Withers Without You

Laying wide awake, trying to sleep in a Perth hotel, so I thought crunching some annual stats might help me sleep.

2024 has been a wild year of travel. Here’s my 2024 travel stats as of when I get home on December 2:

For 53% of 2024 I have slept in a bed I do not call home. 172 nights away from home, 94 flights, 85 marriage ceremonies, 275 hours in the air, 47 visits to Hobart Airport, 37 rental cars, 27 hours lost to flight delays, 15 airports, seven countries, six airlines, six Australian states, three trains, two boats, one moped.

Qantas Platinum, Virgin Gold, Hotels.com Gold, and Accor Gold, Mitre 10 Silver. No I’m not joking about Mitre 10.

Ask me anything except about the moped.

Let’s talk about the disconnect between mainstream media, social media chatter, and reality in Perth’s coffee scene.

When Starbucks opened their first WA store recently, both mainstream and social media were full of people insisting Perth would reject it in favour of local cafes.

Well, I just visited this morning… The reality? Over 100 people inside and a 40+ car drive-through queue. Before 9am on a Saturday.

Just a reminder that media opinions and online discussions don’t always reflect what’s actually happening on the ground. That Starbucks is absolutely thriving.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

John Gruber tells the story of Bill Atkinson’s battle (that has not finished yet) with cancer:

“In addition to being a genius programmer, he’s by all accounts a kind and generous person. Everyone was (and remains to this day) in awe of his skills, but they remember him best for being a friend.”

As a human, a man, a husband, and a father, I often (let’s be honest, almost always) get tied up with the worry and fear about work and business, earning money, and making good financial decisions.

Keeping a good professional reputation in the desperate hope and prayer that another couple would find me and book me for their wedding.

Staying in the good graces of wedding venues, wedding planners, the different algorithms and industry blogs and publications.

But I swear if I get to the end of my days and you, Britt, and my children can’t remember me best for being a friend then it was all for nought.

I’m sorry if I’ve missed the mark on our friendship, it’s honestly all I really want from these few fragile moments we have together on this pale blue dot in the universe.

I asked ChatGPT “Based on what you know about me draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like”

Seeing the Rode Wireless Micro release today (another spectacular release from Rode) reminded me how Australian companies and people are driving the infrastructure level of the creator economy.

Rode Microphones, Blackmagic Design (cameras, accessories, switchers and DaVinci), Procreate, Envato, Canva, Linktree, and Fastmail are the big ones I can think about plus Pocketcasts, Whooshkaa, and Omny Studio in the podcast world. Also, Emojipedia!

Barack Obama:

We live in a time of such confusion and rancor, with a culture that puts a premium on things that don’t last: money, fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves, and then we wonder why we feel so alone. We don’t trust each other as much because we don’t take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other.

Ryan Broderick with the power quote of the century from his piece, Nostalgia will not fix this:

I’m sure plenty of Bluesky power users will read this and say, “Who cares. I’m happy with a tiny site that feels like a memory of how I used to use the internet.” Fair enough. But one day you’ll be the last person writing words on the web and wonder where everyone went.

You can easily replace Bluesky with Mastodon, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Medium, Blogger, Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok.

Straight outta JT

How to know if it’s a legit cowboy hat, a guide

Lucy Schiller in the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine:

The idea of the airline magazine reaching everyone possible. An in-flight magazine is “for you, it’s for your mother, and it’s for your daughter,” she said. “Everyone has to be able to read it. It crosses generations with its appeal. Most people are aware the audience is broad.” So: the opposite type of product, really, from the personalized digital content tooled and retooled by increasingly specific customer data. “It can’t be niche,” Carpenter continued. “It can’t make people feel separated from it. It’s not going to be political or religious. It’s going to be inspiring, positive. Airline magazines don’t write bad reviews. We don’t interview someone to make them feel dumb. It’s all about putting positivity out into the world.”

Thomas Hooven on Love:

“By the time I met my wife, I was a changed man and a real doctor. And our love developed differently from any I had experienced before. Less like a crystal vase, more like a basketball, our relationship is made for bouncing — for the good and sometimes rough play that modern professional lives generate. We do have fights (oh, yes, we do), but they do not threaten our foundation. They deepen it.”

Robert Pirsig the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in this interview in 1974:

If a plant only gets sunlight, it’s very harmful. It needs darkness too. In the darkness, it converts oxygen into carbon dioxide. We are like that too. We need periods of doing, and periods of non-doing.

A mashup of Y.M.C.A. by the Village People and a track from Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack shouldn’t be so beautiful

Ezra Klein in Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You:

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.

I don’t want to join an Illuminati that wants me as a member

Private equity completes another stroll through the web-hosting world (after WP Engine), and thus today begins (or perhaps continues) the enshittification of Squarespace.

As my friend Ori said:

“Nothing like PE to ruin something.”

Private equity seriously is ruining so many beautiful things on the internet (see Bending Spoons) because founders and creators often struggle make a living online, they seek growth and revenue and find it hard, so they sell to PE because PE can make money online: gut the product, layoff staff, raise prices.

Welcome to capitalism, you and I with our little savings can’t stand in the way of it, but in the light of Squarespace going to PE, I’m reminded:

1. Two of our business websites being on Squarespace
2. The other one being on Wordpress (but not WP Engine)
3. And finally, of my own personal philosophy to POSSE and build things yourself.

Jason Kottke shared this a few days ago from Molly White:

“The short-term solution to these problems is a little-known acronym called POSSE. Short for Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere, it’s not a protocol or even a piece of software, but rather a philosophy.”

There’s never been a better time to build your own house on the internet—your own website and blog—and never have to worry about Squarespace, Meta, Google, or Apple anymore. You’ll no longer need to worry about being cancelled or banned. Prices going up, or products being gutted. You get to choose your destiny. Your home is your home.

How to?

1. Learn HTML.
2. Learn Markdown.
3. Learn to host and build your own website and blog, your own home on the Internet.

For HTML, check out the beautifully made HTML For People:

“HTML isn’t only for people working in the tech field. It’s for anybody, the way documents are for anybody. HTML is just another type of document. A very special one—the one the web is built on.”

And for Markdown, it’s just plain boring text with a few additions. The best place to start IMHO is with the document that started it all in 2004:

“The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.”

Search online for other Markdown tutorials, there’ll be millions, but just start learning to write and format in an open language, one that isn’t owned by Microsoft (.docx) or others.

From there, start investigating building and hosting your own website, like the one you’re reading this on. Hosted on Micro.Blog, built using Hugo, and Tiny Theme.

In 20 years, you’ll be thankful that you started building your own house online today.

Lightroom’s Generative AI-powered remove feature is wildly good

The pilots of QF15 invited Luna to the flight deck for her 6th birthday

Cabel Sasser’s XOXO talk is required watching for all inhabitants of earth.

Put the 19 minutes aside and watch this.

Seth Godin in Amplifying the fringes:

It’s no wonder people feel ill at ease. Instead of the ship adding ballast to ensure a smooth journey, the crew is working hard to make the journey as rocky as possible.

Aurora Australis over the Huon River in Franklin, Tasmania.

