← 2022 January 2022
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Readers and viewers aren’t dumb, via The Why Axis email.
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I’ll probably do your wedding for free if you walk down the aisle to Goldfinger’s cover of 99 Red Balloons.
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Thinking about Citipointe Christian College in Brisbane this afternoon …
“Bless those who persecute you. Don’t curse them; pray that God will bless them. Be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with each other. Don’t be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people.
And don’t think you know it all!”
An excerpt from Romans , chapter 12:14-16 from the New Living Translation.
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Has Spotify had a deep clean yet? I’m staying out until everything on Spotify is 100% sanitised.
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“You can do it like it’s a great weight, or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.”
– Ram Dass
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The year is 2034 and your 12 y/o is getting ready for school. She starts the day with classes on empathy and then human connection. After lunch she has class on using social media to diagnose mental health concerns, and finishes with a class on post-algorithmic living.
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Any other old school nerds ever just feel like re-visiting astalavista dot box dot sk?
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Are you even from Brisbane if you don’t come to the Gold Coast on a long weekend and arrogantly proclaim to your partner that (insert beach suburb name) has really come into it’s own.
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Notice how we keep on hearing from people who claim to be silenced?
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Jen Ortiz, The Cut on weed's last taboo, pregnancy:
Those bong rips did the trick: “I fucking thrived after I felt better. I had the best pregnancy — like, glowing.”
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Whites Beach, New South Wales
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Gm Byron Bay 👋💪
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Wategos Beach for sunrise this morning
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"When rain falls, it flows downhill. If desired, you can collect the rain in a bucket and carry it uphill, but the natural tendency of water is to flow toward the lowest point.
Most situations in life have a tendency—a direction in which things want to flow. You can choose to go against the flow (just as you can choose to carry water uphill), but your results tend to be better when you find a way to work with the gradient of the situation.
Position yourself to benefit from the external forces at hand and you will get more from the same unit of effort. Energy is conserved and results are multiplied."
— James Clear
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Name a banger more bangish than Orgy’s Blue Monday. I’ll wait.
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What which craft is this? Surfing without waves!? #witchcraft #byronbay #wategosbeach #surfing
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If you’re interested in joining my new rectangle scheme we just give each other the same amount of money for doing nothing. Plus we get name badges.
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You know how we’d all hate a guy who annually celebrated the anniversary of that time he raped someone. Now think about January 26.
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Why Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car, Timothy B Lee:
"It’s one of the most important economic mysteries of the modern world. While the material things in life are cheaper than ever, labor-intensive services are getting more and more expensive. Middle-class Americans today have little trouble affording a car, but they struggle to afford a spot in day care."
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A story of hope, that the old internet might be coming back, the old internet was when the internet was a wonderland. Not a computer generated echo chamber.
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Brian Koppelman:
"To an artist, rejection, at first, feels like death. That’s how personal the work is. And that’s why we’re afraid to do the work. Because then we have to show it. And then they might reject it. But rejection is only a death if you let it stop you from doing the work the next day."
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It really bothers me that Logan City Council uses Lobster font for its entry to the region motorway signage.
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What lays beneath … // Cook Island, off Fingal Head
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Fingal Head this afternoon.
Was nice to visit and not have to convince a police to let me go home afterward.
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A million dollar sunset over #Tugun tonight
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What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was At The Center Of Life? asks The Atlantic.
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A relationship is about inventing your own language, says Céline Sciamma:
“You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”
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Is a LIDAR capture of a person a photograph? Wired asks what is a photograph.
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This is nuts:
"CoreLogic’s Quarterly Auction Market Review shows 42,918 properties were taken to auction across the combined capital cities in the three months to Dec 2021, an 85.1% increase from the previous quarter and more than double (109.5%) the Dec 2020 figures."
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I just want to get out ahead of any rumours being spread by our almost 11 month old and go on the record saying that we do feed her enough food, and some would say too much food. She’s well fed, don’t believe what she tells you.
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I have issue with Apple’s Texas Hold’em game. Do they not have a graphic designer on staff? Could they not just get a photo of a bunch of Macs on a shelf in a garage from @ismh?
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Sea breeze
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Make taxi ranks car parks again. Return the taxi tanks to the people.
