Notes for my gravestone
“This is not a verification status; it’s an Important Blue Internet Checkmark, which in 2022 is just as legit. Also the Important Blue Internet Checkmark may turn into a bunch of crabs at any time 🦀”
Day 30 in Mexico: Still haven’t joined a drug cartel. Fish tacos are amazing. Send coffee.
Trung Phan on the “massive” podcast opportunity he’s identified, and something I’ve thought about a lot:
“Whatever your niche, a single person on a mic in their home can create the definitive long-form audio content for whatever is their “most valuable audience”. It’s a very simple idea …but not easy.”
So apparently the Commonwealth marriage celebrants portal and database was hacked … just a program run by the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s department …
Is swashbuckling still a thing?
Why don’t we use the word “swashbuckling” more? It’s a very cool word.
The MacOS dictionary defines swashbuckling as an adjective as “engaging in daring and romantic adventures with bravado or flamboyance” and as a noun “daring and romantic adventure.”
It came to mind as I read Margaret Sullivan’s book, Newsroom Confidential, and she recalled the story of Jeff Bezos addressing the Washington Post staff:
“Even in the world of journalism, I think the Post is just a little more swashbuckling. There’s a little more swagger. There’s a tiny bit of bad-assness here at the Post.” After some applause and laughs from the exuberant crowd, Bezos elaborated on those words with some context: “Without quality journalism, swashbuckling would just be dumb. Swashbuckling without professionalism leads to those epic-fail YouTube videos. It’s the quality journalism at the heart of everything. And then when you add that swagger and that swashbuckling, that’s making this place very, very special.”
My new life goal is to be described as swashbuckling.
It’s weird to see so much talk about Mastodon and people walk right past micro.blog. I’ve been a user since @manton launched it on Kickstarter, and I think I heard about it on @gruber’s Talk Show - I love it.
Missed the eclipse, but caught sunrise this morning
We’re heading back to Hawaii in mid-January and it got me thinking about the last time I was there and I created a marriage ceremony across the bay from Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler house.
I’ll never know if Steve witnessed me in my element on Maui, but they’ve never officially said what I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing was about …
Anyway, this is just your regular reminder that I make epic marriage ceremonies from Ipswich to Iceland and everywhere between.
Apple Frames is the ultimate shortcut that most Apple computer users don't know about
Over seven years since Workflow first graced the Apple ecosystem - since then being acquired by Apple and renamed Shortcuts which makes it so easy to Google for information about - it’s still a little-known tool on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
My favourite shortcut - it’s the ultimate shortcut - created by the ultimate Shortcuts guy, Federico Viticci at Macstories, is Apple Frames. The shortcut has just been updated to its third version and is ever more powerful and works even better.
You feed the shortcut one or more screenshots you’ve taken on the device, and it inserts the screenshot into an Apple device frame, so the resultant image carries more context. Examples beneath of some quick single screenshots, and three iPhone screenshots shared together in one image.
We don't have a Trump/Musk/political problem, we have a being human problem
I am continually fascinated whilst reading Letters of Note as to how people not of this time, people who lived 50, 100, or 200 years ago talk about the hardships and tribulations of modern life - in their own context - being hard and negative.
Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Raleigh Trevelyan on boxing day 1967 wrote “Do you think it’s at all sensible to wish anyone a Happy New Year? I think the best one can do nowadays is just to wish that we all survive, year by year.”
Or as the preacher spoke to their church a few hundred years before Christ, recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” and they continued, “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
All of humanity, forevermore, just trying to survive, year by year.
Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Victoria Glendinning on 30th September 1987:
“Anyway, I intend to spend the rest of my life wasting time.”
There are two kinds of people in the world, people who confidently pronounce “pho” and the people who anxiously listen to those people say it because they’re sure they’re not saying it right.
I can’t believe that so much valuable conversation is {you should give me all your money} interspersed with ads and unrelated content {gamble your money away!} these days as if it’s a natural way to read and write {you’re so stupid and fat} lol.
Apple executives discussing iMessage for Android is beautifully shortsighted.
We put these people on pedestals but they’re just lucky enough to be considered winners.
Idea: The most important part of Twitter is the feeling of sending the tweet.
No-one sees your tweets anyway, so what if we made a new Twitter where all your followers and replies were just GPT-3 nodes.
An AI social network where computers affirm you and your thoughts.
I’m wondering whether “stay in your medium lane” is good advice for Elon Musk and Twitter today?
I think about Instagram starting as a still photo medium and how I like it less as it has changed lanes. Facebook started as a “friend-to-friend connection” medium, and I like it less as Adam Mosseri has obsessed over Reels and videos.
Twitter started as, and mostly still is, a text medium.
The human brain likes to catalogue and silo things. Twitter is a textual medium, and all of us on it love that about it.
If Twitter wants to evolve to take on YouTube and Facebook and leave text behind, that will be its death knell. Not headwinds in the marketplace, but the fact that those of us that like to read and write text, want to connect and share in a place that champions reading and writing text.
That’s why Imoved my writing and sharing to Micro.blog when it launched. Micro.blog champions text and text sharing, whilst also encouraging you to own your content/text.
If anything was going to take Twitter’s place today, in my humble opinion, it would be Micro.blog, because it has a business plan, it has a network, by design it’s healthy and good for the soul, but it champions the reading and writing of text.
“Chinese restaurant”
