353.
16 April 2025I have no talent whatsoever for self-promotion, so instead of trying to be a capital-S Substacker (and no, you aren’t reading this on Substack but bear with me) I’m just going to share photos I’ve taken while wandering and whatever happens, happens.
This set is from Mordialloc, the 353rd Melbourne suburb I reached on my self-imposed challenge to hit them all. Read more here to find out more about why I’m doing it.
There are 378 Melbourne suburbs in total – according to the list I made, anyway. I imagine by the end of the Easter weekend I’ll have accounted for the remainder and will have to think about what my next project will be.
Consumption
As AI continues to devour our creative spaces, I’d like to reassure you, my tiny cohort of readers, that I’m a human being and not a photography bot that has been trained very badly. After some deliberation, I’ve decided to prove this the easy way by telling you what I’ve been diverting myself with. I’m far too obscure to dabble in Amazon affiliate links (not that I’d encourage shopping there anyway), so just copy-paste anything I mention here if you trust my taste for some reason and feel the urge to find out more.
It was my birthday recently, and my partner was somehow able to find a copy of Takashi Homma’s Tokyo Olympia to give me as a present. It’s a beautiful and very large photo book documenting Tokyo’s landscape in the build-up to the COVID-delayed 2020/1 Olympic Games, and it’s unfortunately nigh-on impossible to find anywhere. Pretty pointless as a recommendation, really – I may have received the last copy available in this country, in all seriousness. I’m deep in a habit of acquiring photo books at the moment, partly because I’m operating under the delusion that one day I’ll have a body of work worthy of publishing one, giving away a few copies and leaving the rest to gather dust in a shed. A man can dream.
My current reading-reading is Autism Is Not A Disease: The Politics of Neurodiversityby Jodie Hare. I’m just shy of half-way through and I can imagine it being an eye-opener to any curious neurotypical folk out there. Life is unnecessarily challenging for neurodivergent people, and Hare has done a fine job of showing just how urgent it is to tackle the many socio-political forces that bring this about. One of the things I struggle with most as an autistic person is the inherently political nature of my existence, and the reluctance of many people around me to engage on that level. We Do Not Part by Han Kang is next on my list.
I haven’t found myself listening to music with lyrics much lately, but People Watchingby Sam Fender has had some airplay in our household this week. Sam and I (not that we’re on first-name terms or anything) were born in the same small town in north-east England and I find some of his songs alarmingly relatable. I’m happy to see a working-class lad from North Shields do well for himself in an arts scene dominated by private school alumni, seeing as the one writing this clearly isn’t.