I’ve always been a strong believer in the ‘a reason, a season, a lifetime’ principle. If you haven’t heard of it: Spontaneous Concept Explanation!

Basically, the idea is that you have three kinds of friends: those who are in your life for a reason, such as school friends or clubbing friends; those who are in your life for a season, such as those who you used to hang out with a lot, but don’t any more; and those who are or friends for a lifetime, like that one school friend who you can not speak to for months and catch up with and it’s like nothing ever happens. Sure, now they drink instead of taking ecstasy, and smoke cigarettes instead of weed*, but they’re still a friend, and will be until one of you carks it.

The interesting thing is when you start to think about what happens to the amount of respect or trust or care that you hold for this person. Let’s think of them as actual measurable quantities.

In the first case, none of them peak particularly highly. You have a certain amount of each one for the person (probably significantly more when you’re drunk) but when the reason passes the feelings fade, and you’ve never placed a significant degree of trust on the person, or invested a significant amount of emotional resources in caring about them. As such, the result when the relationship ends isn’t particularly impressive – things change, people move on, the world turns, your bins get taken out on Fridays and your boss is still annoying.

In the third case, the issue never comes up – the respect, trust and emotional attachment that you’ve invested is never betrayed because the relationship (read: friendship) never ends, so no harm, no foul.

The interesting case is the second case, and it’s the stage that relationships have to pass through before we realize that they’re actually the third kind. In these cases, respect and trust and caring are more fluid. We may invest a certain amount of trust in a person, and then they do something that feels like a betrayal of that trust. And you know what?

That’s okay.

in this situation, we have two choices: we can walk away, end the relationship, and cut our losses; alternatively, we can reduce the amount of trust (in this case) that we have for the person, and then continue the ongoing process of testing how much trust we should be putting in the person in the first place.

Because trust, respect and caring aren’t earned in one fell swoop. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be. We give a little, we increase it slightly, and we see whether the other person rises to the occasion. Then, when we feel comfortable, we increase it a little more, and see what happens next. Thus, incrementally, we build friends from acquaintances.

And, although a betrayal of trust, respect or emotional investment may feel like the end of the world, this model suggests that it’s not – it’s actually the necessary outcome of testing a relationship. It’s the sign that we’ve reached the limit of what this person can give at this time.

But who knows what they’ll be ready for down the track! Keep on testing, keep on trusting, keep on respecting and keep on caring. Because you never know where someone will be in a month’s time, let alone a year’s.

*Note Bene: not based on reality. No, seriously.

Following the lives of eight teenagers who are on holiday in the Australian bush when the country is invaded by an unknown hostile army, the film is remarkably true to the opening novel of John Marsden’s acclaimed and highly successful series.

Caitlin Stasey is wonderfully strong as heroine and narrator Ellie Lynton, bringing a self command to the role that is sure to leave diehard fans of the novels satisfied and cry out for more. While her rather clipped Australian English seems slightly out of place in the country town of Wirrawee, it is sure to make her more accessible to filmgoers outside of Australia.

Lincoln Lewis and Rachel Hurd-Wood have a fantastic chemistry as Kevin and Corrie, playing off the subtleties of their relationship to be a believably tumultuous teenage couple. Lewis in particular brings a sweet sensitivity to the role of die-hard coward, making the moments of bravery among the most powerful in the film.

Possibly the most poignant performances in the film is that of Chris Pang, as reclusive Lee, who manages to steal several scenes without saying a word. The iron self-control that he shows alongside an admirable passion makes this one of the most restrained and moving performances I’ve seen from a young actor in a long time.

Even in a movie this dark and bloody, a healthy amount of comedy worms its way to the fore often through Andy Ryan, whose quirky, very Australian sense of humour and wonderfully comic timing bring a freshness and joy to a film that might otherwise threaten to overwhelm an audience with it’s dark subject matter. His description of his experience of the war beginning is blackly funnyand must be seen to be truly appreciated.

Of course, all of this would have been impossible without writer and director Stuart Beattie, of Australia and Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl fame. A self-proclaimed fan of the novels, Beattie says that he “made a movie that he would like to watch as a fan, and hoped that other fans would like it too.” Indeed, his devotion ti the film shines through the script, along with a puckish sense of humour that leaves his audience groaning (but in a good way).

Working closely with the cast to build a strong sense of community between them, he has taken a group of largely unknown and mostly Australian young actors and created at east a few unstoppable forces that should take the Australian film scene by storm – and created a stunning blend of Australian comedy and Hollywood blockbuster along the way.

Tomorrow When the War Began opens across Australia on September 2nd.

The number of names I have for people in my life is truly staggering.

Sometimes these names have power – for example, the patient/healthcare professional dynamic is important, in terms of trust, professionalism and the implicit knowledge gradient that it encapsulated.

Without the distinction between patient and healthcare professional, care is essentially impossible. I wouldn’t tell a guy on the street about the intimate details of my home life, but I expect it from my patients and clients, to a certain extent, every time I walk in through the doors of a clinic.

The name implies a pattern of interaction – pleasantries, history, evaluation, recommendation, implementation, farewell. Lather, rinse, repeat, for every monthly, yearly, n-ly appointment from here until the end of time.