Aurora you glad you stayed up?

Dave Winer’s 2004 definition of podcasting is what I think podcasting is:

Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately. Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod or iPod-like device. Think of your iPod as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates. Today there are a limited number of programs available this way. The format used is RSS 2.0 with enclosures. In the future, radio shows like All Things Considered and Rush Limbaugh will be available in this manner, and perhaps other syndication formats will support enclosures.

But I feel like mainstream culture imagines a podcast is a group of people sitting in a room with headphones on and it’s watched via TikTok or Reels.

Which, I’m not going to lie, is quite confronting for a nerd like me who really enjoys his traditional podcasting.

Our decision to homeschool our children is often a hot topic of conversation among friends and colleagues. There are the usual jokes, and many people bring up something about socialisation. Britt’s favourite response when asked why we homeschool is, “Why do you send your kids to school?” Honestly, I love her cheeky nature.

I wanted to distill my thoughts on the subject into a blog post so I could share it with people when they ask. So, why do we homeschool? Let’s start with why we’re not that keen on traditional schooling.

Very few of us speak about our schooling in Australia positively. From bullying to anxiety, peer pressure to abuse, the system has been rife with issues. If my house had such problems, you’d never visit, let alone drop your kids off five days a week, every week.

Then there’s the stress the schooling system puts on our household. From rushing out the door in the morning to rushing back for pick-up, and then from school to extracurricular activities – it’s all a whole lot of rushing, stress, and expense that we don’t need to sign up for.

For something most of us hated as children, and also bemoan as adults, it’s kind of strange that we force our delicate and still-forming children into it.

I’ve also been deeply influenced by Seth Godin and his views on school. Reading his “What is school for? in 2009 changed me. With insights like “school pushes hard for wide, not deep” and “education is not the same thing as learning,” Godin has changed my perspective on how the world works and what school is for. I don’t believe the schooling offered by local providers will take my kids where I want them to go, I don’t believe that what I think school is for is what the education departments of Australia think school is for. I don’t need a babysitter or a childcare worker, I want my girls to learn from the best educators and that can (and does) happen outside of school.

I believe our society is in the depths of a parenting pandemic. We’ve outsourced parenting to the government instead of relying on our families, villages, and communities. We depend on underpaid teachers to raise our children, school principals to discipline and lead them, and government bodies to decide what they should learn and how much they should know.

We look to the government to tell our youth how long they should spend on social media or devices, then complain, “My kid spends too much time on their phone,” forgetting that we are the parents, we are in charge, and if the child isn’t listening or taking our lead, that’s still our problem.

I believe my home is my responsibility, so we’ll raise our kids, we’ll lead them, and we’ll teach them how to be awesome adults. Because when we brought them into the world, we didn’t have kids just to have kids; we had kids to bring spectacular adults into the future.

Our goal is that in 30 years, the world will be enamoured by the generosity, kindness, and intelligence of Luna, Goldie, and whoever else may come along.

We’re also those awkward people who actually like our kids and enjoy spending time with them. We want to do that more, so we’re building a life, a business, a home, and a family that allows us to spend as much time together as possible before they want to leave the nest and go and be adults. Someone smart once said we get eighteen summers with our kids. I’m trying to get eighteen winters, springs, and autumns too.

My brother and I visited our grandmother last weekend, but she was too busy for us. Yet she complains we never visit. I have this vision in my head of my old age, decades from now. In my final days, I picture all our children, grandchildren, and perhaps even great-grandchildren being with us at home. That sixty years from now, we would all joyfully and willingly spend our days together, enjoying each other’s company and missing each other when apart. Reverse-engineering that vision requires hard work today.

If I want a strong family in sixty years, I need to build one now, and for me, that starts with homeschooling. As for you and your family, that’s your call – so make the best choice for yourselves.

Our girls have always come along with us in business and travel. I think Luna’s first outing was to the post office. Both she and Goldie are Qantas Silver Frequent Flyers and they are better at airport security than you are. When we go to the shops or work around the house, they’re not just with us – they’re involved and helping. We aim to spend time in nature with them, learning, investigating, looking, and asking questions. Museums, animal parks, libraries, and exhibits are always on our to-do list. Plus, we spend time writing letters to our friends around the world, painting and making art, and reading about the world around us while also engaging with beautiful literature.

Don’t worry that our kids will miss out on academics or socialisation.

In a world moving towards artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation, our hope is that our kids will shine in humanity and real intelligence.

While their peers may be enslaved by iPads, social networks, and devices, we want our children to be empowered to love, communicate, enjoy, and help. When they’re adults I want to be so proud of them, and for that to happen I need to start today.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

In case anyone was interested, it costs $1600 to fly Qantas then Jetstar from Hobart to the Gold Coast today if Virgin wasn’t able to rebook you on other flights today and yours was getting in to Sydney too late and you’d miss your connection. Just a lazy $1600 and there goes this week’s profit margin.

My high school internet username results in a Googlewhack today. I’ve never been so proud.

Britt Shoo sketched me at work at a wedding in Maleny today, how cool is it!

All the guests recieved portraits like this.

Jenny Saville:

When I paint, I don’t search for beauty, but for the power of life’s force: when you fall in love with someone, it’s life’s force. When you see amazing food or you listen to music that goes right inside your body, that’s life’s force. That moment is not an intellectual space, it’s something beyond – you can’t articulate it. It’s about the moments that help you breathe deeper.

A short love letter to QuickTime. RIP QuickTime Pro.

My favourite thing about taking a car to the dealer for a warranty issue and they make you feel like you’re a woman in the fifties reporting sexual abuse. Looking at you like you’re imagining the problem, suggesting “maybe it’s your fault?”

tap, tap is this thing on?

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my wedding celebrant story, my passions, my heart, and to also talk videographers and audio from an audio tech point of view on the Wed Co podcast today.

Qantas’s ears were burning

Wild how we use the same bowl for popcorn and vomit

I would personally donate money to keep the Raygun fire burning

For the past week, a globally well-known person has been on the Gold Coast for a reason unrelated to their popular life as one of the world’s foremost YouTubers and technology reviewers. Instead, they were here to represent the USA in the World Ultimate Championships, with their mixed team eventually walking away with gold medals in the finals.

But you’d never know Marques Brownlee was competing on the Gold Coast unless you followed MKBHD, because the closest the Ultimate Championships got to any kind of media coverage was in Newcastle, where a local Ultimate player had been chosen to compete. A global championship of a future Olympic sport – allegedly under consideration for Brisbane 2032 and LA 2028 – and the only way you’d know about it is if you happened to walk past the Runaway Bay sports fields.

The simple fact of the matter is that “the media” is not compelled or required to report on or tell the story of every little thing that happens in our community, even if it’s supported and sponsored by local and state governments or the national carrier.

I’m reminded of when a law that I had a hand in creating passed. I expected there to be a news article about it that I could share with colleagues.

But either no reporter was in parliament at the time, or if they were, they deemed this change to how Australia operated not fit for print.

There’s something interesting about the news that you might not have noticed yet: every night, the news bulletin is the same length. The newspaper is a similar number of pages each day. And more so with printed newspapers, where there need to be ads sold by the sales team before there are pages waiting for stories.

