A huge box arrived at my post office box recently. In it was Aaron A Reed’s 50 years of Text Games, a massive hardcover volume expanded from his excellent newsletter. What began as a newsletter telling the back stories of some of the most interested text adventure games evolved into a very readable and entertaining hardcover complete with stacks of additional research and sidebars. Also, as a Kickstarter project, it came with some nice ‘feelies’ - reproductions of different old computer media with a floppy disk, a cassette, and punch card tape.

Text adventures are a remarkably sticky genre - they’ve waxed and waned in popularity since the 1980s. When their first waves faded they were eclipsed by ‘graphic adventures’ and then later by full-motion-video narrative games, and then consoles took over. Text adventures (and interactive fiction more broadly) have roared back over the last decade as part of a surge of interest in indie games and the mass availability of non-code/minimal-code game creation tools. These creation tools have gotten better and better and allow authors to focus on ‘just’ writing good stories without having to also think about things like language parsers which interpret what player/reader is typing. These days large scale vocabularies for interaction no longer need to be created by the author. This abstraction of the code layer has been vital for a renaissance of interactive (text-based) fiction.

Reed’s book is also a potted history of the ways in which even the earliest computer systems were used for play. And through the domestication of the computer into the home in the 1980s, how the expectations of a mainstreaming of the computer were about 15 years ahead of the reality which came with the arrival of the Web in the mid 1990s. In book, rather than email newsletter form, each featured game has more space to be appreciated - I especially love the reproductions of the old advertising material and the maps for the games. The intertwining of interactice fiction mapping-by-hand and the role playing games of the era is specific marker that probably delineates the early generations from those who came later and expect and rely on ‘automatic mapping’.

For the first time I had to skip a talk because of sickness, so big apologies to everyone who I had hoped to catch up with at Remix Summit in Sydney on Friday.

Here’s something retro, fun, and just on the verge of cheese to listen to while you read on.

Its a short episode, this one, because the aforementioned sickness, and also because I’m back trying to write things more swiftly!

Another delayed newsletter, sorry!

Recently both and K and I entered a new age demographic, one more list item to scroll down to when filling out government forms. It was a bit innocuous because of everything else going on at the same time - it’s not every birthday that coincides with Geena Davis attending a major exhibition opening at work! One of our friends said we can continue to celebrate our ‘new demographic classification’ all year round, so I guess we will. Hopefully that means that we will get to share some party vibes with you in another city this year wherever you are!

I had planned to do a 100 track mix much in the same vein as the track selection for K’s and my last major milestone, but that is on the ever-growing to-do list. I’m about a third of the way through the track selection - two tracks released in each year of life is stil the idea. This artificial constraint was useful last time. I’m shaking out of the ‘teens and twenties problem’ - where most of your ‘all time favourites’ might ‘naturally’ cluster. Once it’s done you’ll be the first to know …

i feel bad for neglecting this newsletter!

The recent months have been a flurry of activity - I barely get to come up for air.

A two day symposium, a board meeting, friends visiting from far away, and then Luke’s wedding and reception-rave - that was one week. Then an open source conference keynote, an art talk in a regional city, a conversation with former Wikimedia director Katherine Maher about design and technology at a data and design conference, and then another conversation about the state of the local arts ecosystem - that was last week.

Happy new year. 2022 is over. Finally.

Gung hei fat choi. Welcome to the Year of the Rabbit! 🐇

This one has been a long time sitting in my drafts being tinkered with on a lot of commutes. Over the intervening weeks I have probably deleted 1000 words so its a short one too.

It turns out that this new CEO job is, as perhaps should be expected, quite hectic. It isn’t the hours of work, my jobs for the last decade have meant all waking hours were spent thinking about things. Now it’s also the non-waking hours too. But I am enjoying the job. It’s a new challenge. When I wear a suit, I sometimes joke that I am just a cosplay CEO. I have to edit a staff newsletter each week and I reckon that has also been sapping my writing energies by the time the weekend comes around!

