← 2021 August 2021

  • "When you're young, you look at television and think - There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realise that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought." - Steve Jobs

  • Spring’s first sun has sprung

  • Even the Illuminati has to deal with the hell that is Gmail’s Promotional folder.

  • x% of all sales go to a good cause. The remainder goes to me, a not-good cause.

  • Channel 4's tribute and favourite moments YouTube clips in remembrance of Sean Lock are solid gold.

  • Choices

  • Kesha, the artist, is a prophet: Her ’09 debut single Tik Tok turns out to be quite the business plan for the 2016 social network bearing the same name. 2010's Blah Blah Blah describes, well, it describes everything. 2017's collab with Macklemore, Good Old Days? Enough said.

  • 🛹

  • In the last 18 months, how have QR codes taken off but Touch-Free Copper Keys not? I feel like 2020 was the Copper Key’s year but the key missed it.

  • An ode and a farewell to my Apple iMac G4

  • On in-person education:

    "The Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek had a phrase for the kind of awareness it’s hard to capture in metrics and maps: the ‘knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place’."

    from "How to Make the World Add Up" by Tim Harford

  • record scratch yup, that’s me, catching a ride out to attempt a drone rescue after a bird attacked it and sunk it into the Gold Coast Broadwater

  • Number 2

  • Highline // Palm Beach

  • The wedding industry is weird, it’s one of the few workplaces where you’re encouraged to make your clients cry,

  • ☕️ Merlo

  • The Calile

  • "In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer

  • 39 images, all glued together with digital sticky tape 🌳

  • As a native speaker of Strayan’ English, I feel like our own whistled language has been ignored by the Smithsonian Magazine here. The great Australian wolf whistle is a complex piece of kit.

  • Ira Glass on loving the gap

  • 🚙

  • 🐮

  • Secret beach

  • A weak link in Microsoft's Power Apps portal service has exposed 38 million personal records. Great.

  • “...there is no ladder of intelligence. Intelligence is not a single dimension. It is a complex of many types and modes of cognition, each one a continuum. … we have no measurement, no single metric for that intelligence. Instead we have many different metrics for many different types of cognition.”

    “A squirrel can remember the exact location of several thousand acorns for years, a feat that blows human minds away. So in that one type of cognition, squirrels exceed humans.”

  • Australia’s Channel Seven’s The Morning Show, explaining how Apple’s The Morning Show is called Morning Wars in Australia: “lawyers”

  • Happy third PM anniversary, Scott Morrison

  • 🌺

  • 🌊

  • Sunshine Beach

  • The worlds greatest scientists: do you think we can combine PPE and speed dealer sunglasses?

    Other scientists: no, it’s impossible

    World’s greatest scientists: mission accepted

  • New moon Sunday

  • A lot of people who don't live in a border region posting big words regarding the protest from those living in border regions today. I live 1km inside the Queensland border to NSW and if you cared, I can tell stories for days of people who are affected, you'd be speechless.

  • “The Media Is Too Clueless and Sensationalistic to Properly Explain Breakthrough Covid”

  • ” I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions."

    Currently reading "How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers" by Tim Harford

  • The protested-against take issue with the protestors, who aren’t in lockdown, and are allowed to meet and peacefully protest. Cool story, Nazi Queensland.

  • 🏖

  • Well guys, I think that just about wraps up our first dress rehearsal for humanity. Let’s come back tomorrow and start a fresh and try and do it properly then.

  • BREAKING: Netflix Secures Exclusive Broadcast Rights To NSW Premier's 11am Press Conference

    “The Premier’s 11am press briefing is literally the only thing people watch on free to air these days except the Olympics and maybe State of Origin football.”

  • 2060 US Presidential election prediction

  • 🚲

  • 🌙 Luna

  • 🎢

  • Ok, real talk, in Paw Patrol, why does Ryder, a human, get a Jetpack, but the pups have to drive or fly with their paws? Also, why don’t they deploy all pups to all jobs? Through each episode they all eventually get called out. It’s just inefficient patrolling.

  • 🐬

  • Spammer has given me the name of my next podcast, “Voice Massage”

  • Come on Australia, we can do this, just keep on posting about Covid and we’ll solve it once we reach heard immunity.

  • “Unravel from toxic individualism. You do nothing by yourself. Your whole life is a collaboration.”

