mentor cum cheerleader. Put simply it’s like NaNoWriMo on steroids.

I have always had reservations about the model of NaNoWriMo and events like it. I’m by no means a swift creative writer, and months can go by between words committed to any one document. But friends of mine have participated in such events and come back raving. Not so much about the quality of the words they produced, but more about the sense of community and, strangely, the more productive habits that they fell into after the events. So when the excellent Sam van Zweden announced that she was organising the Rabbit Hole event for the EWF, I finally put my hand up and dobbed myself in for an intense couple of days smashing out words. Or so I thought.

The problem with setting aside a couple of days away from ordinary life to work on writing is that life rarely takes the implication that it is getting in the way very well. In my case, a couple of unplanned events and invitations (that were, admittedly, not obligatory but rather very overdue or would result in me being socially shunned for a long time) got in the way of a lot of the first day and a bit. And then the invasion of my writing space by other people finished off the one-two combination. All in all I ended up with a paltry four-and-a-bit hours of writing completed out of a total possible twenty-four. Thus, a smidge under a fifth of a rabbit hole. A ‘ra’? I managed to get around 7,000 words completed which, while nowhere near the aim of 30,000, was still more than I had written in one sitting all year*. I also got in a bit of practise with the Pomodoro technique, which on first use seems to be a very good motivator.

In any case, the online team was amazing, so big props to them. Patrick O’Duffy was our leader and he did a great job with incentives, prizes, and an excellent motivational attitude. I’m to receive a free copy of his e-book for participating; based on my reading of the extract on Smashwords I’m looking forward to an entertaining tale with some pertinent social commentary. All up I’m pretty glad I had a go, and I think I’m more aware of what is required to do something like NaNoWriMo.

In other news: no job sorted out for when I finish up at Curtin; Louise and I aren’t entirely sure when/where/how the hell we’re going to move to Melbourne; living in a room still sucks.

—

*And, if I might allow myself a bit of mathematical indulgence, gives me an hourly rate that would have resulted in me achieving 42,500 words assuming I’d powered on through the whole thing. Which goes to show that results based on broad assumptions should be carefully considered and mostly ignored.

Today’s post isn’t

contest related, so feel free to tune out if you’re only here for the cash dollaz (although if you are a writer, perhaps you should be at the submission page rather than reading my ramblings). As those who follow my Twitter-self may know, I’ve been applying for jobs over on the East coast of Australia for around six months now, with not so much as an interview to reward my persistence so far. It’s been affecting my ability to do the casual research work I’m currently being paid for a little bit, but thankfully I have people like Lucy to cheer me up when I vent my frustrations into the thrumming social media void:

@toothsoup Looking for work is like having the entire world tell you you’re not good enough. Keep at it, there is an ideal job waiting!

— Lucy (@findmeastorm) May 3, 2012

My problem is, of course, experience. In that I apparently have none, despite my four years of near-constant scientific analysis performed during my Ph.D. project. The attitude of industrial and, to a certain extent, university research positions is that you must have some degree of experience in a laboratory when applying for their positions.  Oh, but the huge number of hours you spent performing and demonstrating laboratories, preparing samples for experiments at national and international facilities, or stuck in front of a computer analysing ream after ream of barely-parsed machine code? They don’t count. No, you need to have at least a year or two up your sleeve doing the kind of laboratory work that would be made redundant by robots in a second if those lab monkeys decided to union up and protest the ridiculously low wages they are paid on graduation from some of the hardest bachelor degrees available.

Ahem. Sorry about that; getting a little ranty. Anyway, my point is that I’m getting nowhere fast, and it’s a bit of a downer. I have occasionally received good feedback from HR departments stating that I was within the top 10%, had a good resume, etc. but apparently I need to spend a couple of years deadening my (already dangerously low) passion for science doing the scientific equivalent of a brickie’s labourer*.

Oh goodness, there I go again.

Okay, staying on topic this time. The point of this post was to talk about goals, and how I don’t generally make them and how I’m trying to make them now. The source of this sudden focus is (like many good things) the bro-tastic Laurie Steed, in the form of a book called ‘Where Will You Be 5 Years From Today?’. It’s one of those dream-big-make-progress-not-quite-self-improvement kind of books, where by you fill in a bunch of fields and end up coming up with a set of goals to work towards. It’s a bit twee, with quotes from everyone who’s ever said something about life flitting about on each page, and cute little graphics emphasising points in bold duo- or tri-colour. But despite this, it’s possible to use it for good rather than mockery. Which is what Louise and I did one night last week. Just sat down and went through the first half of the book, answering as honestly as we could.

The results were surprising, but also not. Both of us obviously have a passion for creative endeavours, and that showed through in our top long-term goals (her: art exhibition, me: novel/collection). But what was surprising was that neither of us really had any real desire to pursue our chosen careers with any kind of vigour. Nor did our long-term goals involve any kind of material gain. In fact, both of us were pretty thoroughly sick of the idea of careers and 9-5 jobs and managers and bosses and climbing the ladder. And we are both rational enough to know that these kinds of feelings are to be expected: no-one actually likes working for the man.

But what was interesting was that, for the first time ever, we actually sat down and thought through what the alternatives might be. Things like starting a small business, or working part-time. Business proposals, grant funding, freelance writing, selling art online, and so on and so forth. And what was even more interesting was that, keeping a rational head on our shoulders, some of these options started to seem feasible. I’m not talking big money feasible, but keeping-your-head-above-water feasible. Which is not to say we’re rushing into anything crazy with idealistic stars in our eyes, but it certainly has given us both something to think about. I guess the take home message is that goal-setting is something that not a lot of us really do in a meaningful way, and it can really help focus you towards pathways that you didn’t think were possible.

And now I think I’d better go before I start raving on about personal journeys and asking the universe to give me a sports car.

—

*Not that I mind labouring. I quite enjoyed my time in Kalgoorlie and would likely do it again if the chance arose.

I meant to

post this last week, but found myself engulfed in all sorts of activities (such as power karaoke with Laurie, S.J., Liz, et al). In any case, we’re now over halfway through the entry window for the toothsoup prize and so far I’ve seen a grand total of four (4) entries hit my inbox! Not a bad turnout, but given that the prize kitty has jumped from a relatively paltry $50 to a rather immodest $85, I’d love to see more flooding in. It’s a handy little sum, and pretty good odds if you’re of the gambling persuasion.

So what are you waiting for? Hit up the submission form and get your entry in!

I have an

exciting announcement for those of you who a) write, b) live in Australia, and c) love the colour yellow when applied to the interior of your wallets. I am totally psyched to reveal the toothsoup prize! The toothsoup prize is a contest open to all Australian short story writers of any genre wishing to submit an original work of 1,000 to 2,000 words.

You can read more about the motivations of the prize at the contest website, and see the submissions guidelines at the submishmash page. The prize is that of cash money–at least $50 of it–which may increase based on contributions from submitters or donors alike. It’s open for a month starting from today and, while I don’t often ask for it, with this one I’d appreciate any link-sharing, tweeting, pingbacks, etc. that you can offer.

Good luck to all contestants!

This story isn’t

necessarily Kalgoorlie-centric, in as much as it might have happened to me somewhere else at some other, future point in time. But, as it turns out, it did happen in Kalgoorlie and so gives me an opportunity to talk about other facets of the job there, as well as some freaky brain stuff.

The area in which we were working while constructing the netting structure is just outside of the roaster itself. The roaster facility is maybe two or three-hundred square metres of factory-type industrial workspace containing the sheds of the tradesmen and permanent staff, as well as the control tower and some rudimentary office space for meetings and management types. The whole place is tinted a rusty, red/brown colour, speckled with the occasional white splash from the lime mill. The most prominent feature of the facility is the roaster itself, standing at an impressive 180 metres tall and constantly breathing a stream of thick, white cloud into the air. This effluent is comprised of water vapour and sulphur dioxide, and really does look like your typical nature-made cloud once it starts floating away; a fact that will come into play later on in this tale.

The worst days on the tailings dam were those where the wind would shift from a south-easterly to a south-westerly and then drop. This wind pattern meant that the cloud of gas streaming from the roaster would fall directly on all of us working in the dam. Because it was heavier than air, the dam would catch it and store it, creating quite a dense fog which, on some days, meant you couldn’t see from one end of the dam to the other. The really shitty thing about that can be summed up in the following quote from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

Current scientific evidence links short-term exposures to SO₂, ranging from 5 minutes to 24 hours, with an array of adverse respiratory effects including bronchoconstriction and increased asthma symptoms.  These effects are particularly important for asthmatics at elevated ventilation rates (e.g., while exercising or playing.)

Emphasis mine. This stuff tasted like shit and caused what I can only be bothered to assume was a reaction with mucus resulting in some kind of sulphuric acid that stung and burned with every breath. Thankfully after the second swing I was prepared with a face buff (pretty much a cylinder of stretchy material) borrowed from Pat that took out most of the sting. But damned if that chemical taste still lingers with me when I think about it.

Anyway, so the roaster operated pretty much constantly the entire time we were working on the dam. I think I was once quoted a loss of a million dollars a day if it didn’t. On the day in which this story occurs, it was streaming almost directly above me as I exited from the crib room. The weather was perfect, with a rich blue sky that stretched, uninterrupted, to the horizon. By chance, I happened to look up just in time to see the moon rapidly accelerating through the sky, seemingly on a mission to leave our orbit and end life as we know it on Earth.

And then I blinked, and the moon was back to being stationary while the clouds of gas marching towards the horizon were now moving, and the visual cortex in my brain had reasserted its authority over an illusion known as ‘induced movement’. Briefly, induced movement occurs when you don’t have enough reference points to decide which object is moving and which is stationary in your field of vision. You may have experienced it when sitting on a train at a station when another train is opposite you. When the other train moves, your vision overrides any input from your body moving and for a second you might think that you are moving, when in actual fact it is the relative movement of the train pulling out that tricks you.

The interesting thing about my experience was not the phenomenon itself (although illusions that trick the body’s senses are really interesting and I may have been sucked into a two-hour wikiloop while I researched this) but rather the way I reacted to it. For one, maybe two, seconds I was utterly convinced that this shit was going down. The moon was flying away and holycrapwhatthefuck. Or, rather, not. Because my immediate reaction didn’t fall into the fight or flight categories. Instead, the first thing I did was to ask myself how this could have happened, and why it was happening. In other words, I began trying to reason out this life-threatening observation despite being absolutely certain that it was true.

It’s strange to think that perhaps, after all these years of scientific study, my brain has been rewired to ask questions first and shoot later.

If there were

one piece of advice I would give to prospective Kalgoorlie workers, it would be to get hired in Perth. The company that I worked for provides housing for free, a daily food allowance, and the convenience of company cars/clothes. You spend very little and save pretty much everything you earn, and the entire philosophy of working a shitty mining job (i.e. to earn le moolah) is vindicated. Not so the poor unfortunates who find themselves blowing in to Kalgoorlie without a predetermined preoccupation. They must pay prices for hostel accommodation that would be hilarious if they weren’t so tragic, buy food at roughly one-and-a-half-times Perth cost, and get themselves to and from site. And the worst part? The recruitment agencies that take in these guys take a chunk of their pay, so they aren’t even earning as much as those coming up from Perth. It’s kind of screwy.

We had two of these recruitment agency workers with us in the last week of our last trip. The previous trips we had two others, one of whom was adequate and the other completely vacant. Vacant in the sense that there was really no knowing what functions were being processed behind those eyes. He could have been a genius, or an idiot. We’ll never know. In any case, this trip we managed to score two decent guys: Dean and Boss. This particular tale concerns Boss.

Boss was a big dude of Kiwi, or possibly Polynesian, descent. His actual name started with an ‘O’ and went on for several dozen syllables, hence the shortened version. He smoked big rollies, was quick to show off his missing front tooth, and knew how to tie a knot due to an extensive employment history in marquee construction. More useful than that, he was confident in everything he did and wasn’t afraid to do something without verification from the (actual) boss. So, kind of rough, but knowledgeable. The hired labour equivalent of The Dude, if you will.

The other piece of this story comes from the fact that, for most of the trip, we had a mice problem in the crib room on site. For those that haven’t been on a mine site, a crib room is simply a demountable room with electricity provided either by mains or a diesel generator. Ours had a pie warmer (brilliant) fridge and microwave for our lunches, and the tangible presence of a whole tonne of poop covering every conceivable surface greeting us every single morning. We thought it was a rat problem at first, but eventually we spotted a couple of mice scurrying from the scene of the crime. Promises were made to put down traps, but they never materialised, and we were sent gagging from the smell most days. The breakthrough came when I discovered that we had inadvertently made a mouse trap by leaving the rubbish bins without liners overnight. Prior to that, the mice had always been able to climb out of their little green feast hall by gripping up the liners and jumping out. I came in to a lack of horrid odour and four mice scurrying around in a panic at the bottom of one of our bins.

I put the bin outside with the lid on, unsure of what to do but wanting the others to see the culprits. Everyone had a chuckle, but each put the lid back on and the mice were left alone throughout the day .

Until lunch time.

We had called it to go back to work, everyone gathering up their pie wrappers and energy drink cans and shuffling off to the 4WDs. Whereupon Boss walked on over to the bin containing the mice, picked it up, and shook the living hell out of it. We watched on as he put it down, opened it up, observed that one of them still going, and picked it up for a second shake. This time he peered inside, pronounced the quartet extinguished, and walked away.

—

(NB: For those of you that might be horrified at the animal cruelty described here, the chances are pretty good that we’d have left Ratsak out the next time they got in. Or worse still, not opened the bin for a few days in the hope that they would silently starve to death, wresting the kill decision from us. So, y’know, consolation or something? :/)

I’m typing with

numb fingers, their club-like mashings a direct result of the final few frantic days over in Kalgoorlie. I expect they’ll be back to normal in a week or so, but for now they both look and feel like Frankenstein’s monster. Thankfully this is the last I’ll have to endure their transfiguration into clumsy tingle machines. Instead, they’ll be working in concert with my five-year-old laptop (almost to the day; love you buddy) to trawl scientific literature for the current state of clay. I can’t say much more than that due to confidentiality agreements, IP, etc., but it seems to be an interesting project with a decent pay package. And more importantly, it’s part-time. Which means I can continue to look for jobs and try and boost my resume on my days off. Because as of now, I’m around twelve for zero in turning job applications into interviews. Needless to say I’m rather frustrated with the process, but since I’ve already banged on about the topic so much I shan’t go into it again.

Oh, and I’m also planning something super nice for the 9th anniversary of my blogging habit on the 18th of April. Hard to believe I’ve occasionally ranted into a blank, white space for that long. Although when I put it like that, it doesn’t sound like too much of a task. Anyway, I’m just trying to get the details written up in a nice format, possibly on a different website, and I’ll make the announcement through various twitter outlets. It won’t change the world, but it might change a morning every now and again (so cryptic!).

That’s about it for now, really. Apologies for the mini-entry, but since I’ve only been back in Perth for a day or so there’s not too much to report. I’ll be back in the habit a bit more often as my nerve endings slowly recover.

By this stage,

I think we can definitely call the thing done.

photo credit: bcostin

Back once again

from the second and (probably) penultimate swing of my Kalgoorlie net installation career. Not much to say on the subject of the job–it was much the same as last time, except with a few more bruises and a few less workers nearer to the end. We’ve just about completed putting up all the netting on the lower dam, covering something like 300 square metres of open hole with around twenty panels of net. The sight of such a structure makes me feel pretty nice about being part of the team that managed to raise it. It’s that whole tangibility thing again. Anyway, we’ll have the bottom dam done in the first three or four days of the next swing, and then it sounds like we’ll be re-raising the top dam for the rest of the time, now that the construction guys have dug a big trench out of it. All of which is code for me lifting heavy things, fetching tools, and running around like an idiot in order to prop up my bank account.

I spent Saturday night with Louise at the Novotel (pretty average hotel, but it’s not a house full of people with ears) and we used Sunday morning to walk around Perth and go and see the Year 12 ‘Perspectives’ exhibition at the art gallery. Louise adjudged them as not quite as good as she expected, but then conceded that it’s probably because it’s been 10 years since we were that age. So we’re bound to have forgotten what an achievement it is to be able to paint/draw/create something like that so young.

Wait, back-up a little. It’s been 10 years since we were that age. And, predictably, we’ve both recently received invitations to our respective high school reunions. I’m fairly sure I’m not going to attend mine. High school was a positive experience for me once I found my clique of awesome, geeky folk, and I have no great desire to reconnect with all the other students whose entire purpose seemed to be to provide a sub-audible backing track of taunts and drama. I have no doubt that seeing them now would be an experience that I’d rate high on the internal-amusement-meter and, y’know, I’d get a chance to show off my smokin’ hot girlfriend and general happiness. But really, when all is said and done, I’d much rather catch up with people I actually like, rather than those I’m only morbidly curious in meeting to see how far they’ve fallen. So to that end there’s a small sub-group planning a piss up with the lovely Cian once she makes it back to Australian soil for Pete and Bec’s wedding. Can’t wait!

Creatively speaking, not very much is going on at the moment. I’ve been fairly stymied in my attempts to write lately, for obvious, manually-laboured reasons. I have had some more ideas for various pieces, but nothing much shifting in terms of actual, concrete word count as of yet. Louise and I are working on a fun project for the upcoming ‘Fingerprint’ issue of dotdotdash, which will be comprised of random zines from all sorts. Even if you are not a writer or an artist, you can totally make a zine, so check out the submission guidelines and have a go!

Alright, that’s all for now. Off to eat cheese and drink wine out the back of the hills. Yeah, you’re so damn jealous right now.

photo credit: Matt Lavin

It’s been two

weeks, and I’m back from my first stint in Kalgoorlie. It’s good to be home, if only for a little while, before we head back over to (hopefully) finish the job on the next swing. It’s been a heck of a couple of weeks, this being the first time I’ve ever been involved in such a physically demanding workplace. I’m proud of the way I’ve handled it so far, with only one dummy-spit and the lightest of friction between myself and the rest of the crew. The person I was most worried about irritating was Pat, and while I think I did get on his nerves near the end, I believe our friendship won’t suffer too much for working together.

The work itself is hard, but rewarding in its own way. I’m not sure if I mentioned what it was I was doing in my last post but if I didn’t, we’re essentially covering a tailings dam with netting so that birds don’t get poisoned. That sounds simple–and I guess it is–but the area to be covered is mind boggling, and the work is all at elevation. It has its own challenges, mostly physical, but there is a logistical element to it. I enjoyed the logic of it all, the necessary step-by-step. It’s like putting together a piece of Ikea furniture, but on a much grander scale. The two weeks passed almost without me noticing. The rhythm of work-beer-sleep-repeat doesn’t leave much opportunity for anything else but laughing at country television advertisements. And since the work on any given day is the same as any other, any conception of time passing is lost in the wash.

Of course, as soon as I come out of that cycle and back to reality, the same problems rear their ugly heads. I’m still completely lost as to what I want to do with my future career. I’ve come to accept the fact that I am going to have to start at graduate level despite my Ph.D. qualification if I want to enter industry: it’s just the way it works in that environment. But it’s whether or not I want to continue with science purely, or if I want to mix and match with another discipline. As I was saying to Louise this morning, I don’t have the passion for science that I see in other (successful) scientists. Or perhaps that’s the wrong way of saying it. It’s basically…well, you tend to find that by the time researchers hit the end of their Ph.D., they have a particular area, or question, that they want to explore. A topic that will drive them, in all likelihood, until the end of their careers. And so far I haven’t discovered that thing that fascinates me so much that I would be willing to devote large chunks of my time to it. Not even my writing has that effect on me. It seems that while I am good at a lot of different things, I’m not passionate enough to become great at any one of them. It’s a bit poo.

In the meantime, I’ve had some news from my former supervisor about some possible literature review work once I’m done in Kalgoorlie. It involves an Indian company who are looking to do some material science research, and so need to know what has gone before. Sounds like just the kind of thing to get me back into the swing of science, and I should (finally) be able to do some work on writing some journal articles while I’m doing that. Who knows? It might even open up some doors for me. Alright, enough of all this navel gazing. Off to make a list of things I need to do while I have a) the Internet, b) money, and c) time.

photo credit: The Library of Congress

Dead, dead, dead;

my job search, bank balance, and blog posting ability, respectively. In the interests of following up on my pledge to dedicate my blog less to apologies and more to thoughtfulness, I’ll only mention that I’ve had another story up at COSMOS, and that I’m still nought for many in the permanent job application stakes. That doesn’t mean I’m without a job, though. I’ve been writing trivia questions for science students at a rate of fifteen Wikipedia searches per minute, and I’m selling my soul for approximately $30 an hour, plus food allowance, to go and work on top of a tailings dam for two weeks. That starts tomorrow, to expect this blog to be even quieter than it was before.

Now, to thoughtfulness. And I must start by admitting that a great deal of my thoughts have been turned to my current lack of work to wake up to. I was speaking to a friend of mine recently—he’s also unemployed and searching for a full-time position—and we were comparing notes on the process. I told him that I was astounded at the extent to which my sense of self-worth is tied in to having a place to go and work every day. And not only that: it is also tied inextricably to the numbers that spin around in my bank balance. He agreed.

For the last year, I have been effectively broke, with the glorious exception of a few months where I was employed at Synergy (glorious for the cash being earned, not the job). That is, before I went on consecutive month-long trips to Sydney (business) and Thailand (pleasure) and chewed even those meagre crumbs. And now I’m back to square one again, cashless and incapable of committing to even a single night out with friends. Relying on the kindness of strangers (even if those strangers are your closest friends) engenders a special kind of worthlessness. Anyway, what with the soul-selling and moving outside of potentially the most dangerous environment for that state of mind (alone, at home, in front of a computer), I ought to feel a bit better. Albeit completely fucking knackered.

Writing continues to be an off-again, on-again hobby. I don’t have the mental space or the ‘closed door’ (I’ve been reading Stephen King’s On Writing, thanks to Anthony) necessary to be able to string a few hours of quality text together. It’s difficult to justify satisfying creative urges when, at the same time, I could be tuning my resume, or checking back at SEEK to see if, y’know, my future career has been added in the previous five minutes. I know that, according to many practitioners of creativity, I should love the craft enough to put in the hours no matter the sacrifice required. But I mean, fuck, it’s easy to say that when you can put food on the table and still have a few dollars left over.

Anyway, enough whining. I’ll see you guys in a couple of weeks.

photo credit: Armando Maynez

It’s natural that

while I’m hunting around for a job, I begin to think about what it is I’m going to do once I have found one. This will be the first time that I am involved in what will be my career, rather than my education. Not only that, but this will (hopefully) be the first time that I command a wage that can be considered in any way plentiful.

Realising this, I’ve been mulling over the ways in which we, as consumers, spend money. I had a delightful (and enlightening and challenging, as always) chat with Laurie yesterday and we talked a lot about what we do with money, and why we do it. Specifically with regards to the pressures of marketing and aspirational branding/living.

Aspirational branding and its social implications is a topic that has interested me for quite a while. His Holiness Charlie Brooker has produced a very insightful piece of documentary regarding aspiration within television marketing and programming, which covers most of the bases more quickly and with cleaner lines than anything I could, so I suggest you check that out if you’re interested.

What the conversation with Laurie and I centred around was the idea of living independently, sans aspirational consumerism, while engaging and building a community. Translated, that means: not buying stupid shit, not owning stupid shit, and using your finances to support creative endeavours by friends and colleagues. The definition of ‘stupid shit’ is, obviously, a subjective one, but for me it includes such things as label brand clothing, expensive cars, expensive televisions, etc. And I’m keenly aware that list makes me sound like an old man, but I just fail to see the point of these childish things. Why aspire to follow the cycle of fashion which exists purely to make you buy more clothes? Why buy a $50,000 car which is speed-limited to the same pace as a $2,000 one? The mind boggles at the transparent surface-level thinking that must go along with the use of money in this way. I am earning money; I am big and strong; choose me as your friend/mate.

