Withers Without You

Am I an influencer now?

Josh Nadeau, aka Instagram’s @swordandpencil, shared these words in a story today and my boy @qldnick shared them with me, which is all to say I have intelligent and thoughtful friends and also that I can’t source the original quote. Regardless of those technicalities, I can’t stop thinking about.

Wendell Berry’s thoughts on technological progress:

But in general, apart from its own highly specialised standards of quantity and efficiency, “technological progress” has produced a social and ecological decline. Industrial war, except by the most fanatically narrow standards, is worse than war used to be. Industrial agriculture, except by the standards of quantity and mechanical efficiency, diminishes everything it affects.

Industrial workmanship is certainly worse than traditional workmanship, and is getting shoddier every day. After forty-odd years, the evidence is everywhere that television, far from proving a great tool of education, is a tool of stupefaction and disintegration. Industrial education has abandoned the old duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of baby-sitting and career preparation.

After several generations of “technological progress,” in fact, we have become a people who cannot think about anything important. How far down in the natural order do we have to go to find creatures who raise their young as indifferently as industrial humans now do? Even the English sparrows do not let loose into the streets young sparrows who have no notion of their identity or their adult responsibilities.

When else in history would you find “educated” people who know more about sports than about the history of their country, or uneducated people who do not know the stories of their families and communities?

My 1994 Packard Bell 486SX 25/33 isn’t that impressive thirty years on but it impressed me in the 90s because it had a the set of matching SVGA monitor and video card. Super VGA my dude. 800x600 pixels, and 24 bit colour, that’s 16,777,216 possible colours per pixel.

I hypothesised back then that if you wrote a program that simply randomised the colour of each of the 480,000 pixels you could see any image ever - eventually.

I called it the Face of God idea. That eventually that computer could just imagine and display any image real or otherwise, even the face of God.

As the Pixel 9 AI “what is a photo” terror arises this week I’m thinking about it all again. What does it mean when a photo isn’t a photo?

I wonder if this is the dawn of a new fantastic era of creativity and wonder, or if my favourite means of creativity - photography - has just been hit with a nuclear bomb?

Imagine the monotony of life if the sun slipped away without a whisper, and the skies farewelled the day with no fanfare, leaving the world untouched by the splendour of their daily performance.

Seated behind me on this A321neo are a bunch of boys who refer to “normal planes” as ones that have a 3-3/4-3 configuration and they’re bemused that we’re flying such a small plane to Bali.

Normalise single-aisle aircraft.

It’s a real creature comfort to be able to listen to my home state Cole’s Supermarket in-store music while in Brisbane

Surfers Paradise street performer in four photos

Remember that time the world united around a dude called Matt dancing in front of things around the world? Better times.

They completed technology. No more technology is needed anymore. They’ve done it all now.

Imagine being so good at dancing that you got a doctorate in it and then were chosen to represent your country in it at the Olympics, only to realise you’re actually terrible at it thanks to some dude on the internet.

A court case I lost a few years ago over a frustrated contract had the ruling go to a hypothetical “man on the 3pm omnibus to Clapham” which is a common law description of the “common person”.

Being on one as I write this I think the modern version is “person on the 6am Boeing 737 to Brisbane.”

I couldn’t stomach any delays today, but I was kinda hoping we’d get the slightest delay so I could test the new machine learning features in Flighty 4

Donut not have kids … they’re the best

It honestly is impossible to get a doctors appointment in the Huon Valley, I called around a few weeks ago (from today’s newspaper)

South Hobart tip shop find of the week: $15 for a 1971 Auto Tamron 80-250mm F/3.8 telephoto lens with a Minolta mount. Add on my MD-RF adaptor from Urth and I’ve finally got a telephoto for my Canon EOS R5 again.

Photo of Britt’s Fuji camera is through the lens, I’m looking forward to playing with it in the daylight tomorrow.

On dying, from @[email protected] who recently died:

It’s because we don’t die online properly.

We need a way to die online. If my time comes tomorrow, I want the offline funeral to serve as a way — as best as funerals can — of drawing a line under my life and letting the grieving process begin.

Reading The Sizzle’s opening lines today by @[email protected] really took me for a six. No day in this life is promised to us, but I’m glad to have spent today with each of you.

Here’s to you, Geordie Guy. May DNS pay for what it did to you.

(There needs to be a new word for people we follow and are followed by online, haven’t met in real life, but have admiration and respect for.)

ABC Chairman on the web: a “pretty ancient concept now”

Josh Withers: “kill me now”

… however I do agree with his stance on lifestyle news receiving so much priority at the ABC.

Honouring soldiers from all three of Australia’s major wars here at Samsonvale