Has Spotify had a deep clean yet? I’m staying out until everything on Spotify is 100% sanitised.
“You can do it like it’s a great weight, or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.”
– Ram Dass
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.
Any other old school nerds ever just feel like re-visiting astalavista dot box dot sk?
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.
Notice how we keep on hearing from people who claim to be silenced?
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.”
Whites Beach, New South Wales
Gm Byron Bay 👋💪
Wategos Beach for sunrise this morning
“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
Name a banger more bangish than Orgy’s Blue Monday. I’ll wait.
What which craft is this? Surfing without waves!? #witchcraft #byronbay #wategosbeach #surfing
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
"If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it"
I don’t like a lot of what I see on Instagram Stories.
Nick Catucci says the same in Embedded this week:
“Instagram Stories had been an IV drip of validation for the past five years, and giving myself permission to live my life not as a constant performance, but for myself, has been liberating. It also means I’m not viewing other peoples’ performances, either, which has brought another unexpected benefit: I’m a better friend.”
It really bothers me that Logan City Council uses Lobster font for its entry to the region motorway signage.
What lays beneath … // Cook Island, off Fingal Head
Fingal Head this afternoon.
Was nice to visit and not have to convince a police to let me go home afterward.
A million dollar sunset over #Tugun tonight
What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was At The Center Of Life? asks The Atlantic.
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.”
Is a LIDAR capture of a person a photograph? Wired asks what is a photograph.
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.”
Why would you make new music when all the growth in the industry is from old music
At a wedding recently I heard my mate Hutcho belt out an old school banger with more energy and passion than the original artist could of. I jokingly asked afterward, “why do people make new music?” There is so much good music, how do you even get the guts to release a new song and meekly tell the world that you’ve made new music despite there being so much good music.
Then once you actually make new music, you’re hoping that the algorithmically-driven music industry today accepts your offering and feeds it to the masses, so much so that you can put food on the table.
Then I read about the actual state of the music industry. Ted Gioia writes a few days ago:
“All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.”
And if you enjoy reading about the death, and rebirth, of pop, you should read Adam Singer as well..
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.
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?
Sea breeze
Make taxi ranks car parks again. Return the taxi tanks to the people.
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.
“Like a bat out of hell I’ll be gone when the morning comes”
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.
Toowoomba’s, Gabbinbar Homestead, on a Thursday afternoon
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.
The one truth everyone that has ever existed can testify to is that you cannot stop people dying, but you can stop them living.
Who do I have to talk to about making the next Mission: Impossible movie about stolen NFTs.
Mission: Impossible - Right Click.
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.
January 2022 in the Associated Press:
“A bill … that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort””
That face when dad makes you leave the beach
South of Talle’ on a Tuesday afternoon
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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.
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?
Breaking news: Novak Djokovic wins the Australia Closed grand door slammed tournament.
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.
Finished reading: Volcanic Winter by Mark Rutherford 📚
Currently reading: Fortune-teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels In The Far East by Tiziano Terzani 📚
“Your goals are meant to honour you, not fix you”
“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
Proposal: Let’s drop the metaverse, and go all in on the meatverse. Less virtual reality meetings, more steak.
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
Molly White: blockchains are decentralised but not really, immutable but not really.
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.
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
2021, the year in typography, if you’re into that kinda nerdy thing like I am.
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.
“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
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.
West Philadelphia born and raised, and now rebooted, much more dramatically
Morgan Cooper made a fan-trailer of a dramatic reboot of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 2019:
Will Smith saw that video and now there’s a real trailer and a real show!
That’s one of the best things about this new world without as many gatekeepers, and falttened lines of communciation and promotion. You can just have an idea, run with it, and see where it lands.
Reflecting on the original show, there’s obviously a darker storyline underneath the lighthearted primetime television show, but the 90s were never ready for that.
Will Smith talks about that idea in this video about the new reboot:
Where’d I get this rainbow fudge? The Country Non-Binary’s Association stall at the markets this morning.
A weird celebration: we won our first Covid court case
Today, on the 683rd day of March 2020, we won our first Covid wedding cancellation court case, a court hearing I attended from the carpark of a service station in Maryborough which had erected a statue of Ned Kelly in front of it. A weird culmination.
