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I've been posting stuff here since 2006. Please don't hold it against me.
I am going to break every single link on this website as a birthday treat and there's nothing you can do to stop me.
18 November 2022 01:00PM rants
It's been an interesting couple of days on the internet.
New management seems to be trying their hardest, most likely unintentionally, to kill Twitter. It's probably the social platform I've been most active on since I spectacularly detonated my Facebook page over a decade ago. Whether or not it survives, it's prompted some introspection about what my future on the internet looks like - and there are two almost entirely orthogonal courses of action that I keep coming back to.
1. Why even bother?
I don't tweet a lot any more. Earlier this year I played with the idea of trying to consciously tweet more. I realised that most of the stuff that used to make it to Twitter was now hitting my group chats first. The thoughts that would have been unfolding - or most likely, being ignored - tentatively, publicly, observed and at risk, were now happening in spaces that were closed, targeted, safer - almost cozy. Occasionally, a particularly good one would make it out to the public timeline, and I definitely got some gentle ribbing about audience testing my tweets on my chats for that - but it does kind of seem a little absurd, when you step back from it. Why would I ever post something publicly and risk it going nowhere - or worse, everywhere - when I can send it straight to the people who will actually care about it?
The idea of having a profile, and expecting people to pay attention to you, your thoughts, your half-baked jokes, really seems like a holdover from an earlier version of the internet.
Why did we ever think any of this needed to be public at all?
When I blew up my Facebook account in 2009, I didn't actually sit down with the intention of blowing up my Facebook account. I sat down to have a rant and a snark at what annoyed me about the platform, and got to the end of the post and realised that I didn't have to do participate in it if I didn't want to.
I'm just realising that I've done the same thing, 13 years later. I didn't realise this was my "I quit Twitter" post when I started writing it, but having built up some steam, it is sort of the logical conclusion.
I have the stuff I care about backed up. Whether or not Twitter survives, I don't know that I'll be back. I don't know if I'm going as far as burning it to the ground, although I might if the mood strikes me, but I'm also giving myself permission to just - give up.
It's been fun, but I think we're done.
So now what?
2. What about this?
If group chats have eaten one half of social media's function, then maybe the other half is something Twitter ate a long time ago and which has perhaps only now able to claw its way, ragged, covered in drool but intact, out of the corpse. That's... here.
Man, I used to lavish so much love on this place. Did you know this whole site is coded by hand? There's a custom piece of software that generates all the pages, and it uses (I think) clever but (actually) horrific abuses of the programming language's built-in text formatting to do it, and all of the subroutines are named after the steps you'd take to make a cup of tea.
And over all that time, I've never broken a single link. You can still follow a bookmark from when this page was hosted on Blogspot and end up at the correct post, skimming across three hosting providers and two domain names. I was 13 when I started doing this. In a couple months, I'm turning 30. This place has been here for most of my life, which is a wild thing to say, and it's all still there, unedited, unbroken, out of some bizarre sense of loyalty. To keep the past around for the future to enjoy, even though it makes me less and less comfortable. Uncomfortable, in fact, to the point of putting disclaimers on content because it was written by a child who was almost but not quite me.
We touched on this above, but in what may or may not be the dying days of twitter, I mused about whether it was worth being public, about being available to all people, everywhere. I think we can apply the same logic to time. Is it worth being archived? Making your past available to your future? I used to think there was some perverse 'sticking with your guns' honour in standing by what you said in the past, in acknowledging that you said it, even if you no longer agree with it, but frankly, much like posting publicly, it's exhausting - and while it might be noble, there's certainly no benefit to it.
So anyway, in the spirit of giving myself permission to do things - I'm gonna break some shit around here. Because yeah, my cozy circles are a safe home for half-baked thoughts, for riffing on jokes, for sharing things I found. But there's still a bucket of things I do actually want to show the world, because they are cool - and finished, and polished, and things I can be proud of. That's not a static set, and it doesn't include everything I've ever done, and it needs some deliberate curating and gardening to make sure it stays as something that I'm happy to have people find, instead of something that makes me cringe a bit when it comes up.
I'm not labouring under the illusion that anyone other than me was fond of this place, but on the off chance that you were, take a good look around - because we're going to shake things up a bit.
See ya later, and welcome back. 😉
(Un)packing
10 February 2022 11:00PM life
It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing remaining to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply.
Iain M. Banks, Look To Windward.