Since the last episode we’ve seen the rapid decline of Twitter and a lot more. I joined Twitter in early 2008 just before the Museums and the Web conference in Montreal after holding out for quite a while amongst my early adopter friends. Back then it didn’t seem to be very useful and was hard to understand its grain. Over the following 15 years it became a very significant part of how I kept in touch with a lot of colleagues around the world in the cultural sector, academia, music, and design. I met a vast number of people in otherwise wouldn’t have through the platform and like a lot of people in academic and academic-adjacent fields Twitter became the primary means for introverted early career folks to make the most of conferences. I made a lot of friends through Twitter, and kept in touch with them as we each moved jobs, changed careers, changed cities. When I would visit a city I would often catch up with people who I had first met through Twitter.

The jet lag from the trip has finally worn off. It feels like a long time that I was away.

I still get the occasional flashback to the phone snatch moment I wrote about in #82. It still replays in my mind like a bad dream. And I keep thinking through what digital memories are now lost forever - each replay uncovers a small sliver of something else that is unrecoverable. This piece on the effect of digital ubiquity on memory and loss by Noga Arikha is a lovely read.

“Yet we continue creating our « digital memories », so clean, so free of historical dust. We are all hoarders now. Each of us, alone with our digital devices, is engulfed in a vast world belied by the small screen. Our smartphones are, quite extravagantly, our cameras. Words and images have become entwined, a return of the imprese of the Renaissance: motto and image aligned to make a point about ourselves, or the world, or our place in it. Record-keeping has become a lived life’s parallel activity. I would even venture that we (I included) obfuscate with picture-taking our melancholy inability fully to inhabit the perpetually fleeting, complex, ungraspable present.”

A few milliseconds was all it took.

I was standing on the street outside my hotel DM’ing with a friend - possibly even a reader of this - and a kid in a navy hoodie on a bike zooms past and grabbed my phone and was gone. It was Sunday morning, my last full day in London, I had low situational awareness because the coffee had yet to take affect and my attention was being monopolized by my screen. it was a quiet wide street. It was all too easy.

I barely noticed it happen.

[There are quite a few images in this one so you might want to load them up!]

Last episode I finished up by mentioning Gabrielle Zevin’s Tommorrow and Tommorrow and Tomorrow. R is now reading it and if I didn’t convince you last episode, go get a copy. I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I’ve been on my adventure to ICOM in Prague and beyond. The main story follows the relationship between two programmer/artists drawn to making games. It’s a lot more than that but as I wrote in the last episode, it captures the tensions of creative collaborations in your 20s and 30s really well. Where those tensions play out, and the specifics of the communities involved, is very important.

When I was talking about my travel itinerary to people, they would always ask ‘why are you going to Bratislava?!’. First I'd say that I wanted begin to understand different game-making cultures and cultural contexts for creative production. Then I would tell them the story of a little collection of games that had been preserved, and now even translated/localized and playable online.

Courtesy of newsletter reader Michal Čudrnák, I got a private view inside the Slovak Design Museum stores. And inside the cupboards that house the rare hardware, software, and self-published magazines from the 1980s Slovak computer game scene. Maroš Brojo who is now the head of the Slovak Game Developers Association also happens to be the curator and conservator behind these items and listening to him talk about the challenges faced by game makers as the Iron Curtain fell was really inspiring. All the well funded institutions I have worked for have also struggled with cataloguing, preserving, and researching their technology collections - this is that multiplied many fold.

I think most of you can probably now guess why there has been such a gap between episodes. And I’m quickly writing this one to ‘productively procrastinate’ on the task of finishing off my impending ICOM keynote. (Does one procrastinate on, procrastinate about, or just procrastinate?).

The first two days as ACMI’s new ‘Director & CEO' have made me understand why people hire folks to ‘do their email’ and ‘do their socials’. I understood the theory - and was uncomfortable with it - but now I understand the reality of this. To everyone that has been in touch with lovely messages - thank you! I will write back - and it will be from me and not a ghost writer! But it may not be today!

