How I create a ceremony
A music festival of one-hit wonders
Here’s my big idea for the day: A music festival of one-hit wonders.
No filler. No B-sides. Just back-to-back greatness.
A full festival, massive stadium PA system, but every song is only the one song you came for.
The band gets on stage, plays their one hit, then gets off stage.
My line-up for a One Hit Wonder Festival:
- Things of Stone and Wood – Happy Birthday Helen
- Bachelor Girl – Buses and Trains
- Lo-Tel – Teenager of the Year
- Amiel – Lovesong
- Gotye feat. Kimbra – Somebody That I Used to Know
- Nathaniel – You
- Orianthi – According to You
- Josh Abrahams feat. Amiel – Addicted to Bass
- Crazy Town – Butterfly (Epic will sub in for Shifty if needed)
- Len – Steal My Sunshine
- New Radicals – You Get What You Give
- Chumbawamba – Tubthumping
- Sir Mix-a-Lot – Baby Got Back
- Nena – 99 Luftballons (the German version only of course)
- Daniel Powter – Bad Day
- Toni Basil – Mickey
- Dexys Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen
- A Flock of Seagulls – I Ran (So Far Away)
- Southern Sons – Heart in Danger
- Blind Melon – No Rain
- Baz Luhrmann – Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) - yes I am serious this would be amazing
- Vanessa Carlton – A Thousand Miles
- Right Said Fred – I’m Too Sexy
- The Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star
- Rhubarb - Exerciser
🎟 One stadium. One song each. No fillers. Just pure one-hit-wonder gold from start to finish.
Make it happen, music industry.
I was asking for a Mac app recommendation from Claude but now I’m a Mac developer.
An ounce of originality is worth a pound of imitation.
– Orson Welles
There is only one thing worse than being imitated, and that is not being imitated.
– Coco Chanel
I sat next to a young honeymooning couple from Guatemala on my flight home to Tassie tonight.
They booked their entire Australia holiday based on ChatGPT planning their itinerary.
I added some local understanding to a few of the routes in Tassie they wanted, but it was a pretty good trip. Hamilton Island, Sydney, Tasmania, covering all their wants in the holiday.
If you haven’t figured out how AI is going to change your business or employment like it’s changing travel then you’re behind the eight ball.
I’d also love to have that conversation with you, particularly if you don’t know how ChatGPT figures out who and how to recommend what it recommends.
New blog post on my wedding celebrant website: The long and gradual cancellation of Josh Withers
The way we’re going here we’ll be on ICQ soon and I am here for it: Friendster is back.
My favourite Charles Bukowski quote is “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence.” Mainly because when you share it, some people are too confident it’s about them.
Today’s another one of those weird days in the best and most beautiful, yet also so strange, wedding industry. Sometime in a few years over a beer remind me to tell you the story about the Tasmanian Wedding Directory
My only experiences with electric vehicles are in renting them, and I rent quite a few as I travel.
The out-of-home charging infrastructure is bad.
Three stories from today:
- I’m staying at my mother-in-law’s home in suburban Gold Coast and the nearest public charging infrastructure is a 15 minute drive away. It’s got two charging bays, each time I visit there’s a queue.
- I had a long drive today and needed to charge in Brisbane before the drive. I get fee Chargefox charging with my Sixt rental but the best located charging station was at a BP. The app - BP Pulse - is yet another horrible corporate app that forgets logins, doesn’t work well, and the third BP app I have on my phone. The working charger didn’t work, and the second was pre-identified as not working. So once the “working charger” had not charged the charging cable was locked and would not come out of the car. The BYD Atto’s manual is electronic and requires the car have internet access. There are three methods to manually unlock, it took me to the third method.
- Charging station locations on Apple Maps and Google Maps sucks. Tonight I wanted to charge at a certain charger and I started the journey in a no-service area so I used BYD in-built maps which don’t know about an exit that had changed so I missed the exit and almost ran out of battery because I couldn’t charge at the BP charger earlier. Further to that I’m now charging at a charger in Brisbane city that’s not on any mapping application but is in the Chargefox app, however in the app it’s across the road and a few hundred metres away and apparently in a construction yard.
