Well, I’ve been a busy, busy beaver.

The import­ant news is that I have pre­view copies of the Unique Trav­el­ler premier issue and it looks fant­astic. The art dir­ector is a genius. The die-cut cover works exactly how I wanted it to. The only embar­rass­ment is that des­pite prom­ising me oth­er­wise, it looks like con­trib­utor pay­ments have been held back until pub­lic­a­tion after all (remem­ber the delay? We were sup­posed to pay early to avoid writers wait­ing for months after com­plet­ing work… A thou­sand apo­lo­gies for that.)

It’ll be on sale in news­agents Monday morn­ing, stuck to the back of Mel­bourne magazine, then in a month it’ll be on sale in its own right.

There’s been flur­ries of crazi­ness sur­round­ing the com­pany: at the same drinks we cel­eb­rated having early copies of the mag, the boss announced Mel­bourne mag’s designer has taken a job in Sydney at Pole, my designer is taking a full-time pos­i­tion in his stead and two of the staff, includ­ing the Mel­bourne mag editor, are preg­nant. Lots of changes.

I also remembered to invest­ig­ate the human right’s degree I was talk­ing about a while ago: The European Mas­ters’ Degree in Human Rights and Demo­crat­isa­tion – not sure about that last bit, but still. Looks inter­est­ing – I love the idea that the first bit of it is at the Uni­ver­sity of Venice and then the second half is at any of 27 par­ti­cip­at­ing European uni­ver­sit­ies. How­ever, applic­a­tions for this year’s cohort have closed… maybe next year?