“Is it enough to enjoy firelight and the company of others to minimise one’s individual footprint amid horrifying entropy and structural violence? To make individual sense of it all through the arrangement of words on paper? Or is organised action necessary?”

I am forever saying that if refusal isn't a live option in any decision making process about "AI", then no ethical practice is possible. You've got to be able to stop if the thing is unacceptable.

ALT: GAMES 2026 ALT: GAMES is a celebration that brings together the Australian games community and industry, running from 18 – 19 April in Sydney, Australia.

ALT GAMES has a Steam page to Wishlist and play all the beautiful games on display. Do it or I’ll perish 🫵

store.steampowered.com/curator/4601...

Give me a comments section on real estate websites. There's a house on the market in my (very small, incredibly remote) hometown for a batshit amount of money and I want to neg some property agents about it

You absolutely SHOULD NOT go around telling people that data centers are full of gold, silver, palladium, copper, and that the data centers are almost entirely unstaffed.

Freeplay | The Shape of Games to Come talks and games and friends

Announcing: Freeplay is here to stay. Parallels 2026 is coming and we're advocating for games to be funded as art. Read more and get involved: freeplay.net.au/posts/freepl...

if you're good at writing documentation, please for the love of god come work with me so I don't have to do it - 4 days a week, full remote (Australians and I think NZ only) $100k/yr and a very chill team

assemblyfour.com/careers/docu...

🃏Wyrmspace Tactics will be at ALT: GAMES 2026 🎮

If you're around come say hi and check out what we've been scheming! Here's a sneak peak at some of our new security features 🤖

#ALTGAMES #PowerhouseMuseum
#AustralianGames

basically little diy computers (although the purists on reddit will have opinions on what is/not a cyberdeck). There's a real raspberry pi resurgence 💖

Hell yeah, you love to see it

Here’s the story of one of them. Awful www.thestranger.com/forced-out/f...

In a world where so much technology is obfuscated and inscrutable, I truly believe making your own tech is a radical act of reclaiming power

There’s been a trend on TikTok of (predominantly) women and femmes building cyberdecks and it is delightful watching people get into tinkering and repurposing compacts, clutches, and making tech CUTE

The Poems I Couldn't Write This Week The poem about two Afghan boys whose throats were opened by Australian men. The cynical poem about there being no reason. The poem where they still live. The eco poem about the river the cut boys were left in. The enraged poem about the graceless water. The war poem on the devastation of Empire. The war poem about artists whose taxes paid for the devastation. The family poem about my mother once again not meeting me at the cemetery. The redacted poem using military language like it can be salvaged. The spiritual poem exploding over intended and unintended targets with no effect. The transactional poem that requires an effect. The bilingual poem that swallows God. The servile that licks the boot of the buyer. The political that invents a moral arc of democracy. The ancestral that won't let the dead rest. The dark that refuses to kill the poet. The domestic that imagines itself as separate from all the others. The poem that poems. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un. The mistranslated: verily we belong, and verily we return.

In light of the news about BRS being arrested for his war crimes in Afghanistan, and the sickening attempts from racists to excuse his villainy, this week’s throwback poem is from my third collection, Non-Essential Work.

The genocide in Palestine continues, as bombs are dropped day after day. In Lebanon, a million people have been forced from their homes by Israel, nearly 2000 people killed by bombs and still, Australia does nothing.

Labor must immediately cancel arms deals with Israel and impose sanctions.

People are expressing outrage about how Ben Roberts-Smith was arrested, saying it was too public. He was arrested with no cuffs, not a hand on him, despite facing allegations of war crimes.

I can’t help but think of the young Aboriginal boy wrongly arrested at gunpoint by the AFP on a Canberra bus.

We lose again: Windham-Campbell Prize manqué Was going to post this on Substack, but they don't let you indent blocks of text.     Today’s insanely long installmen...

Helen DeWitt on turning down a $175k Windham-Campbell Prize because she wasn't able to handle the prize's mandatory publicity requirements. Imo a moving, deeply relatable, and darkly funny story about money, obligation, mental health, & executive dysfunction
paperpools.blogspot.com/2026/04/we-l...

I used to have them *all the time* until I started wearing a retainer at night, so I think my brain was trying to create a narrative for my chronic teeth grinding

As Jewish Australians, we are devastated to learn of the Israeli assault on Lebanon yesterday. We urge @albomp.bsky.social and Foreign Minister Wong to speak out against Israel's violent escalation and call on the Government to take decisive action by demanding an immediate ceasefire.

[alt text by NASA] The Moon, seen here backlit by the Sun during a solar eclipse on April 6, 2026, is photographed by one of the cameras on the Orion spacecraft’s solar array wings. Orion is visible in the foreground on the left. Earth is reflecting sunlight at the left edge of the Moon, which is slightly brighter than the rest of the disk. The bright spot visible just below the Moon’s bottom right edge is Saturn. Beyond that, the bright spot at the right edge of the image is Mars. Credit: NASA

Whoa 🤯

The Moon, in full eclipse, with the #Artemis II Orion spacecraft. Part of the Moon and spacecraft are lit by Earthshine, and both Saturn and Mars are visible to the lower right. Incredible. Details: images.nasa.gov/details/art0...

Ooh ty! Truly a joyous day for me reading cool shit!

I am so delighted right now

I cannot believe I'm experiencing 17776 for the first time. Maybe some of the all time greatest storytelling on the internet?: www.sbnation.com/a/17776-foot...

(image alt text: ".On April 7th, 2026, people stopped being born. On the same day, people stopped dying, and people stopped aging.")

Hello my name is Alex Goldman and I used to host the Reply All podcast. A lot of people liked that show. Now I make @hyperfixedpod.bsky.social which if you liked reply all you’d probably like well. The thing is that a lot of people who liked Reply All don’t know my new show exists.

Thank you 🙏 exactly the vibes I'm going for

I started making a vibey ambient patch in VCV Rack for background writing music and then oops spent the afternoon making noises instead of writing, but sounds pretty space to me!

I used AI. It worked. I hated it. I used Claude Code to build a tool I needed. It worked great, but I was miserable. I need to reckon with what it means.

I appreciated this article by Michael Taggart, on the temptation to use some of these coding tools and the pitfalls, from the POV of an experienced software engineer.

This is why it's important to fight these issues collectively rather than at the individual level.

taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

When the spaceship is performing even better than planned 💅🏼

🌈 Announcing the Magabala Pride Fellowship 🌈

In partnership with Pride Foundation Australia, the Fellowship will award $10,000 to a First Nations storyteller to dedicate time to developing or completing a manuscript.

📅 Applications close 24 April 2026

👉 Apply now: bit.ly/4tjK50s

That Address to Nation could’ve been a text.