The first six were frustrated contracts which meant the contract was basically torn up and the judge had to make a decision as if they were a “man on the Clapham omnibus” which is pretty much the common law definition of the pub test.
Today, our contract stood up and was not frustrated, and the couple had cancelled the contract.
So the real winner in this pandemic is my original lawyer, who I fired after his legal advice when people started cancelling was for us to just refund everyone, something we couldn’t afford to do.
Wedding vendors are not wedding insurance, but for the past 683 days we’ve been treated like it.
The gestation period for new MacBooks is past the two month mark #joy
15 years of iPhone
Currently reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear 📚
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.
Why don’t they make phone screens out of the same glass they make fridge shelves out of?
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?
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.
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.
‘The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.’
— Steve Jobs
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”
I really thought that by this age I would’ve found Carmen Sandiego. Life is just a series of disappointments.
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.
1 in 10 Brits will launch their own podcast in 2022 says Acast via @podnews
“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.”
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”
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.
In 1931 ceilings in movies was impressive.
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.”
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.
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!”
The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible, McSweeney’s:
“It’s as if this Small Child was not designed with accessibility in mind”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The trick with life is you have to actually mean it, which can be the hardest part.
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.”
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.
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.”
Understand the rules so you can break them
One of the wisest things I was ever taught about radio broadcasting … and life … was that you needed learn the rules so you understood them so you could break them.
Learning that rules were so you could understand not so you could be be limited, broke my mind and made me, me.
I feel like Seth Godin was on a similar vibe in this post:
One sort of job requires people to follow a recipe. Another, better sort of job requires people to understand the recipe. If you understand it, that means you can change it. You have resilience and insight and the leverage to make it better.
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!
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.
Gold Coast afternoon
Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth brings some surf to Snapper
Ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth is bringing some wind to the waves at Tugun and Snapper Rocks today.
Expect streaming TV consolidation in the coming years
Matthew Belloni in Puck
A good model is Peacock-WWE. Last March, NBC Universal took over the pro wrestling outfit’s WWE Network and its 1.1. million subs, offering them a deal on Peacock for their Roman Reigns fix. Check out these internal Peacock stats that came to me from a source:
- Of the 1.1 million subscribers to WWE Network, one million successfully converted to Peacock subscribers.
- More than 3 million Peacock subs have watched WWE content since it moved over in March.
- More than half of those 3 million subs indicated that they signed up “because of WWE.”
Rights and branding issues are thorny, but consolidation makes sense, even if it’s not a major merger like Comcast or Netflix or Roku picking off Lionsgate/Starz, or some of the other buzzed-about potential deals.
I wonder what Australian consolidation we could see?
There’s no way that Youtube, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, or Apple will cede their position or brand, and maybe they could suck some streaming providers in. Viacom CBS seems set on playing the long game so they could be in the same lineup as the big five.
That leaves SBS, ABC, Seven, Nine, Telstra, Stan, Kayo, Binge, Foxtel, Hayu, Optus Sport in the Australian market wanting credentials or money, and HBO Max, Hulu, Peacock, Fubo/ESPN not in the market … yet?
Who’s left in 2025? Is there room for 20 subscriptions? Potentially $200 a month on TV.
I noticed a Jetstar Boeing 787-8 coming into Gold Coast Airport in some pretty strong winds and broke the camera out quickly.
Happy 120th birthday to the Federal Government, its birth of course being an issue for the states.
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.”
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.
Sliding doors.
Daily Mail, 5 December 2000:
“The internet may be only a passing fad for many users, according to a report.”
In 2016 Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Academy Award. Many scholars believe this upset the gods and brought torment on our people and the only worthy sacrifice would be Betty White. May her sacrifice lead to peace in our land.
Some personal news, I’m changing the definition of fun to things that take less than four hours to do.
James Cameron walks into the boardroom and “wrote the word Alien on a board. Then he pluralized it, making it Aliens and insinuating he was about to up the ante on this planned sequel. Finally, he drew two lines through the S he had added, turning it onto a dollar sign.”
