2024 was a year to pause, and take stock – a year to get things completed, and checked off the list of all the things I had to do.

I shaved off my beard. That was pretty momentous. I do a major visual evolution every seven years or so, and this let me become much more comfortable with going out and doing things, since my mask could now get a skin-seal against my face.

I sawed up and disposed of my old desk top that I’d carted all the way from Sydney. Another part of my old life jettisoned in the name of storage space, where I did more sorting.

Most of the year, I was on my own in the house, which was pleasant.

Art Projects:

I removed C45C4d3 from the local library, which took several weeks to organise, as it hadn’t been faring all that well with the way it was hung.

I kept going with the image per day on mastodon, which was a really rewarding project – it eventually went through all my Fish Noir and Japan images.

A big, final update to Surfing The Deathline was a huge part of this year, consuming about two months. Once I sorted everything out tech-wise, I was able to fix pretty much everything that had ever bugged me, or just not been perfect (to my eyes). I’m super-happy with the outcome, because I know it’s at a state where I couldn’t have made anything better than it is, given the artwork I produced, etc.

Tech Projects:

Virtualisation and Audio Workflows were the big theme for this year. Setting up VMWare virtual machines for MacOS Snow Leopard, so I could run old Adobe Creative Suite apps, and produce a Surfing The Deathline update took a huge amount of time – I was lucky enough to find a secondhand, unopened copy of Snow Leopard Server for less than a tenth the price I’ve seen it attracting. The setup of all this literally took weeks to work out all the kinks.

Audio workflows revolved around setting up a whole new podcasting setup, as well as migrating all my music from a decades old iTunes library to new, largely filesystem-based setups.

First week of December, I migrated all my web & email hosting  away from Hostcolor, where I had been for around twenty years, to a new, Australia-based host. Things just became too unreliable with the old host – there was a week-long outage in April, as a result of a hardware failure that didn’t have backups running. I procrastinated most of the year once they fixed it, but a huge slowdown and image serving issue in late November, combined with having to endure their general support person finally made the pain of moving less than the pain of staying.

A huge tech thing for this year, was finishing a redesign and new-from-scratch theme for mattgodden.com. This has been a project running off and on for a year or two, and the breakthrough came when I surrendered to a part of the problem being effectively insurmountable with the way I wanted to do things. The solution was a little more conservative, a little more old school, but frankly a better, less showoff solution to the problem. It also made creating responsive versions dead easy, and satisfyingly functional.

Gear:

I bought a secondhand Nikon D810 to try out some features my existing D800 lacked (highlight-weighted metering). I liked those features so much, I bought a new D850, on the basis that it’s the final generation of DSLR camera Nikon will produce. Along with that were new memory cards.

I bought another couple of camera accessories – a filter holder for my big 14-24 lens, and a special rotating collar setup for tripod mounting the camera.

I bought a panel dolly for moving the aforementioned sculpture from the library, but didn’t end up using it, because the movers were able to carry it to their van.

I bought a new iPhone – a 2023 model iPhone SE, which I literally spent months not using, just having it sitting on my desk, powered on as I slowly worked out new processes to replace the old ones I’d used for the previous phone. Once I migrated fully over to it, I’m pretty happy with it. While the extra screen is not as easy to reach, the extra space is VERY usable.

I bought a new PCI storage card for my Mac Pro, and a pair of Samsung NVME drives, so I could migrate to a new operating system install booting off that card, and migrate my photo library from a usb-attached spinning hard drive, to a PCI direct SSD.

Health:

Eighth and ninth Covid shots. Tried to get back into bike riding, but got hit pretty hard by a magpie, which kindof put me off. My shoulder & back developed some issues; the shoulder especially. The fear is a frozen shoulder, which is an inflammatory thing in the capsule containing the ball joint. It makes it hard to sleep on my right. My back on the left side also has issues when sleeping on my left – doesn’t really leave a lot of choices. I had X-ray & ultrasound scans on both, so the new year will see the results discussed.

This was not the best of years. It’s really hard to think what I did, largely because I didn’t do much of anything. When I look back through my weekly diary, the most common word seems to be “research”. I spent most of the year indoors, as the outside world just became too dangerous, with Ubiquitous Covid becoming the new normal. I had an encounter in the service station where some arsehole started mocking and harassing me because I was wearing a mask. Right before Christmas, my mother caught Covid, so I spent Christmas by myself. I managed to dodge the bullet, but I was due for my next covid shot only a few days later. It was a frightening near-miss.