People often complain that their organic reach on social media is lower than it used to be. Despite the conspiracies surrounding Instagram and reach, the main contributor to the drop in numbers is the increase in creators and content, while the number of hours in our day has stayed the same.

There’s a lot of quality life happening outside of newspapers, magazines, blogs, algorithms, interest graphs, TV, or radio.

There are many great restaurants not on any list, and so many good cafes that don’t appear on Google when you search “best café near me.” Billions of valuable, valid, and important stories never get shared by the news.

A lot of life happens in the margins, and that’s where I’m trying to cast my eyes—towards the unseen and the unheard. Not only because there’s good there, but because the systems we live in, the societal scaffolding we’ve built, won’t go there.

I have friends in Gold Coast media whom I could have called to tell about MKBHD and the championships, but that story wouldn’t have reached the top of the editorial pile. Not enough interest, not enough clicks, not enough views to report on a story like that. He’s just a tech reviewer. It’s just frisbee.

The media isn’t evil or bad, but the laws of physics and capitalism means it can’t tell every story. That’s our job – yours and mine.

Along with a social media age limit I’d like to see the app icons and splash screens changed to shocking images of people depressed, public servants dancing, or phone notification screenshots overflowing with replies featuring the opinions of strangers.

Look, I might not be your favourite person, but at least I’ve never tried to sell you a MLM, or a course that promises you that you can make lots of money without any effort.

A drive through Outback Queensland yesterday

“I try to think what questions I’m not asking” - Benedict Evans

I lost a friend in software today as I delete Overcast from my iPhone. A ten year relationship ended because life’s too short to use annoying apps.

For software that I’ll often use a lot, on most days, the developer changed so many fundamental ways the app worked that it went from an app I loved dearly for a decade to the most annoying thing on my phone.

Enacting sleep mode, something I’d do as I drearily fall asleep in a hotel room away from my family had been buried away.

Streaming, something I didn’t realise I used that much, because really annoying. Streaming barely worked before the upgrade - if I was sent an Overcast episode listen link from a friend it would almost never play on first try - but then to lose the feature was really annoying.

It became an exercise in re-learning how to walk, but I’d never had an accident, I was just subjected to an updated and poorer experience.

Plus iOS 18’s beta cycle hasn’t been kind to Overcast either, which is totally my cross to carry, but it’s still impacted the upgraded use experience.

So I had to decide whether the Overcast audio engine was worth staying for, and decided I could live without. (Tim Apple: please feel free to buy Overcast and integrate the audio engine into Apple Podcasts.)

So little did I know that Apple Podcasts has actually gotten a lot better recently.

The podcast transcription is a feature I really like, and anyone I share podcast links with and from uses Apple Podcasts so shareability of podcasts is so much easier as is clicking links from podcast websites.

Every podcast website has an Apple Podcasts link, none have an Overcast link.

Before the Overcast update it was a fringe decision to be on a third party podcast app. After the update it was a liability.

Life’s too short to be confusedly thumbing through podcast apps trying to figure it all out again.

Why blog about it? Because I can’t review about it.

Twenty years of podcastingv this month

Took an early morning photo walk around the host city for the 2032 Olympics, Brisbane, and the new Star (casino name TBC probably if the regulators do their job) casino.

Brisbane’s looking nice tonight

I’ve got a genuine interest inst in the new Pixel phones. Genuinely curiosity if they’d feel nice in hand, how the UI feels, how it works. Maybe they’re a real competitor to the iPhone.

But sampling the product is nigh impossible. They’re on display in shops but covered in security accessories that stop you from folding the folding phone or holding it in hand, plus this one in particular set the alarm off if it was picked up.

I wonder what the cost of loss of sales is compared to stock loss due to theft? Also, it sucks that we live in a world now where theft is so common.

If you actually get Oasis tickets today, start planning emotionally for the excruciating wait for them to play Wonderwall as they walk off stage for the 20th time as everyone starts chanting encore once again.

Hey Siri, define my last four years and five months in a reply by Nilay Patel

Am I an influencer now?

Josh Nadeau, aka Instagram’s @swordandpencil, shared these words in a story today and my boy @qldnick shared them with me, which is all to say I have intelligent and thoughtful friends and also that I can’t source the original quote. Regardless of those technicalities, I can’t stop thinking about.

Wendell Berry’s thoughts on technological progress:

But in general, apart from its own highly specialised standards of quantity and efficiency, “technological progress” has produced a social and ecological decline. Industrial war, except by the most fanatically narrow standards, is worse than war used to be. Industrial agriculture, except by the standards of quantity and mechanical efficiency, diminishes everything it affects.

Industrial workmanship is certainly worse than traditional workmanship, and is getting shoddier every day. After forty-odd years, the evidence is everywhere that television, far from proving a great tool of education, is a tool of stupefaction and disintegration. Industrial education has abandoned the old duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of baby-sitting and career preparation.

After several generations of “technological progress,” in fact, we have become a people who cannot think about anything important. How far down in the natural order do we have to go to find creatures who raise their young as indifferently as industrial humans now do? Even the English sparrows do not let loose into the streets young sparrows who have no notion of their identity or their adult responsibilities.

When else in history would you find “educated” people who know more about sports than about the history of their country, or uneducated people who do not know the stories of their families and communities?

My 1994 Packard Bell 486SX 25/33 isn’t that impressive thirty years on but it impressed me in the 90s because it had a the set of matching SVGA monitor and video card. Super VGA my dude. 800x600 pixels, and 24 bit colour, that’s 16,777,216 possible colours per pixel.

I hypothesised back then that if you wrote a program that simply randomised the colour of each of the 480,000 pixels you could see any image ever - eventually.

I called it the Face of God idea. That eventually that computer could just imagine and display any image real or otherwise, even the face of God.

As the Pixel 9 AI “what is a photo” terror arises this week I’m thinking about it all again. What does it mean when a photo isn’t a photo?

I wonder if this is the dawn of a new fantastic era of creativity and wonder, or if my favourite means of creativity - photography - has just been hit with a nuclear bomb?

Imagine the monotony of life if the sun slipped away without a whisper, and the skies farewelled the day with no fanfare, leaving the world untouched by the splendour of their daily performance.

Seated behind me on this A321neo are a bunch of boys who refer to “normal planes” as ones that have a 3-3/4-3 configuration and they’re bemused that we’re flying such a small plane to Bali.

Normalise single-aisle aircraft.

It’s a real creature comfort to be able to listen to my home state Cole’s Supermarket in-store music while in Brisbane

Surfers Paradise street performer in four photos

Remember that time the world united around a dude called Matt dancing in front of things around the world? Better times.

They completed technology. No more technology is needed anymore. They’ve done it all now.

Imagine being so good at dancing that you got a doctorate in it and then were chosen to represent your country in it at the Olympics, only to realise you’re actually terrible at it thanks to some dude on the internet.

A court case I lost a few years ago over a frustrated contract had the ruling go to a hypothetical “man on the 3pm omnibus to Clapham” which is a common law description of the “common person”.

