Categories
Tourism

Visiting Wollongong

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Wollongong (and the broader Illawarra) over the past five years – recreationally and for study. But I’ve never really thought about what a tourist might be looking for. In the last few weeks, I have had to approach the city from that angle because I’m organising a national […]

Categories
Academia

Reflections of An Undergrad

I have set this post to auto-publish at around the moment I will be graduating from my undergrad degree. The ceremony starts at 2:30pm! For the duration of this post, I’m going to ignore the fact that I have just applied to do an hounours year, and focus on celebrating the completion of my first […]

Categories
Community

A Rotaract Weekend

The Rotaract Club of the Southern Highlands has a busy weekend: Our trivia event So You Think You Know Christmas on Friday night was successful. While fewer people came along than we might have hoped, everyone had a really great night. We raised about $200, which the club has decided to donate to the Bowral […]

Categories
Academia Web

Honours, here I come

My honours research proposal, as submitted to UoW: My honours research will attempt to trace the spread of a variety of memes and motifs in digital media. It will not aim to provide predictive tools – though perhaps some will emerge – but instead to examine the common characteristics of cross-media memes and motifs. The […]

Categories
Politics/Government

Start the Speculation

With just over a year until Local Government elections in NSW, candidates have already begun to emerge. There are three Councils I’m usually interested in: Wingecarribee; Wollondilly; and Wollongong. Of those three, Wollongong has recently had elections after several years without an elected Council and the new Councillors will serve five years rather than four. […]

Categories
Community Politics/Government

Yakkity-YAC

I was recently asked to give a short speech to a regional gathering of youth advisory council members. The young people had come from NGOs and Councils across the Southern Highlands, Wollondilly, Camden and Campbelltown areas. Given my experience in YACs at all levels, I felt I had something important to offer the attendees. Below […]

Categories
Academia Community Web

I’d Be Honoured

As I near the end of my undergraduate degree, I have started to consider whether to add honours to my qualification. I have been encouraged by a number of my lecturers to consider honours. I have good marks and I’m interested in further, research-based qualifications in the future. Nonetheless, at the moment, I wonder whether pursuing […]

Categories
Media Web

Peach is in Another Castle

Do video games (and other digital media) influence society or does society influence them? Or is it a bit from Column A and a bit from Column B? There are some strong arguments that repeated exposure to violence desensitizes people and, in the case of violent video games, even spurs/trains them to commit violent acts. […]

Categories
Community

Take Me to the Fifties

I’ve just spent the last few months helping to put the final touches on massive project for the Southern Highlands Youth Arts Council (SHYAC). Grease took between 15 and 35 hours each week since early September, and a large amount of time before that. I think I’ve been working on the project since about September 2010, […]

Categories
Academia Media Politics/Government

On Hyperreality

He will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has […]