make thing

My mate Kat recently posted - on her new ƂʆϘϭ - about her Summer of Flops: going on a tear watching movies that were financial or critical failures. In the post she mentions a “Zine” she wrote about the topic months ago and handed out on real actual paper to real life humans.

The word 'ART' written in caligraphy style with brown and plue strokes, with litte black squiggles between and around the letters

My Art by screenbeard

Zines aren’t a thing any more! Yet here Kat is, acting like they never went out of fashion - like blogs didn’t kill them before Facebook killed blogs. She even graciously sent me one, despite the soaring postage prices.

Zines are so old school. I remember being part of a group who wanted to put out a zine at Uni. I think they were so old-school then that we wanted to do a “digital zine” on the university web hosting. That was my fist experience with HTML, and I think it sparked something. I wish I could find those old files now to share just how bad it was, although the writing and art that the people in the group contributed was really very good1.

Before that zine I thought that while an art career was never in my future, at least I might learn how to create art and start making it some day. Like music, I thought it was a skill you could pick up through practice, and like music, I thought that once you had the skill, you’d want to do it.

But I never wanted to practice, and ended up convincing myself that I just am not into art (or music), and don’t have it in my bones. Which is sad.

But recently I’ve been hit by a couple of examples like Kat’s zine that have made me consider that I may have cut myself off from learning what art even is.

CJ the X is a youtuber and musician that has done a number of videos that exalt art to a place I’d never thought to place it. In their video about the 7 Deadly Art Sins they breaks down the many reasons one might fail to commit art, and how the sins rob you and the universe of something singular that only you can provide.

You are a nonfungible individual.

We are the original bored apes. The boredom is the pain of existence, the club is the collective unconscious, and the yacht is NFTs. Your specific perception of the universe and the potentialities that lie under your skin, your little imagination lightning rod that detects like the ghosts of hitherto unrealized dreams, it is not replaceable!

There’s not going to be another one of you. So if you’re not going to put in the work to make that idle fantasy that could have been real real, it will not exist.

— CJ the X, 7 Deadly Art Sins

CJ the X talks about art in these terms in all their videos and despite myself I find it inspiring, even though I barely know what it means to be inspired.

The most creative times in my life have been writing code and writing two full stories I’ve felt proud of. I can’t convince myself that code is art, although I’d be open to arguments if anyone cared to make one to me, but if I squint hard enough I could call those two peices of writing “art”. One was a stage play I did when I took some extra year 12 classes one semester. The play is lost now - I can’t find the print out or the file backups - but it earned me the only A I ever got in highschool.

The other is a series I posted here about a ‘lil guy who is a badass space adventurer who dies in the second chapter. The story was fun to write because I constrained myself to writing tiny micro-chapters with a specific structure, but the story spiralled out and I stuffed it full of the tropes and sci-fi story beats I love, and it’s absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done.

But I didn’t finish it and post the end anywhere. I wrote the ending, and there were only a few tiny chapters left, but I never typed them up and published them and I still can’t identify why I didn’t just put them out there into the world to be their own thing. The Deadly Art Sin of greed - hoarding the final scraps so the story could be mine and only mine and I wouldn’t have to ask why no one else was enjoying it like I was.

So I’ve spent some time building out my own journaling software so I can keep writing these little posts and trying to do a art again, and I will post the remaining chapters and you can yell at me on mastodon if I don’t put them up soon.

Another good friend Ruben wrote about writers using AI images to acompany their posts. I admit I’ve been tempted to see AI image generation as a way to overcome my own lack of artistic talent and if I’d been at all active in the last two years may have actually used some on my own site. But as he says:

But to the writers specifically who are dumping garbage in their vegetable crisper, I’d implore you to reconsider. You don’t need them! Eschewing (gesundheit) an image entirely is preferable. Heck, even a stick figure or a bunch of shapes thrown together in LibreOffice Draw would be more useful and charming than anything these slop machines are puking onto your site and stinking up the joint. You—and by extension, your words—deserve more.

— Ruben Schade, Press button, receive slop

That snapped something in my brain and I vowed I’d put a little dinky art of my own on posts from now on. It’s why my come-back post included a very bad drawing of me at my computer, and why I didn’t just destroy the picture immediately when I finished it, but actually posted it on the internet for everyone to see. I’m not proud of my art, but it’s my art. And it won’t ever be perfect but I have to learn how to keep making it and giving it to the world.


