The app has received some criticism for ‘policing’ women’s speech, although other critiques could be made. For mine, knowing your limitations is an asset rather than a setback, and accordingly the words ‘I’m no expert’ could stand to be used more often. In addition, the phrases singled out above seem to be a way of putting a recipient at their ease; hardly the worst sin to commit in an email.

In the real world, of course it is quite possible to have a high degree of interest in or even knowledge of a problem and yet come up with truly terrible solutions. But even this reasonable objection loses sight of the larger issue: for the inventors of Flux, politics, or policy-making, is a sum of individual decisions, as somebody in economic or game theory might see it, and not the coming together of different and sometimes opposite viewpoints and interests.

Since the new pay structure has been in place for a few months now, authors have had the chance to experience the change in their royalty payouts – sums which have sparked a great deal of debate within the independent and self-published community. Some established writers of longer fiction have done quite well out of the arrangement. Others, not so much.

Early in September, Queensland video game developers Halfbrick fired their last remaining game designers. No, they’re not about to focus on more traditional smart phone apps, nor are they about to go out of business. They still plan on making video games, and they still remain a ‘design-focused studio’. Just, you know, without designers. The move was met with derision among many fellow developers, critics, and players, who saw it as the latest misstep of a fixture in the turbulent Australian video game development scene.

Archiving and sustaining history is an impossible challenge for every art form. Old paintings fade, books go mouldy, original copies of films are lost in warehouse fires. The perceived immateriality of digital forms such as videogames is often seen as a miracle solution, not susceptible to the degradation of mere material artefacts. But the truth is far more dire: digital artefacts are no less dependent on their material grounding than non-digital artefacts.

It is not totally clear whether the ghastly name given to the operation – ‘Ice Pick’, as in the weapon used to mortally wound Leon Trotsky – originates from inside the party or was thought up by an especially sardonic critic, but the contention that its ultimate aim may be to root out radicals has some intuitive merit: given the presence among the candidates of an insurgent with considerable appeal among disaffected voters and activists, trawling for past declarations of criticism in order to disqualify new members would have precisely that effect.

‘I think it would also be fair to say that we should have made more of a fuss at the time.’ It was April 2015. In a brightly lit Australian National University lecture theatre, Seven West Media’s Bridget Fair was lamenting the passage of a terrorism law. Depending on how you count such things, it was either the sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth anti-terror law passed by Australia’s parliament since 2001. This one had far-reaching implications. Among other things, it criminalised the conduct of journalism.