Articles from Cheeseburger Gothic

We didn’t take a holiday over Christmas so we’ve been on the road this week catching up on some downtime. Currently we’re hanging in Sydney, but we also did a couple of days in Newcastle, where Jane used to work, and broke the trip at the half way point on the first day, overnighting on a farm in Bellingen.

I very much enjoyed this very obviously planted story of ASD punking the Russian cybercrims who stole my Medibank data back in August 2022. The government (in fact, all of the 5 Eyes governments) dropped the story for a bunch of reasons, including image management and deterrence.

I doubt it will have a deterrent effect. You’d need more kinetic solutions for that to truly happen. But it is good narrative management to tell these tales occasionally.

Even though I didn’t drive, I was still pretty worn out by the time I got back from the film festival panel on the weekend. Luckily, Jane had made chicken Provençal, which was a nice thing to come home to. She’d opened a bottle of Chardonnay for the recipe—Allendale, I think—so I had a glass with dinner. It was the first bottle of wine we’d opened in about six months. Anyway, it was nice. We ate, had a drink, and then I sort of drifted around, not doing much of anything.

I read a lot of crazy health and fitness content so you don’t have to, and some recent crazy advice has been to avoid caffeine in the morning.