Thanks for sharing this. It seems quite balanced and the useful.

I read The Walking Dead comics up to around issue 108 (I think), enjoyed them. I enjoyed the first season of the TV series too but after that they should have renamed it The Talking Dead. I suppose the economics of TV zombies are generally going to make it cheaper to film people arguing than action.

We stayed with my sister and her husband for a few days over Easter. I don’t get to see my sister very often precisely due to the distance.

Anyway, it’s only anecdotal but I don’t usually see people driving below the speed limit unless they’re in a camper van so I thought it noteworthy.

I’m not so sure. I drove 3½ hours north to visit my sister in northern Tasmania yesterday, much of it on highways with 110 kph speed limit. I was doing between 90 and 100 mostly, especially when there were overtaking or double lanes. Almost never got overtaken even when there were 4 or 5 cars behind me. It was quite relaxing.

Iain M Banks should definitely be on any list of leftie SF authors. There’s a reason The Culture is sometimes described (rather reductively) as luxury space communism.

The popular association of ‘anarchism’ with ‘chaos’ and that organisation is anathema to anarchists has long been a source of humour. It’s a convenient misdirection for the ruling class who are directly threatened by an idea that humans can live without, you know, rulers.

Yes, at least it does on macOS now.

Excellent. We should play games on our own terms. I’ve hit skill barriers in many games, set them aside ‘for a short while’ and never returned to them. I bet I’ve missed so many great moments due to this so now my policy is to lower the difficulty if I’m getting too frustrated.

Also, difficulty levels can be quite arbitrary especially in games that have a particular play mechanic and then introduce something complete different for one level. (My pet hate is token platforming inserted into shooters.)

I remember one game (Indigo Prophecy I think) had a tiny segment that required subtle joystick control to get the player across a narrow beam. Nothing else in the game was like this. I couldn’t do it, countless fails. I asked my young nephew to have a go and he got it on the first try.

People forget that America was a penal colony before Australia.

I love great book covers and have great fondness for the covers of novels I love however I buy most books online and by reputation or review so rarely see a cover that arrests my attention.

This isn’t the same article but it’s relevant:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-02/kanye-west-denied-entry-to-australia-after-antisemitic-song/105487620

Sounds wonderful. I recently had my writing—which is liberally sprinkled with em-dashes—edited to add spaces to conform to the house style and this made me sad.

I also feel sad that I failed to (ironically) mention the under-appreciated semicolon; punctuation that is not as adamant as a full stop but more assertive than a comma. I should use it more often.