Last Wednesday afternoon I got my COVID booster. The reaction was quite impressive; for the next thirty-six hours, I was bedridden with strong 'flu-like symptoms, pain in the joints, dehydration, headaches, sweating etc. It was quite a journey and, whilst better than the alternative (actual COVID itself) it put everything one day behind what I had planned, which meant on Friday morning I was quite rushed to attend Conquest, the annual TTRPG convention in Melbourne, which had some five hundred registrations and where the RPG Review Cooperative hosted a heavily visited second-hand games stall. Thanks are due to Michael C., Andrew D., Charmaine D., Karl B., and Liz B., all of whom staffed the stall, ferried games around, engaged with attendees, and so forth - and also to Penny D., who served an apprenticeship at the table and drew amusing pictures. For my own part, I left the convention some two hundred books lighter, which was quite a good result.

After Conquest finished on Sunday I made my way down immediately to attend the Drone Orchestrata event at The Mission to Seafarers, and especially to see Carla's band, BBQ Haques perform, including Carla on the theremin and Liana F., on the harp. Afterwards Carla, Liana, Erica H., and I made our back to my place to celebrate Carla's birthday as the clock struck midnight. Somewhere among all this Bowie cat made their way back home after their little holiday at my place, which I am sure he thought was some sort of cat prison).

The following day was Erica's birthday which was quite the moving feast. It started with a late lunch at Roccella Italian Restaurant which was very good and quite inexpensive, then to the Kino to watch the Korean supernatural film, "Exhuma" which had a satisfying treatment of themes and narrative. After that it was a quick drink at Lilly Blacks in Meyers Place (they're working that deco style) then to Tasma Terrace in Parliament Place Melbourne for the comedy skit "Maren May is German" which certainly had its moments. To complete the birthday succession, today I am heading off with Ruby M., for a couple of evenings in Apollo Bay, extending my time off work to well over a week - I think I'm making good time of it.

The past week, in addition to my usual work, has consisted of my annual series of five guest lectures for the UniMelb master's level course, "Cluster and Cloud Computing" which covers supercomputing from a high level, the local system, job submission, parallel programming, more than enough Python, and a modicum of Linux commands. The course coordinator and I had some discussions about how the education system is prepared to teach the intricacies of object-orientated programming, but core operating system commands are learned by osmosis. After all this comes the marking of the 380 students enrolled this year. In addition, I have three days of workshops to run next week, with much greater detail and with the addition of regular expressions into the mix.

I have been blessed by a few occasions this week with a visit of my dear Darwin friend, Lara D. Hilariously, we met at the airport at 12.30am on Saturday morning, as her plane from Darwin arrived at the same time as mine did from Townsville. Shortly afterward we found ourselves visiting the Triennial exhibition for what must be the fourth time or so for myself and later in the week it was off to the Da Vinci (and friends) exhibition at Lume, which is another impressive show (although I twitched a bit on a misattributed quote, which is sloppy of them), with VR flyovers, drawing classes, a lovely cafe, and Lume's signature immersive experience of art and music, in this case mainly 19th and 20th century Italian operatic.

On a more culinary and personal aesthetic dimension I hosted a very nice dinner for Liana F., Julie A., and Erica H., during the week which included confit byaldi, the signature dish from the film "Ratatouille", which turned out pretty well for my first attempt at this; it looks fancy, but it's pretty straight-forward). Another event of note was attending Anthony L's wonderful annual gathering at "Life's Too Short", attending with Ruby M. We took the opportunity to visit the NGV at Federation Square beforehand with the wide collection from the Joseph Brown collection. Anthony, as host of his event, noted that it was International Submarine Day and offered plentiful AUKUS-based "yellow submarine" cocktails (rum, tequila, citrus, with more than a dash of imperialism). It dovetailed well with my attendance the day prior at a Labor Against War meeting with former Qld Senator Margaret Reynolds visiting in support.

I have just arrived at the Australian Institute for Marine Science near Townsville for a week of teaching high performance computing and parallel programming. This is a genuine working holiday, having taken a week's leave from my usual place of employment and taking up a one-week stint here. AIMS is a curious place; if you want to produce an image of an isolated scientific research facility this is it, this is it. Apart from the fact they are never even remotely as well funded as they are portrayed in the movies - not even CERN. We have already received our due warnings about regular visits of crocodiles and snakes, so this is no beachside holiday. The week's teaching dovetails quite well with the two days of usual workshops I ran this week at UniMelb, and will follow up with even more the week after that for the master's course and the week after that for the usual HPC training.

