We’re casually viewing the greatest atrocity of modern times. No normal state does this to its enemies. No state that does this should get to be part of the international community. It shouldn’t be in orgs, or relationships, or trade. Boycott, divest from and sanction lsraeI
I have been working nonstop for the past 6 months covering what’s happening in Gaza, but what I saw today while visiting Al-Shifa hospital was unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed before :
Israeli occupation forces executed 300 Palestinians in and around the hospital, and this
I’ve been in the CBD donating blood & it’s infuriating to see all the unmasked construction workers, and to hear them whingeing about their tearooms, while a queue of masked, distanced international students stretches for almost a block outside a food bank on La Trobe St
This is "the passive exonerative" and the media also uses it to diffuse culpability when reporting on killer cops, state retaliation against peaceful protest, and violence against women and minorities
I can tell you’re trying to concentrate. I’ll sit 2 feet away and stare at you so hard you will physically feel my steady, unblinking support. You’re welcome
omfg the university is running a "Burnout Fatigue & Self Care" webinar. Here's my tip for combating staff burnout – hire enough staff and don't sack people. I'm so sick of 'self-care' that consists of telling the workhorses of capital to hold their own reins
My friend
@wynnkj
walked in Carlton Cemetery this morning & spotted this very pointedly phrased tombstone, so of course I had to research what happened to poor Georgie
The Free Palestine rally in Naarm today is the biggest I’ve seen since Invasion Day. So many people, so many chants. We’ve barely started marching, there are so many of us. They thought we’d get tired of this? We won’t stop until Palestine is free!
Oh my god wait now I see why I’m getting hate messages — someone actually wrote a story about this??? Saying that I accused this episode of *promoting* genocide??? What!!!
Am watching ‘Ms Represented’ on iview, and Penny Wong is holding an iPad, watching footage of Michaelia Cash absolutely going off in the Senate, and says drily, “She’s very measured, isn’t she?” 🔥🔥🔥
Okay, I am now realising that
@abcnews
is only 1 of many online media outlets that DO NOT KNOW HOW PULL QUOTES WORK.
A pull quote is a DESIGN element (like an image, caption or embed). It ‘breaks up’ text and makes it more inviting to scan.
It can’t REPLACE ACTUAL TEXT.
Today in the city, a lot of shops were empty, having not survived lockdown
But y’know what DID survive? That bloody shop Babushka in the Royal Arcade that sells ONLY matryoshka dolls! That’s all it sells!!! Who even buys those? Surely it’s a front within a front within a front
If I were a children’s author I would describe my characters deliberately in such a way that parents who discover they have to make Book Week costumes of these characters at 9pm the night before can easily do so with everyday materials from around their houses
According to the ABC, "At our current pace of roughly 446,000 doses a week, we can expect to reach the 40 million doses needed to fully vaccinate Australia’s adult population in mid December 2022."
Gough wept
I have now read 3–4 different awful stories about amazing, cutting-edge bionic implants (ear, eye, spine) that changed people’s lives, but the venture-capital funders got bored because the project wasn’t profitable enough & shut it down, leaving participants worse off than before
4. A person who was paralyzed and unable to walk due to a spinal cord injury became able to walk with the power of AI.
We live in sci-fi times.
It's a meaningful use of AI 👏👏👏
@bairdjulia
@smh
It’s not a Gen X thing, really – it’s a ‘privileged victim’ thing. Karen has the social power in any given scenario but wields it (over less powerful people) by claiming she’s been hurt and wronged
@lingerie_addict
There was a cool fashion museum show a few years back called ‘Deaccessioned’ that allowed visitors to play with and try on the clothes because the museum was getting rid of them anyway
I would prefer that all of Melbourne were locked down to the targeting (and consequent over-policing) of localities that are already stigmatised and over-policed
@redditships
The bit where he hugs her violently enough to knock the food she’s eating to the floor, and then claims she’s upset because the girl in the movie is being bullied 🙃🙃🙃
I'm quite taken with a proposal that we treat AI like we treat faeries:
– never tell AI your full name
– never accept a gift from an AI
– never tell an AI about a newborn child
– never eat food you find in a server farm or you'll have to live in the cloud forever
Universities love new buildings. Meanwhile staff are overworked & underpaid, & students are posting on Reddit about how lonely and atomised their uni life is. Doesn’t matter how “open” the campus is if the daily experience there is miserable
It’s depressing how capitalism turns every career path into a CEO track: the more senior you get in a field, the more you get pushed into management/bureaucracy & not practice. Anyone who just wants to be a respected, well-resourced practitioner is tainted by ‘lack of ambition’
I was struck by this: "We need … to teach media literacy in schools and to educate people about social media echo chambers." Y'know where you learn this? The humanities. Not just 'media studies' but basic reading comprehension & textual analysis
Witnessed a couple being turned away from Mario’s for not having a vax certificate. The guy decided to take it up with Mario: “I just wanted to enjoy myself with my wife”. Mario listened patiently but eventually was like “I’ve got all these other people I need to serve”. GO MARIO
What staggering fragility it takes to tell the media that the words “IsraeI” “PaIestine” & “apartheid”, written on your gallery wall by a famously polemical artist you’ve repped for 36 years, at his own exhibition, at your invitation, are “hate graffiti”
Dying at reports from the neighbourhood FB group that teens are getting back into listening to CDs as the sound quality is better than streaming and it’s nice to listen to a whole album at a time
One thing it took me ages to realise about ABC articles is that their pull quotes don't work like regular pull quotes, ie repeating quotes from elsewhere in the article; the big text IS the text and it's meant to be read inline with the regular text above and below it.
