Recently I’ve been playing around with AI-generated images. This is far less impressive than it may sound: there’s a small community on Twitter and elsewhere doing this stuff already, many using scripts and tutorials which mean you don’t need any more skill than the ability to log in to Google Colab, type in some keywords […]
To mark May Day, the Fleet Air Arm Museum, @FleetAirArmMus, tweeted about the Royal Navy’s first rigid airship, which was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in 1911 in an attempt to match Germany’s Zeppelins: I was surprised by the comment about the airship’s name. Probably because of its brief, non-flying existence, it’s known by a
A few weeks back I previewed my cohosting of the 1943 Disney film Victory Through Air Power for History at the Movies Australia and Aviation Cultures Mk.V. Both the conference and the livetweeting went splendidly (I think!), but I didn’t get around to lazyblogging the latter… until now. The evening began with the half-hour short
Yesterday marked the centenary of the founding of the Royal Australian Air Force on 31 March 1921. I celebrated in the usual way (buying books, talking about myself):[tweet id=”1377043532775493636″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044249552678913″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044649374715908″ conversation=false]But I also decided to use the occasion to talk about something that’s missing from the usual RAAF origin story, and that’s
Back in the depths of last winter (and the great Melbourne pandemic lockdown of 2020) I had great fun as the co-host for the Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus) livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing it again, this time along with James Kightly and Daniel
The Aviation Cultures Mk.V online conference is just a week away! A lot of activity is going on behind the scenes, but all you need to know is that the extended program (including a list of presenters and presentations) is here, and that you can buy tickets (25 AUD, or 10 AUD unwaged/student/COVID-affected) from here.
Exactly six months ago today, I posted about some aerial theatre in the time of coronavirus. That was the first time I mentioned the pandemic on Airminded, and it is, of course, still here (Victoria is — hopefully — nearing the end of its second wave, with 42 new cases reported today, down from a
Here’s my contribution to last night’s livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for #HATMAus. It was fast, furious and not always particularly accurate — much like the film itself… Spoilers follow (though equally there are also a lot of tweets that don’t make sense without seeing what was on the screen at
At 8pm AEST/GMT+10 this Sunday, 30 August 2020, I’m co-hosting the Australian version of Historians At The Movies (#HATMAus) along with fellow historians Joel Barnes and Chelsea Barnett as we livetweet the 2004 science fiction film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and dissect it for fun and (alternate) history. With an all-star star
https://twitter.com/Airminded/status/1288659222431817729?s=20 I’ve made a new Trove bot to accompany @TroveAirBot and @TroveAirRaidBot: @TroveUFOBot. The name is somewhat misleading, since it doesn’t search Trove Newspapers for the keyword ‘UFO’ at all, which turns out to be a bad keyword. Firstly, it’s so short that it frequently turns up whenever the OCR is bad and a random
