The saddest part about Elon Musk screwing up Twitter and Twitter Blue is that the Internet needs to install a values system where we understand things have a cost and Twitter shouldn’t be free.
But now paying $8 for Twitter is a meme, not an exercise in human betterment.
I’ve been saying crap on the internet and into microphones connected to radio and TV towers for 20 years next year, it’s a miracle that the most scandalous thing I’ve done is MAFS series one.
I need help with panoramic images made with my DJI Mavic 3 drone. The camera itself stitches the images together but the stitch is never great. So it saves the 25 individual images, but Photoshop and Lightroom can never deal with them well. What software can help with this?
For Polkadot Wedding’s Planning Issue this month I wrote an article on choosing a wedding reading and also how you don’t need one so if you have one, let it have purpose.
Well, count me surprised and dumbfounded /s that this weird crap is happening on Spotify.
Stumbled across this fascinating story of Little Richard being in Australia in 1957, seeing the Russian satellite Sputnik in the sky and thinking the world was going to end so he takes the stage to preach the gospel at his concert instead of performing so the promoter offered refunds.
My first tweet was tweeted 18 months before I even started tweeting
I’ve been reminiscing over Twitter this week, wondering what the last tweet will be amongst other things as Space Karen prepares to take away the verification tick on my profile that proves I am who I am, a tick gifted to me from my time in the media in Australia.
I started my current Twitter account in October 2009 but I was sure that I had an account before then so I went searching and searching and searching and found it: March 2008, @1073brekky.
In 2008 I scored my first paid breakfast radio gig: the morning show on 107.3 FM on the Gold Coast (at the time called 1073fm but now called Juice FM). I’d been training and prepping for this role for five years and was so keen. I was also a bread-and-butter kind of computer nerd, so ideally my non-nerdy radio show would have some nerdy elements. In 2008 the breakfast guy didn’t get access to the website - they probably still don’t today - so I wanted to find a way to post short updates to the website. Something inside of me felt like the internet might be a thing one day so it would be good to use it early. I’ve got so many stories about being the nerdiest and most future-thinking guy in the radio station that it broke my heart so many times to be honest.
I had heard things about this service in the USA called Twitter that had heralded a new kind of web publishing, micro-blogging. You could send updates to the service and they could appear in a website widget. I signed up, got the code to the web developer and before you know it, I could post updates to my show website! I didn’t care so much for the Tweeting, the replying, or the broadcasting. I just wanted to blog on my radio station website and the CRM didn’t allow blogging or micro-blogging or anything of the like.
Twitter solved my problem and I’m sure my problem was never in any of their minimum-viable product meetings.
About two months later I quit the station because at the time it was honestly a terrible place a human with a soul could want to work, but fifteen years on I only have good memories from my first breakfast show, my first Twitter account, and my experiences being unleashed on the Gold Coast community on the radio.
I’m working on a new business that is a web service - a mobile/desktop web app with video and audio upload components + email. I’ve never directly hired devs for this kind of project before. What kind of web dev language and tech should I be asking for in 2023?
I was moved to hear of Father Bob’s passing. I’ve never met or talked to a crankier, lovelier, old bloke who was thoroughly and passionately focused on loving and caring for humans without personal gain or agenda.
When I think about being Christ-like, I think of Bob.
Many publicly-known priests and ministers are loved by church leadership whilst being in the news for scandal and crime, while Bob was hated by church leadership whilst in the news for loving the outcasts of society.
I’d rather die a man lambasted by church leaders and known as a friend to outcasts, the downtrodden, the forgotten, the least of our society. That’s who Bob was.
Shared my nerd bio in my NerdyBio interview
Everything that was old and awesome becomes new and terrible, whist still whipping the llama’s ass.
My “Batman only exists because of 9/11” theory
I have a theory: today in 2023, we have a Batman because terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Centre towers in New York City, a.k.a Gotham City.
My premise is that timing of My Chemical Romance’s Welcome To The Black Parade’s release influenced Robert Pattison’s Batman at an influential age and made him the Bruce Wayne portrayed in the 2022 film, The Batman.
The 2022 Batman was born in 1991 or 1992, making him “about 30” when the movie was released.
The Batman’s parents died in 2001 (possibly 2002), the year that terrorists flew into the World Trade Towers and changed the world forever. One such change being that Gerard Way formed the band My Chemical Romance in response to the attacks. The other obvious infliction point here is that the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne is the motivation for young Bruce to become Vengeance personified.
In 2006 when The Batman was about 15 or 16 ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’ was released. Bruce is still rattled by his parent’s murders, growing up a young boy trying to figure out who he is and what his purpose is.
Your teenage years and the music you listen to through those years are formative to who you are and the music you love.
Look at some of My Chemical Romance’s lyrics from the Black Parade:
When I was a young boy, My father took me into the city, To see a marching band. He said, “Son, when you grow up, Would you be the savior of the broken, The beaten and the damned?” He said, “Will you defeat them? Your demons, and all the non-believers, The plans that they have made?” “Because one day, I’ll leave you a phantom…
Cut to 2022 in film, The Batman
“They think I am hiding in the shadows, but I am the shadows.”
Bruce Wayne is the Batman we know in 2022 because of 9/11.
Goldie, who just turned two, just buckled up her own airplane seat and is patiently awaiting takeoff whilst playing peek-a-boo with three different strangers and babbling to her neighbour.
So yeah, I think she’s doing ok developmentally.
Nashville, Tennessee ✈️ Phoenix, Arizona ✈️ Kona, Big Island of Hawaiʻi
The news is incentivised to be broken and terrible
I was a media and news man for over a decade, I loved being - what I considered to be - an important part of the community, telling its stories and keeping the community informed, safe, and entertained.
But the industry isn’t doing well.
The second story on news.com.au today is about a Fox News story about a recent TikTok that went viral, which the newsdesk found out about through a Twitter user sharing the TikTok in three parts, and the TikTok was just a replay of a Youtube clip from a radio show four years ago.
Serendipitously the original clip and radio show was broadcast about one kilometre from where I type this in Franklin, Tennessee, but there’s no good reason for Australia’s national news website - news.com.au - to publish this as a second story today. That the second most important story in Australia today is a four year old viral video is an insult to the wealth of stories Australia has to tell, and the global stories it could engage with.
Yes, it gets the clicks. Yes, it’s actually an important story inside the video, be debt free. But from a professional storytelling point of view it’s embarrassing for the news.com.au staff. Even the actual article is poorly written and just lazy.
This is the downfall of society, our storytellers are poorly incentivised to do good work, and over incentivised to do work that gets clicks that advertisers want even though no-one is clicking the ads.
Will, a mate of mine has written and released a guide on working in film and television production, something he’s an expert in.
I thought readers of my blog might appreciate the book if they or people they knew aspired to work in film production (it’s a great and personal read, even for me, an old man without film and TV aspirations), but also, they’d enjoy this excerpt about what technology you should own and be proficient in before you start as a production assistant.
“Seriously, people will look at you like you have three heads as you drag that eighty-pound hunk of plastic with the extended numerical keyboard from your bag and plop it on the desk.”
If you, or someone you know, wants a start in the film and TV production industry Will’s the book is a must-purchase and must-read - and it’s now on Kindle.
Because I’m a man-child I wanted to share my two of my favourite photos from photographing the horse sanctuary in Baja
Reckon we could get the ChatGPT guys to spend an an afternoon working on spam filtering?
Once all the adults admit that they don’t know what a conservatory is we’ll finally get world peace