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.
Salon Tom Weston’s Five Rules of Being A Grown-Up:
- You must not have anything wrong with you, or anything different about you.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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
“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.
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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."
It's the crocodile you don't see you have to worry about.
Crocodiles found on the Mowbray River, just south of Port Douglas in Queensland. Photographed with a DJI Mavic 3.
Free business idea: Instagram, but for photos.
Many think that "the elites" or "the media" are pushing an agenda. They're not, it's actually worse. They're just giving us what we want so they can sell it to us and become wealthier.
Heck, if I was them, I'd do it.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in Everybody Lies:
Many have viewed American journalism as controlled by rich people or corporations with the goal of influencing the masses, perhaps to push people toward their political views. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s paper suggests, however, that this is not the predominant motivation of owners. The owners of the American press, instead, are primarily giving the masses what they want so that owners can become even richer.
“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad.”
– Miles Davis
Brisbane on a Tuesday afternoon
It was a good month for me on Unsplash. Zero dollars made, but millions of feel-good bucks.
More Aussies - 18% - are going to be investing in crypto in the next 2yrs than real estate - 17% - so it's going to be a pretty good 2yrs for A Current Affair. In fact, I might invest in ACA, they're going to have some great li'l ozzy battler ripped-off stories.
Tugun Beach tonight
🌙