I'm selling my car, if that's the kind of thing you're looking for
2018 Volkswagen Polo Launch Edition AW Auto MY18
Sixth-generation 2018 Volkswagen Polo Launch Edition in Limestone Grey metallic, five door hatch, 4.9 L/100km three Cylinder 1.0 Litre petrol engine with a sports automatic dual clutch transmission.
Apple CarPlay and Android Auto built-in.
Adaptive cruise control, stop/start engine for fuel efficiency, rain sensing wipers, power windows, autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian detection, driver-fatigue monitoring and automatic LED headlights. Viofo dashcam installed.
Just renewed for another 12 months of Queensland car registration, expires 10 January 2023.
Never been in an accident and has paid membership too VW Assist which includes free roadside assistant.
Available today, price includes GST as it’s being sold by a private business (not a car yard, my business).
$19,100 inc GST located in Tugun, Qld.
Song idea: Nugget Connection.
A song about why there are so many songs about chicken nuggets and why they look like little maps of Australia if Australia would just let Tasmania be free from its reign.
This is the first episode I’ve heard of Seth Roger’s Storytime podcast, but it’s a beautifully made podcast, and this episode is gripping and the story is so good! • The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dowler, Storytime with Seth Rogen
Productivity inversely affects creativity, and vice-versa. So, welcome to the lowest productivity week of the year. May your creativity flourish.
A letter to a newborn child, requested of Desmond Tutu by the girl’s father, July 2016:
Dear Juliet
Hello, little sister.
You don’t know me. I am a very old grandfather from South Africa nearing the end of my journey on earth while your journey—on another continent many miles away—is just beginning. We may never meet on earth, so I thought to send you a secret. Well, it’s not really a secret because we should all know it. So I don’t mind if you tell everyone else.
Did you know that all people belong to one family, the human family? That although we may look nothing like each other, live in separate homes, practise our own cultures, subscribe to different religions—and some of us have more money than others—we are all sisters and brothers of God’s family?
You and I, and everyone else, were born with the same purpose. For love, for goodness and for one another.
God Bless You.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
Cape Town, South Africa
Whenever I hear Carol Of The Bells I have this tribal urge to run home to protect it because I think it’s about to get robbed.
Disney+ thinks that Iron Man 3 is a Christmas movie. Is everything a Christmas movie now?
Bob Lefsetz, self-proclaimed boomer, on boomers:
“Going to see McCartney, the Stones and the Eagles has become a ritual. Because their music reminds us of when we were our best selves, when what we had to say was important, when we were against the man before we became the man, when we wanted the new instead of the old and familiar, when we wanted change instead of stasis.”
“A tribe without enemies is, almost by definition, not a tribe. As a consequence, tribal dispute and warfare is part of what defines humanity.”
…
“Things have changed a lot since. The biggest enemy we have to fight against right now is our tribal past. What served us so well for thousands of years is now an obsolete concept. It’s no more about the survival of this tribe or that one, but about Homo sapiens as a species. … For the first time in our collective history, we must think of ourselves as a single tribe on a single planet. … We are a single tribe, the tribe of humans. And, as such, not a tribe at all.”
— Marcelo Gleiser in “The Trouble with Tribalism” via Tim Ferriss’s email.
I met a Betty once and told her that when she calls me she can call me Al.
She just nodded in reply.
I think about this a lot.
If you got your professionally shot wedding, couple, or family photos printed at Officeworks, Harvey Norman, Big W this Christmas, know that you broke your photographer’s heart.
“In the not too distant future, learning video editing will be the new learning cursive.”
When I’m elected your President I will legislate that bakeries are allowed to make and serve real rum rum balls. None of this bullshit chocolate ball stuff.
A lot of people whinge about Jesus being taken out of Christmas, my issue is much more important. My two local grocery stores have zero Christmas food. Who took the rum balls out of Christmas?
There’s a very late model MacBook Pro on my kitchen table and aside from all the power in that chip, I’m getting serious PowerBook Titanium G4 vibes from the body shape.
I’m that old that I’m having nostalgia for old computers.
