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

For those of us that know Internet Explorer 4.0 was the GOAT, a reflection on the Geocities, marquee rage, dial-up Internet era, the 90s on the web, by Zach Holman

Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation. By combining these two tags, you were a trailblazer. A person capable of great innovation. A human being that all other human beings could aspire to. You were a web developer in the 1990s.

I’ve written the first seven issues of my new daily email letter for wedding celebrants: Aisle Authority.

I’m writing for the North American wedding officiants and celebrants that contact me every day, but Aussies and well honestly anyone, is welcome to jump on board.

www.aisleauthority.email is the place to subscribe if you want to be the best damn wedding ceremony creator in the world.

For those of us that know Internet Explorer 4.0 was the GOAT, a reflection on the Geocities, marquee rage, dial-up Internet era, the 90s on the web, by Zach Holman

Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation. By combining these two tags, you were a trailblazer. A person capable of great innovation. A human being that all other human beings could aspire to. You were a web developer in the 1990s.

Took a peek at a peak across the Remarkables today

Marketing is actually part of the product.

That’s an intangible element of Apple products that is often missed by the Android, Windows, Meta Quest commenters.

Sure, the other products do “the same things” the Apple products does, but Samsung, Microsoft, Meta, Google marketing is woeful.

This isn’t an Apple thing, this is a human thing. Some of us just want to be a part of something beautiful and cool.

An Apple invoice and delivery is not just some plastic and metal, software, and some USB cords. It’s also a story, a narrative that some people with certain taste, would like to purchase.

And the rest of you can go use your Android, Dell, Meta Quest.

Ben Thompson’s interview podcast with Spike Eskin about radio from 2023 is a really good listen if you have a Stratechery membership.

a mob of kangaroos

If every website firewall brought this kind of tease energy I’d be a broke man but journalism would be funded globally.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can just nominate awesome people around you for an Order of Australia medal on the Governor-General’s website.

You should nominate someone valuable in your community today.

Ten years on since we filmed the first season of Married At First Sight, nine years on since it aired, and I still get recognised. Just happened in Footscray.

It’s wild how being on TV has such lasting brand power.

Unlike this post which will be seen by two humans, five computers, and a large language model.

going to bed with an empty inbox and an audience size of 3 …

I can’t escape this idea of what ‘taste’ is, as discussed on the Ezra Klein show.

I like to think about taste not as something that’s not just about consuming a thing or enjoying a thing superficially on a day to day basis, but instead almost making it part of yourself.

Surely, and please give me grace if this isn’t the case, surely the people really upset about not being able to buy new Chinese manufactured cheap plastic crap adorned with the Australian flag surely have some old Chinese manufactured cheap plastic crap adorned with the Australian flag they could repurpose instead of vandalising and throwing flares into a Woolworths store operated by Australian humans who don’t have any Chinese manufactured cheap plastic crap adorned with the Australian flag?

The Farnham Street email:

A different take on what makes us feel so busy, stressed, and anxious.

As a rule, the larger your surface area, the more energy you have to expend maintaining it. Of course, when most of us think of surface area, we think of the area of a rectangle or how much grass we have to mow. But there is a surface area of life, and most of us never realize how much it consumes.

If you have one house, you have a relatively small surface area to maintain (depending on the age and size of the house, of course). If you buy another one, your surface area expands. But it doesn’t expand linearly - it expands slightly above that. It’s all the same work plus more.

Friends are another type of surface area. You have a finite amount of time to spend with friends before you die. The more friends you have, the less time you can spend with each one individually.

Money is another form of surface area. The more money you have, the more you have to keep track of different types of assets and investments.

When your surface area expands too much, you hire people to help you scale. Assistants, property managers, family offices, etc. They’re scaling you - but they’re also scaling the surface area of responsibility. This, of course, only masks the rapidly expanding surface area by abstracting it.

Beliefs are another type of surface area.

The thing about surface area is that the more you have, the more you have to defend and maintain. The larger your surface area, the more you are burdened with mentally and physically.

If you think in terms of surface area, it’s easy to see why we are so anxious, stressed, and constantly behind.

We feel like we need more time, but what we’re craving is more focus. What we need is a smaller surface area.

Your surface area becomes part of your identity. She’s the ‘busy person’ with her hand in every project. He’s the guy with four houses.

Competition can drive expansion. Most people want a bigger house to compete with someone else who has a nicer house. We are animals, after all. On a group level, this causes great benefits. On an individual level, it can cause unhappiness.