Being on one as I write this I think the modern version is “person on the 6am Boeing 737 to Brisbane.”

I couldn’t stomach any delays today, but I was kinda hoping we’d get the slightest delay so I could test the new machine learning features in Flighty 4

Donut not have kids … they’re the best

It honestly is impossible to get a doctors appointment in the Huon Valley, I called around a few weeks ago (from today’s newspaper)

South Hobart tip shop find of the week: $15 for a 1971 Auto Tamron 80-250mm F/3.8 telephoto lens with a Minolta mount. Add on my MD-RF adaptor from Urth and I’ve finally got a telephoto for my Canon EOS R5 again.

Photo of Britt’s Fuji camera is through the lens, I’m looking forward to playing with it in the daylight tomorrow.

On dying, from @[email protected] who recently died:

It’s because we don’t die online properly.

We need a way to die online. If my time comes tomorrow, I want the offline funeral to serve as a way — as best as funerals can — of drawing a line under my life and letting the grieving process begin.

Reading The Sizzle’s opening lines today by @[email protected] really took me for a six. No day in this life is promised to us, but I’m glad to have spent today with each of you.

Here’s to you, Geordie Guy. May DNS pay for what it did to you.

(There needs to be a new word for people we follow and are followed by online, haven’t met in real life, but have admiration and respect for.)

ABC Chairman on the web: a “pretty ancient concept now”

Josh Withers: “kill me now”

… however I do agree with his stance on lifestyle news receiving so much priority at the ABC.

Honouring soldiers from all three of Australia’s major wars here at Samsonvale

I’ve just been named the number one Asia-Pacific photographer who made zero dollars from their passion in the month of July but had a lot of fun doing it. I’d like to dedicate this award to my wife and children who roll their eyes every time dad gets the camera out.

Well, this definitely whips the llama’s ass

Guy next to me on my flight is pricing up bacon and how much it costs him to produce and I’ve never wanted more to strike up a flight-friend-for life.

Ever since Bo Burnham’s Inside I’ve felt like it’s not worth creating anymore. Content peaked in 2020 with Inside. Now we live in the post-Inside era.

“Do you want to be really good at a thing? I’ve got bad news for you. You’re going to have to be significantly worse at a lot of other things in your life.” – @cgpgrey, Cortex episode 157

Lady at this cafe in the Huon Valley is working on an 11” MacBook Air running one of big cat OS X operating system releases.

It would have to be more than a decade old at this point wouldn’t it? It’s still such a beautiful machine. Honestly, I think it would be my favourite computer I’ve owned.

I’m researching for project in Tasmania and I think, to the best of my research and knowledge so far, this is the oldest and first photograph of Tasmania. The photo is of the south-eastern-most tip of Tasmania, Cape Pillar by James Backhouse Walker onboard the Beagle with Charles Darwin, enroute to Hobart on February 5, 1836.

My greatest fear in life is that Jaycar could go broke and shutdown

If you talk to anyone in the destination wedding industry they have their bucket list of places they want to work. Mine is remarkably weirder than most.

I’ve been lucky enough to create marriage ceremonies all around the world in places like Iceland and Italy, New York and New Zealand, Croatia to Canberra, Fiji to Vancouver.

But my favourite places to travel are the weird places, more likely to be featured on Atlas Obscurer than Lonely Planet.

My destination wedding and elopement bucket list:

1. North Korea because I want to fly Air Koryo and live to tell the story.
2. Saudia Arabia and Qatar because a Middle East desert elopement would be wild! Plus I’d love to be the guy that delivers personalised and fun wedding ceremonies in the Middle East.
3. Tuvalu, Bora Bora, Tonga, Samoa, and The Cook Islands because I’ve got big Pacific Island energy.
4. Bhutan where Gross National Happiness is a real thing they measure.
5. Kazakhstan because of Borat.

I think it would also be cool to do a wedding in Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch in Wales because writing that name on a marriage certificate would be fun.

Tuscany versus Amalfi

When I first started as a wedding celebrant in 2009 you’d write some blog posts, build some SEO, and maybe attend a wedding expo to promote yourself as a celebrant and earn a living.

Now, however … things have changed.

Lord knows if it’s for the better? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

In the year 2024, we - the consumer/viewer/listener/single-digit-in-a-spreadsheet - have an opportunity to cultivate and curate our media diet, and I personally take that responsibility to be aware of the world I live in and contribute to really seriously.

I understand that I am the net average of those I spend time with, and that which I consume, so who I follow, mute, block, and subscribe to is of great importance to me. My impact and output on or to my family, community, and the planet can be ascribed to my intake.

Despite being featured in publications like the Daily Mail online or News Corporation newspapers, I generally choose to read or consume them on-demand, instead of having them flung into the different algorithmic newsfeeds I experience daily.

The news sources I do follow, like, subscribe to, get emails from, and even have notifications on for, are few and far between but they’re really deliberate.

This brings me to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, one of the greatest protective bastions of Australian culture and identity. I get ABC News app notifications and follow them on Instagram.

The functions of the Corporation are:

(a) To provide within Australia innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard as part of the Australian broadcasting system consisting of national, commercial, and community sectors and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, to provide:

(i) Broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community; and (ii) Broadcasting programs of an educational nature;

Item (b) is about outside of Australia and although I’m writing this in Rome, it doesn’t apply to the article, and:

(c) To encourage and promote the musical, dramatic, and other performing arts in Australia.

I now reference one of the great books written in recent times, The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton, on how news organisations tend towards engagement over boring important content:

But the answer isn’t just to intimidate people into consuming more ‘serious’ news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is too easy to claim that serious things must be, and can almost afford to be, a bit boring.

Alain holds “the news” to a very high standard, and rightly so:

For all the talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by far the most influential means by which their populations are educated. Whatever happens in our classrooms, the more potent and ongoing kind of education takes place on the airwaves and on our screens. Cocooned in classrooms for only our first eighteen years or so, we effectively spend the rest of our lives under the tutelage of news entities which wield infinitely greater influence over us than any academic institution can. Once our formal education has finished, the news is the teacher.

It is the single most significant force setting the tone of public life and shaping our impressions of the community beyond our own walls. It is the prime creator of political and social reality. As revolutionaries well know, if you want to change the mentality of a country, you don’t head to the art gallery, the department of education, or the homes of famous novelists; you drive the tanks straight to the nerve centre of the body politic, the news HQ.

This brings me to the @abcnews_au Instagram account.

Am I the only one who feels like the ABC News social media department - deliberately separating them from the local radio stations and their social media teams, TV stations and iView and the TV social media, the website, the apps, and the actual news being broadcast wherever ABC News broadcasts end up - is off charter?

Here are a few posts from the last week I do not feel are adding to our sense of national (Australian) identity or reflecting the cultural diversity of the Australian culture.