Speaking of health, this whole sedentary thing started to have some pretty major effects, with significant stress events leaving me tight chested and short of breath. However, a scare with my 2022 annual specialist’s assessment that I was losing upper body strength lead to biting the bullet and getting back into shape.

Mystifyingly, in the second half of the year, I went on a big diet health-kick. I mean big enough that “who are you and what have you done with Matt?” was a reasonable question to ask. I cut out almost all takeaway, junk food, processed snacks, radically reduced the amount of bread, more or less eliminated cereals, and had salads with a protein, like beef or chicken, for dinner almost every night. I think I accidentally paleoed. Breakfast for months now has been a banana, a handful of walnut kernels, and a small piece of biltong. I cut out all the soft drinks, all the beer, radically reduced my alcohol intake.

I lost almost 10kg doing this. I’m back to the weight I was, when I was 18. And the really weird thing is, I really don’t miss any of this. I think I’m so happy with the leaned down figure, that no food treat really has that allure any more. I’ve combined this with working out with weights almost every night, and my strength seems to be returning.

A big theme for 2023 was attempting to move house. We spent months with the house on the market, and almost bought a new one, but had to pull out when the offers on the current place didn’t go high enough. The whole process is arse-backwards, as agents try to tell you how good the offer for your place is, but fail to understand that the goal isn’t to sell, it’s to buy, and the sale is merely a means to that end.

The place we were trying to buy was pretty interesting – two houses on a single lot, but as we spent more time looking at it, worries started to surface. And that’s the real problem – the margins are so thin that we could get to a point where we go broke trying to own the new place. So, by August, that had come to an end, and we stayed put. The stress damn near killed me. We looked at another interesting property – a huge bamboo grove of a place, but again, the owner wouldn’t drop the price to something we could manage, and the house itself (which was being passed-off as the work of a prominent local architect) was in need of a lot of work.

I spent a lot of time working Sketchup, remembering why I love using it so much, and how disappointed I am with it being a subscription-only app these days.

Speaking of tech, this was the year all my tech fell on its face, and had to be refreshed. My beloved old Mac Pro finally died a hard death, and I replaced it with… Another Mac Pro, but this time a 2019 model, with dual graphics cards that cost me $10k secondhand. It’s an insane purchase, given Apple is transitioning away from Intel processors, but this was the machine that was closest to what I already had, without being less than I already had. Worst-case-scenario, It will become a chonky Windows or Linux machine one day. But, it should last me for a while. Interest rates being what they are, It’ll only take 14-15 months for the interest on my savings to recover the outlay, which is a shorter term than a personal loan I would have taken out to buy something like that, so that puts things in perspective. Those interest rates are part of why I’m more sanguine about not moving right now, than I might otherwise be – it’s a good time to have savings, and a bad time to have a mortgage. That big new computer actually followed a new iPad Pro, which has proven to be a lot less compelling than I thought it might be. I think I just need to give it more work, but the lack of bezels really makes it less good to draw on. I don’t feel the same carefree doodling I had with sketchbooks in the past.

The great tech revamp included some interesting things I’ve wanted to do for ages – I installed a switch in my tech gear cupboard, so instead of 4 ethernet cables leading downstairs to the modem, there’s just the one. The Mac Pro is installed on the shelf as well, with 7m display cables routing back to my desk, so I have a lot more leg room than I used to have.

My B&O headphones were replaced under warranty as they kept filing to connect to my Xbox. I bought and returned some Beats wireless earbuds, because they were too uncomfortable to wear. I don’t know who Apple tests their earphones on, but I’ve never found them as good as my old Sennheisers.

Mastodon really became my go-to social media space once I found Mona.app – it has some rough edges by virtue of being a Catalyst app, but it’s better than using the website. I stopped posting to Facebook entirely, nothing since May, and only two people reached out to check if things were OK. So much for social networks bringing people together.

So that was it, a pretty terrible year, which feels like I achieved nothing of note. Probably the only thing I can say that was successful with things, was reprocessing some of my old photos, and re-establishing my digital workflows – which accounts for a lot of the “research” time.

