B.D. McClay in The Hedgehog Review:

"The other great crime of whataboutism is that it solidifies the online sense that the appearance of paying attention is paramount—not actually paying attention."

View the world through a series of incentives and you’ll find we’re doomed in every direction. Health departments want people to drink less. Tax departments want people to drink more.

NPR:

Japan launches a contest to urge young people to drink more alcohol

When this real estate agent announces a successful deal on Instagram, she doesn’t put SOLD or PURCHASED on the listing — she puts MANIFESTED!

How sunrise at Currumbin Rock looked this morning

An update to the whole 'my photos were stolen and published in a book at Kmart" story:

Before beginning any legal proceedings I sent them an invoice for a "plucked from the sky" number to license my photos to them. $2,200 an image, $8,800.

The publisher freaked out, took the book off the shelves, and called me to apologise. They ended the phone call with a commitment to come back with a compensation plan, but so far nothing.

$2,035 to send a lawyer's letter on a hope and a prayer that they respond.

It'd be a lot more money to take it to court.

Sitting here wondering how to respond, so I sent a text. Thank god autocorrect softened the blow.

My favourite kind of internet communication is when you write a joke then people comment with real advice.

Sam Neil is bringing Jurassic Park down under!

My mate Jay has made a documentary about remote knowledge workers, digital nomads, working around the Arctic Circle and I'm pretty damn jealous of those landscapes, the visuals, and the lifestyle! Check out the trailer!

Temple & Webster bed: $450. Koala king mattress: $1039. I Love Linen sheets: $335. How Luna sleeps: priceless.

The only correct way today can go in #auspol is if the Prime Minister does a press conference where he takes off an Albo mask and is Scott Morrison underneath.

It’s weird when I hear about people watching the same TV show at the same time as other people because the antennas on a nearby mountain determined it so.

Its kinda quaint, like calling someone on the phone, or catching a bus cross-country.

Running your own business is the most powerful vessel for learning. Theory actualises itself into practical, meanwhile, you've placed a bet, you've made a sacrifice, on the learning.

An ever-changing and growing list of the top 50 life hacks at 50hacks.co

Muppets magic.

"I'd save every day like a treasure and then again I would spend them with you"

Cover of Jim Croce's 'Time In A Bottle' as found on The Muppets in 1977. Also, weirdly, featured alongside another Muppet in an iPhone ad for the iPhone 6S and Siri.

Finally, how I feel about Britt. Love you xx

Salon Tom Weston’s Five Rules of Being A Grown-Up:

1. You must not have anything wrong with you, or anything different about you.
2. If you have something wrong or different about you, you really need to correct it. You need to be able to pass under all circumstances.
3. If you can’t correct it, or change it in any way, you should just pretend that you have. It’s not a problem anymore. Good news!
4. If you can’t even pretend not to have corrected the situation, you should just not show up, because it’s very painful for the rest of us to see you in your current condition.
5. If you’re going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to be ashamed.

How many fools you know that have specific global and Australian marriage law, rituals, traditions, and customs knowledge like this? Not many. If any?

Outside our front door just now

A solid opportunity to transfer some of your wealth to me and for me to transfer some of my art to your walls at www.joshwithers.art

Y’all bringing your outdoor furniture inside after using it?

As an old nerd I find it fundamentally offensive when tech podcasts publish a 404th episode instead of skipping it, or maybe publishing a no-audio audio file.

Saturday morning coffee date

I’d rather have no phone than an Android phone.

Why is it ok for William Joel to be professionally called Billy Joel but it’s not ok for Joshua Withers to be professionally called Joshy Withers?

Science says we can all just stay at home and the Titans will still lose despite a home ground advantage.

Jerry Saltz is a gift to this generation, and his Vulture article: How to Be an Artist should be required reading for humans on planet earth:

"33 rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively)."

Matt Ruby (plus every wedding photographer I know):

Your grandparents have photos in a shoebox, but we'll have nothing. Reminder: Just like every hard drive fails eventually, every business goes under eventually. Get a hard copy of anything you want to actually own and keep forever.