It’s all innocent content, getting some great views and metrics for the team, but I raise the following issues:

1. Attention is one of the greatest assets online today, only second to original content. The ABC is wasting content creation resources and our attention. Tell the great Aussie stories that add to or reflect the Australian story, and let the content farms share the viral junk food stories, and let the local news outlets tell the international stories - they do it better, and we can choose to view them there already.
2. The interest-graph driven social media industry of 2024 is built on signals. Much like driving a car and we flick on the indicator to let other traffic know we’re turning left, each time that light blinks it’s a signal to the traffic as to your intentions. We, the consumer, have the opportunity to choose what signals we deliver, which content we like, share, comment on, and mute, but the ABC also holds a great responsibility to deliver signals to the interest graph.
3. The ABC has many different outlets for great content like this, can the News be sanitised to just be the plain-old-boring, need-to-know, news, all the news fit-to-print someone once said.
4. I could be wrong on this and await your well-written feedback as to how I am. Seriously, every time I bring this up with broadcast friends they look at me weird as if engagement and growth at all costs is the only thing that matters.

And a few questions I’m pondering:

• How do the ABC staff know if they are being successful? Is content like this the only way for some social media person to keep their job because it gets numbers?
• How do they know if they are meeting the charter?
• Is feedback like this welcome?
• I know that ABC funding is contentious, how can the good burghers of Australia shape our government, and instruct it, so we have an ABC that our great grandchildren will be proud of in 100 years?
• What is the ABC News social media accounts for? Are they for content like this?

I’ll end on this word from Alain:

News organisations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years – and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences. They are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line.

Turns out hope might be good for the soul.

Emily Brown in Relevant Magazine:

Gen Z has been fairly vocal about their struggles with mental health, but according to the American Bible Society’s recent report, “The State of the Bible 2024,” young adults who read their Bible regularly report being much happier than their peers.

iPhone hack: when your iPhone 14 overheats in Rome, get a drink from McDonalds and melt the ice on the phone until it cools down.

I spent the last two hours in this seat, capturing as many interesting photos as possible from this single location in Rome, Italy, on the early evening of Monday, July 8, 2024.

Welcome to a little Roman photo essay I created, if only to entertain myself: L'angolo tra Via dei Gracchi e Via Fabio Massimo.

These two sparked the thought. We don't see many fully frocked nuns from the Vatican in Ranelagh, where I live in Tasmania.

Food and drinks from an ice creamery, a café bar and ristorante, and a few other spots at the corner of Via dei Gracchi and Via Fabio Massimo show how many food options are around here.

Since these are streets, you might have expected some vehicles. I extended my stay to two hours because I missed a classic Italian road rage incident: one man screaming at another, making a pointed gesture, exasperatedly sighing, and then driving off, completely forgetting about the incident.

I met quite a few local dogs and birds. There was also a rat, but I was too slow to catch it.

And of course, some locals.

Photos composed and created by me with my Canon EOS R5, the Canon RF 35mm f/1.8 lens, edited in Lightroom CC, with Carssun’s Amalfi Coast presets.

Professor Giuseppe’s Grand Hotel Tritone and its 1000-odd steps to the beach.

When you’re hot-headed and your Ray-Bans stage an intervention

Why did they call it the Amalfi Coast when they could of called it the Stairs Coast and it would’ve been far more accurate

My favourite thing to do whilst in Italy is to pretend to not be in Australian then surprise traveling Aussies with a big “G’Day, mate!”

Apple Health: You’ve been on tour through Asia and Europe for four weeks.

Flighty: Your journey home begins in nine days.

Me: This is going to ruin the tour.

I was trying to to get to the Metro Linea 2 in Napoli, I saw this series of lines, and let’s just say that things escalated quickly

Some things I looked at in Roma, Italy

Rachel Rumi:

You don’t like to see that other person neglecting their homework when it comes to growth through intimacy so you take on the curriculum yourself.

Some frames from Tuscany this last week

Do you ever see someone else’s project and realise that everything you’ve ever done in your life is meaningless? That’s for me dropofahat.zone

Colours of Toscana

May the API bless you, Threads humans

My local laundromat in Passignano is closed on Sundays so I journeyed over to Perugia, Umbria, for my clothes washing today, caught a glance of something that looked like a monorail, turned out it was a MiniMetro, a “family of cable propelled automated people mover systems”

Quoting Wikipedia:

Perugia People Mover: In Perugia, a 3,027-meter (9,931 ft; 1.881 mi) stretch with seven stations opened in February 2008 to relieve the inner city of car traffic. It consists of more than 25 vehicles of 5 m (16 ft 4+7⁄8 in) each, with a capacity of 25 passengers and a speed of up to 25 kilometers (16 mi) per hour. The interval between successive vehicles is around 1.5 minutes. In 2013, the system carried 10,000 passengers per day.

Scopello // Sicilia

Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage​, in 1981:

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

John Gruber:

Fortunately, because Apple is delaying Apple Intelligence and these other new features in the EU, all of the thriving EU-based smartphone and OS makers can jump in and compete on merit now, without Apple the gatekeeping bully in their way. As Vestager reiterates throughout the interview, competition is the European Commission’s north star.

Posted from the EU.

When you’re watching Instagram Reels before the Zoom meeting begins and the AI Zoom Meeting Summary takes it as fact

That was $9.95 I’ll never get back.

(Stolen from Basic Apple Guy on Threads)

Jamstack websites terrify me.

I feel technology often takes a backward step as it advances.

I used to make the most powerful small business, single use case, applications in Microsoft Access for businesses. To do the same today is so much harder. It’s the same with websites. Jamstack is exponentially more complex than Wordpress and its PHP brethren.

Our Imaginary Brother Only Watches PBS by Eileen Donovan-Kranz

What happened next made sense only to my mother: She created an eighth child, a three-year-old she named Joe.

Thanks for the link, Scotty.

In the spirit of Zuckerberg renaming Facebook in honour of what’s coming up, please no longer call me Josh. Only refer to me as my new personal brand identity in honour of the next big thing: Sleep.

Everyone has their different social media celebrities they get excited about meeting. Today I meet mine.

12 years ago I shared this infographic about the data being transferred around then. Here’s the 2024 version on my daily letter.

Little pleasures in life is your laptop remembering the password and automatically connecting to the wifi at your cheap Rome airport hotel

Yes, hello, is this Qatar Airways? I’d like to collect my prize money.

Qatar things

When I make photos I like I share them, and because of the way the world is today (i.e everyone has a camera, algorithms rule the world, photos don’t get as much airtime as videos, plus no-one knows who I am) most people never see my photos, so I upload them to Unsplash and Pexels.

Something I find super interesting is how even on those two sites the per-photo statistics vary so wildly.

The Sunday night commute to work 📍 Beachcomber Island, Fiji

Easy like Sunday Melbourne Airport morning

I like writing, I like reading, I enjoy running a sustainable and fun business, and I like getting email letters on the topic, so I made one called Aisle Authority.

My pitch is that it’s a short daily letter to the best wedding creators in the world.

The stats say that most people scroll on, but I’m hoping maybe one other person who likes reading encouraging daily things about being a wedding creator might like it too - read today’s letter and subscribe.