@jackbern23
Similarly, don't clap your hands too hard at the end of the show because you never know how much more clapping you're gonna have to do, and you don't want your hands to get sore
I like to start with a light pat that can intensify when the performers inevitably come back onstage
@OmarjSakr
I almost white out with rage at the way the supine captive media are reporting pensioners as "winners" for getting a one-off coin-toss of $250 or $420 or whatever, totally ignoring the HUGE THEFT of this government from the people to its own private-school-to-parliament pipeline
Australia’s obsession with giving public funding to private schools never fails to sicken me. This is OUR COMMONWEALTH, OUR SHARED FUTURE being ROBBED by rich bastards who’d be fine without it
NO GOVT FUNDING TO PRIVATE SCHOOLS EVER
@annaspargoryan
I think it pre-dates the department store & refers to William Buckley, the escaped convict who lived peacefully for 32 yrs with the Wadawurrung people, a turn of events the colonisers deemed so unlikely as to be near impossible
He died on 18 December 1981, aged 79, and is buried at Ballarat New Cemetery. Here is his grave. Maybe this is a good point to leave this story: with both boys' graves
@FourRedShoes
@annetdonahue
The other day I was thinking back to 1999 when there was a moment of grim millennial futurism when I embraced long A-line skirts, wide-legged pants and chunky funnel-neck jumpers in black, grey & dark red
Georgie’s coworker, 19yo Frederick William Lohse, was initially charged with murder but a coronial inquest found it was misadventure. Georgie’s last words to his mum in hospital were, “He was my chum, and he did not mean it.”
I’m so sick of The Guardian’s cynical series of hateclick articles in which writers mock old films they dislike. I would much rather read someone enthusing about a film that has brought them joy and pleasure
I’m impressed by the way Grace used what is generally a pretty toothless symbolic role to repeatedly intervene in public discourse, to highlight & shame govt hypocrisy. They thought she would simper & be grateful. They were wrong
The tiny lamps of Australian Author Twitter flare hopefully as the annual PLR/ELR royalty statements come out.
A reminder: some authors get more money from public lending royalties than from regular publishing royalties, so please ask your local library for books you want!!
A while ago I was reminiscing about ‘The Dress’: a particular style that was hugely popular for school formals in the 1990s: chiffon, princess line, spaghetti straps, matching chiffon scarf
Anyway I just found an image of it after years of fruitless googling
@tomryanauthor
Post-apocalyptic or survivalist men have bushy beards, but women still have smooth legs and underarms. Also: when lovers get home & burst through the front door, kissing, and get straight to sex… but did they close the door behind them???
Imagine a parallel world where Labor had the guts to say, “yeah, we thought offshore processing of asylum seekers was okay at the time but now we realise it’s unconscionably cruel so we no longer support it“
@exfatalist
@MrMoth7
@redditships
But could that be a writing style cultivated by a guy who has spent 4 years cultivating his key professional skill of shit-talking to teenagers on forums?
We have a chance to revise how jobs work, what home & making are, how to express love, care & community. The thought of squandering that chance & just going back to an endless exploitative scrabble for profit makes me sad & anxious. They weren't good times!
