Technically not ‘convicted’ until sentenced but that day is coming.

lazy and unprofessional

This is a key aspect of Trumpism: it’s all about the grift and that means the shortest path to money.

Indeed. Apple always gets criticised for the 30% ‘Apple Tax’ but the console manufacturers get a free pass for the same thing. Bizarre.

Yes, additive colour theory is based on red, green and blue (RGB). These are the colours you see if you look at your TV screen very closely.

Subtractive colour theory uses cyan, magenta and yellow. In printing black, abbreviated ‘K’, is added for contrast—CMYK. These are the inks used to print the dots you see if you look closely at a magazine photo.

I think people are confused by this because they’re taught a bastardised version of subtractive colour theory, using red, blue and yellow, at a very early age.

I think the Easter Billy thing may have been a fund raiser for the Save the Bilby Fund, though I’m not sure. Did some work with them in Charleville some time back, as part of a student field trip looking at design concepts for what eventually became the Bilby Experience. Great people.

From what I can remember they’ve had good success in rebuilding the bilby population.

Good luck getting Optus, a communications company, to promptly and accurately communicate with its customers.

I could see this degeneration happing about 5 years back when our vice chancellor started calling herself ‘president’. They gave up on it after a few years but it’s very clear where their priorities lie.

It wanted to end its suffering. Blue jaunt.

Tower Bridge has its own website which has a little information about what’s inside (though it’s mostly trying to get you to do a tour).

Yes, they’re good books. Ripping yarns. Their charm lies in seeing the underdog earthlings (humans and cetaceans) fight against the odds. There’s a strong vein of what you might call earthling exceptionalism running through the series.

I managed to get through the first book but it was embedded cultural mores like that that made it tough going for me. That’s probably a shortcoming in me more than any fault of the book—science fiction should take you to places that challenge you—but it wasn’t worth it for me personally.

Re: dickie for car boot (what Americans would call the ‘trunk’); some old two-seater cars had a third seat in the boot, known as a ‘dickie-seat’, at least in the UK, so perhaps it’s an old term that still survives in Indian English.

I wonder if doing the Moon Walk would get you burnt at the stake for witchcraft a few hundred years ago.

I re-read the trilogy and progressed through them at a good pace but got bogged down on the later books (which I haven’t read before). I think the writing shows its age and are a little longwinded at times.

Groundbreaking story in concept and scope, that hasn’t changed for me.

Some protestors I saw interviewed on TV wanted to abolish Australia Day entirely which doesn’t seem right to me. Many countries have a date that celebrates nationhood. Also, good luck convincing Australians to have one fewer public holidays.

How about we have a public holiday for ‘Arrival Day’ and another for ‘Survival Day’? Two public holidays are better than one.

Yay, the first Australian head of state!

I’m not a coffee drinker but my partner is. She says she had two decent cups of coffee in Italy (two weeks in Rome, Bolzano, and Venice) but every day in Australia she has better. Australians are complete coffee snobs.

I remember marching against this stupid war and naturally the Howard government ignored public sentiment in favour of boot licking.

It’s so embarrassing how Australian governments appear to be so obsequious to US administrations. Surely you’d earn more brownie points by holding out for a while than being first to tow the line.

The bigger the budgets, the less appetite for risk. These huge superhero franchises are so different in scale from the original comics in this way.

Nah, your just use your increased intellect to get other people to push the button for themselves, increasing the pool of intelligent potential friends available to you.

Actually this reminds me of a story I read last year where two people are in a race to massively increase their intelligence. Neither can tolerate the potential threat the existence of another hyper-intelligent person holds so it’s a struggle to the death. If I remember correctly they gain there ability to effectively read people’s minds by reading body language, micro expressions, etc., develop new systems of logic and hyper-efficient language to think in and have an entirely mental showdown at the end.

Unfortunately I’m too stupid to remember the title.