I fence; a couple of times a week, I hit other people with, and get hit by, weapons. Naturally, this requires protective gear to ensure nobody does any permanent damage to anyone else.

When I first put on a chest protector, I found it painful. Every time I swung, the top of it dug into my arms. No one else seemed to be having this problem. I mentioned it to the instructor, and he told me this can be a problem for people with large breasts.

For most people, the chest protector sits flush with the rest of their body, or close enough that it doesn’t cause any issues. For those of us with big breasts, it protrudes, causing pain with every swing.

There are chest protectors designed for large breasts, known unaffectionately as “boob plates”, which have protrusions in the plastic for breasts to fit into. These... suck. Because of the way they curve inwards between the breasts, any blow to the chest is going to have all the force of it funnelled to the centre. It can be, I am told, quite painful. I don’t even want to think about the long-term damage from repeatedly having all the energy from a blow constantly directed to the same place.

This is hardly the first time equipment has been designed for men to the exclusion of everyone else. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez1 is a whole book about how this is a man’s world, and includes an example of utility belts for emergency services. These belts, designed to fit a male body and sit on male hips, cause back and hip issues for women after long-term usage.

I don’t understand why we no one sells a chest protector that just... sticks out more, curves around the sides of the breasts, and is flat. Has no one designed it? Can they not get funding? Do they exist somewhere, but are struggling to be heard?

The Bullshit Solution

There is a sort-of solution that I think is going to work. I now own both a boob plate and a flat chest protector. The boob plate sits beneath the flat one, higher than it should be, to protect the upper chest. The flat protector sits lower, half on top of the boob plate, and protects my abdomen. Because the flat one is now lower than it should be, the edges that were digging into my arm are now too low to do that.

This does require me, and others like me, having to buy two chest protectors. Thankfully they’re not too expensive, especially relative to other pieces of fencing gear, but... that’s double the cost, which most other people don’t have to pay.

And don’t even get me started on a fencing jacket. I’ve been putting it off because I have to get a custom one; I cannot breathe in a jacket that fits my body, and one which fits my breasts is comically oversized everywhere else. So I have to take a lot of measurements, which I don’t like doing (thankfully a friend has offered to help), and fork over an extra 20%.

Because of my biology.

Now I’ve finally overcome the chest protector hurdle, I’m going to do this soon.

My club has been inclusive and welcoming; there are so many queer people involved, and I love going just to hang out with people. Which makes it all the more disappointing to encounter a new, random way men are treated as the default in this world.

Yes, this is niche, and there are bigger problems in the world, but because of that, it’s not widely known. This is yet another small addition to the pile of bullshit designed for the male body that doesn’t work for everyone else.

Content warning: This article discusses child rape.

People talking about trauma making you stronger has always been demoralising to me.

Being raped made me weaker. It made me angrier, meaner, and overrode my sense of self. It gave me fragility. I didn’t feel strong, and so whenever I heard I should be, I felt like a failure.

Recovering from trauma takes a lot of time and work.

It’s a long road.

Losing the Self

Amy Remeikis, in On Reckoning, talks about how there is a before and an after when you have been raped. She talks about how important it is for those in the after to prevent others from joining us here1. It’s a useful framework, but it gives me a weird feeling I can’t place, because I don’t remember the before.

I wonder, sometimes, who I would be in the absence of rape. At the same time, I don’t think it matters too much since I was so young, and so much of me was changing regardless. I was seven when a family friend, only five years older than myself, took an unnatural interest in me. There is no way of knowing who I would have been in the absence of rape, so there is no point in wondering about it.

...Right?

I’m not so sure that’s true.

Despite my young age and barely-developed sense of self, it was still there. I have had a clear set of values around fairness and justice since before I was able to articulate it.

There is something you see all the time in fictional narratives which I find infuriating. That is, when the villain goads the main character into doing something cruel and then says this is their true nature. They claim the protagonist was merely pretending to be kind the whole time.

This ignores the fact that, in their absence, the main character would not have been cruel. That the cruel action repulses them so much, it may make them physically ill.

This is how I feel about trauma’s effects on my brain.

My natural state is to be kind, forgiving, and empathetic to others who are the same; who mean well. When I encounter people who are cruel, it feels most natural for me to not give them any quarter or let them get away with any of their bullshit, the high road be damned. It feels right when I am acting in this way.

The effects of trauma have gotten in the way of this my whole life.

I can feel when an urge is contrary to who I am, when I am being unnecessarily mean to someone I like, or am letting a prick get away with some garbage. I have come to realise it literally makes me sick. Headaches appear or intensify; I get random soreness; I get cold sores; I chew on the inside of my cheek in my sleep; I am in a constant state of having a cold or some other malaise. The most visceral tell is the crawling inside my arms, as it springs to action and scrabbles for an escape route, pushing against my skin, rearranging my muscles.

What’s more intense is what it does to my mind.

Bones

I do not think in words. The colours and shapes that form my internal world are varied, bright and vibrant.

When the spectre rises, I’m flooded with darkness, which dampens everything else. The colours disappear; the shapes fold in on themselves and turn to nonsense or nothing. It becomes all consuming; the paranoia, the anger, the helplessness, the wrongness under my skin.

I didn’t used to notice this. It’s only through hard therapy over the past two years that I’ve been able to recognise this, and then to work on it. Now, I can tell when a thought or urge comes from a place that is not me.

It slithers out from under my muscles, rising with the noxious purple smoke, and it will feel... wrong. I’ll crack it over something that doesn’t matter, or it will take a justified negative emotion and expand it until I am so apoplectic I can no longer form words. I shake, feel the urge to cry, lash out with hurtful words. It doesn’t feel apart of me; it is something else, something unwelcome, something toxic that exploded into my bones a long time ago and refused to leave.

And I get the crawling under my skin; the feeling that something is lurking, looking for a way out, scrabbling back and forth, trying to break free.

I don’t blame all negative emotions, thoughts, or urges on the trauma; that would be silly. I have negative reactions to things, I can be petty, sometimes I want to lash out when I’m upset. Sometimes I’m angry because someone is being a dickhead. Irritable because I’m hungry, tired, or overstimulated. Upset because something bad happened. That’s all totally fine so long as I don’t act on these feelings and hurt anyone else, and when I do, I front up and apologise. This is all part of the human experience.

That’s why I invoke the spectre of the purple funk; to differentiate my natural negative emotions from the ones manifesting as a trauma reaction.

The villain is at work, forcing me down to their level and then claiming I secretly want to be here.

I am me, and I am NOT you.

- Rufus Albarea, Trails into Reverie

I refuse to use the language of “my” abuser, “my” rapes, or “my” spectre. They are not me; they are not welcome here, and I don’t know how to articulate the feeling of repulsion when I think about describing them in that way. All of those were forced upon me, and I’ll be damned before I claim them and allow them to get comfortable.

Of course the spectre is going to be inserting its will into my thoughts, trying to pass them off as my own. Its survival depends on it.

Because once I started to see it, I started to work on it; to expel it.

Incision

For the past two years I’ve been excising the marrow of the invasion with the assistance of my psychologist, bit by bit, in our sessions. Digging it out, hacking deeper and deeper, toward the roots. I’m in up past my elbows, now, tearing and cutting and pulling to get the fucking thing out. I’m doing the hard work - no one else can do it, it has to be me - but there are people nearby, helping.

My psych parses tools with me, my friends are nearby keeping them sharp, passing me food and drink, telling me stories, adjusting my music - just being there so I can properly rest whenever I pull myself out of the muck and collapse onto the grass for a break.

It took - still takes - so much additional work for me to function at what is supposed to be normal. I have a vivid recollection of asking my psych if people without PTSD have to figure out all the shit we’ve been working on in our sessions; to work so hard to function at a baseline level. She told me that no, they don’t. I cried.

It is an unambiguously good thing that most people don’t have to deal with this. But fuck, it is so unfair that I - or anyone - has to deal with this bullshit.

It’s taken me years and thousands of dollars in therapy to get to my current point, in addition to all the support I’ve gotten from my extraordinarily broad support network. It’s still ongoing, and will be for the rest of my life, to some degree, but I am already having to do less, day by day.

Now, coming through to the other side, I am finally feeling strong. And rather than being belittling, talk of resilience now pisses me off.

We Need Material Support

Telling people who have been traumatised we need to be more resilient is bullshit. It literally changes the way our brains work, making it harder to do what we need to do. Sympathy without support is useless; politicians, who could choose to legislate proper, systemic assistance, can take their thoughts and prayers and shove it up their ass.

We need quality psychological care; a strong support network of people we care about where the feeling is mutual; we need our basic needs to be met.

All of this becomes easier to lose after a traumatic event. It’s harder to maintain relationships if you’re depressed, lethargic, irritable, angry, or otherwise upset.

From there, everything else breaks down. Friends and family in your support network might drop contact if they don’t want to be around someone who is regularly upset or unable to enjoy the things you used to do together. You can lose your job for similar reasons, or because you’re unable to continue performing at the level you were before. Suddenly, you can no longer meet your basic needs.

Then it becomes reinforcing. Can’t get better cause you don’t have the means, can’t get the means cause you haven’t gotten better.

I’ve gotten better for a few reasons:

• When I told Mum about the abuse, she believed me. My parents supported me. I was reassured it wasn’t my fault, and because I trusted my parents and the police, I have never had issues with guilt.

• I exercised agency. I’ve read a few books about trauma now, and a recurring theme is the loss of agency. The abuse ended because I told Mum; I had taken action. Without knowing it, I had reclaimed my autonomy, which would have repaired something in my brain.

• Strong support network. I had a lot of friends then, I had enough throughout high school. I somehow have so many more now, and the depth in my current relationships is nothing I’d have been able to fathom in the past. There are a lot of people I can lean on for a rant or a chat, about this bullshit or... anything else. There are people I can go see who are happy for me to sit there and be grumpy while they go about their day, so I don’t have to be alone, stew, and get worse. The foremost in my support network is, of course, my loving partner; we’ve been together for almost a decade and a half, now, and she is critical to my everything.

• Money. The cutie I started dating in high school turned out to come from a family that had money; she now has a well-paying job. It’s enough that I could not work for about six months and we’d still be comfortable. When I am working, we can easily afford specialist appointments, including therapy. This means I can get the psychological care I need, and I don’t have to worry about my basic needs.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of initiatives I want to see:

• We need a strong social safety net, so that people can drop out of work and not have to worry about food, rent, or bills. Or, even better, just make those things free so everyone can live.

• Psychological care (all medical care, really) should be free and fast. No one should have to wait weeks or months for anything, or be forced to choose between healthcare and food, housing, education, transport, or any other basic need.

• There need to be programs to support people who have been through traumatic events to find or rediscover community. That can be peer support programs, helping to reconnect with people they stopped talking with as they fell into the after, finding others with similar hobbies, work assistance, and more.