2022 started with a sense of doom as the full ramifications of dropping border restrictions into Qld became apparent. That continued throughout the year, and for a full year I don’t think I attended a single restaurant in-person. I’m still in a mask whenever I visit any establishment of any kind. Those in charge of protecting our health have definitely decided that endemic sickness is cheaper than trying to prevent infection. The chief medical officer referred to it as a “reaping” of vulnerable people. Reaping of course being something done deliberately after sowing.

We had a release of a rescue lizard from the end of the previous year, and there was general lizardyness throughout summer.

Laser eye therapy – this was a big thing for the early part of the year. It’s unpleasant, somewhat painful, but the least nasty one could hope for. They repaired a spot of retinal detachment that had appeared, as well as some congenital retinal stuff I’ve had for years. Hopefully it will mean the problem is solved.

Covid shots continued, fourth and fifth doses. I injured my foot by wearing slippers… which is very me.

Bike-wise, I became more adventurous with maintenance. I pulled the chain for a deep clean, adjusted the brake callipers, pulled the wheels, and bought a standing trainer so I could get more exercise without having to actually travel outdoors where the plague people live.

In sculpture / welding progress, I had practice, made some improvements, but the setup and packdown time has really defeated me. For little individual tasks I expect to be able to work here, but needing a consistent, repeatable setup, this just isn’t going to work. The heat and fatigue just get to be too much.

Speaking of heat and weather – we had flooding of the river, unending rain, and then our roof flooded as a result of the air conditioner being set up in a way that caused it to never stop running, attracting so much condensation to its ducting that it shorted out our lighting circuit.

Domesticity led me to do a few things I should have done 7 years ago, and buy some storage furniture. I managed to hack together a nifty laundry hamper  from a shallow IKEA cupboard, as well as add some glass fronted cupboards above. This allowed me to bring a bunch of stuff home from storage – things like movies, games and (a small number of) books.

Storage cleanup was a big chunk of the year, sorting, reboxing, and stacking things to the ceiling in the storage tank. Seeing your life catalogued and labelled in an anonymous metal shed produces some mixed emotions.

I had some big writing projects this year – the first was a submission to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission about Apple and eBook publishing. The second, a grant application to the Australia Council. The grant application has been particularly disappointing, both from the perspective of it being unsuccessful, but more so from the feedback being so generic that it reads like it wasn’t actually written in response to my actual application. In particular, a comment to include relevant support material, when I had included the maximum allowed support material raises a lot of red flags that the support material wasn’t even accessed.

Technology continued to be a struggle. I found  some interesting automation technologies that really opened up the possibilities for how I could do things, and build complex workflows. It’s empowering, which a lot of technology really isn’t any more. The end of the year also brought a constant struggle with system instability, which I suspect is due to my mouse.

I built a nice little stand out of gal plumbing pipe, that lifts my display, and gives me a bit of extra desk space.

My Xbox headsets broke over and over, so I bought an expensive Bang & Olufsen one to replace it. It’s pretty nice.

In terms of space, we looked at a few houses, they were all terrible for various reasons.

Of course the big thing throughout the year was Russia invading and pillaging Ukraine. The world feels like it’s just tipping over the precipice and everyone is more concerned with making sure the champagne fountains don’t spill.

Well, that was a year.

Things started with dental and optical problems, which remained an open issue due to pandemic waves keeping me away from practitioners.

On the medical front, I was vaccinated, second vaccinated, then third vaccinated. Each dose hit me hard, and we’re still cowering in place for fear of the plague. My overall health seems fairly static. I haven’t been able to ride my bike as much as I’d like, so I’ve lost some condition, but at the end of the year I started addressing that – before the borders opened, and plague came back.

My powered cooling suit continued to be an issue, as the supplier was unable to get spare parts. Speaking of cooling, we had a new air conditioner system installed, and most of the year was spent fine tuning the control system, which it seems the original installer didn’t set up properly. Eventually a guy, who was a professional fitter and servicer for the system we have, and who had contacted me via Whirlpool after seeing me post about it, came out and sorted it all for us. It seems to be working well.

