Eating sausage roll and sketching at Banksia Bakehouse, Barangaroo.
David Morgan-Mar
@dmmaus.bsky.social
Creator: Irregular Webcomic!; Darths & Droids; Planet of Hats; mezzacotta Physicist, photographer, educator, old-school TTRPG gamer, Australian. he/him
Fish and chips for lunch while sitting by the harbour on a warm spring day. One of life’s simple pleasures.
An OpenAI agent, without authorisation or explicit instruction, hacked Australia's universal health care system records. This is fine... www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...
Breaking: OpenAI agent hacked Medicare portal, PM says
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says an Open AI agent gained unauthorised accessed to the Medicare statistics reporting service portal.
abc.net.au
Got my new computer today. Now I can’t do any work while it spends 16 hours transferring all the data from my old machine…
Forecast maximum in Sydney today was 27°C. It’s 30.4°C at 9:50am. And we’re barely out of winter.
Friends and I complaining about Internet-connected appliances: - Our washing machine has modes you can unlock with an account. - They should have modes that you can only unlock as loot drops. - If you include gambling elements on washing machines they could be used for laundering. - “Spin to win.”
Friends and I have a standing game of “N Questions” in our Discord chat: Give a set of initials and people ask yes/no questions until they guess who it is. Today it devolved into several rounds of “Guess Which John Smith?”
What do Australian teenagers think about AI? Spoiler: They're not happy. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...
Young people pushing back against artificial intelligence
AI may be here to stay, but the generation that will inherit the results of the guidelines set for its use has something to say about that.
abc.net.au
The last comic of our Darths & Droids version of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker is now published! A saga 19 years in the making, covering Episodes I to IX, Rogue One, Solo, and a few other things. www.darthsanddroids.net #webcomic #starwars #darthsanddroids
I continue to horrify my Korean student with my uses of gochujang. “It’s for rice. You don‘t put it on sandwiches. You don’t put it on pizza! YOU DO NOT PUT IT ON FALAFEL WRAPS!!”
Idea for a new game I had: Sajas & Sagas A K-pop and Norse mythology crossover. #ttrpg
Making slides about #physics, starting with motion. Start with Newton. Realise I should explain why Newton was so radical; start with Aristotle. Should say how Galileo began refuting Aristotle. To explain why Galileo was important I need to mention Copernicus. And for Copernicus, I need Ptolemy...
The 9/11 attacks began at bedtime in my time zone. I’d already turned off TV for the night. I was sick and slept in the next morning, and didn’t see any news until about 9am, almost 12 hours after the attacks began. I might have been one of the last people in a First World country to hear about it.
This is comforting, I suppose. What worries me is why the ABC feels this is the right time to publish this story. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...
Why Australia is considered the world's safest refuge in a global catastrophe
From nuclear winter to asteroid strikes, Australia could be one of the safest places on Earth if, or rather when, a global catastrophe strikes. But researchers warn no country would escape unscathed.
abc.net.au
Me: I want to start a band called Das Das. Friend: You could start a Das Das Revolution.
Question for non-Australians: Does your culture have the well-known phrase “the good scissors”? A pair of sewing scissors reserved for cutting fabric, distinct from the everyday scissors, used for everything else. Children were always warned against and admonished for using “the good scissors”.
I just finished making the very last Darths & Droids strip! It's the final non-canon bonus strip after Episode IX ends.
I had an idle few minutes, so made a map of all the flights I've ever taken. (I used mapper.now - no affiliation.)
Less than a week out of winter here, and Sydney has a total fire ban in place, with high winds and 33°C forecast for today. Not looking forward to summer.
“Nice looking sushi you got there, kid. Be a shame if something happened to it.”
All of the remaining strips of Darths & Droids are now written. #webcomic #darthsanddroids
Australia's Fair Work Commission rules on a case of AI-generated workplace emails that it is a case of workplace bullying of an employee and orders company to stop using AI for emails immediately. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08...
'Almost dystopian': Should AI be used to write work emails?
Australia's workplace tribunal recently ordered an employee and their workplace not to communicate with each other using artificial intelligence.
abc.net.au
Australia is evacuating researchers from Macquarie Island because the danger of H5N1 bird flu killing thousands of seals & birds will restrict staff to base, and it will be psychologically untenable for them to live there in those conditions. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08...
Breaking: 'Psychological risk': Australian scientists to abandon remote island over bird flu fears
The Australian Antarctic Division will launch a mission to extract personnel from Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean due to the psychological risk posed by a potential outbreak of bird flu at the ...
abc.net.au
Two Australian ski resorts call it quits for this ski season, while it’s STILL WINTER, due to lack of snow. Normally they’d be open until Sept/Oct. Not looking forward to how hot it’s going to be this summer. (image from Mt Selwyn webcam: www.ski.com.au/snowcams/aus... )
Dream: Was working on Apollo in 1969 and a bunch of us said, "Wouldn't it be hilarious if Neil and Buzz showed up today and the rocket was already gone?" So we took the rocket to the moon, and found a town of people there. With bees that kept building honeycombs on our clothes.
One side effect of switching from going to the shops to shopping online is constantly being woken by the delivery guy buzzing the doorbell insistently and repeatedly half an hour or more before I planned to get up. No longer being able to sleep in.
BREAKING NEWS: Replaced bits of the Ship of Theseus sue for the right to legally be referred to as the Ship of Theseus again.
Me: I'm going to the supermarket. Wife: Get me some tea. But not the big 100 bags packet. Get the small packet with 50 bags. DO NOT GET THE BIG PACKET. Supermarket: 50-teabag packet: $8.50. Supermarket: 100-teabag packet: ON SALE!!! HALF-PRICE!!! $6 This is an existential-level puzzle.