There are exceptions. I don’t begrudge those who have an active mechanical interest in automotives their passion, for example. But I would much prefer to commission a student of film, or ask an artist to paint my family and friends, than own a big shiny chunk of materialism. But what is it that makes other people, particularly those with a large disposable income, follow through with such purchases? This is the kind of stuff that will tie in with the project that I have planned for 2012, which may or may not be an attempt at a novel. Okay, well, actually, it is an attempt at a novel. But no promises as to a completion date.

Anyway, thanks again to Laurie for the great coffee conversation. I’ve just spent the day garnering answers to the question of Kindle Direct Publishing, so expect a small post about that soon.

photo credit: jonoakley

As the year

draws to a close, especially a year such as this one, I feel that it is a good idea to have a look back and etch milestones to memory in anticipation and preparation for the following three-hundred and sixty five days.

2011 started in the worst way imaginable: standing and staring incredulous at the message informing me of a good friend’s suicide. The blow felt within the group of friends was immense. Its initial, unimaginable impact blossoming into bruises that I am sure still yellow the minds of all involved. I think I am as yet unable to believe that he is truly gone, despite having seen him laying at rest within the coffin. It’s worth repeating that if you ever feel like you need someone to talk to—yes, you, whomever you are—I’m right here, and I’ll spend as long as it takes to help you out. Suicide is such an ugly thing.

It took a while after that to get back on track with my studies. My scholarship had run out three months prior, and so I was relying on a rapidly dwindling savings account to keep myself fed and watered (and not much else). Being poor and under pressure to finish a thesis isn’t the best place to find yourself in. Eventually my money ran well and truly out, and I was forced to find temporary gainful employment, eventually securing a full-time position at Synergy to help administrate their solar energy scheme. I spent somewhere in the region of six weeks working full-time and driving straight from work to university to tap away at revising my thesis manuscript. It worked though, and I submitted my thesis to the examination committee on June 9th: a mere four years and three months after starting.

I continued working at Synergy for around three months after that to save some money up, paying back the cash that had been lent to me by Louise and my Mum. It’s a good thing that I’m a bloody good saver, because I applied for and received a place interning at COSMOS magazine for five weeks. And five weeks spent in Sydney’s CBD doesn’t come cheap, even at a YHA. The time I spent at the magazine was really great, and I learned a great deal about the balance between information and communication with regards to science and journalism. It’s definitely something that I can see myself continuing, and thanks to the lovely, encouraging editorial staff (hi Heather and Becky!) I have been commissioned to write a couple more articles at their online news site since coming back to Perth. I ended up leaving the internship a week early in order to visit my Uncle, who has been a patron throughout my Ph.D. studies, and see their new farm and really have a good relaxing time there and at Mark and Monique’s place before heading back home.

Once I got home, Louise and I had a week to move the last of our stuff out of our old house before jetting off to Thailand. Thailand was just an amazing experience, full of friendly people, stunning landscapes, and amazing activities. I’ve already dedicated something in the region of 5,000 words to the place in two previous posts so I won’t go on any longer about it. Suffice to say that it was another incredibly positive experience.

Which brings us to around about now. The last month or so hasn’t been a particularly great one for me, despite the festive season or perhaps because of it. I’m pretty much broke again, and the job market is rather barren at the moment. Staying at Louise’s folks place has made me feel like a bit of a burden (through no fault of theirs, they’ve been really supportive as well) and asking for help isn’t something I do without some degree of anguish. As a result, I’ve been pretty down about myself and my future, but Louise has been amazing as usual in a million little ways and a couple of big ones (e.g. I’m typing this in the study which she cleaned up and organised for me to use as a job hunting power-room).

So for me the new year can’t come quick enough. It represents a move away from the sedentary lifestyle I’ve been stuck in for the last three years or so, an opportunity to rediscover my enthusiasm for…well, for life in general. Making time rather than marking it. There are hurdles to get over in the short term, but I think 2012 will end up being a fairly drastic change in the way that Louise and I live our lives, and I can’t wait to arrive in that space.

Happy New Year everyone.

photo credit: bernat…

The folks at

dotdotdash held an excellent series of events last week as part of their Subscribeathon, and if you are a writer or a reader, you should totally go to their subscriptions page and jump on board. It’s only $35 for four issues and you get to act smug and say “That? Oh, that’s dotdotdash, it’s a literary magazine, you know, like what smart people read?” when they point to it on your coffee table. Anyway, the marvellous man that is S. J. Finch (who, after having comprehensively beaten me at Super Smash Bros., departed from running the mag to work on his Ph.D.) invited me to speak at the ‘Home’ themed event, asking that I write something about my childhood home, and childhood in general. I found it again this morning, and it went down well enough with the crowd to think that maybe others might like to read it. Anyway, here you go.

———

While preparing for tonight I foolishly asked Twitter how I should go about writing something about home and childhood without falling into a giant pit of nostalgia. I got two responses, one of which was “Make sure you had a terrible childhood”, while the other was “Write about someone else’s” [Edit: that advice coming from Sam Twyford-Moore and Steph Convery, respectively.]. As I am ever a slave to the Internet, I decided to follow the advice of my somewhat cynical friends.

So the first thing I had to do was weigh up whether or not I had a terrible childhood. And while rummaging through the pile of dirty laundry that is my memories, I realised that the moments I remember of my childhood are somewhat unfairly dominated by my father. The reason for that being that my parents split when I was six, after my father essentially walked out on us. But we did still see him regularly at the insistence of Mum, and so my time was split between my home and a succession of houses, units, and apartments that my Dad occupied in the years following the split. My father was quite an angry man during that time, and that anger resulted in a number of incidents throughout my childhood which are still affecting my siblings and I to this day. And my feelings regarding him are the subject of a few of my stories and memoir-ish pieces, one of which you’ll find in the upcoming Gambit issue. Which is why, tonight, I don’t really want to talk about that side of my childhood. Because I think that while the days that we spent with him were damaging and awful, it shouldn’t eclipse the fact that, at the same time, I had a wonderful, loving environment created by my Mum at what I considered to be my true home. So instead of going over the bad stuff, I wanted to celebrate that place: 12 Priory Road, out in a suburb called Maida Vale.

I think I’m in the statistical minority in that throughout my childhood I lived in the same house. My siblings and I all went to the same primary school and high school, a fact that wasn’t lost on teachers who would take every opportunity to compare me to my predecessors. My brother and I played on the same sports teams at the same club five minutes down the road, and we have known all of our neighbours to varying degrees–one of whom spent a very determined afternoon trying to play kiss-chasy with me. So we grew up having a very well-defined sense of community and place, which I think may be a rare thing nowadays anywhere that isn’t a country town. My Mum actually still lives there, which means she’s been in that house for about 35 years. If you were to visit, you’d see a white wooden-clad house, built up on stumps that keep the insects out and provide cover for the occasional wandering echidna. You’d see the front half of a garden that she spends most of her weekends nurturing, while around the back there’s a wide strip of lawn that we spent most of our weekends destroying. Almost every bit of green on the property belongs to native plants, whose gleefully shed pollen never failed to make me hate them for what they did to my sinuses.

Once inside, you’d immediately be aware of one of the main reasons why I always felt, and still do feel, safe and loved in that house; and it’s something that I believe comes from my Dutch ancestry. My mother is Dutch, she emigrated to Melbourne with her parents when she was quite young, and moved over to northern W.A. and then Perth once she’d completed her nursing training. So despite having lived here for most of her life she does still keep up the Dutch habits, and one of my favourite ones is the fact that Dutch houses are typically filled with a carefully curated collection of crafts and knick-knacks. Shelving overflows with seashells, daggy photographs, books from all stages of our reading careers, lolly tins, unironically decorative cutlery and crockery, framed embroidery, handmade runners and bowls, every woodwork or metalwork project that my siblings and I ever completed, wooden sculptures from overseas trips, and so on and so forth. There are no clean lines, no brushed steel, and certainly no minimalism: at last count there were five different clocks in the living room alone. Up until very recently above the kitchen bench there hung a cardboard fish coloured in with pastel crayons that my sister made when she was in grade two. My sister is now 32, and insisted that Mum finally cut the damn thing down when the kitchen got renovated [Edit: I have since discovered that it is still up in the house, it's just moved to my old bedroom.].

If you were to open up any of the drawers you’d find exercise books from every primary school class we ever had, along with yearbook photos and newspaper cuttings from our occasional excursions into local fame. It sounds redundant to say this, but it’s a very homely home. You know how you go to some people’s places and it feels almost like a hotel? Mum’s isn’t like that. The whole place just so perfectly represents the way that our Mum loves and lives for us kids. If there hadn’t been that feeling of warmth and safety that my home provided after visits with my Dad, I don’t think that I would have turned out nearly as well-adjusted as I have. And while my definition of home has changed over the years to encompass my girlfriend and a certain feeling to a place, I know that 12 Priory Road will always be my first home.

So after all that I think I can safely say that I had a pretty good life growing up, with only the occasional terrible-ness sprinkled on like chunks of licorice on an otherwise perfectly baked childhood cake [Edit: I interrupted myself during the night to declare this an absolutely abhorrent metaphor, and so it is]. And I think that, having reminded myself of that fact, it’s helped me to realise that I do have a tendency to cling on the bad stuff and relegate the good stuff to the background. So I’d like to thank the dotdotdash folks for prompting me to appreciate how lucky I really am.

Anyway, still following the advice of my Internet buddies, I am now going to play a game of a ‘Who Am I?’ with someone else’s childhood, and I’m challenging you guys to yell out when you think you know who it is that I am describing.

I was born by immaculate conception into slavery in the desert. It was a very hard life, but I made myself indispensible to the slave masters by quickly picking up the finer details of machinery. By age nine I was a gifted engineer, building engines and machines out of spare parts and eventually earning my freedom in a race [Edit: it was at this point that Liz Tan yelled out the answer, she's sharp that one!]. Recognising my ability, a wizard came to visit me, asking that I come with him to the city of wizards, so that I could be trained in their ways. With an automaton of my own creation by my side, I left my mother and travelled with the wizard to where the others of his kind lived. But when I finally got there, they refused me on the advice of a fortune teller within their ranks, who saw my future to be a dark one. However, when an army invaded, I proved my worth to the wizards by using my engineering skill and quick reflexes to route their most important forces. After the battle, an especially courageous wizard offered to tutor me, and the rest agreed, although reluctantly. I spent the rest of my childhood in training, until my masters sent me to investigate an assassination attempt on a queen.

[Edit: The answer, of course, being Anakin Skywalker.]

photo credit: kevin dooley

I’ve been back

from my holiday and mired in the depths of unemployment for almost three weeks now. It’s often thought of as a paradise, but in reality it’s a little bit depressing, this not having anything to get you moving once you wake up. Or perhaps I’m just not the right person to appreciate large amounts of hours with nothing particularly pressing to fill them up with. For the first week or so, I had the task of getting my thesis resubmission process completed. Which I did, after spending a painstaking day re-jigging some images and chasing down signatures from various faculty members. So that kept me occupied. After I’d done that though, it’s been pretty much been a week or two of very little at all.

Wait, sorry. ‘After I’d done that’ is probably a little too glib for what it actually represents. I am now officially done with my thesis. It’s complete. Finished. Kaput. I never have to look upon its smug, papery face ever again if I don’t want to. Well, that’s a lie, I’m currently flicking through it for table scraps that I can try and mash together into some semblance of a meal that a journal editor might like to chow down on. But the main thing is that I have passed and I will never have to do something so incredibly hard ever again. So yay for that. Alright, back to the main point of the post.

In order to keep myself from going completely insane at home, I’ve been trying to make sure that I have goals to achieve each day. These range from the mundane (make sure I get the dishes out of the dishwasher and put on a load of washing) to the necessary (go for a run so that I at least leave the house once a day) to the creative. And strangely enough, the creative ones haven’t yet included writing. I have yet to write any new fiction since before I left for Sydney, back in September. This is probably the longest I’ve ever gone without writing something, anything, for a few years. And the urge still hasn’t taken me. I have no doubt it will come back eventually (and hopefully in time for my resolution to write a novel in 2012) but for the moment, I’ve got nothing going on in the writing department with the exception of a COSMOS article or two. Oh, yeah, I’m an occasional paid science journalist now (:.

Anyway, so instead of writing, I’ve been turning to other forms of creative output. One which has turned out to be surprisingly rewarding is that of programming. Now, I’ve tried to program before, and you’d think my background in disciplines that use logic as their main way o’ doin’ stuff would result in me being an apt pupil. But the language I chose to pop my “Hello world!” cherry was Fortran, and Fortran can be a little difficult for the newbie. So this time around I’ve been easing myself into it by adopting Python as my tutor. And so far, the results have closely resembled this xkcd comic. I’m following the excellent Python for Absolute Beginners book by Michael Dawson, which walks you through a number of game-based programs and teaches everything from basic programming workflow to more advanced techniques. It’s already got me dreaming of all kinds of text-based adventures that I could create.Of course, I’ll need to figure out a whole heck of a lot more stuff before I get that far, but the possibility is firmly embedded in my head now.

The other thing I’ve turned (or should that be tuned?) back to is playing around with sequencing. As previously mentioned, there’s a (FREE!) tracker known as Buzzmachines that offers a complete digital solution for making a song from beginning to end, with one of the most elegant graphical interfaces ever devised. And it’s been really fun to mess around with sounds and such. So far I’ve been playing around a lot and not making a whole heap of songs, but here are some little tunes that I’ve been happy enough with to upload to my Soundcloud:

Peachy keen — Trying to emulate the arpeggiated style and substance of chiptunes, though I did use a lot of sounds that are ‘illegal’ for the genre (i.e. delays, etc.). Still, I think it came out okay.

Shred test — I was linked by wauterboi to this excellent VST called Shred, which emulates guitars rather bloody well. So I ended up playing with that and a rhythm gate to make something a bit more driven.

Little mountain & Easte-reverb — These are part of an ongoing attempt to make some music that I can share with my fellow writers as songs that aren’t going to distract them. Kind of like the Ghostly ‘Music for creatives‘ album (which you should definitely get if you haven’t already).

So that’s a few of them. I’ll be trying to get maybe one per month done, as the mood takes me. But really its all about enjoying the process, rather than any kind of output.

And that brings me to another point I wanted to make in that, for me at least, I think it’s important to have multiple outlets for creativity. I don’t think I could exclusively stick to one way of bringing ideas into reality; I’d get either bored or stale in my methods. Even from just the two examples I’ve put here show how bringing learning into your life can result in new ways of expression: I now have the ideas of a text adventure and a themed album floating around my head. And who knows how those ideas will interact with the rest of the stuff that gets thrown in there? And before anyone gets any misconceptions, no, I’m not looking to make money out of these things. Of course I’m never going to get signed to a label or picked up by EA (not that I’d want to in the latter case), but it’s fun to try new things! And that’s what I’ve been feeling like doing lately, trying out new stuff.

Alright, well that’s enough rambling from me for the moment. I hope you’re all enjoying the lead up to the holiday season. Let me know your plans in the comments, or tell me some of your alternate creative hobbies, I’d love to hear whether your outlets have interacted with each other in unexpected ways.

photo credit: CW Ye

The holiday is

fast disappearing from my memory, although we have yet to go through our photos properly–I’m sure that’ll help. Anyway, while it’s all relatively fresh in my mind, I wanted to go through what I thought were the best bits of our trip. A top five seems appropriate, but since everything was so great, I won’t number them.

Cave Lodge — Not strictly an activity, but more of a hub where you have access to activities. The lodge is located just by the Burma border and is run by John. John’s a bloke who left Australia for Thailand 20 years ago and has never looked back. He’s mapped the region extensively and knows just about everything there is to know about caving and exploration. His book, ‘Wild Times’, makes for an impressive read. I would absolutely recommend staying here: not only is it a central location to a huge number of caves, waterfalls, and villages, but the atmosphere of the place is friendly and enjoyable. All of our nights were spent around the fire, having a laugh and a beer with fellow travellers. We made some great mates and ended up doing things like caving and kayaking/trekking that we never thought we would be able to do. Take my advice and do caving (2) — extreme caving. You’ll never forget it.

Diving in Koh Lanta — We really ummed and ahhed over doing a diving course while we were over. Our main concern was the expense which, even in Thailand, is significant. We were also a bit hesitant about the quality of the courses, as there were rumours that some of the centres were graduate mills that just want you in and out as quickly as possible. Eventually we decided to go for the Scubafish dive training centre in Ko Lanta. Definitely worth paying a wee bit extra for, as we were put in a group of three and given as much help and advice as we wanted to get us through the training. Huge thanks to Corinna and Natalie! The diving itself (near Koh Ha) was just spectacular. Crystal clear waters and a huge number of fish and coral that was just begging for a return trip. Even if you don’t want to do a dive course, the trip out there for snorkelling would be a great day out.

Elephants in Chiang Mai – This should really be enough said at that. However, there are a LOT of elephant parks around Chiang Mai, so I’d like to give some info about the one we went to. It was called ‘Elephant Nature Park’ and its aim is to buy ex-working elephants from around Thailand and give them the best treatment they can get before they die. Most of the elephants were blind or injured. We didn’t go on rides or see any of the elephants do any tricks like other elephant parks (we were informed that in fact an elephant’s spine can’t comfortably take much more than one average adult–it isn’t built for that). Instead, we learned about each individual elephant’s story, and spent the day feeding and washing the elephants. Much more friendly to the elephants, and we knew that every baht that we put towards that day was going to be spent on helping buy more elephants and pay medical costs for the current ones.

Emerald Cave in Koh Muk – Emerald Cave is frankly the most beautiful place we found ourselves in. It’s a naturally formed beach with a miniature jungle located amid soaring limestone cliffs. The only way to get in there is to swim from the ocean through a pitch-black cave, the water in which glows an eerie green with the light from outside. There aren’t too many words to describe it; we’ll be putting a video up on YouTube as soon as Louise cuts it together, so keep an eye out for it. Suffice to say it’s a must-see.

Scooter riding in Pai – Really this could read ‘scooter riding in X’, because scooters are fucking awesome, and the countryside in Thailand is a blast to ride through. Roads are either long and straight or wind smoothly up mountains. The sun on your helmet, the wind through your hair, and a girl on the back seat of your (child-sized) motor. It’s also to do with the sense of freedom you get when you have a vehicle to get you around. All too often you might spent an entire holiday at the whim of taxi drivers and public transport, but hiring a scooter for a day is a reminder that there are other ways and means to get around.

Alright, I think I can stop at five different activities. Of course there were other aspects of Thailand that were consistently great: the food, the people, and the weather being three I can immediately point to. We never felt harassed (well, not in the regions where we didn’t expect to be harassed), and could always make ourselves understood to the locals. And the food, my life, the food was amazing. So that’s Thailand. Highly recommend everyone go there at least once in their life — like John at Cave Lodge, you might find yourself staying for a lot longer than you planned!

in Thailand I endeavoured to keep a diary of our experiences, so that when we returned to Perth and reality descended on us with all its myriad demands, we could remember all the things we did and people we met. There were times when I failed to do so as a direct result of things that we were doing, but I count that as an indication that we were doing it right. Since I have a few days respite before my supervisor returns and I can round out the graduation forms with his signature, I figured I’d reproduce that diary here. It was kept in shorthand at the start, mostly with bullet points, so I may add some commentary from memory in italics. The rest is verbatim: @s, smiley faces, bad grammar and all. Hope you enjoy it, and I’ll try and get some of the better photos, and a rough-cut movie up sometime soon.

Chiang Mai

28/10

• Arrived, checked in @3Sis
• Huen Phen, Northern Thai for dinner.
• sweet, sweet sleep.

29/10

• visited temples: funeral celebrations at Wat Chedi Luang; teak-made Wat Pan Tao; main one, Wat Pha Singh.
• visited 3 Kings monument
• mastered riding in red bustaxis!
• visited icon plaza and central department store: huge!
• Dinner @ Bierstube, German food + 2 x Chang King Browns = sleepy.

30/10

• Blind masseuse in the morning. Pretty much died.
• Was lead on wild goose chase by 2 (TWO!) red taxi drivers;
• had lunch @ pizza hut in defiance. >:D Shall try again to get to the lunch bar (or not).
• came back to hotel, cooled down and planned/booked some courses.
• Went to Sunday walking markets, got rained on, went back to hotel, back out, bought stuff & ate vendor food. :)
• witnessed first national anthem stop.
• came back to get some sleep before cooking class.

31/10

• up early for cooking class!
• cooking class was awesome! Very long day of eating, ended up being very full, didn’t even need dinner. :)
• coffee and ice cream did happen though.
• relaxed in the evening with a beer and some premier league.

1/11

• ELEPHANTS! Went to elephant nature park and spent the day feeding, washing, and interacting with the elephants. Absolutely amazing! Only got back to hotel @ 6pm. Totally knackered!
• Dinner at Huen Phen again, convenient. Then back to sleep our final night in Chiang Mai.

The elephant reserve that we went to was called ‘Elephant Nature Park’ and was aimed at educating visitors with regards to the cruelties the elephants had endured. All the elephants had been rescued, which meant that a lot of them were blind in at least one eye, or had limbs that had been cut off or blown off with landmines. We didn’t ride the elephants or get them to do tricks, but we were able to feed them a lot and wash them in the local river.

Pai

2/11

• Caught minibus from Chiang Mai -> Pai. Pick up in red bus-like. Thought at first this was minibus but only transport to station.
• minibus to Pai was bit cramped, great views, incredibly curvy! Minivan driver was mental, overtaking around corners, hammering it.
• arrived in Pai, called Run to pick us up, he told us to hire a motorbike! We ended up getting a scooter — best. thing. ever. After shaky start, got the hang.
• Went into town on scooter to Beer Cafe, then back to bungalows.

3/11

• spent day bombing around on scooter, saw waterfall, canyon, markets, awesome fun! Ate at Ban Jarong great food! Accidentally drove thru night markets.

Cave Lodge

4/11

• had to return scooter :( before catching the bus to Soppong. even more rough + ready than minivan.
• we got it to drop us off at Tham Lot where we thought it was a ‘short walk’ (from LP guide) but after an hour of walking we hadn’t got anywhere. Eventually caught a lift the rest of the way (4km!) to get to Cave Lodge.
• Got straight into it thanks to Dave, Sam + Adrian. went to Lod Cave for an hour, amazingly huge caverns; the guide kept pointing to formations + telling us what they look like.
• came back and drank with the other residents. then sleep :) (despite there having been a spider in our room)

5/11

• got up with the intention to go to village walk with Jack + Sarah — Sarah had a wee bit too much to drink. So took a while. We swapped rooms while we waited.
• Sarah ended up being too sick to do much so we signed up for a kayak tour w/4 American girls/women. Super fun! I was on my own + Lou was with the guide. Went through Lod cave plus rapids and over two dams. Awesome.
• At the end some local kids jumped all over our kayaks and tried to pull us away, v.cheeky.
• Back to the lodge, had some lunch and wished the manchester boys luck in their quest to climb and sleep in a huge fig tree near the exit to Lod cave. They had ordered a huge pizza to eat up there :)
• We waited + then convinced Adrian (really nice Perth guy who was into nature and caves) to go down to the exit to see the swifts’ nightly migration into the nests there. It was pretty spectacular, until we almost got brained by rocks falling from where Sam + Dave (the british tree lads) were climbing. Decided to head back shortly after that, but Adrian detoured us to Hair Cave.
• Hair Cave was a push in the dusk, neither Lou or I were really dressed for it (Lou spelunked in a skirt!). But was very cool once we got down there. Amazing formations, and no guide to push you. Eventually got back out with slipping + swearing and went back to cave lodge for a rare warm shower.