This year I did a big project abandon – giving up on my studio in a box. That’s a difficult one for me, because I’m usually a person who won’t give up on things, even when they’re past saving. It’s sort of progress for personality, because my inability to let go of things has been a problem for too many things in life – so I refocussed on a smaller goal, which will hopefully be achievable. That project is to just build some shelves that can go in the hallway, and will let me roll my gear out to the carport, via the wheelchair access ramp I bought.

With the gear able to be moved in and out of the house, I resumed my welding practice, and am making some real progress on getting to grips with the gear.

Speaking of the house, towards the end of the year we looked at a new place, and even made an offer, but other people bid higher than us. It would have been a great one to get, but sadly not to be.

The major non-abandoned project, the project that’s consumed me for 20-odd years, was completely finished. Surfing The Deathine as a collected volume was done, and with it, my new fully independent Fastspring store was set up, so that I’m able to be completely free of Apple. It was a long complicated process, involving completely rebuilding my entire production pipeline, but it worked in the end.

Speaking of Apple, this was the year I really lost the faith. Not only did I lose interest in anything new that Apple is doing, I also lost interest in any media commentator, or content maker, who talks more about Apple products, than they do about Apple’s terrible labor practices, or abusive market tactics.

This year, the technology I rely on to work continued to be awful, but there was a bright spot – the technology I use to be entertained…

I bought a new games console. The XBox Series X is a delight of a system, and a joyous thing to be near. Its size, proportions, matte-blackness, it’s all wonderful.

So overall, it was a year of consolidation – of just trying to get by, of fixing and refining things, and of trying to snatch moments of normality wherever they were.

I expect 2022 to be worse.

What a year.

Things were going ok for the first ten or so weeks – I bit the bullet an began gearing up to do some welding, to finally make a push to get some sculpture done. I was offered another arts residency, which would be a wonderful expansion of Noosa Mnemonic, in cooperation with the local regional art gallery…

…then the plague hit, and hit HARD.

By week 12 we entered a kind of non-time, in which things drifted and became unfixed. Public events went away, my residency was cancelled. So I ploughed ahead with my home welding setup, and designing the Studio-in-a-box.

I received an Arts Qld grant that covered my costs for the Studio-in-a-box, which was also a nice little notch to add to the artist’s cv. A big part of this year was figuring out quantity surveying for materials, and mapping out cut-charts for steel lengths.

There were some big upgrades for my protective clothing kit this year – with a new powered respirator welding helmet, and an (as-yet untested) powered water-cooling suit. When all this stuff is combined, I should be kitted up like an astronaut, and able to work safely and comfortably in more or less any conditions.

I solved a problem of flakey power supply during the storm season, by dropping a bunch of cash on a honking great UPS.

In photography my processes had some issues to overcome, adapting to a new photo processing / management tool. It produces better images, but has worse management features. So I’m effectively now working in two apps. I also updated my monitor configuration for my workstation to 3 screens. Sadly, these changes really didn’t work out too well – 2020 is definitely the year I fell out with technology. I have to learn to not allow anyone to provide an “ecosystem” to me, and instead build one myself.

I finished an update to The Metaning, which frees it from Apple Books, and a European publishing standards group released an Ebook reader for Mac, Linux & Windows that can read the fixed-layout EPUB format, so that clears the way for me to ditch Apple for selling my books, and move to direct sales.

The other major thing this year, was 15 minutes of fame, after a tweet thread I started about my time in high school was picked up and retweeted by a bunch of folks. Had a lot of people relating to me their childhood horrors from the same school.

Overall, 2020 was a year in which a lot of long-term plans and strategies played out, and produced results that weren’t all I’d hoped. Of course, across everything hangs the pall of Covid, so it’s hard to put the achievements of the year in any greater context of where I thought I’d be by the end of it.

2019 started with high hopes for diving back into EPUB development. I put huge amounts of time into redesigning my EPUB books to be able to have their text on a separate layer, so different translations could be done, and to allow the artwork to be user-selectable between finished, sketch, and thumbnail versions.

Weeks were spent trying to get the image outputting from InDesign to work correctly, and I had more or less cracked it, and knew theoretically how it would all be achieved.

Unfortunately, updates to Apple’s books platform broke the core functionality I relied upon, and all my books on the Apple Books store are now broken.

My uncle, Travor Ashton, a wonderfully generous man, sadly passed away.

I entered a major outdoor sculpture festival, and put a bunch of work in to applying for a grant to cover training costs to refresh my welding skills.

