I think a wombat would be cool to have around the place, assuming domestication allowed for some level of trainability.

One of my old uni lecturers was very keen on the idea of domesticating the spotted quoll. He reckoned they would make a great pet for those who would otherwise get a cat (a convincing argument actually).

My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that’s a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.

It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it’s always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it’s even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I’d even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the ‘usable with one hand’ criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.

I’d also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that’s a pretty niche thing to be after.

North orientation is the standard for when just browsing a map, but when in navigation mode applications usually rotate the map to match your direction of travel. If your car has a Android Auto/Carplay head unit or one otherwise capable of displaying maps it will also likely default to autorotating the map when driving even without a destination input.

This behaviour does make it easier to distinguish relative directions to your position (roads on your left as you drive will be on the left on the map and so forth) but also takes away an easy way to orient yourself on a scale broader than the limited section on the screen.

It’s what the Americans call coriander leaves. If you haven’t come across that name either it is indeed a herb.

I reckon Port Arthur is a solid contender with its low population of 251 (known for being the site of a mass shooting that led to significant changes in Australian gun laws). It is fading in name recognition as time goes on though, after all that was approaching 30 years ago and lots of people have been born since then.

My top pick however would be Bega with its population of 5013 and the name recognition the cheese factory has brought. It’s hard to go past a name that’s printed on cheese (and assorted other products now) in the vast majority of supermarkets across Australia, and they even export overseas to get a bit of international cachet.

Fair enough, it does have associations there. Pretty sure I’d toss y’all in the same basket though if I heard anyone trying to make it a thing…

Why bother with importing y’all when we already have yous (or youse depending on how you want to spell it)? Or you could just treat ‘you guys’ as gender neutral, it effectively is these days with how people use it.

Looks like I could buy one for $55k (AU) - would be kind of fun to have actually and cheaper than a lot of new 4wds. Pity some wowsers had issues with it running around with a machine gun, I feel like that’d reduce traffic problems…

I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.

I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.

Far from the only one, I think there’s plenty which could plausibly be a duck. It’s just that most people seem to be going for one of these ducks:

Or one of these ducks:

instead of one of these ducks:

Reading the news while having breakfast, though it’s now on my laptop instead of the newspapers I started this habit with.

Nutbush City Limits might have a chance then, we’ll see whether Australian public schools are still teaching the dance in a couple of hundred years…