Sophie Zhang and a Honduran disinformation researcher on Facebook’s election problem:
“We don’t expect Philip Morris to solve tobacco addiction”
The British Medical Journal fact checks Facebook’s false fact checking of the BMJ’s “news blog”.
I can’t help but feel that the skill of knowledge, the skill of knowing something, will be a superhuman skill in the future. Because we can’t leave it up to algorithms.
PSA: next year isn’t actually 2022, it’s 2020 Two. It’s the sequel.
2020 II: 2020 and the Chamber of Secrets.
How grunge started
From today’s edition of Josh Spector’s For the Interested email:
“At the start of the 1990s, no one cared about the Seattle music scene.
That was a problem for the founders of indie record label Sub Pop, who couldn’t get any LA or New York music journalists to pay attention to their bands (including Nirvana).
So they got creative.
They flew out a British music journalist for a few days, set up a bunch of shows and introduced him to the Seattle scene.
He found it cool and wrote a big story about it.
That piece caught the attention of US journalists who suddenly thought they were missing something in their own backyard, and that launched the Grunge era.”
I really want to help this guy find this photo of Leonardo DiCaprio at the University of Sydney student bar, but the websites he mentions - 2Day FM and others - have all been re-made os many times there’s be no archives.
Is Santa coming on a one horse open sleigh, or with nine reindeers? Why are there so many holes in a fabricated story? Does Christmas need better writers?
Chinese spies infiltrated Aussie telco using Huawei gear and installed malware
Anthony in the The Sizzle via the old mates at Bloomberg who keep on reporting solid tech news despite screwing up ‘The Big Hack’ all those years ago:
According to Bloomberg the reason for Huawei’s exile from Australia was based on a “software update from Huawei that was installed on the network of a major Australian telecommunications company” in 2012.
A new religion is being formed on the Internet
“Call it the religion of “just asking questions.” Or the religion of “doing your own research.” It’s still in its infancy, and has evolved in an attempt to correct a societal wrong: that the world is a pretty fucked up place and it doesn’t seem like the current system of dealing with it is really working, so maybe something else is going on, something just out of reason’s reach.”
Our newest god is an algorithm.
COOKIES.TXT in 1994 according to Microsoft
Reading through this beautiful 1994 email remnant of a Microsoft that was trying to beat Apple and Unix from owning the Internet, apart from the zinger after zinger, my favourite element is the very innocent 1994 version of a COOKIES.TXT. The file was about baking cookies, the food ones. So sweet and innocent.
“The word on the Internet is that if you want to bring a server online, buy a Unix. If you want to get a cool Internet client, use Unix - or better yet buy a Macintosh.”
Some personal news: in the new year I’m also going to be studying a diploma in the difference between the “Auto Intensive”, “Auto Wash”, and “Super Wash” modes on my dishwasher.
What a time to be alive. When Dawkins defined a meme as “unit of cultural information spread by imitation” he was definitely thinking of Sidetalk NYC’s Thanksgiving on IG spreading to the Jonas Brothers in the Whitehouse on Tiktok. Bing bong.
What exactly is Crazy Frog riding? Is it a spacecraft, a motorbike, a bicycle, an Imperial Speeder Bike?
"Some worker’s preferences and lifestyles may have shifted after a year and half out of the labor force"
James Hennessy’s The Terminal on the rise of anti-work
“It’s not just media talking about the brewing revolution. In a November note to investors about the slow pace of recovery for US labour force participation, Goldman Sachs specifically pointed (with some evident concern) to the growth of r/antiwork, which it described as a possible bellwether of a developing distaste for employment among Americans.”
Ira Glass on beginners
If you’ve been in a car with me for for more than 30 minutes I’ve probably told you this story by Ira Glass, adlibbed by me. Here it is in full:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap.
For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.
Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this.
And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile.
It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Alan Jones’ “audience didn’t go anywhere. It’s still there and it’s still being fed the same old shit to serve the same old interests of the truly wealthy, madly powerful and deeply, deeply unaccountable.”
From JB’s Alien Sideboob
Spiders, mannn looks large over Brisbane
📈
Calile-rise
Astral Codex Ten on the potential threat of ancient plagues emerging:
“I think if something goes wrong, the third most likely vector will be curious Siberians who see a corpse half-hidden in the ice and go investigate. The second most likely vector will be archaeologists. And the most likely vector - by far - will be scientists investigating to see whether something could go wrong.”