Unfortunately, my grant application was unsuccessful, and the sculpture, once repaired, displayed some significant structural weaknesses when exposed to driving wind, that meant i would be unable to install it at the event, so I had to pull out.

I had a new residency project, Noosa Mnemonic – a VR recreation of Noosa, based on people recreating in VR, places they love in Noosa, working only from memory. The goal was to have all the separate places added together into a single VR environment. I created a really interesting new VR location, and arranged for other artists to contribute locations.

Unfortunately, by the end of the year, it seemed to have become moribund, lacking for funding, and a reduced scope that makes the vision more of less moot. After breaking myself on the previous year’s major project for the Drone Racing course, I resolved to be less emotionally invested in this project, so C’est la vie.

I did some more VR outreach projects for the Library Makerspace – I really wonder if I’ve missed my true calling, because I love doing public outreach events.

My bike was serviced, and I was able to get back into riding periodically. It’s good for my mental health. The bike works better now than it ever had since new. I bought a helmet-mounted action-cam, and took to videotaping all my rides, so as to protect myself from incompetent drivers.

We sold my late father’s house, and dissolved his estate. It was finally over. I find myself on occasion missing him, missing that ability to have someone to talk to, who was largely removed from my life, but towards the end, there wasn’t much left to say. His ideas and opinions had been so poisoned by the right-wing internet, that in the end, I was left with very little in the way of happy memories about him.

I started investigating drop-shipping my photo prints as I dipped a toe into Instagram, but then Instagram changed the ability to see metrics of user interaction with posts, and it became yet another platform that one has to question if it’s worth the effort.

More upgrades and updated to my 10 year old Mac Pro tower. it’s such a dependable tank of a machine, frankensteined to hell as it is.

Toward the last third of the year, gearing up for internatonal travel to Japan, gained a sense of urgency, and I designed and had fabricated a set of camera mounting plates to let me better mount my camera on a backpack, while remaining connected to my sling-strap. The design was a pretty amazing success.

Then, I was in Japan, and three of the happiest weeks of my life. Magical country, and I wish I could live in a country mountain town, with the constant sound of running water. The cities weren’t so much my thing, but I could spend months travelling around on local trains, seeing the little farming communities.

Once I came back, there was a lot of lost time – administrative things, medical things – I saw The Sisters Of Mercy play live – a lifelong ambiton, and they were “meh”.

The year ended sitting on inflatable pool chairs with friends, drinking margaritas in the pool, watching Return of The Living Dead on a projector I’d rigged up to screen onto the side of the building.

It was a year of highs and lows, but then aren’t they all?

A year in retrospect. It’s been all over the place – a year in which there was no silver lining that couldn’t tarnish.

The big events of the year, the project for Rent, my VR residency with the library, and the death of my father, all in quick succession in the first half of the year, cast a pall over the second half.

In technology, this was the year in which everything broke.

I came into the year with a Mac that could post directly to Facebook from its share sheet, and with third-party Twitter clients that made Twitter a truly powerful platform for connectivity, and with Twitter able to post directly to my Facebook feed.

By the end of the year, my Mac couldn’t post directly to Facebook, and neither could my Twitter account. My third-party Twitter apps were smoking ruins of their former selves, and the best outlet I had to connect to the outside world from my regional town, had been effectively ruined.

I started on a TIG welding course, and got a few weeks in, before it became apparent that being the one TIG student in a MIG class, that was being run without any semblance of professionalism, meant I spent half a 3 hour class waiting for my non-working machine (which I had told the tutor about at the beginning of the class), and ended up in a shouting match with the tutor, who tried to blame me for not spending hours chasing him around an OH&S-unsafe workshop to get him to come fix my machine.

I build some nestled table workbenches for my room, with the hope they’d be something I could show my father, that he might get some joy seeing me making. But he died from his cancer while I was in the process, and so I don’t know if he ever really saw them.

I built a huge sculpture that went on stage at QPAC. It was a project from hell, marked primarily by a department lead who wanted me for my talent, but didn’t credit me with any actual expertise to know what I was doing when it came to the technical side of things, and so didn’t listen to my specific technical demands. She alternated between being angry that I wan’t keeping her in the loop, and complaining that I was overwhelming her with pointless information when I actually tried to tell the the specific information that informed my technical requirements for what I needed the production to provide, and what the consequences of choices I needed her to make would be.

