Zelda D’Aprano held onto the chain with the devotion of a worker who sifted through the words of bosses to find that reason to obey, she held the chain with the ease of a woman holding a handbag of unfair payslips, she held the chain with the strength of her father’s will to survive the Nazis and the drive of her mother’s hope to share our burdens.

Janusz tucks his mouth into his elbow, makes the shape of the word with his lips. He recognises the sound, insectile in the distance, pictures the plane on the runway, propellers whirling, ready to launch. He rolls his head so his cheek rests against his forearm, the open pages of his maths book a pillow beneath.

If most videogames are collaborative stories that the player travels through and participates in, like an actor following their part of the script, Elden Ring is more like a complex puzzle box that players collectively poke at, trying to find a way into to figure out its secrets. It pretends to be about masochistic individual performance but is in fact about collaboration, helping each other out, and working against a deliberately obtuse and unfair opponent.

ABC News Exchange is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. / Time: Jan 6, 2022 03:00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney / Interviewer: Why are you boycotting Sydney Festival? / [redacted]

i feel you shiver-shift against my pillowed fingerprints feel the warmth of me slick your skin {dew-licked and humid} I walked to the gates of the Botanical Gardens in my formal pleated shorts, purchased especially for the occasion. I wanted this experience to be memorable. I wanted to impress.

The third volume of Helen Garner’s diaries, How To End a Story, is a reminder of how affecting books, or art and culture more widely, are. This is art, as Elizabeth Grosz writes via Gilles Deleuze, as an ‘enhancement or intensification of bodies’, an ‘elaboration of sensations.’

Been watching women in romantic comedies toss tiny handbags over their shoulders, laugh without smudging their gloss. They suck lollipops noiselessly, as if silence is true seduction.

‘We’re not going to tell you who the client is, because we don’t want your creativity, or your capacity for constructing a narrative, to be limited by a product or a brand. Because what we’ll be creating together this semester is more than that. It’s aesthetic, discursive. It’s embodied. Hopefully.’   Joe, our seminar tutor, […]

Treating insecurity and longing as more authentic than other emotions means giving in to the bleakness of capitalist realism. When I'm depressed, my brain tells me that this is real and my other emotions are fake, but as a friend once reminded me, my depression brain isn't all that bright.

You’re asleep in the next room. I watch Genet’s Un Chant d’amour. A prisoner is in love with the murderer in the next cell. He kisses the concrete between them. The guard is jealous.

Over summer, part of our gang’s routine was blocking Marcus’s dad from leaving. We wanted to pretend to drive his sports car. Usually he was busy, but this time he moved into the passenger seat. Everyone took turns holding the wheel and playacting. When I sat down, he patted me on the knee.

In reproducing some of the visual conventions of the noir genre, night luxe connects itself to a history of image-making that is enthusiastic about the way images can be manipulated, and about the way night-time resists visual clarity. Night luxe signals a shift not so much in ‘vibes’ but in the fact that the internet is now reflecting on its own practices of image-making and trying to think up narratives for them in real time.

the ratings icons have vanished no one cares yes maybe no mostly no --- how’s it going bin night bin night bang bang bring out the dead --- & the mouse plague – how’s that going in the barren paddocks wheat &endless glare

You died last Tuesday, while we were both sitting on the couch watching a YouTube clip about hummingbird cake. When I think about it, it’s possible you actually died during the recommended video afterward: Super easy beginner’s guide to peanut praline.

While Taylor urged managers to control their workers to ‘get more’ out of them, productivity literature and productivity tech take this imperative and urge the individual to turn this control inwards: to self control, to self manage, to ‘get more’ out of themselves. In this way, the failure to thrive in competitive work environments, to fail to succeed or even to enjoy, becomes an individual failing, hinged on an inability to properly optimise oneself or one’s time.

The delivery zone is empty but investors have no crisis of relevance and couldn’t care less — deliveries are taking place elsewhere and will continue until the cows come home — there’s metal-dust on the water vats, the hand-sanitiser dispenser is exhausted or ignored.