Friends of the Armchair Traveller

 Two years ago many friends introduced me to AI bots,  Sora and Runway and Luma Dream Machine.   There were some others whose names I have forgotten. I tried out experiments on all of them but I was not impressed much with any of them, there were so many glitches, artefacts, the wrong number of fingers on a hand, the wrong number of legs on a horse, until about the middle of 2024. In mid 2024 I was working on a new idea which I'm presenting today.  "Dining With Stella"    I made this short in conjunction with my good friend Alix Jackson. Alix is an animator who also knows a lot of technical things I didn't know then, and I'm still catching up!  We completed an early verision of "Dining With Stella" but I didn't want to release it at the time as it had so many "bugs". I bit the bullet last week and decided to fix it up so we could release it.  We also have more episodes of Stella and Peter in the pipeline, some of which we'll release ...

On "Good Friday" this year I was sitting around enduring the usual Good Friday events, fund raising for the Children's Hospital (a worthy cause), the AFL footy, the clash between my own view of the horror of the religious cultural meaning of Easter (Torture, Death, Resurrection, Hot Cross Buns, the Easter Bunny, Easter Eggs) and my cultural separation from all of that, when I decided to write to my friend Richard and see how he felt on that day. Richard and I have been freinds for just short of 29 years when he was a student in the Doco course I ran at Vic. College of the Arts. We've always had wonderful communication, to and fro, on every topic under the Sun and way beyond the Sun into the depths of Eternity. We often argue from entirely opposite sides, completely different points of view.  I'm deeply irreligious just as he is deeply religious. W e both enjoy vigorous discussion but  we've never had any sort of angry breakdown, we've never hurt each other...

 I Lost my faith Cape Conran, Victoria, March 2025, @Richard Leigh ... in documentaries. When I studied at film school in 1997, I put all my career eggs in the basket of being a Documentary filmmaker. Documentaries had the power to change the world, and us students were all pumped and ready to do just that. One of my VCA colleagues a few years later said, “Documentary filmmaking is all I ever want to do,” but I remember thinking — really? I’d already started getting cynical, even back then. Fast forward to the start of 2026. I realised that I hadn't watched a documentary in years; well nothing longer than about 5 or 10mins anyway. Frankly I found them all a little boring and besides, they were usually preaching to the converted. They always had an agenda, something they were trying to convince me about; so effectively they were just long ads. Why would I waste my time watching? Tell me your point in 30 or 60sec so I can move on with my life. Sure, I still watched a bit of TV drama,...

Our media represents everything that Israel and US are doing to Iran, but they're not reporting accurately what Iran is doing in retaliation. There's no surprise there! Israel and the US certainly do not want you to know how the Iranians have hurt them. In my opinion the war being LOST by Israel and US. It is not about the first few days, it is about how long the supporters of Israel and trhe US can tolerate their economies being torn apart. I'm talking about a very large number of nations whose economies will be fracture if not turned upside down. Just a few examples: To keep operating the UAE spends  $27 Million USD  per day even when there is no business in that country's airspace. Think of that on a Gulf-wide basis, include every Gulf state.  Emirates burns approximately  US$25–30 million  in fixed costs every 24 hours when its network is grounded. During normal operations, the airline generates about US$97.6 million in daily revenue. Key cost components dr...