People who were not bad at sport as children have no idea what a particular hell it is in Australia to be bad at sport. In PE I used to dissociate and pretend to be commentating the game
Just had a look through threads on
#COVID19Vic
& it’s depressing how many people blame the Vic spike on the BLM protests. Think it thru, people: there were similar BLM protests on the same day all around Australia – but only Victoria saw a COVID spike. SOMETHING ELSE caused it
Turns out Georgie was an apprentice driller at the Newport railway workshop, where one Friday arvo one of his mates played a stupid prank on him by playfully applying a pneumatic drill to him. He died in hospital the next day.
You ever read a book you bought secondhand, and you go to dog-ear a page, and it falls easily into a fold because it’s been previously dog-eared, and you feel a ghostly fellowship with the previous reader?
Scary thread: anyone who claims to care about women should be dismayed by how easily women's legal autonomy could be stripped away within a single generation. If your main 'feminist' activity is attacking trans people's rights, you're only helping them take yours
Steven Crowder attacked no-fault divorce again when he announced his wife was divorcing him against his desires.
@kylietcheung
wrote about him and other high-profile conservatives campaigning against the right to divorce last year.
I don't see Adele's weight loss as a triumph or a glow-up, really. It's just a thing she decided to do, and if she enjoys it then good on her
Your size says nothing about you
The Daily Telegraph hung a source out to dry because they were so keen to run their story. They’re paying now but that woman’s reputation has been trashed in court, and now other powerful men will be emboldened to use defamation law as a blunt weapon
It was also terrible for Frederick Lohse, who was just a kid himself and yet had to live with having killed his mate. I wanted to find out what became of him afterwards but he disappears from newspaper records. Someone of that name died in Box Hill in 1950
@manwhohasitall
It should have special buttons labelled TURBO and OVERDRIVE so the lil fellas feel like their calculations are going faster. (They aren't, of course; the buttons are just dummies)
Just remembered that when I was a kid I loved to press flowers. I'd put them between the pages of a heavy book, and I also had a wooden flower press that tightened with wingnuts at each corner. Pressed flowers seem impossibly old-fashioned now
Inspired by Philip Pullman's passionate hatred of the present tense, I'm curious about your stance on how to format dialogue in novels
'Single quotes?' I asked.
"Double quotes," I replied.
—Euh-huh-huh, added the European.
No quote marks me lad the muscular modernist said.
@thebalmainboy
@rarewaterparks
in that way it's a lot like the actual Nutbush, where you get sick of it after a couple of cycles but are condemned to keep going for the entire song
Before I blocked yet another scambot shopfront I had to lol that its product is like that
@bradneely
Professor Brothers skit: for when you have to pick up the dean in the rain in your new cherry shoes, but don’t want his wife to do Magic Flute voice
@redman
It's weird how you're launching this after the Bon Appétit reckoning made so many people aware that stripping food workers' stories and identities and earning capacity away from their recipes is… bad
just so weary of living in a world that rewards greed and theft, where the idea of everyone having what they need is radical, and power comes from hoarding resources and not from care and knowledge
Wow, I knew higher-ed casualisation was bad, but… "UNSW’s Vice Chancellor Ian Jacobs disclosed that around 741 FTE positions are filled by 5,800 people". So when universities report the number of full-time jobs lost, multiply that by EIGHT
@AITA_reddit
NAH. She can’t help making the noises and he tried so hard not to laugh and to apologise afterwards. I see it as that involuntary kind of embarrassed laughter, not mean or malicious
When I was looking up Ellen's death notice in The Age, I also noticed a very devastating notice above it on the same page:
Mavis Florence Cheese, daughter of Mr & Mrs Eric Cheese of Murray-road Preston, died in the Women's Hospital, Carlton…
aged 1 day
baby Mavis Cheese 😭
Pull quotes REPEAT key sentences from the article, and paste them elsewhere in the layout where they will catch the eye.
You don’t place a pull quote inline where it naturally appears in the text! And you don’t CUT a phrase from the text and make it a pull quote INSTEAD!!!!
Georgie’s parents, however, could not get over the way their only child died. For several years after, they put In Memoriam announcements in the Argus newspaper saying that Georgie had been “deprived of a promising future in the beauty of health and youth”.
"These are people who are always the first go-to when we're asking people to work for free" –
@Tony_Burke
gets that arts & entertainment shouldn't be treated as a luxury that society can forgo. It's a huge industry of workers, taxpayers & consumers who put back into society
During the inquest it also emerged that workers at the Newport workshops were in the habit of cleaning their clothes and boots using the same compressed air drills, and Lohse himself had been pranked moments before, in exactly the same way he pranked Day