It’s a weird time to be a travelling EV driver.
Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamoured with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.
On 65x24 and editors
On the same day Fuji announced invest a new camera (which I would love to own!) I discover an app that shoots in one of the Fuji’s built-in aspect ratios, made famous by Hasselblad: 65x24.
The thing that breaks my mind about crops like this is that you’re leaving good pixels on the table.
Which activates a traumatised part of my brain. But also reminds mee of the power of a good editor. That the best editors know what to remove, not what to add.
picked up a new cool domain name for my non-personal and non-wedding blogging: thesmh.com.au
I've been learning about SEO and GEO and could help you too
Over the past two years I have become really disillusioned with advertising and marketing agencies. I’m in a weird, niche, very unique field, so it’s possibly my fault, but on all the accounts I can recall the provider of the marketing, advertising, and SEO services has also let me down professionally.
A friend who is a professional SEO operator took payment for services then never replied to a message after then. Colleagues in the wedding industry took payment for marketing services, then stopped responding when I questioned the low effectiveness of the ads. Countless stories of poor performance. Thousands of dollars wasted on stupid strategies.
So I’ve taken it upon myself to stop paying people and to learn to do it myself and I’ve spent the last year reading and studying SEO and GEO. SEO is optimisation for the search engines like Google, Bing, Kagi etc, and GEO is optimisation for the LLM AI products like ChatGPT and Claude.
I’ve been implementing these new skills and I’m now in the stage of seeing results. Slowly but surely, which is the only true way to win in SEO and GEO, over the long game. Anyone promising a short game win is doing dodgy work that will no doubt come unstuck eventually.
I’m actually happy enough to share my strategy because it’s not really my strategy, it’s just me doing what the search engines, LLMs, and industry says to do. Apparently it’s all out there in black and white ready for you and I to learn and read. We just mostly ignore it and then complain about the algorithm.
It’s a three pronged solution:
- Website speed and technicalities
- Content on your website
- Content on other websites aka backlinks.
Website speed
The easiest way to slice this is to enter your webpages in the PageSpeed Insights tool and to get your pages to 100/100/100/100 on desktop and mobile. It’s hard work.
I eventually gave up trying to get those scores on Squarespace and Wordpress websites and I learned static site generators. In particular, Astro.
This is just an incentives game. Slow websites cost the crawlers literal money because it takes longer to crawl each page. They don’t like you if you cost them money, plus users don’t like you either.
Content on your own website
It turns out that these algorithms don’t know what we don’t tell them. So we need to tell them what we’re about, what we’re good at, what we’re experts and authorities at. In lots of words and photos. A lot of the time. All the time. For a long time.
This basically means blogging but also the whole website should really tell your story. In words.
I’ve gone to great lengths to talk about marriage law and the essentials on my Hobart Marriage Office website, about Hobart wedding celebrancy on my Hobart wedding celebrant website, eloping to Tasmania on my Elope to Tassie blog, and about weddings on my Wedding Magazine blog.
Content on other people’s websites
This starts with social media and Reddit links and call outs, but goes on to people in the same areas of expertise linking to you, and I’ve gone a little farther. I’ve been finding websites that were abandoned by their former owners, and building out websites there like I have on celebrantforyou.net.au or The Tasmanians.
If you have a good and fast website, that explains your whole deal, and others verify that, you can win online.
Feel free to steal this whole strategy, or, hire me to do it for you or to coach you along it. I’m offering the coaching for $100 a month or $1000 a year (commit to a year because it takes that long to really win well), $450 a month or $4500 a year to do it for you if you are a small local business looking to win in one geography, or if you have a larger business we can talk about about something that would suit.
I’m still loving weddings and love doing them, but I looked at my schedule and I could afford to take on 5-10 clients for SEO and GEO, so get in touch if you’d like the help.
The human spirit is a beautiful cacophony of stupidity and kindness.