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If only he’d been like a bat out of Wuhan, still here when the morning comes, when Christmas comes, when the wedding comes, the funeral comes, still here, a few years on.
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“Like a bat out of hell I'll be gone when the morning comes”
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If you’ve ever worried about robots rising up and taking over, have no fear, they’re a long way off.
I’ve used brooms smarter than our Roomba i7.
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Toowoomba’s, Gabbinbar Homestead, on a Thursday afternoon
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A Jewish scholar I once heard speak talked about how his people viewed life and death not as one season followed by another, life and then death, but that throughout your day they were states you would enter. That your decisions and thoughts and actions would take into life or death.
That for a people so obsessed with life after death and whether we could get into heaven - or if there was one at all - we could be focused on bringing heaven to earth today through our words, thoughts, and actions.
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The one truth everyone that has ever existed can testify to is that you cannot stop people dying, but you can stop them living.
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Who do I have to talk to about making the next Mission: Impossible movie about stolen NFTs.
Mission: Impossible - Right Click.
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She turns around to tell me to make sure I take a photo of her on the scooter, “take photo of me!” My firstborn, @lunawithers.
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January 2022 in the Associated Press:
"A bill ... that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort”"
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That face when dad makes you leave the beach
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South of Talle’ on a Tuesday afternoon
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I’m not antistacks, I’m just saying, when you’re on the bottom of a stacks-on it sucks. It’s all well and good if you’re on the top of the stack, but the rest of us have a large weight on our shoulders, torso, legs, etc.
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I've upgraded my MacBook this week to a new MacBook Pro, and a friend asked me how it was.
I said it's unnoticeable, like a good marriage celebrant, or a good real estate agent should be. That good that you don't notice.
When your computer is slow you notice, and you moan about it. When your celebrant isn't confident and delivering a great ceremony, you notice it and joke about it at the reception, and when your real estate agent is a dodgy one, you really notice, and tell all your mates.
My hope is that I'm that good that you don't notice. That I'd be like my new MacBook, so fast, efficient, and plain old good, that you don't notice how good until you think about all the other computers you've used and you realise you've got a real powerhouse of a computer in front of you.
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"A signal is not a trend. A trend is not a future. A future is not THE future."
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The Algorithmic Trap by David Perrell:
"If you want to find emerging and under-rated ideas, stop using algorithms ... and improve the quality of what you consume."
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Luna got a camera for Christmas from Uncle Harley & Ainsley, so tonight she wanted to go and make photos of planes taking off.
You couldn’t understand how proud I am of her. Her little brain astounds me and impresses me every day!
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In 2022 I want to be a lot more deliberate about my inputs. Garbage in, garbage out. I'm continuing to craft my newsletters and subscriptions, detailed on my inputs page. Plus I'm now documenting books I want to read, books I am reading, and books I have read.
Small atomic changes should put make sure I'm walking down the right track.
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I’m not anti-tax, I’m just saying that we don’t know the long term effects of giving these politicians half our cash. How do we know they’re not going to make stupid decisions with it?
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Breaking news: Novak Djokovic wins the Australia Closed grand door slammed tournament.
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When Britt and I were dating we lived in different cities the whole time as I travelled for radio work (Port Macquarie, Mackay, Cairns, Sydney, Brisbane) so we spent heaps of time at night on the phone.
We’d go outside and ask each other if we could see the moon.
Ten years on we have a daughter named Luna.
And we named her sister Goldie so we could have our sun and our moon.
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Finished reading: Volcanic Winter by Mark Rutherford 📚
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Currently reading: Fortune-teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels In The Far East by Tiziano Terzani 📚
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"Your goals are meant to honour you, not fix you"
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"As soon as you decide to do without planes, you realise how they impose their limited way of looking at things on you. Oh, they diminish distances, which is handy enough, but they end up diminishing everything including your understanding of the world. You leave Rome at sunset, have dinner, sleep a while, and at dawn you are in India. But in reality each country has its own special character. We need time if we are to prepare ourselves for the encounter; we must make an effort if we are to enjoy the conquest. Everything has become so easy that we no longer take pleasure in anything. To understand is a joy but only if it comes with effort, and nowhere is this more than in the experience of other countries. Reading a guidebook while hopping from one airport to another is not the same as the slow, laborious absorption- as if by osmosis- of the humours of the earth to which ones remains bound when travelling by train.