I had to do a huge cleanout at my father’s house in victoria, to get it on the market to sell. What a headfuck of a shitshow.

I did my first VR residency, learning about sculpting in VR, and 3D printing. The tools demonstrate great potential, but are also not fully baked.

My public outreach roles for the library continued – It’s a fun passtime.

I worked on a new project for the library, constructing racing gates and obstacles for their drone racing programme. It was fun, but the work was so intense, the deadlines so tight, the stress so high, that I caused my health to fuck up again, and gave myself some (so far) permanent neurological damage in my spine, with phantom sensation as a result.

All in all, not a great year.

So, 2017. It’s been a year of ups and downs. More downs than ups, but that gives 2018 a lot more room to improve.

Health

My knee had a setback this year, but is slowly on the mend after a visit to a surgeon who suggested a new exercise regime.

I had a change in an immuno-modulating medication, from requiring an injection every second day for the past 12 years, to one every 2 weeks. So that’s a pretty significant  improvement.

Friends & Family

I was able to catch up with two of my dear friends in Melbourne this year. As nice as it was to see them, I was down to visit my father who’s battling cancer, so the trips were tinged with melancholy.

I still miss all my peeps in Sydney (and the amazing gozlame at Marrickville Markets). As nice as Noosa is, it’s somewhat isolating if your thing isn’t surfing. I’ve been going to a few meetups in the sunshine coast area for people interested in VR & video game development, I might just have to get used to travelling to neighbouring towns a bit more, which I did a fair bit of this year, taking day-trips out to various small towns in the area.

I balance that against the sheer natural beauty of this area. Earlier in the year, after driving 5 minutes from home, I was able to see humpback whales – an adult and a calf that had been overnighting in the bay. I didn’t have to go out in a boat, just walked a few steps from where we parked the car. I was able to see all kinds of marine life walking to the river at the end of my street. On Christmas day we had ducks from the river wandering about in our driveway.

We were also hit by the tail end of a cyclone, which was interesting. You get a real glimpse into the heavy-weather future here.

Art & Culture

I saw a bunch of interesting performances this year, standup comedy by Jimoin, an amateur musical version of Jurassic Park, a live performance of the British podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno, Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine, and while I was in Melbourne, a trip to the NGV to see a big Hokusai retrospective.

There’s a little rant building there, because this trip to Melbourne made me see a side of that city I’ve never felt before – an unjustified self-importance that manifests in a reflexive need to tell tourists from other parts of Australia that they’re finally going to be able to get some (cultural item), now they’re in Melbourne. The simple truth is that there’s nothing in Melbourne, not culture, not food, not interesting little bars, that can’t be found anywhere else with better weather. The NGV in particular, has a stupid “no professional cameras” policy, which means they try to stop you taking a DSLR into exhibitions. If a publicly funded gallery isn’t supposed to be a place for artists to investigate and document works of art, just what is its function?

I spent more time in Brisbane this year, and have developed a real affection for it as a city. It’s not crowded in the way that Sydney and Melbourne are, and the multitude of radically different bridges over the river, give it a quirkiness I dig.

A big event this year was an attempt to get one of my sculptures installed on the grounds of the local Men’s Shed. This was a significant professional undertaking, involving coordinating with the Men’s Shed leadership, and the local water utility who own the land. I photographed the site, created a pitch document showing how an unused scrap of land would be made into a feature for the entrance to the site, and laid out how it would all be done at no cost to either organisation. Everyone seemed quite keen, then the water utility told me that someone in the Men’s Shed leadership, who had been away when I was conducting initial meetings, had told them that the Men’s Shed wouldn’t be supportive of the proposal if it came up to a vote amongst their leadership. That’s left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

I continued to shoot photos throughout the year, my camera being one of the few creative instruments available in an absence of studio space. Updates for Surfing The Deathline came out, to a point at which all the niggling little issues I had with some of the older artwork appear to have been fixed. I also signed up for a TIG welding course, which will begin in February 2018, and should allow me to get my metal sculpture mojo back. It’s much neater, and can potentially be done at home, than the MIG process I’ve used previously.

The most effecting artistic endeavour this year however, goes to my first experience of freestanding VR.