I managed to squeeze a couple of social events in this week but the absolutely unexpected highlight, which I must describe in some detail, was the screening of "Grass" (1925) at The Astor, which I attended with Liana F. The silent film, considered the first ethnographic documentary, starts in Turkey, goes across Iraq, and into Persia where some 50,000 Bakhtiari people (and 500,000 animals) engage in stunning and extremely challenging migratory quest for better pastures, across the Karun River and over the Zard Kuh mountains. The cinematography was absolutely astounding, and the narration provided many moments of comic relief among the often mortal dangers. The screening was shared with a live musical performance by ZÖJ who provided a perfect score. Little wonder that at the end of the show, the near-capacity attendance broke out into thunderous applause. It was, quite honestly, one of the best screenings of any film I have ever had to pleasure to attend.

The third major event of the week was attending my first committee meeting of the Australia-China Friendship Society (Victorian branch) and leaving the meeting as President of the group. An hour later I was putting finger-to-keyboard to compose my first President's report, which basically consisted of thanking the immediate past president, Anthony L., and secretary, Robin M., for their years of dedication as office-bearers, to highlight the need to get the organisation's membership and finances on a firmer footing, and thirdly (and most importantly) to reduce the poison of foolish bellicose voices in Australian public opinion. One can certainly express differences of political opinion, international and internal, without being a damn fool about it. Especially when one is discussing a nation that has extremely deep cultural and economic ties with our own, and especially when said nation will be absolutely pivotal when it comes to addressing the global matter of climate change; to think that even in this context, some lunatics seem bent on war? Obviously, my new position will do little to dampen my own political independence and opinion (for the record, Sun Yat-Sen is my favourite Chinese political theorist of the twentieth century, along with Chen Duxiu not far behind).

The last week was spent in Sydney for Supercomputing Asia 2024, overlooking Darling Harbour with some impressive storms that made me feel good about being inside. With over 1,000 attendees it is obviously smaller than Supercomputing (US) or the International Supercomputing Conference (Germany, my preferred choice), but there was a very good sense of intimacy at this size. Conferences of this sort do have their share of high-level presentations along with some managerial-level buzzwords of where they think the industry is heading, which are sometimes less true than they would like the dollars to follow. "Artificial intelligence" and "quantum computing" were two particularly notable phrases this year, although with regard to the latter, I do note that more careful minds point out the difference between quantum computing (typically conducted on stock-standard HPC systems) and quantum computers (which are still, after many years, a bit of an experimental oddity at best).

The Conference was especially good for getting a sense of the power of some of the truly big iron. Representatives of the two largest systems, Frontier (no 1), Aurora (no 2), and Fugaku (no 4), were present. It is humbling to see systems that have more nodes than cores in the UniMelb system (which is no laggard), and pleasing to get a good grasp of the architecture. I was quietly pleased that my own comments about HPC microprocessor trends from 18 months ago were quite accurate, and I have a special nod to the Thai supercomputing centre which has really become an impressive national facility in its own right. A nice quirk of the conference was that the voice of Siri, Karen Jacobsen was the MC for the plenary sessions. There was, of course, the opportunity to talk to many vendors who are all doing some very interesting things and making plentiful offers, although I do note that there is often a pitch in favour of monopolisation ("we'll do everything for you") rather than interoperability.

For my own part, I presented a talk the "HPC Certification Forum: An Update", which was very well received (particularly the idea of using the skill tree as a teaching structure), and the poster "HPC Training Generates HPC Results". The evening hosted by Xenon at L'Aqua on Cockle Bay Wharf was very nice, and I happily managed to arrange a dinner to catch up with a few Sydney friends with John A., Julien G., Jiri B., and Adam B. all attending. Most importantly, however - as confirmed - HPC generates an enormous social return on investment, either in cost savings or new revenue. The current figure being quoted is around $77 per $1 funded - which makes it an ultimate infrastructure investment. Of course, the most recent pandemic is a case in point, and today I chaired the researcher meeting for Research Computing Services with Tom Karagiannis and team explaining how they built a massive database of antivirals for COVID-19 related molecular dynamics simulations. It is results like these that prove the worth of supercomputing; the infrastructure that touches and improves all our lives, and yet we can rarely notice.