Reached by plane, all places become alike- destinations separated from one another by nothing more than a few hours flight. Frontiers, created by nature and history and roots in the consciousness of the people who live within them, lose their meaning & cease to exist for those who travel to and from the air-conditioned bubbles of airports, where the border is a policeman in front of a computer screen where the first encounter with the new place is baggage carousel, where the emotion of leave taking is dissipated in the rush to get to the duty free shop- now the same everywhere"
— A Fortune Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani
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Proposal: Let’s drop the metaverse, and go all in on the meatverse. Less virtual reality meetings, more steak.
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Dear Me,
If, in future years, anyone asks you to give advice to your sixteen year old self… don’t.
Make your own unique messes, and then work your own way out of them.
See you,
Alan Rickman
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Molly White: blockchains are decentralised but not really, immutable but not really.
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I missed this New York Times piece on my hometown, Mackay in North Queensland, about how the mayor is almost single-handedly trying to turn the community around on climate change.
"Over the past year, Mr. Williamson, a fifth-generation Mackay local, has tried more outreach and education, meeting frequently with residents to discuss why the trees are needed, and whether a lighter mix of vegetation might be allowed for partial ocean views."
If Mackay was going to be in the New York Times I always thought it would be because they ship about 100 million tonnes of coal out of the region every year.
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Things we were very worried about in our youth that turned out to be non-issues:
- using algebra
- the Bermuda Triangle
- snakes on planes
- quicksand
- monsters under our bed
- remembering phone numbers
- what’s in Area 51
- becoming prime minister
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2021, the year in typography, if you're into that kinda nerdy thing like I am.
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Om Malik on the lethal and constant feeling of self-importance we walk around with:
"With all the conversation of breaking free from big social platforms, owning your own digital identity, and being independent, I have been asking myself: how can all of us who have slowly become online performance artists ever be post-social?"
Since March 2020 I've thought a lot about what it means for us to think we're so self-important and what that means for us living in a community with a virus like the spicy cough.
I'm sure it's not only me, but the moment a sense of self-importance enters my soul I start feeling sick. This photo of a chicken with a mullet often helps me get over myself.
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“I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought with 30 years of good science we could address those problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy – and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
– Gus Speth
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My mate @scotty_mcdonald knows Brisbane better than you, and he's writing an email about it called Brisbane is Weird and you ought to subscribe.
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Where'd I get this rainbow fudge? The Country Non-Binary's Association stall at the markets this morning.
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The gestation period for new MacBooks is past the two month mark #joy
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15 years of iPhone
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Currently reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear 📚
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Your Animals With Attitude artists were so preoccupied with whether they could make a Super Mario Koala, they didn't stop to think if they should make a Super Mario Koala.
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Why don’t they make phone screens out of the same glass they make fridge shelves out of?
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I’m just saying, if you can’t trust people who spend billions of dollars to get fit good looking people to run around aggressively in arbitrary rectangular boxes, who can you trust?
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Isn’t it wild to imagine that if everyone on the whole planet just stayed at home until February there’d be no Covid.
No deliveries, no takeaway, no construction or maintenance, and in Feb it’s 2019 again.
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The government response to Covid this month seems akin to trying to stop a large boulder running out of control down a mountain.
I, for one, welcome our new geological overlord.
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'The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.'
— Steve Jobs
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W.L. George in The New York Herald in May 1992 didn't think that "the little girl who sells candles at Grand Central Station" would be too impressed with 2022:
"The year 2022 would have to produce something very startling to interest her ghost"
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I really thought that by this age I would’ve found Carmen Sandiego. Life is just a series of disappointments.
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I remember my friend Clifford showing me these photos and us waiting for them to render. Seeing a girl’s naked shoulders was a big deal back then.
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1 in 10 Brits will launch their own podcast in 2022 says Acast via @podnews
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"Cricket and ten-pin bowling ultimately derive from the same sport. It makes sense if you think of the wicket in cricket as analogous to the pins in bowling."
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Olivia Laing in 2015 on the future of loneliness:
"the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person"
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The most disappointing element of modern society is the insistence that all stories (including the news, and celebrity or sport stories) must be completed as soon as possible so we can establish tribal battle lines and figure out if our tribe is winning or losing.
