TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

The Bruce Railway Station. Now a private residence. V isiting the almost forgotten town of Bruce reminds me of visiting Silverton back in 2007, except Silverton has been revived into a kind of arts town with a very famous pub. Bruce, on the other hand seems a little too spread out, and a bit too out of the way to make a similar 'arts' kind of revival. Bruce's Pub appears to be an art studio with signs of restoration work in progress. The main part of town appears to be the Bruce railway station (now a private residence) and a pub, also privately owned and possibly was, or still is, and artist studio. Other buildings and homesteads are set fairly wide apart, and are mostly privately owned homes. You don't get much sense of being in a town as such. I'm told there are approximately 14 local residents/families? Once earmarked to be a commercial centre, Bruce fell by the wayside after successive floods and drought in its early years. Obviously the railway line is no lo...

While this is an AI image of me, I can assure you I write all of this blog myself with no help from AI at all. I 'm afraid this may be an uninteresting article, three days before Christmas, for the sole purpose of not missing my weekly post to this blog. I'm drawing a blank on what to write about so... I settled on doing a review of posts for the year. Read on at your own discretion. Starting 2025 I introduced my new Resident Dragon Daily Cartoon series that grew out of a daily drawing habit I had started six months earlier. As I write this I've sketched about 335 cartoons, and digitally inked just over 50 of them. Initially I was writing about the new US President   but I stopped covering US politics back in March of this year, because I was tired of giving the current US president any attention at all. So I won't. Let me know when you elect a proper leader. Since 2025 was an Australian Federal Election year I took a deep dive on looking into our political landscape...

The footbridge from which the gunmen primarily conducted their attack (pictured in 2019) By Philip Mallis from Melbourne - Pedestrian bridge across carpark, Bondi , CC BY-SA 2.0 , Link A s I write this, it is the day after the 2025  Bondi Beach Shooting . Sixteen people were killed, including one of the two gunmen, and 42 others injured. I feel for anyone who had to live through this, and particularly anyone who was injured, or died from a criminal act by cowards. I'm not going to speculate, or even give air to the gunmen's motives, nor am I going to contextualize their targets. While neither are irrelevant, people will use one or the other to pick a side. Use it to justify their spin on the day's events. Use it to create division. Whatever you may think about globalization there is one truth that should be global, without question. The human right to life. In my opinion, the moment you are causing people to lose lives with purposeful violence or attack, is the moment your...

My home made 'curb' board slider. S eason 02, Episode 01 of my ten part, Second Sunday Skate Sessions Series is here. I'm still working to master the tricks of Braille Skateboarding's Skateboarding Made Simple Volume One, however, this season will be more focused on my 'curb' Board Slider, that I built, and seeing what tricks I can learn on that. If you're actually interested in following my full progress of relearning to skateboard, the first season can be viewed in these posts: Introducing the Second Sunday Skateboard Sessions - Doing Less to Skateboard More Second Sunday Skateboard Session Ep 2 - Some Improvements Second Sunday Skateboard Session Episode 3, 4, and 5 - Definitely Seeing Progress Second Sunday Skateboard Session Episode 6, 7, and 8 - Shuv-its On Lock (Pretty Much) Second Sunday Skateboard Session Episode 9, and 10 - Shuv-it Revelation and Did I Improve? In this episode I do a quick run through of Skateboarding made simple tricks just to sh...