• The above should go hand-in-hand with campaigns to destigmatise abuse. All shame should be on abusers.

• Our legal system should actually help survivors of rape and sexual assault. I refuse to call it a “justice” system because it’s not. How many other crimes go to court to argue over whether they even happened? Very few, and those that do relate to people being abused by the powerful - people subjected to gendered, racial, heteronormative, ableist abuse have a hard time being believed or taken seriously.

• We need a society that is fundamentally different to what it is now. While we live in a society ruled by patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism, any solution will be temporary, always fought against by powerful politicians and their thinktanks.

A lack of resources should never be a barrier to anyone’s recovery, and every day policymakers choose not to act is a disgrace.

Subscribe now

Late last year, I decided to find something I could do on my phone for those times when I was too tired to think or read, but wanted to do something while I was waiting for... an appointment, a train, a friend to show up. Something mindless. I found I had been spending that time scrolling my feed on Substack, which I did not want to be doing. I had uninstalled the app previously but found I missed being able to read posts from people I had subscribed to while out or lying in bed, so I reinstalled it so I could do that.

However, I was now sometimes getting trapped on the feed. Which was part of the reason I had previously left other social media platforms. And I know it’s bad for me.

I needed something different.

When I’m at home, my colouring books fulfil that role. If I’m not sure what I want to do, I’ll grab whatever page I’m currently working on and colour until I decide to do something else. I’m fond of colouring while listening to an audiobook, or if I need a break from a screen.

So I decided to download a colouring app on my phone. I knew it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as that tactile experience of a paper colouring book, but I figured it would suffice as an alternative to a social media feed.

Ads

I downloaded a colouring app and watched an ad.

Wait.

What?

Before and after each colouring page, I needed to watch a short ad to support the app.

Makes sense. They need to make money somehow, right? I’d rather pay for something than have it be riddled with ads, though, so I went looking for the purchase option.

Which... I couldn’t find. Because it didn’t exist.

I scoured the app for any trace of a way to give them money to get rid of the ads.

None.

Scratching my head, I went to the app’s reviews and, between people praising various aspects of it, found people complaining about exactly this.

When it started playing ads multiple times in the middle of the same page, to the point I was ad watching more than colouring, I got annoyed.

I deleted it and downloaded a second app.

This one allowed me to pay for it. Great!

I quickly ran into another roadblock.

Hints

These apps are, by and large, of the colour by numbers variety. Each image has numbers between the lines, and each of those numbers corresponds to a particular colour. When a number is selected, it highlights the sections of the drawing you can fill in with the corresponding colour.

I kept running into areas I needed to colour which were so tiny, I couldn’t see them, even with the highlight. Luckily, this app had hints, so I could just press that whenever I couldn’t find what I needed.

Unluckily, the hints were limited in number.

And in order to get more,

You had

To watch

A fucking

Ad.

I began to believe1 they deliberately created these small, impossible-to-see sections to force you to use hints. And then once you’ve burned through them, you have to watch ads again.

What’s worse, if you didn’t find a new spot to colour quickly, or paused your movement of the picture to examine things more closely, that infuriating little light bulb would crop up to prompt you to watch an ad. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the whole picture yet! Bugger off!!

I deleted this app, too, and redoubled my search. I looked up best colouring apps for Android and got nothing that fit my criteria. As a last ditch effort, I started to go through the colouring app section on the Play Store.

Subscriptions

I found a number of apps that allowed me to pay to get rid of ads and bequeathed unlimited hints.

They had subscriptions!!

Just let me buy you outright!!!

The worst I saw made my stomach churn. $50/yr, marked down from $250/yr. This is absolutely a trap to catch people who forget to cancel, OR they make it ridiculously hard for you to cancel. Maybe even both!

Oh my god why is it so hard to have a normal colouring app on my phone.

Finally

My brute force searching paid off. I found an app that permitted a one-off payment of $20 that both eliminated ads and allowed me unlimited hints.

A number of its reviews were asking if the app’s owners had links to a previous app, Zen Color, which was similarly well-made, but had disappeared a while ago.

As a bonus, this app claims to have artists hand-drawing each piece, which I appreciate. I am always sceptical of any corporate claims, but at the very least, it looks good, it runs well, and I’m not watching ads every few minutes - or at all!

I’m quite happy with the app I’ve landed on. I’m concerned I’ll eventually run out of pages to colour in a few months’ time, but for now, I’m quite happy with my find.

Content warning: There are extensive discussions of rape and sexual assault in this article as this was what made me form this view in the first place. There are also discussions of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Journalists are disincentivised from challenging power structures as they may then lose access to those who inhabit them; politicians, company executives, and the like. This would, in their view, deprive them of the exclusives and background information they require to do their jobs.

This is why political commentary today has devolved into what feels like a team sport. It’s everywhere, and their collective choice to prioritise political relationships over the core tenets of their profession is preventing them from conducting the deep analysis we saw in the days of yore.

While I think this is an explanation, please do not take it as an excuse. Understanding why something is happening is important, but it does not remotely justify their collective abrogation of responsibility. I deliberately used the word “choice” in the last paragraph to make it clear that this is something they are electing to do, and could stop at any time. They are prioritising their collective prestige over everything that matters.

EPBC Act

The government rammed through changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) shortly before Parliament adjourned for 2025.

This is despite the fact there was a consultation on the legislation open at the time. The legislation passed 27 November, eight days prior to the consultation’s close on 5 December. The committee plans to report back on the consultation on 24 March 2026 (these often get delayed, but you can check the progress here at any time), not that it matters anymore.

While this was going on, I listened to an interview with the Minister for the Environment and Water, Murray Watt, and was frustrated both by what he was saying, and by how one of this country’s most experienced journalists was not holding him to account.

Watt ruled out adding a climate trigger, which would force the government to take greenhouse gas emissions into account when approving projects. He cited other initiatives from the government to reduce emissions, the implication being that their existence means we don’t need a climate trigger int he EPBC Act.

He didn’t name them, because they don’t exist.

Where was the pushback on this? Our most significant piece of environmental legislation has no way to take the climate crisis into account. This is utterly absurd. Why wasn’t Watt pressed on why they’re forcing through legislation while consultations are still open? Will they be making further amendments once consultations close? If not, why even do the consultations?

Why wasn’t Watt asked about the hypocrisy of our Prime Minister proposing climate trigger legislation in Opposition, but never once he came to power?

Only a handful approvals have been refused under the Act, one of which was for wind power. On what planet does it need to be made more development-friendly?

I’m picking on this one interview, but it’s a wider problem. So many journalists talk about the politics like it’s a game; what a particular maneuver will do to the other team, or if that team is wedging the other one.

I. Don’t. Care.

I want reporting that contextualises what policies mean for every day people and holds power to account. The only reason I am across politics and political speak is because I pay close attention and had the patience to learn the jargon. Because it is jargon; political reporters talk in such a way that anyone who doesn’t pay close attention will find it baffling and switch off. Part of my understanding came from Amy Remeikis actually explaining things, such as what the hell “doors” is (it’s a specific set of doors at Parliament in Canberra where journalists gather; politicians walk through when they have something to say).

Part of the reason, I think, they don’t explain anything is because the less people understand and the more we switch off, the we will scrutinise them. This means most people remain unaware of the depths of their gutlessness or the shallowness of their reporting, and it prevents our collective regard for them from cratering even more than it already has.

No; instead, we get a press which is utterly out of touch, advocating for one side or the other at the expense of the rest of us.

Rape & Sexual Assault

I became completely disillusioned with political reporting during the sexual assault cases of early 2021. One centred around allegations of a rape inside the office of Senator Linda Reynolds, who was in cabinet back then. Both the perpetrator, Bruce Lehrmann, and the victim-survivor, Brittany Higgins, were employed by Reynolds at the time. The other case was a historical rape allegation against an unnamed federal cabinet minister, who later outed himself as then-Attorney-General, Christian Porter, presumably to put a stop to the endless speculation.

All of the reporting around these rapes, a crime described by the UN as a “grave and systematic human rights violation”, was about politics as a team sport. How each revelation would affect either party, both sides accusing the other of political point scoring, and the like. Basically no one was talking about the impacts this was having on sexual assault survivors.

Amy Remeikis was a lifeline; being a survivor herself, she gets it in a way the overwhelming majority of her colleagues did not. She would later talk about this in On Reckoning; of [male] colleagues complaining about how the story was still ongoing and they didn’t understand why, until they noticed her standing there:

When Brittany Higgins’s story first broke, many of the men around me became awkward. No-one wants to say the wrong thing around a Rape Victim. If, in those early days, any male colleagues expressed frustration that the story wasn’t moving on, or that women were being ‘too sensitive’ about Scott Morrison’s comments, they’d realise I was there and quickly depart, suddenly remembering why the story wasn’t moving on. Because there were real-life examples of the wreckage sexual assault can wrought, everywhere.1

As a survivor myself, I can assure you that time was utterly horrific. I was subjected to two years of child sexual abuse by a family friend when I was young; he was a child himself, only five years older than me. I don’t remember the overwhelming majority of it as I was so young and trauma does weird things to brains; I only know it went on for two years because that was what he confessed to.

I bought my first colouring books in January 2021 for the express purpose of giving myself something mindless to do that wasn’t scrolling social media, as the discourse was unrelenting and devastating.

In May, I suddenly realised that people were no longer talking about Christian Porter; the government hadn’t deigned to look into it at all.

I broke.

I spent the next day in bed, physically ill with a horrendous head cold. My mental state was awful until I could see my psych at the time, who wasn’t available for two months. In that time, I was listless, lethargic, and in the middle of the semester, which, shockingly, I scored atrociously in. I later found out I could have seen the psych sooner if I’d explained how bad I was, which... would have been good to know beforehand.

The allegations against Porter faded into the background pretty quickly as the woman in question, dubbed “Kate”, died by suicide in 2020, despite the efforts of her friend, Jo Dyer, to keep the story alive. Porter sued Dyer and the ABC for defamation, which he then lost.

The allegations against Lehrmann turned into a media circus, which is still ongoing.

There was a criminal trial, which was abandoned due to juror misconduct and then not retried due to the effect it was having on Higgins’s health. Lehrmann then sued Higgins for defamation, which ended with a spectacular finding against Lehrmann that floored me in the best possible way.

Justice Michael Lee not only ruled in favour of Higgins, but busted a number of rape myths in his judgement. He laid out 10 facts which demonstrate how trauma’s impact on memory means someone who has been through a traumatic experience may seem like an unreliable witness due to the very trauma they are reporting. They’re worth reading in full; it’s page 29 of his judgement. Later, Lee says that he does not believe Higgins said no during the rape, but that ultimately this didn’t matter, as Lehrmann was “recklessly indifferent” to whether Higgins consented. He then stated plainly on page 150 that “Mr Lehrmann raped Ms. Higgins.” It is worth noting that this was a civil case, and not a criminal one; this was a finding “on the balance of probabilities.”

