A book of images from a photo shoot at Mosman Bay in 2013. Late afternoon, with long shadows; the conditions isolate the small toadfish who swim amidst more than a century of building rubble left over from the construction of the seawall, during the reclamation of mudflats to produce a parkland. The images from this shoot are paired as colour, and high contrast black & white variants.

This 30 page book is published in DRM-Free Fixed-Layout EPUB format.

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Eddie Cartridge, and Janelle Tan – Machine Intelligence researchers and former partners.

Separated following the takeover of their mutual employer, which saw Eddie made redundant, life has lead them to radically different outcomes. Eddie is homeless, unemployed, down to his last few dollars, and living under the streets. Janelle is engaged to their former employer, living in a penthouse, and travelling to work by helicopter.

Eddie has been offered a job – subvert a Machine Intelligence for a critical window of time. The job has a payday large enough that he can escape this awful city – a middle-class-authoritarian city state, where the streets are always clean, and welfare benefits are tied to medical tracking implants which monitor sobriety, amongst other things.

The first problem, is that Eddie is not fast enough to out-react, and out-think a Machine Intelligence. He’ll need an edge, in the form of The Deathline – a neuro-accelerating hallucinogen.

The second problem, Eddie has never used The ‘Line before, and has no supply contacts for this highly illegal substance. He must reconnect with Janelle, who consumed prodigious quantities during their time together, to find out if she still has access to anyone who can supply what he needs.

For Janelle, contact with Eddie has contained a revelation which forces her to question her recent past, and to reassess her relationship with her fiancé. Will she abandon her comfortable, “perfect” life, and be reclaimed by the world of The Deathline?

The world is one in which Machine Intelligence is the supreme power, where a failed nuclear strike has fractured America into three separate nations, Europe is stricken by secessionary conflicts, and new Machine Intelligence-equipped non-geographic distributed states are beginning to emerge.

This 232 page book is published in DRM-Free Fixed-Layout EPUB format.

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The last couple of months have been some pretty intensive nights, some of the most solid, prologued work I’ve done for a while, resulting in:

A forum for users of card-slot expandable Macs, made relevant now that Apple has cancelled the Mac Pro as a product.

Happy birthday, absent friend. Wherever you are. 

Apparently some bot (or exploited people) network has been running fraudulent purchases through the Golgotha Graphics FastSpring store. The angle appears to be that because my books are relatively inexpensive, the purchase is small enough to not be noticed. If it’s successful, it marks a particular set of (stolen) credit card details as valid, so they can then be used for something larger.

The scale of it was pretty impressive, dozens of purchase attempts every minute, which I hadn’t known about because the system by default only notifies you when a payout is due, after a certain amount accrues.

I reported it to FastSpring, and it’s now in their hands; after all, they’re the ones with the big fraud detection network, etc.

Derby Daze Volume 1 collects the pick of the non-square format images from my 2013 roller derby shoots. This is a new re-processing of the images through a different workflow. The result is a significant shift in colour tone, distinguishing them from the original version, which is still available. This new edition also features an updated book design, which I’m standardising across all books going forward.

The goal for these photos was to treat the images in a painterly fashion, thinking in terms of abstract patterns of colour, without trying to prioritise the representational nature of the picture. The result sits somewhere in a Venn-overlap between pastel & ink-coloured charcoal drawings, Futurist motion imagery, and the friezes of a Hellenistic monument.

It only took three months, but I finally have a new, new condition toolbox.

Wonders never cease.

So, here’s a small rant about poor customer service, the sort that’s just baffling where all you can contemplate is “who the hell thinks this is ok?”

On the 6th of February, I ordered a large, metal, multi-drawer toolbox from Sydney Tools. As pictured here:

The cost; $1050, plus delivery. So I was all-in for around $1100. There was a bit of organising to do, as the box was ordered from the Virginia (Brisbane) store, but being delivered from the Stafford (Brisbane) store, to a location in Brisbane.

I’d previously been to look at one of them at the Kunda Park store, and take some measurements off the baseplates for the wheels. The goal being to fabricate lower-height levelling feet, so it can be placed on uneven ground under a table.

There’s also a couple of hundred dollars invested in steel and heavy duty levelling feet to achieve that.

The day of the delivery arrived 10 days later, the 16th of February:

The bottom of the cardboard box was all mashed up, which made it hard to see (until the delivery driver had left) that the box has been smashed into by a pair of somethings. Those somethings appeared, suspiciously, to be the size and distance apart one would expect from a pair of forklift tines.

So, I called up the guy who I’d been working with at Virginia to discuss this, and he had to talk with management, and while they made a token offer of $100 refund to keep it, I declined, and said I’d like the box replaced with a new, undamaged one. To which he agreed.

We had to organise a date for the pickup and delivery of the new one, and so on the 16th of March a truck turned up again, to take the damaged box (which I had put the wheels on, as they had requested) back to Stafford, and (bafflingly in a second trip) bring a new one back.

My “new” replacement toolbox:

This one is in worse condition than the one I returned. It’s clearly a demonstrator they’ve had out and in use on the showroom floor for a significant amount of time. There’s a sizeable dent in the stainless steel top (whose protective film was missing), both the pre-attached side handles, which are supposed to be a user-fit part, have paint scraped off. On the back, there’s gouges through the powder coating all the way to the metal, which has already begun rusting. There’s scuffing through the topcoat to the red undercoat in multiple places on the sides. The caution sticker on the side has been torn, and the wheels have seen extensive use.

What sort of person thinks this is OK? Who looks at “we delivered a damaged product to a customer”, and thinks “we’ll send back a damaged, worn, distressed demonstrator as a replacement”?

Who thinks a damaged, secondhand, demonstrator product is a replacement for a warranty claim?

Seriously, at what point did “fuck the customer” become standard operating procedure?

The delivery driver hightailed it while I was on the phone to Sydney Tools to tell them that this wasn’t an acceptable replacement, which after he’d spent both deliveries complaining about the job, and trying to get us to do the actual moving of the product, demanding we climb up the waist-high hydraulic platform suspended in the air at the back of his truck, seemed a final “screw you” to me, the customer, who’d paid for all this in the first place.

Now, lest you think “this is just cosmetic” dear reader, again:

• it’s starting to rust, and
• it’s over $1000 of equipment, and
• it was bought NEW.

I didn’t buy a factory-second, or a demonstrator, or a secondhand product; I bought a new, pristine, in box product. All I want for my money, is to receive the thing I bought.

Occasionally my little rants catch the zeitgeisty breeze ;)

Continued from Part two…

This was actually finished several weeks ago, but I had to clear some stuff out before taking the photos.

So this is the completed frame, which acts as a support structure for the work, allowing it to be hung from something that isn’t the corner bolts, and providing a free-standing support, so it can be placed upon the ground, while keeping the circuit boards clear. It also provides end, and corner protection during moving.

Everything bolted together nicely.

That’s the biggest 2025 project complete.