All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris. Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
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I haven’t written anything new for Anzac Day this year. I’ve said it all before in 2011, and before that in Anzac Day Rememberings and Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice.
They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget
[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]
So this is a bit weird. Just as someone on Twitter asked whether I was hanging out at Hellfire Club, the robot @hyper_mpesce mentioned it too. WTF?
I’m not sure who @fivewalls is, but he asked: “You’re not hanging out at hellfire again are you?” That’s the column on the right, people who mention me or direct their conversation towards me.
@hyper_mpesce, which is a robot that repeats things Mark Pesce says, rearranging and making everything hyper, said: “hyper-If hyper-you hyper-even hyper-if hyper-you hyper-read hyper-the hyper-Hellfire hyper-Club. hyper-” hyper-#DISCONNECT.” As one would. That’s the column on the left, which is everyone I follow.
I can think of no explanation for this coincidence.
I reckon Benno Rice was right when he tweeted that this card is definitely for me. Consider this little sequence from Twitter early this morning.
Leslie Nassar had just tweeted that he’d had a dream where Channel Seven’s Sunrise program was “throwing One Direction celebretweens at super-fat versions of TV chefs carrying butterfly nets”.
I responded thusly (here with some minor improvements to the flow):
In the last dream I recall, the hipster wouldn’t shut up so I slowly sawed off both his hands at the wrist with a knife.
At first he thought I was joking, but as the blade worked through the tendons he realised in terror that I was serious. Blood everywhere.
I threw his hands onto the floor in front of where he was sitting against the wall and left him there, whimpering. His friend went quiet.
And then I woke up. Pulse racing. Sweating. Breath gasping. I couldn’t go to sleep after that, so I made coffee and read the news.
Why am I telling you this? Well, a week from today I’ll be flying to Perth to… to… [gulp] to speak at #DigitalMe. Yes. Speak. That’s it.
I would like to have a dream with butterfly nets. I think butterfly nets would be quite lovely fun.
I think I will make a coffee now. And read the news.
The title of this post comes from a subsequent tweet by the Snarky Platypus. “Are you going Wolf Creek on hipsters again?” He makes it sound like a bad thing…
Incidentally, if you do a Google Images search for the text “I don’t get nearly enough credit for managing to not be a violent psychopath” you will discover moist, sticky muffins and a dwarf-eating hippo. You’re welcome.
I’ll be in Perth on Friday 27 April to present at DigitalMe, one of a series of media140 events, the other two being DigitalBusiness on Thursday 26 and DigitalFamily on Saturday 28 April.
(These events are part of the City of Perth’s Innovation Month. It looks like there’s some good stuff happening, including the screening of some classic futuristic films.)
DigitalMe is a full day of activities that “takes the individual on a journey through the digital landscape of blogging, video, personal privacy, personal reputation, mobile web and social media helping to demystify the digital world and understand more about your personal digital footprint.”
My half-hour session at 2pm is “Destroying your world, tweet by tweet, like by like”:
Facebook, Twitter and social mobile applications encourage you to share your life. But what happens when you share too much? Every time you share, tweet, email or browse a website you leave a digital footprint that reveals far more than you may realise — or want. Find out what Facebook, Twitter and the secretive online advertising companies know about you and take control.
I covered some related themes in a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks back.
DigitalMe is being held at Northbridge Piazza. It’s free, but you’ll need to register online.
I’m flying into Perth on Thursday 26 April around lunchtime and leaving on Sunday 29 April in the mid-afternoon. My schedule is fairly open so far, so other diversions are welcome.
So this image was sent to me in a very roundabout way, and I seem to have drawn the virtual short straw and ended up publishing it.
Could it be that Ben Grubb, deputy technology editor at Fairfax news sites smh.com.au, theage.com.au, brisbanetimes.com.au etc, is the secret love child of independent Member for Kennedy, Cloncurry’s own Bob Katter?
If you have a theory about what the connection might be, do tell me in the comments. People do need to know.
And no, I am not going to reveal who sent me the image.
If you find it to be particularly disturbing, do let me know and I’ll suggest some remedies.
Since the list of most popular posts for 2011 was pretty disappointing, just like the previous year, here’s my personal selection of seven more timeless posts for this year. Happy reading!
As usual, this does not include the material I wrote elsewhere, for Crikey, ZDNet Australia, ABC The Drum, Technology Spectator, CSO Online and the rest. That’s all listed on my Media Output page.
You might also like to check out my personal favourites from 2010, 2009 and 2008.
[Update 27 December 2011: Minor corrections to text and HTML markup.]
As has become my wont, at the end of each year I do a series of posts looking back at what I’ve done and how people reacted. This is the first, a list of the most-read posts from 2010.
There’s not a lot to choose from this year. Most of my writing has been elsewhere. But there’s some interesting results nonetheless.
Google knows everything. Google knows what people like. They also know what they don’t like.
Here’s what Google suggested just now when I started typing in the search “people do not like…”. Me. Change. You. Obama. Vista. Cats. To think. War.
It’s interesting to compare this with what turned up in previous attempts to have Google explain human nature. Personally, I find it quite disturbing.
Given that last year on Anzac Day I just recycled two previous Anzac Day posts, I’d planned to write something new this year. But I haven’t.
There’s two reasons for this.
One is that I’d thought I might write something about the way the defence establishment has handled various controversies recently, including the incident at the Australian Defence Force Academy. But once I started doing the research it all got a bit too depressing. And I wondered what I might say that hadn’t already been said. So I killed that idea.
The other is that when I looked back at those recycled posts, I realised they actually still say what I think I’d like to say on this occasion. So, recycled posts it is.
Those posts are Anzac Day Rememberings and Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice.
They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget
As I wrote two years ago, we trust that our politicians, who decide where and when these men and women serve, make worthy decisions about their most valuable contributions. Sometimes they never return, or return… changed.
Prime Minister Gillard, are you making worthy decisions? Tony Abbott, are your policy proposals also worthy? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.
[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]
Artemis breathed her last breath at 12.37pm AEDT today. It was a peaceful moment. I held her while she moved from this world into the next. I cried. I am crying now.
Artemis led a gloriously adventurous life, if perhaps short at a little over seven years. She hunted everything from moths and grasshoppers to rats and noisy miner birds, eating most of them. She even brought us the striped marsh frog from the garden pond — three times before she learned, the hard way, that it’s poisonous. She never did catch a currawong, and I’m glad of that.
Artemis used up one of her nine lives when her tail was crushed and eventually amputated.
Today I chose to take her ninth.
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