Hi! My name is Josh, this me blog.

The dance of pleasing the social media algorithims of the world’s biggest companies, whilst being beat to death by strangers with their comments displeased me so now I’m here.

I wish I were the kind of person who could just live without broadcasting. But there’s an animal inside me — right down in the marrow — that keeps asking ‘can you see me?’ and silence has never once soothed it.

  • Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution:

    Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity.

  • Gurwinder:

    The Opinion Pageant: The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are cheap and easy to counterfeit.

  • Help me name my new creation which I made for the kids for dinner tonight. It’s a quesadilla with leftover spaghetti bolognaise sauce and despite Luna’s objections, it’s great!

  • Coming soon to old London Town, pixels that I made in Burleigh Heads.

  • Rutger Bregman in Humankind:

    Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.

  • Three years of hell

  • 📷 Court (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @rom)

  • Most people I respect or look up to journal every day but it's not a habit I can get into. Tonight I learned about the simple and powerful 1-1-1 journalling method, and then to get nerdy with it, there's a tutorial on making a Shortcut to make it easier. Then follow this advice from Apple on how to run a Shortcut from a Reminder, I prompted Siri to remind me of it every day at 9pm.

  • Had coffee at a cafe in Todos Santos today where they hand out 30-minute wifi access codes. They mixed my order up - bringing a cold americano with hot milk when I ordered the reverse - so my 30 minutes ran out in the middle of a text chat. I asked for another code and the barista said "you should have bought food if you wanted more wifi" then walked away!

  • A new website for Los Sagrados Horse Sanctuary

  • 📷 Chance (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @V_)

  • 📷 Insect (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by a@alexink)

  • 📷 Tiny {people} (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jasonmcfadden)

    It was Luna’s turn to decide what we had for breakfast. Her choice? La Esquina, the cafe with pancakes and a playground.

  • It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch getting engaged for the fifth time at the ripe age of 92, but at least he's doing his part to help the wedding industry after Covid. What are you doing? Have you even considered getting married again?

  • Maryanne Wolf on reading:

    Literacy literally changes the human brain. The process of learning to read changes our brain, but so does what we read, how we read and on what we read (print, e-reader, phone, laptop). This is especially important in our new reality, when many people are tethered to multiple screens at any given moment.

    She also quotes this which really makes me want to throw the TV in the bin:

    When watching a screen, the infant is bombarded with a stream of fast-paced movements, ongoing blinking lights and scene changes, which require ample cognitive resources to make sense of and process. The brain becomes “overwhelmed” and is unable to leave adequate resources for itself to mature in cognitive skills such as executive functions.

  • You know yo've really embedded yourself in a Mexican community when you see a friend riding in the back of a truck on the highway.

  • 📷 Houseplant. Did I do the #mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt right, @jensands)?

    (Photo made a few moments ago on the way to get a coffee in Los Cerritos, Baja California Sur)

  • 📷🇲🇽 Analog (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @skarjune)

    I made these photos on Playa Cerritos, Baja California Sur, Mexico, on a broken film camera a week ago, then a few days later they were developed in a photo lab at Currumbin Beach, Australia, and I’m posting them today from Las Tunas, Mexico. The wonders of living in a connected world. (Britt has flown back to Australia this week).

  • 📷 Portico (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @annahavrom)

    From a snow day in Nashville between Christmas and New Year’s Eve just passed.

  • Dan Shipper's representation of AI/GPT as a copilot for the mind harkens back to Steve Jobs talking about computers in 1990 as "a bicycle of the mind".

    Something that takes us past our inherent abilities.

  • Ansel Adams:

    You don't take a photograph, you make it.

  • 📷 Early (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @krisfredrick) also shared on Pexels.

  • Everyone move along, there’s nothing to see here.

    The “crack” on Josh’s iPhone screen that has occupied his sad mind for the last two hours was actually the smallest dried strand of egg yolk draped across his screen, hard enough and thin enough to seem like a crack to the untrained mind.

    If only you could’ve seen the look on my face as I scratched off the scratch like a miracle healer.

  • A bunch of smart people say we need to learn "‘critical ignoring’ – the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest our limited attentional capacities."

  • 📷 Road (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @Dejus)

    There’s a saying in Baja that “bad roads bring good people and good roads bring bad people”.

    So we keep the ungraded and bumpy dirt roads as an instrument of faith in the neighbours we want.

  • Alexander Haymen:

    “Home is where people notice when you’re not there.”

  • 📷 Patience (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @amit)

  • 📷 Horizon (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @crossingthethreshold)

  • 📷 Connection (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @agilelisa)

    The moment I connected with my minutes-old first child and daughter.

  • 📷 Shiny (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @odd)

    The second percolator I’ve owned in Mexico. I forgot the first one was on the stove, on heat. Melted all the plastic components.

  • 📷 Gimcrack (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jafish).

    My local tyre shop here in Baja California Sur has real gimcrack vibes.

  • Friday afternoon in Pescadero, Baja California Sur

  • July: great at selling luggage, not great at supporting it

  • You're a Miracle by Mike McHargue is a book that zings around the inside of my brain all day every day:

    You are a miracle because 86 billion neurons in your brain form into thousands of structures and networks, built from a map created over billions of years to understand the world you live in. But sometimes, you are a pain in your ass because all these networks are running a playbook that’s been around a lot longer than you have. The cells in your body have survived through the eons by eating every delicious calorie they come across, allowing fear to make them run, and using anger to make them fight for their lives.

  • March 10, 1976, the first and last time "Articulate speech was transmitted intelligibly" over a telephone. For the 147 years since inarticulate speech transmitted poorly has been the theme.

  • 📷 Ritual (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @drewbelf)

    Our morning coffee. While we’re in El Pescadero, it’s from La Comuna Espresso Bar at Mini Super Munchies.

  • Keith Richards:

    To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it. That's the reason I'm still alive.

  • 📷 Together (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @sherif)

    Our little nomadic family, our most recent photo all together in Australia, in October last year.

  • Rancho Gaspareño

  • Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic writes on the vindication of Ask Jeeves:

    Many years later, it seems I owe Jeeves an apology: He had the right idea all along.

    For all the hype, when I stare at these new chatbots, I can’t help but see the faint reflection of my former besuited internet manservant. In a sense, Bing and Bard are finishing what Ask Jeeves started.

  • 📷 Early morning beach walks with my three girls (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt 'walk' suggested by @lwdupont)

  • When dating apps match you up and ChatGPT writes your wedding vows, it's like you're part of a high-tech breeding program for computers. We're like surrogate parents for algorithms, helping to create the next generation of AI love stories.

  • Ten whale soup off Todos Santos yesterday 🐋📷🚁

  • Just a wee little note that imma be on NBC News tonight from 8pm NY time talking about weddings with Gadi Schwartz in case you hadn’t heard enough from me lately

  • Ed Catmull:

    We are meaning-making creatures who read other people’s subtle clues just as they read ours.

  • Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer:

    The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

  • Number three surprised me: The Best Nikon Camera For Wedding Photography In 2023.

  • From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King 📚

    "Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around."

  • 📷 Whole (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @val)

    A whole lot of whale as I saw it from my aerial camera yesterday.