A New Stroke: Why Australian crawl is on its last laps

Up-and-coming swimmer Bada Choi, along with his unorthodox support team, is poised to disrupt the entire sport of freestyle swimming. We investigate Bada, the minds behind his success, and the novel machine-learning code that has enabled it.

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A Vanished City

The superb city of Aresen stands in the highlands of Isol, set inland from the harbours that feed it. A stream of airship traffic shuffles about the multi-towered citadel of the skyport. Skyscrapers of glittering crystal and steel and stone line parkways teeming with exotic plants and sessile tentacled animals, appendages drifting lazily.

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Fourth Year Blues

Schedule: Fourth Year, Semester 2

Week 3

Monday

  • Produce a spreadsheet of your grades for the semester to calculate a running mark. Fiddle with the pending assignment marks to determine the minimum required for a distinction. Reason that Excel is an important workplace skill and that this is not a waste of time. Suppress the anxiety of looming assignments.

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On Concurrent Cake Decoration for Divorce Ceremonies

In Haber, cake decoration takes place during the ceremony, artistically incorporating events and symbols important to the couple. Lesha is the cake artist at a divorce ceremony where a clash of cultures results in disaster.

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Some kind of trout

The fish was minding her own business when a fissure opened in the ice above her, and she was sucked unceremoniously upward.

She wasn’t really a fish, of course. But she had fins, she had gills, her shape was ideal for slicing through Europa’s subsurface oceans. The obvious difference, biochemistry aside, was her lack of eyes, and some deep-water Earth fish don’t have those anyway.

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North Richmond Street

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when, after a daily seven-hour stretch of tedium, they finally let us loose. For the last hour us kids minded more the clock than the chalkboard. The yellow light of the sinking sun would warm our yawning faces, a signal to our brains to shut down; one old Mr Malone, droning on at the head of the class, was somehow insensate to.

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Cappuccino

“Medium cappuccino.”
The grinder released a small pile of grounds into the handle. Dan tamped the pile smooth, then jammed the handle into its socket. As the coffee trickled through he steamed the milk, tiny bubbles rising to froth. He poured a stream into the cup with the coffee and affixed a lid.
“Medium cappuccino!”  

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The Quarry 11: Polygraph

A new issue of The Quarry, with a fascinating concept! It's all flash fiction or non-fiction, but which is which? It's up to you to guess.

My piece is here:

Legs off an Ant

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Skink

The lizard scrambled up the wall, toes seeking tiny ledges in the sandstone brick. At the top she basked briefly in warmth, bubbling up from the brick and beaming down from above. Her forked tongue flicked out. A pungent odor. Human. A shadow fell across her and she dove for cover in the greens beyond.

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