When I was a young boy we had little junk food in the house. I would go over to friends’ houses and be amazed at the assortment of crisps, Tim Tams, Arnott’s shapes, Nutella and confectionary of all sorts. In my house, there were two types of snacks: fruit (predominantly apples) and plain biscuits. The [...]
Update: Subsequent to writing this, I posted on AVCon’s Facebook page that their donation drive was inappropriate and that they should reconsider their decision. Without any correspondence, they deleted the comment. I guess they’re not interested in people that don’t agree with them and they don’t think it’s in bad taste to start asking for [...]
I’m not making this up. Today I tried to recharge my Vodafone prepaid account using the website. I received an error message asking me to try again after restarting my browser. I did this and still got the error. A telephone number is given to call so I tried that. I stayed in the queue [...]
After about 18 months I’ve returned to Japan. I left Japan in April 2009 to return to Australia to complete the work experience component of my Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice. This is a necessary step to qualifying as a solicitor and, given that I had already completed the coursework component of the Diploma, had [...]
I’ve been inspired by Michael Lee’s excellent behind the scenes post about SMASH! to explain how things looked from my side of the fence. First, the background. I was a founding member of the Sydney University Anime Society and one of the original organisers of Animania. I stopped working on Animania after 2003 and in [...]
Disclaimer: I work on SMASH! and in the past I have worked on Animania. The people who work on Australia’s anime conventions — Ai-con, Animania, AVCon, Manifest, Wai-Con and us at SMASH! — all work really hard. Let’s just accept that as a given. If you didn’t want to do any work, you wouldn’t put [...]
I rather like Japan. Some of my best friends are Japanese. My wife is Japanese (probably should have written that one first). I’ve lived and worked in Japan for two and half years and deeply admire many aspects of the society. Today I saw the film 夕凪の町、桜の国 (Yūnagi City, Sakura Country). The film follows the [...]
So I’m about a month late but I did promise to let you know how things were going with those New Year’s Resolutions. My list was originally 11 items long. Of that I’ve completed (or have kept up with) three. That’s not a particularly good score I’ll admit and given that two of them were [...]
I really like the word ‘superfluous’. I think part of the reason is because it’s one of the few words in English that is what it describes. The word ‘phonetic’ is not phonetic. The word ‘mispelt’ is not mispelt. The word ‘long’ is not long (indeed the word ‘short’ is longer than the word ‘long’). [...]
Usually I avoid taking part in Internet memes because, well, I’m just crabby like that. But I felt bad after Ana said that she had tagged me because she wanted to know more about me. Ah, guilt. Would I do anything without you? My middle name, Ian, is the Scottish form of John. John is [...]