Crikey! Australia’s R/Place In The World

~ bonwag

It’s been a mad few days, but the April Fools’ Joke that keeps on giving, Reddit’s R/Place has faded back into the white void from whence it came.

It’s a massive, profane, beautiful, combative and thought-provoking collaborative art piece based on a simple rule: you have the ability to change the colour of one dot on a field of 2000×2000 every 5 minutes.

And anyone else could do the same. At any time.

What could go wrong?

It started white, and eventually, became white, when the admins restricted the colour palette from 16 colours to 1 after several days of charged to-and fro between redditors to claim real estate in the final jewel in the crown; the Final Canvas.

Alas, unlike five years ago, the true April Fool’s joke is that there’s no ‘final canvas’ to own. There’s only points in time; places where great art rose and fell according to the whims of tiny friend groups and giant political collectives.

There was a point in time where a few loosely coordinated Australian teams claimed parts of the canvas to create animals, flags and portraits. Those works of art took time to plan, co-ordinate and maintain against hostile streamers and other groups. These works are archived below. They may exist elsewhere, but only as snapshots.

R/Place is, again, a white void. But what a void.

A tribute to Warnie, jointly maintained by Australia, India, and other cricket fans from around the world
Bluey was maintained in cooperation with the UK
Australia’s largest and longest surviving piece, nestled between the famous Star Wars poster from A New Hope, and the infamous OSU army (a popular game and gaming community), You can see VB, Vegemite, Aboriginal Flag, Bunnings, Aussie Flag, Harbour Bridge, Poppies, Ned Kelly, Koala, Kangaroo (sometimes smoking), a heart (indicating a partnership with the OSU team) often reworked as a boxing glove, Freddo Frog, Bubble O’Bill and cockatoo. The green and gold borders marked out Aussie territory but grew over time.
The second-longest standing AU/NZ collaboration, featuring magpie, parrots, emu, crab, opera house, crocodile, auckland tower, Eye of Sauron, Mount Doom, kiwi, kererū, Jonah Lomu, beehive and sheep.
And right in the middle of it, an ANZAC-commemorating poppy.
Australia’s finest hour – a callback to a previous artwork with Steve Irwin, the flag, ‘gatorade bong’ and Uluru. The joey was not an aussie production, nor were the girl and fruit pieces, but Australia fostered a tight partnership with streamers to jointly defend each other’s art. This piece was destroyed by a UK YouTube group in the final moments of the event.

UPDATE: Here’s what the canvas looked like before the White Void took over. You might want to zoom in.

UPDATE: here’s an interactive atlas if you want to explore the whole thing,

UPDATE:And finally, a breakdown of my own humble contribution

Courtesy http://kisielo85.cba.pl/place2022/index.php

ABF CBF DYJ

~ bonwag

This not good. Not happy ’bout this.

This is lazy, blunt-edged policing. To not be required to justify a seize and search of someone’s entire set of personal and professional records is overreach by definition. ABF should be embarrassed to have to resort to this.

Border Force defends temporary phone seizures at checkpoints – Security – iTnews

UPDATE: Confirmed that ABF knows full well it’s not a legal requirement, but they intend maximising inconvenience to get the same outcome anyway.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/08/australian-border-force-searched-822-phones-in-2021-despite-having-no-power-to-demand-passcodes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

TIL: Human League lays claim to ‘Together In Electric Dreams’

~ bonwag

I was halfway through a note to Spotify when I saw one of the greatest pop singles of all time, Together In Electric Dreams, incorrectly credited to Human League, rather than Giorgio Moroder.

Glad I did my research, though. I had forgotten that this was a collaboration with Philip Oakey. It’s not a Human League track, but they consider it one of their Greatest Hits and still perform it at concerts.

Nice to find it on the playlist today though. I can highly recommend the Spotify Stations app as a shortcut to your pool tunes.

UPDATE: Australian daytime TV has the definitive cover; sometime around 1985. Glorious.

It’s T-Time!

~ bonwag

After an extra-long weekend I’m excited to be joining the Telstra Field Marketing team this week – and especially thrilled to be back working my home patch.

I’ll be supporting the Telstra Enterprise business in WA and looking forward to working with a new set of colleagues and technologies to help build a brilliant connected future for the West.

Let me know if you have opinions on what that future should look like ;-)

#telstra #marketing #fieldmarketing #outstandinginthefield #humansandrobotsftw

Hello Tomorrow

~ bonwag

Bundling up my access key and laptop for shipping back to head office, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic. Back in 1998, Day One, I was given an access key, pointed toward a shiny new Pentium II desktop, and asked to ‘build websites’. No laptop back then. (No cellphones, either, only The Sales Guys got Nokia 5110s.)

Wordnerds know that nost-algia means ‘homesickness’, or the bittersweet pain or longing associated with remembering a past home.

I’ve had several homes within CA – from the earliest days as part of the crack ‘Internet Solutions Group’ at Platinum; to Product Management at Computer Associates; to Field Marketing at CA; Marketing Operations at CA Technologies; and finally, Mainframe Marketing at CA Technologies: a Broadcom Company. CA: Change, Always.

If you’ve been part of those teams, you’ll know that CA had its own way of doing things, for better or worse, and the CA Family was always ‘assuming positive intent’ and built some amazing tech and experiences through sheer esprit de corps. I’m proud to have built those with y’all – and yes, it is kinda bittersweet to know that the CA we knew is no more. (Here are some videos if you want to share that feeling now.)

I’m moving out of Broadcom, but not moving on – there are still robots and humans that need me to broker peace-among-worlds! I don’t yet have an access key for a new home, but I know I’ll always cherish my CA ancestry, wherever in the world I find my folk.

Hope to see you again soon; maybe for breakfast?