Most of the time this week, before I zip off to my talks at ICOM Prague and Remix London, is all about handing over some of my previous role’s responsibilities and identity - and figuring out what can now be done that couldn’t be done before.

It’s been many weeks since the last episode. And I know that for American readers, its been particularly awful and I hope that this episode provides some distraction.

I got sick and had to head home early from the annual Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA) conference this year in Perth. Then I had to quarantine and wait for a PCR result meaning that I also missed the opening of the Light exhibition at work. But finally with a negative COVID result, I headed to Sydney to do the first Sub Bass Snarl gig in far too many years. Oh and G turned 18 too. But that’s all over now and I just have a lingering snotty nose and a fair amount of regret.

As a result of these delays, this is a reasonably long one. (And I’m pretty sure I’ve still left a whole lot out that I meant to include!)

(D. Woodard and W. S. Burroughs with Dreamachine, 1997, John Aes-Nihil via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

After nine years of hard pushback on social change in Australia, it is pleasing to see that our federal election result holds hope for the near future. For many its like waking from a long, slow, nightmare that it looked like might never end because of the spell of complacency that had been cast so effectively over us.

I was amused to find the measure of distance to the moneyed heart of the art world represented at the Venice Biennale was the tote bag. Pretty much every pavilion had one and if you were early enough - by having a press pass ideally, or queuing on the next day - the first day of the Vernisage - then you could snap some up. The NZ pavilion definitely had one of the nicest but also ran out quickly - much to my chagrin! The Sami takeover of the Scandinavian pavilion had different colour options, and others ran the gamut from super deluxe thick fabric to the basic cotton tote for your single origin vegetable shopping at the local organic market. At Venice the tote bag was the art world equivalent of the band t-shirt - they let you express your cultural capital and impeccable taste whilst being entirely compatible with whatever un-labeled fashion you are wearing. For what it’s worth, I went with the bright yellow Sami tote which made the colours of my jacket ‘pop’. Hahaha.

Two days in I started to get serious tote envy.

in the last episode I had just landed and was settling in to Venice. This one is the ‘art’ episode, a text accompaniment to my Insta feed - I’ve embedded some more pics that I haven’t posted on Insta so, if you’re like me and don’t automatically load images in emails, then select ‘load images’ and let’s go!

R and I are almost finished an intensive beginners kendo course. Neither of us can quite remember how the idea first started but it also involved G potentially doing ‘Italian’ fencing. The latter didn’t happen but now five hours a week R and I are learning to perform very specific cuts to the head, wrist, stomach and throat. In the first few weeks our instructors at the dojo didn’t draw attention to kendo’s roots in the samurai era of feudal Japan. Everything was very technical - ‘aim your strike at the wrist/head’. But now when we learn to perform cuts they describe the effects of each cut in more graphic detail than before when we perform them incorrectly - how the bamboo shinai flexes when a steel katana would slice through bone - and how our incorrect cut would only inflict a flesh wound and too easily open us up for a counter attack. It is intensely hard - it turns out that older age has ruined my sense of balance when I have to correct my footwork. Moving feet, arms, in a coordinated response to commands in Japanese is hard! Unlike other martial arts, kendo’s grading system doesn’t solely use the demonstration of skill or sparring bouts to progress, instead there is a minimal time you also need to spend in training and study. The highest rank cannot be obtained without spending 10 years at the previous level meaning all the most awarded and skilled are all as old or older than me. The age range of people is wide and the mix of genders is too.

But right now I am missing two classes.

I just finished the 18 hour leg of my first long haul flight since 2020. Australia is very far away from Europe and these days I am out of practice. Stopping over briefly in Darwin - rather than a usual stopover in Singapore or Dubai - we tracked north west over Pakistan and then skirted the southern shore of the Black Sea. Odessa, Kharkiv and other cities we know about because they have been bombed and invaded by the Russians began to appear on the inflight map. Before these cities would have passed without care - but now they have a new meaning. These inflight maps have been standard on new-ish planes since the late 00s and I’ve been interested in their choices to reveal specific towns as well as cities, deep ocean topography - seamounts, trenches, fracture zones, and shipwrecks. They aren’t always obvious major places. Instead these choices reveal the historic risks of long distance travel and reconnect aviation to its nautical origins.