6/11

• Night before we got convinced by John to do the (2) caving experience — serious caving! he told us it was just a bit of crawling + some short climbs. We had to wait a little bit for Adrian + Brad to get back from Soppong after dropping Jack + Sarah off. A new couple joined up, Angus + Lucy, and we took off on the hour drive up to the drop point for the walk.
• We then walked down to the cave. That sentence is contained a punishing up and down trek over mud and making a path through dense undergrowth (this was the first time the tour had been run in over a year!). Lou + I had a fun time getting down the hill, in our completely gripless shoes. Fell over about six or seven times! Eventually got down to the cave. Trek inside was awesome. Some highlights:
• Bats! Really tiny ones as well.
• 20m crawl through water
• huge house centipedes
• amazing formations (sparkly! pure white, etc.)
• a banana tree, pale green, growing a couple of kms in the cave – from a seed, amazing.
• white fungus growing from every piece of wood in beautiful arcs.
• pure white slaters.
• A moment at the end of the trek where we turned off our headlamps – pitch blackness. Total except for two specks of light that appeared (luminescent) fungus? after a long time of eye adjustment.
• 2 hours 20 there, 1 hour or so back.
• Oh, and 2x snakes!
• We then trekked all the way back up, incredibly sore, and took the van back up. Happy, tired, in desperate need of a shower :)
• Saw a man with blood streaming into a tin cup, and Adrian found a straw hand.
• Showered and drank with the other peeps until we went to bed!

7/11

• Bit of a relaxing day, we got up late, did some washing (including our shoes, which took some scrubbing).
• Lou went for a massage while I snoozed; when I woke up I discovered she had locked me in! Oh well, more snoozing :)
• When she came back she convinced us to go for a trek to ‘Tortoise Cave’. I groaned a bit (a lot).
• A black limpy dog accompanied us the entire way, going ahead + then looking back to see if we were coming – our own personal guide dog. We later learned that he had done the same to the earlier group (Adrian, Sam + Dave). What a trooper!
• To get to the cave we had to pass through a family’s front yard, only the lady was home but she was very friendly and lead us through her fields – pointed out the fact she had cleared the whole field in 2 days by herself. Crazy.
• The cave itself was hard to get into + it was getting dark so we took some photos and trudged back out. Lou squee’d at the little piglets in their pen and the lady came out and gave us a papaya + a cucumber (huge!) to take with us. We thanked her profusely + went back to the lodge. The dog stopped at the same place it had started following us, presumably to guide another farang :)
• We had dinner (Nung cut us up the fruit and cucumber, shan eat it with salt) and crashed early, with an offer from Angus and Lucy to give us a ride to Mae Hong Son in the morning.

Mae Hong Son

8/11

• We had breakfast, packed + left Cave Lodge in a rush — Angus + Lucy had promised a ride to Sam + Dave as well, + they needed to be there by 10AM! S, D + I all crammed into the back of the pickup while Angus gunned it into town, Thai style! (i.e. never ever take your foot off the accelerator). We dropped off S + D, said our goodbyes, and careened off on a route that would take us up to the Myanmar border before down to Mae Hong Son.
• The constant twists and turns of the drive made me feel a bit sick, and by the time we got to Mae Aw (a Chinese village on the Thai side of the Myanmar border – go figure) I was feeling pretty dreadful. Lou was totally fine thankfully – I don’t hink Angus or Lucy would have appreciated two carsick travellers. At Mae Aw we had samples of tea, and a totally Farang can of coke for me that settled my stomach a bit.
• There was a wooden, handpowered ferris wheel (seriously) that Angus and I cranked for the two girls plus three other Thai tourists that were there (bit harder getting the westerners up :P)
• After that effort we wound down to a waterfall, lingering for a while to enjoy it before heading towards a long-neck Karen village. It was a bit weird, and I felt a predictable Westerner guilt for taking their photo etc. Still we bout a bunch of stuff :/
• Oh! Before we got to the village we got stuck due to the 2WD going down a shelf of rocks near a river. Thankfully a few locals showed up and we managed to lift the chasis up and jam some rocks under the tires so they had some grip, although as it lurched forward the rocks fired out and smashed my shin, giving me a lovely cut + bruise. :(
• Anyway, after the village we went down more twisty roads and ended up in Mae Hong Son where A+ L dropped us off after some lunch. We checked in, organised ourselves, then went to the lake to see the markets, where we caught up with A + L and also Alana and Sam (different Sam who went on caving tour with us), 2 Canadian Cave Lodgers. We all had drinks then Pad Thai, then said our goodbyes + went to bed.

9/11

• Bit of a rest day planned, as we were exhausted by the pace of the previous days. Still, we hired a scooter and decided to head south Pha Bong Hot Springs. After going back and forth through Pha Bong, we gave up looking and decided to keep going south as it was a great day for riding. Eventually we stopped for lunch @ a road residence/restaurant where the owner chatted to us and asked us to sign his guestbook (Lou drew koalas, kangaroo + a happy Australia). He advised us of some amazing sunflower fields further on, but said it was up steep hills. The confidence in our scooter was low — its brakes barely worked — so we decided to head back. We still had a couple of hairy moments ( I shaved an inch or so off my thongs using them as rubber brake pads) but got back to town safely.
• We used the arvo to rest up and went up to the temple for some photos before lazing at the hotel + booking Phuket accommodation.
• The night was similarly lazy, with us going to the night market + eating and drinking while watching some preliminary lanterns go up. The Chang is starting to affect us a bit; even after just one King Brown of 6.4% mix we’re hit hard.

10/11

• Scooter ride
• Festival
• Mae Hong Son
• Lanterns, boats, fireworks, Muay Thai, beauty pageant

The festival mentioned here was Loi Krathong, which involves people getting little floating decorations with candles and incense and letting them go onto the lake. There is also a simultaneous festival known as Yi Peng where lanterns are released into the sky. You can read more at the wiki, but for us it was a pretty amazing night. There were lights floating all over the lake, lights heading into the sky at regular intervals, and fireworks and flames going off constantly. Also, there was the rather bizarre combination of a beauty pageant going on right next to a Muay Thai boxing ring. Something for everyone, I guess.

Phuket

11/11 + 12/11

• Gross
• Stayed mainly in hotel + read
• Dino Park minigolf
• Got out of there fast

Phuket is just…I dunno. I guess if you like staying in those kinds of massive hotels, but Lou and I were just horrified by the commercialism and the–well, is ‘rape’ too strong a word? Let’s go with ‘abuse’ then. The abuse of the coastline with deckchairs as far as the eye could see. That and we felt more harassed here than we had in weeks up North. Do not recommend.

Ko Lanta

13/11

• Transit to Ko Lanta via 4 hr stop in Phi Phi. Also kind of gross but found spots to sit + enjoy a bit of quiet.
• Organised diving when got to Baan Phu Lae — much better, way less people on the beach :D

14/11 — 18/11

• Diving!!! Koh Ha. Corinna/Natalie @ Scubafish
• Transit to Krabi/Rai Leh to hopefully meet up with Angus + Lucy on their boat! And do some rock climbing.

It seems a lot to skip over with just the phrase ‘Diving!!!’, but we completed our PADI 4-day Open Water Scuba Diving course while in Ko Lanta. It was pretty full-on, with DVD sessions followed by pool instruction, before having two separate days out under the open water. Lou and I both got a wee bit seasick on the first day, which lead to Lou getting slightly panicky before she went under, but other than that it was fine. We dived off the coast at Ko Ha, which has a lagoon perfect for viewing coral and fish. We ended up seeing some fairly rare specimens of Sea Moths; tiny, fragile looking ground dwelling fish. As well as hundreds of other species of tropical fish in all their dazzling colour. Well worth the cost, and now we have another activity that we can enjoy back on the Aussie coast.

Rai Leh

19/11

• Rai Leh is incredibly hot + humid — we slept in after a bucket + chang night at Chillout Bar and ended up finishing breakfast just in time for the mid-morning heat. Accordingly our goals for the day were modest: find an ATM + Internet cafe. To do that we walked down Ton Sai beach, though we had to stop once to refresh ourselves with lassies and shakes and a heavenly breeze. We decided to go back to our room to get our bathers on so that the water could cool us when we made it to Rai Leh West beach.
• Round two saw us out in the middle of the day, and we felt it. The sand glowed with heat and the humidity was near 100% with no breeze forthcoming. We had wasted the low tide, so rather than climbing around the chunk of rock that separates Ton Sai from Rai Leh West we were pointed up the ‘jungle route’ by some helpful Americans. And a jungle it was, steep and steamy, and slippery in thongs. Eventually we made it down, found a spot of shade and had a swim to cool off.
• While we sat and air dried, we watched two dogs have a nasty fight (requiring beating with shore detritus to break them up) and a big ghost crab digging his hole — cute!
• After our swim we found a computer and were happy to find A + L on their way — hoping to see them tomorrow. Lunch and some new sunnies for me, and then the trek back to our hotel. A couple of hours of reading, punctuated by showers to cool off, and now it’s time for dinner and drinks :)

20/11

• Woke to msgs from A + L, saying they were in the Ko Hong region + we should come out. LP had no mention of the place so we went down to the long tails and asked how much it would be — 3500 baht each! Way too expensive, so we msg’d A+L and went with our original plan — lunch and visiting princess cave on Rai Leh East.
• After getting guidance from two German couples, we made it through to the East, and wandered in the rough direction of a restaurant near the cave. However, before we could find it amongst the developed mangrove front, the heavens opened and we got mighty soaked. The only option was to duck in a nearby restaurant and commiserate with some ultra-farang burgers.
• Eventually the rain stopped and we decided to have another crack at finding the cave. Did finally find the road that lead up to it and trekked there, to find a really nice, very large cave. It wasn’t as well preserved as those we saw @ cave lodge — not as pristine, with stalactites snapped off and walkways installed. But still pretty cool.
• Spent the next couple of hours meandering back to our hotel, stopping for a shake when the rain came down too hard, then scrambling over the muddy jungle route back to the room.
• Ended up back at the Chillout Bar, drinking White Russians and listening to the local acoustic band. Good night to finish off our time in Tonsai :)

Trang

21/11

photo credit: tochis

This is a

pre-emptive farewell as I’ll be away for four weeks starting Friday, tramping around Thailand with Louise. You may have heard about the floods over there that have displaced over 2.5 million people, although there’s an equal chance that you haven’t given the media’s obsession with the Queen, CHOGM, and sharks at the moment. We’ve had to skip Bangkok in our plans for the moment, heading North to escape the encroaching waters that are reported to be the worst in 50 years. Not exactly the environment we were looking to land ourselves in, but there’s a most to be made.

So the toothsoup will stagnate for the next month or so, but I promise I’ll be back with lots of amazing photos and tales to tell once I return. Wish us luck and solid land.

photo credit: Patrick Hoesly

Yesterday, I had

the singular pleasure of reading a book in its entirety, start to finish. That book, Cian will be happy to note, was Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett. It was the first time in many, many years that I’ve been able to nom down a novel in one sitting. The act itself evoked memories of when I was a kid and Mum had driven us up to the library to borrow a big bagful of books. We’d come back and be eager — really, terribly eager — to sit down and read the stash of novels we’d nabbed. Made me want to join up at a library again (and also reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s excellent short story “Exchange“).

But apart from memories, the thing that really struck me was that of my much deeper emotional involvement with the story. Now I admit that I’m already very familiar with Pratchett’s work, having been a fan since I was only a wee little dude reading Truckers and Diggers and Wings. But taking that into account, I think it was the actual process of sitting down and reading for a long period of time that allowed me to strip off the various critical reading hats and really just read to be entertained.

And it’s reading as entertainment that I would also like to get back into. I appreciate that (like the ‘whole writing as fun’ thing that I mentioned a couple of posts ago) it’s wishful thinking to want to go back to my original, untainted-by-critical-knowledge self, but I also think that I sometimes approach reading books like a scoring board. To be ticked off when I finish them and to be analysed while I read them. It was really nice to forget that for a while and just get caught up in the adventures of Polly and her crew. I’m going to try and recapture that feeling in the future.

Anyway, apologies for yet another blog post about reassessing the way I do this whole writing and reading thing. In less esoteric news, I had a wonderful time yesterday recording a podcast for the lovely JOMADdogs, which will be up sometime soon (earlier than some other podcasts I’ve done, eh Tim? :P). I also finally go home tomorrow, after spending 5 weeks away from Perth. I honestly can’t wait.

photo credit: Mourner

This week, I’ve

had nothing to do. Nothing! I finished my Cosmos internship last Friday*, flying out to Albury to visit my Uncle and Aunt at their farm. They have around fourteen horses, beautiful creatures, and I accompanied my Aunt as she took one of the pacers around to a trainer’s place to be worked. I hung out with the trainer’s three ancient dogs while they saddled the horses and ran them around the sandy track. After we dropped the horses back off, we travelled around the paddocks, stopping off to chase a calf back to the right field before travelling up to the top hill to get a good view. I may have sneezed several thousand times, but it was worth it; it’s truly beautiful country.

Caught up with my other Aunt over coffee before heading out for nine holes of golf. My driving game was absolutely horrendous, but I had a couple of nice short set-up shots.  Had dinner and a chat with my Uncle, then watched the Wales vs. France rugby game. I haven’t really ever followed rugby, but now that I know some of the basic rules of play it’s fairly enjoyable to watch. Plus, y’know, it’s a field of green with a small white object being moved around. I’m pretty much genetically obliged to follow it with an intensity completely independent of any actual interest in the game it represents. Anyway, it was an absolutely lovely time, and I came away a lot more relaxed than I went in.

So now I’m in Melbourne, enjoying the fine company of Mark and his lovely fiancée Monique. They are. Amazing. Cooks. And I’m sleeping in a double bed for the first time since leaving Perth (albeit on the ground, but honest-to-snoozeness I do not even. It’s heavenly). Melbourne is just as great as I remembered (the coffee, oh my the coffee), though I haven’t gotten out as much as I might’ve if I’d come straight here. As it stands I’m quite content to spend most of the day snoozing and having the occasional wander down the streets.

Louise and I surpassed our six year anniversary yesterday. Apparently this is supposed to be celebrated by candy and iron. The former is kind of impractical to send through the post, and the latter, well. Iron? Really? Anyway, she’ll just have to be happy with the little gift I picked out in Sydney. All of which is besides the point, that point being that she is the best ever and I’m glad she’s put up with me for this long. Our next year is going to be amazing, I’m sure of it.

And with that, it’s time to enjoy some kind of unbelievably delicious dessert that Mon is currently putting together in the kitchen and kick back with a cider. You may start your envy…now.

—

*I’ve listed the articles that appeared at COSMOS online news on my Articles page. I’ll have a few things in the next magazine as well! :D

photo credit: s myer

[Pre(r)amble: This post is pretty much all over the place. I've tried to distil the main points/questions as I go along, but it's not exactly a complete, ordered thought process. Consider yourself warned. ;)]

I have been

writing now for very nearly seven years. The real figure is obviously a lot longer than that–my Mum’s carefully maintained boxes would testify to support this fact–but I’ve been using writing as my main form of creative expression for seven years. In that time I’ve had some hits with publications and more than enough misses to counterbalance them. I’ve met people whose writing I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving, and people whom I consider to be great friends even though I have never met them.

Bloody hell, so far this is reading like a eulogy. Let me start again.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my writing. More specifically I’ve been thinking about my writing in the context of my main pursuit, that of science. As has been pointed out by me elsewhere, I’ve just finished my PhD in chemistry, and so the time has come (the Walrus said) to talk of many things. Or at least think about them obsessively until I feel obliged to externalise them in a blog post.
The things I’ve been thinking about are things like where my writing will fit in my future career, how I’m going to balance work and life and writing, whether I want to continue to take writing ‘seriously’ or relax my expectations of myself; y’know, all that fun stuff. So I guess that’s what this blog post is going to be about: thinking about and planning how I might continue my hobby without killing myself doing it.

The fun factor

Hobbies are meant to be fun. Challenging, but fun. I think it is safe to say that following the path to becoming a respected, known writer in Australia doesn’t always tick those boxes. And the main offender is the submission cycle. I joked to a friend the other day that we had to start a support group for people who were submitting just to stop us all from getting too depressed (The Subcommittee, a Facebook group that I reckon is the best thing to come out of my writing this year). There’s the fretting over drafts, the imagining of intended audiences, the guessing at when a rejection email will come back. Of course there are good aspects as well, the most noteable of which is the coveted acceptance.

But for a person whose career isn’t determined from his publication record (well, at least not his literary one–scientific publication is another matter entirely), why should I go through that stress? Why should I be placing that pressure on myself? I’ve found that over the last couple of years, writing has stopped being about fun and play and more like work. I want to change that. Which I think is a nice place to wrap this part up and pop out my first conclusion:

1) I want writing to be fun again. Or if not fun, exactly, then at least for it not to feel like work.

Audience

Okay, so I want writing to be fun. But I also want my writing to be read. Because as much as I love playing with myself (ahem–purely in a metaphorical sense), I get a lot out of interacting with readers and other writers. But then I have to ask myself: who is my audience, and how does that audience change the way I write? Well, I want to get my stories out there and read by people whose opinions I respect. In other words, those people whom I have read and whose work I admire, or whom I have met and think are ace, or both! And I’m not sure that submitting to literary journals really does that. Sure, I might nab a few new readers; not a bad outcome. But do I really care if Jane or John Critic think my story is cool? Not really. It’s flattering, for sure, but on the other hand if someone I knew and was into came up to me and told me they liked my work, I’d be over the fucking moon! So. Second conclusion:

2) Having my contemporaries (and more specifically, people who I know and respect) reading and enjoying my work is more important to me than praise from an unknown.

Distribution

Speaking of journals has reminded me of another line of thinking, concerning their readership and their reach. The main question being how many of my contemporaries read literary journals? For at least the last year or two, I am the only person I know who subscribes to Meanjin. I have also heard through the grapevine of the absolutely dismal figures for subscribers to both the Westerly and, to a certain extent given its age, the Southerly. I dare say those figures don’t even compare on the same scale to the numbers of people that read the online components of literary journals (in the sense that the online compenents probably get hundreds of visitors per day). In the absence of hard statistical data, I’m unable to make any concrete assertions, but if we are evaluating distribution purely on the number of people that read your work, then online means must be considered suprior. Similarly they are more advantageous in the terms of my second conclusion, in that I can guarantee that more of my contemporaries are reading thins online than they are in journals that they subscribe to. Of course, there is always the factor of quality assurance in Australian literary journals. Australian journals produce absolutely top notch stuff in both design and content. Every single journal I subscribe to (of which there are many) is a joy to read. But couched in the context of a non-professional writer who just wants to share his stories, there isn’t much to persuade me against posting stories on Facebook rather than submitting them to a journal.

I’ve been dabbling in online distribution in various forms for quite a while now. And by ‘online distribution’, I mean posting my writing on an art website (deviantART) and maintaining this here blog. Not the most professional of options, but then that kind of fits with the theme of this post. Nevertheless, there’s some surprising statistics to be had from looking at it. On the deviantART side of things, I’ve accumulated a bunch of friends and followers who read and comment on my work, and have influenced me in a profoundly positive way. The pieces that have been featured as a ‘daily deviation’ (a daily showcase of artwork and writing that community volunteers think is worth featuring) have accrued almost 26,000 views between them. While this doesn’t mean that 26,000 people have read things that I have written–only around 800 of those actually responded with a comment–it is still a heck of a lot of people to be looking, however briefly, at my writing.

(I should hastily note at this stage that I am not looking to burn bridges. It’s highly likely that I will continue to submit stories and articles to journals for publication, but I won’t be putting pressure on myself to do so. Editors please don’t hate me.)

What does all that mean? In a sentence:

3) I’m equally keen on seeing my work in print or digital, but seeming as though digital has already resulted in my stories being read by a bunch of people, I’m leaning that way as a first destination.

Conclusions

Alright, so after all that, maybe I can come to some kind of conclusion as to what might be the shape of future writerly self. Now what the heck were my points again? Oh right:

1) I want writing to be fun again. Or if not fun, exactly, then at least for it not to feel like work.

2) Having my contemporaries (and more specifically, people who I know and respect) reading and enjoying my work is more important to me than praise from an unknown.

3) I’m equally keen on seeing my work in print or digital, but seeming as though digital has already resulted in my stories being read by a bunch of people, I’m leaning that way as a first destination.

So what does the combination of these point towards in terms of what I’ll be doing with my writing in the future? Here I think I’ll switch to bullets, since they’re easier to think in:

• Maintain a formal distribution space for stories that I think are publication quality. This could be a well-designed website, or choosing a platform such as Smashwords or Amazon Singles to put together some 99c wonderpackages.
• Share these stories with friends and followers via deviantART and places like Twitter. Given my glacial writing pace, I don’t think there’s any risk of spamming people.
• Continue to send some stories off to more traditional markets such as journals and competitions when I feel that they fit, but don’t put any pressure on myself to accumulate publication credits.

Keep in mind that this should all be considered with the fact that I hope to start a career in science research in the new year. This will effectively (discounting the four mind-numbing months at my temp job) be the first time I work a full-time 9-5 job. So time will become even more of a premium, and I want to be ready for that. I don’t want to burn myself out and end up hating writing. I also don’t want to neglect the other important things in my life (i.e. Louise, friends, exercise, etc.). But as you can see, devoting this amount of time to roundabout thinking to how I’m going to make sure I don’t kill my writing hobby shows how much it means to me. I think that for folks such as myself who are looking to keep up a creative output while working, it’s important to have some kind of idea about how to go about it.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far thanks for sticking it through. If you had any comments with regards to anything I’ve said here I’d love to hear it. I’m still a little up in the air, so any advice would be really appreciated.

photo credit: doug88888

I’m sitting in

a cafe on Newcastle’s Hunter St., listening to a symphony of bakehouse clatter and the bubble of excited voices as they discuss performances, panels, and workshops. It’s absolutely hammering it outside, but I’m dry and warm and filled with delicious satay chicken pie, and more than a few cups of coffee.

The train ride here was fairly uneventful; two and a bit hours of gorgeous landscapes scored by a group of Indian pensioners singing the songs of their country. Not quite as romantic as it sounds, and I tended towards bumping up the volume on my music whenever they reached a particularly boisterous chorus. But harmless, certainly.

When I first arrived in Newcastle, I wandered the suburbs near the hostel that Sam Twyford-Moore had kindly agreed to put me up in. I should take the time out now to give my sincere, heartfelt thanks to Sam, who has been the perfect host through Sydney’s writing community. Ever since first inviting me to the writing centre at which he works, he has ensured I felt at home and introduced me to the vibrant group of writers and creators here that are producing amazing stuff. Thanks Sam.

We checked in at the hostel and Alex–a lovely girl who is working on an absolutely fascinating account of trying to reconcile a sword her grandfather found in WW2 with its owner–gave Sam, Jacqui, Jess, and I a lift out to the heart of Newcastle where TiNA was/is being held. Picked up a guide, grabbed a coffee and then went off to meet up with Amber and part of the Voiceworks crew (Brad, Beth(?), Christie(?)). Was really good to finally meet Amber, given we’ve known each other through deviantART for well over four years now. Meeting people I knew from the Internet was a constant theme throughout the day, as I caught up with various Twitter peeps (JoJo, madiecrofts, jodiekinnersley, booktuner, etc.) and found them all to be kind and inviting and lovely (and sometimes incredibly enthusiastic). The Voiceworks peeps were running a great workshop about editing your own work, and asked us to produce a story or poem or something by censoring out words in a newspaper article. Mine ended up transforming an article about the effect of India’s burgeoning skilled worker set resulting in a greater number of luxury items being bought for households, into a small fiction about dicks:

“India plays with Margaret on the concrete floor. Daniela is happily unaware of India’s massive bulge, the largest in the world. India’s rising, he earns five times what his father does, but it feels like less, because everything costs more. Toys scatter the floor. India’s asking which of them they own. ’40-inch like mine, 10 neighbours would come to your house to watch it.’ He will limit himself to two children.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a news story about capitalism could very easily be converted into soft erotica. Thankfully I didn’t have to read it out. The editorial went on to discuss the main mistakes made in self-editing, how to distance yourself from your work, and all sorts of other useful stuff. Unfortunately I had to leave a bit early to catch a panel by Sam on the Sydney writing scene. That one was really interesting, with a varied panel discussing where they have come from and how the interpret the Sydney creative scene which (it was said) has really begun to bloom in the last five years. The discussion ranged widely, from the Sydney vs. Melbourne rivalry (being from Perth, I was an enthusiastic neutral), to writing from place, to philanthropy, to the concept of embracing all of Australian writing in one big happy community. I was a little bit absent from much of the discussion about writing from place, given that the majority of my fiction doesn’t occur in a specific geography. The issue of place seems to be rather prominent in Australian fiction, and I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s due to the Miles Franklin and that idea of the ‘unique Australian voice’. In any case, it was very well moderated by Sam, and a lot of the questions were answered at length and with a lot of consideration given to the nuance inherent in the dynamics of creative communities.