Most of the really happy people I know have a relatively small surface area. I know billionaires with two houses. Most of my close friends only have 4-5 close friends - everyone else is a friend in the loose sense of the word. Most of the productive people I know at work are focused on one or two things, not 5.

The way to maximize your enjoyment in life is to keep your surface area small. It’s a lot of work but if the happiest people I know are any indication, it’s a lot less work to keep it small than to maintain it when it’s large.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world, this makes it difficult to plan the day.

— E. B. White

How it started, and how it finished

A Brisbane based crew have delivered on their Kickstarter promise to deliver a “camera for the small moments”, the Flashback Camera. It’s a digital film camera, or a film-like digital camera more to the point.

I’m an avid Kickstarter backer, but especially for cool gadgets like this, and it was a pleasure to unpack.

The idea is to take the point-and-shoot disposable film camera vibe to a digital setting, mainly for the purposes of getting off our phones, disposing of cameras a lot less, and making memories.

I don’t have a full review in me, instead, a reflection on having used it for a week: it’s a lot of fun and a beautifully made product.

I have but one issue, probably the same one that everyone who has ever clicked the shutter on their iPhone then instantly been able to share and edit the photo.

In an update today the makers have expanded on the feature I find most annoying. That at the end of the arbitrary digital film roll of 27 photos it takes about 48 hours for the photos to “develop”:

The processing done to develop your photos is currently too intensive to run on a mobile device. Over the last 2 years, we developed our own effects. In particular, our method to generate film grain is complex. Often, “film grain” effects are based on adding random digital noise, but true film grain is fundamentally different. Analog images are composed of grains, not pixels, and our method follows this closely. Our vision for this product has always been to stay true to the analog world, and we’ve worked hard to never compromise on that. If we were satisfied with simple filters, we could run them inside the app, but we continue to believe that our current setup is the most flexible in providing the best possible photos from this camera.

Personally, I think there would be greater customer satisfaction if that 48 hour time period was minimised to the actual required time to process, and ultimately that could be brought on to the device. I think the iPhone CPU has proven itself to be apt at processing photos.

It would be nice if the processed photos had better metadata as well, like orientation of photo, date and time that was correct, that the flash even if enabled accidentally by fat fingers wouldn’t fire in full sun, and ultimately this last one is just me being really nerdy: GPS co-ordinates of photos so the captured memories end up in iCloud Photo Library memories.

Here’s some demo photos take over the weekend in Exmouth and the Gold Coast …

Disappointed this hasn’t come to pass yet

This article on “Afrofuturism” is so interesting, so I’ll lead with the end:

The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror – The wide brown land for me!

– Dorothea Mackellar

Photos from somewhere between Exmouth and Learmonth on the Exmouth Gulf.

When I’m president I’m going to classify printers as terrorists

Digital incompetency truly will be the swan song of the people of the 2020s.

“The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts are grown.”

– James Clear

I wrote this eight years ago on Facebook. I think it’s more valid today plus I want to preserve it on my blog:

With all of our books, albums, magazines, and letters going digital and stored outside of the physical and easily visible realm, how will our kids discover that album that dad loved, or that magazine that mum kept?

I remember that “already in our house from mum and dad” discovery being a big thing for me.

I love Led Zeppelin and Sheryl Crow because I found the album at home. I loved Nick Earl’s ZigZag Street because it was sitting on a shelf in a room I was renting on the Gold Coast when I first worked for Sea FM. I discovered albums I still love because they were sitting on the music director’s desk and they weren’t on demo enough to give away on air. I love Smith Journal, Monocle, and Relevant Magazine because I found them on shelves, tables, coffee shops, before I ever bought them.

How will our kids discover things?

Will they rely purely on people recommending things?

Recommending culture is hard. I barely ever show other people music I like because a) I don’t want them not liking it to affect my liking it, and b) it’s kind of rude to assume that anyone would like anything.

Passive discovery has been such a strong driving force for hundreds of years, surely that hasn’t been replaced with trending topics, Facebook shares, and retweets?