In his pursuit of gratification, he did not care one way or another whether Ms Higgins understood or agreed to what was going on.2

There have been a string of other defamation actions variously involving Reynolds, Lehrmann, Network 10, and Lisa Wilkinson which I will not detail here. But it just. Keeps. Going.

None of this has been handled with sensitivity by the media. There’s one particular journalist I’d like to talk about, but defamation law in this country is cooked, so I’m not going to.

I understand there will be political pundits who will want to discuss what this for their field.

However, why are they all refusing to discuss how this affects the millions of people in Australia who have been raped or sexually assaulted? Or doing anything that could materially help us; to stop more from joining us in the After?

For every article about the “politics”, it should be counterbalanced with at least two on the impacts on survivors and their loved ones. There needs to be an accompanying discussion on how we can stop people (overwhelmingly men) from raping. There needs to be rape myth busting, like we saw in Justice Lee’s judgement. Platform us; let us tell our stories. If the thought makes you uncomfortable, spare a thought for those of us who are forced to think about it every day; to feel it in our bodies and in our new thought patterns.

Journalists need to dig deeper, do work like my favourite Substack writer Jo, and discuss rape more frankly. Here are some potential topics off the top of my head:

• Our systems disincentivise people from talking about having been raped.

• We’re unlikely to be believed.

• How many other crimes go to court to argue over whether they even happened?

• Being dragged through our legal system (which I refuse to call a justice system) leads to victim-survivors being re-traumatised, while alleged perpetrators can opt out of this.

• Survivors of rape (and other trauma) come across as unreliable witnesses due to the very nature of the violence we are testifying against, and effect it has on our brains. This makes the abovementioned court experience worse and serve no purpose in the pursuit of justice - but it is an excellent way to deter victim-survivors from reporting their experience.

• When people do report, we are often not taken seriously, or it does not proceed.3

• There needs to be additional effort to accommodate people society normally leaves behind, and/or are discriminated against by law enforcement. First Nations people, people with disabilities, queer people, people of colour, those who do not speak English, and other marginalised groups.

• The number of both false accusations is miniscule.

• The rate of conviction is so low, rape is effectively decriminalised.

• People who have been raped are likely to be blamed for violence which was not their fault.

• Victim-blaming as a self-defence mechanism, while making it clear that an explanation is not an excuse and this is completely unacceptable.

• All shame should always be on the rapist, not on the person who was raped.

• The banality of so many rapists, and how labelling them monsters is counterproductive.

• The perpetrator is likely to be someone we know.

• The onus should be on men to stop raping, not on women to protect ourselves.

• Telling women to watch our backs is effectively saying “Make sure he rapes someone else instead” and does nothing to solve the problem.

• Rape is often an exhibition of power, not lust.

• “Sexual assault” is often used as a euphemism to dodge unpleasantries many people don’t want to confront.

• All men benefit from rape even if they’d never rape someone themselves, as it keeps women cowed.

The ultimate effect of rape upon the woman’s mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act. For to accept a special burden of self-protection is to reinforce the concept that women must live and move about in fear and can never expect to achieve the personal freedom, independence, and self-assurance of men.

Susan Brownmiller

But no. It’s all a team sport to these vultures.

Instead of reporting that could actually make a difference, they focus on the politics. They could be using their platforms to explore any of the abovementioned topics and more, and they refuse to.

Social Media Ban

Journalists bemoan people turning away from them, refusing to see that it is their own fault. The old guard has been displaced by newer entrants who are more serious than them, as viewers are uninterested in politics as a contact sport.

A 2023 survey of young people from Western Sydney University found that social media was the most common news source after friends and family, equal with live TV. 17% got news from the radio, and coming in at less than 10% each were news apps, on-demand TV, podcasts or the newspaper. Trust in news organisations was low, with only 16% saying they trust them a lot. Almost two thirds struggle to find news tailored to them.

Half (50%) of 13-16 year olds and 37% of 8-12 year olds agree that getting news stories is important... However, two thirds (66%) of young Australians agree or strongly agree that most news media have no idea what the lives of people their age are really like.

Large media companies successfully lobbied the government to institute a social media ban so they could cultivate a captive audience. Their strategy to pick the low hanging fruit worked; they bleated about child safety to prevent people under the age of 16 from accessing good, alternative media that isn’t the garbage you see on TV or in the paper. Viewed through this lens, restricting access to large social media companies but allowing 4chan makes sense. People under the age of 16 are not going to find good news info on 4chan, and since it’s not actually about child safety, they don’t care that kids retain access to that cesspool.

Genocide

A year to the day that Labor Senator Fatima Payman crossed the floor to support a Greens resolution to recognise Palestinian statehood, Antionette Lattouf won her unfair dismissal case against the ABC. Lattouf had been dismissed after she posted on social media about a Human Rights Watch report which alleged Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. To quote from an SBS report:

Justice Darryl Rangiah on Thursday found the national broadcaster contravened sections 50 and 772(1) of the Fair Work Act by terminating Lattouf’s employment for reasons including that she held political opinions opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

It was decided that the ABC, “in a state of panic”, repudiated her contract — a decision said to have been made solely by chief content director Chris Oliver-Taylor. He did so to mitigate a “deluge of complaints” and “appease” pro-Israel lobbyists, Rangiah said.

In fact, the media’s treatment of the genocide in Gaza is an instructive example. At the time of writing, over 270 journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel, more than in any other conflict. And yet, the media here still dithers on calling it a genocide, which the United Nations and so many other human rights experts declared long ago. If you’re seeing less information about Israel’s atrocities, don’t think it’s because they’ve stopped; it’s because there is no one left to tell us about them.

If Australian journalists aren’t going to stand by their colleagues who are literally dying, what hope do the rest of us have?

Bondi & Venezuela

I haven’t discussed the shitshow that has been coverage of the Bondi shooting for three reasons. The first is that I finished my first draft of this piece a couple of weeks before it occurred. The second is that, having largely switched off from mainstream media, I simply haven’t seen much of the coverage. Most of what I know about it has come from other people talking about it.

Which brings me to my third point: If I wrote something, it would just be an amalgamation of a handful of others’ writing. Instead, I’ll point you to the pieces I would have drawn from.

• Omar Sakr has published two long pieces on the mass media’s coverage. Sakr is struggling to find work because of his advocacy for Palestine; if you can, throw him some money to keep him afloat.

• Nick Feik has published a great piece on how grief has been weaponised. It contains a lot of the same points as Sakr’s posts, but it’s much shorter.

• Joel Jenkins asks who owns a national tragedy in his work a week after the shootings.

There are good discussions here about the political exploitation of a massacre to pass laws preventing our right to protest, and to shout down those of us who have been protesting against a genocide. Why are they quoting Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity? Why is no one talking about the intelligence failures; why was the father of a man on ASIO’s radar granted a gun permit? It took three years for him to get one; this is not normal. What was the hold up, and why was he eventually granted one?

Sakr and Feik also pointed out that ISIS, which the shooters had a flag of, hates Hamas and Palestine. I did not know this. They point out that anyone claiming the shooters were doing this for Palestine are assuming all Muslims are the same, when in reality, someone with an ISIS flag doesn’t give a damn about Palestine.

Incidentally, the second reason from my list at the start of this section is part of why I have said nothing about Venezuela. What I assume is happening and/or will happen will be the press talking about how Maduro was a dictator, while failing to point out that this does not mean Trump gets to kidnap a world leader. This abduction represents a huge upset to the current world order that will be bad for most of us, and other autocrats around the world will take it as licence to act against their political opponents around the world. I hate living in interesting times.

The main reason, though, is that we don’t need another uninformed person from the West talking about this. I know next to nothing about Venezuela. It is okay to shut up and just listen sometimes.

What I Want to See

I think of a friend of mine who wants to travel to communities across the country, explaining what a changing climate will mean for them and what they can do to prepare. I find the idea exhilarating. I think it’s sooooooo cool!! She’s already held one workshop for a community in Naarm/Melbourne, where she talked through what they can expect, and listened to them about the changes they’re already seeing. One of the key points here is that it was a two-way conversation, and not just her talking down to them.

Why aren’t journalists doing the same? Working in regional areas, reporting on local issues, from that region, and not an office in a city? We used to have independent local newspapers who did this, but they have been bought out and shut down over the years, leaving many places without. In their place, partisan papers masquerading as independent are rising. The four big players, which comprise 84% of newspaper revenue, are squeezing out the small ones, making us the second most concentrated media market in the world. For a detailed timeline of how Rupert Murdoch took over the media in this country, head here. I haven’t made my way through it yet, and will probably have more to say once I do.

I’m concerned they’re going to keep pushing for more restrictions on social media for more people, to prevent the rest of us from seeing through their sycophancy.

Who I Follow

There are, of course, some good ones out there. My favourite journalist is Amy Remeikis, and has been since the clusterfuck of early 2021. Cam Wilson is another one. Greg Jericho is the only economist I pay any attention to. I’m not sure if he’d call himself a journalist, but Ketan Joshi does a lot of awesome writing on climate.

My favourite news site, now, is Deepcut News. I like the Bogan Intelligentsia (which also wins the award for best name), and satire websites like the Betoota Advocate and The Shovel. I’ve also found a number writers, activists, unionists and academics, who I now follow individually for their work. I’m subscribed to a number of organisations that work on things I am interested in, such as Queers X Climate and The Australia Institute, including their new site, The Point.

For straight news I go to The Conversation, Al Jazeera, Reuters, SBS, ABC, and The Guardian - that last one to a lesser extent, now. I was a subscriber for five years but cancelled it earlier this year after I noticed a number of good people (particularly the aforementioned Remeikis and Jericho) had left.

Mainstream journalists need to treat devastating topics with the sensitivity they deserve. They need to hold powerful people to account and ask tricky questions. They need to relate their work back to the average person, minus the jargon. They need to own the fact that people are turning away from them because they are not doing any of the above; that it is their own fault.

Unless and until mainstream journalists start to report in a way that matters to people, I will continue to be one of the many Australians ignoring them.

I just finished Aiming Higher by George Williams, and there was a statement in there which got my attention:

“Today’s and tomorrow’s graduates won’t work the same job over a lifetime.”1

This is not just in Williams’s book; I am only mentioning it because it was what got me thinking about this. This is everywhere, and it’s more than just an attitude; it’s true.

This narrative ignores the fact that so many jobs require a degree, or some form of certificate or training. Employers, in my experience, refuse to recognise transferable skills, so you need to apply for work that is below your current pay grade -- and capability -- in order to find a job somewhere else. You cannot jump careers at the drop of a hat or without some kind of penalty. There is so much investment in careers, now, in the form of degrees, certificates or specialised training, and we’re also expected to change them multiple times throughout our lifetimes.

Make it make sense.

I will!