Tools & Tech

VR is my new religion, it’s where I want to spend my computing time. Drawing and painting in a three dimensional environment is so profound, it left me almost in tears. Hand in hand with this, is a profound loss of faith in the ability of Apple to keep providing products I want to use. I’ve written about what a bad fit Apple’s hardware model is for VR, which requires regular user-upgrades of graphical hardware, but I add to that that nothing from Apple has improved my enjoyment of using their devices in the last couple of years – quite the opposite, every update they make, makes the products less reliable, less pleasant to use, and breaks compatibility with other products, forcing you onto this never-ending merry-go-round of upgrades, so that you never have a stable set of systems where everything works together. I’m left asking myself “what do I actually get from paying a premium for Apple gear, if it’s not any more stable, or pleasant to use than the alternative?”. More than the implementation, I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with the philosophy behind Apple’s products – more and more, these are products which reflect the decision-making people who create them – inhumanly wealthy, able-bodied people with unlimited bandwidth. That’s not me, and increasingly, Apple’s products are losing the ability to serve anyone who doesn’t want to sign up for a world of sealed, non-upgradable appliances, where the software is always a semi-functional work in progress.

It may be that my future is in Windows or Linux workstations, especially since all my professional software is cross platform these days.

The really big tech thing this year has been the arrival of the NBN where I live. We’ve gone from the fastest possible connection we could get – 7/1 (down/up), which would flake out and fail whenever we had sustained rain, to 107/44 which has been rock solid through the worst of weather. We also ditched our previous provider, Telstra, for a small company, who, for the same price, don’t offer any “unlimited” plans, so peak hour congestion is largely unnoticeable. Next to my change of medication, knowing I’ll never have to speak to one of Telstra’s “support” people ever agin, is one of the happiest changes this year has brought.

In photography, I finally bought a speedlight – something I’ve wanted for a while now, so that I could have lighting while I’m out and about. It’s an interesting piece of ahead-of-the-curve technology, using a lithium-ion battery rather than AAs, and having the ability to be driven wirelessly.

Closing out the year, I finally bought a travel tripod from a company I’ve been following for a number of years. They’re another small outfit, who try to engineer their way into punching above their weight. It hasn’t been delivered yet, but hopefully it’ll get here soon, and I’ll be free to do a bit more photography-oriented hiking.

So, that’s 2017 in a nutshell.

Somewhat delayed, but Here’s a reflection on 2016. It’s been a relatively quiet year, mostly spent on nagging health issues. Lots of physio rebuilding my knee, which periodically gets worse, in my opinion, because the post-operative rehab physio in 2012 got me jumping too early. Just as that was coming good, I managed to tear a ligament in my dominant hand, one that keeps the tendon centred over the top of the first knuckle, meaning it fell off to the side when I bent my finger down enough. A pretty terrifying experience all round, but after 2 months in a splint it’s slowly getting better.

In terms of art, the beginning of the year saw Surfing The Deathline – Fourth Dose released, and now at the beginning of 2017, Fifth Dose is out, which means it’s all done – I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, and the work is more or less what I intended. Finishing a project that’s been going for 14 years is interesting. It didn’t really have the commercial success I would have liked, but at least it’s done. Most importantly, I’m now free to look to new projects.

Some other notable events this year were a small retrospective of student sculptures at a laneways festival, and delivering a PetchaKucha talk about The Metaning at Nambour.

Going in to 2017, what are my goals? Right now, I’m going back through the old issues of Surfing The Deathine, and updating them to the style of the last part. Then? I’ve got a bunch of photographic projects planned, some will require space to set up lights etc, some are landscape based. Along with that, there’s sculpture – I’m going to need space to weld, after which I’m going to try to learn TIG welding properly, so I can do fine and neat work. Things to look at sculpturally are revisiting the ethernet figurative piece, even if it means I just have to buy bulk cable in various shades of blue. I’ve also got to get serious about investigating bending perspex rod without blistering it, so I can build small versions of my valve sculptures.

I think that’s enough to have on my plate for the moment.