Another short one. Again in the service of shorter attention spans and quicker responses.

Charlie Wurzel’s recent rumination on abundant personal digital storage and the near endless scroll of our digital photo libraries on our smartphones builds on a lot of the stories of the past decade or so about the ‘effect’ we are noticing as we reach near ubiquitous computing in our lives is a good read. Ubiquitous storage is starting to shape our memories and narratives in way that, in old world cyborg way. We are being augmented and changed in the process. Wurzel writes,

Hello again

This week I managed to finish a book, not just pick up read halfway, and then get distracted, but actually finish it. Progress is being made. Slowly. Slowly.

Like the last one, this is short and I've been inspired by Dan Hon's newsletter which is just what he can write in 20 minutes, nothing more. This took more than 20 minutes but definitely not the 30 days it was starting to take!

This week its a short episode with some optimistic links for these increasingly dark times. The war in the Ukraine is unbearable, the new IPCC report is unbearable. And closer to home, there have been recent, vast, and devastating floods in NSW and Queensland too.

So, optimism. And distraction.

Juha van 't Zelfde recently put together a new section added to the Designing The Social, an ongoing and expanding exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Called RoXY: nightclub as cultural crowbar Juha's room explores the history of the RoXY club in Amsterdam (1987-1999), connecting it back to earlier radical movements, the Provo and Constant (Nieuwenhuys)’s New Babylon in the 1960s. Juha has been talking for years about the doing some museum-exhibition-y-thing about the 'liberatory spaces of nightclubs' bringing together his curatorial work with his other interests in club culture and electronic music. He sent me a link to his excellent impressionistic mini-documentary that accompanies the exhibition. Assembled from archival footage and interviews, it captures past utopian moments and teases out potential old threads - the 'anti-museum', everyday resistance, Situationism - that might be picked up and reimagined by younger folks in the present. It opens with a snippet of Willem Sandberg, then of the Stedelijk Museum,

It turns out that 2021 was a pretty terrible year all round. I know you almost certainly had and awful one too. But I’ve been doing annual round ups each year for a long time so here goes.

Not everything is work

At the office (or the ‘home office’) we finally launched the New Thing. The opening went well and the work won a stack of awards (and continues to do so). Everyone involved was simultaneously excited and exhausted. Katrina, our CEO, who comes from the world of arts festivals and knew that a ‘festival hangover’ was coming. As a result there was institutional acknowledgment of post launch exhaustion - perhaps lessening the blow. Of course we didn’t just launch the New Thing, many years in the planning, but several other unplanned Pandemic New Things too.

It’s already the second month of the new year and I’ve still not finished writing my 2021 round up! Time marches on and I can’t have that weighing over all the new 2022 stuff so I'm skipping the recap for now and just getting a new episode into your hands.

But I got a little vacation down at Phillip Island with sunburn and jigsaw puzzles. And a sun setting on the western horizon. Here's couple of pics.

[A lookout in Katoomba is unexpectedly prescient about our uncertain future]

I have rushed this one out the door so it gets through to you in the final minutes of 2021. The next one will be the annual recap of what was a pretty terrible year for everyone.

Today was a good day - in that Ice Cube way. Things got done. Things that were hard to resolved got nudged out of inertia. And there was a beautiful sunset.

It was also a good day because I inhaled Tamara Shopsin’s LaserWriter II, a compact novel set in the Apple repair centre of Tekserve in New York in the late 90s, early 2000s. It captures a moment in time when computers were expensive and they were actually ‘repaired’. And people cared about then a lot more than they do now. Those 'misremembered halycon days' where a simple repair wouldn't necessarily be charged for, and helping customers choose the best option rather than the choice with the highest profit margin was a thing. Shopsin captures that long gone era of self taught repair, and the nostalgic glow of componentry that wasn’t so miniature that it became unserviceable. It’s a fun read if you have memories of old Mac computers before the era of the iPhone - and I don't quite know how to describe it other than 'ambient fiction'. The brevity has a strange stickiness to it and it has coloured my thoughts for the days following.