It has been eleven days since I last posted a journal entry, but not without reason. Last Friday I submitted the final (c20K words) research essay for the Master's in Climate Change Science and Policy (MCCSAP) with the snappy title: "Climate Change Impacts, Adaption, and Just Financing for Small Developing Pacific Island Countries" (thank you to the hundreds of you on Facebook who sent their congratulations). My main aims and conclusions is that adaption is more important than mitigation in the Pacific and that adaption funding can come from the "loss and damages" clause in the Paris Accord. Today, with the others in the programme, I completed the final compulsory requirement, a presentation on research findings. Because resistentialism applies ("Les choses sont contre nous!") my laptop decided to die this morning (the charger is not powering the device). Fortunately, I had the foresight to (a) have a spare laptop at hand and (b) backup my presentation last night to Google Drive. Whilst the presentation was successful, I still have to get my laptop fixed or at least the data off it before I go to Supercomputing Asia next week. What is going to take a little more getting used to the fact that this is now the first time in five years that I have not been a full-time student and a full-time worker simultaneously.

Whilst most of the last fortnight has seen me buried in finishing this research essay and presentation, I have had the opportunity for some social occasions. Last night Nitul and his mother took me to join the studio audience for The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, which I confess I knew very little about not being much of a TV watcher - but it was very entertaining! Much of Sunday was spent with Mel S., for the Fitzroy implementation of the Midsumma Festival, and Friday evening was learning the Merrilyn New Vogue Dance from Nick with Liana and Julie. Several days ago, I travelled with Alison B. to attend Django's most excellent birthday party. I didn't quite get the chance to speak to everyone I wanted to (I did spend a lot of time with the host and Adam F), but I did make the acquaintance of one Ruby M., who has most remarkable alt-musical knowledge and taste well beyond their years. I have also had the opportunity to visit a certain consulate in the past fortnight for business purposes - but there are all sorts of complexities around that that deserve their own post once things have settled down a bit - and I have composed my own thoughts of the matter.

It has been a week since I completed another sunlap and it is only now that I have had the opportunity to put finger to keyboard in consideration. I feel blessed by the many friends who called, visited, or wrote to me on various social media. As for the day itself, I was determined to have a fairly quiet event. The day started well as Alison B., awoke me with her rather good French singing voice. For the day, I prepared a highly Pacific-themed lunch (my goodness, so much coconut and banana) for myself, Mel S., Liana F., and Julie A. which included ceremonial kava and accompanied by a ludicrous flashing disco ball I'd picked up a few days prior. Later in the week Liana also took me out to see "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Botanical Gardens. It was quite an excellent performance and the company did well to modernise and contextualise "the Mechanicals". Despite this, I honestly think the Mechanicals are a major flaw in the play. Comic relief in a faerie tale with confused relationships is already easy and the Mechanicals take up too much time from the magical story. Yes, I realise I'm editing Shakespeare. But that was not the only birthday gathering of the week; on Thursday night a sizeable number of old friends caught up with Simon S., who has just returned from a substantial trip throughout old Indochina and surrounds. We ended up at The Craftman's Corner in what turned out to be quite a late night. There was another birthday on the day as well; for them, I wrote a card and put it in a box, the best we humans often conduct little rituals in memory of absent friends.

Apart from all that I am now in the final stretch of my Master's research project, a 15000-word essay on impacts, adaption, and financing for developing Pacific small island states. It is, according to my style, painted with a broad brush across multiple disciplines and with a mountain of contemporary references across the subject matter. Calculating the impacts is a matter of scientific extrapolation, and whilst the developed world dithers on matters of mitigation, those impacts will only get worse. Chief among them are the storm surges and effects on coastal environments and especially potable water supply. Adaption to such impacts can involve major projects such as mangrove restoration, which has attracted some pretty big corporate sponsors. Suspicion of their motives is certainly warranted; after all, we are dealing with the systemic trajectories and vested interests of international political political economy. Ultimately, no matter what the moral justifications exist for torts, for reparations, the capacity for such states to receive the just compensation is limited by their capacity to wield international political power. The canary in the coalmine is a sacrificial bird.

Late last week I took a couple of days off work (they keep telling me to reduce my outstanding leave) to go on an Avatar Mountain business planning session with Anthony L., and Robin M., at the RACV Country Club in Healesville. We explored a number of the immediate environmental issues facing Pacific island states as well as longer-term projects, noting how the latter seems to have some fairly interesting players engaging in what appears to be a bit of a land grab under the supposed marketing of environmental protection. But of course, imperialism has always pretended that it was for the benefit of the colonised. The resort itself was of very good quality and in pretty nice surroundings; the bed came with its own tribble, and I was pleased to be woken by a baby magpie on the balcony. The following day was the AGM of the ACFS, where Anthony and Robin stepped down from their many years of service as president and secretary, respectively, and I had the opportunity to give a presentation on last year's conference in Suzhou, but also extend discussion to the much wider issue of China and the global climate which generated a lot of interest. I took the opportunity to suggest that the "Two Mountains Theory" of environmental protection coupled with economic development, also needed to be extended to a "Two Roads Theory" for international trade and infrastructure.