The end of another year, and I’m looking back at the past 16 months, since they mark a two major shifts in life. The first was mentioned here. The move to a warehouse turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of my adult life. Once we’d moved in, it became apparent that the landlord’s version of what we were promised, was very different to what we believed it had been when we moved in. We spent months freezing through the tail end of winter, chasing leaks in the roof when it rained, then roasting through a brutal summer – desperately trying to block the sun from the windows and keep the heat out. Our neighbours, as far as we could tell, were putting human excrement on their garden, so every week or so there’d be a reek so pungent you couldn’t step outside. The suburb itself, may as well be a demilitarised zone. All night you’d hear the sounds of idiots in hotted up cars.

It’s a low socio-economic area, and frankly when you see the way people drive, you can see why. I watched someone overtake a car which was stopped at a red light with a pedestrian crossing, on the crest of a road bridge over a rail line. To do this, they crossed an unbroken centre line onto the wrong side of the road & ignored the red light. I saw someone else driving down the main road overtaking cars that were waiting to parallel park, by driving on the other side of planter boxes and pedestrian islands that separated the two lanes of traffic. My car insurance went from $800 for a $17k vehicle, to $1100 for a $14k vehicle, per year.

Two months after we moved in, we were flooded. Several inches of water throughout the building, sewer breathers underwater, so bathroom drains backing up, and that neighbour’s garden, which was uphill of us, flooded all of its contents in as well.  I lost a about a third of my college drawing work to the water. We were flooded again, to a much smaller extent, almost a year later. This time the water simply came in through the base of the walls, because the building’s dampcourse was too close to the ground.

The extra distance from the city did a large amount to kill off the social life I’d enjoyed previously. Night buses became enough of a pain point, that the non-taxi distance we were just made going out more effort than it was worth.

By early 2015, It was apparent that this wasn’t going to work, so I started working on an escape plan.

Artistically, the year saw a number of major things happen. My sculpture out at UWS was destroyed in a wind gust (at least that what they said happened), or rather, it was destroyed as a result of being left in a damaged state for 2 days before I was contacted. So I brought it back home in pieces, and then scrapped it – something I’d never done for a large work. I managed to finish off all the drawing for Surfing The Deathline, and I finally got to the top of the panoramic photography mountain I’ve been climbing for 15 or so years, by getting a hardware and software workflow that produces super-accurate and predictable results.

My biggest artistic achievement of the year was the exhibition of The Metaning – as far as I know, a first within Australian comics. The exhibition had some hiccups – most regrettably, there was no video recording of the opening speeches, but overall was a success.

With the exhibition out of the way, I was able to prepare for the most significant event of the last year – leaving Sydney.

For 40 years I’ve lived in the one city, half of that in the same small enclave of the inner-west. However, Sydney has become an insane city, ruled over by the avarice of property developers, and a police force drunk with power. Every bit of life is being squeezed from the town. My year away from the inner west saw many of the things I loved about it disappear, and as rents inexorably climb, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t afford to live anywhere in which I’d actually want to live.

So, I left. I moved 700 miles north, into the sub-tropics of the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland. It’s a very different life up here. For the first time, I don’t feel a constant pressure, a constant stress of anxiety and fear. Granted, part of this is because I’m staying with family (but still paying market rents). Most of it, however, is an absence of a part of the experience of Sydney if you’re renting – constant fear of the whims of landlords. Will they raise rents in retaliation for asking for necessary repairs? Will they be so heavily geared, they’ll go bust and the bank will sell out from under you, will they put the place back on the rental market, because they know they can get a higher rent, just by getting a new tenant in?

Here, things are different (for now). It’s a short walk to some nice bars, with a view over the river, everywhere has separated bicycle paths, so I bought a bike, my car insurance is down to ~$600 / year, and I’m getting significant work completed on Surfing The Deathline – the end is in sight for a project that has been a constant in my life for the past 12 years.

One that’s done, I need to look at the next stage artistically. I’ll try to look for what the options will be in terms of new things. I’ve already attended my first local comics convention as an exhibitor, and the first week of the year is scheduled to be concluded delivering a workshop to children on Manga and comics design. Getting my sculpture practice back up & running is going to be a bit of a challenge, but I’m going to get much more heavily into photography, until then. The other change I decided to make, is to get a Lynda subscription, and teach myself to program software. With Apple launching a new language that looks like it’s going to be a pretty big deal, and the little bits I taught myself to do for the EPUB comics I released, I think this’ll be a good use of my time between finishing Surfing The Deathline, and having  a workshop again.