That Hygge Life

I find myself in the situation where I have a number of "almost finished" diverse projects nearing completion and several social activities worthy of mention, but without a common and unifying theme. The first involves an essay I'm composing out of pure love following several Shakespearean events which my mind raises the question: "Why Shakespeare?" After all, there were many excellent playwrights and other artists during the English Renaissance, but here we are still looking toward The Bard almost five hundred years later. It is an extraordinary achievement by any measure, and I have a few thoughts on the matter which I will circulate in the near future. Also in the "coming soon" category is a review of "Bleak Squad" at the Queenscliff Town Hall, a sort of 90s supergroup made up from members of Dirty Three, The Bad Seeds, Magic Dirt, and Art of Fighting, which I attended with Kate R., who rather delightfully took me out to see them and spend an evening at the 19th century Vue Grand Hotel (their website is so bad I won't link it). Band member Mick Harvey was also present at the lodgings, and I took the opportunity to mention how much I liked his work in "The Birthday Party". The overnight stay was also an opportunity to visit my old friend Lyle A., who now lives in the region, and also to see the famous "Black Lighthouse", apparently one of only four in the world to have such a hue.

On the RPG side of things, I notably joined Liz, Karl, Gavin, Phil, and Dan for an in-person session of "Dragonbane" on Sunday. This game is derived from the almost-mythic "Drakar och Demoner" Swedish RPG from the early 1980s, which itself was "very heavily" derived from Chaosium's Magic World booklet from Worlds of Wonder. The latest incarnation still shows these roots, albeit with some newer innovations, but still with a great deal of style and design elegance. The day previous, my dear friend from Ningxia, Dr Yanping, graced my home for lunch with Kate R., and Mel S., as well (why am I always surrounded by such fabulous women?), where I experimented with an Italian-Chinese fusion cuisine. Yanping has been away from Australia for over a year, so it was a real delight to see her again, and I'm very pleased that she'll be here for an extended period, having acquired some gainful employment at Monash University. Somehow I neglected to mention attendance at Brenda L's birthday gathering in recent entries where I played the role of waiter and provider of cocktails; especially excellent conversation with Brenda, Fiona C., Matthew C. and others. This all does sound like an extensive social life, and to be fair, that has taken a good portion of the past several days. Journaling does provide a gentle reminder that I do have other serious ("boring but important") work to catch up on; the batteries have been recharged.

A couple of weeks ago, I made initial preparations for an upcoming trip to South America and Antarctica with my friendly neighbour Kate R., and last week, payments were made for said voyage. In addition to the tour's planned route to Lima, Cusco, Machu Picchu, Buenos Aires, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, the Antarctic Peninsula, the Falkland Islands, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires (again), we've added a couple of nights in Santiago. To say the least, the trip isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but there is a great deal of ruggedness involved on the itinerary, and volume makes a difference as well. There are many practical tasks to be undertaken between now and December, including improving my questionable competence in the Spanish language. I have smashed my way through the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile introductory course in Spanish over the past fortnight, at least in part helped by an existing "fairly good" B1 level on Duolingo.

Eschewing the numerous optional activities offered by the tour company that are not really to my taste, I am scanning attractions that suit my inclinations toward museums, art galleries, archaeology, natural beauty, and, in the South American style, anything relating to their surrealist and magical realist literary traditions. I already have firmly marked out "La Chascona", built by Pablo Neruda, who, apart from winning the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature for his surrealist love poems, was also a career diplomat and politician. Another site of this ilk to visit will be the "Centro Cultural Borges" in Buenos Aires, dedicated to the mythologist, writer, and poet Jorge Luis Borges. This said, the pair of them come with certain controversies, as if often the case, the art and the artist make a troublesome union.

It seems fitting that so much of the trip will be an exploration of wondrous landscapes in reality, history, archeology, and the literary tradition of surrealism and magical realism, and, I readily admit, I will be drawing a great deal of this travel experience in writing my "Call of Cthulhu" project "Fragments of Time, Slices of Mind". As that is being written, I have decided to run a short campaign using "ElfQuest", based on the comic series by Wendy and Richard Pini with their palaeolithic and telepathic characters. In the most recent months, I have been quite involved in a game run by Andrew D., "Night's Dark Agents", which is a story involving modern European special operations teams versus vampires. Finally, on this trajectory and of marginal interest to anyone not deeply into the lore, I have picked up (at an incredibly cheap price) an unpunched copy of Chaosium's "Dragon Pass", close to fifty years old and in "almost new" condition.

The past couple of weeks have resulted in some rather pleasing work-related events. The first followed a meeting with representatives of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia which has resulted in me acquiring a test account and becoming the responsible person for approving projects that are seeking to upgrade from UniMelb's Spartan to systems like Setonix, which is the most powerful in the country and number 59 in the world (this time last year it was 28 - the landscape moves quickly!). The architecture is somewhat different to what I am used to (HPE Cray OS, HPE Cray MPI), so I'll be doing some additional learning myself and some hand-holding for researchers as they navigate and migrate data and code to this system. At the other end of the scale for the newcomers on Spartan I conducted two introductory workshops last week with some fifty attenedees. Quite a few times now, I have met researchers several years after taking my introductory courses who express their significant gratitude that I led them on the path of using high performance computing to process their data with efficiency, and hopefully, there will be a few of that nature from this cohort.

I often make the point of how supercomputers are utterly critical for current economic development with an ROI of 7:1 almost all through positive externalities, and literally save millions of lives. Could you imagine COVID-19 vaccines without HPC systems to do the simulations? We'd still be living under lockdown. Well, on a smaller scale, I was very proud to organise a researcher presentation last week for Research Computing Services (RCS) and Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) with Dr Debjyoti Karmakar who is developing a non-invasive fetal monitoring device to prevent perinatal asphyxia for high-risk pregnancies. Dr Deb's presentation was very well received, even if he had to take a brief emergency call in the midst of it! He has been making extensive use of both the Spartan supercomputer and our Mediaflux-based data storage system, which dovetailed quite nicely with a virtual meeting a few days later with several representative from Princeton University who also are interested in integrating the HPC systems with Mediaflux, which is not as simple as it should be, but that is the nature of our work.

In my own research, I am still making good progress on studies in the psychology and sociology of climate change denial and have recently made contact with a long-standing member of the UNFCCC Accreditation Panel of Experts and Methodology Panel of Experts who shares this interest. Over the next two months or so, I am hoping to elaborate from this member's own interest on the psychological need for "belonging" and "club membership" which leads to climate science denial being strongly correlated with ideology rather than scientific evidence, and to draw a stronger correlation between this and vested interests in political economy. Ideological positions are usually strongly associated with political economy, so it should not surprise me to find such a connection, and when it comes to the damage done, there are those who are responsible, and one thing we do know from institutional and individual analysis, very few people like to take responsibility.