I recently read an article in iO9, about the potential shape of future political systems. And it got me to thinking, as these things do. I have a BA(Hons) in history. Part of my honours year was a fascinating study of the French, American and Russian revolutions, and the rise of Fascism in Italy and…
This morning I logged onto a group I belong to on Facebook and read a post from an author bemoaning the fact that a friend had stopped ‘liking’ their author page. It’s not something Facebook notifies a page owner. This person simply noticed the number of people liking the page had gone down. In fact,…
The subject of ‘trigger warnings’ has come up for heated discussion among my circles of friends. For those of you who have just emerged from under a rock, “Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as ‘trigger warnings’, explicit alerts that the material they are about…
I really, really have to wonder about some website developers. Do they ever test anything on real people? This is going to be my list of gripes, but when I mention these cases (especially the last one) to others, I get a chorus of violent agreement. I sure wish somebody would take note. 1. Show…
I haven’t had a rant for a while. Let me tell you, readers, the time has come. (Takes deep breath) Rant/ What is it with Apple and Microsoft? Why do they find it necessary to change a perfectly functional user interface to something that is supposed to be ‘better’ but clearly is not? I recently…
Many ships have been wrecked over the centuries. Most of their names became nothing more than ciphers in the ocean of history. But the wreck of the Dutch East Indies merchantman Batavia on remote islands off the coast of Australia in 1629 is well known in Australia and Holland. Why? Because over half of the…
Censorship The very word conjures up visions of Big Brother, of somebody leaning over your shoulder, ready to snatch the latest book or movie or song or whatever out of your hands. The mind turns to dictatorships or communism or any other form of totalitarian state and I, for one, shudder. That interpretation is far…
Finally! My very own copy of the extended edition of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey arrived! I spent a happy afternoon watching the movie and I’ve had some time to think about it. These things are all about editing, are they not? And we writers can learn from what the pros do. So this is…
On a recent journey down the west coast of Australia, I wrote a blog post in which I mentioned the town of Leeman, and I promised to tell the story that goes with that name. It’s another one of those incredible stories associated with the Dutch shipwrecks on the WA coast. In 1656 the Vergulde…
I’ve decided I must be odd. I confessed in an earlier post that I don’t understand vampires as sex objects and I fear I must reveal my strangeness once again by admitting that zombies are… just… yuck disgusting and what is the point? I realise that zombies is the craze of the moment, replacing vampires….