In my happy place - plane watching - for a few hours in Melbourne Airport on the way to Fiji for a wedding

Shalom Auslander:

I was thinking about sex the other day because I was having a really depressing day, and a dead body had been found by the pier, and as I was taking my son to school and waiting at a traffic light, a homeless man in a mad fury began circling my car, shouting and spitting, and it felt like forever before the light turned green and I thought I needed to get my mind settled so I went to a bookstore and all the books were about how to succeed in business, and about how to work even more, and there was a whole section about how to use the ancient philosophy of Stoicism to get ahead in your corporate career, and outside the bookstore people were sleeping on the sidewalk and there was a store where shoes were 30% off and still cost two-hundred dollars and I stopped to write at a coffeeshop where people were arguing about politics and war and fascism and genocide and a woman at the table beside me was talking loudly at the people on her laptop screen, who were talking loudly at her about the client and the presentation and the need for a more aggressive social media marketing plan, and as I drove home the billboards and buses were covered with advertisements for movies, and the people in the advertisements were giants, and they were perfect, and they were revered and admired like Gods and most of them were actually truly awful people who shouldn’t be admired at all and so by the time I got home, I crawled into bed and I closed my eyes and a moment later, I heard a little girl outside my window, and she was crying and shouting and her mother asked her what was wrong and she shouted, at the top of her little lungs, “EVERYTHING TODAY MAKES NO SENSE!” and I thought that must have felt really good, I would love to scream like that right now, I would love nothing more than to scream “EVERYTHING TODAY MAKES NO SENSE!” and how that would make me feel better than sex, better than the best sex better than all the sex in the world, and that’s why I was thinking about sex the other day.

Free entry!

What’s weird/nerdy/fun/cool and not on the “must see” lists for Doha, Qatar? I’ve got a full transit day there on Thursday.

My will: and I hereby bequeath to my children, 739 partially completed buy 10 get one free cards from coffee shops all over the city.

Scott sent me this cute Thread by Calm and I remarked that defragging my computer ‘back in the day’ was one of my favourite tasks.

I loved running defrag.exe on DOS and then Windows as often as possible.

It was one part “I’m doing God’s work,” one part “this will totally speed the computer up,” even though it only slightly affected performance, one part “looking under the hood,” which is an element of computing I dearly miss today, and one part just sitting there for an hour watching the defragger defrag.

A file, say your homework – homework.doc – might have been saved in position 1045 on the spinning hard disk. However, it might have needed 10 positions, but only positions 1045 to 1050 were free, so the last five parts would be placed later on the disk where there was free space. Then, if you wanted to access that document, the disk would be spinning back and forth between the two different positions on the disk.

Defragmenting would bring all the bits together by moving other bits out of the way.

Watching the defragger run you built such an intimate relationship with your file system, operating system, documents, applications (we called them programs at the time), files, games, etc.

In some defragmentation apps, they would show you which file it was working on at that time, and if you were nerdy enough, you’d come to know all the files, even operating system files. When you only had 100 or a few hundred megabytes on a disk, you’d have to sacrifice things like help files, unneeded applications or operating system features, or Minesweeper if you wanted to install a new program or game.

It really was a beautiful time to use a computer.

Miss you, defrag.exe.

You know what sucks about using the internet today - whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or Threads - is that they’re all geared towards virality, these big pieces of content that goes so far.

There’s not really any room for me just to bitch and moan about being stranded at Melbourne Airport for five hours this morning when I want to be home.

I guess that’s for the better. Who wants to hear about me being stranded to Melbourne Airport?

The thing I miss though is that sharing our mundane life was a fundamental part of the social web 15 years ago and I miss your food photos and flights delay posts.

48 hours in Bali - a photo dump

It must be terrible for every other musician and songwriter in the world to know that anything they ever make will be - at very best - second best to Throw Your Arms Around Me.

One day, some day in the next few years, I probably won’t fly as much as I do, and as my Qantas status fades and staff forget my face, the thing I’ll miss the most after the Qantas staff is the Sydney Qantas First Class Lounge.

It’s just a real joy to slip away to a fancy as heck (and free) restaurant (airport lounge) then get a neck massage before being slammed into a tin can for a long haul flight.

WWDC 2024 prediction: iOS is dead. Long live aiOS.

aiOS: Think Different.

Did you know Japan had its own beautiful and amazing method of measuring time before Christians ruined it all?

The Uniqueness of Japanese Time - JapanUp!

H/T Ian Betteridge’s A+ email, Ten Blue Links.

Kent Nerburn:

Debt defines your future, and when your future is defined, hope begins to die. You have committed your life to making money to pay for your past.

Apart from actually doing the work couples pay me to do, like making their weddings and elopements, some of the proudest professional work I’m doing these days is in Aisle Authority, my daily letter to the world’s best wedding creators. If you create weddings for a living like I do, it’s the kind of daily business encouragement I wanted to receive but no-one was making, so I wrote one.

I can’t stop looking out the front door of our new home in the Huon Valley, so now I’ve got to show you. Plus a photo of the door because it’s potentially the cutest way a house has ever been presented at settlement.

They say that when you have kids you enter your second stage of life. This is me entering my third stage of life.

John Green on happy marriages and feeding the content machine that is 2024 and the internet

Call me a conspiracy theorist, call me crazy, or call me stupid, but I get a feeling that TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, LinkedIn and honestly any algorithm-driven social network isn’t the place for deeper thinking, intellect, and non-viral-bs-business ideas. So I’m investing what little business-intelligence capital into my own blog and email. It’s called Aisle Authority, I write it every day, and it looks like this. Read it and even subscribe like a madman at aisleauthority.email.

The aurora australias, the southern lights, were a spectacle to behold last night aroundd Hobart, even with lots of cloud cover.

My first taste was a seeing pulsing of lights from behind the clouds. It was the most surreal thing I’ve seen.

I can’t stop thinking about this Boox Palma

I could work for a million years, doing the best jobs, making the best things, writing the most eloquent words, delivering the best service, or creating the finest art, and still, I would pale in comparison to the eternal and beautiful legacy left by any mother, especially Britt.

Do you ever just do something, then regret it, then feel awesome about it? That’s how I felt when I got the domain name theinternet.com.au this afternoon

A quick search on the internet for Stan Hillard doesn’t reveal much. You’ll find my name-dropping about a decade ago on Radio Today as I trample on the great legacy of community radio in Australia, you’ll also find that Stan was most recently the President of 2WAY FM and was even presenting radio shows last week. He loved the theatre, and even acting if we’re allowed to call whatever is in that YouTube video as acting.

I met Stan on my first day at 4CRM, Mackay’s Community Radio station early 2004. I’d always wanted to be on the radio, firstly because I’d admired everything I’d heard come out of Triple J, Hot FM, and 4MK’s transmitters since I was a little boy, and secondly because it was the closest I could ever come to being heard - something that didn’t happen much for this kid from a broken home. I walked past and saw a sign on the door about learning radio.

This post to the usenet group aus.radio.broadcast recalls the moment in terific hi skool dropout englissh

I went up the radio station stairs expecting to find out about some big course and the next day, after talking to station manager Allan Berry, I was in the studio with Stan.

