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August 2025

Created: 2025-08-31 (06:35:39) — Modified: 2025-09-02 (08:34:50)
Status: completed

August turned out to be a pretty big month! I have been spending as much time as possible outside, away from computers, enjoying early spring. So things have been quieter for the website. But there are still a few updates!

Updates

There is now an RSS feed for the newsletter! Credit goes to PKLucky’s RSS Feed Tutorial, which finally made feeds make sense to me.

I created a Repair Directory for the 32-Bit Cafe Sites for Social Change code jam! It is a bit empty right now, because it was made in a rush! I want to add to it over the coming months and explore other ways of organising the resources. Watch this space.

Other Worlds Zine Fair

I travelled to Sydney at the start of the month to visit the Other Worlds Zine Fair and get away from the winter chill for a couple days. Sydney as it turned out was in the middle of a deluge. Even with the rain and wind, even in the middle of winter, it was still way warmer than Canberra.

Other Worlds is held once a year in Marrickville Town Hall, which is a beautiful art deco building. I trekked all the way down from my hotel, stopping to peek at the flower-filled gardens of cottages on Enmore Road. Lots of people attending despite the rain. I picked up lots of stuff!

Love poem inside a walnut shell by Honeybittle

Gas Station Prose and a love poem inside a walnut shell (!!!) by Honeybittle. The walnut poem is very difficult to get back in its shell without another person to help, which is rather sweet, actually. Honeybittle also had a poem inside a button and one that required you to unfold a threaded deer.

Cropped panel from Henchman by Caroline Zijing

Henchman by Caroline Zijing, a comic about a cat that works for a supervillain. I feel for this little cat.

Cropped page from Nightlight by Clare O’Toole

Nightlight by Clare O’Toole, a book of night photography. I love this stark use of flash photography. Reading through feels like exploring an unfamiliar neighbourhood after dark, possibly my favourite spring and summer activity.

A spread of zines collected at the Other Worlds Zine Fair

Heaps of other zines from folks who do not seem to maintain online spaces. A pair of zines about Sanity’s Edge, a cyberpunk multi-user dungeon. Two collaged zines called DIY Space Exploration and End of Summer. A zine about the Animal Crossing exhibit at Sydney Aquarium. Why doesn’t the aquarium in my city have an Animal Crossing exhibition?

Zine fairs are so enjoyable for exactly this reason. People bring work that is so personal, that you would not otherwise encounter except in niche online spaces. I left feeling really energised, wanting to make stuff of my own.

HTML Day

As it happened, the HTML Day jam was happening on the same day on the other side of the city. I brought all that excited energy from Other Worlds into the garage space of a cafe in Surry Hills and spent a wonderful few hours hanging out with other people, goofing around and making a page for the event.

I made a poem called Travelling to Sydney. The original jam version is hosted on Max Bo’s event page.

People made heaps of creative things in the space of a couple hours. Not all of it appears to have made it online, but some that have:

I fell in love with generative poetry all over again because of this event and later that evening, holed up in my warm hotel room while the rain poured down, wrote another poem about Sydney. Find them and more at my Permutational Poems page!

People living outside of Sydney often get negative about the place. It is busy, crowded, superficial. I love visiting it! I love that it is full of people. I love its old and crumbling architecture, and its new… and crumbling… architecture. I love that it still has dingy pubs on almost every corner.

Living there is possibly less enjoyable. But it is lovely to travel places and imagine the alternate lives you might lead in them. Even when they are just a couple hours up the road.

After a whole weekend meeting people and talking zines and websites, it felt a little sad to return home. I have resolved to set up something similar in Canberra, once it gets warm enough to hang out in parks again. Canberra people who are interested hmu!

Marginalia

Post-travel, I have been spending a lot of time bicycling around and napping in parks and sticking my nose into clusters of early blooms. On warm days in this city it is a pleasure to lie in the grass by the lake, listen to music and think about nothing at all.

Pretty purple flowers up close

Because of this though, a lot less reading. I finished the script of Angels in America by Tony Kushner and have no idea where to begin reflecting on it. As with the stage and television versions, it left me in tears. Even though the focus is on a group of gay men during the AIDS epidemic, so much of it still painfully resonates with the broader queer experience. I’ll write about it… sometime.

I have been having a great time rereading the Hellboy trade paperbacks. I never cared for superheroes but have always loved Hellboy. For all that he is a creature of the underworld, capable of withstanding (and returning) impossible amounts of damage, the prophecised bringer of the apocalypse, he is also the put-upon everyman of his stories.

His role in the shorter ones often works out to be supernatural pest control. Hellboy wanders from place to place throughout the twentieth century helping the locals rid themselves of changelings, curses, ghosts and malevolent entities. He invariably gets punched in the face, thrown through walls, shot at, and every time, improbably, manages to get back up and outmanouver his foes.

I love these comics’ willingness to syncretise grand mythological themes and characters, to set Ragnarok and the destruction of humanity as the ultimate horizon of its stories, and at the same time to be very, very silly about it all, to let Hellboy grouse as he fights the corpse of Grigori Rasputin once again. Comics are well suited for this. They have the room to let their characters roam, to be destroyed and resurrected, to put them in both minor one-off episodes and world-ending catastrophes.

The later Hellboy comics continually up the stakes, but they never lose sight of Hellboy as a character increasingly frustrated with all the secret societies, prophecies of doom and monstrosities from beyond the pale he has to deal with. It is also just very enjoyable to watch him punch nazis over and over. I’m excited to keep reading!

I downloaded Into the Emberlands because it was on sale and the little kobold protagonist was cute, and fell right into it for about a week. A gloomy miasma has covered the whole world. As the lightbearer you venture out to rescue people lost in the darkness and collect resources to rebuild your village.

The fuel in your lantern steadily depletes while you are outside the village. If it runs out completely your lightbearer will also become lost in the darkness. Your guy slumps to the ground looking resigned while the gloom closes in. Heartbreaking.

I went out of my way to rescue every chubby kobold (knack), even when there were already a bunch following behind me. The loop of the game is to find lost knacks, collect resources and all going well, return home to fix things up. An oddly soothing experience since with a little caution the risk you will run out of fuel and lose your progress is relatively low.

The game does not seem to have gained much traction, which is disappointing given it takes an interesting approach to the roguelike format. I enjoyed my time with it!

Around the grounds

Chipzel released a track, did u leave ur brain at home, about the breakdown of the social fabric. But why is it so fucking good??? I want to go to a rave where the music is all this.

I reread “Ten Manifestos For Groups of No People” by TheCatamites. The bit that resonated with me:

“If you absolutely have to absolutely have to make something for whatever unresolved psychic pressures I’d rather it be long, long, dreamy, long, unfinished, unfinishable, long, long, just a daydream…”

Finally on the continued shittiness of payment processors and terfy activist groups, an article by Mimidoshima about “How the Religious Right Censor Morally Objectionable Content to Target Queer and Adult Media.”

A reminder that you can still yell at money!

References

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