After that, we went back to the TiNA headquarters for drinks, and pretty much stayed there until the Big Top party. I was initially bamboozled at the bar by my insistence on ordering pints rather than schooners, but I got the hang of it eventually. All went really well and I had a blast meeting people like Ronnie (Scott, who produces The Lifted Brow and shares my enthusiasm for China Mieville), Nicci who I chatted to extensively about books and music (she runs The Booktuner, which is a great mashup initiative of matching album soundtracks to books–in my experience she’s spot on every single time), Pip Smith (who runs Penguin Plays Rough), and a whole bunch of other people (Ben, Connor, Luke, Rebecca, Maddie, Rosie, Brad, Amber, Jodie, etc. etc. etc.) who ate, drank, and were very, very merry.

I ended up leaving a bit early, exhausted as I was by two weeks of consistently interruptive dorm-mates at the hostel. The room that Sam had booked me into had a double bed, and I luxuriated in the feeling of crashing drunkenly into a bed that was actually big enough for me, falling blissfully asleep. Until, that is, I woke up at four in the morning to discover that my window had been open, and it had absolutely hosed it down during the night. Needless to say, when we left the next morning, I was careful to inform the manager of absolutely nothing, pocketing my $20 key deposit without so much as a chipper warning that she may want to look at the curtains. I am a terrible person.

Jacqui and I got out into the depressing weather that had rolled in overnight and traipsed down to catch the bus into town. We then proceeded to wander around a bit before finding a bakery for breakfast. Can’t recommend the Newcastle Bakehouse enough; perfectly cooked bacon, soft eggs, rough-cut mushrooms, and fresh-baked bread. I was in heaven.

The zine fair was up next, and while it took us far longer than is really acceptable to find it (in a multi-storey carpark up the steepest bloody hill in Newcastle), the trek was worth it. Awesome books and zines lined every stall. I may or may not have burned through pretty much all the cash in my wallet buying zines from the dotdotdash folk and grabbing the very lovely Penguin Plays Rough collection. After tagging in for Voiceworks and helping sell a couple of issues, and having a coffee and an excellent chat with ex-dotdotdasher Steph, I came down here.

And now I’m about to go and see a discussion on story in video games, before catching the long train back to Sydney. It’s been a really fantastic festival, both for the panels (although they have all been great) but more to see the enthusiasm and up-for-it, inclusive attitude that everyone involved possessed. I never felt like I was on the outside looking in to a clique, which was something I was afraid might happen. But from the first cup of coffee to the last pint schooner of beer, it was a blast. So a final thank you to all those I spoke with, and to the organisers of TiNA for a great event.

List of TiNA Twitterfolk (feel free to comment with more):

@samtwyfordmoore @jacquident @maddie_crofts @jojojakob @velvetbrownfox @RosannaBeatrice @rebeccagiggs @WritesFiona @JodieKinnersley @theliftedbrow @booktuner

photo credit: c@rljones

The end of

the first week of my internship at COSMOS, and I’m feeling pretty good! I’ve had two articles go up on the COSMOS website–one on HIV and the other on the CERN faster-than-light thingo–and I’ve learned a lot about how an editorial team operates. It’s an interesting ecosystem of writing stories, scouting reports, outreach to schools and business, and design. Everyone kind of pitches in on everything, and there’s often overlap between writers when getting interviews and such. Like I said, it’s an ecosystem; very natural.

Outside of the office, I’ve been reading quite a bit. I finally got around to reading The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (or, ‘bag a loopy’ as it sounds in my head). I enjoyed it, it’s obvious why it won a bunch of awards. It’s that kind of novel, like China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, which divides its time between multiple protagonsits, each with their own political and personal motivations. They’re all very well-realised, and the backdrop of a post-energy crisis Thailand is as novel as a different planet.Recommended if you’re after satisfying a sci-fi craving. EDIT: I’ve since had multiple conversations with others who have read this, and I think there are definitely flaws in the book (some weak characters, and a certain amount of predictability). I still think it’s worth reading as a result of the unique Asian world it presents, but it’s certainly not as good as Mieville.

I moved off that and into J.G. Ballard’s Crash. I’ve been meaning to read more of Ballard ever since being impressed by Hello, America. But woah, pretty different works. I’m enjoying it, it’s probably the closest to erotica I’ve ever read, so it’s certainly a new experience. If I had to sum it up in five words or less, they’d probably be ‘chromium, pubis, penis, mucus, semen’. But it seems to be a bit more than just an erotic novel, exploring the relationship we have with our industrial evolution. I think once I’m done with it I’ll pick up something slightly less uncomfortable to read on a bus.

Despite my vows to stay clear of video games while I’m over here, I may or may not have found a copy of Chrono Trigger staring at me with puppy eyes. Goddamnit, technological luxury. At least it makes for something different to do in my dorm. Alrighty, back to trying to get some writing done while I have a spare day.

photo credit: _Max-B

At the risk

of this blog becoming primarily concerned with my major life changes, I have some more awesome news to announce. I passed my thesis! I managed to scrape in with only minor corrections to be made, and some really nice comments from the examiners regarding the overall structure and presentation. I’m really glad of the fact that it’s only minor corrections, as that means that I don’t have to send the thesis out to the examiners again. Instead, I’m able to just do what they suggest and hand it in. I think the news is taking its time to sink into the date-entry-addled quagmire that is my brain at the moment. A small favour to ask of people that read this blog: if you happen upon me standing in the middle of the street, smiling inanely at the sky, could you give Lou a call and get her to come pick me up? I’ll keep her number in my front pocket. Thanks.

At the same time as getting that awesome piece of news, everything else continues to happen at the usual breakneck pace that comes with trying to finalise things before a long period of absence. Our rental agency finally got its act together and let us know that it’s cool for Lou’s sister and her peeps to take over the lease when Louise and I move out. So that’s a relief that I won’t be leaving them in the lurch when I go to Sydney. And Sydney! I’ve decided to go with a hostel for the first two weeks, and hopefully I can leech a couple of nights of rooms/couches off people at the magazine to sustain me for the rest of the time there. A few friends of mine have also scouted around for me and given some cautious nods of one-night sleepovers, contingent on me not being, I dunno, a murderer. For the record: I’m not a murderer.

…There really is no way of saying that–even over the internet–that doesn’t make you sound like you are actually a murderer, is there? Anyway, hopefully I can knit together a tattered quilt of nightly stays* so I have a bit more cash going into Thailand andohmyGEEZELEPHANTS. I WANT TO MEET SOME ELEPHANTS. Seriously. Cheap beer and beaches can go hang, I really want to meet an elephant while I’m over there, all thanks to Lou’s friend Pam who has totally psyched them up for us. But! Elephants will have to wait until I’ve worked my arse off at COSMOS (the #1 science magazine [hi Cian]) for the five weeks I’m there.

Alright! I think that’s about everything. Thesis, internship, Thailand. Oh! Actually, I think I’m allowed to say that I am going to have a piece of mine appear in the ‘Gambit’ issue of dotdotdash magazine, available in December, I believe. I’ll post links up when the release happens. Okay, definitely time for soup and then packing up all my books into boxes for tranport to my convenient maternal storage unit. Stay safe all! (:

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*That knitting-related metaphor goes directly out to Sheralynn, who hopefully still reads this blog. Hi Sheralynn, I’m done now!

photo credit: jared

It’s been a

while since I posted a proper post here, having gotten caught up with the thrill of uploading my jabbering mug onto the intertubes. However, if I’m going to keep calling this a blog, I need to keep up with the writing aspect or else risk losing my very limited ‘net cred altogether. In my defense, not a whole lot has been happening lately, so there hasn’t been too much to report on. The jury of two is still out on the assessment of my thesis; a fact that, astonishingly, fails to dumbfound or enrage me. I guess I’ve resigned myself to a lengthy trial, although the preoccupation with my temporary occupation at Synergy has contributed a great deal to the ease with which I have found myself forgetting exactly what it was I used to do with all those fairly leisurely hours I used to enjoy.

Anyway, that’s not news (in fact, I already wrote about it at length a couple of entries ago). What is news is that I have secured an (unpaid) internship at the Australian science magazine COSMOS.

*ahem* If I may? SQQQQQQQQQQQUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I’ll be flying to Sydney on the 17th of September, and spending 5 weeks learning the tools and tricks of the science journalism trade. I think if I had to name my top five dream jobs, writing for a science magazine would be right up the top there, so I’m hoping I can work hard and make a good impression. It’s a pretty hectic time for me, as while I’m over there I’ll be living on savings, but when I get back I’ll be hopping on a flight to Thailand for a holiday that Louise and I have been planning and looking forward to for the last six months. So I need to save as much as I possibly can, move out of my rental, and secure cheap accommodation while I’m in Sydney in order to make sure I have enough money to survive. Oh well, better get used to the taste of noodles.

In other news, I have been deaf in my left ear for the past week, as a result of wax build-up. Bet you wanted to know about that, huh? I am also, as of this morning, coming down with a cold. So it’s not exactly a wondrous time to be my head at the moment. I’ve been to a nurse practitioner for the ear thing, but two lots of syringing haven’t done much good yet, and I’m really getting sick of the sound of my own voice.

I think that’s about it. Work, internship, and a stupid ear. Huzzah! Now to go see if the chemist has some wondrous solution that can cure me.

Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue, recommended to me by Katrine as a response to the very first vlog. As you’ll find out if you watch, I really enjoyed it! I also give a round-up of some collections I’ve read, including my final opinion on Bob Franklin’s Under Stones. Anyway, hope you enjoy this episode. And if you’ve read any of the stuff I’m reading, or if you have any more recommendations based on what you think I might like, let me know in the comments!

Books reviewed in this episode:

Bob Franklin’s Under Stones

Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Essays 2010

McSweeney’s The Better of McSweeney’s, Vol. 2

Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch

that since videos are kind of fun and different to writing out everything, and I don’t need to further my rapidly developing RSI to do it, I’d keep them up. And because a video blog of reviews of books is the only thing my video game-addled brain could think of*, I’m going with that. Really though, reviews are something I’d like to do more of, as they encourage me to engage more with books so I don’t come off as a bland twat ‘on camera’. The first book I’ll be review is one called JPod by Douglas Coupland. As you’ll see, I was satisfied with the book overall, but when compared to the only other Coupland book I’ve read, Microserfs, it didn’t quite stack up. But you’ll have to watch to find out why**. (;

I’ve decided to go with YouTube for video services, as while I can’t really guarantee the speed of my server, I can guarantee that of Google’s. So below you’ll find the embedded video. No more dodgy default WordPress plug-in streaming, yay!

Anyway, hope you enjoy it, let me know of any thoughts in the comments. I’ve already had a recommendation for a future book thanks to Katrine; Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue. I’m ordering it off bookdep as we speak, and I’ll hopefully have it done in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’m having a crack at You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. It’s the first Eggers books I’ll have read, despite admiring him for his work with 826 Valencia and his fucking amazing TED talk. So I’ll let you know how that goes, but until then, here’s me talking about Douglas Coupland’s JPod.

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*Had a drinking night/LAN at tim’s place last night/this morning, and I’m not sure of which of five or six worlds I’m in right now.

**Yeap, I can already feel myself turning into one of those irritating tools that ask you to subscribe and thumbs-up things.

photo credit: coolmonfrere

In the last

seven weeks or so, since I started working my office job, I’ve noticed something rather curious about my trains of thought. University work life has the luxury of being tailored to the individual, i.e. you can come and go however you please, as long as you get the work done to the satisfaction of your supervisor (and, in some cases, you don’t even really need to do that). As such, there were long hours spent within the confines of my uni office where I was doing anything but work. I read an astonishingly broad array of news articles and essays, commented on blogs, and, the perennial favourite, completed a whole bunch of in-browser flash games. And that was fine and good: after all, you can’t write, edit, and review a thesis without allowing yourself downtime between milestones*.

However, in a corporate environment, downtime is a luxury, not a given. One half-hour lunch break and two short coffee breaks are all that are allowed, and the rest of the time you are expected to be at your desk, churning away at whatever it is you are being paid cash money to do. I’m aware that this isn’t a new concept, and I’m not here to bleat about how time-poor I am, or how cruel the corporate world is. I understand the economics, and I’m happy to offer my services in exchange for the weekly injection of fluid cash into the desiccated landscape of my savings account. The monotony of the work was not unexpected, but what I have been surprised by is my gas-like ability to fill the container within which I am placed. I have offered absolutely no resistance to the change in focus that moving from a uni-based, research position to an 8-4:30, full-time workplace brings. Yes, it’s early days–seven weeks is hardly long enough for the novelty to have worn off, given that this is the most significant change in lifestyle I’ve had in 8 years–but I’d have expected something. Some discomfort at the shift, some sign that this was not something I could easily keep doing for another 3 months after my contract finishes, then another 6 months after that, then another year, and so on, and so forth.

As a result of the smooth transition, I’m experiencing a narrowing of focus that is sometimes almost comical in nature. During our week of overtime, when the team was running 10 hour days plus Saturday shifts, I found myself almost bursting with unbridled joy when I discovered that a customer had correctly filled out their application forms. Emotions that I hadn’t experienced in my most proud moments of, say, getting published, or having particularly awesome sex, I was suddenly feeling on behalf of an anonymous stranger that had accomplished the momentous tasks of correctly filling in their name and ticking a box. This narrowing has me a little confused; should I be happy that I can focus so exclusively on the task placed in front of me, no matter how trivial? Or should I be worried that I am apparently unconcerned with what it is I do, as long as it’s something I can find some aspects with which I can engage?

Perhaps I’m looking into it a bit too much. After all, I’m not going to be doing this kind of mind-numbing work forever, and it has the advantage of being able to be told firmly to sit and stay at the sliding doors of the office. But I think I need to make sure I am doing something every day that isn’t just fuzz. My routine for most of the weeks has been to come home and play video games for the remainder of the night, cook dinner, and go to sleep. So perhaps more blogging, more writing, and more action that engages the manual shift in my brain’s transmission might be a good idea. Starting with this here blog post. (:

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* The possibility that my milestones may have been a tad bit too finely-spaced didn’t escape my notice, as my self-imposed, 6-month-long guilt-trip will attest.

more or less, since my last post. That’s probably the longest break I’ve had here for quite some time, and it’s mostly down to my new job, overtime, and all manner of crazy happenings. Anyway, to help relaunch the blog as a regular thing, I decided to record a video of myself yammering on about work and reading and writing. As I say in the video, I’d like to do more regular videos of book reviews and interviews, so if you have any ideas for future editions, let me know in the comments. And hey, while you’re there, let me know if you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed making it. (:

[stream flv=x:/www.toothsoup.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/toothsoup_vlog_1.flv img=x:/toothsoup.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/writer.png embed=true share=true width=320 height=240 bandwidth=med autostart=false /]

photo credit: Tiago Daniel

I have some

news to report: I have a temporary contract working for Synergy for the next three months. It won’t be using my degree, but it’s pretty much perfect timing. I’m due to hand in on June 1st, and the turnaround time for examination is cited at around 6-12 weeks, depending on the examiners. So hopefully by the time I’m finished at Synergy I’ll at least have my thesis back or possibly, fingers crossed, have it passed.

I’m playing with fire, taking a full-time job before I finish my thesis completely. It cuts the time I’m able to work on my thesis from around 12 hours a day to maybe 4 if I’m buzzed up on caffeine. So I’ll definitely need a lot of discipline (and a lot of the aforementioned caffeine) in order to make sure it gets handed in on time.  I’m aware of the pressure it’s going to place on me both personally and professionally (remember, I’m still participating in the Subdate Challenge–I have no idea when I’m going to find the time to write anything now), but it’s something that I absolutely need to do. I’ve been running on a zero dollar income since August last year. My savings account is completely empty now, having been only briefly perked up by my chemistry laboratories, and I can’t keep borrowing money from my family and Louise. So the cash injection will be incredibly welcome, and I can’t see the work being so heinous that I can’t handle it.

So that’s that. I guess this is a warning against the relative inactivity of this blog over the coming month or so. Or perhaps an explanation if I end up using it as a way to procrastinate further and clog your feeds with mindless news posts. (:

photo credit: estherase

The tumbleweeds crossing

the broad, white space of this blog are, I assure you, temporary installations. I’m entering a three week crunch time, die-or-do (the former preferable) period in my thesis’ existence. Couple that with the insistent pull of the page in order to fulfil my obligations to the Subdate Challenge and it’s clear why I don’t have a huge amount of time to blog. Except of course, to mention two news items, both  related to competitions and women.

The first is the announcement of a new competition rising over the Australian literary landscape. The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award has been announced over at Spineless Wonders, accompanied by an interview with the namesake of the competition herself, Carmel Bird. The competition will be judged by the inestimable Sophie Cunningham, most recently the former editor of Meanjin but also the editor/publisher of approximately three-point-six billion other things.  Submission details can be found here, but the main features are a tidy $500 for the winner, and $100 each for two runners-up, a piddling entry fee of $7, a maximum word count of 3,000 words, and a closing date of the 31st of July. Fairly standard rules apply, but be sure to check the submissions guide before sending in your piece!

Related to the competition by way of Ms. Cunningham is this piece in the New Yorker, regarding the formation of a new women-only prize in Australia in response to the under-representation of women in the Miles Franklin award. I’m all for more prizes, just as I’m all for anything that give more exposure to great writing, but I also think that Sarah Holland-Batt makes a good point when she says that:

“Really, these are two separate issues: whether there should be a new prize, which there probably should, and whether there is a problem with the Miles Franklin—and there is.”

To have no women on a short list that could quite easily have accommodated them has meant that this year, the implied gap between male and female writing of and in Australia has become glaringly obvious. And while I support the ‘positive discrimination’ that such a new prize would enforce, I would much rather see a concerted effort made to fix the underlying issues in the reluctance to hold up our female writers as being of literary merit. Obviously that’s much easier said than done; as with anything subjective and related to taste there are a million different tacks one can take to defend a selection that happens to favour male writers. But surely, with the quality of writing that we have coming from female writers in Australia there must be some basic selection bias that prevents them from being picked? In any case, I say bring on the ‘Australian Orange Prize’, I can’t wait to see the short list.

photo credit: Desmond Kavanagh

Been a while

since I updated so I thought I’d give a bit of a progress report. Probably the biggest news of late is the nailing down of a final submission date for my thesis: June 1st. That’s the absolute latest though, and I’d much prefer to be a few weeks earlier. My supervisor has now seen all of my chapters at least once (and a couple of them a whole lot more than once), so a lot of it is polishing and editing rather than new content. Also: references. I can’t believe past-me was so bad at keeping track of where statements were coming from. On that topic, there’s more than a few pieces of advice that would be useful to pass on to potential Ph.D. students, I might try and put something together sometime once I’m done and dusted. But at the very least, there’s light at the end of that particular tunnel.

The Subdate Challenge is progressing spectacularly well. The Facebook group, especially, is going gang busters, with the feed full of progress reports, research requests, and at least one or two submissions having been fired off. And that’s after only a week and a bit! If you’re a writer who needs a bit of a push, feel free to join in any time, there’s more than enough support going around. I made some good headway on my milestones in the first week, but this week I’ve been lagging slightly. Thankfully I’ve now finished or uninstalled pretty much every game that’s on my computer, (I finally 100%’d Super Meat Boy! a few weeks ago; the pride in achieving that ranks up with my graduate degree) so that’s one distraction out of the way. Louise is away this week as well, so I feel as though I should use that time to really hammer the words out. Not that she prevents me from doing so ordinarily, but you can get, ahem, distracted very easily by your significant other.

Anyway. So that’s the two main things: writing and thesis. I’ve been dabbling some more in Buzzmachines , making beeps and boops. You can listen to some very amateurish attempts at sequencing at my Soundcloud account, here. I’m getting some help from the excellent community that surrounds Buzz, but I’m a long way off getting to the standard of wauterboi. I’m certainly enjoying the learning curve though. It’s a nice distraction, and it kind of compliments my writing in that I often leave half-complete loops going as background noise while I switch to getting a couple of paragraphs done. Anyway, it makes a nice change to think in chords and waveforms rather than metaphors and adjectives.

Alright, that’s enough of that. Back to work and combing through my .pdf collection to find where I’ve lifted statements and sentiments. Ah, the life of a disorganised student.

photo credit: ….Tim

After compiling that

submissions list the other day, I found myself in the middle of a very entertaining, and ultimately challenging, Twitter conversation with @LaurieSteed and @TiggyJohnson, whose Twitter usernames aren’t so obscure that you wouldn’t know they are writer/editor extraordinaires Laurie Steed and Tiggy Johnson. As a result, I have now been entered into a three-way challenge with Tiggy and Laurie, the aims of which are to submit five (5) pieces of writing to a variety of venues.

***UPDATE***

The Sub-date challenge (or the Subcommittee, as it has been re-dubbed) has grown so large and been so successful that a fair few of the members are a bit anxious about having their submission goals up here. The publishing industry is notoriously fickle, so on the off-chance that someone finds the organisation of a group intended to support and encourage submission of great literature to great literature journals, I’ve agreed to take them down.

photo credit: jef safi

A quick round-up of submission dates to various literature journals that some of you may be interested in. Keep in mind that most of these are either Australian residents only, or Australian residents are favoured. And in each case, make sure you read the submission guidelines carefully! There’s nothing worse than having a story thrown out for not having read the rules.

3rd of April: Voiceworks ‘Other’ Edition

For the under-25s out there, Voiceworks is looking for submission to their 85th issue, with the theme of ‘Other’. For inspiration, here’s an excerpt one of their famous theme blurbs for the issue:

Broke from the bed, membranous soup, hand-first. Unplugged beeping limbs from their sockets. Got a satellite out here, beside the solar panels, for coverage, for picking up signals from whatever leaves those crop circles. Cleaned my pale hide with organic matter. Ate locavore breakfast, checked paddocks on a pushbike, watched the community next door baptise a dark face – some noble savage – in the creek. Inevitable simulacra of difference, but familiar in that. Their children don’t learn from books, I’ve heard. News beamed through the web during evening yoga, there’s a new party on the rise: manifestos, black suits, clean fingernails. In the black of my bed, fell asleep fondling over another beast.

Voiceworks has been one of my favourite publications for a long time now. And it’s a great kick-start for any young writer. So get those submissions in!

29th of April: Griffith Review ‘Such Is Life’ Life Stories Edition

Despite the pop-cringe of the theme title, Griffith Review is a quality publication looking for the best memoirs, essays, and fiction exploring the way we relate and interact with each other:

Whatever you call it – memoir, personal essay, biography, literary journalism, life stories – there is a seemingly insatiable hunger for the stories of real people facing impossible odds, or dealing with the mundanity of life. Such is Life will showcase many such tales, and also explore the way these narratives help make sense of the world and enliven our understanding – thanks to detail and nuance, perspective and insight.

So if you think you have a unique outlook on life, or if you have a personal story you think is worth telling, get on it.

10th of May: Alan Marshall Short Story Award

This one will be judged by Fiona Capp, and features three sections to enter — ‘Open’, ‘Local’, and ‘Young’ sections for anyone, people in the Shire of Nillumbik, and writers between the ages of 14 and 19, respectively. You can read the submission conditions and read last year’s winners at the Nillumbik Shire web page.

27th of May: The Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Award

One of Dan‘s favourite contests, the KSP Speculative Fiction Award always attracts some great entries. Again, you can read the competition details and grab the entry form at the KSP Writing Centre website.

27th of June: DotDotDash ‘Gambit’ Issue

Perth’s own DotDotDash are looking for submissions to their 8th issue, with the theme of ‘Gambit’. Like Voiceworks, they accept themed and unthemed work alike, but your best bet is to interpret the theme in your own unique way and write some great work around it. Their latest issues have been of a really fantastic quality, and I sense ..- will definitely become a recognised force in the Australian literature journal scene over the next couple of years. So get in early and grab your bragging rights!