I never knew I needed a Transformer that transformed into a Canon R5 until now. now it’s all I want in this life.

A fascinating element of modern web design is that developing/producing for the open web has actually gotten harder, not easier.

I remember the promise of Microsoft FrontPage, Apple's iWeb, Macromedia Dreamweaver, that normal people could just make websites then upload the boring old HTML, CSS, and images to a directory on a web-facing file server and bam you're online.

But today you've either got Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress.com or installing Wordpress on your own server - but then shit gets weird. Like someone I know was all excited for Astro and I look at the website and in the hero image area is the instruction to "npm create astro@latest" and I have no idea what that means?

Where's the cool and hip web content creator of today?

Never forget that time the two largest mobile phone software companies partnered together and the Australian federal government said, yeah nah, and instead blew $21 million on an app that found two cases and is being deleted today.

Sunrise this morning from Snapper Rocks

Photos were created by me, on the sunrise of Wednesday, 10 August 2022, at Snapper Rocks and Greenmount Beach at Coolangatta, Queensland. Photographed on a Canon EOS R5 with a 70-200mm lens.

Ok, this is cool: makemydrivefun.com

Can confirm this is true. Please refrain from messing with me:

"I don't mess around with anyone over 42, they built different, their families had them formally trained in something by the time they were 2, they had keys to the house by age 5, could cook full meals at 7 and were pretty much self-sufficient at 9.

They left their house at dawn every Summer morning and didn't come back til nightfall and survived all day on water from garden hoses, they might get a sandwich on the off chance somebody's parents had went shopping, they spent three quarters of their lives by themselves with a parent maybe checking on them twice a month, most of them have evaded at least one kidnapping attempt, and, they know 15 different ways to remove blood stains from clothing. They the real fuck around and find out people.

My favourite weekly email newsletter - Dense Discovery - just clocked over 200 editions. Give it a read and subscribe.

You know what the most disappointing element of the Trump presidency has been is finally finding out that Area 51, aliens, werewolves etc, they don’t know. If they knew, then he’d know, and he would’ve blabbed by now.

Who knew that Trump would confirm that we’re all alone.

Australian weather data on the iOS 16 public beta doesn’t look to be any better than previous incarnations. The leftmost app is Weathergraph which is using the Apple Weather API. The middle app is Apple’s stock weather app and it’s weirdly still using The Weather Channel (USA). The right most app is the Australian Bureau of Meteorology app, the arguably one true source of Australian weather data.

Finally it's happened! Millennials are old too!!!

Jideofor Onwugbenu on his Leverage Thoughts Substack wonders if doing a lot really does much:

In our world where the current zeitgeist is of being productive(hustle culture), where our calendars and hours are filled with events in the aim of succeeding, and where productivity channels have grown on mediums such as youtube, have we truly become productive?

I found the 'Soon Horse' at The Ekka today

John Dickerson in Slate:

“My children are vampires. I don’t mean that they are going to dress as vampires for Halloween. I mean that, like vampires, they cannot be captured on film.”

I’ve been working on getting my Instagram account back to friends and family, after a decade of “better follow this account for brand and business reasons.” Turns out that unfollowing a thousand odd accounts over three days gets you locked out of Instagram for a week.

Where are the most notable people on the planet from? This really cool mashup of Wikidata and Openmaps shows you, on a globe. Looks like I've got to do something pretty notable to knock my local celebrity off her mantle.

28

TikTok Moderators Are Being Trained Using Graphic Images Of Child Sexual Abuse, in Forbes:

"Nasser expected to be confronted with some disturbing material during his training to become a content moderator for TikTok. But he was shocked when he and others in his class were shown uncensored, sexually explicit images of children."

How annoying are cold fries

Port Dougie this afternoon.

Port Douglas, Far North Queensland.

Spain says no to nice aircon temps:

"A decree published on Tuesday morning in the official state gazette and scheduled to go into effect next week mandates that air conditioning in public places be set at or above 27 degrees Celsius (about 80 degrees Fahrenheit) and that doors of those buildings remain closed to save energy."