📨 Mail Client - Mail.app

📮 Mail Server - Fastmail

📝 Notes - Drafts/Obsidian

✅ To-Do - Reminders.app

📷 iPhone Photo Shooting - Camera.app

🟦 Photo Management - Photos.app after a Lightroom CC edit

📆 Calendar - Google Calendar (for business) and iCloud calendar for family, read by Fantastical

📁 Cloud File Storage - Dropbox for work and iCloud for family

📖 RSS - NetNewsWire

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts - iCloud and Contacts.app + Obsidian for work

🌐 Browser - Safari

💬 Chat - iMessage plus whatever everyone else makes me use, God bless their souls

🔖 Bookmarks - Raindrop.io

📑 Read It Later - Pocket on Kobo

📜 Word Processing - Remarkable 2 tablet

📈 Spreadsheets - Numbers

📊 Presentations - iA Presenter

🛒 Shopping Lists - Reminders.app

🍴 Meal Planning - my heart

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance - Xero for business, Up for personal

📰 News - as little as possible, but Apple News plus local news subscriptions

🎵 Music - Apple Music

🎤 Podcasts - Overcast

🔐 Password Management - 1Password

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

– Alain de Botton

It’s amazing how close Google is to upsetting the iMessage monopoly and I’m betting they’ll let go of the opportunity.

I’ve just started using Google Chat for a new project and it’s actually not terrible. For someone in the Apple ecosystem, it’s not far from being as good as iMessage.

They need a native Mac app that works like a Mac app, and their iPhone app needs to work in with the share sheet API, but it’s close.

They’re so busy fighting for iMessage to accept RCS/Google that they’ll no doubt miss this opportunity to just put iMessage out of business.

The hardest thing about being a wedding celebrant is figuring out the right balance of smiley faces, exclamation marks, or periods, to end sentences in emails with.

You don’t want to sound too cold, but you don’t want to sound too excited. It’s an art.

You know, it’s super fun and easy to take a pot shot at the Humane AI Pin, but put your hesitations aside and 1) watch the video and tell me it’s not actually kinda cool, and 2) it’s refreshing to see someone have a crazy idea and actually get it to a stage of putting a price on it.

So many big ideas never make it past a concept video. Ideas are easy. Shipping is real hard. If it was available in Aus today I’d probably give it a red hot shot because it’s just fun.

Watch out guys, the police have installed new air drumming detection cameras and if you actually can’t play drums or if you’re out of time with the music it’s a $2000 fine.

Answering the most common question I get asked, “Do you travel for weddings?”

This is so fascinating, CT scans of real AirPods versus the fake ripoff AirPods

Sorry I missed your text, I’m currently being force-fed all of the information about the entirety of the existence of the human race, past, present, and future, through a handheld slab of glass and aluminium, and my brain stopped coping in 1995.

Old people/nerds like me: Do you have memories, or photos, of the computer software and shareware kiosks from the mid-90s in Australia.

I remember going to Video Ezy in Mackay (in the Canelands carpark to be precise) and you could BYO floppy disk or buy one from the staff, and there was a computer kiosk where you could choose which shareware programs you’d download to your 1.44MB floppy disk.

the more you K-sound now

We celebrated my moon girl’s fifth birthday today and without doubt I have so much love for everyone that loves and celebrates her, but I wanted to share something I taught Luna today that is applicable to weddings as well.

Life’s not a dog and pony show, we’re real people with real feelings and lives and we don’t need to watch another TED Talk to know that

This musical tribute to the #SydneyOperaHouse by Tim Minchin and crew is the best thing on the internet today

In my dream last night I had to explain the “bah-lark-eh” substitute teacher joke from Key and Peele to a wedding guest named Blake. So I guess weddings are back.

I love how at no point is the world left wondering what Ziggy Stardust did and if he was good at it

GM - how people apparently say good morning on social media where - globally speaking - there is no real morning or night or day.

GM - me, thinking you’re talking about that car company again.

Here to help

Monthly photography revenue: $5 Monthly photography audience: 9 million across Unsplash and Pexels.

Can someone check on Mark Di Stefano? Surely the trust fund babies have a price on his head now?

There’s a lot said about how we Aussies are more divided and alone than we ever have been in this country.

But when I see multiple cars across lanes of traffic work together to hilariously block an aggressive driver from getting ahead in the traffic I reckon there’s voice left in us yet, Australia.

Vote yes.

Show me a more “Aussie” Aussie, than this legit Aussie legend.

I’ll wait.

I have a confession to make: I’ve built an Australian news website that is purely created by large language models. It’s autonomous and although I can edit, delete, and stop it, I don’t unless something bad happens.

It’s been a week so far and honestly, I prefer reading it to the other news websites that inspire it.

It’s public but I’m scared about sharing it just yet.

I’ve also been having an LLM rewrite a friend’s blog and I love it.