  1. you can’t prove it wasn’t 

New Site, New Me

A very rough purple pencil sketch of me sitting at my desk facing my computer. I have a beard and glasses and it's not a very good drawing

Me @ my computer by screenbeard

Hi folks! It’s been a long time since I last posted, and a lot has happened. No more than has happened to anyone else over the same time and none of it is newsworthy, but the passage of time seemed like something that that should be at least acknowledged. Which seems redundant now that I type it out loud.

One of the things keeping me from posting is just the sheer insanity of life. Things don’t so much get in the way as they make posting seem inadequate. How do you put mundanity mixed with chaos and frustration into words without boring people? How do you tease out the parts that made you happy without looking like you’re trying too hard.

And then there’s the site itself. Writing up Markdown and finding images and putting it all together in Hugo was never a fun way to write. I was tied to my desktop and although I tried to have a “workflow” the way Hugo changed from month to month meant every time I uploaded I had up to a half-dozen broken steps I’d need to work through to get it re-built.

So I ended up putting it off more and more, even though my drafts folder was growing (slowly - but growing), and now we’re here more than a year later and no updates.

This time I determined to build the website my way. It’s taken a minute but I now have a way to generate my site that’s built on technologies I understand and my own sweat and tears. More of that when I write up how it works and how and why you might want to try it, but for now - I welcome you to the new and improved The Geekorium!

I’m still dogfooding it as I go, and there are a couple of things I still know I need to do, as well as a few bugs I’m not aware of, but if I put it off until it’s perfect I’ll never release it.

You might see some items that look like this: {{< youtube xyzabc123 >}} or some links that still look like Markdown. Those are unfinished until I can port over the plugins I need to translate the Hugo exclusive tags. I have figures working, and my next goal is the youtube tags, but please be patient while I get them going.

You might also get old sites in your feed reader (if you’re still subscribed). I rewrote the Atom feed and it may not even work, so sorry if it makes your reader grumpy.

In the meantime I welcome feedback. I reached out to Georgie of Hey Georgie for design help and she graciously gave me some ways to make the site look better, but all bad decisions are my own. If you have any ideas for improvements I’m all ears, because I don’t really have an eye for design. You can get in touch via email at josh @ this.domain.au or on the fediverse at https://social.chinwag.org/@josh and if you notice any jank please let me know.

November will be this this site’s 20th anniversary. I hope this new format will make me more likely to keep it up-to-date. So here’s to 2025 and the new online me!

Google+ (or Google Plus if you wanna be search-engine friendly)

So I’m hanging out on Google+. I mean literally of course - the second1 new social network that Google has launched in the last couple of years has a “hangout” feature where you can chat with lots of friends simultaneously via video. I’ve never tried it, so I’m sitting here in the hopes that someone will join in with me. No one has come past yet, but I think that says more about Australian/American time difference and my own social ineptness than the popularity of the feature. I hear very good things about it.

This article isn’t about that feature specifically. This is about Google+ in general. The new social network that totally isn’t trying to out-social Facebook2. It seems quite a hit! But then so was Buzz initially. You remember Buzz? The social network built knee-deep into GMail that a lot of people tried, but no one really liked3. There was also Wave - but that never made sense to most people4. I mock, but only out of love. Google, despite their failures are not a company to give up on something once they have it in their sights, and understandably they want to get in on this “social” act.

What “social” means exactly is anyone’s guess, but in vague terms it means somehow putting all that information you generate when you browse the web and share the cool stuff you find with your friends to use. Sites like Facebook are all about giving you a central place to post videos and photos you like so other people can see how witty and clever you are for liking Transformers before they were ruined5 by Michael Bay. This sort of sharing has come a long way since the web was made. It used to be that you had to own your own website and manually copy/paste links and videos into your pages and hope to hell that people might find, and occasionally re-visit, your site. Then sites like Blogger and Wordpress came along and made that somewhat easier, then Tumblr and Facebook - making those sorts of short and snappy link sharing posts easier and easier to do. Now you wave your mouse in the direction of the Facebook tab and it pulls out that it’s a Youtube video and picks out the title and description and even embeds the video, and you barely have to do anything. Well now Google is heading one step further. They aren’t there right now - Google+ is still a lot like Facebook on the surface - but deeper down the steps are there to become something massive.

Google+ is a service where you share your links, photos and videos with people in your “Circles”. You group the people you know into named Circles to make sharing easier and less prone to accidents of the “sharing photos of myself drunk with Aunt Sally” variety. For example, you create a “Work” circle, a “Family” circle and potentially a “Drunk shenanigans” circle. Then each time you post a picture or a report, you can easily assign it to be seen by the appropriate group. For the record: Facebook offers a similar option, but I’ve rarely used it, and I can’t imagine my mum has ever bothered.