Aside from the obvious benefits of expected patterns of interaction, the name also implies an obligation towards care. If I don’t want to be there, the name of ‘healthcare professional’ obliges me to be there, providing care and supporting my patient to the best of my ability.

However, this pattern of behaviour, while useful, has the fundamental drawback that it locks two people into a cycle that one of both may dislike or find unhelpful.

In healthcare, the advantages often seem to outweigh the disadvantages – and, indeed, a sizeable amount of research and development time has gone into ensuring that patient-healthcare worker interactions are useful and productive.

In more general interpersonal relationships, however, the question has to be asked – how much does this name reflect the relationship as it is, how much does it reflect the relationship as I’d like it to be, and how much difference is there between the two?

Particularly in complex, multicategorical relationships, are names or categories helpful or restrictive? Is it more useful to treat this person as my friend or my mother, particularly in a situation where different aspects of those two categories are coming to the fore? Is this person my coworker or my friend? What makes this person a boyfriend/girlfriend over a friend (besides the obvious physical aspects of an intimate relationship)?

Indeed, is the distinction necessary? I wonder whether we would be better off focussing not on what we should do, but on why we want to do – behaving in a manner that reflects that particular person, and the individual relationship that we have with them.

No rules. No labels. No holds barred.

No worries, mate!

At first sight, it should be a simple problem – write a web services backend to a provided HTML5 frontend to handle OAuth logins to a couple of different services, intelligently storing the authentication information and allowing posting to those services via the integrated frontend.

Oh, $DEITY was I wrong.

Firstly, OAuth has a kind of triple handshake thing going on that means that I have to reengineer the front end to load the required login pages and then handle the callback. Okay, that’s fine. Doable, if nothing else.

Then turns out that the thing that’s passed back isn’t the actual string that needs to be stored. Okay, background call to get the actual string, that’ll be fine.

Then, apparently those strings expire. Oops, nobody mentioned that. So, when they’re not valid any more, you have to pass back the original string and get a new one. But you can’t just use that, that would be silly, so both have to get stored.

Is it any wonder I’m pulling my hair out right now?

I sometimes wonder whether the purpose of an open standard is just to make it so everything is equally annoying. Which is helpful, I’ll grant them that.

The problem arises when the web frameworks that will eventually have to function within that system either aren’t set up to handle them at all or try to do too much for you.

For example, Grails has a beautiful OAuth plugin, which I’m sure works great for websites written in Grails, but which continually throws weird redirects and stuff around when I try and modify it. Cue several hours of rolling my own. Several hours I don’t have, I should add.

Ah, well – at least I don’t have to write separate handlers for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. If only flickr would get on the OAuth bandwagon, I’d be a happy man!

In the meantime, check out some of my current projects, including An Awkward Pause, Creative Innovation 2010 or The Hub Melbourne.

- DAemon

The world’s biggest short theatre festival, Short+Sweet roars into Melbourne this week with Short Sweet+Cabaret, its first foray into the world of cabaret performance.

Held at the home of cabaret in Melbourne, The iconic Butterfly Club, the short cabaret festival showcases emerging and established cabaret artists from around Melbourne and Australia generally. With 17 new works in total, each of only ten minutes, the shows are varied, exciting, fresh and innovative.

Packing 12 performances into two hours has been a challenge for the Butterfly Club, but the effort seems to have been worth it, with some very polished and promising performances on the opening night. A wide range of performances took to the stage, from classical cabaret takes on How To Dump Your Boyfriend to a quirky take on geek love in Face Value

Elenor Jane Adams’ absurdist take on superstardom, Little Miss Janey-May Dimples Presents: F**k You Shirley Temple, was the first great surprise of the night for me, with a strong storyline and an impressive commitment to her character. Elenor struck a nice balance between insanity and humanity, endearing herself to the audience in her brief time.

Melding politics with performance is never an easy task, but it’s one that Karin Muizneiks and Erin Newington attack admirably, with Hell’s Cabaret taking on crime, punishment and gay marriage in one 10 minute whirlwind. Although their performances were occasionally unfocussed, the concept is brilliant, and the girls have a great chemistry and two highly expressive voices.

Emerging cabaret artists can come from anywhere, with Tom Dickins’ Cab-O-Rage sat squarely in the night-life of Ballarat. A well-fleshed out story with clever staging, the piece suffered slightly from nerves, but was nonetheless engaging, and promising for the future of cabaret outside of metropolitain Melbourne.

Hayley Ramsay’s hilarious portrayal of a drunken bridesmaid in Not So Secret Bridesmaid’s Business was a particular highlight, with a solid script, good use of music to advance the story and a great sense of comic timing. I hope to see this piece again, if only for the hilarious bridesmaid’s dress!

With a wide range of styles, stories and skill levels, Short Sweet+Cabaret is a great showcase of new and emerging artists in the Melbourne cabaret scene. Fun, exciting and at times touching, each show of the festival is a pot-pourri of creativity.

Following the story of a family watching their father die of cancer, All My Sleep And Waking is an in-depth look at what it means to be a carer for someone in the later stages of their life.