[Edit] 30th of June: Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

I knew I’d forget something. Thanks to Chris Flynn of Fly the Falcon who reminded me of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. You’d think I’d remember, given she has a building named after her at my university. Anyway, the ABR is looking for short stories up to 5,000 words, with prizes totalling $8,000, which is no small change for an Aussie literature competition. You can read the short-list and the winner from last year’s prize at the link.

[Edit] 1st of July: Black Inc. Best Australian Stories

Whoops, another one I missed that’s been brought to my attention by PW in the comments. Thanks PW! The Black Inc. Best Australian Stories (as well as Essays, and Poems, though I’m not focusing on those) is now open for the 2011 issue which will be edited by Cate Kennedy. You can obtain the details and get the address to send your story to at their website.

1st of July: Sleepers Almanac No. 7

The Sleepers Almanac has been a fixture in Australian short fiction for years now, providing some of the best and most innovative writing from both established and emerging writers (whatever ‘emerging’ even means any more). But for this issue, they have specifically stated that they are interested in unpublished, or little-published authors from around Australia. Early submissions are encouraged, and they have Twittered recently that they’d love to see longer and/or humorous and/or experimental fiction. There aren’t too many publications that would ask for all those things. What are you waiting for?

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That’s all for now, but remember that I do try and keep all these updated on my Australian Literary Journal Calendar. If you’re a Google user, you can even add the calendar to your own account and set reminders, etc. Good luck and happy submitting!

photo credit: Stuck in Customs

Sometimes it’s nice

to have a weekend where you release the pressure valve that controls creativity. For me, last weekend was one of those. Here is what I did that had nothing to do with writing:

• Knocked off work at 4:15pm Friday to go play nine holes of golf at Collier Park for $10. Bargain.
• Played best nine holes I have ever played (46, so on average a bogey every hole) and felt fucking amazing.
• Spent the night at home with Lou while she created some awesome new artwork (I’m going to try and get some pictures up here at some point, they’re great)
• Woke up late-ish Saturday, had breakfast, and then sat down to play some Battlefield 2: Bad Company 2 multiplayer.
• Stopped around three hours later for lunch. Briefly played some FIFA2010 on the XB360.
• Browsed reddit for an hour or so. Yeah, I’m a redditor. I lurk a lot.
• Went back to Super Meat Boy after raging last time I played it. Finally finished the Dark World version of Dr. Fetus’ Castle. I’m so close to 100%-ing that game it’s not even funny. That might be this week’s non-writing project.
• Went around to Shani’s place for an epic Pi(e) night, in late honour of it having been Pi Day a couple of weeks ago (14/3, according to the Yanks). Ate so much awesome pie I don’t even. Shani really ought to open up a restaurant some day, with Dino and Irene as co-owners. Espagnollincks? Crashed into a pie-induced coma when I got home.
• Sunday morning went down to investigate the South Perth Fiesta. I took some photos of the Gopher Muster, which was less like Mario Kart and more like, well, Gopher Kart. Time trials only, so no swinging of handbags to take down opponents. Met up with Dino and Irene a bit later on and, in the face of Irene going all girlie on the craft stalls, Dino and I decided to go golfing again.
• Played another nine holes at Whaleback, joined up with another couple of guys who were quite a bit better than us. Got a few tips about my swing though, so that was good. Shot a 51—one off my best at Whaleback–so that was a nice feeling as well.
• Got back home and Louise was still going at her art. She’s at about two-and-a-half out of three pictures for a triptych of line art. Seriously, it’s awesome. ‘Magnetic muscles’, was what she referred to it as. Definitely got to get some pictures up somewhere.
• Both Louise’s Mum and my Mum arrived for tea at roughly the same time. First time they’ve seen each other in a year (or two?). Felt slightly awkward, but caught up on all the news.
• Watched both The Prestige (awesome) and The Illusionist (not so awesome) while Louise cooked up a kangaroo mini-roast with peas and mashed sweet potato. Indulged in a couple of Hahn White Beer, which is fruity as all get out, very appropriate for the weird heat we’ve got coming back. Also, Louise made ‘Angel Delight’ for dessert, which is some kind of weird packaged mousse that needs only milk and whipping to prepare. It’s like watching cream ferment. Has roughly the same texture as well.
• Played another couple of rounds of BF:BC2. Owned everything everywhere. Oh yeah.
• Finally fell into another food-induced coma.

In the end, a lot of video games, a lot of food, and a lot of golf. Pretty much the perfect weekend, all up. Definitely feel recharged for this week.

So, what did you guys get up to that wasn’t writing?

photo credit: Cameron Cassan

This is just

a quick update, as I’ve not had the opportunity, or, let’s face it, the motivation to get my rant on. Especially not in the face of the events happening in Japan. My home page has been permanently refreshing the ABC news feed, which seems to be capturing not only the facts, but also a good deal of the feeling of the nation whose hopes keep being battered. My thoughts, as much as they can be, are with all of the Japanese people.

‘As much as they can be’, because as you might have guessed from the couple of weeks between updates, I’ve been pretty busy. Thesis work is winding up: I’ve only got a couple of results left to slot into tables, then it’s all conclusions, abstracts, acknowledgements, and hopefully a kick out the door. I would propose a date, but I’ve played that game before and I don’t want to disappoint anyone, least of all myself. Laboratory demonstrating has started back again. It feels good to be back in the labs, doing practical things and helping the students learn. The unit I look after is a bit of a dog’s breakfast at the moment–five different lecturers over two very distinct fields of chemistry, one of which they will never have seen before–but the students aren’t demanding. And when Curtin eventually starts paying me, I’ll be able to cover rent again. In other job news, there’s also the possibility of producing a literature review for a project with an industrial partner that my supervisor is part of, which would result in a part-time contract for a couple of months. Fingers crossed, I’ve been without an income for way too long.

I’ve been cycling to uni for three weeks now, and my legs are correspondingly fucked. Not fucked in any dangerous sense, but they quite often let me know that they would very much like to lie down right here, yes, right now in the middle of this pavement would be great, thank you very much. It has had a positive effect on my lower back issues though, with far less discomfort with walking around and the like. Plus, y’know, I’ve now got buns that could be used as anvils.

On writing…well. Nothing much to report, really. I’ve set some submission goals, which is unusual in itself. They’re lofty ones involving railway ties and universities, but I’ve given myself a great deal of time to work on getting final drafts ready. It’ll be nice to get feedback from the writing group again, I’ve been too long in my own head. To keep some balance I’ve made sure to include some fun side-projects while I’m at it, which may or may not end up getting sent out. We’ll see.

Alright, I promised short so short it’ll be, but I’d love to know what you guys are up to. Do you have any goals for the next six months, or the year?

EDIT:

In what is my very first foray into the world of blogging competitions, I seem to have entered myself in the Best Australian Blogs competition being run by the Sydney Writer’s Centre. Click on the badge for more details.

EDIT EDIT:

Also, I have just realised that this is my 700th post *waves flag*. I am demolishing a chocolate in celebration.

photo credit: moneboh

In the previous

post, the talented young man known as wauterboi offered up a variety of perspectives on the creative process with regards to music, but I found one particular response really interesting:

I do not force tracks, and that’s why I believe boredom is an important part of the music-creating process. Boredom will lead you to try new things and not be afraid. Boredom will cause you to challenge yourself – and that’s what I have done for six years. Boredom will give you the ability to keep trying. Boredom will make you do things you wouldn’t normally do, because I mean what else is there to do with your time?

While I’m not entirely sure that ‘boredom’ is the right word–I would argue that it’s the resistance to boredom that has resulted in wauterboi’s talent, so perhaps restlessness, or curiosity–he makes a good point. Boredom is a necessary catalyst for creativity*. At some point in the past, we all got bored of our toys and decided to make up some new ones. So how does this relate to writing?

Well, take writing in the same style. While we are often advised, as emerging writers, to discover our style or voice and stick with it, I’ve never quite believed this is the absolute answer. I get bored very easily when I find myself employing the same voices, or the same styles, or the same genre. When looking back at my portfolio, there isn’t a readily-identifiable trend in the subjects of my writing (except maybe a tendency to write about males, but so sue me, I’m a guy). I want to surprise readers with my writing. As far as I can tell, a lot of my writing peers have a similar approach, and I don’t see anything wrong with this. So where does this advice come from? Is it uttered with publication in mind? The ability to deliver a similar-but-different reading experience to an expectant readership? A collection of stylistically related short stories, or a recurring character? I’m just not sure why anyone would limit themselves in any way when writing, and I see developing a distinctive style as a kind of limitation. the list of things I want to write is immense, an impossible mountain. Comics, flash fiction, novels, weird miscellany; like my Twitter profile says, I have too many ideas and not enough cheese. But while focusing on one face of this mountain might allow me to explore it with more care, I see a definite case of diminishing returns. I don’t want to retread the same ground again and again. Is this how experimental fiction happens?

I know I’m basically just thinking aloud here, but I’d love to hear from other writers, emerging or emerged, on how they perceive their own approach. Are you deliberately cultivating an authorial voice? Do you stick to the same styles? Are you operating within one particular genre? Do you ever become bored with writing and need a break to express yourself in other ways (or not express yourself at all)? How does boredom affect your creativity?

—

*All my story ideas come while I’m supposed to be working on my thesis, for example.

photo credit: altemark

Today, I’m delighted

to present an interview with a very talented young musician named Isaias who goes by the moniker of wauterboi. I stumbled across wauterboi’s music completely by accident, while looking for some help with a program called Jeskola Buzz (don’t worry if you don’t recognise the name, it’s explained in the interview). After listening to a few of his songs, I downloaded, and eventually bought, his latest album, entitled if then. According to my ears, wauterboi’s compositions being together instrumental influences such as God Is An Astronaut and Explosions In The Sky, mixes them with industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy, and then dunks them all in a variety of flavours that range from chiptune melodies to D’n'B filth. Think Tweaker, but (sadly) without the access to the high-profile vocal talent. Certainly impressive work for someone who’s half a decade away from being able to purchase alcohol.

I had the good fortune to be able to quiz Isaias over the digital divide, so read on as we discuss boredom, the music industry, creativity, and careers. To set the mood for the interview, why don’t you head over to his store and stream his album for free? I guarantee that by the time you’ve finished reading the interview, you’ll be ready to click the buy button and support an up-and-coming talent. Alternatively, I’ve embedded a couple of my picks throughout the interview, so feel free to click on those.

*        *        *

toothsoup: So, who is wauterboi? Tell us a little about yourself.

wauterboi: I like to think I’m wauterboi. (I think.) I produce music here in Las Vegas and I have ever since I was ten. (For the record, I’m sixteen at the moment.) I write music as a means to escape. Escape what? Boredom. It’s also nice to have all these crazy projects I do bring feelings to you without words and in a very experimental way. Overall, it’s fun.

TS: How do you make your music? What are your tools of the trade?

WB: I make music using a run down and (kind of) abandoned modular tracker made for Windows 95. In lay-mens terms, I have to write out all of the notes and automate everything using hex. (You know, the crazy number system that goes from 01-0F then repeats with an increase of ten.) I also have to pray that it doesn’t break on me, but I have found ways to add stability.

People tell me all the time that the program sucks and that I should be using mainstream stuff out there – you know, stuff like Reason, or Ableton, or whatever else you can think of. I actually downloaded the trial for Reason a little while ago and I thought it sucked.

Why is this? Well, for one, the program I use is free. It’s also not CPU or Memory rape from trying to pretty and have a fancy GUI like all the others. Jeskola Buzz doesn’t even have a piano roll editor and I love it. It’s simple. It gets the job done without all the BS unless I do things like add additional instruments, hacks, or plugins. All the others have the priority of looking sexy and having a rather large price tag. Let me tell you – the only thing I ever spent money on was a twenty dollar copy of VoxengoElephant, a VST limiter that makes sure that your overall sound doesn’t go over a specific volume. (Great for preventing earaches!)

Also, Jeskola Buzz’ source code was recently found by the developer and has been updated constantly now. He’s building off of what he had and it’s been pretty cool messing with the newest versions of Buzz – Vista/Windows 7 style!

[haiku url="http://toothsoup.com/files/wauterboi/wauterboi--i'm%20feeling%20like%20a%20break.mp3" title="wauterboi--i'm feeling like a break"]

TS: Your latest album, if then, features a wide variety of electronic styles such as industrial, dance, chiptune, and D’n'B. Is there any particular reason why you tend not to repeat a general style?

WB: No. I don’t know what happens when I open my music program and I start making music. When I begin, there’s no chance you’ll know how it’ll end up sounding at all – which something I actually like because I don’t like writing music to formula or trying to write for a specific genre. I write music with the intention of sounding good – well, at least relative to me.

Also, sounding different for every track kind of makes the album more exciting to listen to because you don’t know what’s coming. You don’t get bored with it. On top of that, since there’s so many different genres, there’s probably going to be at least one that you’ll enjoy out of all the others, which kind of adds a little bit of accessibility for everyone. Someone can like Chiptune and hate Drum n’ Bass, and then there’s others who are the complete opposite. Some might like the elements of of Drum n’ Bass and Chiptune and never had a chance to see them collide. Maybe they didn’t like a genre, but when I play this way they can enjoy it. It’s kind of nice to have that ability.

TS: On your about page you say, in reference to the use of the Jeskola Buzz tracker:

“A lot of people actually dislike it because of the fact that, “it’s so hard!” and then fly to another program with a fancy GUI. The truth is, they need to be bored.”

I found that last fragment really interesting. Looking beyond Buzz (which is a powerful, if not completely user-friendly, tracking software), do you think that people ‘need to be bored’ in order to be creative? Is there a restlessness that drives you to create?

WB: Hell yeah. The entire reason why I began writing music is because I was bored out of my mind with a pile of video games I’ve already beaten and a TV that played mindless BS 24/7. I was tired of everything and I decided to pry open this random program and while all my creations sounded like crap it was awesome and it killed time. It was fun.

That isn’t lining up who I am now though. When I start writing a track, I start to play and improvise random melodies or drum patterns and what not and that’s how all my tracks start. Just a random melody I accidentally made. I do not force tracks, and that’s why I believe boredom is an important part of the music-creating process. Boredom will lead you to try new things and not be afraid. Boredom will cause you to challenge yourself – and that’s what I have done for six years. Boredom will give you the ability to keep trying. Boredom will make you do things you wouldn’t normally do, because I mean what else is there to do with your time? You’ve got nothing else to do! What are you going to do? Play that video game you’ve beaten three times? Start collecting stamps? Yeah right, you’re gonna be a musician, or at least be some kind of bored one.

TS: As a solo artist, do you find it hard to motivate yourself to make music?

WB: No, not really. I like writing music. The only problems I have are random bouts of writer’s block, which can be solved by giving yourself a minute and doing something else.

[haiku url="http://toothsoup.com/files/wauterboi/wauterboi--arpeggiated%20stress%20test.mp3" title="wauterboi--arpeggiated stress test"]

TS: You released if then with an interesting payment model: listeners can stream the entire album for free, download a portion of the album, and then decide if they want to buy it. What drew you to this kind of distribution method?

WB: Well, I’ve been around many, many pirates in my life. (Pirates being pirates who pirate music.) One of the main reasons they pirate isn’t the reason you would normally think – they often pirate the album to see how it sounds and see how they enjoy it and then, depending on how that turns out, they buy it. On top of that, audiophiles like to download the music in the highest of qualities ever known to man, and so I kind of thought to myself for four years about a method that would let you “test-drive” the album, and that method is what I use today. You can download the EP containing a portion of the tracks, and depending if you like it, you can purchase the album in whichever quality or format you like.

Is this in anyway my battle against pirates? No, I could care less if you didn’t buy my album. (I’d care if you did though!) I’m not going to chase you down with a knife to get my five dollars. Why? I believe that if my music is any good, I’ll be getting it anyway, or at least a thank you or friend request. I get all three and there are alternative ways to show your appreciation. Money isn’t everything.

In fact, I love the spread of music so much, I uploaded my music for free on a private tracker, got featured on the front page, and got over 1,000+ downloads. Super exposure, much?

I do not like the way music industries provide their music currently. It’s a little bit harder to figure out if you like a track or album now if that makes sense. If you want to do the 100% legal method of checking out an album, you can go onto iTunes and check out their thirty seconds put right in the middle of an unintelligible piece of the song leading you to believe, “Well, I think I could like this… I guess.” If you want a sketchier method, you can check out the tracks on YouTube in high quality… sometimes… Having all the tracks streamable and some tracks downloadable for free completely takes the middleman out. Having me distribute it the way I’m doing now (and for cheap) allows everyone to get a chance to do something as simple as listen to me. Industries now are all about money, and I don’t feel like you should have to pay a listening tax to enjoy music.

TS: You’ve mentioned the fact that you’re a very young artist, is creating music something that you think will stay with you for the rest of your life?

WB: Hey, if it works and I can get somewhere with it, yes. Seems like a slim chance though, but that’s just the pessimistic side of me being a baby. :P

TS: Related to that last question, the luxury of boredom is something that can disappear once school finishes and jobs start. How do you think you’ll handle that change?

WB: I always thought about being a computer programmer and doing music off to the side for the fun of it and for free. This is something I’ve thought of for a while actually.

Generally, the way I look at it I have a bunch on my plate right now and somehow I get music done. My parents are divorced and so I live at like three or four houses every week, I have a lot of AP and Honors classes, I am actually involved in the administration of a lot of gaming servers away from music, and then just the little things of life cause my plate to overflow just a little bit. I can (for some reason) do all this now and produce music, so I would imagine that having a job in the mix would cause less time but not make it impossible for music to be made. Music is my home away from home – there’s no leaving!

You’ve also got to remember I work on music everywhere. When I’m in class, I think of drum patterns and what not using my desk (which has been known to irritate people, haha), when I’m on the bus I’ll dig into my program on my laptop, on my way to places I’ll do the same, when I’m at my cousin’s and my two homes, I always work some stuff in. I’m constantly moving around and I still get work done.

TS: Do you think that producing music is something that you will pursue as a career? Can you see yourself getting a degree or pursuing a job in sound engineering or something similar?

WB: My dream is to become a relatively famous musician. I idolize Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and other artists like crazy – I want to be like them. (except I wanna be me of course)
Also, yes. I love working with audio in general. Haha.

Career-wise, from what I’d really enjoy being to what I’d enjoy being, would go something like this: Musician, computer programmer, graphic designer, website designer, some kind of designer, writer, etc. I just don’t want to be in an office or in a warehouse.

[haiku url="http://toothsoup.com/files/wauterboi/wauterboi--take%20me%20away.mp3" title="wauterboi--take me away"]

TS: Lastly, do you have any hints — technical or otherwise — for people looking to get into using Jeskola Buzz or trackers in general?

WB: Work with what you’ve got and don’t quit just because the things you possess aren’t the things you’d want to use to get the job done. 3/4 of my music was done on low-end computers – all kinds of them. At some point, 1/4 of my music was accomplished completely with free software and on a computer that shut off every thirty minutes randomly without warning. Advance technology-wise as you go. Currently, I’m on a cheap Compaq laptop I stole from my mom, haha, and I’m getting stuff done. The only other piece of equipment is something I just got this year – a lovely $100 MIDI keyboard from Sam Ash with some aid from the profits I got from if then. While I’ve got a little more on this laptop, I have worked under the pressures of lag, memory rape, CPU destruction, random restarts, presets and full-songs disappearing, massive external hard-drive failures, and just straight up technical tom-foolery. Persistence is your friend. Boredom is your friend. An open mind is your friend. Patience is your friend.

Also remember that generally everything gets better. Slowly, but surely, things get better. Everything. Techy stuff, your music, your mind, you – everything. Six years, and I’ve made it this far. It’s not that far, but it’s far enough to show that you can very much do the same and probably better. :P

*        *        *

So there you have it, some very telling words of wisdom at the end there. Just keep at it and things get better. Anyway, if you enjoyed the interview and want to have a peek at more of wauterboi’s world, you can find his website over at wauterboi.com, and he tweets @wauterboi. As previously mentioned, you can buy or stream (or buy, seriously) his two albums at his page on Protagonist Records. Do some good, support a young artist. As a final note, I should also mention that I’ve found his music to be incredibly good to write to. Strong beats and compelling melodies do a good writing tune make.

photo credit: maistora

You may have

heard the news that REDGroup Australia, owners of Borders and Angus&Robertson bookstores has gone into voluntary administration. That is, they’re broke. There are quite a few angles to view this development from, but the one most seem to have taken is that of the book store as a physical place no longer being valid in the modern market. Borders’ capitulation is the first, bass note struck in the death knell of all book stores everywhere.

I respectfully disagree.

The book store as a physical place to make reams and reams of money from is, for sure, almost certainly dying. There’s no way that places such as Borders can continue to make the kind of profits that they built their empires on while online marketplaces such as Amazon, Book Depository, etc. are busy refining how close to the bone they can cut their profit margins and maximise selling volume. The average age of consumers in Australia is lowering, and with it (no offence, Mum) technological proficiency is rising. We know how to order books online. We know how to scout out good deals, and the idea of brand loyalty to a big chain book store is a concept so foreign as to have been conceived in the Amazonian (hah) wilderness.

However, brand loyalty to an independently-owned, locally-staffed, lovingly-curated book store with far more modest expectations of profit is not unknown to us tech-savvy youngsters*. I’ve commented about this previously over at Spike, the Meanjin blog (read the article and then scroll to the comments), and I believe the same thing now as I did then: if independent book stores continue to focus on providing a service that big chain book stores cannot — i.e. the addition of value through the experience of having your tastes known and catered to** — then they will be fine. Hell, they may even find space to flourish after the big chain companies have all bitten the dust or moved online. And almost certainly they’ll have to do something extra to make themselves attractive. Cafe book stores, or pub book stores, or music venue book stores, or creative writing class book stores, or community improvement book stores. Who knows? It’s exciting to think of the opportunities.

Guy Rundle over at Crikey has taken the long view, questioning what the shift to online options means for the future of society. Will we eventually approach some pseudo-dystopian future where physical store fronts are a thing of the past, and the seduction of the window shopper can no longer be relied on to generate revenue? Well, no. Will big chains continue to find it difficult to maintain a physical presence in the fact of online pressures? Almost certainly. But that’s because the solid ground that they have been built on is shifting, and cracks are appearing through which the weedy growth of independent booksellers can sprout. As John Birmingham states in his round-up of the issue, e-books will destroy the large chains. But there’s an opportunity over the next 5-10 years for communities –real, honest-to-goodness communities, not forced bullshit — to be built around a shared, art-gallery-esque experience. Think of a library crossed with your favourite literary journal. That’s basically what I’m getting at here.

Maybe I’m being optimistic. Probably. What do you think?

—

*Man, that was a lot of adverbs and hyphens. Are all of those correctly used? I can never tell.

**That’s a horrible way of saying ‘Knowing the owner and being able to talk shop and he/she knowing your tastes well enough that they have a list in their head of all the latest books that you will enjoy.’

photo credit: Clint M Chilcott

A couple of

days ago, I discovered that my blog had surpassed 50,000 hits. That’s according to the ‘WP-stats’ plug-in that I’ve had running ever since I moved from my previous ‘insanejournal‘ to toothsoup.com in July of 2008. To mark this momentous occasion, I figured I’d post some statistics to give you some insight into the kind of people that visit my site. I must warn you that it’s pretty sad, but it’s the kind of sad that you can laugh at. I’ll be using the stats from Google Analytics for the past year, as it is a lot more versatile and gives roughly the same picture.

The Sad Facts:

• 86% of the search terms used to find my blog relate to Mr. Clickety Cane lyrics or Beauty and the Geek: Australia.

• In fact, between them, my posts about Mr Clickety Cane and BatGeek: Australia accounted for 52.8% of my total traffic for the last year. See? Told you it was fucking sad.

• The other two major pages were my main blog page and my ‘about’ page, contributing 17.9% of my traffic. The remainder (29.3%) was taken up by posts that didn’t mention beauties, geeks, myself, or playing silly games.

• Concurrent to the visits coming from Mr. Clickety Cane, my bounce rate (that is, the percentage of people that look at one page on my site and then bugger off) was 80.77%. That drops to around 60% when excluding the Mr. Clickety Cane lyrics page.