Listing of the day: “With minimal land left in this stunning new estate”
Stand back, imma fix email
Why people hate their email but also why they should love it.
I think it’s a crime that not many people subscribe to The Sizzle. The idea of paying $5 a month for it still scares lots of people away. Which is crazy, because for $5 you get immense value from the desk of @decryption. I referred my mate Nick to The Sizzle and he said “The Sizzle is one of the best things I regularly read. Can’t believe I didn’t know about it til now.” In that group chat another friend replied “Most people hate email. That’s a huge hurdle.” Which is true, but I have a theory about email.
People saying they hate email is like people that say they hate church. There’s actually nothing wrong with church as a building, an idea, the gospel as a whole is a good guide for living, it’s just that some people have majorly abused elements of church. Seriously, please stop, Christians. So should we burn church as a concept to the ground? Churches don’t kill people, people kill people. Or something like that. Should we burn email to the ground?
On the “burning email to the ground” note, a recent episode of Hemispheric Views interviewed Rob from Fastmail on the topic /cc @hemisphericviews @canion @martinfeld @burk
IMHO it’s the same with email, emails aren’t bad, but the way people use email can be bad.
I look at my mate Ash’s iPhone screen and see the red badge on his email app and it terrifies me. What’s the current unread count, Ash? The thing is, most people don’t love their inbox because it’s their internet yard … and most people don’t like looking after their own backyard.
They like going to restaurants where waiters bring the food and take away dirty dishes. We like going to public parks where the council mows the lawn. We love theme parks where the employees maintain the rides. In this analogy, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Apple News, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, are the third parties.
It turns out our homes & our yards are pretty cool, we just need to invest into them, maintain them, clean them, and if we do, we might enjoy living in them, and we can do whatever we like there because it’s our backyard.
Email is the backyard of the internet. Your inbox is yours, you own it, and most of us leave it to rot because it’s not on public display and most people won’t see it.
- Hit the unsubscribe button on as many emails as you can. Be brutal, if you miss it, you can go back and resubscribe, but you don’t let just anyone camp in your backyard.
- Have a personal inbox, hopefully on your own domain, so you’re not beholden to a big tech provider. I recommend Fastmail, or for my personal email I use iCloud/MobileMe/.Mac, I have for maybe 14 years.
- Separate work and personal. Get personal emails in your personal inbox, work in your work inbox. Don’t look at your work inbox if you’re not working.
- Explore other email apps, technologies, and plugins, like Spark or Sanebox.
- Listen to this episode of Mac Power Users to get a little jumpstart on email.
- Regularly check your spam fodler and mark as not junk or move it to your inbox so the junk mail filter learns what is good and bad. On GMail learn how to use the Promotional tabs etc, and even disable them if you like.
- Actively look for emails to subscribe to. If you do have emails you love to receive, share them as a reply to this so others can experience the joy of receiving good, nice, helpful, relevant emails in their inbox.
Here’s my mostly up to date list of emails I subscribe to.
Email is one of the few agnostic, device-independent, big-tech-independent, communication channels that you can easily and lovingly own. Learn to love it. Mow your internet backyard, and maybe even do some landscaping.
“Researchers have identified an odorless compound emitted by people—and in particular babies—called hexadecanal, or HEX, that appears to foster aggressive behavior in women and blunt it in men.”
Just a heads up and reminder - because @scottymcdonald reminded me - that maybe you’re walking around with excess blood this Christmas, so why not donate some and they’ll pass it onto some peeps that really need it.
Nature is healing!
The Queensland border has been open to other people for 12 hours and our roads are filled with tourists who don’t know the roads again. It’ll be a good week for tow trucks.
Business idea: Home Alone 6: Too home, too alone.
Name the song with lyrics and without searching:
“You serve me up with cake and that’s your big mistake”
How you know email communities are a real threat: when Facebook enters the game.
James Clear:
“Someone else living a good life does not prevent you from living a good life. There are many ways to win and plenty of space.”