Tools of Capital

Mass redundancies and forcing people to change careers so often are tools of capital to keep workers down. Being surrounded by layoffs scares people into staying in the garbage job they already have, as they are too scared of starving to leave. I know a few people in this position. I personally am looking for work I don’t want, but have experience in, because of the need for money.

It’s all infuriating to me. Why do so many people take instability for granted and don’t question why it is the case?

Commentators often talk about how younger workers are all to happy to jump ship, of not giving their all to a workplace, of not committing to their employer. But when employers treat their workers like a trinket to be discarded when we’re no longer useful, it’s business as usual. They only sound the alarm when we do the same to them.

For me, personally, I am an autistic person who has a prominent trait of rigidity2; of not dealing well with change. I particularly detest any alteration to my material circumstances or physical reality, especially when it is not of my own volition.

I do not want to move workplaces every few years. I want to work in a single place for 30 years and then retire. I want to build relationships with other people in my field and become an expert in my domain that others can turn to. I want to spend most of my work time getting to know this field, exploring how it interacts with the world and other sectors. I want to build relationships with experts in different areas and explore interactions between our domains. I want to go out to conferences and industry events and make friends with people who could use my expertise to do good, and whose expertise I could use. The flipside of my autistic rigidity is that in an environment like this, where I can focus, where I am in control, and life remains stable, I thrive and can get stuck into a deep focus.

I know that’s not for everyone. And that’s fine. Everyone’s brain is different and has different needs and preferences. I know there are people out there who would prefer to move around regularly. There are people out there who would not like to work at all. I’m just not one of them.

Even in an ideal world where no one was required to work to survive, there would still be things that needed doing. People get sick and need treatment, and food, clothes, housing and other necessities will have to come from somewhere. For recreation, we’ll still need community centres, crafting clubs, publishers, sporting infrastructure and more -- all of which will need people to run them.

I would love to work in something like that; something fulfilling, helping people around me. Ideally, I’d be working about 15-20 hours a week, maybe up to 30 if it was something I particularly liked. The time I work would be flexible, the labour and conditions wouldn’t be exploitative, and I’d be building connections with my colleagues and community.

And it would be stable, god damn it.

Even for people who like to move jobs or careers regularly, the current environment doesn’t work, because it is so rarely on their own terms. Choosing to jump from one employer to another on a regular basis is great. But so many don’t choose; they get laid off, they get forced out by discriminatory bosses or colleagues, they don’t get a pay rise or promotion for years and need to leave in order to attain that.

And the media uncritically follows the corporate line, as it so often does. You see it in the propagation of terms like “quiet quitting”, where employees are castigated for refusing to do more than the minimum required of them. These narratives never ask why more than half of the workforce doesn’t care about what they do. With so many people adopting this attitude, it would be a prudent question to ask. But they don’t, because doing so would mean unravelling the exploitation at the heart of a capitalist society they benefit from, so instead, they choose to turn a blind eye.

I’m not sure what the best way to achieve something like this would be. It would definitely start with joining your union and building solidarity with people at work and in your personal life, in a way that cuts across lines of race, (trans)gender, class, disability, sexuality, nationality, and more. A co-operative would be ideal.

What do you think, reader? What would you want in the world of work? Stability? Genuine flexibility? No work whatsoever? All are valid. Let me know in the comments.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first two essays from the Australia Institute‘s new Vantage Point series. The first was about the Australia/America relationship and the second about the issue with centrism as a concept. As such, I was greatly looking forward to the latest essay, which was about Australia’s embattled university sector.

Aiming Higher: Universities and Australia’s Future was written by Western Sydney University’s Vice-Chancellor, George Williams. My favourite part of the book was near the beginning, when Williams discussed the history of university regulations. Weaved throughout was a compelling contextualisation of the corporatisation of universities; as I was not around for the Dawkins reforms or all that followed, it was all new to me. He discussed what the federal government to do to help restore university funding to make it more equitable and prevent the problem from worsening.

Williams also highlighted the role of universities themselves in their unpopularity. Two quotes in the book from former Labor leader and current Canberra University Vice-Chancellor, Bill Shorten, sum this up nicely:

“Too often millennials and Gen Z look at universities and see cold institutions that talk about themselves; obsessing over prestige and rankings”.1

“[Students] want a university that values and encourages a learning community, not a slick and soulless corporation that sees everything through the lens of revenue.”2

I respected Williams’s extensive discussions of inequity in the fee system, and his learnings from interacting with students on social media, in food banks and at community dinners. Reading a Vice-Chancellor explain the hardships his students face, which he had heard from them directly, wasn’t at all what I expected from the book, and I appreciated it.

Other parts of the book, however, baffled me. Williams’s failure to link parts of his writing back to the broader whole left me with a lip-curling feeling of distaste for the book after I had finished.

Generative AI

Williams extols generative AI (genAI) towards the end of Aiming Higher, even going so far as to proclaim:

We must move away from a focus on the transmissions of knowledge and instead concentrate on skills such as critical analysis and creativity where humans can add value to generative AI systems.3

That statement repulsed me to such a degree I had to take a break.

Such a strong emotion arose in me for several reasons. Most fundamentally, the sentence quoted above is an oxymoron and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the effects of this technology on the brain. Using genAI undercuts the very “critical analysis and creativity” skills Williams wants to focus on. Use of genAI software starts to erode these skills immediately, and it gets worse the longer one works with it. There is simply no way to “concentrate on skills such as critical analysis and creativity” whilst using it; it has the opposite effect. Check out the “Rots your brain” section of my previous article on the topic.

Secondly, why are humans adding value to generative AI systems and not the other way around? I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can create and relax, not have the machine take over my interesting tasks. GenAI, as it currently stands, cannot actually do that much. ChatGPT was released as a tech demo and should be treated as such, but after the marketing machine kicked in, people bought into the lie that it can do everything. For more on the incapability of genAI, check out the “Wrong, but faster” section in my evidence-based rant.

When you peel away from the hype machine created by the people who build the tech - and have a vested interest in boosting it - you find that most computer scientists do not think chatbots can reach he goal of artificial general intelligence. Would you trust cigarette companies who say smoking is bad for your health when medical researchers and doctors say otherwise? If not, why would you trust the companies making money from the technology over other experts who are not?

Thirdly, Williams spends a great deal of time in the book focusing on inequity amongst his students. While this was admirable, genAI technology, as currently built, magnifies inequalities. The people who build it exploit disadvantaged people, who carry out the grunt work required for it to function4. The data centres required to run it are often placed in communities that lack the capacity or resources to prevent them from polluting their neighbourhoods. Going back to my long article, this time check out the “Power guzzling”, “Water guzzling”, “Exploitative”, “Polluting”, “Theft” and “Makes things cost more” sections.

Finally, it is unclear whether genAI will be sticking around in a huge way for long. At the moment, its rate of use is plateauing or declining. Businesses are not seeing a return on investment. It’s possible the technology will weather this storm and people will continue to use it in droves, but I don’t think it’s going to do well enough to recoup the amount tech companies have invested in it. They need to recover hundreds of billions of dollars in the lifecycle of their data centres, which is about half a decade. I don’t see that happening, and I don’t know what will happen after the bubble pops.

In all, going all in on genAI in universities is misguided, at best.

Corporatisation

Williams rightly critiques the corporatisation of universities and how it came to be this way. However, he seems to miss other signs of this malaise.

Williams discusses the chancellor of Western Sydney University, Jennifer Westacott, saying that “[s]he believes universities must disrupt and lead”, and then quotes her directly:

“[T]he outdated academic structure goes against what students want -- which is choice and flexibility”.5

Anyone who follows industrial relations or corporate doublespeak will likely be hearing alarm bells at that statement. That is precisely how corporations justify attacking workers’ rights. They claim to be giving workers what they want, but employers and business groups often use “flexibility” as a common form of spin to justify insecure work and short-term contracts. When workers don’t have a choice in the flexibility of their work, it is harmful.

Williams doesn’t talk much about these other aspects of the corporatisation of universities; this unethical treatment of workers. Not that this wasn’t an issue before, but as per the author himself, it has gotten worse in recent times. He did talk about how universities need to be better workplaces, but failed to place this within the corporatisation context.

“It is hard for academics to be great teachers or to plan their curriculum for the longer term, let alone to build a fulfilling career, if they do not know whether they will be employed from one semester to the next. There are too many examples of universities letting their staff down, whether it be through underpaying salaries or over-relying on insecure work.6

“Underpaying salaries” is wage theft, especially on the systemic basis some universities have engaged in, and is illegal. The phrase “letting their staff down” is a gross understatement, here. He would have done well to discuss these aspects more in his book; I kept waiting for Williams to bring it up, but that never happened. The extent of wage theft in the sector is truly staggering:

“The national university wage theft tally is now a confirmed $265 million, with a further $159 million set aside by universities to repay workers for suspected wage theft incidents.”

For those playing at home, that is a combined total of $424 million either confirmed or suspected wage theft across the industry. Those figures are from 11 months ago, too, so it may have grown since then.

It’s strange, too, that Williams talks about issues of university corporatisation without discussing his own. His aforementioned boss, Jennifer Westacott, was a senior partner at KPMG for six years. She then moved to the Business Council of Australia (BCA), where she was chief executive for 12 years. According to her LinkedIn profile, she has gone back to KPMG as a special adviser, and is a non-executive director of corporate conglomerate Wesfarmers; these two roles are ones she still holds alongside her current role as Chancellor.

If Williams is going to (rightly) criticise the corporatisation of universities, he’d have done well to start in his own backyard. You don’t get a much better illustration of this than a former long-time CEO of the BCA being Chancellor.

Overall, this was a disappointing third entry in the Vantage Point series. I hope the following books are more like the first two.

Expedition 33 was a brilliant game in a number of ways, but I loved the polearms on show in particular.

Spears have always been my favourite weapon; I am truly a spear queer at heart. I started swordfighting a couple of years ago as a way to bounce back from an injury, and also because one of my best friends would come along if I started going. I didn’t start learning to use a spear because… I couldn’t find any classes in my city. The place we ended up swordfighting at had a spear course on at the time I was recovering from my injury, and I figured, there was a good chance they’d do more of the same in future.

I proved to be correct.

I now make a two hour round trip every weekend to participate in a polearm study group. It is a literal study group, because old fencing masters were NOT clear when writing their manuals, so there’s a lot of interpretation involved. This is more than just spears; we’ll look at texts for staves, poleaxes, halberds, partisans, and whatever else we feel like. Spiedos pending because we lack the trainers, and spear and poleaxe trainers just can’t be adapted to it.

So! I love spears and all other forms of polearms, and in my 100% completely unbiased opinion, we don’t see enough of them in media. Swords are overused; nothing wrong with them, but c’mon. There’s so many other cool weapons out there. Diversify.

Because there’s so much focus on swords, when I do see polearms somewhere, I get unreasonably excited.