• Again, thanks to the high volume of people who searched for lyrics and found my page, 68.6% of the visits to my blog came from Google. 18.5% arrived via linking sites, while 12.94% of you came straight here from your bookmarks, or feeds, or whatever.

• No real surprises in where people came from, with the top five being: Australia, U.S.A., U.K., Canada, and New Zealand in that order. Within Australia, visitors from Sydney and Melbourne both outnumbered my home town, with approximately a third of visits coming from Sydney, and a quarter coming from Melbourne. Perth only gave around a sixth.

• A special thanks to the lone readers from Dubbo, Wagga Wagga, Katoomba, Nambour, Mackay, Toowoomba, Bundaberg, Tamworth, Muswellbrook, Bunbury, Echuca, Kawana Waters, Ballina, and Wangaratta.

• 78.6% of visitors were new, meaning only 21.4% of you came back for more than one sip of the dental broth. 11.6% of the total hits came from people who had visited 5 or more times. Also there are apparently a few people who have visited 100+ times. <3.

• To a reasonable approximation, no-one has viewed more than 7 pages at a time when visiting my blog. Understandable, given there are only 5 posts shown on the main page at any one time.

• Again, given the number of mothers that are visiting my blog looking for children’s songs, it’s unsurprising (but still alarming) that the most common browser used to visit my site was Internet Explorer. This panics me slightly, as I have absolutely no fucking idea what my site looks like in I.E., having not used it for the past 7 years. Firefox came in second, and Safari third.

• Windows was the most used operating system to visit, giving 72.7%. Macintosh was next, followed (interestingly) by iPhone.

• Apparently a lot of you poor bastards are still on old monitors, with the most common screen resolution being 1280 x 800, followed by the positively tiny 1024 x 768. Are you getting scared by what Google can tell about you, yet?

• Oh geez, I’m feel really bad for y’all now: the vast majority of you are still on either Telstra or Optus internet plans. I am so, so sorry.

Anyway, that’s about enough of that. While obviously a great deal of the hits I’ve received come from pages that are not precisely  in the spirit of the discussion that I like to keep going here — i.e. literature, writing, creativity — there’s still enough of you coming along for those topics to keep me happy. Hope you had a bit of a chuckle at my expense, and thanks to those of you who keep coming back for more and commenting. (:

EDIT:

I forgot this last one:

• In the past year I’ve written 57,406 words with an average blog post length of 780 words.

Is it sad that that is longer than my Ph.D. thesis?

photo credit: victor_nuno

I’ve had some

time to mull over the response that the post previous to this one received, including some comments that I thought raised new points, so I thought I’d add a couple of additional ideas that had occurred to me since posting it.

Writer-publisher

Mark Welker raised two important issues in his comment: the perceived negative effect that self-publishing is having on the furtherance of new creative discussions, and the necessity in separating writer and publicist. With regards to the former, Mark says:

But I wonder why there’s so much focus on the product over the process. Seems like we’re falling over ourselves to get people to buy and read our words – and not as much concerned with whether what we are writing is actually contributing to some creative discussion. There seems so many echoes of the same impulse.

This is a difficult one to assess on a purely quantitative level, and I’m not sure how much it has to do with self-publishing. The way I see it, new writers almost always imitate the writing that has gone before them to some extent. And in fact, it could be said that editors of journals and publishing firms alike encourage this, what with needing to pander to a kind of literary fashion in order to sell units. Truly new writing is a rare thing, and it often takes either a work of pure genius or a very brave editor to see it through to the publication stage. If we assume that a lot of self-publication is coming from emerging or recently-emerged writers, this would account for the common perception that a lot of what is being released is trying to reinvent the wheel; whether that wheel is popular-genre-shaped, GAN-shaped, or otherwise. But along with enabling these legions of imitators, self-publication also enables truly new writing to bypass the (again, perceived) timidity of market-ruled editors and be released into the wild far faster than it might have in the traditional cycle of literary fashion. When viewed as a method of disseminating new ideas and ways of writing rather than making a buck, self-publishing suddenly becomes a whole lot more important. Of course, an experimental novel or collection still faces the same problems getting noticed as outlined in my initial post, so whether we’ll see any noticeable acceleration in literary movement occurrence remains to be seen.

Moving onto the separation of writer and publicist. There’s a bit of a divide when considering this question, but in my opinion if you are going it alone, you need to separate your writer-self and your publicist-self. At least during the act of creation. A writer-publicist is not the same thing as singer-songwriter; there’s no synergy between the two. My justification for this is that the constant reference to some imagined press-release will stifle your writing and lead your stories down the path of remaining pleasing to an imagined audience. While I do think that stories should be written for an audience — even if that audience is yourself — I don’t think that writing for an advertisement is a healthy thing (and I’ve blogged about this previously). Some gurus will tell you otherwise, insisting that the only stories worth writing are ones that can be sold, but that’s their prerogative. And this is my blog, so bugger them. Once your story is written, edited, and polished to a high shine, then you can think of ways to push it on the public. Until then, write the story the way it wants to be written.

Filtrate

Another thing that I missed out on discussing was a point raised in the previously-linked blog by Alan Baxter:

There’s one simple difference – all the fiction I’ve made available to read here is previously published somewhere (with a couple of exceptions that I’ll talk about in a minute). Some of it is older stuff published in non-paying markets, but it’s still stuff I’m proud of. Other stories are published in better markets and the links here are directly to sites where the story can be found. The point is that it made it past an editor, so I’ve got unbiased, third party confirmation that it’s worth a read.

Essentially, Alan is using publication in journals and e-zines as a way of filtering what writing he shows to readers. By showing that the writing he is putting up has been vetted by an external third party, it adds a legitimacy to the writing which might encourage visitors to his website to spend a bit of time reading his fiction. This is a relatively common way to go about things, used by a whole bunch of indie and emerging writers all over the place, including my meagre offerings at my ‘About’ page. But in terms of self-publishing, it offers yet another method of getting quality work out there.

In my experience, most publications only claim first publication rights, whether electronic or print, and possibly the right to reprint in a future anthology. So there’s nothing stopping you from gathering up the stories that you have had previously published and binding them together in a collection, with the tag-line of ‘Published stories: 20XX – 20XY’. In other words, use the taste and reputation of editors to provide a filter to the very best examples of your work. They use you to fill pages, so why not use them to select pieces? Obviously this whole argument operates on the assumption that you have a collection of stories that have appeared in journals whose previous content/editors you respect. Obtaining such a portfolio of work can be a years-long endeavour. But it absolutely guarantees that you have a bunch of tight stories ready to bind up and sell.

Anyway, I’m going to wrap it up there, as I’d like to avoid this site turning into one of those ubiquitous writer’s advice blogs. I’ll be back to more regular (read: boring personal crap) content next time, I swear. As always, feel free to chime in with any reactions.

photo credit: gruntzooki

I’ve been seeing

a lot of conversation going on lately about self-publishing and how it relates to emerging writers. This is a topic that I’m quite interested in, having both considered the possibility of self-publishing and applied the term ‘emerging’ to myself and my writing. So I thought I’d take a moment and explore my own thoughts surrounding the subject and give some advice on how to make the best of the current scene.

Broadly speaking, I’m in favour of self-publishing as a thing. As far as I’m concerned, the more options an artist has to distribute their art, the better. And writers have produced some of my most favouritest art ever. Print-on-demand services are great, in that they are putting the power to publish in the hands of people who have the willingness to do so. Not to mention the fact that they are more environmentally friendly, as there are no pallets full of returns to be pulped. The great advantage of the open-armed nature of the self-publishing market is that anyone with a bit of tech-savvy can release a book. This fact is also cited as its great disadvantage, in that there is no filter of taste to keep the good, solid examples in and let the slush flow through. And those that cite this disadvantage have a point: there is already a lot of slush out in the wild. I’m not going to argue the fact that there is, statistically, more crap writing than good writing in the self-publishing world. It’s self-evident. To prove it to yourself, just spend more than five seconds trawling the Kindle boards or Smashwords. Not only that, but the average self-published book would hardly be called profitable, and more often than not a self-published book does not even come close to earning out the number of loving hours poured into it. So what’s the reason behind this lack of quality? Why don’t good self-published books earn out? And what can emerging writers do to keep from falling into the same traps?

Quality assurance

When looking at the self-publishing industry, analysts often cite other indie industries as examples of how self-propelled creative arts can work. Industries such as the short film or music industries, where a self-funded project can often lead to big deals for indie darlings. But there’s a difference between these industries and self-publishing, and it has to do with skill. Any person with a basic education can successfully perform the physical act of writing. A person with a masters in literature can certainly do it, but primary school kids can too. There is no threshold of time spent practising to complete the physical, pen-to-paper (or fingertip-to-keyboard) act of writing. It’s not like the music industry, where you need to spend a lot of time getting to the point where you can play even one song properly. Or the film industry, where the price of access to quality equipment can mean that only those dedicated to the craft get allocated time to use it. The beauty of writing is that it doesn’t have any of those in-built thresholds. And of course, that’s one of the best things about writing and language; anyone can do it, using just about any material on hand that can make a mark on another. It’s much like the visual fine arts in that regard.

Of course, with fine arts, it’s very easy to identify talent. Often an artist can easily measure themselves against the physical world that they are trying to represent. And with the extremely high standard of visual literacy demanded by our modern world, even the average Jean can tell you whether they like your amateur efforts and how you might improve them. But with writing, it’s quite difficult to get the kind of feedback loop that might enable an emerging writer to grow. After all, how often have you seen writers posting work online with a preamble saying that their friend/family member had said it was really good? The combination of the ease with which writing can be physically performed and a lack of access to honest feedback means that quite often, pieces of writing are self-published without any kind of quality control; the kind of quality control that traditional publishing routes more or less represent. Of course, there is some quality control in self-publishing in the form of the hivemind of readers that rate titles they read (or which their friends tell them to rate), but it’s not exactly as precise as an editor with years of experience.

Earning out

So that’s my intepretation of the ‘why’ behind the lack of quality. The earning out part is a bit less complicated, but interesting to talk about. Intuitively, we all know why a lot of people won’t be making any more money on their self-published book  than their day job earns them in an hour, and it’s to do with signal-to-noise ratios. When you release your shiny new e-book , it drops into a huge reserve of similar books that haven’t sold any copies. And trying to lift it out of that reserve is a bloody difficult thing to do. It’s the reason why people hire and pay the wages for marketers and promoters–getting enough signal attached to your book to boost it out of the noise and into the public eye. But in self-publishing market, you haven’t got a salary to give a marketer, you’ve just got yourself. And not everyone can sell themselves. It’s a hard thing to do, both in a technical sense and a personal sense. Technically speaking, a writer has to have the Internet savvy to build a social network without coming off as a spammer. That takes care and patience, but I’d say it’s achievable by most who grew up with the Internet. But on a personal level, you have to have the confidence in your writing ability to see the whole thing through. You have to have faith that your book isn’t like the millions of other slush pile wannabes. Yours is the real deal, and here’s reasons a), b), and c) why the reader should buy it.

Achieving both of those things without skittering to the wayside is hard, and some players start with an advantage. In an interview talking about his successful experiment with self-publishing, Lee Goldberg (author of the Mr. Monk series of books) talks about a ‘gold rush mentality’ regarding e-books at the moment. The seductive narratives of the few fortunate people who have been able to make a living selling e-books have lead to ‘…thousands of authors who will be lucky if they can give away ten books-a-month at 99 cents each’. That’s because they don’t have the networking skills (read: publicist) or the core fan-base that an already-established author has. Getting those famed 1,000 true fans is an uphill battle, and it’s certainly not guaranteed. Garnering enough momentum and five-star reviews is very often a game of chance, and the conditions that a self-published writer needs to fulfil on any given day to become an Internet phenomenon are as difficult to predict as the Melbourne weather. But there are a few things that I believe are essential to giving at least a bit of weight to the die.

Emergent behaviour

So what can emerging writers do to avoid falling into a sea of anonymity? There have been quite a few articles discussing this lately, the reading of which prompted me to write this post. First up was Benjamin Solah’s post mourning a lack of sales of his self-published e-book, Sanity Juxtaposed. There were a few choice quotes from the comments, but the one that was picked up by Alan Baxter in his constructive post and which I think represents the first point that I want to make is this one made by Jason Fischer:

My two cents is this: trunk stories belong in your trunk. You either take them apart and make them good enough to sell, or you leave them there.

The problem with Ben’s e-book was that it was, as stated in its description, not his best work. It was bits and pieces that he had written but not polished, pieces that were unpublished and languishing on his hard-drive before they were put in the collection. The temptation for emerging writers to have something with their name on it out there for people to buy and read is one that is rooted in the issues of validation and insecurity (which I’ve covered in a previous post). But that yearning for validation sometimes ends up rushing the writer into releasing work that isn’t exemplary of their best ability. As Lee Goldberg puts it, just because you can publish for free with a mouse-click doesn’t mean that you should. There’s another angle to this argument, in that sometimes writers will reserve their best writing for querying traditional publishing avenues, and use the electronic route to release the stuff they aren’t as proud of. This is based on the misguided preconception that e-books and self-published works are inherently worth less than getting print on paper through a traditional publisher*. All of which brings me to my first recommendation for emerging writers looking to self-publish: if you are going to self-publish, make it your best work. This is also known in the programming community as ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If you release a piece of writing that isn’t up to standard, don’t be surprised when no-one wants to buy it. The definition of ‘up to standard’ may vary between groups, but I’d recommend at least a few redrafts and an edit by someone whose writing you respect.

So that’s the first thing, only release good writing. Not exactly rocket surgery. The second bit of advice comes from the desk of a guy named Chuck Wendig, whose to-the-point missive entitled ‘Why Your Self-Published Book May Suck A Bag Of Dicks‘ (and its follow-up) cuts very close to the bone. In it, he extols the virtues of good book cover design, well written book descriptions and synopses, getting someone (anyone) to edit your book, and making sure your sample excerpt gives the best possible hook to potential readers. In other words, professionalism in the presentation of your product to customers. That’s right, your piece of finely-wrought prose is a product. I’m going to say it again, in bold, just to be sure. Your writing is a product. If you are taking the self-publishing route, you absolutely cannot afford to kid yourself about this. There is no reason why your writing, no matter how amazing it is, should rise to the top of the slush pile. There is no buoyancy ascribed to it based on its artistic merit. A lamentable fact, but a fact nonetheless. So it makes sense to polish the presentation of your product as much, if not more, than the polishing of your writing. Anything less is shooting yourself in the foot before trying to run a marathon. Publishers know this, that’s why they spend millions of dollars on expensive ad campaigns to get booksellers on board with their latest best seller. It’s why they’ve started investing in book trailers, and why they invite managers of book stores to expensive, canapé-fuelled slide shows of their latest catalogues. So find yourself a designer who can create an eye-catching cover, a PR person who can find the best combination of wow-words to convince a stranger to click through to the sample, and polish that excerpt until it can’t stand its own glow. And if you can’t find family or friends who can fill those roles for a carton, be prepared to spend some money. People can, will, and do judge books by their cover.

Exception handling

Of course, there are exceptions to these bits of advice, just like there are exceptions to any rule. If you’re writing something because it’s fun and ridiculous and you just want a few of your friends to be amused by it, hell, don’t let me stop you throwing it out on the Interwoobles. That kind of writing can be awesome and light and breezy and completely separate from the writing you look to publish. Just take a peek at my ‘Unpublications‘ page. Seriously, go look at it, I finally figured out how to put up a recording there. Those are examples of passion projects. They were fun little pieces that I enjoyed writing, but would never, ever find a place in the current Australian journal landscape**. Alternatively, if you’re writing a cookbook for members of your family as a novel (hah) Christmas present, you probably don’t give a shit about sales ranks.

A final disclaimer, now that I’m done. I’ve never self-published anything of mine. But what I have done is watched a lot of people make the attempt, some successfully and some not successfully. And I think I’ve learned enough to be able to make a decent attempt if I ever decided to. I guess that means you should take everything I’ve said with a hearty pinch of salt, but it’s the Internet and you really should have been doing that anyway.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. If you have any comments or thoughts about stuff I’ve missed, please feel free to comment. I’d particularly like to hear the perspectives of people who have gone through with the whole thing and can tell me how applicable (or not) my advice is.

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*This is nonsense, you and I know that. Words are worth exactly how much they are worth, regardless of the medium they are presented through.

**The tragedy of which is a topic for another post, perhaps.

photo credit: ?-WQ-?

Last night, I

did two things that I’m proud of. One was to get up in front of a whole bunch of people for the February Cottonmouth meeting at the 459 Bar and read out my short/flash story ‘Network Connection‘. A daunting task made a lot easier by the awesome attitude of the crowd*, and the reassurances of both Simon and Zoe telling me I’d be fine**. So I’ve now officially popped my public reading cherry.

The other thing that I did–and I’m still as-yet uncertain which is a more proud moment for me–is to unlock The Kid in the awesomely difficult platformer Super Meat Boy. Proof, taken on my phone after I’d run around the room like an idiot:

(I’m also really close to getting the next band-aid character unlock)

For the uninitiated, SMB is a really, really hard game. It’s like Mario, if Mario was made of meat, took one hit to die, and was antagonised by a phoetus in a suit who constructed levels of pure death for him to run around in. Look, it’s easier if I show you. Here’s a video sequence of what I had to go through to get The Kid. The cuts made for that video make it look easy, but trust me, it ain’t. I’m not actually certain how many times I died, but it was a lot. Like, genocide a lot. And that’s not even the hardest bit of the game: I still have to work my way through Cotton Alley.

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*Who genuinely wanted to hear fiction. They told a bunch of guys at the back to shut the fuck up while Tiffany Ha was reading her intriguing sci-fi short story. Kudos to that kind of dedication.

**Two pints of beer on an empty stomach also didn’t hurt.

photo credit: Auntie P

Two articles were

recently brought to my attention via the Twitterz: Amber Sparks’ ‘The Influence of Anxiety‘, and Kirsty Logan’s response at the Pank Blog, ‘This Modern Writer: Youth Is All’. You should all go and have a read, but if you’re of the busy-busy persuasion let me sum it up for you. Both articles* explore the anxiety and distress that can be caused by the relatively new world of social networking, as applied to emerging writers. Everywhere on social networks (herein known as the so-netz), people are boasting about their word counts for the day, how many chapters they’ve edited of their fifth novel, who they just met at the festival they were invited to attend. It’s enough to give an early-career writer a serious bout of self-doubt. And it does. Like every single person in the comments on Amber’s article, I too suffer from this constant self-evaluation, and the subsequent lacking I observe in my achievements. And the so-netz that I am a part of are veritable land-mines of success. Twitter is constantly feeding me the proclamations of milestones met by established authors and emerging/emerged writers alike. To be clear, I don’t begrudge them that. Just like Amber and Kirsty, I enjoy the interaction. But see, for example, my ‘about’ page and the publication credits therein. A handful of flash fictions, a couple of short stories. Compare that to the lists of the two amazing writers who wrote those articles. And they’re anxious about not having achieved enough? Fuck me, I should be practically catatonic with insecurity.

The whole discussion reminded me of the excellent article that Tracy Lucas wrote back in July, entitled ‘How to make 100% sure you never get your big break as a writer’. It’s uncanny how closely my thinking has followed Tracy’s. My quest for validation had much humbler origins: I set goals of favourites and comments on the art/social website deviantART as my first step towards being considered a ‘real writer’. From there it was publication in an e-zine, and then publication in a ‘real’** paper magazine, and then publication in a real magazine that had also featured one of my favourite writers (I haven’t met that one yet), and so on and so forth. Each validation didn’t seem like it meant anything. They still don’t, if I’m honest with myself***.

But the thing that struck a chord and motivated this post was that, for me, all this self-doubt and need for validation isn’t even limited to my creative writing. It is also evident in my thoughts about my education and skill set. I have always felt as though I am constantly behind the bell curve. I’ve tried justifying this feeling in myriad ways: I was never in the top of the class because there were real geniuses in my cohort, my Ph.D. project is a failure because it’s fundamentally intractable, I’ve been unlucky with circumstances beyond my control. But all these justifications feel like excuses for the fact that I am just not as good at this as other people. And, like the writers in the articles, my comparative youth is no longer an advantage. Honours students are getting published in A-star journals. Undergraduates understand the theory I use better than I ever have. Where are my advantages now? How can I compete with the next generation of smart, motivated, better qualified graduates?

This is my daily thought routine. An exercise in self-examination and, let’s be frank here, self-pity that I know I should be able to snap out of and get on with it. Tracy Lucas suggests checking yourself against the goals you set, making yourself accountable for your successes as well as your failures. That’s good advice, and I’m going to try it out. But there’s a flip side to it, in that I am fearful of what my reaction might be if I don’t reach the goals I set. Will I just collapse? Or worse, not care and just continue on not meeting my goals.What in the hell are my goals, anyway? Am I trying to be a successful researcher? Should I? Or should I step away and try and focus on getting a job that makes use of my writing skills? Will that close off any future interest in getting back into research? How do people make these decisions, if they make them at all? Or does everyone just take the next logical step without giving due consideration? Lots of questions. It could be the case that I’m reading way too much into this, but then, that’s me. That’s my way of doing things, just ask Louise. The number of times I’ve nearly screwed our relationship up by thinking too hard about it, well, it’s more than I can count on two hands.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are external factors contributing to all this. I’ve had to deal with a lot of emotional stress in the past couple of months, and that will always spill over into other areas. But this is something I’ve been feeling for years now, and so I tend to think that it’s a real thing that has been brought to the surface by the catalyst of pressure. Just like alcohol brings out truths, only less fun. Of course, there’s a possibility that this is all a product of me being a twenty-something, and all the uncertainty that comes with it. And I’m well aware that finishing my thesis will bring a lot of clarity to these questions–it’s hard to see when there’s a big chunk of blank paper waiting to be filled blocking your vision. I guess I just needed to get this out there. Writing is, after all, my catharsis. But if there’s any ring of truth in any of this, I’d love to hear your experiences and views on it.

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*Yes, I’m calling them articles rather than blog posts. Get over it.

**I know, I know. E-zines are just as real as paper magazines. We all know this, don’t get in a huff, it was just my way of thinking back then.

***This is absolutely not meant to be insulting to those fine folks that have published my work. It’s just the way my brain works, please don’t take offense.

photo credit: rogilde – roberto la forgia

Again, it’s been

a bit quiet around here. Lou and I have been house sitting at her folk’s place for a couple of weeks while they had some much needed time off in the South-West. It’s a nice house on the river, with a good kitchen and plenty of space*. So we’ve been enjoying the mini-holiday, and the change in routine that it brought. Her folks have a dog (Tara), so Lou and I have been walking her every day. She’s got a bit of arthritis in one of her front paws, so she’s been re-christened Limpy for most of the time we’ve been there. Walking the dog, reading a lot, watching a few movies on a television that has a screen larger than my hand, it’s been good. Lou’s mates came over on Australia Day and we all despaired at the hottest 100. Later, we rode our bikes down to the foreshore to watch the fireworks**, and met up with the rest of the uni crew at Dino & Irene’s place. Good, relaxing day off. Weird to have it in the middle of the week, though.

As in all my down times, I’ve taken to writing little humorous pieces. I’ve also gone back through my catalogue of stuff that has been lying around for months or years and decided to host them here under the banner of ‘Unpublications‘. I’ll be recording some of them this week and next and posting them for your enjoyment. Should be a good exercise in improving my reading voice.

Other than that, the steady march of edits and new work continues on the tee-haytch-ee-ess-eye-ess. It’s cracked the roof of 250 pages, though 20% of that is appendices, 33% of it is introduction and theory, and the rest is actual results and interpretation. I have a feeling it’ll have inched towards 275 by the time I’m finished. I have no idea about word count, maybe 45,000 without appendices? I’m shaking my head right now, just so you know.

Anyway, back to it. How are you?

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*Read: it’s a fucking mansion.

