My week of Monday 21 to Sunday 27 September 2026 was both productive and scrumptious. A podcast posted. A livestream conducted. Two new dishes conquered. And an endangered moth sighted.
I often trying cooking new things, but this week I tried two new things. On Friday it was more or less a Malay ikan bakar, or grilled fish on banana leaves, using one of the barramundi we won at a local RSL club three weeks back. The other was Taiwanese three cup chicken on Saturday, although there’s nothing particularly Taiwanese about it. As you’ll see, I’m not big on presentation, but I do link to the recipes.
There’s been a little more progress in the saga of The Lost Module, the big wooden crate that contained one-third of the goods I’d had in storage and which went missing. Now the company is saying: “We have completed a thorough audit and identified several modules dating back to [the period in question]. While these modules may not contain your goods, we intend to open and inspect them to eliminate that possibility.” One wonders why that wasn’t done six months ago, but I’m happy to give them a little more time.
Meanwhile this season’s crowdfunder The 9pm Spring Series 2026 is now 68% of the way to its first target. Thank you all so much. That means there will be at least four special-guest episodes of The 9pm Edict podcast in total for this season.
Podcasts
- The 9pm Space Dust of Disappointment with Dr Alice Gorman and Rami Mandow, recorded last Wednesday and posted this Tuesday.
Articles
- The Weekly Cybers #135. OpenAI hacks Medicare and maybe others, Meta releases a new AI agent, tighter rules coming for .au domains, and more.
Videos
- The 8pm Six Months in Campsie livestream happened on Thursday night. It includes a 10-question Quiz.
Media Appearances
- One of my old photos of a Sydney train was used to illustrate the story How fight over valuable Sydney land will shape a future train line on some sort of news digest site called MundaneRead. The site also rates the stories on several curious criteria — including how many adjectives it has, which somehow is meant to indicate how “descriptive” it is. Which is weird, given that a lot of writing advice reckons that if you rely on adjectives you’re using the wrong nouns.
Photos, Media Appearances, Corporate Largesse
None of these this week. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos appear and when the occasional livestreams are scheduled.
Some Interesting Links
- Apparently the human brain is two separate organs.
- I don’t know why, but Snarky Platypus and I have been watching a lot of defunct Australian game show Sale of the Century lately. There’s quite a bit of it on YouTube, including the very first episode and one of the 10th anniversary episodes featuring David Lange (former PM of NZ), Don Chipp (leader of the Australian Democrats), and Gough Whitlam (mythical creature embodying humility).
- For those of you following the resuscitation of Australian literary journal Meanjin, an interview with establishing editor Ashley Hay.
- There’s some fascinating bt also frightening news stories linked from this Bluesky thread, AI bros are perfectly normal people living perfectly normal lives. Which of course they’re not.
- This week’s suggested follow: I haven’t listened to this new podcast yet, but Who’s the DJ? is “the show that digs deep into the music and stories of the world’s greatest DJ’s and producers”. I’m choosing this because it’s presented by MC Scott T and produced by John Thompson-Mills, with whom I co-presented Club Escape on Triple J in Adelaide back in the early 1990s.
The Week Ahead
This week’s theme is gearing up for the final quarter of 2026. This will include locking in some podcast guests, some client work, and starting in earnest to get some more paying work in the coming months.
I’ll also be trying to get into a proper exercise routine, starting off with these gentle exercises from the UK’s NHS and the others in the set. I love the model they’ve chosen. I’ll also make sure to go in a proper walk every day,
And I’ll be clearing out the wardrobe where I stacked away a bunch of stuff that was pulled out of storage — some to sell, some to give away, some to chuck out in the council clean-up day on Friday.
The Weekly Cybers newsletter will appear on Friday afternoon as usual.
On Saturday, after quite a long gap, Snarky Platypus and I are finally recording an episode of Another Untitled Music Podcast. Yes, this was postponed from last week. If you’re a supporter with a We Will We Will Judge You playlist or want to Recommend a Song to Us, please let me know by midday AEST this Saturday 3 October. If you’re not sure whether you’re owed these or any other rewards from my crowdfunders, just get in touch.
Saturday is also the start of a three-day long weekend, with the Labour Day on the Monday. At this stage I don’t have any plans beyond the podcast recording.
Further Ahead
- NEW: Aussie Bird Count, 19–25 October 2026. Yes, I did add this event so this section wouldn’t be empty for a second week in a row.
[Photo: A bogong moth (Agrotis infusa) photographed in Campsie, Sydney, on 27 September 2026. I was very pleased to see this critter and two compatriots, because there’s been very low numbers since 2017 and they’ve been listed as endangered. It looks like they’re back.]