One of your party members, Sciel, uses a polearm, though not the traditional pointy stick most people think of. She has a cool double-sided scythe you can see in the image at the top, on the right. I didn’t use her much because her gameplay style was too overwhelming to me.

A number of enemies have polearms, too, and I was pleasantly surprised to see them used well. The attacks went beyond just stabbing with a spear; there were a few different kinds of polearms getting screen time, and they were used in a variety of interesting ways.

Expedition 33 has a counter mechanic, where you can, with perfect timing, parry and riposte an enemy’s attack. If an attack hits the whole party, then the whole party will hit back. It’s so sick.

I was perfectly fine countering most attacks, often having to see an attack multiple times before I learned the timing, which I’m told is pretty normal for someone who isn’t into the soulslike genre.

However, whenever my opponents held a polearm, I was usually able to parry the first time I saw a given attack. Their movements were exactly what I would expect; some of them are even ones I’ve performed. As such, I was able to counter properly, quickly and consistently whenever they wielded a polearm. The only exception was for jumping attacks, because I don’t use those, since, you know, I don’t want to hurt my friends and I’m not sure they can be performed safely.

It felt to me like Sandfall Interactive really did their research when developing enemy attack patterns -- for polearms, at least. I can’t speak for other weapons I’m less familiar with. I’d love to see more of this.

If you know of a book, show or game with good polearm representation, let me know in the comments.

I learned recently that internal monologues are real. Up until a few months ago, I thought they were a joke invented by sitcoms. I was unaware people actually have them, because I don’t, and it seems people who do have them are in the minority. In order to produce words, I have to really concentrate. They are not my natural mode of thoughts.

What I have instead are colours and shapes. When I’m listening to someone speak, or reading something, I’m not able to recall specific words particularly well. Instead, I remember the vibe of what was said; the coloured shapes in my mind that it was encoded on.

Sometimes it seems like I recall quotes well, but it’s less the words and more... the colours I associate with the concept of the quote. I might misspeak the exact wording if I haven’t gone out of my way to memorise it, but I’ll recall its relevance to me, as it’s embedded on the shape in my mind. And so sometimes things I say are a bit off, as it’s stored in my brain in such a way that my feelings about it are centred, and the other context around it comes later. Without additional information, the stuff that comes out of my mouth can seem totally out of pocket.

For the detail, I most strongly recall the cadence of the quote. I’ll be filling in the blanks in a way that make sense based on context, syllables per word, and intonation. I may miss the mark due to any of those things; replace a two-syllable falling intonation word with another that makes some sense, but misses the nuance.

As a result, sometimes when I’m speaking, I have long pauses as I try to reach for the appropriate word. People will often ask if I’m okay as they think something is wrong, to which I may reply that I’m tired, because how do I explain to someone that I don’t know what the green hexagon is trying to tell me?

Synesthesia

I also have synesthesia. I attach colours to numbers and letters. Interestingly, the colours for each letter or number can change when in combination.

A 6 on its own is a beautiful sky blue. But for 66, one of them is a dark purple, and the other a paler shade. I struggle to describe exactly which colour is used for each number or letter because of this; they’re always changing. And it feels like when I try to think about it, it gets harder to see, so I can’t describe exactly which colours correspond to which numbers or letters when asked. I think it helps me be excellent at mental maths and number recall; even if I don’t consciously remember the colours, my subconscious does.

I started paying attention to the synesthesia because it was giving me issues in Final Fantasy XIV. I was tackling a difficult fight with seven friends, and at one point, players have a number of dots appear above each of our heads. We get between one and eight dots, indicating the order in which we were about to get exploded and needed to move away from the group so no one else got caught in the crossfire. Even numbers were coloured red, and odd numbers were coloured blue. I kept dying when I was allocated seven, and it took me a while to realise why: The odd-numbered shade of blue was almost exactly the same shade of blue I associate with six. Because seven is so close to six and displayed almost exactly the same way, my brain automatically processed my seven as a six. So I’d move too early, get hit by the explosion before mine and then my own, and die.

It’s been useful and frustrating to learn that so many other people think in words. In order to express my emotions -- before that, even -- for me to even work them out for myself, I have to concentrate and make an effort and write it out.

I’ve been working with my psych to figure out my signs of stress, and have become more attuned to my body and my feelings in the process. I’ve been journalling for over a year, which has helped me to figure out what particular bodily sensations mean, when I should rest, need to engage my brain, or to create something with a pen or sketchbook. I’m still refining this, but I’ve come a long way in the last year and a half. It’s been a fantastic process, as I am now able to recognise my emotions when they’re small and work through them in a healthy ways.

Alexithymia

Last year I realised I had alexithymia. This is a condition by which people do not feel, recognise, express, or have the ability to describe their emotions. I am much better at it now, as described in the last few paragraphs.

I wonder... How much of the alexithymia is a mismatch between my natural mode of thought and what society uses?

If society communicated using shapes or pictures, would I have alexithymia? Would people with internal monologues, instead, be the ones with alexithymia?

I couldn’t find any research on this. If you know of any, send them my way. I’d love to see studies on alexithymia prevalence in people with different modes of thought in word-based vs. picture-based communication.

What about you, dear reader? How do you form thoughts?

When reporting on heinous crimes, there is a tendency in the media and amongst many people to call the perpetrators monsters or something else to that effect; to dehumanise the perpetrator.

When we classify all perpetrators as monsters, we miss them, because rapists and murderers are not monsters. They are people, like everyone else. They are siblings, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, children, colleagues, public figures, friends, spouses. They read, watch TV, see films, play video games, participate in community events, host dinner parties, work in respectable jobs, do housework, have pets.

The purpose of this rhetoric is threefold. For the average person, it protects them. They are uncomfortable with the idea that the lives of murderers and rapists look so much like their own. It is, I think, one of of the many reasons the Gisele Pelicot case was made into such a spectacle. The sheer number of ordinary men (at least 72) from all walks of life who took the opportunity to rape an unconscious woman made the case extraordinary for people who are unaware of rape statistics.

In no particular order, here are the professions of the 51 men who could be identified:

• Electrician

• Estate agent

• Firefighter

• Supermarket employee

• Journalist

• Construction worker

• Hairdresser

• Delivery driver

• Truck driver

• Ambulance driver

• Gardener

• IT specialist

• Tiler

• Biker

• Plumber

• Boxer

• Builder

• Roofer

• DJ

• Club manager

• Warehouse worker

• Painter

• Decorator

• Hotel manager

• Refrigeration specialist

• Baker

• Cleaner

The overwhelming majority of them were fathers and husbands. Some (8) had prior sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, stalking, or drug convictions. Most (43) did not.

These people could have been good people, but they weren’t, through circumstance and choice. And people don’t like that closeness. 72 men, over the course of a decade, chose to head to a stranger’s house to rape his unconscious wife, taking him at his word that it was a kink and never thinking to check with her. One of them missed the birth of his daughter to rape Pelicot.

All of those men look like someone you know. And so, many choose to fall back on the monster rhetoric to avoid having to confront that closeness.

The second purpose of the rhetoric is to protect abusers from being found out in the first place. Abuse of others is more common amongst the powerful; when someone feels immune from consequences, they are more likely to do it.

And so, the powerful construct this narrative because it is in their interest to do so. They want to continue to abuse, so they build and protect this idea that it is monsters, not people like them, who rape and maim and kill, so no one suspects them. Psychology Today has a great primer on power dynamics in the context of sexual assault.

The third purpose kicks in when one is finally caught, and aims to let them get away with murder. Many people don’t believe one could be guilty when they don’t fit the dingy, loner, antisocial stereotype. As we saw in the Pelicot case, people who commit atrocities are very much humans; people leading otherwise ordinary lives. By constructing perpetrators as monsters, those in power manipulate perceptions to create “evidence” they are sacrosanct; they don’t look like an abuser, therefore they can’t be! You see this over and over, with media and people who know the accused protesting they couldn’t possibly be guilty of an atrocity because they’re so nice, they’re a sports star, they have a family, and so on.

Putting all of this together, you get ordinary people (overwhelmingly men) committing acts of violence against people they view as less powerful than them, and then manipulating others and the broader narrative so they can get away with it. Often, mental illness in an abused or raped individual is used as evidence they are lying, with no one stopping to think about why that person is ill in the first place. More likely than not, their story of being violated is true, and caused or worsened the mental illness their abuser is now weaponising against them.

False reports of sexual assault are rare. The rate of false sexual assault allegations in Australia is 5%, and that’s just the ones that got reported. Over 90% of sexual assaults are not taken to the police at all. If you factor that in, counting unreported assaults in the 95%, the amount of false reports drops below 1%. It shrinks even more when you consider the 5% figure includes cases closed due to a lack of evidence, because the victim withdrew due to mental health reasons, or any other procedural reason the case may not have proceeded. Hell, cops are known to ignore sexual assault reports completely arbitrarily.

Factors such as gender identity, class, race, sexual orientation, disability, and more come into this, as they always do. Such is the case of American serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, a cop who specifically targeted Black women. He’d pull them over for no reason or visit them in hospital and then sexually assault or rape them, threatening to arrest them if they resisted. Presumably, he targeted Black women as he knew they were less likely to be believed.

You can see the factors at play in Holtzclaw’s case. Being a police officer would make him well-regarded in society, and also give him power over others. The article I linked demonstrates the third factor nicely, by including irrelevant details about Holtzclaw - his college football days and his degree - to garner sympathy for the convicted rapist sentenced to 263 years in prison.

It is crucial to remember that people who commit heinous acts are people, just like the rest of us. Thinking of perpetrators as monsters mean people search for monsters, and overlook the very ordinary abusers in front of them who commit atrocities out of sight. The monster rhetoric is not just misleading, it is actively harmful as it leads to people not believing victim-survivors when their abuser is ordinary, which will be the case the overwhelming majority of the time.

I’ve noticed a trend developing, which has been hammered in over the past few months in back to back examples. That is, universities have not been standing up for intellectual pursuits or the staff that seek them, and/or are abandoning important institutions to focus on innovation and entrepreneurship.

In August, we had the Bendigo Writers Festival fiasco, which was sponsored and subsequently shattered by La Trobe University. Just days from the event, authors were told they were required to sign a code of conduct which aligned with La Trobe’s guidelines and would prevent them from speaking on divisive topics. Of particular concern was a controversial definition of antisemitism which would include criticism of Israel being disallowed, despite the fact Israel has been waging a genocide out in the open for over two years now.

Concerned about the breadth of the code of conduct at a festival where discussing difficult topics is kind of the point, and in solidarity with each other, over 50 speakers pulled out of the event. 21 sessions had to be cancelled. Because the Festival had sent the code at the last minute, it meant all those writers evaporated as the it was about to begin. The City of Greater Bendigo has now launched a review.