    – @TheNapMinistry

  • Phone call starts with a recorded Australian accent speaking “This call is from National Crime Authority, the legal department of Services Australia” and I'm probably one spam phone call away from never answering a call again.

  • Hometown

  • Magnetic Island

  • Proposal for a name for a new Gold Coast region: SoTal.

    “South of Tallebudgera”

    It encompasses Palm Beach, Currumbin, Tugun, and Coolangatta, along with the Currumbin and Tallebudgera valleys.

    In a sentence: “no, I can’t meet you in Burleigh for drinks, I don’t leave SoTal.”

  • 🐄

  • Sunday

  • Real talk, it's been 17 months today since the first restrictions on what I call, the Australian Beforetime. Since then our every day has simply been different.

    How long until we all collectively lose our minds?

    I keep on seeing signs of the dam wall breaking.

  • Hey, does anyone know how Sia feels about cheap thrills?

  • #shotoniphone

  • Scientific evidence that social media makes us sadder and angrier. Why do we do this?

  • Hey, if masks are going to be a thing, could we at least use them to remind me who you are and how I know you?

  • The most ignorant thing I read these days isn’t from conspiracy theorists or anti-vaxxers.

    It’s the phrase “believe in science.” As if science is a belief, a faith, or religion.

    Science is a pursuit, an experiment, an adventure. I love science. It requires not, my belief.

  • For most Australians, before March 2020 we’d never identifed as a Queenslander or a West Australian, outside of the odd game of sport, or in a fleeting moment of pride.

    We identified as Australian.

    Will the new Covid-lead state-based patriotism continue after Covid?

  • A few hours on Magnetic Island, Queensland

  • 🧲 Island

  • Thursday morning // Brisbane

  • Whatchulookinat

  • Yo

  • Alright, real talk, how far from an airport can you be and still call yourself an airport hotel?

  • Everyone has their little covid skill they've learned. Some of you might have sourdough, or knitting. I have the ability to clearly and concisely respond to emails from the Office of Fair Trading in under 6 hours.

  • On ABC radio this morning I predicted that the cost of weddings will rise post-covid because the wedding industry has been one of the hardest hit by Covid and received the least amount of support, financial, or political.

  • I haven’t got a job because of a resume in over 18 years (thanks Ali and Sea FM Mackay!) but I made one today because I think the pandemic has fired me from being self-employed ¯_(ツ)_/¯

  • When consumed moderately, whisky’s many medicinal benefits include preventing the “head from whirling, the tongue from lisping... the hands from shivering, the bones from aching.”

    — Sixteenth-century English chronicler Raphael Holinshed

  • As the Gold Coast left lockdown today

  • Follow-up to
  • A wedding celebrant’s Covid story: I’m not ok

  • Recreating the After Dark screensavers in CSS is a strong, super strong, nostalgia kick. I’d pay good money for a Flying Toasters screensaver today just to steal my mind away from 2021 for a minute.

  • Luna Hawk Amateur Skater

  • Friends often ask what it’s like to cross the border from NSW into Queensland so I filmed today’s border crossing after collecting essentials from Tweed Heads icon, Bread Social (I have a permit to cross the border)

  • I'm studying for a Certificate IV in Real Estate at the moment, and there's a whole section on how real estate agents can be human.

    Must be a new section.

  • Meme, circa August 2021.

  • Hey Siri, please remind me of this every day

  • “A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

    — Jorge Luis Borges

  • Toying with the idea of flushing my entire digital identity down the toilet for my 40th birthday later this year and starting a fresh. New phone number, email, domain, Apple ID, Google Account, blog, all new social accounts. It feels like a grand idea.

  • I’d pay money for an iOS upgrade that acknowledged swearing in autocorrect. I’ve never in my almost 40 years wanted to get tucked or ducked.

  • On paying more

  • Please check surroundings

  • Good news, I finally get to leave the quarantine I never went into, but have been texted about every day for 14 days, despite calling the Victorian Dept of Health to let them know I left Victoria an hour after arriving and never even came from a hotspot and they said all good …

  • Failed to save a spider

  • James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, was paid $3M by HBO to reject a $5M offer to be the new boss on The Office. We should really be paying people like @darrenhayes to not sell out our high school memories for food mountain.

  • Forty years ago today, August 1 in the USA, 1981, MTV launched by playing Video Killed The Radio Star.