The Slow Train to Sydney

I am writing this month’s newsletter on the eleven hour overnight train from Sydney back to Melbourne. I’ve just had a lovely little holiday in Sydney before exam season kicks off, and I thought the train was the most sensible way of getting there and back. When people have asked my reason for choosing the train, I’ve given reasons ranging from the economic (the train costs around $80) to gonzo journalism (what kind of freaks are getting the train) to my fear of flying. It’s not a real phobia, but for a process so streamlined and routine, I don’t think we acknowledge how ungodly flying is. As the plane speeds up on the runway, just before it leaves the ground, I always get this terrible sense of foreboding. It’s so clear to me that Mother Nature had no intentions of you ever leaving the ground, and in that moment you can feel she’s trying to keep you down with all her might. Then the plane gets faster until it’s yanked into the sky, which always feels like tying a loose tooth to a door and slamming it shut.

Landing isn’t much nicer. Even the most graceful landing feels like a crash. But after being lowkey deported from Vietnam, I’ve become as accustomed as you can to being ripped from the earth.

Really, I wanted to get the train because I was curious. Everyone I’ve told I was getting the train was so concerned for me. One of this people had actually taken the train to Sydney before. She said they never turned off the overhead light and it was so cold she almost froze. But she also showed up to a four day music festival with nothing but an empty backpack. I simply had to find out for myself.

So I was slightly disappointed by my journey there. It was so unremarkable. The person sitting next to me was friendly, and the staff were friendly when they let her know she was in the wrong seat. I watched a few downloaded Youtube videos and had half of one of those gummies they prescribe to insomniacs. It wasn’t a restful sleep, I was tossing and turning, but I still got a good seven hours. Every time I woke up in the night there were a different number on board. It seems like a lot of people get the train from Wagga Wagga or get off at Campbelltown. Then after all that, there was an odd hour on the other end and I was in Sydney.

It wasn’t lux. The XPT trains are based on a British train from the 1970s. But considering one of my Melbourne friends that I was meeting in Sydney had to get a 4am flight to land at the same time I alighted, I’d say it was a pretty good deal.

Melbourne to Sydney is the sixth busiest flight corridor in the world. If it isn’t obvious, Melbourne and Sydney are not the sixth and seventh biggest population centres in the world. Instead, we are just two big cities that haven’t figured out that if you built a half-decent train people will use it.

If the government spent half the money it uses on tax carve-outs for Qantas as it did on the train, it would be very nice service. Focusing on how much cheaper the train ticket is makes it seem like the rail is strictly worse than flying. But beyond not needing to contend with the wraith of god, there are lots of little benefits to rail. You don’t have to bother with take off and landing, you can get up as soon as the train leaves the station. You’re going from Southern Cross to Central, not from Tullamarine to Sydney Airport, so you don’t need to pay to get to the airport. And you arrive in the city centre: once I was in Sydney, I was at the hotel in ten minutes.

People assume that the only way to cash in on these benefits is by building a hugely expensive high speed rail. Yes, it would be epic to get a bullet train and be in Sydney in a few hours, but given how many business cases have been published and tossed out over the last few decades, I’m not hopeful. Instead, a slightly less slow, slightly more comfortable train would do a lot of good. As it stands, the service leaves a lot to be desired. A place to plug in my phone would be nice, as would on-board Wi-Fi. You travel through some pretty remote parts of NSW, so reception is about as spotty as it is on the plane. You could also probably shave off a few hours with slightly better tracks and slightly better signalling. My train was delayed by 50 minutes.

But until you enter high speed territory, there isn’t that much benefit to going faster. I got the overnight train, so there’s no point going quicker than eight hours anyway. It’s pretty baffling then that the new XPT trains that are being introduced next year are removing the sleeper cabin entirely. There’s been very little uproar, probably because most people don’t realise there even are sleeper cabins. But there is: one car in every set has lie-down beds. You have to book months in advance, and you can only book over the phone for some reason. I didn’t elect for it because it would have been an extra $120 each way, but having a bed would be so much nicer than flying.

I’m not sure why the government doesn’t want you to get a good nights rest. My guess is that they view the train as charity, which tends to happen when public transport service falls out of popular use. Rather than an economically viable service that people want to use, the perception becomes that it is primarily for people who can’t afford the plane or for towns too small to have their own airport. The sleeper cabins are much lower capacity than sitting cabin, so more seats means more supply means cheaper tickets.

It’s just a shame, really. I’m not sure if I’d get the train again, but there’s a not too distant world where the train is a no-brainer.

Sydney

Sydney is so beautiful. It feels slightly trite to say that, because it’s very obvious that Sydney is beautiful. That’s probably why the Melbourne-Sydney rivalry is so one-sided, because Sydneysiders have security in their city. On the train in, I was sat next to a very nice Korean girl on a Working Holiday Visa who was coming back to Sydney after a week In Melbourne. She had that very charming thing where her English wasn’t perfect but she still said ‘no’ with a very broad Australian-accented ‘naur’. She said that everyone she met from Melbourne was connected to Melbourne, more proud of their identity civic identity than their national identity. I told her that’s exactly how I feel.