In September, Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) announced it would be closing Meanjin at the end of the year. Meanjin is one of Australia’s longest-running literary journals, established in Brisbane in 1940 and named after the First Nations word for the land Brisbane is located on. It moved to Melbourne (Naarm) in 1945. In its time, it has hosted writings from a variety of new and established Australian writers, giving them space to launch careers or play with new forms of writing. Meanjin has hosted important cultural commentary through its tenure; one of its most enduring is a 1950 essay from Patrick White and AA Philips that gave us the term “cultural cringe” to describe the way Australians lack confidence on the world stage.

MUP cited financial concerns for the closure, despite the relatively low cost of running it, general high revenue for the university, and the uncountable cultural value of the journal. Writers pointed out that it’s unlikely Meanjin ever turned a profit, and no one is quite sure why it has been abandoned now. It was appreciated for its cultural significance, which no longer seems to matter to Melbourne University.

In October, it emerged that Monash University would be shuttering their Monash Sustainable Development Institute (MSDI), which I have previously placed within a broader political context. For months, staff had been told they would be folded into another faculty, which was bizarre given the reason the Institute was set up in the first place was to get people out of silos and encourage cross-disciplinary work. I’d had a robust discussion a few months prior with a friend who knew people there, discussing the faculty options and what they might mean for MSDI. The university’s intention was exposed when staff found out the Institute would not be absorbed into another faculty and would simply cease to exist. Staff on temporary contracts are unlikely to be renewed. Climateworks, one of Australia’s foremost climate change thinktanks, was part of MSDI. It will be safe, but the rest of the staff on permanent contracts are going to be scattered throughout the university.

I’ve heard from friends in the sector that other universities are quietly shuttering or defunding their sustainability institutes, too, with nary a press release. I don’t think there’s much left in the country, if anything, now.

Instead, there has been an increased focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, leaning on engineers and scientists to invent our way out of societal problems to put off the changes necessary to make society sustainable. This is to protect the profits of capital; inventing ways to “solve” problems, rather than tackling the root cause, allows capital owners to continue to make money unabated.

Innovation

A cursory scroll of Monash’s LinkedIn page subjects you to a flood of posts on innovation in lieu of posts about scientific research. I laughed as I was scrolling it after writing that last section, and saw this post which literally has “entrepreneurial innovation” in the second sentence. Their annual reports also show a change in focus. Research highlights in their 2024 annual report (page 15) are mostly medical. It contains a mention of Climateworks, which is laughable given they were in the process of dismantling MSDI when that report was published. Contrast this with even just the year before, where there was a wider variety of research highlighted (page 12), including a number of sustainability initiatives.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to support the entrepreneurial innovators or invest in health. But it’s a problem when it comes at the cost of other forms of research universities should be supporting. How will anyone know which projects are worth backing if they stop researching to find out where the biggest issues are? How are we supposed to innovate without incoming knowledge to guide us toward the most pressing issues?

If universities don’t do it, who will?

This strategy aligns universities with the fossil fuel industry’s pivot to technological solutions to climate change. Exploitative companies have claimed for decades that we can offset our way out of the crisis (which is bullshit) so we can keep polluting (and they can keep making money). This holds for a number of other industries, too; tobacco, nuclear power, other forms of pollution, and many more. Corporations downplay the need to tackle root causes, instead proposing research into add-ons to make their harmful product less harmful. It never works. It is always, always a delay tactic.

By dropping hard-hitting scientific research in favour of fostering entrepreneurship, universities are validating that idea in a different form; that the lone entrepreneur can fix all the world’s problems, and the rest of us don’t need to change our lifestyles.

Capitalism

It is not in the interests of capital owners to actually solve problems. Helping people would mean the owners of capital would lose their reserve army of workers, ready and desperate to work for a pittance to enrich their employers and keep themselves alive. Helping people is antithetical to profits, as a world where people are comfortable and happy is a world where workers won’t accept the garbage labour conditions or pay that is essential for capitalism to function. When workers have choices and aren’t going hungry, profits wither.

It is far better for profits if, instead, capitalism’s agents make a spectacle of assistance without real difference. This logic underpins the NGO industrial complex; most NGOs will never actually solve the problems they work on, because if they do, their funding will dry up and they’ll be out of a job. They might help communities and individuals here and there, but never much more than that.

There are some that genuinely fight, but they are few. They should all be aiming to work themselves out of existence and support their staff in any closure, as End Rape on Campus Australia did when they achieved their goals:

Hackathons are a great example of this spectacle. They are highly publicised and often carried out by men in Western countries who are completely removed from the problems they are trying to “solve”. There is no community consultation, as hackathons are often accompanied by a pervasive, arrogant belief that the would-be hackers know best; better, even, than the people who live every day with the issues they are trying to “solve”. They do not recognise that lived experience is legitimate knowledge, as they do not acknowledge anything from people outside their own institutions.

Their “solutions” rarely get implemented and actually help people, as they inevitably miss some aspect of design or implementation due to… not talking to the end user. Anyone looking to launch a product aimed at white collar workers without doing any market research would be laughed out of the room. But when it comes to designing for those of a lower social status, tech bros paternalistically assume they know better than those poor people who need their charity to survive. It makes them feel good to be “doing” something, and it never enters their minds that they are wrong.

That’s not how hackathons began. They got their start in marginalised communities who would get together to solve actual issues they and their communities faced every day. This could involve creating totally new devices, or taking an existing one and modifying it for a particular use. The bulk of innovation on products happens at the margins, amongst minority communities who know they’re too small or not wealthy enough to have products designed for their needs. Hackathons arose out of this reality, so they could build their own. For more on this, as well as how to design hackathons better, check out chapter four of Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock.

This makes hackathons another example of an idea stolen from marginalised communities by those with more money than sense, who are too out of touch to utilise it effectively. Another example of capitalism’s agents taking a concept that genuinely helps people and twisting it into something unrecognisable to its creators. Snatching away a tool from the marginalised and encasing it within the master’s house.

With the increasing focus on entrepreneurship over research, it looks like universities are increasingly falling into that category, too. They’re shedding good staff working on long-term solutions in favour of people trying to fix it now, who are out of touch with the people they’re designing for. Whose creations will not make substantial differences, or tackle root problems. Executives are making decisions that affect people on the ground, with only perfunctory consultation, and that’s bleeding through to the work throughout the rest of the institution.

There are some institutions and programs who are designing well, who are including communities in the design process are doing the hard work of ensuring collaborations are mutually beneficial. But it seems to me they are shrinking, and even then, I doubt all of them would be compensating community members for their time.

Where To From Here?

I’m not sure where to go from here. For now, all I can do is keep focusing on what I’m interested in, and keep an eye out for opportunities to use my skills and carve out a role for myself, somewhere. And keep talking about it, reading about it, writing about it, and the like. Stay with my communities, keep each other safe and cared for.

I noted in a previous piece that America has an outsized influence here, and I’m concerned the Trump administration’s attitude is part of this shift. That their attack on universities has instilled a fear worldwide. Or maybe I’m overthinking it, and they’re just short-sighted executives. Probably a mix of both. I’m looking forward to the next Vantage Point essay on universities. The illustrious Hannah Forsyth released a book about universities a decade ago that I’m interested in reading, too.

On a personal level… I’m looking to get into research in the medium to long term, examining the effects of the climate crisis on queer people. I have no confidence I’d be able to finish any thesis I’d start, as I’d be expecting my funding be cut partway through.

We need collectivism now more than ever, as we are continually pushed into individualism that makes society weaker and prevents us from fighting back against injustice and corruption. Losing universities in this fight is not going to bode well for the rest of us. Which institutions are going to stick up for research and collaboration, if not universities?

None, save for maybe local governments, though that varies between each one, and I’m not confident it would stay that way. It’s going to be more important than ever that we stick together, help each other out, and demand more from the institutions that are abandoning us.

As I mentioned last time, if you’re a Monash alum, sign the petition to save MSDI.

If you have any more information, suggestions on actions, or anything else, let me know.

I have caught almost every single fish in Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV). I’m only missing a handful of regular fish from the latest patch, as well as some spear fish from Dawntrail. Yes, this includes ocean fish; I’ve caught them all, spectral and not, across both routes.

Let me back up and take you on a journey through this niche community so you can full appreciate how unhinged this is.

Fishing in FFXIV is not like fishing in most games. Catching most of the fish in the game is straightforward; you rock up, you apply the correct bait, you catch the fish. However, some of them are more complicated than that.

Some fish will only show up at certain times of an in-game day. With an in-game day lasting 70 minutes, you’ll still have a decent amount of chances to catch the fish in question, as it’s always just over an hour before you get another shot. Each in-game hour lasts two minutes and 55 seconds, so for example, a fish which is up for two hours (which is pretty common) will be available for five minutes and 50 seconds at a time.

Some fish will only show up in certain weather conditions. This is random, but thankfully, players have created handy tools which will show you future weather conditions. Weather changes every eight hours of in-game time, which is 23 minutes and 20 seconds of real time.

Some fish will only show up in certain weather conditions that have been preceded by another, specific weather condition/s. Some weather conditions can be quite rare, so this criteria leads to some fish being down for long periods of time.

When weather combines with a time requirement, fish can start becoming unavailable for days at a time. Not in-game days; I’m talking real-world days. And of course, it can be at any time, so some of those availabilities will be when you’re not free. You might be sleeping, at work, studying, at a birthday party... anything.

Some fish require you have intuition active, which you gain by catching certain other fish at the same fishing hole. You know you’ve got it because a little message will pop up and a blue symbol will appear on your screen. When a fish requires intuition, it will not bite unless you have it, even if you show up in the correct time and weather conditions. Once you’ve got intuition, you’ll retain for a set amount of time, during which the fish you’re after now has a chance to bite. The length of intuition varies between 12 seconds to a full weather window of 23 minutes and 20 seconds, depending on the fish.

To keep track of it all, a player maintains the Fish Tracker App, which shows you which fish are currently available and allows you to mark fish as caught once you land them. It also shows when fish are next available. You can filter by a few different categories to display the fish you want to see. You can also click to see the next 10 windows for a given fish. Below are the next available windows for one of the most notorious (which also stretches the definition of “fish”):

It’s not uncommon for people to set alarms for rare fish windows. Some even set them if the fish is available in the middle of the night, which is... too much for me. I’ll just wait for next time. But if I’m home and not otherwise busy? I’ll definitely set an alarm 15 minutes out to give myself time to finish what I’m doing and prep for the fish. I’ll usually check what’s coming up, too, so I can log out near the next fish I plan to go for.

Fish have all of these prerequisites... and we are told none of them by the development team.

The only piece of information we have when new fish release is the location for each one, but we’re not told that. We only know because there are weirdos out there who have spent an inordinate amount of time catching every single fish, who can then open the fishing log and see where their ticks have disappeared.

People are able to find out pretty quickly if a fish has an intuition message. And... that’s it. We don’t know the time of day, we don’t know the weather, we don’t know the preceding weather, we don’t know the bait.

To figure out the conditions for each fish, the community comes together.