**Is it just me, or does everyone else think that fireworks are a little bit, well, lame nowadays? Sure, when the Chinese first invented them in 2,000 B.C. they were probably pretty friggin’ spectacular, but c’mon, we’ve got shit like Avatar now. Surely there are better ways to spend the money? Maybe I’m being too practical. I’m sure there’s a special reason why we gather thousands of bogans on the banks of a river and shroud our city in smoke to celebrate the invasion of Australia by European colonists. Right?

I’m very pleased

to report that Precipice Books–a new publisher of independent books–has a website up and running to promote their first release: the second edition of Todd Keisling’s A Life Transparent. I read A Life Transparent in its first, self-published incarnation and found it as entertaining and inspiring as any mainstream release (you can read my review of it here). I’ve watched Todd working his arse off over the last year or so to refine the new edition to a razor-sharp point. His editor, Amelia, then filed that point down to the nanoscale. Have no doubts about it people, this edition is going to slide right into your brain. And you’re going to enjoy it.

You can pre-order the signed paperback or hardcover editions at the site, alifetransparent.com, or buy the slick digital copy right this very minute.

photo credit: jenny downing

As the end

of the year nears, I’m mindful of what has happened in the twelve months. I’m feeling a very wordy post coming on, so if you’re not in the mood to read a lot of retrospective self-analysis I’d advise you to run for the hills. Say hi to my Mum while you’re there. Again, just in case you skip the first two sentences of every one of my posts:

THIS IS GOING TO BE MOSTLY ME TALKING ABOUT MYSELF AND NAVEL GAZING ABOUT THE YEAR THAT WAS.

There. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

It’s no secret to many that I began getting down to the business of writing my thesis at the start of this year. In the beginning, there was absolutely no room in my mind for the thought that I wouldn’t be finished by the end of my scholarship. No way! I would be finished with time spare to write up a couple of papers from my thesis chapters, get them submitted and hopefully published before, say, August, and have a job lined up for January 1st, 2011.

What a freakin’ noob.

The fact of the matter is that writing a thesis is fucking hard. I would say it’s been harder for me than most, but that would not only be boldly presumptuous, but also implies that everyone else has had some kind of magical fantasy thesis-writing journey where LaTeX farted auto-formatted rainbow tables of perfect results and supervisors sang their praises from the backs of unicorn Pegasuses (Pegasi! Pegasi!). The truth is that it’s just a bloody hard slog, and maintaining concentration has been tough. My methods have been a combination of externally forced disconnection from the rest of the world (i.e. Leechblocker and yanking out the CAT5) and the tiny spark of hope that one day, maybe, I’d be able to escape this relentless homogenisation of my mind. It seems to have worked at times, which is why I can say in confidence that as of this moment, I have a clear idea of what remains to be done, and the end is, if not near, at least within sight from the crow’s nest. Land ho, indeed.

This stagnation has applied to more than just the sweaty soup of desperation and coffee that permeates my office, however. I’m now going on four months without having been paid. I’m incredibly lucky that I’m a thrifty kind of guy, but even still, the diminishing state of my savings is a sorry sight. And the last couple of months, in particular, have been ones in which I feel like going out and enjoying myself is an undesirable thing, because it means money spent. Add that to the guilt that almost every Ph.D. student feels about not sitting at their desk typing 24 hours a day, and you’ve got a nice little cocktail for feeling awful every time you go out with your mates. I’m very thankful that I have friends that seem to understand this and go out of their way to make sure I feel included, despite me turning down their offers to go down South or out for dinner. While I don’t want to go into it too much, it’s also had an effect on home life, leading to a few crisis talks and more than a few evenings of stony silence. Not happy times. But like I said earlier, land ho. I really can’t wait until I can thump a big ol’ bound tree on my supervisor’s desk and call it quits.

‘Quits’ might sound a bit over-the-top, but if I’m honest with myself I don’t think I’m quite cut out for a life of academia. It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. The Future. Vast, unknowable, probably lacking in the quality cheese department. Whether it’s because of the unfortunate lack of a result in my project, or something else, the feeling is that I need a bit of a break from research. Putting it in perspective, I’ve been at one form of educational facility or another non-stop since  was 5. I think it’s about time I got out and did something other. Anything other. A few of my colleagues have suggested that I hang on for the post-doctorate position that would eventually come once I managed to publish a few papers. I’m still uncertain though. I’ve had a look into science communication–even expressing my interest in a group over in Melbourne–and I think it would be something I would be good at, and probably enjoy a lot. Eh, it’s all a bit hard to figure out in my head at the moment. Again, it’s probably best to arrive at land before deciding whether it’s worth building a settlement (plus I still need some sheep, wood, brick, and wheat).

Moving away from depressing talk, my creative writing has been steady and somewhat successful. I’ve managed to tuck a few publications under my belt; the advent of joining a writer’s group really acted as the catalyst in that regard. There’s something about having someone ready, willing, and able to read your work with a critical but fair eye that works wonders for motivation. I’ve seen my words in print a couple of times, and it’s just as rewarding as it was the first time all those years ago with Voiceworks. I’ve also used social media a lot more this year, using it to connect with writers and like-minded creative types over East. It’s amazing the sense of support that one can get from people that I might never meet, but yet offer their advice and time freely and enthusiastically. The Internet sure is a, uh, special kind of place. I guess it was discovering that social media can indeed be social rather than superficial; realising (or perhaps reaffirming) that there are real, live people on the other end of the chat window. It’s something I tend to forget sometimes, even with people I’ve known for years.

My family life has also had a bit of a bumpy ride this year. I’ve spent every second Monday rebuilding a relationship with a father whom I’ve really barely known. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s there. Well, okay, that’s really the only bumpy bit: my bro and sis continue to be awesome people and my Mum, oh! My Mum has lost an incredible 14kg over the last 20 weeks or so, which is just so damn inspiring. I had to laugh when she told me that she was annoyed that she didn’t lose weight over Christmas. Very determined lady.

And of course, leaving the best till last. Louise and I are still going strong, this year marking our fifth anniversary. Our relationship has gone through a bit of adjustment since the start of 2010. The advent of her getting a real, honest-to-goodness, full-time, 9-5 job has resulted in a bit of figuring out exactly how to work around that new kind of routine lifestyle. But with a few hard-fought realisations regarding how to structure the weeks, we got there okay. She still surprises and delights me (case in point: she came home today with brown/copper hair) despite the obvious drag of having to machine her way through drafting new houses for the ever-expanding extremities of Perth’s suburbs. I can’t imagine heading into a new year without her. And that’s the final word on that.

In any case, 2011 promises to be a really interesting year. I’ll be finishing up the big T, engaging with the workforce, writing more (and perhaps focusing on a few big projects), and perhaps even moving to a new city. All exciting thoughts. And with that, it’s time for me to get some sleep. Hope everyone had a very merry Christmas (and got as spoiled as we did) and enjoys a safe new year’s eve.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs

Been a bit

quiet around here. I assure you it’s for a good reason; The Document That Must Not Be Named is drawing near to being completed, and as a result, a lot of my online activities are being curtailed. But now that my page view statistics have returned to normal levels* I did want to stop in and update on a few things that have happened lately. In bullet form, for ease of reading.

• As hinted at, my thesis is approaching its end. I’ve finally got an idea of its final shape in my head, I can see where the splines suck together and form a nice smooth finish. It’s a nice feeling, but there’s a lot more work to be done. December is crunch time. I’ve told everyone I know that I want a thesis-less Christmas. It’s time to back that shit up.
• I attended the Cottonmouth/ Amnesty International spoken word/music/observational speech extravaganza that was put on at The Bird last night. Really great night, and it was great to meet some of the dotdotdash people there as well. Speaking of dotdotdash, I also attended the launch of their ‘Feast’ issue, which Anthony (one of the guys in my writing group) read at. He’s a great writer, and a really good speaker, who should be more confident about his abilities (yes, I’m hoping you read this, Ant). Also met the very cool Rosanna Beatrice Stevens who, if her performance at The Bird was any indication, will be one to look out for in the lit circuit for years to come.
• I’ve had two stories accepted for publication since my last post, which is really uplifting. Network Connection will be appearing in Ricochet, and Jack is forthcoming in Fractured West. Very pleased to be appearing in such nice places.
• Unfortunately, despite the acceptances, I haven’t been writing all that much. Dribs and drabs, but nothing spectacular, or even close to being finished. I’ve started critiquing at my old stomping ground, deviantART, and that’s given me a bit of fuel. But reading is what really fires me up, and so I’ve bought a few more books lately to try and get that going. Read my first J. G. Ballard (Hello America) and very much enjoyed it, and also my second Chandler (Farewell My Lovely) and loved that as well. The characterisation in both is incredibly good.
• I’ve been trying to get out on the weekend more often, hitting the beach a few times and playing golf with Dino and Marc more often. Really need to be doing more exercise (I’m developing a nice little pot belly at the moment), but I’m finding it hard to get the motivation up. The sooner I see a physiotherapist about my back, the better, but funds are also an issue at the moment.
• The recent Steam sale yielded a grand total of 23 games. I’m currently in talks with some friends of mine to host a charity event where all the guys who have bought excessive numbers of games through Steam participate in a no-sleep marathon to finish them all (and possibly review them?) to raise funds for Child’s Play. I’m hoping to organise it for January, but again it’s dependent on the capital-T Thesis.

Alright, that’s about all I can think of/have time for. Oh, there’s also the launch of Voiceworks that I’ll be helping out with, but that deserves its own post. Keep a look out for more info in a couple of days.

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* 1,000+ views per day for weeks on end was starting to make me slightly unhinged.

*EDIT: Woah, easy there, tiger. I meant 100+, though there was one day that marked my largest traffic at ~500 views.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

First, let me

start by apologising for the lateness of this post. I’ve been interrogated by various folk over the past few days as to when my intepretation of last episode’s events was going to appear, and various placatory assurances have been given. Rest assured, dear reader, that I was merely giving myself the time to grieve before delivering my eulogy. Without further ado, here we go.

Alright, start off with a re-show of all the makeovers just to make absolutely certain that we’re all aware that all the geeks are totally hot right now.  In the challenge room T.V. show host that isn’t Tim informs them all that the beauties that aren’t Tim are going to be archeologists for the day at a dig site. My mind is immediately filled with images of the beauties that aren’t Tim slaving over tiny chunks of pottery in ridiculous heat, using brushes to carefully extract the history of our civilization.

Nope, turns out it’s mud wrestling. With inanimate objects. And the geeks are going to be dancing/singing in/with a boy band. Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim kind of loses it. Bruce Lee starts humming Kun-Fu fighting, which proves how witty he really is, making a joke BEFORE HE WAS EVEN AWARE of his own second nickname. James Bond does some kind of weird thing with his head (I can’t really remember what it was that he did, but my notes say it reminded me of something like this). He also pretends to be a gorilla in preparation for the challenge.

Before that though, Tim has what seems to be a very oddly and carefully worded exchange with Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim. Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim says that Tim is like family, reinforcing every single stereotype of geeks being permanently in the friend zone on national television. THANKS TIM’S BEAUTY THAT ISN’T TIM.

Anyway, back to the mud-wrasslin’. All the beauties that aren’t Tim are basically rocking the Lara Croft look, but with a much higher poly count. Turns out they have to go into a mud pit and grab out random items and place them in chronological order. I can just imagine the producers pitching this one:

Producer #1: Mud wrestling. We have to get mud wrestling in there somehow.

Producer #2: What? But it’s got nothing to do with anyth–wait a minute. WE GET HISTORY FROM DIRT. MUD WRESTLING IS HISTORY K LOLZ.

Producer #1: HERP DERP HISTORY DIRT WRASSLIN’ BOOBS AMERICAN FRAT HOUSE CLICHES HAHAHA LOLOL

If someone could possibly clear up how chicks wrestling in mud is at all sexy, leave a comment. Please, it bothers me.

Anyway Bruce Lee’s beauty has perhaps her very first flattering camera shot and it’s one where she is covered in mud. Too bad, El-Lee. Speaking of which, the general consensus in my group is that Ellie-May has done precisely fuck all the entire series, leading me to suggest that her first name be changed by deed poll to Ellie-May-Not. Again, the geeks are not allowed to tell the beauties anything, which leads me to wonder how strictly this might be followed given they have had time to formulate ways of telling their beauties how to do things in the meantime. If I were one of the geeks that aren’t Tim (as Tim would never stoop to such base immoral behaviour), I’d totally have worked out a series of subtle signals. Anyway, beauty with incredible…personality that isn’t Tim winds up smashing this challenge, and she and James Bond have the unenviable position of having to nominate someone later in the show. Then the girls spray each other off in slow motion. Honestly, have any shame Mr. Producers? What’s that, none whatsoever? Right. Gotcha.

Geek challenge next and some random guys rock up to the mansion and all the beauties that aren’t Tim go a little bit spastic. This is Thominem’s chance to shine choreographically, since he can’t sing for balls. Probably something to do with the fact that he sounds a bit like Microsoft Sam. Tim trying to sound like a rapper is admittedly pretty hilarious, but hey, if Jerry can slay a crowd, anyone can. The geek band is named Geek Unit which, I dunno, they could’ve at least but in something starting with ‘p’ in the middle there to get a little meta. Geek Profit Unit? Geek Pimp Unit? Fuck yeah, that last one. So the geeks turn up and there’s a fairly respectable crowd to watch all the geeks that aren’t Tim do random moves and look slightly less awkward than I thought they would. Tim goes for an elbow stand and deliberately stacks it to make his peers look better.  Apparently he ended up with a mild concussion and a slightly fused vertebrae after that, and was warned he should stay conscious to ensure that no internal haemorrhage was present in his brain. If that’s not metal, I dunno what is. Anyway, Bruce Lee wins this round, obviously due to his ability to FLOW LIKE WATER.

Back at the mansion and Tim is having a bit of a shitfight with Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim. This makes for some of the most surreal conversation I’ve ever been witness to as Tim apologises for not doing the triangle leg hop and going for the elbow stand to whatever. Honestly, there is no scene that could ever be conceived that would so remove the concept of reality in reality television in my mind.  Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim is obviously nonplussed by Tim’s emotion. I’m not sure if that makes her an un-empathic child or an insightful observer of the gap between reality on display.

To the nomination stairs now, and Bruce and El-Lee nail The Fonz and Fonzette for obvious reasons, while James Bond and beauty with enormous…personality vote Tim and Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim. Reason cited is that Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim is not as devoted as Tim. Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim says that Tim is perfect. Well, duh? The topic of the quiz will be pop music, which is just REALLY FRAKING GREAT as Tim is so metal his balls clang when he walks.

The beauties get asked about Australian history which, let’s face it, is a bit unfair since you can count the number of students that actually know anything about Australian history on one hand. Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim has a question that’s not about Aussie history, but muffs it up when she doesn’t realise that a stool groom was someone who wiped the King’s arse. Fonzette really should have known the Ned Kelly question, given it’s tattooed across Ben Cousin’s drug-distended belly.

0-0 at half-time and it’s up the geeks to fight it out. Tim makes a gloriously deadpan joke while answering a question about Katy Perry, but then, like the rest of us, has no fucking idea who New Kids On The Block are/were and misses out on answering the question adding up member numbers. But Fonz also manages to miss a question about some lesbian with a bad haircut, so it’s down to a tie-breaker.

Now, I’m not going to retread this scene, because it’s too painful, but let me say this:

• I’m standing by my comment that the second person has a very obvious advantage in any ‘closest-to-pin’ guessing game. I mean, sure, Tim made it really fucking easy for Fonz when he accidentally made a joke about Madonna’s age rather than attempting to answer the question, but still. Even if he had said an age close to her real age, it’s a lot easier for the second person to think ‘Hm, is she older or younger than that?’ rather than ‘How old is she, actually?’
• Also, let’s face it, she could really be 68.

So Fonz and Fonzette win, and Tim and Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim are off the show. And so ends my brief foray into the realm of reality television (that isn’t Masterchef). Look forward to my post next week where I completely fail to give a fuck about anything that happens.

few weeks ago, my Mum asked me to get some photos off an old beige box of ours that had been sitting in a cupboard for the better part of two years. It was a fun experience, hooking everything up and remembering the technologies that came before the ones I’m used to (e.g. “What the fuck, this only has IDE?”). While I was at it, I plugged in some hard drives that I’d had in storage and poked around in their cavernous 1Gb and 5Gb interiors for anything interesting that past-me might have thought worth saving.

Boy, was I in for a treat.

Behold, in all their two-dimensional, pixellated glory, the screenshots of Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn that my former self decided to keep. There’s some pretty epic shit in there: me slaying a dragon, me starting to fight the end boss (I beat him), me finding awesome secret underground temples in one of the main cities that none of my friends did. I have no idea how many hours I poured into that game, but it was a lot. So thank you, past me, for providing me with a great moment of gaming nostalgia.

[Show as slideshow]

photo credit: sd

This week was

the week that everyone was waiting for: the makeover episode. And by ‘everyone’ I really mean ‘everyone that likes watching Sex and the City’ because that’s basically the demographic we’re talking about here. Apparently Tim’s makeover was supposed to be the most SHOCKING and TEARFUL, which hardly had me wetting myself because, as my good friend Dino pointed out, cutting off someone’s (spectacularly beautiful) hair that they’ve been growing for something like FIVE FUCKING YEARS is bound to be pretty bloody heart-breaking.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The episode started with the geeks’ morning routines which, to be honest, aren’t that geeky. They get up, get into clothes, and leave the room. This is standard practise for EVERY MALE ON EARTH, so I don’t see why the beauties were so shocked. What’s really shocking is the amount of time a girl can spend doing what is essentially precision masonry in front of a mirror. I digress. I seem to remember Marlon…fuck, I mean Asian geek that isn’t Tim saying something pretty funny, but all I’ve got on my notes is “MARLON comes in with his usual rapier wit. YOU ARE AWESOME” so I’m going to have to assume past me was right and move on. Tim’s hair is shown in slow motion and I pass out for a while from its majesty. When I come to, T.V. host that isn’t Tim is telling everyone that tonight is the makeover. The beauties that aren’t Tim take this opportunity to rag on their geeks that aren’t Tim, calling Beardy geek that isn’t Tim a 40 year-old werewolf, and referring to Asian geek that isn’t Tim’s hair as belonging to that of a lego man. I had two immediate thoughts regarding that last statement:

1. Fuck lego is awesome, and;
2. When was the last time you saw an Asian lego man? I don’t even think they exist, since the only way you could iconographically represent them would be through the eyes, and that would almost certainly be perceived as being racist.

Anyway, so the geeks have to strip down for a spray tan, which re-burns the PALE MAN OH FUCK SO PALE and Tim’s extraordinarily lean body into our retinas. Great, and GREAT respectively. Tim busts out two GOLDEN lines about flesh origami and giblets. Beauty and the geek? Beauty and the COMEDIAN, more like it. After the spray tan comes waxing. So. Much. Waxing. The girls laugh it up variably outside sunbathing, or in a spa, or just generally milling about. Why didn’t they do anything to the beauties? Couldn’t they have made them take OFF all their make-up? Wouldn’t that have been a great experiment, to see how badly the geeks cringed when all the foundation came off? Missed opportunity, Mr. Producer.

Fuck. As noted by Beardy geek that isn’t Tim in the comments on last week’s post, Beardy is no longer Beardy. Don’t worry, with his transformation I have a new name for him, but it’ll come later. Tim gets his hair cut, and I would like to take the opportunity to say that Tim very generously donated his hair to a foundation that makes wigs for cancer patients. How’s THAT for generosity? He could have auctioned it for (conservatively) well over five thrillion dollars, but no. Some cancer patient somewhere is going to be pulling chicks left, right, and centre. Go you good thing.

For some reason we segue into Hawaiian T-shirt enthusiast that isn’t Tim dancing with an old guy to Vanilla Ice. I’m not sure if this is still BatGeek or if I’ve entered some weird twilight zone art experiment. Oh thank fuck, it’s stopped.

Tim has a small moment, where he confesses his troubles in high school, and the choosing of his image to protect himself. I can’t say anything funny about this, a lot of geeks and social outcasts do exactly this kind of thing to cope with the trauma of intellectual targeting in high school. Where do you think this blog came from initially? But don’t worry Tim, we’ve got your back. Anyway, again the AMAZING comments come out: “First cut of the rest of my life.” MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER CIRCUIT HERE WE COME. Suckers’ll pay thousands for that kind of gold.

Alright, ad-break and then the reveals begin. After all the shouting, screaming and weeping, we end up with (in order of appearance):

• Bruce Lee,
• James Bond,
• Eminem,
• The Fonze, and
• Tim/Zoolander.

Tim has the cheek-bone structure of a DEMIGOD. And I guess everyone else looks pretty fucking sweet too. However, I’m pretty sure that the fashion guru guy that was responsible for all this was just trying to go for the Village People of the 21st century and got a bit mixed up along the way. For the sake of historical accuracy, here are my live notes from the reveals:

Marlon up first: HOLY CRAP HE IS PUNK MOTHERFUCKERS. FUCK YESH MARLON.

Michael up next: Very suave duder, Love the thin tie look. Stop the neck bobble though dude, kill that. Tamika wantey.

Pale Man/Thomas up next: Holy crap, hip hop with platinum blond. Kind of like Spike out of buffy. Pull anything off?

Daniel: Obviously quite a looker before, so not that big a surprise, Italian. FONZEY EHHHH.

Tim: FUCK YES. Best ’til last. OH GOD WHY DID THEY KILL YOUR HAIR WHY. HE GETS HIS OWN AD BREAK.

WOW. WOW TIMMY WOW. PINK, REALLY?EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE GIRLS IS JAW DROPPED. KARA CRYING. DUDE. YOU NEED A TAN.

Anyway, so the makeovers lead into the fact that the geeks are going to be auctioned (‘like a piece of meat’) and then go on a date with the lucky bidders. Oh, and they need to get a kiss at the end of it. The totals the geeks pull in are pretty predictable, but the ridiculous shit starts happening when Bruce Lee pulls his shirt off and confirms his nickname in the most epic way possible. DAMN KID. Do you do weights every time you make an awesome comment, is that how that six-pack happened?

The dates themselves were actually too awkward for me to sit through in their entirety, due to the beauties having to fuck with them during the night. Incidentally, this was one hell of a walk week for the beauties–lying around while the geeks got their bodies abused, then saying a few words through a microphone? What a fucking gimme. Thominem actually made me laugh for the first time with his comment about having to compliment his date’s nostrils, and their being impossible to compliment since they are the things you SUCK AIR THROUGH. HAH. Anyway, all the geeks got a kiss despite appearing to be complete weirdos. THANKS BATGEEK PRODUCERS.

So everyone gets through to the semi-final round, yay! Michael is relaxing in the spa and Tamika WHAT THE WHAT! GO TAMIKA. HOLY CRAP. WOW. NICE. FUCK FUCK WOW. Two episodes to go peeps. Bring this shit on.

photo credit: cmiper

There’s been heaps

of commentary regarding the print versus electronic publishing industries (are they even separate industries?) throughout this year, and most recently at the Meanland, Wheeler Centre et al. blogs. A great deal of the discussion centres around the usual topics of gatekeepers, the value of print, print anthologies as sought-after objects, the freedom of digital content, etc. But as yet, I haven’t seen anyone really embracing and playing with the idea of digital content delivery. This afternoon, after reading Paul Mitchell’s post on Meanjin’s imminent switch to online (whose loss of print copy I will certainly mourn) I lost myself a little bit in a thought experiment about how forward-thinking publications might bridge the digital divide.

It should be obvious that a lot of these ideas don’t have the digital architecture easily or freely available to be able to be delivered in the near future, but I think most of them are certainly within reach. I also apologise to anyone who has already had these thoughts: some of them are rather obvious/straightforward and so I dare say a few have already contemplated the possibility of them. A credit to you if you have already lay awake contemplating the feasibility of such features.

Reading playlists:

With all the free content that magazines and e-zines put up, I find it odd that no-one has thought to enabled a cross-site ‘click-to-add-to-playlist’ button. A reading playlist that you can then send to somebody in a convenient, shortened URL. Of course, there are things like Instapaper which are almost there, but an Australian journal/blog specific service would be a boon.