The simple fact is that there's an upper limit to how much you can do in a one bedroom apartment with one car bay and no yard. Not just in terms of space, but in terms of complexity. You would think the limiting factor would be storage space, but with some clever arranging, that turns out not to be as much of a problem as you'd think. Ikea, Kmart, even Bunnings, will sell you no end of storage solutions that let you pack a surprising - perhaps even shocking - amount into a storage unit and a linen closet and let you line the interstitial spaces over wardrobes and under beds with neatly packed objects.
No, the actual problem - and one that to some extent is masked by the solutions you find to the first - is that there's no room to actually use any of the stuff you've cleverly stored. There's plenty of archival space, but very limited working space. Or, to deploy a computing metaphor, you've compressed all the files on your hard drive and you're feeling smug about how much free space you have, but now you don't have the RAM to unzip - well, anything.
It's subtle, and teasing its effects out from the homebody-inducing nature of the past two years would be almost impossible, but in moving out you notice it. A satisfyingly tetrised storage unit full of things you're totally going to do any day now becomes a spread across the floor in a horrifying admission that you didn't do any of them. Ah yes, I will definitely make some more homebrew, as soon as I figure out where to put the fementer while it's doing its yeasty thing. I'm definitely going to get back into archery, but I'll have to find someone else's yard to practice in, and then borrow the car for a whole day to actually shoot. I'd love to have mates over for a barbecue - although dragging the thing upstairs is a pain, and there isn't really room on the balcony, and I don't even know if we're allowed to. Stoked to try those new PC games and maybe do some streaming, pity I have to run it through a slightly janky remote desktop connection to my laptop, I guess that's in the too hard basket as well.
Living here has been a selection bias against anything you don't have space to do, and you don't have space to do anything. The affordances of the space are stacked against you. And when the only hobby - or probably more accurately, recreational item - you have permanently set up is the television, then that's what you do in the evenings.
At some point, in other words, I suspect we may have become slightly boring.
And maybe you kid yourself that you're making up for it by using the pool in the building or being able to walk to the Local Small Bars And Cafes, and yes, we are going to miss those things, but Having A Pool and Going To Bars is a poor substitute for a personality.
Living here was always going to be a trade-off, and while it was a fun experiment, I think it's time to move on. I don't think we were too big for this place, necessarily, nor do I think we've "outgrown" it. But I do think we perhaps lived a more complex life than we gave ourselves credit for, and were maybe more interesting than we thought we were too, and the compression process to fit in has been... lossy.
Is that something we can reverse? Maybe! I'm hopeful, at any rate. I'm excited for my hammock and my fire pit in my yard, and to put sound absorbing foam and LED lights in my study, and to have a horrible vat of fermenting something in the laundry. I'm excited to steal a corner of the garden my wife is already planning out to grow fresh tomatoes she won't eat that I can have all to myself. I'm excited for our hypothetical dog, and equally excited for our very real cat.
I'm not just excited about the possibilities - I'm excited that, suddenly, again, there are possibilities at all.
How's married life?
29 January 2022 04:21PM life
Pretty much the same, but people ask you that question a lot more.
Glib comments aside, I think it's interesting to reflect on why people assume things are going to be so different. We didn't do this because we felt we had to, or because we're particular believers in the institution of marriage. We did it because we love each other and we wanted a party, but we sure didn't go into it to change anything. We set out to formalise the relationship we already have.
I think that was reflected in how things went down on the day. There's a whole lot of things that you're "supposed" to do in a wedding in the 21st century and I think we probably did less than half of them. As soon as you stop accepting "because that's just what you do" as a reasonable answer to "why", things suddenly get way more fun.
We took every component, and examined it carefully, and if it wasn't shiny enough to make the cut, we ditched it. It was a magpie's wedding, carefully hoarded from the sparkliest objects we could find, and I honestly couldn't think of a better way to do it - because (he says confidently, only a few months in) that's how our marriage feels as well. We're not suddenly doing things differently because "that's just what you do". Why would we want to do that? We liked what we had before and wanted to lock it in forever, not tip it on its head.
Getting married didn't change what we thought about our relationship, but our relationship did change what we thought about marriage. Our wedding was descriptive, not prescriptive. It reflected, rather than redefining.
Which has been a weirdly nice confidence boost, actually. Realising that I - we - are the ones calling the shots in how we run our partnership and our lives and how we're seen by and interact with the world has been weirdly empowering. It makes you feel grown-up, except it's our turn to decide what that means.
And when you put it like that, it really takes a lot of the pressure off.
One of the most common bits of advice we got leading up to the big day was to lower our expectations, to acknowledge that not everything would be perfect, and that even if things went wrong we should make sure we enjoyed it. Except, in my experience, that turned out to be completely incorrect. I had this very vivid picture in my head of what I wanted the night to look like. I remember looking out over everything at one point and realising that it was exactly, one hundred percent accurate to that picture.