Fishers gather on a Discord server called Fisherman’s Horizon, or, more simply, Fishcord. There is a spreadsheet for each new fish, with a table of all the possible weather conditions and baits usable at that spot. People who are willing to help will sign up to be testers, meaning we’re happy to be notified whenever there’s an important testing window coming up. Initially, we’ll be notified by the spreadsheet chief when any rare weather windows will be up soon. Once we’ve narrowed down the conditions for a fish (because someone got a bite or catch), the notifications end up being for all viable windows. We’ll fish in a window till someone catches it or we’ve fished enough to be able to confidently rule it out.

Because we have no idea which weather conditions or bait we need to be fishing with, we just... brute force it. Lots of people will be fishing at lots of different times, using different bait, and report in with the information once they stop fishing. If a given weather condition, time of day, and bait type has 20 reports, we can safely rule it out. You can see one of my reports from August below:

Fishing for partial windows is fine; you just make sure the reported fishing time is accurate.

There’s one piece of information people often leave out of their reports. Can you guess which one that is?

People start to lose it a little when testing drags on for a while. The hardest fish release every two years, shortly before the next expansion. We’ll be due for the next set of those early to mid next year. In the last batch of super hard ones, I was amused to watch this happen live (Icepikes are a common bycatch for this ass hole):

I love fishing because I find it so relaxing. Even when I fail to catch a fish, I don’t mind because it just means I’ll have another opportunity to unwind and cast a virtual line. It also takes me to places in the game I never would have otherwise seen, like the trans pride crystal cave in Il Mheg.

I enjoy working through lists, and this has been a huge list I’ve steadily ticked off over several years. There’s a part of me that wishes there was more so I can keep fishing, but it’s also so satisfying cracking open my fishing log and seeing all the ticks.

And it lets me do this with other people. Unlike most spreadsheet-related activities, fishing in FFXIV has an incredible community around it.

The Community

The people who fish are generally an awesome bunch of people. I’ve been lurking for a while and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone be an ass hole. There’s a lot of people who come in and ask questions, and whoever’s around will just answer it, no matter how basic the question, no condescension.

It’s also so... gratifying, knowing there are a bunch of people all around the world casting a line at the same time as you. Sometimes when I report at the end of a window and watch everyone else’s reports roll in, I lean back and appreciate that all these other people I don’t know are working towards the same goal as I am. Players are spread across different worlds within the game, which means we could be in the same place but not see each other. So to be fishing alone and then see a dozen or more other people were in the same spot at the same time... There’s something special about it. It’s also fun when I see someone else at a fishing hole and then see their name pop up in Fishcord.

Some of the core people involved in testing are stats nerds, so you sometimes see some incredible distribution curves and other graphs show up in the testing channel, alongside technical discussions. I love how hard people go for this.

The last testing period was mostly over in August, but there was one rare weather condition that didn’t appear until mid-September. So a number of us all met on the same world and carried out a successful test where we could all see each other. I had it in my calendar.

I’m looking forward to the next set. We don’t know exactly when it will drop, but I think it’ll be fourish months after the last ones in early August, so... early December, more or less?

I hope you enjoyed this window into a niche gaming community you probably never knew existed!

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is easily one of the best games I have ever played. It might end up being one of the few I would give a perfect score; I’d need to reflect for a while before I can say for sure, but it’s a contender. However, I’ve had one thing niggling in the back of my mind since I finished it last week, and this piece is my attempt to tease it out.

If you’re familiar with the plot, feel free to skip to the next section.

For the uninitiated, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the debut game from Sandfall Interactive, and they’ve knocked it out of the park. I remember thinking it was a cool premise when it was first announced, and while I was unaware of its release date, I became aware after the wall-to-wall acclaim from… everywhere, in the days leading up to its launch.

Every year, in the city of Lumière, the people await the next Gommage. During the Gommage, a being known as the Paintress paints a number; she started at 100 and has been working down. Every time she paints a new number, everyone at that age and over dies, dissipating into flower petals. The next day, an expedition leaves the city to attempt to put a stop to her Painting. The player assumes control of the eponymous Expedition 33 as they embark on their journey. Before the Paintress appeared, the world was relatively peaceful; her arrival coincided with The Fracture, which threw the world into chaos, sheared reality, and began the Gommages.

The game has a marvellous opening where the main character, Gustave, meets with his ex-lover Sophie, who is about to be Gommaged. The two had broken up over their differing views on having children, and regret hangs heavy in the air as Sophie spends her final hours with Gustave. The whole sequence is heart-wrenching and does a brilliant job setting the stakes.

This brilliance carries through every other aspect of the game. The music is a standout; Lorien Testard did a fantastic job as the composer, with Alice Duport-Percier’s vocals adding a haunting quality to every track with lyrics, occasionally accompanied by Victor Borba. I have played a lot of turn-based games as it’s my favourite genre, and Sandfall put a fun spin on it, with the satisfying counters and AP system adding variety. A particularly entertaining mechanic was whenever the entire expedition successfully parried an attack; the game made a weird yet satisfying sound and time paused for a moment before everyone hit back, together, for enormous damage. I never tired of it.

Okay, I really am about to spoil a bunch of plot points, twists, and the ending now. This is your final warning.

The expedition goes wrong immediately when a man with a cane (oh my god I could do a whole essay on the sound design for his cane) appears on the landing beach alongside a bunch of monsters, and wipes out almost everyone. You play as Gustave, as well as his fellow survivors Maelle, Lune and Sciel. Later, Gustave is replaced by Verso, and you also pick up Monoco (who has a banger battle theme).

When you eventually reach the Paintress, you find out she is not the cause of the Gommage. Her numbers are a warning; she is slowly weakening, and they indicate the people she is no longer able to protect. She was, in fact, keeping the true culprit in check, and upon defeating her, he proceeds to wipe out everyone in Lumière.

You discover that this entire world exists inside a Canvas, situated within a world similar to our own. It is one of many Canvases brought to life by the Dessendre family of Painters, who regularly create new Canvases with their Painting skills. Lumière is but one of many worlds contained within Canvases in their manor.

Outside the Canvas, the Paintress is a women named Aline. Her husband is Renoir. They had three children; Clea, Verso, and Alicia. The Painters in their world are rivals to the Writers. Prior to the events of the game, the Writers had befriended and lured Alicia into a trap; she was subsequently caught in a fire in which Verso was killed and Alicia herself was scarred and left unable to speak, struggling to even breathe.

Lumière was the one and only Canvas that Verso ever painted. Unable to cope with his death, Aline entered the Canvas and was refusing to come out. Once inside the Canvas, she Painted a new version of her family as she sees them. The Painted versions of Renoir and Verso became her protectors, and their role was to stop expeditions from getting to her. She had Painted her two daughters, too; the Painted version of Alicia, who Aline blamed for original-world Verso’s death, retained her inability to speak, and Painted Clea does not show up onscreen.

Eventually, Renoir followed her into Lumière with the aim of forcing her out and destroying the Canvas. His entrance was what caused The Fracture. A while later, Alicia followed, but got caught up in her mother’s power and was reborn as Maelle. In Act III of the game, Maelle awakens to her powers as a Paintress and is able to exercise these powers in a limited way.

The game ends with Maelle and Painted Verso arguing over whether to destroy the Canvas; Maelle wants to preserve it, while Painted Verso wants to destroy it. The player can choose to side with either of them, giving rise to two different endings based on this decision.

What About the People in the Canvas?

My issue with the game is the lack of autonomy for the people living in Verso’s Canvas. The Dessendre family argues about the fate of the Canvas – and all of the people in it! – while Lune and Sciel are right there, and they… never react. The game puts a lot of effort into showcasing the suffering of the people of Lumière. We see it, we hear them talk about it, we’re shown it. It’s done artfully; never gratuitous, but never shying away from how fucked up the whole situation is. Sandfall did a masterful job striking that balance.

But… in the latter half of Act II and into Act III, as we’re learning about the Dessendre family and their ideas for Lumière, Lune and Sciel felt too quiet to me. The discussions never involved them, and they never forced their way into it. It was treated like a Dessendre family affair. The Dessendres never acknowledged the life they had given birth to. The people of Lumière are living, breathing people, with thoughts and feelings and loved ones and favourite foods and hobbies and life, and that’s never considered by a Painter.

Why did Sciel not question this? How did Lune not interrogate Verso about it? Sure, they showed displeasure when the erasure is actually triggered, but how did neither of them interject at any point and angrily proclaim their own right to live? There were so many opportunities, especially when confronting Renoir, that they could have – should have – stepped forward to demand life. To point out this family don’t have the right to kill thousands of people just because they can’t get their shit together. But that… never happened.

If I, the player, was sitting there wondering about the suffering of all these people due to one family’s inability to appropriately deal with grief and resentment, surely they were, too? Why didn’t they?

The most charitable reading of this would be that the lack of focus on their feelings was deliberate, to mirror how the Dessendre family failed to see their humanity. If that was the intention, I feel Sandfall miscalculated; all it did was make it seem like Lune and Sciel didn’t have strong feelings about their world ending. It’s also possible the two of them simply trusted Maelle to advocate for them, but they never said anything about that, and I can’t see them not speaking up. It feels out of character for both of them.

Ultimately, the events of the game were triggered by the Dessendre family’s inability to get their shit together. As a result, thousands of people over the course of decades underwent an untold amount of suffering.

It’s a Whole of Family Affair

While ultimately, Verso or Maelle makes the final decision, I don’t feel the blame should fall entirely on their shoulders.

Aline had displaced her resentment onto Alicia, blaming her for Verso’s death, even though it was the Writers who tricked her and lit the fire.

Renoir was desperate to get his wife back and have his family together again, no matter the cost – especially since being in the Canvas for so long was doing so much harm to Aline.

Alicia was grieving both her brother and the loss of her old self. Permanently scarred and unable to speak, she relished life in the Canvas, free of blemishes, able to communicate as she pleased, and being a top tier fighter. She did not want to go back, under any circumstances.

Clea was barely present because she was barely present. She buried her feelings and went to war with the Writers instead, dismissing everyone else’s feelings, including her own, in the process.

Painted Verso was trapped by everyone else. He was Painted and sustained by Aline because she could not deal with the loss of her son. Maelle later kept him alive because she couldn’t imagine a world without him, and was consumed by guilt due to his dying to save her. Neither of them would let him go, no matter how desperately he wanted it all to end so he could stop grieving.

The family’s fight over the painting pissed me off. Not because it’s bad writing, but because they took the one Canvas that Verso had Painted and made it about themselves. They could have engaged with it in a healthy way, using it as a way to remember him by, going in to visit the world and mingle with the people he had created.

But no; they instead fought over it, with half the family wanting to destroy his one and only creation forever because they cannot get their collective shit together. It’s a beautiful Painting with a vibrant world, and once destroyed, there would be no Canvases from Verso left.

If I were Verso, I’d be rolling in my grave.

