← 2023 May 2023

  • Remember that classic scene from Notting Hill where Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts' characters meet at a travel bookstore and then get a doughnut from that Brisbane doughnut chain?

  • Overcast and 14 degrees Celsius and the Britts are so sure it’s good weather that there’s a kid at the park in their swimmers.

  • London things

  • WordPress just turned 20 years old, which means I've been using it for different projects for a smidge under 20 years.

    My memory is that I was about to use b2/cafelog for a project and someone told me to try this new fork, WordPress.

    Cheers for making the web better, WordPress!

  • Luna, who considers herself royalty, wanted to present at the king’s house

  • Someone call the fire brigade

  • Maggi Hambling:

    It is not difficult to make a work of art, the difficulty lies in being in the right state to do it.

  • Withers on film in Hawaii

  • Withers on film at the TWA Hotel.

    Man, I loved this hotel!

  • Withers in Mexico.

    I found an undeveloped roll of film from our time in Baja California Sur. Missing Cerritos Beach!

  • Withers in Paris on 35mm film

  • What is, and isn’t, AI/artificial intelligence?

    Is displaying the letter a on a computer screen, or printing it to paper with a printer, by pressing the a key on a keyboard artificial intelligence?

  • Every leg of this journey we drop a bag. We’re down three suitcases so far.

    At this stage when we come home to Australia in August we’ll be backpackers.

    Paris 🚄🚇 London

  • Bought Luna her first camera, the Hyundai Excel of first cameras: a Nikon point and shoot.

    I believe that my kids should save for their first Canon but I’m happy to pay for their potato camera.

  • She called us to the church house, gin house, school house, and outhouse. She called us to the Nutbush City limits from the wedding dance floors of Australia to a little old town in Tennessee.

    She was, simply the best dance floor filler.

    She is the Queen of Rock, the Empress of Soul.

    Here’s to the diva, Tina Turner.

  • AI is genuinely exciting and terrifying but most of us nerds have been thinking about it and talking about it for 30 years.

    This is Steve Jobs in 1983:

    ...when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.

  • If you ever want to hate yourself you should try writing a book, then editing the book, and then reading it.

  • AI is super interesting to me

  • This is beautiful and terrifying

  • A terrifying argument for paper voting in voting booths from Ready Player One:

    Besides, now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.

  • Do dogs understand elevators or are they just like ‘Ok it’s time to get into the world changer’?

    (via @ronnui_ on Twitter via the Dense Discovery email)

  • Those good family dinners, they’re no accident

  • Hawaii versus Paris

  • I

  • Imagine being as big as a failure as Yahoo

  • Dan Shipper in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of 1-1 Learning:

    One of the most famous studies in educational psychology found that students who learned through 1-1 tutoring performed two sigma—98%—better than students who learned through a traditional classroom environment.

  • Just found out that Metallica played a concert across town last night and there were tickets available. I had Australian tickets for their Covid-cancelled concert. This is the most disappointed I've been since we left Australia!

  • Film’s not dead.

    On arrival to a film lab at 3pm on a Friday in Paris there’s like seven people ahead of me and three behind me pretty quickly.

  • If publishers paid as much attention to how their articles were experienced by readers as newspaper editors used to, maybe they wouldn’t be going broke?

  • “Non-smoking Garden of Eden”

    As Moses wrote in the book of Genesis, the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food except for tobacco.

  • A mum playing Frozen on her phone for her daughter at the playground is super confused as to why every other kid at the playground is up in her grill right now.

  • Watching 1980s Inspector Gadget with Luna this morning and I never realised how much Gadget influenced my life. All I ever wanted was Penny's computer book, Gadget's computer watch, and being accepted for being basically useless in society saved only by the woman by your side every time.

  • Am I a man or a muppet?

  • Evidence that the world’s first mobile phone was probably French

  • Excited to share another chapter of the book today:

    I still distinctly remember the day after getting engaged and Britt’s aunty called with thoughts on which horse-drawn carriage company we should use for our wedding. This was odd to me because in 2012 I had been creating weddings for over two years yet I had not even conceived of the idea that once I asked Britt to marry me that we would then proceed to a wedding.

  • None of the current large language models/artificial intelligences understand the concept of months, or calendar months, or leap years.

    So I'm sure everything is going to work out just fine.

  • Look, AI is great and everything, but I think we're going to be ok

  • What a wonderful time to be alive: malicious-content.zip

  • Photos I made yesterday in Paris

  • I stacked a Lime scooter an hour ago to make this photo of this local tower in Paris so you better like it or share it or comment or something so my aching shin is healed by the algorithms that control our emotional well-being.

  • The not her damn of paris - still under construction

  • The Brisbane Story Bridge of Paris is what they call it

  • Parisian things

  • Fourteen
  • Paris’s final metre

  • Milton Glaser:

    You feel differently towards the world when you make things.

  • Apple Shortcut for recording photography metadata

  • I think this is the great pyramid of France

  • Introducing, an eye full tower.

    Built for the 1889 World’s Fair only to be upstaged 99 years later at 1988 World Expo by the Brisbane Sky Needle.

  • When you order an americano with ‘some cold milk on the side’ in Paris

  • Stumbled into a second-hand-camera/new-Leica store in Paris and accidentally left with a Leica film camera after swiping my credit card. Oops.

  • Play

  • Luna Withers, art critic

  • Paris’s NFT Factory

  • My favourite thing to do in the big cities of the world is to ignore the must-do lists, the must-see places, the hotspots and the icons, and to just walk around and exist in a different big city. Walking down random streets, getting bad coffee at little-known cafes, and finding the unseen parts of a city. The towers, cathedrals, arches and museums are cool and we inevitably end up there. But there’s something really interesting to me about experiencing another people’s normal.

  • The playlist in the French cafe I'm sitting in just went from contemporary hits to one of the songs from Star Wars. Wild taste here.

  • The genesis story of Apple computers

  • 12 Ancient Greek Terms that Should Totally Make a Comeback

    Aidos was actually the Greek goddess of shame, modesty, respect, and humility. Aidos, as a quality, was that feeling of reverence or shame which restrains men and women from wrong. It also encompassed the emotion that a rich person might feel in the presence of the impoverished, that their disparity of wealth, whether a matter of luck or merit, was ultimately undeserved.

  • My review and photos of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport

  • Bluesky lovin

  • If you see my travel photos and think they’d look cool on your walls, I sell fine art prints, framed fine art prints, and canvas wraps in my online store.

    Please buy a print so Luna and Goldie can afford the good croissants in Paris this week ahead, not the cheap ones dad thinks they should have.

  • 44 hours door to door, Kona to Paris. Godspeed, us, with a four and two year old.

  • Ever since Twitter started falling on its face I’ve tried so many contenders, Mastodon, T2, BlueSky, Nostr, and I’ve been on micro.blog for years already and love if there, but Wavelength is the only place I’ve seen community, engagement, joy, and fun.

  • This is a lovely click for today

  • I can still remember my ICQ number 25 years on (49739400) but I can't remember the joke about remembering my ICQ number

  • Why Nick Cave is attending the King’s Coronation:

    I am not a monarchist, nor am I a royalist, nor am I an ardent republican for that matter; what I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age. Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.

  • The Withers family in the island of Hawaiʻi

  • 🗿

  • 🔱

  • Some feelings of the Big Island of Hawaii, or the Island of Hawaiʻi, or Hawaiʻi Island, or Big Island, or Kona, or Hawaii County, or just Hawaii. I don't really know how to refer to this landmass tbh.