Outside of such formal activities, on Friday night Liana F., took me out to the "Motley Bauhaus Burlesque". The style was more arthouse burlesque, as fitting the venue and clientele, although I must say that the MC's outfit of an almost square-shouldered suit jacket, ruffle shirt, and giant red beret was getting pretty close to the classic Bauhaus clothing style and their sense of performance. The following night Julie A., who has just finished her psychology degree and was feeling in a celebratory mood, invited us out to Creature Bar, which has a good sense of horror-movie aesthetic and plenty of board games. We ended up playing Scrabble over a couple of wines; Liana, whose life has been associated with this game (her mother was a state champion), managed to score more than both Julie and I put together. Tonight Erica H., visited for dinner and a quiet evening of "Star Trek: Enterprise", which we have been slowly working through together. Although it is a bit of a middling series and story, and terribly socially anachronistic, one cannot help but be impressed by Jolene Blalock's performance and style as the Vulcan science office, T'Pol.

I try not to make too much of a fuss about the herald of the New Year and its arbitrary date, but the period does provide an opportunity for reflections on the past and commitments for the coming year. I saw the evening in with the delightful company, food, and conversation with Liza D., and friends several of whom are part of Sonidos Del Alma, the local Spanish-language choir. The end-of-year also saw the long-overdue release of an issue of RPG Review, which included two articles from myself ("The Law is not an Ass" and "RuneQuest Empires Review"), along with an article for the Isocracy Network, "Imperialism in the Pacific". In addition, I have already provided a "reflections and portents" review of my work life under the title "Another Year in Supercomputing", which outlines events such as the extensive training programme and its surprisingly good metrics, the inclusion of 'Spartan' in the Top 500, the successful project of the Cultural Working Group, and the reorganisation of RCS with a new role. Work, of course, takes up much of my time and I am very fortunate to have worthwhile employment, which I love, and satisfies all components of ikigai.

Another part of my life is that of a scholar. This year I completed the final two papers (using the Aotearoa New Zealand parlance) for the award of a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology (degree number seven), and eight for my new degree, a Master's in Climate Change Science and Policy. As much as grades are important, the psych papers were B's throughout the entire degree, and the climate science papers have all been A's except for one B. The climate science degree is, of course, an enthusiastic turning point in my life which dovetailed with an international trip this year to China in Suzhou to attend an environment conference. I have written about that at some length, and this is just the beginning of what will be a major effort in environmental engineering in coming years as I work alongside my well-connected and dear friends Anthony L., and Robin M. Of course, the first thing I must do in 2024 is finish my research project on financing climate adaption technologies in the Pacific isles and make a visit to said region!

As for the psych degree, I must admit, was heavily inspired by an interest in a challenging partnership over the preceding three years that ended in January. I am mostly saddened and disappointed with the events, but emotional extremes and instability result in words in great divergence from actions, which are the foundation of integrity. It was with some wry amusement that my best (and final) essay for the degree was on "Relationship Advice"; arguably I had so much recent practice. As for the degree itself, most of my applications are helping unfortunate souls on the BPD LoveOnes group on Reddit who are often desperately trying to make sense of their situation.

On a better note, I must also give recognition to certain friends who have given me joy and support in the past year; namely, Liana F., who despite some challenges in their own life, always finds time for me and has such reasonable advice for interpersonal matters, Erica H., steadfast and loyal beyond measure, and my favourite person when I want to watch Netflix, etc., Lara D., my distant Darwin friend with a wonderous engagement with the aesthetic in all dimensions, Mel S., with whom long walks, op shops, and trance music make for a better world, and Alison B., who has reintroduced me to fandom and goth social groups that I have somewhat neglected over the years: my thanks to all of you and I hope to spend much of the coming year in your company. You may not realise it, but you each have contributed a great deal for the recovery of my mental health which had some difficult periods in the previous years.

As for everything else, all is well. My physical health is fine, my financial health is fine (I am especially sensitive to the fact that this has been a horrible year for many). The Isocracy Network continues its work and I wrote several articles for the site this year, as does the RPG Review Cooperative. My language studies are now almost exclusively Chinese, French, and Esperanto. In addition to China, I also took interstate trips to South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland. I have modest operational plans across all these vectors for the coming year, all of which are quite achievable. In summary, 2023 was an excellent year for me personally even with the myriad of problems in the world; I'm hoping that 2024 will continue along this trajectory and I will endeavour to fill my time appropriately in a balanced manner: As Seneca The Younger quipped in De Brevitate Vitae ("On the Shortness of Life"): Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdidimus ("It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it").

