Here at No Award, we embrace and promote conscious consumption (and Steph is always willing to talk about it because that’s her job and she loves it). In The Bottom Line: Patagonia, North Face, and the Myth of Green Consumerism, you can have a read about winter sporting wear Patagonia’s business practice of minimising consumer purchasing as part of an overall strategy to make our society less disposable. BASICALLY THE BEST. It might not work as a strategy right now, but it’s pretty great.

Victorian Labor wins election by stealing the Greens’ strategy; also swears about Australian media and Lolstralia doesn’t blink.

This Idiot Senator Wore A High-Vis Mining Vest In Parliament And Got Torn To Bits By Everybody.  This is old, but totally worth it.

It is worth noting at this point that Macdonald, who is both Australia’s longest-standing current Senator and a fully-grown man, is perfectly happy to stand in a chamber of Parliament and loudly advertise that he is literally sponsored by a corporation.

The terrible psychological consequences of our border policy for the naval personnel who implement it.

New Atheism, Old Empire – examining the way New Atheism just coincidentally overlaps with fascism and imperialism.  Warning for violent language in the quotes.

Tansy Rayner Roberts asks, Does Sex Make Science Fiction Soft?  A look at SF’s traditional wariness of romance, the division between “soft” and “hard” SF, sexism and intersectionality, and there’s also a reading list which might even inspire Liz to try once again to read romance.

It’s an inter-network battle to the death as newsreaders take up arms in … are Hunger Games comparisons considered tasteless in the wake of ABC cuts?  The important thing is that No Award is Team Lee Lin Chin.

30 Years of Hating Alison Ashley

On many levels Hating Alison Ashley is a farce of character. Erica Yurken is rude, self-centred and intoxicatingly megalomaniacal. Her delusions of grandeur are completely at odds with her life at Barringa East Primary School – a school of such disrepute that Erica laments its sole mention in the local newspaper, which occurred when a classroom burned down prompting the headline ‘Arson Suspected at Barringa East Primary’. In Erica’s Barringa East we see shades of Porpoise Spit, the depression-inducing town from the classic Australian film Muriel’s Wedding.

(a) I can’t believe Hating Alison Ashley is 30 years old; (b) that means it was already eight years old when I first read it, yet it felt totally fresh to my childhood eyes; (c) let’s pretend the movie — which transplanted the story to a high school and featured my nemesis Delta Goodrem in the title role — never happened; (d) I didn’t know that Robin Klein has suffered a stroke and can no longer speak or write — that’s very sad; (e) with details like Erica’s mother being a proud welfare cheat, I wonder how modern kids perceive this book?

The Best of Mike Bowers’ Brick Senate – Senate rules limit photography.  So The Guardian makes do with Lego.  Obviously.