In their respective endings, Verso and Maelle are responding to grief; both their own, and that of the broader family’s. They are both reacting to a situation other people have put them in, and it’s unfair to wholly blame them for the decisions they made. They should definitely be held responsible for the consequences, but it’s important to remember the broader context in either case, and how everyone else’s behaviour shares some of the blame.

The Endings Sucked, and I Wouldn’t Have it Any Other Way

It’s rare for unhappy endings to leave me feeling satisfied, but that was the case here. Sandfall’s writing team nailed it. I didn’t like either ending, but they make sense for the characters.

In his ending, Painted Verso made the decision to stop the Painting because he didn’t trust Maelle to let him die. In Maelle’s ending, we see that he was right.

I can see why Painted Verso wanted to destroy it; his family’s fighting was centred around his counterpart’s creation, so he sees it as his duty to destroy it and end the conflict. However, his desire to die doesn’t mean he gets to take everyone else with him.

Maelle’s desire to live doesn’t mean she gets to force the facsimile of her brother to stay with her against his very explicit wishes. It’s also an unhealthy coping mechanism.

Maelle’s ending could have been beautiful. I would have loved to have seen Painted Verso perform his final concert, and as he takes his literal final bow, fade into petals on a sunbeam shining through the window.

But no; Maelle is unable to let her brother go, and with no one else powerful enough to stop her, she keeps him alive against his will.

Expedition 33 was a phenomenal game, and easily one of the best I have ever played. If you are even mildly interested, buy it. I’m excited to see what this team crafts next. I was happy to learn that Clair Obscur is going to become a franchise, so we’ll see more of this brilliance in future.

Tools have been cropping up that claim to be able to expose the use of generative AI (genAI) in a given piece of writing. Around the same time, there have been accounts of people being accused of using genAI when they haven’t.

The latest casualty in this fight has been — wait for it — the mighty em dash, which is apparently now a sure sign that a writer has used the technology.

While I don’t use the em dash often, I have whenever the situation called for it, as have many others. It’s absurd to me that anyone would take this seriously. But people do, and I’m concerned about the potential consequences for people who are falsely accused of using genAI in their work.

But it has gotten me thinking… how can we tell if a given piece of work used genAI? I’m not sure we can, because of the way these systems are built.

How does genAI work?

For the uninitiated, generative AI systems are trained using reams of data scraped stolen from the internet. This includes data which is free to access, data which is paid, and even digitised copies of physical media purchased illegally from the dark web. This information is then fed into the systems that power these models, which, in turn, “create” their content based on all of this information they have been trained on. Without this training data, they would not exist.

The most well-known genAI systems are large language models (LLMs), which generate text based on the prompts you supply them with. There are other genAI systems which generate images, music and other forms of media; these are known as multimodal foundation models (MFMs).

There are ethical concerns about the way these machines are trained using data they do not paid for, and the writers and artists whose works are being stolen are not happy about it. These systems have tremendous negative societal and environmental impacts, especially when it comes to climate through energy use and water. I might write a longer article about this in future; probably a rant whenever I next hear someone claim that this is all an acceptable cost since AI will solve all our problems in the future (spoiler: that is bullshit).

LLMs are probability machines. When they generate text, they calculate which word would make the most sense to come next in their current sequence, based on the data they have been trained on. They do not understand any of their outputs, which is why they frequently lie (the industry euphemistically refers to their lies as “hallucinations”). Even calling the machine a liar doesn’t feel quite right; it’s not really, since it doesn’t understand anything it’s outputting. Using any humanising language isn’t correct, really, as genAI does not “think”, “calculate”, or anything of the sort. It works based on probabilities. However, it is hard to talk about these machines without using anthropomorphising language, which is why I continue to do so.

The problem

Every single output from genAI is derivative of its training data. The more something appears in their training data, the more likely it is to appear in their outputs. Therefore, anything that is an apparent hallmark of generative AI is also a hallmark of human writing.

Em dashes apparently frequently appear in genAI outputs because people use them a lot, so they were overrepresented in training data.

As far as I can tell, this would be true of literally anything. If something appears in a lot of genAI outputs, it is because they have been used by countless people across the internet, in books, on forums, and more. This is why I don’t think it’s possible to be able to detect genAI properly; I think this will happen every time anyone tries to invent some way to do this. People will always get caught in the crossfire for the crime of using common literary devices or writing in a clear, concise way.

A video game called Little Droid recently stoked controversy by apparently using genAI to create the game’s cover art. Except they didn’t. The artist’s style is reminiscent of that weird sheen you get on a lot of images produced by genAI, but was in fact created by an actual artist. They even provided a video of the revisions the art went through, including the layers in their program (check it out in that link), and people are still convinced they used genAI.

Why do people fall for it?

It’s tempting to be able to tell, in a snap, whether something falls in or out of line with our moral code. Having to actually spend time to figure it out for anything we find suspect would suck up a lot of energy. And, to be frank, if someone took a LLM output and edited it, it would be damn near impossible to know. LLMs and MFMs are even getting better at mimicking the styles of specific writers and artists, as we saw a few months ago with the repulsive Studio Ghibli trend.

I’ve had a teacher I know tell me they can tell if a student used an LLM for an assignment because they know the student and what they’re capable of. This… seems fraught. For one, it risks magnifying biases any given person may hold around gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, neurodivergence, or any other dimension. Aside from that… what if the student just improved? What if they turn in an exceptional piece of work because it was about something they love or have an aptitude for, but then get accused of using an LLM because they’re benchmarked on previous work they don’t like or are unsuited to?

I’m not sure what the solution is here. But we need to resist ideas which simplify too much just because they’re appealing; we need to make sure they work.

I deliberately phrased the title of this article as a question because I don’t know the answer. I think I’m correct; I don’t think there’s a definitive way to tell. However, I’m not an expert on this matter. If you are, feel free to jump into the comments and give me your opinion.

Further reading

If you’re interested in some books on the AI industry, here’s three I’ve read this year:

• Empire of AI by Karen Hao. Hao has been reporting on the AI industry since 2019. She drew on her experience and wealth of contacts to create an outstanding book about the key people in the industry, as well as how AI and Silicon Valley attitudes have evolved over time. She also discusses some of the environmental and societal impacts of the technology. As Hao is a journalist, it’s written in a way that’s easy to understand. I’d recommend this book to anyone.

• Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford. This one takes you around the world to look at the way AI is built by various exploited people and environments around the globe; it is, truly, an atlas. I enjoyed it a great deal, but it is a bit dense, so if you struggle with more academic texts, this one may not be for you. If you’re fine with that, though, I definitely recommend picking it up. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

• Work Without the Worker by Phil Jones. This is super dense, but also short and to the point, and I loved it. It goes into detail on how AI systems are trained by low-paid workers to recognise things in images, and the people who are exploited in the process. It goes into granular detail on these microtasks and connects this style of work to global oppressions and the constant corporate drive to control their workers, no matter the cost. Fantastic book.

Here are several others on my list I haven’t gotten to yet:

• The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna.

• Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini.

• The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates.

• Supremacy by Parmy Olson.

• More Everything Forever by Adam Becker.

• Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus (who you can find here on Substack) and Ernest Davis.

• The Myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Larson.

• Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia.

• Ghost Work by Siddharth Suri and Mary Gray.

Subscribe now

I am writing this piece not to excuse the assholes and pricks of the world; ideally, they would stop their cruelty, face reprimands for their actions, or simply shut up. Figuring out how to respond to them should not be necessary, and should not require this additional emotional labour from their target. Unfortunately, these jackasses nonetheless exist. The aim of this piece is to tease out what these people look like and how to effectively deal with them when they inevitably arise, if you have the means.

I would like to note that responding in kind to either of these jackasses requires privilege not everyone has. I am fortunate to be able to do so. I have a supportive partner, both in the emotional and financial senses, so leaving or being let go from previous shitty workplaces had few negative immediate consequences for me. Not everyone is so lucky, and to those people - good luck dealing with the assholes and pricks.

I think there are, broadly, two types of people you might hear this phrase in relation to. Against one of them, the intentional asshole, it will work. Against the other, the incidental prick, it will not. I elaborate on this below.

Intentional Asshole

The people who can successfully be challenged by being kind are those who are being an asshole with the intent to hurt. They expect a reaction, or a rise, from their hurtful words or actions. They are aware of what they are doing, and doing so deliberately, because they enjoy belittling others or seeing them hurt by their actions. It might make them feel powerful in some way to do this.

And so, responding to their hurtful words or actions with kindness, or at least not getting angry or rude in return, works. You’re depriving them of the reaction they sought, which will piss them off. A simple way to do this is to take their question at face value. Ignore their tone and any harsh language, then watch their viciousness fizzle out when they fail to get what they wanted.

Depending on the person or context, this may not actually help. Some people might redouble their efforts and be an even bigger asshole to get the reaction they want, becoming more difficult to ignore in the process. This is especially the case if the asshole in question is in a position of power, or if the behaviour is taking place in an environment which enables it. Why would they stop if they enjoy it and are not going to face any consequences?

Ideally, however, they leave you alone. You can tell when it works by their reaction. I have a vivid memory of a former boss whose lips would droop; his eyes would lose their gleam; his mouth would tighten in frustration. Then he’d mumble some response and move onto something or someone else. It was always satisfying to watch him go, but not entirely, knowing I’d have to deal with him again tomorrow. Knowing, as well, that he was going to try to extract his power trip from someone else. Shockingly, I checked out of that place pretty quickly.

Incidental Prick

This prick sees you as subservient. In their view, everyone around them exists to serve them. When they’re being a prick, it’s not necessarily deliberate, though it can be. It’s more they don’t consider you an equal, so they spare no thought as to whether they hurt your feelings.

Because they view themselves as strictly superior, responding to their harm with kindness reinforces their perspective. You are acquiescing to their worldview, in which you (and others) exist to serve them and their peers. Responding with kindness will not harm them in any way and is simply viewed as respecting their authority. It is part of the natural state of things.

The way to piss them off would be to be rude, refuse their request, or disrupt the script in some other way. I recall a meeting with a manager at a previous workplace in which I, about to leave and out of fucks to give, interrupted the man’s longwinded explanation of a task so he could get to the point (and stop wasting everyone’s time). He looked and sounded dazed, and was so befuddled someone else had to jump in to take over.

Regrettably, many people would be unable to respond in such a way without jeopardising something essential. If the incidental prick is someone actually important, failing to do as they request in the manner they desire will have consequences. There are countless stories on the internet of people complying with demands from important people no matter how outrageous or disruptive to their already existing work or plans. It would also be problematic in the workplace in general, but even moreso if the prick in question is a manager with power over you and your career.

Even if you are unable to respond along these lines when you encounter these assholes and pricks, I hope having them broken down like this makes the variants easier to spot.

If you found this interesting, subscribe to my newsletter to be notified whenever I publish a new musing.

Subscribe now