Dig deeper on Google for Stan and you’ll find a story from the Alice Spring News reported on February 11, 1998, a story containing an anecdote about colour TV coming to the region:

When Alice Springs finally got TV in 1970, it could have gone straight to colour. However, the ABC, the sole transmitter at the time, had put a colour bar on its equipment. “Nobody realised this,” recalls Murray, “but we had a technician here called Stan Hillard in charge of the transmitter. He went to Adelaide and while he was having a look at their equipment, he noticed the colour bar, pulled it out and all of a sudden Alice Springs had colour. “He got into hot water for doing this, the ABC were going to reinstate black and white but the Northern Territory Government intervened, someone in the ABC got their knuckles rapped and Stan was a hero for the town!” Murray has heard that Stan now lives in Rockhampton.

Born on March 11, 1947, Stan passed away this last week, and although the internet leaves much to be imagined about Stan, his leadership, training, and guidance in the early days of my career were foundational and I wanted to honour his legacy by repeating what he taught me on my first day in front of a microphone, before which he’d taught me how to panel a radio show. I quoted Stan on this blog last year, but I share again to honour the mark Stan left on my life and career, and so the people at the back can hear it:

Imagine the audience are the stupidest people alive then treat them with the upmost respect.

It’s my golden rule for broadcasting, publishing, posting, tweeting, threading, tooting, facebooking, gramming, or microblogging. Imagine for just one minute that the people reading this thing, or hearing it, and they have no idea what you’re talking about - explain it to them in a quick and simple way so they may understand and perhaps even engage.

Whenever I’ve failed in life it’s almost likely because I’ve ignored or failed to employ that golden rule.

Brought wedding-ready two pairs of pants and three shirts to Queenstown for three weddings here this week with the full confidence that one of the pairs of pants would serve double duty.

Both ended up in the snow mud, and I think I’ve cracked my ribs.

It’s now 10pm at a laundromat.

This is the exciting life of a travelling adventure elopement celebrant.

I’ve realised that I am not equipped enough to manage replies to my actual Mastodon account - @[email protected] - and my Micro.Blog account, @[email protected] - so I’m totally migrating my Fediverse life to the omglol kingdom. This is the way.

This reporting on the mysterious 777 Partners and it’s Australian investment in airline, Bonza is a good read and good reporting by Ian Verrender and the ABC.

Virgin Blue executive Tim Jordan, claimed from the outset that he needed 10 aircraft to make the new operation viable. When he called in administrators this week, he had just four.

The large Boeing 737s are arguably the wrong fit for Bonza, flying second and third-tier routes, and appear to have been used as a means to soak up the US backer’s fleet and provide it with income.

Happy Star Wars Day!

I saw Episode 1 at the cinema this week and I’ve got a hot take.

Jar Jar Binks is an important character and the people that hate him, hate him because they see their clumsy selves in Jar Jar and they need to talk to their therapist about it.

Also, adding midi-chlorians to the Star Wars canon was weird. Welcome to my TED Talk.

Weird week to be running an airline

The parable of the prodigal traveller:

“For this budget traveller of mine was dead to me and has now returned to life. He was flying Bonza, but now he is found.’”

‭‭Jetstar ‬15‬:‭24‬

One day, when I grow up, I’d like an Apple Jonathan please

Anzac Day 1916 was a very different ANZAC Day compared to that I experienced in Canberra this morning. Martin Crotty, a historian at the University of Queensland, said that Anzac Day commemorations have “suited political purposes right from 1916 when the first Anzac Day march was held in London and Australia, which were very much about trying to recruit more people to join the war during 1916-1918.”

As war efforts changed over the last 109 years, and eventually subsided, the Anzac Day commemorations have taken on a more solemn and meaningful practice. After attending the 2024 Dawn Service at the Australian War Memorial this morning–my first in Canberra, and possibly my fifth as an adult–I have some thoughts.

I’m not going to discuss how I thought arriving half an hour early for a 5:30 am service would be “early enough” to secure a good viewpoint–it was not, and I’m pretty sure that most of the 30,000 attendees beat me to the Sculpture Garden this morning. Nor will I mention how the lacklustre audio and video production at the memorial left me feeling blind and deaf, yet my hearing was sharp enough at 5:30 am to hear someone vomiting behind me and a staff member using one of those hand-held clickers commonly used by bouncers, walking through the crowd in the dark, clicking away.

I won’t wax lyrical about how the male performers were named and the master of ceremonies asked the crowd to applaud them, yet the female performers were neither named nor acknowledged.

Where my mind is at, here in the Canberra Qantas Lounge at 4pm on the twenty-fifth of April, is the book I’m currently seven percent through on my Kobo e-reader, “Van Diemen’s Land” by James Boyce, and a PhD candidate from Turkey who was ahead of me in line for a bacon and egg roll after the service.

The PhD candidate studying tourism in Turkey has come to Australia for a few weeks to complete his study on why Australians aren’t visiting Gallipoli for Anzac Day anymore. Apparently, for the centenary in 2015, over 40,000 Australians and New Zealanders made the pilgrimage, but numbers have significantly dropped, to about 1,500 last year.

I can’t shake the feeling that Anzac Day needs to continue to evolve.

In 2115, are we expecting our great-grandchildren to be trekking to Gallipoli, or even to the Australian War Memorial, to remember the events of April 1915?

Or can the spirit of Anzac Day start to embody more of the Australian spirit, leading me to James Boyce’s “Van Diemen’s Land”?

The thorough rewriting and retelling of Tasmania’s history should be a must-read for all Australians–not for the interest in the Apple Isle–but for a thorough understanding of the relationship between the first Australians, the early whalers and sealers, the French, the Dutch, and the British.

I was sold a narrative as a child that there was nothing here on Terra Australis except for some savages until the Brits arrived, and then some things happened, then we got Channel V. My little brother was born in 1988, so he got a cool birth certificate because the country was 200 years old, and I got a trip to Expo ‘88. Simpler times.

Modern brave and valiant efforts to flesh out that story with truth, to include First Australians, their sovereignty, and their story, have undoubtedly helped me understand more about the brutality inflicted by the early settlers and the sudden change to the Aboriginal way of life– one day they’re living their hashtag bestlife, and the next, some guy is waving a metal rod of murder towards them, killing some of their friends and family.

James Boyce’s nuanced approach to the 18th and 19th-century tension has led me to a greater understanding of the times. An understanding that softens the often poisonous narrative about the early explorers and convicts, acknowledging that they were strangers in a new and foreign land, and also that the locals were being impacted by strangers in their homeland.

One simple story that greatly impacted me was about how back-burning was misunderstood. We now know that Australian Aborigines are experts in land and bushfire management, and we also have evidence that being caught in a bushfire isn’t exactly conducive to survival. In what would be one of the earliest misunderstandings between local Aboriginals and settlers, the Aboriginals were back-burning on their land, as was their right and responsibility, but the British were terrified and believed they were under attack from the Aboriginals.

There are countless other stories from that time of the early explorers, soldiers, and convicts having extremely positive relationships with the First Australians.

But the scarlet thread through it all are tensions between the nations and their people.

The path of reconciliation made its way into the twentieth century where the First Nations people of Australia fought alongside the first immigrants of Australia in World War I, albeit paid dismally and treated worse, and still today our people struggle with that tension between our peoples, working feverishly to close that gap and heal the wounds.