Modular print-on-demand:

This is something that I think is probably being worked on as we speak by a larger publishing company. Imagine a service where you could browse the archives of a short story publication, tick the boxes of stories you want included in your personal anthology, and be mailed out a (probably cheaply made, say Popular Penguin style) paperback of those stories for your unique enjoyment. A money-spinner waiting to happen, says I.

Open anthology voting:

This has the most potential to go disastrously wrong, but the thought of having voting open for stories or essays to be included in an anthology is not too farcical. If voting were tightly reigned in, and the authors not opposed to the notion, a public option on the inclusion of a small percentage of the included pieces of an anthology would be a great way to generate community involvement in the publication process.

Comments in anthologies:

The way I imagine this might work is that an essay is released on the journal’s blog a few months before any production cycle begins. It is flagged as having been selected to appear in the journal or magazine, and people are encouraged to contribute thoughtful, articulate comments responding to it. Comments would be, understandably, heavily moderated, and the editors would only choose the best to appear on the blog itself. The author could choose to respond, and that way build up a dialogue that could be included in the journal article itself.

Micropayments for comments:

Paypal has a new micropayments option that has had the web comics world on their knees weeping with joy. Relating to the above, a system of small micropayments for each comment that you wish to contribute to the discussion of a journal-bound article would encourage folk to be even more articulate to ensure their money is well-spent. Micropayments could be implemented in a bunch more places: for special interactive events with authors, or other things I can’t think of right now.

Interactive/dynamic comments:

This needs to happen. The disconnect between the blog post and the comments has gone on for far too long. The ability to place comments/footnotes at any point rather than comments at the bottom of the page would be a HUGE boon to the discussions of the kind we have seen Emmett Stinson and Overland promote over the past few weeks.

Video content & podcasts:

Something that has already been picked up by a few places. The Kill Your Darlings podcast is fantastic, and I regularly listen to the lovely Estelle Tang interviewing and discussing with Aussie authors. Video is alive and well at the Wheeler Centre, but these are really the only two very noticeable attempts at introducing sound and video to the Aussie lit landscape. Paper Radio is another, though their release schedule is, er, well-spaced. I’d mention my own project, Soundzine, but that’s international and besides, you would think I was being a filthy pimp. Edit: totally forgot about our very own Cottonmouth here in Perth. Mah b!

These were my main ideas after thinking about it for a little while. Does anyone else have any great ideas of their own? I’d love to hear them in the (irritatingly static) comments.

photo credit: GrungeTextures

Same deal as

last time, my furry fellows. Provide me with exactly three words (no more, no less) and I will interpret them and write a vignette for you. One prompt per person, please. Help get me off my lazy arse and write some new stuff.

photo credit: Bascom Hogue

Thanks to Irene

for alerting us all to this: until the end of November, the entirety of the Royal Society journals are free to access. Ever want to see the original Newton discussions? Bragg’s papers? How about Lennard-Jones? This is, quite frankly, a ridiculous thing for Royal Society Publishing to do, but I’ll take it! A huge number of important scientific discoveries are published in their archives that stretch way back from 1665 to present day. Here’s a few that might tickle your scientific pickle:

Lennard-Jones’ “On the Forces between Atoms and Ions”

Schrodinger’s “Contributions to Born’s New Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”

Born’s “On the Quantum Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”

Bragg’s “The Reflection of X-rays by Crystals”

Fermi’s “Artificial Radioactivity Produced by Neutron Bombardment”

Rutherford et. al discussing the Structure of Atomic Nuclei.

But don’t let me prescribe, go and have a look yourself!

photo credit: Pragmagraphr

Sorry for not

getting this posted as quickly as usual, but I was just so seething with geek rage last night as I watched this episode. Also because I accidentally missed the show while playing FIFA10 and had to stream it half an hour afterwards. But I’ll get to the rage later. First, Tim.

Episode opens with the beauties that aren’t Tim learning they’re going to be debating stuff  in a court room. The geeks that aren’t Tim attempt to illustrate the finer points of law, while Tim takes the smarter route and attempts to teach Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim how to speak for long periods of time without sounding like there’s a tumble weed down her throat. Unfortunately Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim gets upset because she doesn’t quite have the vocal range of Tim. Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim should be less concerned; imitating perfection is pretty much impossible. Tim’s Yoshi becomes the most envied plush on Australian television.

Afterwards, the beauties who aren’t Tim attempt to teach the geeks who aren’t Tim what flirting really is. Tim is not present as he is already the master of all body language. He can read you like a book, and probably already has. Beardy geek that isn’t Tim is with one of the twin beauties that isn’t Tim. Beardy says that he enjoys spending time with Ellie, condemning a kitten to death-by-milliner. My rage begins to simmer. Beardy makes out with twin. DUN DUN DUUUUN.

Next day is the courtroom challenge. All the beauties that aren’t Tim are dressed like that office girl you’ve always wanted to bang. The disparity between debates is pretty ridiculous, ranging from a discussion of socio-economic policy to whether kissing on the first date is cool. One of the twins that isn’t Tim confirms what we’ve all suspected: every single one of the geeks that aren’t Tim are firmly in the friends zone. Beardy geek that isn’t Tim wants to raise an objection. My rage continues to simmer, letting out an occasional hiss as bubbles rise to the surface and release angry vapour everywhere. Will definitely get to him later in this post. Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim wins the courtroom debate, which means for the second week running I have no sense of tension for the remainder of the show. But Beardy geek that isn’t Tim has my ire up, and I continue watching anyway.

In downtime between challenges, Tim gains an enormous amount of geek cred by starting up a game of D’n'D and being the DM. Fuck yes, we love you Tim. Also Tim gets a bit of a funny feeling about Beardy geek that isn’t Tim, that perhaps he’s too good with the ladies to be a geek. Conversely, the beauties that aren’t Tim have some kind of weird spa time where twin that isn’t Tim tells the other beauties that aren’t Tim that she made out with Beardy that isn’t Tim. Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim gets angry and upset (again). She calls Beardy that isn’t Tim a fraud and a deceiver and OH MY GOD MY RAGE CANNOT ME CONTAINED ANY LONGERRR NRRRUUUUGHHYYYRRHHAAAAARGH

BEARDY YOU ARE A FUCKING FRAUD. FROM THE MOMENT YOU STEPPED ONTO THIS SHOW WE KNEW YOU WERE A FRAUD. WE CAN SMELL OUR BRETHREN AND YOU ARE NOT ONE OF US. YOU ARE TO BE SCORNED AND RIDICULED FOR YOUR TRANSPARENT ATTEMPTS AT SEEMING NERDY AND INTELLIGENT. YOU EVASIVE MOTHERFUCK.

Ah, man. Okay. So everybody seems to hate Beardy geek that isn’t Tim, which is as it should be. Onto the geeks’ challenge for the week, which is WHAT THE FUCK WHO MAGAZINE MODELLING OH MAN. The photo shoots are awkward as all fuck, and Hawaiian T-shirt enthusiast that isn’t Tim is a dead fucking ringer for the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. Finally it gets to Tim and

TIM’S

HAIR

IS

FUCKING

AMAZING

I think you can all agree. Hottest picture ever. Definitely buying a WHO magazine, despite myself. The unveiling of the finished products reveals a mathematician that isn’t Tim as the winner, and he compounds his win with an Old Spice reference. FIST POUND THAT SHIT RIGHT THERE.

Nominations are next and Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim completely SERVES THE SHIT out of Beardy geek that isn’t Tim. And what does Beardy douchebag that isn’t Tim try and do? DEFEND HIS ACTIONS! IT was like watching some vile rodent opening its mouth to spew forth patronising, toxic sludge. WHAT THE SHIT. Dude, you better be thanking your beauty because she stopped you from making EVEN MORE OF A TOTAL TOOL of yourself on national television.

So the questions are just as ridiculously disparate as the courtroom challenges (attributing some random quote to Kate Moss versus answering a question about Zoolander that had FOUR DIFFERENT AND CORRECT ANSWERS) and country kid that isn’t Tim and the twins that aren’t Tim are out. Fuck I hate that greasy Beardy mess that isn’t Tim. But someone’s got to keep an eye on him and call him out, so I’ll be tuning in next week to do that, and also mourn the loss of Tim’s beautiful locks.

photo credit: ArslanIS

If you weren’t

aware, today marks the first day of the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Long the scourge of my Google searches for nanotechnology-related articles, ‘NaNo’ is an exercise in fury. Imagine willingly placing pressure on yourself to write in excess of 1600 more-or-less coherently strung words every day for a month. You would need to be either stark-raving or very angry at your keyboard. Which is why this year, like every other year before it, I won’t be participating. Next year, perhaps.

But! I don’t want to seem disinterested or discouraging. I think NaNo works for so many people precisely because it involves switching off the inner editor and just going for it hell-for-leather. Plus there’s a whole great cheerleader community that has evolved at the originator website (nanowrimo.org–which seems to be down at the time of writing) to help you on your way. So to add my shouts to the NaNo camp, I’m giving those writers out there two software presents related to the process of writing without editing.

Present one is Q10, a program that I have mentioned before and probably will again. It’s a no-nonsense, full-screen text editor that will stop you from getting distracted by things while you type. It doesn’t do formatting (you’ll have to add that in later if you truly want bold, italics, underline etc.) but it does give you word counts, section counts, basic stopwatch and timer functionality, and charming typewriter sound effects if you so want them.

Present two is The Guide, which is where you would place your text once you have finished with it in Q10. The Guide allows structured layout of documents so that you can place each day’s writing in its place, as well as keeping any research you have done close to hand without needing to open up a hundred documents in Word and keep switching between them.

So good luck contestants, I hope you win (for those not in the know, ‘winning’ is defined as having reaching the 50,000 word minimum by November 30th), but more importantly I hope you all have a great deal of fun!

photo credit: Pedro Glez.

Alright, time for

episode to of BatG:A, or BatGeek Australia as I’ve come to refer to it in my head. New credits this time around, with all the geeks and beauties looking like they’re having a pretty awesome time in spas and such. God Tim’s hair looks amazing. Anyway, show starts and cut to Hawaiian T-shirt guy that isn’t Tim  is making breakfast for his sleeping beauty that isn’t Tim. He knocks over a bunch of flowers. This is the guy that said that he already loved sleeping beauty that isn’t Tim. He has no idea what he’s doing or what these feelings are. But he can make a pretty mean breakfast of…toasted sandwiches? Why on earth would anyone have toasted sandwiches for breakfast? That’s a LUNCH TIME thing, Mr. Hawaiian T-shirt enthusiast that isn’t Tim. Sleeping beauty that isn’t Tim thinks that her geek is incredibly sweet and even sweeter because he doesn’t really know that he’s sweet. And let me step back from the show for half a second here just to make my position on this clear:

Geeks: You can do sweet things like this for a girl. It’s completely awesome, and girls will definitely love you for it. BUT. Have the self-respect to EXPECT SOMETHING BACK at some point in time. If the girl for whom you are doing all this awesome shit just takes and takes, leave. Self-respect is much more important than the ‘tang in these situations.

Girls: If your guy geek does something really sweet for you, don’t just take it. You can’t just expect that he’ll keep doing this stuff because he doesn’t realise how great it is. TELL HIM HOW GREAT IT IS. And then, follow that oft-repeated maxim of creative writing, “Show, don’t tell”. Show him that the fact that he’s doing something awesome for you means something by doing something thoughtful and awesome for him. That way you can both be all like FUCK YEAH MUTUAL AWESOME.

Right, rant over. Anyway, all the geeks that aren’t Tim and OMG ALSO TIM walk into a room and they’re wondering what the deal is with the alcohol and giant pink novelty calculator. T.V. host that isn’t Tim says something about the geeks working on Martinis. Also the beauties have to do some arithmetic. They don’t know what that’s about. Everyone except for Tim is shown trying incredibly hard to get them to learn arithmetic via methods like clothes pricing and exercise. Presumably this is because Tim was able to teach Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim maths in its entirety. All of it.

The beauties’ challenge is to do maths with spiders, stick insects, cockroaches, and witchetty grubs. Tim sums this activity up with a very good impression of a Harrier Jump Jet. Essentially there’s a lot of screaming until aforementioned sleeping beauty that isn’t Tim ends up winning by performing this impressive bit of mathematics:

Three orb spiders + a cockroach + another bigger cockroach + a stick insect + witchetty grub = 100.

BatGeek Australia: we teach numbers good. Anyway, so then television host that isn’t Tim unveils a crazy challenge for one of the beauties to eat a witchetty grub to earn immunity. And holy fucking shit folks, it’s on between Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim and another beauty that isn’t Tim.  It’s pretty obvious that Tim has taken the time to teach Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim some essential survival techniques, ‘cos she’s got that sucker down the hatch in no time. AND YES. YES. TIM AND TIM’S BEAUTY THAT ISN’T TIM EARN IMMUNITY! THE CROWD GOES WILD!

Knowing that Tim wasn’t in any danger meant that the rest of the episode was without the nervous fear that he might get eliminated and I’d have to, well, stop watching a television program. I have to admit I kind of tuned out while Hawaiian T-shirt geek that isn’t Tim had his dream come true: a legitimate reason to wear a Hawaiian T-shirt on national television. There were some things about cocktails and Tim made a funny about gravity when he threw a shaker too high and narrowly missed crushing the skull of Beardy geek that isn’t Tim. Or at least I really hope that was the reason. Actually, fun fact: Tim is blind in one eye, and therefore probably wouldn’t have been able to catch the damn thing if it had come down near him. Perhaps flinging it far away was a survival mechanism? Sneaky, Tim, very sneaky.

Eventually Asian geek that isn’t Tim wins the day, saving the arse of fiery redhead beauty that isn’t Tim who didn’t touch one single insect. Where’s the justice, eh? There’s some fun times in the evening, and Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim and Tim get cosy while looking up at the stars. And if I hear the phrase “I just want to get to know you better” ONE MORE TIME, I WILL MARCH THROUGH THE SUBURBS OF PERTH WEARING A KITTEN‘S SKULL AS A CROWN. Scout master geek that isn’t Tim and beardy geek that isn’t Tim then went head to head, culminating with the Perth beauty that isn’t Tim and scout master geek that isn’t Tim getting eliminated. Sad to see Perth beauty that isn’t Tim get eliminated, she seems pretty nice.

A preview of next week plays and OOH OOH, you can see that Tim and Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim are in the position of nominating people for eliminating! THAT MEANS TIM IS STILL IN ‘TIL AT LEAST THE FOURTH WEEK! FUCK YES! Also something about beardy geek that isn’t Tim (who is Tim’s competition for Tim’s beauty that isn’t Tim) being vilified for totally making out with one of the twins. I thought the point of the show was to transform geeks towards social norms? Doesn’t that mean they’re supposed to become jerks? I will never understand television. Roll the fucking credits, please.

photo credit: joshfassbind.com

I’ve just sat

through the first episode of Beauty and the Geek Australia. ‘Dubble-yew tee eff Phill’, I hear you say. ‘You have been known to scoff at regular reality television, and yet you’re willingly watching a series that seemingly takes advantage of your geeky brethren?’ Well, yes and no. It’s true that I don’t like reality television, but it’s also true that I’m going to sit through and enjoy every single damn episode of BatGA for the next six weeks. Why? Geek solidarity, that’s why. It also doesn’t hurt that my good friend Tim just happens to be The Fucking Sex of this series. I vowed to blog my experience of being entertained at my friend’s expense, so here we go. Obviously my focus will be on Tim because, well, he’s my mate. If you don’t like that, bog off to one of the other geeks’ mates’ blogs. Those of you who expect a sense of logic and decorum from my blog posts, look awaaaayyy….now.

The opening sequence was masterful. Eight geek stereotypes gliding into the mansion grounds on some kind of motorised scooters. Why they thought scooters and not Segways, I have no idea. Into the house the geeks went. The beauties were next, having been transported into the mansion grounds by vehicles that could not only go faster than I can walk, but were driven by other people. The beauties were made to sit down and ‘bid’ on geeks as they were revealed on a giant conveyer belt. Tim made possibly the corniest astrophysics pick up line in the history of astrophysics pick up line. Fortunately the history of astrophysics pick up lines started about an hour ago, so he’s safe there. He had a couple of bidders and one of the girls noted that his hair was better than hers. You’re damn right it’s better than yours, and [SPOILER ALERT] we mourn its loss greatly.

Anyway, all the geeks got picked, so no-one was left out. Woo! After a mild bit of shenanigins in the spa and Tim proposing a nautical toast that I guess he learned on the Leeuwin, the first challenge was presented. Geeks had to make bikinis for the beauties to step out in. In 90 minutes. Except it wasn’t 90 minutes, and it wasn’t just bikinis. But that’s insider information and we won’t go into that. Actually we will. I heard from a source very close to the show that in fact that 90 minutes was 40 minutes. And it wasn’t just a bikini, it was a dress and applying the girls’ makeup. Those dresses the beauties were standing in at the end? The geeks made them. Not bad, eh? And if you were wondering why all the beauties had complexions that wouldn’t have made it past the mirror, well, now you know.

Anyway, some guy that wasn’t Tim won and it was revealed to everyone that the tall olive-skinned one was a twin. And the grin on Paleontologist that isn’t Tim threatened to split his fucking neck. Anyway, more stuff about people that weren’t Tim and it was onto the next challenge. Flight.The beauties had to construct things and the geeks had to stand there and try not to shout patronising instructions. Let’s pause here and consider this. GEEKS had to NOT INSTRUCT PEOPLE on HOW TO DO SOMETHING. I’m astounded that one or two of them didn’t spontaneously combust with the effort required to not tell their beauties how shit fits together. Bravo boys, bravo.

Anyway, next the geeks came out in spandex suits and, yes, Tim, I did look at your junk and I have two things to say:

a) I’m impressed, and;

b) High five for being a lefty.

So then a bunch of guys that weren’t Tim jumped off a bridge into Darling Harbour. One of them even got winded, so I was almost interested. But then Tim suited up in a coyote helmet and managed to KICK OFF a CARDBOARD ROCKET in MID AIR. Seriously, play that shit back and tell me he didn’t manage to get an extra metre or so from his acrobatics. Stuntman in the making, says I. So Mr. Twins wins and his smile extends to somewhere at the back of his head and we all head back to the house. Here’s the sad bit coming up. Tim cries tears of pure, manly pleasure as he realises he has not been picked. Somehow he manages to make a neckerchief look not totally gay. There’s a quiz between one of the geeks that isn’t Tim and another of the geeks that isn’t Tim. Also beauties that aren’t Tim. Somehow the beauties don’t know the answers to questions that are simple but outside their experience, oh aren’t they stupid?

NO. NO THEY’RE NOT STUPID. IGNORANCE IS NOT STUPIDITY. FUCK YOU AND THE JUDGMENTAL HORSE YOU RODE IN ON. IT’S PATHETIC MOTHERFUCKERS LIKE YOU THAT MAKE PEOPLE NOT ASK QUESTIONS. NOT KNOWING SOMETHING ISN’T A CRIME. SIT THE FUCK DOWN.

Anyway, so the geeks get a couple of questions wrong as well. It’s a tie-breaker. The one geek that isn’t Tim hazards a guess at 30 while the another geek that isn’t Tim goes for geek cred with 42. Fist bump to the another geek that isn’t Tim. We cool. You lost, but we cool. Everyone cries a bit, the another geek that isn’t Tim and his beauty get eliminated, and credits roll.

Hell yes, I am addicted.

photo credit: olivier.jeannin

It’s been pretty

dead around here lately. I’m busy and stressed and tired most nights, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Whoever thought writing a scientific summary of three years of your life would be so hard?  However, I do have a few moments spare this evening so I thought I’d report on a graphic novel lecture I attended a couple of weeks back.

The master class was run by Justin Randall and organised by the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Western Australian division. Justin is a very accomplished illustrator and graphic novelist, having illustrated plenty of well-respected series such as 30 Days of Night and Resident Evil. If you check out his portfolio, you’ll immediately see why: his style is very much suited to that kind of dark, foreboding storyline.

There weren’t that many of us there on the night–five in total–which made it a very intimate affair. Of the five, two were more interested in the artwork side of things, two (including yours truly) were more interested in writing, and one was interested in both. So split pretty much down the middle in terms of where people were coming from.

Justin started by giving a brief history of how he came to be a comic artist. He confessed to finding no enjoyment in the superhero genre (except when it was subverted) and pointed us to a primary influence on his artistic style in the form of the late Zdzislaw Beksinski. He also recommended some movies and graphic novels that have influenced his storytelling style, and some books that might be of good reference. No surprises that the latter were Scott McCloud’s Making Comics and Understanding Comics, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, and on a more philosophical level The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

He went on to define the five basic parts of his storytelling:

1. Protagonist: Introducing your protagonist, providing their motivation and abilities, and earning the readers empathy.
2. The Spark: The event that provides the driving force of the story. Also known as the conflict of the story.
3. Escalation: The hiccups in the journey, the struggles they go through that earn more reader involvement and empathy.
4. Climax: Ensuring that the escalation doesn’t just stay as escalation, this provides the resolution of the conflict.
5. Denoument: Wrapping up loose ends and providing closure, of one kind or another, to the story.

Once we’d run through examples of each, Justin talked on originality and being aware of (but not alarmed by) cliches. He drew parallels with the kitchen: when cooking it’s okay to use the same ingredients, but be aware that you are. Mix things up a little and you’ll get original recipes that other people will enjoy and that you can (hopefully) sell. The creation of real characters that weren’t stereotypes was discussed, with Justin suggesting that history can provide some compelling examples of people who have existed (and are therefore real, or as real as written history will allow) and can be used as a basis for character creation.

We then had a quick run-through of frame transitions, and while I’d already read a discussion of them in the aforementioned Making Comics, it was nice to go through again and see some more exampels from Justin’s work where each can be used to unique effect. It’s always nice to know that the theories put forward in books are actually practicable.

The discussion then turned to how to get started with the physical act of writing scripts and stories. The formats of scripts and the various considerations of angles and scenes and how to play with the readers sight lines. One thing I hadn’t considered was the very act of turning a page being used to hide reveals; if a reader is faced with a cliff-hanging frame on an even numbered page, they can be shocked with a reveal on the next odd-numbered page. There was also the plea from Justin not to rely on dialogue to deliver major plot points, as this often comes off as wooden and deliberate.

Finally, we talked a little about the way comics are a natural choice of storytelling for our generation. Kids and young adults growing up now have an incredibly high level of visual literacy as a result of the huge volume of advertising and other visual forms of art (movies, television, etc.) being witnessed every day. Justin advised us to respect that visual literacy and not to spend too much time hammering the reader over the head with plot, but trusting them to pick things up and figure things out from even the most subtle of clues. Definitely wise words there.

Overall it was a very worthwhile experience. Justin ended by giving us all a five minute exercise of writing a short scene script for a pre-determined short plot, and then went over it with us quickly. He offered to give us critique on our fully-written scripts if we completed them, and I got some feedback from him last week on mine, which really helped drill in to me how in-depth the thinking on various transitions and shot choices can get. Absolutely invaluable.

And of course, this post wouldn’t be complete without some pimpage for Justin. His new series, Changing Ways, is available through Gestalt Publishing–Australia’s foremost indie graphic novel publishing house located right here in little old Perth. I’ve embedded the really very nice book trailer below especially for you, Mark.

I get an idea in my head to do something that I think perhaps Louise would like. When we moved into our current house in Rivervale, we had, for the first time, a garden to look after (our inability to do so has since become an issue with our rental people, but we’re looking at employing a gardener to fix our mistakes). In the backyard there was a large, deciduous tree whose constant leaf-poop we all cursed at when it came time to do the primitive raking and mowing chores that were all we really knew how to do with our garden. By July it had finally stopped dropping all its leaves, and we were left with a tangle of bare limbs taking up most of the backyard.

Aha, said my brain.

You might recall that my last romantic effort used a very practical ping-pong ball Instructable which I made and strung up with various photographs of us. The lighting aspect was something I wanted to repeat, but I decided to move outside. 60 light globes, a hacksaw, 1kg of beads, 30m of brown string, a screwdriver, reverse pliers, 20 square centimetres of moss, 39 miniature clothes pegs, 300 fairy lights, one glass cut, and a cryptically chopped up message later, and voila:

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