Then there’s the Hangout feature I’ve mentioned above. When you’re online, you can set up your webcam for chats with whichever friends happen to be browsing Google+ at the time.

The third major feature at launch is “Sparks” - a kind of automatic interesting article finder. Type in a few keywords about what you’re interested in, and you get your stream filled with articles that match those keywords. I find this feature somewhat limited at the moment. A few of the articles it’s uncovered have been interesting, but mostly it’s just more of the same sort of thing I can get at one or more of a dozen similar services. Once it’s fully integrated into everyone’s Google account though - like my mum’s - I can imagine it being useful for some people to find new and interesting articles they might otherwise not go searching for.

Thus we get to the crux of the matter: integration. Google practically runs the web right now, despite the valiant efforts of Microsoft and up-and-comers like Duck Duck Go, and despite the sneak-in-from-behind services like Twitter and Facebook. If you want an answer to something you most likely start at Google and work your way from there. But Google recognise it’s only a matter of time before someone takes that “social” power that other sites like Twitter and Facebook have and turn it into a more useful information finding service. The power of social is to hopefully take it one step further and start recommending things to you before you even recognise you were looking for it. To help you dig out more reliable information - reliable because a friend or relative has already used it and shared about it6. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet and has been for years. On top of that, Google has sites like Blogger (for web pages) and Picasa (for photos) and - because you might not have actually heard of those - Youtube for video.

Google’s plan with Google+ has already started. You can “Plus One” any search result to indicate to other people in your networks that a particular website is a good result - similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, but on your search page. Now website owners can embed these buttons onto their sites, and you can “Plus One” after you’ve visited - the results are shown to your friends in their Google searches.

The next step will be to turn this functionality on on Youtube and their other properties. When you “Like” a video - soon to become “+1” no doubt - this will be added to your list of +1s on your profile and I’m imagining eventually integrated into your stream. As more and more Google properties are built onto the Google Plus platform, stuff you have found useful or beautiful or interesting will be offered to your friends and family as reliable content that they might also find useful or beautiful or interesting. It’s all part of Google’s plan to find ways to understand what you do on the web and make themselves more useful so you use them more7. It’s a grand vision. It’s easy to imagine this as the start of something big, which is why I’m so excited about it.

Screenshot of the Introduction presentation for Google Plus

Of course at the moment, it’s all seems much like the other services we know and love. This is not a bad thing. The fact that you can take your knowledge of Facebook (or Buzz etc) and move into Google+ is a huge bonus at starting time. If Google can layer more functionality over the top of this simple base, I imagine Google+ being a powerhouse of sharing and a massive database of knowledge.

This is just my initial reaction/summation of Google+. The best way to find out what it’s about is to give it a go. I’ve got some invites if you’d like to try it! Check out my +Josh posts and put me in one of your circles.


  1. or third? 

  2. But is really - everybody knows, you guys 

  3. not really deep down 

  4. although I never knew why - it was pretty straight forward 

  5. or exploded 

  6. It’s also to make advertising more profitable, but that’s another story 

  7. and see and click on more ads 

Tech for Newbies!

I’m gonna try to get a new series going here on the Geekorium where I answer some of the questions I get asked in my job. I get asked for advice every day, and it’s often more interesting than the sorts of things I actually do to get paid. Ages ago I toyed with the idea of making a site where I would break down technical concepts for the less technically minded, but wasn’t sure it would have an audience. The advice I get asked for though already has an audience - the people that asked in the first place. So when I get asked a question I think warrants some fleshing out I’ll put it under the new category [Tech for Newbies]({{< ref “/categories/tech/” >}}).

A baby with a white onesie that has a stick figure holding a red semaphore flag, with the word n00b written underneath

omg n00b! by Kim Unertl

Keep in mind if you’re technically minded, that the people I give this advice to aren’t. My answers are simplified and often lacking some of the stuff us geeks find very important. Feel free to point this stuff out in the comments, but try not to be too harsh on my for leaving it out! Also sometimes I don’t actually have an answer - it doesn’t mean I won’t try to put them on the right track.

And if you’re not a geek maybe I can help you out. Leave a suggestion (there’s a suggestion tab just over there to the right) if you have a question you think I could answer. Make sure to read what the geeks have to add though!

The first topic I’m tackling is the age old dilemma - [Should I Buy a Mac?]({{< ref “should-i-buy-a-mac” >}})