Some personal news, December 2021
The past two years has rocked us to the very core financially, mentally, emotionally, and to think it’s still not over yet. We’ve been trying to keep moving towards our north star of not being old, grumpy, tired, burnt out, angry, people that the old panny-demmy ruined. That’s not the news, that’s just me setting the scene.
1. New job!
The main news is that I’m diversifying my career and I’ve taken an opportunity to join the team at Harcourts Property Centre and over the next season I’ll be training and learning how to be a gun real estate nerd. Britt and I have bought two homes and sold one so I have some opinions on how I think I could bring a Josh-like-vibe to the real estate game.
I’m actually really excited about my future career placing people in their new home. On that note, getting new listings is the hard work in real estate. I plan on being authentic on that journey, but if you’re local to me and looking to sell, call a brother ;)
2. Still creating marriage ceremonies!
As far as weddings and elopements go, nothing is changing. Anyone who has me booked in, we’re all still good to go. Nothing to stress about, I am still your celebrant. Could you imagine finding out the opposite on social media?!
I’ll still take new wedding bookings into the future, but maybe less, and probably more local. I’ve lost more money to airlines, Airbnb’s, and hotels in the last two years than most people have spent so I’m fairly gun-shy about gallivanting around the universe in the near future. That’s why I’m adding real estate to my resume, because I think I can do a great job, and it tends to be a little closer to home.
Want me to be your celebrant? withers.co/celebrant
3. About this instagram account!
So [my wedding Instagram page, @hellojoshwithers](https://instagram.com/hellojoshwithers) will broaden out and I’ll share my weddings, elopements, family, and real estate story; and my old personal Instagram, I’ve decided to start sharing my love for the better end of the Gold Coast, the GC south of Talle' so I’ve renamed that account @southoftalle.
I’ve been making photos for more local businesses and myself recently, if you’d like some photos of your business or home get in touch at withers.co/josh
4. About @southoftalle!
About four years ago our family made the move south of the border, that is, the border to the Southern Gold Coast: Tallebudgera Creek. I was a proud North Gold Coaster but Tugun, Palm Beach, Currumbin, Cooly, Snapper, all won my heart.
I’m a storyteller at heart and I want to tell the story of the better end of the Gold Coast, the GC south of Talle'. So I’ve converted my old “here’s random photos of stuff” Instagram account to @southoftalle and started an email newsletter, sharing the stories of the Southern Gold Coast. I’d actually love to work that old radio muscle and podcast with my neighbours down here, other entrepreneurs, and locals that have a cool story, like the bloke that plays the didgeridoo at Snapper Rocks. So if you want to fall in love with the promise land south of the Tallebudgera Creek, give me a follow over at @southoftalle and throw your email address in here.
I’m keen to get my new drone up, and to fire up my camera, and share my ‘hood.
5. Britt’s making photos of families and couples!
I’m super proud of Britt, she’s picked up the camera and started making photos that really rock families and couples’ world - she’s sharing them over at @brittanywithersphoto and you can book her in at withers.co/britt.
Mavic 3’s 1x versus 28x zoom.
Somewhere in my nerdiness - born in DOS, grew into Win 3.11-XP, morphed on over to macOS sometime in 2006 - I missed the workshop that explained how websites work in 2021.
It’s like website admin has gotten harder since Frontpage and Dreamweaver, then Wordpress, not easier ….
I’m so keen I reckon I’ll double these numbers before 2022
After being grounded for over a year - since the great wave vs. drone fight of 2019 - some of my favourite people bought me a new bird to commemorate my 40th birthday.
I am beyond pumped to get back in the air making art!
Cherian George for Nieman Lab:
“China’s and Russia’s global influence operations won’t need to resort to fake news to exploit the genuine dysfunctions in the American system.”
Photoshoot with a spider
The most depressing take on the state of “the media” today is the one in Max Read’s email that basically suggests that Buzzfeed’s public listing failure will be its biggest success because it will prove that there’s no market for more new media.
Happy Pretend to Be A Time Traveller Day!
(Yes, this is a real international day, Google it.)
I’m vibing this Dutch multigenerational living space
Ever seen a goanna scale a brick wall?