(This episode has a couple of images so you might want to check you've loaded them in your email client!)

I had hope to be sending this a little sooner than this but, y'know, its been quite a week in Melbourne. Not just a lockdown but also riots and, errr, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake. For those overseas, no, Melbourne is not used to that and we're not on a fault line. The bridge near my place swayed quite spectacularly as everyone suddenly disappeared from the Zoom call that i was on, and I thought the washing machine upstairs had malfunctioned. As for the anti-vax riots, the only good thing to come of them are the response posters emerging on @workersartcollective on Instagram'. Even up near me at the local suburban shopping centre there was an anti-vax skirmish, mostly incompetently disorganised, but when G is off doing shifts at her teenage customer service job she is having to face off with anti-maskers in a way she should never have to deal with.

Immersion

A little while back, between lockdowns, K and I went out to see a twice rescheduled immersive theatre production Because The Night to celebrate our anniversary. It had been a long while since we’d been to a theatre show. This one had been pretty much advertised in every 25-45 year old in Inner Melbourne’s Facebook and Instagram feeds in the months when it first opened - between early-2020 lockdowns. A number of friends and colleagues went to see in its early days but with our tickets rescheduled to late in the run, I was especially curious to see if it was better than early attendees had said.

Meow

Cats will always find the highest point in a room. Maybe not while you are in it, but when you creep downstairs in the middle of the night, there they are perched a top the highest bookcase. Looking. Watching. Their yellow eyes glinting. One of ours, Pixel, has recently started mewing at the garage door - we can’t figure out why - and so we let them both in there. The next thing we see is them both chilling on top of two side stacked mattresses we have stored in there as if nothing was wrong. The mewing continues.

They have been excellent lockdown companions.

A1

It turned out that the Rising Festival that so many of us were looking forward ended up being cancelled - the second year in row. A reader, Esther, pointed out my error in #64 where I wrote that this was going to be the first Rising Festival - the first one was cancelled in 2020! While Melbourne has just emerged from what ended up as a 4 week lockdown, now Sydney and Darwin are in lockdown.

(Apologies for the enormous gap between episode 63 and this one - its nearly been a month! Here's a tune to listen to while you read on, for reasons that might make sense 2/3 of the way through)

I didn’t expect to be finishing this episode off under a new Melbourne lockdown. It was almost written - and after all the Hermit Kingdom was meant to be in the future, a beacon of a post-COVID world where life was almost ‘back to normal’. But it’s a mirage - without a successful vaccine rollout, we have actually managed to be stuck in the past, and thus more exposed. And so here we are again.

Just before this latest lockdown I caught the tram over to the Royal Exhibition Hall and got an ‘ahead of schedule’ first shot of the AZ vaccine. Although the staff noticed I was under 50 they waved me through - and somewhat shockingly there were no queues. It was straight from the door to the needle! Australia has been so complacent about vaccination that it is infuriating - and that’s even before mentioning the political incompetence - an example of the Aussie “she’ll be right” attitude. Most Melbourne folks are angry right now. They should be.

Upwards

G's photo of K & I doing what people seem to do when they get to the top of a mountain these days

Actual dancing

K & I went to an actual gig last weekend. It wasnt the first we had been at since things have slowly begun opening up, but it was the most 'normal'.

Earlier in March, Joelistics' launch at Howler had been entirely seated and Ai Yamamoto's gig at Melbourne Recital Centre had been seated and masked, but the CS + Kreme gig at the Curtin was like the old days - no seats, no masks - even though it was at lowered capacity. We arrived in time for Jonnine, playing with a full band, to play a set of what might be described as 'ketamine-trip-hop', equal parts AR Kane and Tricky, and The XX - but entirely without forward motion, a kind of numbness, everything held is stasis. CS + Kreme were fantastic too - and live, I became a lot more aware of their sparkling drum programming that reminded me a lot of early 00s Timbaland, with jittery triplets, that lifted their foggy dub productions into something approximating danceability.

