Are we at peak Wes Anderson yet? With Asteroid City still showing in some cinemas, maybe some film-goers would welcome a break from the American filmmaker. If that’s not you though, then check out The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, trailer, a short film made by Anderson, based o … | Continue reading
Regulars will have noticed the slowdown in posting at disassociated recently. It’s a tad busy at the day job, but more excitingly I’ve also been working on a large (think novel size) writing project in recent weeks. It’s the same one I’ve been chipping away at for years mind you, … | Continue reading
American climate scientist Zeke Hausfather has described global temperatures in September 2023 as gobsmackingly bananas. This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas. JRA-55 beat the prior monthly record by over 0.5C, and wa … | Continue reading
Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize for literature, for what judges describe as “his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” Fosse’s work spans over seventy novels, poems, children’s books, essays and theatre play … | Continue reading
Book cover of Incredible Doom Vol 1, created by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden. Incredible Doom is a serialised comic strip about two American teenage proto-bloggers, Dougie and Anna, in 1999, by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden. If you were on the web in 1999, as I was, this cou … | Continue reading
The recent long running strike by members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) in the United States, has ended. But the settlement secured by the WGA not only means fairer pay and conditions for screenwriters, it is also seen as a victory over Generative AI technologies, which w … | Continue reading
Twenty-four hours in an invisible epidemic is an especially poignant edition of visual essay magazine, The Pudding, produced by New York City based journalist Alvin Chang. The epidemic in question is not Covid-19, though the lockdowns triggered by the pandemic have aggravated ano … | Continue reading
The shortlists for the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize were announced earlier today. The award is presented in two categories, Adult, and Children and Young Adult. The three finalists in each category are as follows: Adult Salonika Burning by Gail Jones Iris by Fiona Kelly McGreg … | Continue reading
Stefanie Koens has been named winner of the 2023 Banjo Prize for unpublished Australian fiction, with her manuscript titled Islands of Secrets, a work of historic fiction that spans several decades: Shortly before Christmas in 2018, schoolteacher Tess McCarthy flies to Western Au … | Continue reading
Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, writing for The New York Times, suggests sortation, a method of selecting public office holders in Ancient Greece, be given consideration: People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective tha … | Continue reading
In a few weeks Australians will vote in a referendum to decide whether the Australian constitution should be amended to include a Voice, an advisory body, for the nation’s Indigenous people. It’s an idea some people are not in favour of though, including a number of First Nations … | Continue reading
Book cover of Amy Winehouse: In Her Words. Amy Winehouse: In Her Words, published by HarperCollins, one for fans of late British musician and singer Amy Winehouse. Much has been said about Amy Winehouse since her tragic death aged just 27. But who was the real Amy? Amy Winehouse: … | Continue reading
The recent, post pandemic lockdown, sometimes poor behaviour of film-goers has been the subject of some discussion recently. Many of the problems frustrated cinema patrons have reported stem largely from the gratuitous use of smartphones during screenings. It’s enough to make you … | Continue reading
Noctalgia is the recently minted neologism for the phenomenon of missing dark skies at night. Noctalgia is something astronomers could tell you about. Dark, light pollution free, skies are essential for their work, but they’re not so commonplace anymore. And here we have a dilemm … | Continue reading
Nineties supermodels Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, were household names thirty years ago. At least in my household, that is, because when you had an aspiring fashion photographer in your midst, little that the four did would go unm … | Continue reading
Poison ivy, a noxious plant often found in North America, and parts of Asia, could become more common place as global warming creates an environment conducive to its growth. Poison ivy is poised to be one of the big winners in this global, human-caused phenomenon. Scientists expe … | Continue reading