Flying into Sydney over the Blue Mountains from Uluru this afternoon was a visual treat

Two Google conspiracy theories proven true today:

1: Google Chrome tracks and shares your web browsing for advertising purposes:

Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a “topic” list it shares with advertisers.

2: Google Assistant shares your queries for advertising purposes: Research paper.

Podcast recommendation for the media, podcasting, and tech nerds in my circles: Really Specific Stories. It’s by @martinfeld of @HemisphericViews on “the narratives of tech-podcast fandom and the role of open RSS”. Two of my favourite episodes so far are with @marco and @jsnell.

Shane Parrish on playing the long game:

Every action is a step toward the short game or the long game. You can’t opt out, and you can’t play a long-term game in everything. You need to pick what matters to you. But in everything you do, time amplifies the difference between strategies that work in the short term and ones that work in the long term. The long game allows you to compound results. The longer you play, the bigger the rewards.

Duelling Retro Roos sighting

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together—just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

– EB White

I’ve driven 737km today, I have 93 left, and I just want to say there needs to be a royal commission into the state of servo food in this once great nation.

I often wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda is working on a Peggy spin-off

Many thanks to the airline gods for offering up a new CEO for our national flights of Australia for make benefit glorious nation of Qantastralia! May our new blessed CEO that is the one and only decision maker in the entire organisation, no board of directors or any other executive staff. Make good our glorious airline that can now do no wrong and only make good decisions. Whoever the former CEO was, whatever their name, sexuality, or ethnicity was - I forget - may that bad person be forever gone to go lead some European airline far, far away, from our great nation.

Qantas forever!

The lead singer responsible for bringing this century its greatest motivational pop/ska punk/power pop song, All Star, has passed away.

Pitchfork:

Steve Harwell, the founding singer of Smash Mouth, died today at his home in Boise, Idaho, of liver failure, The New York Times reports. The musician was 56 years old. Harwell dealt with alcoholism and numerous health issues in the years preceding his death.

Smash Mouth undeniably left a dent on pop culture from 1999 onwards, and when I saw the band perform in November 2018 it was stale performance from a tired Steve with a team of young local musos behind him, yet the songs struck that joyful chord in my born-in-1981 heart.

But I want to leave you with Steve’s 2003 cover of Neil Diamond’s You Are My Number One.

Hold me down I’m gonna fly straight to heaven Hold me down Dont ever let go I’ve been around You know I can’t stay forever And when I leave I want you to know - When I’m finally gone, I’m gonna be gone without a trace There’s a lot of good times ahead before we’re done

As someone commented on X, with Jimmy Buffet passing it’s not a great week for guys who liked to party, but it seems like Steve was self-aware enough to know that all of our days are numbered.

I just hope the girl with the shape of an L on her forehead had nothing to do with this.

Can anyone I know remember the name of the modern web browser for MacOS System 9? I don’t know why this matters to me so much but I need to browse the web inside a virtual machine of System 9 just to feel something today while I wait for news to occur for today’s Sizzle.

I’m a part of the Hobart wedding trail coming up in a few weeks. I’m expecting a great crowd to fly down and come and jump on a bus or boat and check out the Tasmanian wedding scene. My friend Nina at Isle Weddings is hosting, check out her website for more info.

You’re never going to guess who Nouba interviewed.

I’m guest editing The Sizzle today. Apologies for any banana peel in the email.

I’m the guest on the most recent episode of Polka Dot Wedding’s Feel Good Wedding Podcast. My audio recording isn’t great because it was recorded in a small tiled Italian co-working office room, but the sentiment is great: getting married can be and should be awesome and enjoyable.

Listen on their website or in your podcast app of choice.

And thank you to Dorothy and Mary for having me :)

YouTube bringing that dad energy

Death to paper straws

Home

Can confirm, hearing the instrumental “Still Call Australia Home” as you’re settling in your seat as everyone boards, tickles an emotional muscle.

I’m in the Qantas Singapore Lounge and the waiter poured me a glass of Shiraz, a 2020 from South Australia, on the left.

I make the joke, “2020, not a good year” and then I laugh and smile back at him.

He comes back five minutes later with a 2016 cab sav (on the right) hoping that I like that better.

My comedy is wasted on these people.

Four year old just now at our Singapore hotel as we’re getting ready to go to Singapre airport: I don’t want to eat here, I want to eat at ‘the club at the airport’.

Someone’s enjoying her dad’s Platinum status a bit too much.

Luna calls cable cars “plane trains” and honestly, that’s a much better name.

When we took the kids overseas everyone told us to make sure we look after them …

Hello, Qantas my old friend