Most stories require hours, if not weeks, or years to bake in the story oven.
It’s highly likely that the stories you’re reading or hearing are actually half-baked and require a lot more time in the oven.
Reject half-baked stories. Reject the need for every story to have a tweet or post attached to it. Embrace slow stories where the storyteller has spent time researching, listening, asking, and they’re delivering a well baked story.
Not some bullshit your mate or a politician tweeted.
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In 1931 ceilings in movies was impressive.
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A group of enterprising and nostalgic nerds want to take Blockbuster back.
"Our mission is to liberate Blockbuster and form a DAO to collectively govern the brand as we turn Blockbuster into the first-ever DeFilm streaming platform."
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There are only 25 blimps in the world, but this guy is trying to bring them back. Can you imagine standing in front of a venture capitalist telling them that you're taking blimps back.
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The Australian people for the last 30 years: “We want - and will vote for - smaller and governments, with lower taxes, which means less tax revenue, so less money to spend.”
The Australian people in 2020, 2021, 2022: “Arghhh, our government is so small and useless!”
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The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible, McSweeney’s:
“It’s as if this Small Child was not designed with accessibility in mind”
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Week one of writing an email about life on the southern Gold Coast is that poor that @revue isn't sure how to communicate it to me.
"Yeah, no-one really cares, kid."
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I don’t understand magazine publishing in 2022. Today, January 4, a few minutes ago, someone published a pdf to Apple News and it’s about Macs released on November 10 with a release date of next month.
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One more Tokyo memory. No man has ever made me as happy as this man, as he handed me the nicest coffee my body has ever experienced. Japan is missing from me.
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Whenever Brittany talks about having more kids, I start thinking about buying us a children buggy like this mum in Tokyo I saw in 2019.
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I think about this bloke I saw out the front of a Tokyo train station in November 2019 reading a book with a magnifying glass quite a lot.
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Making art is a form of madness – we slip deep within our own singular vision and become lost to it. There is no musician on Earth that is as committed to their own derangement as Kanye, and in this respect, at this point in time, he is our greatest artist.
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The trick with life is you have to actually mean it, which can be the hardest part.
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I've got an old friend and we share ideas with each other. Then years later we share a news article about how someone "stole" our idea.
James Clear's distinction between our sharing ideas and working on them, stings:
"If you're not working hard, ideas don’t matter. The best idea is worthless without execution. If you're already working hard, ideas are crucial. Most effort is wasted on mediocre ideas."
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In Praise of Conspiracy Theories, David Perell:
It’s easy to hate on conspiracy theories, but what are the best arguments for taking them seriously?
Here's one: At a recent dinner, we started talking about John F. Kennedy assassination theories. One guy remarked that historical conspiracy theories are worth studying because they illuminate so much about the culture of the time.
Studying the JFK conspiracy theories is a fun way to learn about the tension between Cuba and America, America’s rivalry with the KGB, the won’t-stop-at-anything political motivations of Lyndon B. Johnson, the mafia’s influence, and the power of America’s Central Intelligence Agency.
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Peter O'Dowd and Kalyani Saxena:
"When you were a kid, it seemed like you could walk up to just about anybody and be best friends the next minute. But somewhere along the long, winding road to adulthood, making new friends became an impossibly hard thing to do."
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Storytime with Seth Rogen is a new fav podcast and it's going on my inputs page. The most recent episode, The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler, is a grizzly bear epic!
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Drafting up an email for my #southoftalle email list right now with all my photos from today where Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth was hitting the Gold Coast beaches pretty hard. Into that kinda thing? email.southoftalle.com to subscribe for free.
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Gold Coast afternoon
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Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth brings some surf to Snapper
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Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth is bringing some wind to the waves at Tugun and Snapper Rocks today.
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I noticed a Jetstar Boeing 787-8 coming into Gold Coast Airport in some pretty strong winds and broke the camera out quickly.
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Happy 120th birthday to the Federal Government, its birth of course being an issue for the states.
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Joan Didion on being in the world:
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
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I never thought I’d be in such a winning position, but if anyone is trying to buy a rat, the ones under my house are of good breeding and honestly I’m happy for you to take as many as you can hold.
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Sliding doors.
Daily Mail, 5 December 2000:
"The internet may be only a passing fad for many users, according to a report."