Australia is officially in the grip of an El Niño weather event. This means affected areas can expect higher than normal temperatures, and reduced rainfall. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology announcement on Tuesday confirmed what many people had suspected for some time. The Bu … | Continue reading
The internet felt like an unexplored new frontier when I launched the first iteration of disassociated in 1997. New frontier may seem ornate, trite even, but it was an apt description. We were feeling our way in the dark, and I’d say most of us were clueless as to what the intern … | Continue reading
A study of the accents of eleven scientists, originally from different regions and countries, who spent a winter together at an Antarctic base, found they had developed a new accent of their own: In 2019, a team from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich studied the phonetic … | Continue reading
Astronomers are convinced the solar system hosts another planet, often dubbed Planet Nine, or Planet X, but are unable to agree on its size and mass, nor its location. A few years ago speculation was rife a Neptune size body was orbiting the Sun well beyond Pluto, taking between … | Continue reading
American journalist and cartoonist Malaka Gharib used to visit her father in Cairo, Egypt, during the summer school holidays, in the mid-nineties. It was hot, as anyone who’s been to Egypt in June or July (yours truly) could tell you. Like many Egyptians though, her father’s home … | Continue reading
Sydney based Australian filmmaker and editor Kerrod Cooper has been named winner of the inaugural LUMIX seventy-two hour filmmaking challenge, with a short film titled Big Chef, Little Chef. Cooper’s production is a glimpse into the life of a troubled TV chef, portrayed by Sydney … | Continue reading
Adelaide based Australian actor Tilda Cobham-Hervey will take the lead role of Esme, in the stage adaptation of The Dictionary of Lost Words, based on the 2020 novel of the same name, written by Australian author Pip Williams. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the … | Continue reading
Book cover of Kinky History, by Esmé Louise James. Tuesday 3 October 2023 promises to be a red letter day for devotees of kinks, fetishes, and spicy sex, for that is the day Kinky History, by Melbourne based Australian writer Esmé Louise James will be published. For those thinkin … | Continue reading
Threads. Mastodon. Bluesky. They’re among options for fans of micro-blogging who want to leave Twitter behind. But is seeking out alternatives to Twitter really the solution? American computer scientist and author Cal Newport, writing for The New Yorker, believes we should instea … | Continue reading
Baltimore based American teacher and poet Edgar Kunz writes about the hardships of making a living as a poet, while also wondering how long his poetry will stay with his readers: I’ve been using my writing to hustle a life: a place to live, a salary, some measure of stability. Bu … | Continue reading
I hate to think exactly how backwards compatible disassociated is. In the past I strived to work with web standards which ensured some uniformity of visual display, regardless of the web browser, or operating platform, being used to view the website. For the most part, but not qu … | Continue reading
Australian author Alexis Wright, a past winner of both the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Stella Prize, has been awarded the 2023 Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council) Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature: Alexis is an author of ground-breaking works … | Continue reading
All roads, even Roman roads, lead to TikTok. Take any topic, no matter how obscure, how antiquated, and the subject will, it seems, surface, eventually, on the FYP tab of the ubiquitous video sharing app. Last week it was the turn of the Roman Empire to trend. The Roman Empire. A … | Continue reading
Everything you wanted or needed to know about floppy discs. An awesome computer science history resource put together by British IT consultant Jonathan Pallant. Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy … | Continue reading
Making it as a prepper, or survivalist, is not merely a matter of storing some canned food in dug-out somewhere, and watching a few YouTube videos on the subject, warns Jessica Wildfire: We don’t think about where we’d go to the bathroom. We don’t think about how we’d filter our … | Continue reading
The Star Wars origin stories keep a coming. Lando Calrissian, one timer owner of the Millennium Falcon, apparent scoundrel, administrator of Cloud City, and later a general in the Rebel Alliance, is set to feature in his own big screen production. A Calrissian backstory has been … | Continue reading
