René Girard in Wanting:

“Humans don’t desire anything independently. Human desire is mimetic – we imitate what other people want. This affects the way we choose partners, friends, careers, clothes, and vacation destinations. Mimetic desire is responsible for the formation of our very identities. It explains the enduring relevancy of Shakespeare’s plays, why Peter Thiel decided to be the first investor in Facebook, and why our world is growing more divided as it becomes more connected.”

A wild Filet-O-Fish spotted near Hinze Dam on the Gold Coast

Hey, feel free to join me, imma storm Meta HQ.

I’m taking a convoy to Menlo Park to demand that the Business Suite app work better.

If you didn’t watch the 2010 banger of a film, Valentine’s Day, tonight, you’re actually not in love. Trust me, I’m a celebrant, I’d know.

SMH reports that we are on the way to the darkest timeline:

“Premier Dominic Perrottet said the information was uploaded in error and the bungle, which has alarmed privacy advocates and women’s safety advocates, shouldn’t have happened.”

Ya think, Dom?

Business idea: a screening of the Super Bowl for people like me who like to stay culturally relevant but don’t care about the football - and also have jobs. Just a little catch-up video. Help a brother out?

The sunset over Tugun tonight was all levels of madness.

Every day I wonder why when I was a young boy my father never took me into the city to see a marching band. Just something else for me please thank romanticise over as I take these chemicals.

It seems like the path to podcasting success isn’t to create good new content, but to have old good content

Sliding into the weekend from Burleigh

Some people donate to good causes, my personal contribution to world peace is wasting time for scam callers. Rosie here just spent 30 minutes trying to get me to install the Anydesk app so they could help me with my NBN.

Isaac Asimov:

"It is important to remember that the viciousness and wrongs of life stick out very plainly but that even at the worst times there is a great deal of goodness, kindness, and day-to-day decency that goes unnoticed and makes no headlines."

Muhammad Ali's letterhead in 2003 #GOAT

What ever you do, do not google goats eyes.

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”

– Jean-Luc Godard

Elle Hardy talking her new book and the global Pentecostal movement with James Hennessy in The Terminal

“Pentecostals are basically eating everyone's lunch”

Alex Ross with Reasons to Abandon Spotify That Have Nothing to Do with Joe Rogan:

"I don’t know how to explain to them that it has never been ethical or sustainable to expect to have unfettered access to the entire history of recorded music for $10/month."

The only thing more terrifying than a Black Hawk rocking up on you in the middle of a battle with a load of bad ass soldiers, would be a ghost Black Hawk, just looking at you, ready to charge.

I'd bet $10 that the image was created on a Mac and saved without a .jpg extension. Can't wait for the link that proves this and the headline is about how a Mac broke a Mazda over the air.

Ars Technia: Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems.

"The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions"

If you say "website dot com" when it's a .com.au, you're a boomer.

The painting was defaced by a security guard who added two pairs of eyes to the painting 😂

Why?!

Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic, "When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z":

"She has more time and wealth than she knows what to do with—and so now she will pause to bathe an elephant. Wait a minute, you say to yourself. Could this be my life too?"

When I moved to Tugun four years ago we paid half what is now marketed as "Tugun's most affordable home" ... what a time to be alive.

Georgia O’Keeffe //

"I said to myself, 'I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me…shapes and ideas so near to me…so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.' I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught."

Before he became CEO of the Trump campaign Steve Bannon made his living selling virtual gold on the Internet ... Bannon managed to convince Goldman Sachs to plow $60 million into imaginary goods in an imaginary world.

I think about this a lot

James Clear:

“When considering a new project or opportunity, one of the first questions to ask is, “How do I want to spend my days?”

C. S. Lewis in a letter to a young fan:

Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

Via Letters of Note

How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook, Darren Loucaides:

"As I sat with him, I thought back to the conversation Zuckerberg and Durov allegedly had more than a decade ago. Both saw their nascent social networks as transcendent structures that would free communications from control by the state: governments and regulators reduced to the level of nuisances, rendered obsolete before the liberating force of a platform. Thinking this under a waning winter sun as my conversation with Telegram's VP concluded, I felt a chill."

How much are they paying for this myGov thing again? I got the notification email overnight, I've been anxious about it all day, finally got the guts to log in and find out what was wrong, and I owe them $0. Can I sue the ATO & myGov for anxiety inducement?

New data on how Americans drank themselves to death during the pandemic, by Christopher Ingraham

The Final Comeback of Axl Rose, by John Jeremiah Sullivan in 2006, referenced in the Rubesletter by Matt Ruby, today:

Axl has said, "I sing in five or six different voices that are all part of me. It's not contrived." I agree. One of them is an unexpectedly competent baritone. The most important of the voices, though, is Devil Woman. Devil Woman comes from a deeper part of Axl than do any of the other voices. Often she will not enter until nearer the end of a song. In fact, the dramatic conflict between Devil Woman and her sweet, melodic yang—the Axl who sings such lines as Her hair reminds me of a warm, safe place and If you want to love me, then darling, don't refrain and Sometimes I get so tense—is precisely what resulted in Guns N' Roses' greatest songs…

And what does she say, this Devil Woman? What does she always say, for that matter? Have you ever thought about it? I hadn't. "Sweet Child," "Paradise City," "November Rain," "Patience," they all come down to codas—Axl was a poet of the dark, unresolved coda—and to what do these codas themselves come down? Everybody needs somebody. Don't you think that you need someone? I need you. Oh, I need you. Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? I wanna go. Oh, won't you please take me home?

Remember when (20 years ago) British Telecom tried to patent hyperlinks so that everyone who used the web would owe them?

Sitting next to a couple on a first date (over lunch at a kebab shop) and the poor girl is really trying to make this work. After about 30 seconds of silence she asks “so do you read books?”

He’s hesitant with an answer.

This is gruelling!!

Miles Davis:

"If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad."

Sad to see that TED Talks are actually useless

One day I'm going to open a restaurant called Alice's Restaurant so that the three other Arlo Guthrie fans have somewhere to come and take photos for Instagram.

English writer and poet, D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930):

“The world fears a new experience more than anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.”

If there was a 24/7 streaming channel of just Rhys Darby talking about things in his funny manner, you could just pump that directly into my brain.

Finally made it to Buzzfeed

Every cricket season I think about the couple I met with who didn’t book me because I didn’t know who the groom was.

I asked what he “did”, he said “play cricket”, to which I replied, no I mean like a career or a job.

He replied “I play cricket.”

Still don’t know who he was.

Also currently reading: On Reckoning by Amy Remeikis 📚

Currently reading: Things Hidden by Richard Rohr 📚

Chemical emitted by babies could make men more docile, women more aggressive:

The study provides “pretty convincing evidence that HEX can modulate aggression in humans in a sex-specific way,” says Dayu Lin

Yossi Ghinsberg is speaking to my Harcourts team today, this early statement about him reading books during school classes ignoring the teacher captured me all afternoon:

“No matter what you do, make a story out of it”

Then this one on dreaming:

“Nothing exists if you don’t imagine it first”

Readers and viewers aren’t dumb, via The Why Axis email.