If that beautiful mixture of stupidity and kindness is out of balance, well, that’s why we have journalism and social media.
Our Goldie is four
An idea: Chrismania, aka Christmas in July in Tasmania
I was selling my mate, James, on how much I love living in Tassie, discussing how Christmas in Tasmania is lovely weather-wise, but there’s something slightly sad about missing out on Christmas lights because the sun doesn’t set til 9:30pm.
“The only thing I don’t quite love about Christmas down here,” I told him, “is that the sun sets so late that Christmas lights and proper nighttime celebrations don’t really work the same way.”
Then it hit me – Christmas in July would actually make more sense in Tasmania than anywhere else in Australia.
Our winters are properly cold, our mountains get snow, and we can actually enjoy a good drink beside a fire without sweating through our ugly Christmas jumpers.
James looked at me with a glint in his eye and said, “Why not call it Chrismania?”
And just like that, Chrismania was born.
Think about it. All of the traditional Christmas iconography – the snow, the reindeer, the cosy fireplaces, and woolly jumpers – comes from the Northern Hemisphere winter.
Meanwhile, in December, Australians are throwing another prawn on the barbie and hoping the pavlova doesn’t melt before dessert.
But in July? That’s when Tasmania truly shines in its winter glory.
Imagine it:
- Crackling fires in Huon Valley pubs
- Proper Christmas markets on Salamanca Place with hot chocolate and mulled wine that actually warms you up
- Winter feasts featuring Tassie produce
- Fairy lights twinkling against dark winter skies at a reasonable hour
- A genuine chance of snow on Kunyani/Mount Wellington and the other mountaintops to give the kids a white Christmas
- Christmas Carols and celebrations in July
But Chrismania wouldn’t just be about matching the season to the celebration. It can be about creating something uniquely Tasmanian. This might be something amazing, something to light up the Tasmanian off-season.
While the rest of Australia swelters through forced traditions in December, we can embrace our island’s distinctive winter charm.
We could turn the July school holidays into a time when locals and visitors alike gather to celebrate community, feasting, and light in the darkness – the original spirit of winter festivals anyway.
I can imagine special winter concerts in historic venues, carols and church services, Christmas-themed dinners at our world-class restaurants, and winter markets showcasing Tassie’s incredible artisans.
I’m not suggesting we abandon December Christmas – that’s still family time and our traditional celebration. But Chrismania could be our special addition, our gift to ourselves during the quieter tourist season, a way to embrace our island’s unique seasonal identity.
Though, alongside keeping December Christmas, I will note that December 25 is barely a chance for being Jesus’ actual birth day. Some say it was possibly in June.
Researchers have speculated that the Roman Catholic Church chose Dec. 25 because it ties in with the winter solstice and Saturnalia, a festival dedicated to the Roman deity Saturn. The church could also co-opt this popular pagan festival, as well as the winter celebration of other pagan religions, by choosing this day to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, according to scholar Ignacio L. Götz in his book “Jesus the Jew: Reality, Politics, and Myth-A Personal Encounter” (Christian Faith Publishing, 2019).
Tasmania can be about ceremonies and gatherings that bring people together during our coldest and darkest months. Everyone says Tasmania shuts down over winter, but does it have to?
As someone who creates celebrations for a living, I can see the potential for something truly magical here.
So who’s with me? Could Chrismania become the winter festival that Tasmania deserves? I reckon it’s an idea worth exploring – a celebration that honours both our place in the world and the true spirit of the season.
I’m thinking the last week of the July School Holidays would be amazing.
And if nothing else, it’s the perfect excuse to have two Christmas puds a year. I call that a definite win.
Want to get behind this? I see it being community-led, but I’ll build a website for it and maybe list events that people are hosting.
If you’re going to celebrate Chrismania let me know on email josh@chrismania.au Instagram or Threads.
I hearby proclaim that from today the opposite of a wanker is a Sam Kerr and all Australians shall now use it as a proclamation of encouragement.
Suggested use: “You’re such a Sam Kerr!”