I was reminded of that as one of the speakers at the War Memorial dawn service this morning recounted the 1944 story of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, where HMAS Australia was attacked by the Japanese.

In 2024, Japan is the number one nation Australians are visiting–willingly, for leisure and fun–only 80 years after we lost thirty Australians to a Japanese kamikaze aircraft attack.

The story I see being told on Anzac Day 2115 is a story of principles being held and fought for, and tensions being identified and resolved, a story of reconciliation.

Perhaps today we can start sharing that beautiful, rich, and rare story of resolved tension, principles of treaty between the First Australian nations and those of us who come across the seas for the boundless plains to share. May we advance Australia fair.

I honestly didn’t know that public speakers like comedians, Arj Barkers, and wedding celebrants were allowed to have opinions on babies being in the audience.

I hereby request that all babies at weddings I’m officiating in the future would share their snacks with me, or they can leave.

The internet’s all upset at my latte/flat white comments while I’m over here drinking a fat white, a long black with a dash of pouring cream

What’s the word for when something is a hilarious joke but also very true? I also own and recommend whichever Brother printer you want, I got the MFC, because I needed to scan things.

This reminds me of the internet I grew up and I love it so much: After The Beep.

As March 2024 almost comes to a close I’m reminded how it’s four years since my life fell apart.

Four years on I’m seeing a therapists and building a new life in Tasmania, basically starting a-fresh, it’s like 2012 all over again, the 100% brand new kid on the block.

Still tens thousands of dollars behind.

Still mentally scarred quite bad.

But I turned a corner recently. I was encouraged to understand that no-one from any government or any group is going to come and apologise and I need to forgive, and move on.

I was so busy holding on for dear life that I never even realised that I was the one holding myself back. Covid wasn’t my fault, but letting it dictate my mental wellbeing in March 2024 is, and it’s never too late to see a therapist and to talk honestly with friends.

I heard you could install Linux on an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro … so I did it …

I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m like a toddler flying an A380.

Found this old piece of pretty poor writing by me on Medium, about podcasting from 11 years ago.

The thing that will bring our society to an end is our compulsion to insist that things are other people’s problems

You might have noticed Kate Middleton has been a bit quiet on the socials lately. Well, let’s just say Tasmania now has two princesses. Tasmania’s Queen of Denmark Queen Mary, and me, the, Josh Withers, the Princess of Photoshop.

Naval Ravikant, on the modern struggle:

Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising…

Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponising abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.

Finished reading: Extremely Hardcore by Zoë Schiffer 📚 what a terrifyingly odd account of one of the richest men alive today.

Palmsy is amazing.

A cute little social network just for you with fake likes and notifications from your friends.

We should all tell our parents that this is the new Facebook.

If this photo I made ten minutes ago excites you, you’re going to love this real estate listing for our home.

A lovely Qantas flight attendant yesterday asked me if I was Josh Withers, at which point I prepare myself to say yes and have a chat to her about a wedding of mine that she attended or how she saw me on TV, like the D-Grade celebrity fool I am.

But no, she goes on to say how my wife is lovely and amazing. The flight attendant was planning to get married and was considering eloping so she ends up on the phone with Britt talking about eloping with The Elopement Collective.

Anyway, Britt really is all that and more, you know.

I was planning on singing her praises today anyway but I’ve opened up the old social media today and found it to be International Women’s Day, so it’s an even better reason to scream her name from the rooftops.

Not only is she the best person in my world, plus she made me a father of two of my other favourite humans, but Britt also spends countless hours each week counselling the brides and grooms of Australia about getting married, whether they should elope or not and whether or not we’re the best place for them to do that.

I’ve always said the thing about being remarkable is that remarkable people are easily remarked on, you are able to remark on them because their talent, beauty, smarts, intelligence is so easily witnessed.

You’re remarkable, Brittany Withers.

Prediction: Wedding photography is about to undergo a massive change.

The people who hold cameras like Fuji/Sony/Canon/Nikon need to figure out how to get their JPEGs right in camera.

They might still deliver a cull of 30 odd photos a week or three later, but the expectation is moving to fast turnaround.

The lovely iPhone holding kids - content creators - will fade away as professionals figure out how to deliver in minutes instead of months. Or maybe they don’t fade but they take up the bottom end of the marketer.

The added benefit is that because of the increased efficiency, wedding photographers will be able to take on more work. Where a wedding might have been five to ten days work, so you would be limited to maybe 30-40 weddings a year, accounting for seasonal influxes, now that same photographer might take on double the work to achieve same pay, effectively reducing the price of wedding photography because it requires less energy and effort.

I’m fast realising that my only real talent in this world is being the member of the conversation who can provide the comedic exit of the conversation before we play a guitar riff, the station call sign is aggressively voiced by an older male, then five minutes of ads is played whilst the listener changes radio station.

I asked readers of my Aisle Authority daily letter to the best celebrants in the world what they thought about the length of the daily email letter … the winner was the third of the Goldilocks bears

New favourite website: fontreviewjournal.com

I’m thoroughly convinced that email can be a meaningful method of communication, relationship, community, and entertainment in the future. I’ve always been proud of what my friend @[email protected] is making at @podnews.net so reading this article by Guy Tasaka encourages me in my little prophetic thought.

I have a deep appreciation for newsletters. They say everything old is new again. Today, with an almost overwhelming amount of information we must sift through on news sites, social media and third-party aggregation sites, like Apple and Google News, it’s nice to have information curated and summarized for me and delivered to my inbox. That kind of sounds like a newspaper.

The CEO of the biggest supermarket chain in Australia is stepping down because no other news media dared question an advertiser.

This is the strength and power of listener/reader supported media, and the strength of publicly funded media.

You can’t lose an advertiser because you asked good questions, because you aren’t reliant on, or don’t have, advertisers.

Our reluctance to individually fund good journalism are part of the reason our groceries are so expensive, that and because we’re too lazy to shop around, or better, buy local food from local producers.

Matt Ruby on metadata:

“Is metadata really that powerful?”

“OK, let’s say there’s a guy who texted a girl 5 times without getting a reply. Would you need to actually read the messages to know what’s going on there?”

“Nah, I 100% get what happened.”

“That’s the power of metadata.”

I find reading the news depressing but I still want to get an idea of what’s happening in the local news so I made an AI bot that writes the daily Tasmanian news headlines as a poem: tas.lol.

Levelling up in nerdom is running your own AI/LLM on your own hardware.

A unified theory of fucks:

The theory goes like so: you are born with so many fucks to give.

I’ve just found out - through hearing it - that the Disney cruise ship horn blows the tune “When you wish upon a star” in port and now I feel all magical and whimsical.

Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs at the Grammys singing Fast Car

10 issues into my new daily letter to the best wedding celebrants in the world, Aisle Authority, and it’s feeling good.

Shoutout to my Swede and Hong Kong readers!

aisleauthority.email to subscribe

Seriously

No-one asked but if I was a wrestler my walk-out music would be In The Shadows by The Rasmus