I wouldn’t say I’m jealous of Sydney. But me and my other travel companion Zara basically spent the entire weekend going somewhere and loudly exclaiming how much better it is in Melbourne. Newtown? This is like Chapel Street but worse! And what a low bar that is! Ha! — Okay, we maybe we were a bit jealous.

Really, comparing suburbs felt like comparing apples to oranges. But one area that did feel similar enough to compare were both city’s CBDs. Sydney’s city centre felt like an alternate reality where the Victorian government never implemented their Postcode 3000 strategy. In the 1990s the Kennet government made changes to try and get people to actually live within the CBD, rather than just work there. This meant incentives for developers and converting offices into apartments. And it worked. In the late 80s, there were only 2,000 people living in the CBD, compared to the 55,000 who live there now. That’s compared to Sydney’s 16,000 CBD residents.

One of the initiatives was pedestrianising Swanston Street, in a project known as Swanston Walk. Looking back at design proposals from 1992, you can see the vision for the new car-free Swanston Street was a little more bougie. Something similar to the Bourke Street mall, with boutiques and al fresco dining all the way up Swanston. But the planner can only have so much say, and I don’t think you can inject a 53,000 people into a space and successfully predict the outcome. Swanston Street turned out much more chaotic than anyone probably anticipated, and I love it for that. I love how there’s always a protest outside the State Library, always a busker playing Creep by Radiohead, and always Falun Gong fighting against organ harvesting in China. Sydney’s CBD, comparatively, was still mostly office workers. We couldn’t even find anywhere to eat at 10:30pm so we had to microwave soup from 7/11.

Boggle Updates

I wanted to say thank you to everyone for playing BeatMeAtBoggle. My database is telling me there’s been 7,820 individual games, which since it launched 58 days ago, is around ~135 games a day! I’m pretty sure that includes a bit of double-counting, but still, that completely exceeds any expectations I’ve had.

I got a worrying email on the 31st of June saying I’ve exceeded the free database allowance. I’m going to push an update this month to make the database calls more efficient, but it does leave me thinking about monetisation. I am pretty anti advertisements, so I’m thinking I might start a Patreon, and if you subscribe you get access to every previous Boggle. How does that sound? If anyone has any better ideas let me know.

Music

Mitski at the Opera House

Nominally, the Sydney trip was to see Mitski perform. She was only doing 3 (later extended to 5) shows in Sydney, which would also be her first time performing in Australia. The Opera House is easily the most beautiful building I’ve ever been inside. There’s a very good episode of 99% Invisible about the Opera House, and how it is a near-miracle that it ever got built at all.

Even though I haven’t been a huge fan of her last two albums, Mitski was still amazing. I didn’t realise her fan base was so young, the girls sitting next to me were both teenagers, and the girl sitting next to Zara (we didn’t book tickets together) was literally at her first concert ever. She was also on a Hinge date, randomly. Beforehand, I wondered if the tone would be more like a rock show or more like an opera. It turns out I was wrong both ways, because it felt more like a K-pop show. In some ways, it was annoying that the audience was so ravenous, but I also enjoyed their very real passion. Hearing everyone sing along to Francis Forever made my cry.

My Live-coding Performance at UniMelb

This was my first live-coding performance outside of the Code Jam program, and my first solo performance. My friend Hannah asked if I wanted to be part of UniMelb’s “Stress Less Week”. Basically, the uni wanted to create a relaxing environment before exam season kicks off. This was a challenging pitch for me, given my live-coded music has been very stress-forward.

I thought I’d take the low-stakes nature of the assignment and do something a little experimental. I wanted to trigger video samples from code, but I couldn’t find any software that did exactly what I wanted. I ended up coding something myself that could take midi input and trigger a snippet of a video. I think I have a real affinity for long song titles because I chose to sample LCD Soundsystem’s New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down and Charli xcx’s I think about you every single day and night (This is an unreleased B-side from her upcoming project.)

I’ll explain how the performance set up worked but be warned it’s a little bit stupid. There were no less than five pieces of software involved. I had Strudel sending midi data to Chrome which was running the website I coded from a dev server. Then Chrome’s audio was being sent to Blackhole, which was also getting Strudel’s audio. Both of Chrome’s and Strudel’s audio were then being routed into Ableton, which was being routed out to an audio interface. I then had OBS screen recording Chrome’s window and overlaying that with the Strudel window.

In the end, OBS kept causing Chrome to lag for some reason, probably because my skinny MacBook couldn’t handle it. So I never ended up sharing my code. That is kind of sacrosanct in the live-coding world, so to the community, I apologise.

In the end, I got a very nice response from those who watched. I got to do two performances of it, which made it fun to change things slightly and improve on certain things. I look forward to more live-coding in the future.

Tyla – Make Me Sweat and Motivation

I’ve been listening to Tyla’s songs Make Me Sweat and Motivation. Except I haven’t been, because that’s not what those songs are called. Those songs are called “Water” and, uh— “PUSH 2 START”?? Easily the two worst song titles I’ve ever heard. Someone needs to let Tyla know how to name a song.