(It's been interesting, since then, to go to another similarly personal and beautiful wedding, and realise that other people's versions of perfect don't match ours, and what was perfect for us was just that - perfect for us)
In fact, I think that advice might have been exactly backwards. Everything was perfect, not because it was actually flawless or because we had a zen-like acceptance of things going wrong, but because we were so high on joy that literally everything that happened, whether it was nominally part of the plan or not, was immediately beautiful and funny and precious.
I didn't come into this because I wanted to offer advice, but I think if I were to have some, it'd be this - whether it's the wedding or the marriage, you're defining it, and not the other way around.
I also didn't come into writing this intending to actually answer the question in the title, but I guess I kind of did - because if you can pull that bit off, both the weddings and the married life are pretty freaking great.
Everything the light touches
22 September 2021 06:30PM travelthe-drive-back
Everything that hits the film, whether it's the heat from the cab of a car or a gentle toasting of X-rays from airport security, is part of the journey.
You kinda just have to hope that you've caught the moment you want to - either I got it or I didn't, I guess we'll see. It's hard to resist the urge to take a backup photo.
(Yes, I took three cameras on this trip, a phone, the RX100 and the Nikon film SLR. Ya boi has come a long way from the "phone alone" days. The Sony is really just for astro at this point, and the phone is for... everything else.)
You also don't end up spending ages fussing and trying over and over again though - the lack of instant feedback means you move on quicker
You spend a lot of time setting up and then waiting for the moment, instead of seeing the moment and grabbing the camera. You gotta decide in advance whether you want to try to catch this moment or not. Am I taking the camera? Am I getting it out? It's a more rigid delineation between having an experience and making a content.
I swapped to Ektar in Karijini. The 10-ish year old(!) Fuji I had loaded in the camera ran out right as we took a dip in a pristine pool. This was was my first speciality film experience, and honestly? Zero regrets. It was a perfect match for the colours, and look at how crisp everything came out. 10/10, would swap film rolls on a rock in the middle of nowhere again.
As always, it was a delightful time capsule experience sending the film in and picking it up. What I wasn't expecting was how much more appropriate a set of 24 or 36 photos is for actually sharing with people. Or, how much nicer it is to just be able to hand people the prints and let them leaf through them at their own pace. People actually wanted to look at my holiday photos. Some of that's down to novelty, and some if it's down to me having extremely patient friends, but at least part of it is, I think, that this is genuinely a more human-scale way to do photography.
Oh my god, my kids are going to look at some of these one day and think "jeez, dad".
Oh well. Cool that they'll have at least one of the same experiences I did, I guess.
Great Northern
13 September 2021 09:00AM travelthe-drive-back
Iceland and the Pilbara, I shouldn't have to tell you, are very different places. Almost literal polar opposites, in fact.
They're at opposite ends of the colour spectrum - one's blue and white and black, and the other's red, green and gold. They're at opposite ends of the age spectrum too - Iceland is one of the youngest bits of geology on the planet, while Australia is one of the oldest. And they're on opposite ends of the planet, with opposite extremes of temperature, which means the monkeys who live there dunk themselves in water for opposite reasons.
But somehow, they've got the same soundtrack.
(Yes, this is gonna be another thing about post rock , sorry not sorry)
A couple months ago, my brother gave me a call and if I could help him out. He was planning on doing the Gibb River Road, and having driven all the way up there and then done one of the toughest tracks in the country, he reckoned he wouldn't fancy driving the car all the way home again.
To cut a long story short, last week we flew into Broome and we drove his car all the way home. On the way, just like everyone else in These Unprecedented Times, we took a drive through Karijini National Park. Grace put this on as we drove in to Karijini, saying "I thought it might be appropriately epic" - and she was right.
It's not a surprise that we have sweeping rugged vistas at home, of course. Or that road tripping through one could remind you of the other. To a certain extent rocks are rocks, and extreme temperatures are extreme temperatures, and roads that wind through them are roads that wind through them. That's geology, and meteorology, and... highway engineering.
What's surprising is that this specific soundtrack fits. Maybe it's the genre's origins, or the kinds of names the bands give themselves and their tracks, but post rock always felt cold to me. But it turns out it can be searing hot as well. Listening somewhere else brings out different notes. Literally, I guess. Listening in the frozen north brings out the high, soaring, reverby bits. Listening here brings out the surprising acoustic guitar and piano in the same tracks.
And it wasn't even my pick!
The track that got me into this genre was called Great Northern. I always assumed it referred to a continent - but maybe it was about a highway all along.