“So let’s sink another drink, ‘Cause it’ll give me time to think, If I had the chance I’d ask the world to dance, And I’d be dancing with myself, oh-oh.”
With every drop of news about Omicron I feel sicker about our future. The pandemic is strangling the life out of a business we’ve spent 10 years building. Even just on Saturday with the closure of the Queensland and Tasmanian borders to Adelaide, that cost me $3130.
“If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
— William Morris
Spouses, as you cross the 75% completion mark of cleaning up after dinner, be like: “oh, honey, I’ll clean up, leave it to me”
Hello! I’m Josh Withers. You may remember me from such movies as Regional Breakfast Radio Guy, Weird International Wedding Celebrant, Super Zoom Photographer, and 2022’s Newest Real Estate Agent.
All the world’s a social feed, and all the men and women are merely variables in an algorithm.
That time Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo
“They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”
– Kevin Bachus, the former director of third-party relations for Microsoft’s Xbox unit, recalling (for the 20th anniversary look-back at Xbox) the time when Steve Ballmer sent a team to see about acquiring Nintendo.
via M.G Siegler’s Happy Hour email
I find it interesting that this important research of 60,000 Australians released as a YouTube video has only been watched 154 times. It’s fascinating data on Australian consumers trust, and also separately, distrust of Australian brands, companies, and industries.
Southern Gold Coasters wondering what’s happening at the old Pizza Hut beachside pavilion, it’s called Siblings, and I’ve been documenting the build.
“Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.”
– Buckminster Fuller
My 2020-2030 prediction
A friend, hi Andy, was talking about business and investment opportunities in the coming years. I blurted this out as a text message but thought I might record it here on my blog to look back on in 8 years time.
—
The 2020’s - in Australia and the western world - Will be marked by a couple of significant factors.
– Number one will be high interest rate policy, HIRP, after a decade of low interest-rate policy, LIRP, interest rates will start to rise and this is going to change a lot of things economically - hopefully positively - for the world. My uneducated guess is that it’s going to be a time of slightly more wealth distribution. Low interest-rate policy takes the wealth out of the centre, high interest policy will spread it around more and create more opportunities financially.
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Secondly, there will be a very significant change in the mindsets of people to live for the moment. This means short-term gratification, short-term wins, short-term growth, will be favourable and long-term success will be less popular. There are opportunities here to take advantage of those people.
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Thirdly, experiences like travel and other in person experiences will have a very high growth rate after we’ve been locked up for a while. We want and need to connect with our history, our people, our families and friends.
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Finally, media and communication, social networks, and how we use technology to live, is going to change dramatically with a shift away from Facebook and Google and Microsoft, and there will be a move towards deeper online experiences in smaller niche communities. This is another real opportunity for investment and growth. A good example of this is the company unity who is listed in America under the stock code U. They just purchased Weta in NZ and that positions them amazingly to creat in real time 3D worlds, entertainment experiences like a movie or TV show, and of course games which I already involved in. In the past where you would think of an idea like a TV show and then you would write it, and then you would have to cast and film it. In the future with technology like unity is working on your then just program the script into the system and then you’ll have a TV show. So many massive opportunities in how we experience life and entertainment.
One bonus point: weed. As that’s decriminalised there’s big opportunities imho.
Thought I’d share something I’m proud of today: I’ve consolidated all of our family’s brands and business ventures under the one website/domain name: withers.co
You’re Probably Not Late
From David Perell’s Monday Musings email:
Whenever you find yourself thinking you’re late to a new technological trend, remember that Walt Disney thought he was late to animation in 1923. On the same theme, Marc Andreessen thought he’d missed the Silicon Valley boom when he arrived in 1994. He said: “My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the ‘80s, and I got here too late.” According to one of my Twitter followers, some of the earliest written fragments from Sumer in 3,000 BCE show people complaining that all the good subjects had already been covered by earlier poets.
We’re proud to announce that we’re expecting. Santa that is. We’re expecting Santa.
I also told Luna this week that Santa’s not alive any more, but people dress up like him … soooo I’m a great person.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but we don’t use whisky stones, save your money