As the EoY approaches I have found myself entertained with pretty much a week of pre-Xmas feasts. Starting last Wednesday was an EoY event for the Business Services Division at The Timber Yard, with several hundred people in attendance. I don't particularly like the venue at all, and the food was equivalent fare. It included the worst gnocchi I've had in my life, and this is from someone who rates that as a favourite dish. That Friday, Liana F., visited and I responded with "Filipino Night", which included a sweet potato and rice flour gnocchi in response, and a rather delicious chocolate biko. The following night I was taken out by Alison B. to Renee H.'s annual Midsummer Eve party, where there were some sixty people, many from the old Melbourne goth crowd. A special highlight was the individual expression of gratitude and wishes for the coming year. The day after that I had James N, Liana F., and Erica H., over for dinner after getting my hair shortened by James; all of us from the Perth goth scene of the later 1980s and all of us having haircuts from James (including his own). The day after that it was a visit to Anthony L., and Robin M., for more plotting for the great South Pacific venture of early next year.

Liana F., and I have also managed to sneak away for a couple of days to Phillip Island, staying at the perfectly reasonable Amaroo Park in Cowes. It was a pretty relaxing couple of days and included a beachside picnic, a bit of a dip in the ocean, a visit to the string of opportunity shops nearby (I picked up a small collection of Tintin books), a visit to the koala conservation reserve, and visits to Nobbies Point and Cape Woolamai. Apart from the aforementioned koalas, we spent some time in the company of some swamp wallabies, the famous Cape Barren geese, and a multitude of other birdlife. With the parade sold out, the only penguin we chanced upon was a youngster who had come out of its breeding box at Nobbies Point and had promptly learned an evolutionary lesson about coming out whilst the seagulls were still awake; "nature, red in tooth and claw", as Tennyson observed.

Officially I am on leave for the rest of the year, and I have done well so far not to even glance at the system or my work emails. However, I do have one more activity for tomorrow, to chair a delayed tech-talk and do a write-up of the activities of the Cultural Working Group which I have chaired for the past couple of years. Of course, when I am not working my nose is buried in research and as a result, I have made quite a reasonable start to my master's research project on "Climate Change Impacts, Adaption, and Finances for Developing Pacific Island Countries". The bulk of the findings will be conducted, of course, after the trip in the Pacific itself. But I have made a pretty good start on the aims, geography, demographics, methodology, and methods. I optimistically assigned myself the possibility of completing a draft by the end of the year. More realistically, I will complete more than half the content. But that is more than good enough.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that work had a slight restructure which was pretty sensible to facilitate future growth and better allocate duties. As a result of the restructuring, I received a little promotion last week in title and responsibilities, with further expansion planned for the coming year. It is a rather nice way to conclude the year especially following Spartan's long-delayed entry in the Top500. Apropos, work also hosted a retirement function last week for Terry B., who managed service delivery at our group and had been at the University for twenty-four years. It was an excellent little gathering and a great opportunity to catch up in person with several workmates, and another EoY event will be held for Business Services in two days.

Recaps are, of course, popular at this time of year. Duolingo's little green owl has informed me that for the second year in a row, my linguistic obsessions have landed me in the top 0.1% of that application, despite my misgivings of changes to their user-interface. It all comes just after I found myself in the monthly Diamond Tournament and ended up third - I don't need to do that again! Another site where I've spent a fair bit of time this year is Reddit; although a very long-term member (I created my account in 2010), I didn't use it until the last two years. It has the feel of the old USENET groups and tends to concentrate on communities, rather than individuals (unlike Facebook). The site gives a little recap of one's activities and in 2022 I was surprised to find myself in the top 1% of users. This year it is impossible to determine - although my "karma" has increased from 9,656 in 2022 to 65,252 in 2023 the new recap misses out on providing metrics on even on relatively easy items (e.g., karma increases, relative percentage, time spent on main subs).

In the more visceral world, a good portion of this weekend was spent in the company of Liana F., and Carla BL. Carla was unable to attend a rather beautiful concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre with piano, violin, and harp performances and gifted us the tickets. The following day we made our way over to her neck of the woods to engage in another Saturday of helping her move items from her old home to her new home and avoiding the wet weather, which always makes moving house difficult. The following day I finally put finger-to-keyboard and started composing the first draft of my research project on "Climate Impacts, Adaption and Financing for Pacific Island Developing Nations", being the final item of assessment for a master's degree on the subject. I am hoping to have that draft completed by the end of the year, revised in situ in January, and submitted in February.