rendering // april 2026
zetland, ocean swims, ninajirachi, and glass animals
the sights of zetland
When I walk around Green Square in Zetland, I feel like I’m walking through a building prospectus - one of those glossy 3D renderings zip-tied to a construction fence, with a few CGI humans for completeness.
Everything is either under construction or recently opened. Map routes haven’t been updated with new streets, and I once spent 10 minutes waiting for a bus I didn’t know had been diverted to a laminated piece of paper taped to a pole 500m away.
The neighborhood feels young. It has convenience, but no memory. The demographic consists of young families and professionals, and international students with $$$. I’m not surprised. It’s a nice place to live and a bus ride from the only three places you need to be in your 20s: university, the city, and the beach.
Within a ten minute walk, there’s woolies, a primary school that doubles as a late-night basketball court, a swimming pool, infrared gyms, DOGS, molly tea (opening soon), a train station straight to the airport, lime bikes, an underground library, and a huddle of Year 9 geography students beside it ready to learn about “urban renewal.”
Green Square was an industrial hub, and it’s now a mixed-use, high-density, sustainable residential and commercial hub. In 100-200 words, how do you feel about that?
riding a rip into the ocean
highlights from my first ocean swim event:
being dragged out by a rip… when you’re chilling in the water, you don’t want to be caught in a rip current and spit out in the middle of the ocean. but when you’re racing, it feels like riding a rainbow boost pad in mario kart, or speeding through a water slide. euphoric.
overtaking someone else :)
seeing fish
swimming against the waves and not knowing if you’re making any progress
realising you are, because the sand has disappeared beneath you, and there’s a vast dark NOTHING below. how deep is the ocean?
zig-zagging towards the inflatable marker buoys because you don’t know how to sight properly
wondering if sharks would come and eat the fish you saw earlier, and then trying not to think about sharks while swimming in the ocean, but hey there’s so many other swimmers and they’ve stationed lifesavers around for the event, and also sharks are tagged these days, and the weather’s been good all week, and yeah ok just focus on the swim
realising you’re on the crest of a wave and can see the beach pavilion
getting lil power boosts back to shore
laying on the sand after the event, shivering in the sun, googling symptoms, and having “mild hypothermia” show up in the results
post-swim sausage sizzle and it’s only 10AM
live music through a screen
When I’m at a concert, and I see some tall person holding their phone up the entire time, I’m like why. come on man, please just put the phone down, I didn’t pay to watch this show through your glass screen, when are you even going to watch that back??
And yet, a good chunk of my music taste has been shaped by phone recordings from strangers on the internet. I have the biggest respect for people with steady hands and decent audio, as does the YouTube comments section it seems.
Most recently, I’ve been looping through Ninajirachi’s unreleased collaborations from Coachella 2026. I’m waiting for WannaCry with Porter Robinson to go viral and am placing my bets it’ll be released on May 12, an easter egg for the security nerds in the room. It’s been stuck in my head for days, so I recreated the first verse on the piano to get it out.
All of human history converged so you can tune into multiple Coachella stages while cooking lunch at home in Sydney.
Of professionally recorded live shows, my favourite is this rain show by Glass Animals. A friend sent it to me after I was worried it’d rain for their show on the Sydney Opera House forecourt. After watching it, I was almost disappointed that it didn’t rain.
“I’m pretty sure God was watching this performance and helping with the special effects”
(see: the perfectly placed thunder at 3:12)