Withers Without You

The Withers family in the island of Hawaiʻi

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Some feelings of the Big Island of Hawaii, or the Island of Hawaiʻi, or Hawaiʻi Island, or Big Island, or Kona, or Hawaii County, or just Hawaii. I don’t really know how to refer to this landmass tbh.

Unkept looking bloke who’s loudly mumbling to himself and is scaring the parents at the playground he’s circling because he looks like an addiction that hasn’t showered in a few days, says to me “weird day man, weird day” and gives me a cheeky grin.

Weird day.

If you’ve ever been the first guy to map parts of Australia and New Zealand, to witness the transit of Venus so ya bois in the lab could figure out how far earth is from the sun, or named an Aussie state, then this memorial marks the place some Hawaiians murdered you because they don’t take kindly to colonisers here.

Lusting after the new Teenage Engineering microphone

Sitting in a Starbucks in Kona just now and a family of four Brits fresh off the Quantum of the Seas cruise ship which just arrived in town. That’s the ship that lost a passenger overboard 1400km south of here. Apparently the person’s nickname/codename onboard the ship is “Old Mate”. I guess this is what it feels like to be a minority.

Harry Belafonte finally met Mister Tally Man and had his banana’s tallied.

James Tylor and Matt Chun in the ANZAC Myth:

The Australian government has fabricated a nationalist mythology around the invasion of Gelibolu Yarımadası (Gallipoli), telling a story of heroism and sacrifice.

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.

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

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

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

Bad news for plastic kitchen good lovers, Tupperware is about to go broke. Turns out they were about seven decades too early on the influencer marketing trend.

Never forget the French dancing plague of the summer of 1518.

Charlie Munger on how the world actually works:

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

The worst sin committed by the news media, today is using synecdoches, helping simplify stories, fitting complex stories into headlines or a tweet whilst not representative of reality. People act, not synecdoches. Don’t dehumanise people, reducing their acts to those of the many.

Complex stories deserve gestation time, time for us to understand an comprehend them.

Millennial quiz: What have you got if you’ve got Sick Puppies next to Puddles of Mud with Twenty One Pilots?

Researching places to stay and this is the third sentence in the second paragraph in Wikipedia:

In 1968, five Swiss artillery shells accidentally hit it, damaging a few chairs that were sitting outdoors.

Ronald Sharp via James Clear’s excellent email, on how friendship transforms us (or any great relationship, really):

It’s not about what someone can do for you, it’s who and what the two of you become in each other’s presence.

“Now this being so, how much happier and better would the world not be if only it could be purged of women?”

From a March 28, 1912, letter to the editor of The Times, signed by C.S.C., one of the doomed. Who turned out to be Clementine Churchill. via Letters of Note

Eleven years ago I asked Britt to marry me, and honestly, it would still be my best idea yet.

I’ve written the story into my Rebels Guide draft chapter on proposals and how I think you should approach asking someone to marry you, now on the blog.

Over a decade ago Vinod Khosla wrote a series of blog posts about artificial intelligence, the forecasts hold up today, and the headline basically tells the whole story: ‘Do we need doctors?’ and ‘Do we need teachers?’

Number of times a well-regulated militia has been required in the USA this year: zero.

Number of times a school student has been wanted to not be shot at this year: way too many.

Dropped a new draft chapter of the Rebels Guide to Getting Married today: choosing a person to marry.

Ted Gioia on becoming a Substack shareholder and why the rest of the business isn’t run like this. Why don’t the creators own the platforms?

“I’d love to live in a world in which the major record labels were owned by musicians. Or the Hollywood film studios by cast and crew. Or those five huge publishing businesses were controlled by writers.”

I cannot imagine living in a community where the word “another” preceding “school shooting” isn’t cause for rioting in the streets and major societal change.

When Vanilla Ice rapped that he was back with a ‘brand new invention’, he was indeed ‘back’ after his first hit, a cover of Play That Funky Music, but was the invention the lyrics (which is kind of the whole idea of a song), his theft of the Under Pressure bass line, or was he talking about the Ninja Rap that came out the next year?

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain?’ is playing in the cafe and I’m singing ‘Have you ever seen Lorraine?’ and the guy at the next table is not handling it well.

I have a confession. I don’t know where to take the book I’m writing. I actually feel kind of stupid for even having thought I should write a book, when all I had was a handful of good ideas. It’s not that I have writer’s block, as much as I’m out of ideas …

I’ve spent the last week mulling an idea about Apple and AI then Linus goes and writes a piece which basically is what I was going to write, with the only addition, to keep an eye on Stability AI and Stable Diffusion. Apple has made a few small moves in their direction recently.

My guess is that any Apple LLM/AI move will be under the brand of Siri, albeit an extension or added product to what we know as Siri in early 2023.

Jose M. Gilgado on embracing a title to help you actually become, that title:

The earlier you use that new term: “athlete,” “writer,” or “artist,” the easier it will be to accept your new identity and act accordingly.