Its worked!

If you’re reading this message then the newsletter migration from Substack to Buttondown has worked! Hence the slightly different formatting this time around.

in the last two years, as the Substack platform has grown it has actively attracted (and paid) a number of right-wing content creators that neither I nor patrons want any small percentage of their money directly or indirectly supporting. Indie publisher Anne Trubek but as someone who is also interested in platform-portability, I figure that the ability to move between newsletter providers is good thing for me to to test out every now and again.

It’s alive!

I’m conscious that the last time I wrote to you was a month ago! But its been busy.

I’ve spent the last few weeks with my colleagues launching the new ACMI. Because of COVID, instead of one big party we held a series of smaller opening ‘group tour’-style events. And, I think they were a lot more effective. At least if the of a launch is to get what you’ve done out and by people who will then go and tell their friends. Whilst we all need celebratory parties when projects complete, most people come to those for the free food, free drink, and mingle with people they know. It’s pleasant - fun, even - but as far as actually enjoying/experiencing the project that is being launched, very few do. You might promise to ‘come back and see it properly’ but in this COVID era, I think that is more doubtful than ever. So this new, more intentional, focused, but multi-evening launch process was a good switch up.

Thanks to Dan Cohen’s tweet going viral after the last episode I need to welcome a lot of new readers! So “hi!” (and thanks Dan!)

As some of you are around here, I should recap what this newsletter is about. It’s a tightly edited thing with a hidden team of ‘content creators’ behind it - instead it’s mostly a sketch/notepad for things I am thinking about, things that have peaked my curiosity, sounds I’ve been listening to, videogames and art I’ve played and seen. There will be typos. For those who are wondering I am, I currently work in a museum in Melbourne and have done stuff around the world experimenting with experiential design and technology in museums and libraries. In a once-parallel Sydney life, others know me for the clubs, raves, radio shows, festivals, record labels and music magazines that I was involved with.

Hello 2021. Feels just like 2020 with a tiny bit less dread, right? Or maybe just a different kind of dread. I started writing this one several times then ‘the news’ got in the way and I had to rethink, so this one is a bit of a stopgap and a hodgepodge of shorter notes.

Like a number of you I spent the last few days of 2020 reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s . It was one of R’s Christmas presents but I managed to sneak in a read of it while he was engrossed in something else. That ‘something else’ at the moment is Czech game - a pretty neat cross-platform factory building game which has all those characteristics that made so addictive for youngsters. Although opens with a very grim scene of extreme climate collapse, by its end the book was a surprisingly uplifting and optimistic way to close out the year. As far as speculative fiction goes, it managed to tread a line that was hopeful plausible, and importantly, US-centric. R is reading it now. It’s probably quite good for kids to read optimistic fiction about our ongoing climate crisis.

I’ve been doing a bunch of talks recently and several folks asked me to write them up rather than let them stay ephemeral moments. This shift to the ephemeral in ‘museum project storytelling’ mirrors the wider shift from 2000s era blogs to less persistent 2010s social media - and suffers from the same long term problems. The recordings of talks are everywhere and unsatisfactory at the same time, even if transcribed verbatim.

In light of that, here’s a rough amalgam of two different talks that skirted around the challenges for digital staff and skills in museums - and how its different now, to a decade a go, to two decades ago. On one hand the complexity of systems, technologies, and their baked-in politics is even greater and more opaque; and on the other hand the in-house skills, deep craft, and at the very same time they are most needed. This is not just a ‘museum problem’ but common across all the culture industries, public sector, and dare I say, the business world too.

Things are looking a little different today.