The latest Kurzgesagt video may — like a number of their recent offerings — still have an end of days theme, but at least the subject matter is a little more fanciful. Even if we’re talking about the eventual heat death of the universe, or as Kurzgesagt posits, the already happen … | Continue reading
It’s been twenty years since American filmmaker Sofia Coppola’s second full length feature, Lost in Translation, was released. Pretty much all anyone could talk about at the time was the whisper scene at the end of the film, when Bill Murray’s character, Bob, uttered a comment in … | Continue reading
Kagi Search is a pay-to-use subscription search engine founded in 2022, that promises to deliver relevant search results free of extraneous clutter and adverts. Another plus is Kagi’s undertaking not to track users, or collect their data. But Kagi isn’t only about locating pertin … | Continue reading
Still from Foe, a film by Garth Davis. Foe, trailer, a science fiction psychological thriller, is the third feature of Australian filmmaker Garth Davis. Based on the 2018 novel of the same name, by Canadian author Iain Reid, and set in 2065, Foe tells the story of a married coupl … | Continue reading
The ten-day weather forecast for some parts of NSW are currently predicting several days with maximum temperatures in the vicinity of thirty degrees centigrade. This, at the moment, for Saturday and Sunday, 16 and 17 September, and Tuesday 19 September. These temperature ranges c … | Continue reading
When it comes to quickly gauging whether a movie is worth watching (since life is too short for bad films), I glance at its Metascore, a rating of a film which is calculated by Metacritic. This score is based on, as their FAQ page explains, a weighted average of reviews from top … | Continue reading
Book cover of Looking After Country With Fire, by Victor Steffensen. Looking After Country With Fire, published by Hardie Grant in 2022, written by Indigenous Australian writer and filmmaker Victor Steffensen, and illustrated by Far North Queensland based visual arts teacher Sand … | Continue reading
The Boy and the Heron, trailer, is the latest animated feature by Japanese filmmaker and manga artist, Hayao Miyazaki. Released in Japan under the name Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka, Miyazaki’s latest film is said to be partly autobiographical: Through encounters with his friends and u … | Continue reading
Dictionary.com has unveiled a new series of updates to its lexicon. Five hundred and sixty six new words have been added (seems a lot) along with three hundred and forty eight new definitions. The words don’t stop coming, so we’re updating the dictionary more frequently than ever … | Continue reading
The shortlist for the 2023 Banjo Prize, for unpublished Australian fiction, was announced on Tuesday 5 September 2023, and includes the manuscripts of five writers: Lou and I, by Anna Fursland Islands of Secrets, by Stefanie Koens The Shores Between, by A’Mhara McKey The Sister T … | Continue reading
Book cover of The Conversion, by Amanda Lohrey. Tasmanian based Australian author, and winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Amanda Lohrey, has written a new novel, The Conversion, which will be published by Text Publishing, in October 2023. The story follows a couple … | Continue reading
The French capital, Paris, has become the first European city to ban the use of electric share scooters. The move follows a referendum earlier this year, where Parisians were asked to decide whether the e-scooters should remain or be removed. Paris will this week become one of th … | Continue reading
Shayda, trailer, the debut feature of Iranian born, Melbourne based, Australian writer and filmmaker Noora Niasari, has been selected by Screen Australia as Australia’s entry in the Best International Feature category of the 2024 Oscars. Based in part on Niasari’s own experiences … | Continue reading
Ways are being sought to reduce the harmful environmental impact of air conditioning (AC) systems, which remain essential for health and well-being, starting with how buildings are designed and constructed in the first place: “We need to design our buildings in a way that consume … | Continue reading
The 2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award shortlist was announced yesterday, Monday 4 September 2023, and consists of the following six titles: An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family, by Alison Bashford Anam, by André Dao Emperors in Lilliput, by … | Continue reading
The winners of the annual Davitt Awards for crime and mystery writing were announced in Melbourne on Saturday 2 September 2023. All That’s Left Unsaid, the debut novel of Sydney based author Tracey Lien, won the Best Adult Novel award. Seven Days by Fleur Ferris won the Best Youn … | Continue reading