Jon Haidt in Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest:

There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self. That’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the “snowflake” (referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique), the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves; then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way; and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. On the other side of the political spectrum, there was the most insensitive culture imaginable: 4chan. The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence. Meanwhile, the young men on 4Chan moved in the opposite direction; they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic that today’s Cancel Culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

After reading this, all I want to do is walk the streets of LA.

Helen Garner on happiness in The Guardian:

What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.

Virginia Heffernan in the Wired article on TSMC, “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory”:

In 1675, A French merchant named Jacques Savary published The Perfect Merchant, a mercantile manual that came to double as a guide for doing commerce around the world. Albert O. Hirschman cites Savary to explain how capitalism, which would have been regarded as little but avarice as recently as the 16th century, became the sanest ambition of humans in the 17th.

Savary strongly believed that international trade would be the antidote to war. Humans can’t conduct polyglot commerce across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed the Earth’s resources and the fellowship created by commerce were God-given. “It’s not God’s will that all human necessities be found in the same place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Providence has dispersed its gifts so that humans will trade together and find that their mutual need to help each other establishes ties of friendship among them.”

It’s been four months since I’ve blasted this idea across the internet, so here’s my regular reminder that I blog before I post on social, and that blog automatically sends a weekly roundup to anyone that subscribes.

I can’t stop thinking about this RIAA story with Steve Jobs. It’s amazing how fragile - while also strong - the world is. Thank God Rogue Amoeba made it through, I use their software every day.

How to cook soup, by the late Dean Allen:

First, you need some water. Fuse two hydrogen with one oxygen and repeat until you have enough. While the water is heating, raise some cattle. Pay a man with grim eyes to do the slaughtering, preferably while you are away. Roast the bones, then add to the water. Go away again. Come back once in awhile to skim. When the bones begin to float, lash together into booms and tow up the coast. Reduce. Keep reducing. When you think you have reduced enough, reduce some more. Raise some barley. When the broth coats the back of a spoon and light cannot escape it, you are nearly there. Pause to mop your brow as you harvest the barley. Search in vain for a cloud in the sky. Soak the barley overnight (you will need more water here), then add to the broth. When, out of the blue, you remember the first person you truly loved, the soup is ready. Serve.

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.

Rutger Bregman in Humankind:

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

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!

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.

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.

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.”

Alexander Haymen:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Well, that’s a wrap on another day of pretending like I know what’s happening.

Talking to a lovely old Mexican bloke in Cabo San Lucas and he asks where we live, I say Pescadero.

He says, ‘I love Pescadero because it looks like a Mexican fishing village but it’s full of white people!’

So apparently my whiteness is like some kind of gravitational force.

If you look closely you’ll find yours truly’s name mentioned in the New York daily rag today.

U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and the Singapore government said they were transforming old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks. Reuters put that planted AirTags inside 11 pairs of donated shoes and found them at Indonesian flea markets instead.

I fell victim to a phishing scam yesterday and man, I haven’t felt shame like that in a while. Here’s what happened, and how you could avoid it if you weren’t an idiot like me.

Anthony Bourdain in 1999 before he was that chef guy everyone knew, writing ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ in the New Yorker:

“Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals.”

I don’t wish to cause the editors at Atlas Obscura any stress, but why is this not titled ‘The God’s Must Be Thirsty (for Red Fanta)’

Celebrating Wayne Shorter (1933-2023) with his 2018 open letter co-authored with Herbie Hancock:

“We are all pieces in a giant, fluid puzzle, where the smallest of actions by one puzzle piece profoundly affects each of the others. You matter, your actions matter, your art matters.”

One of the little joys of being great at your art is inspiring others to take part in it. So often I am asked how to become a celebrant, that I have finally published my little eight-part guide on how to become a celebrant at the ever-so-smart domain name, becomeacelebrant.au

I’m a sucker for a crazy plan of any genre, but a crazy plan to save newspapers, I’m all in, Ted.

This line from the late Rich Mullins is my inspiration for writing, but gosh it’s hard sometimes

God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God’s been speaking through them ever since.

Stephen King in On Writing:

If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

Debt by David Graeber:

If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank.

I’ve just had my peak Mexican moment. I delivered a dad joke in Spanish and it was perfect.

I’m at our local sushi restaurant ordering takeaway dinner and whilst waiting at the bar they offer me a margarita, and you don’t say no to a margarita in Baja.

I finish it, and he gestured towards my empty glass to which I reply “esta roto” which means “it’s broken” whilst inspecting the bottom of my glass, implying that the drink must have fallen out of the bottom.

He laughs, I laugh, I’m now a Mexican dad and can never leave.

Do you think Carls Sr. is proud of his son?

Los Angeles bound for a few days, thankfully it’s raining so we won’t stay long enough for it to make us soft.

Hey everyone, make sure you update your … checks notes … Apple power cord …