Like everyone I know, we anxiously awaited the US election results, constantly refreshing web pages with the tabulations as they came in. Outside all of the noise, this is yet again the demonstration of the importance of on the ground activism, collation building, and the mobilization of those coalitions. My friends in the US have been especially happy after a very tough four years. Although the work of social change is never going to be over, there needs to be time for a moment to pause and exhale. Maybe we aren’t quite there yet.

But back here and in the local neighborhood, it is like a new Melbourne - coming out of 100+ days of lockdown. I had expected the city streets to be very quiet still but there’s quite a buzz on them. And the cafe strip near us is almost back to ‘normal’, except for the ‘for lease’ signs. I don’t expect it to last but the vibe and energy this week - coming out of lockdown is notable. I live in  with the highest economic impact, largely a result of the number of neighbors employed in arts, culture, hospitality. For those friends overseas going into another lockdown, I don’t quite know what to say.

The recently released new Google Arts & Culture experiment, Gael Hughes’ An Ocean of Books, is a cute but telling example of the challenges of large heterogeneous datasets. Ostensibly a ‘discovery tool’ it uses basic book metadata from Google Books (itself built on standard library MARC records and classification practices), to group authors into islands in an ‘ocean of books’. But just as a ‘map is not the territory’, these placement of these islands end up revealing the deep problems with the original classification data.

Here’s some example pics. [You might need to tell your mail client to load them!]

The Whitney’s recent exhibition cancellation controversy is yet another reminder that an art museum is not. Power and capital accrete to the art museum in a way that they do to the social history museum.

I had hoped to get some of this out earlier but change is happening so fast at the moment. Things have escalated again in recent days and we are in a new shutdown here in Melbourne, and for five days nine inner city public housing towers went into a level of police-enforced lockdown hitherto unprecedented in Australia. The way in which the pandemic is revealing to everyone the enormous social inequities in our communities is hopefully bringing an renewed focus on the need for wider spread social change. That’s my naive optimism probably.

Two weeks ago, and before all this, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a flight last week - a little later and the state borders would have been closed. And it was a strange experience. I didn’t go very far, just up to Sydney and then a train up to the Blue Mountains to see my mum who I hadn’t seen in months.

This was originally going to be posted on Medium but my frustration over whether it would be accidentally paywalled means I’m publishing it here instead as a public post. As a bonus, all you regular newsletter readers get to read it too. Think of it as a (as we might say down here in Australia in the 1980s) “a Clayton’s newsletter episode”. [The real #48, now #49, will be out soon!]

Last episode I speculated about my experience of video tours, and I totally forgot to write anything about a really fantastic video tour that our friend Sherri organised for us to do with her and some other internationally distributed friends. At the proscribed time, we all logged into a Zoom tour to spend an hour looking at flowers growing in the grounds of Kyoto Imperial Palace with XJ Lee and his rescue forest dog Mori. I hadn’t expected the tour to be as engaging as it turned out to be - but Lee was a fantastic tour guide and had all the right macro lenses to attach to his phone camera to zoom inclose on the flowers as he led us around. We didn’t actually travel very far on the tour - a small part of the palace gardens and then out to the oldest well at a nearby shrine. There were only a small number of actual ‘stops’ - but it was Lee’s commentary and his interactions with Mori that made it so much fun to be part of. The teenagers even stayed engaged for the whole hour! Being on Zoom also made for more equitable attention throughout the tour to us as viewers - no physical crowding to see up close. Maybe museum virtual tours need guide animals!

The tour also reminded me of the existence of , a very straightforward App that introduces you to the Japanese ‘micro-seasons’ from the historical planting calendar. Today we at the tail end of a five day ‘season’, June 10-15, that translates roughly to ‘grain in ear’, the time when grain and rice seedlings should be planted, and barley harvested. With each of the 72 annual seasons, comes a related haiku, seasonal foods (currently loquat and striped jack). Its a very simple, single purpose (free) App. In a similar vein, and via Joe Muggs’s emails is , a site/app that delivers an Indian classical raga appropriate to the time of day and season. Its excellent - especially if you need a way in to Hindustani classical music. I’m very tempted to subscribe.