Here to help

Monthly photography revenue: $5 Monthly photography audience: 9 million across Unsplash and Pexels.

Can someone check on Mark Di Stefano? Surely the trust fund babies have a price on his head now?

There’s a lot said about how we Aussies are more divided and alone than we ever have been in this country.

But when I see multiple cars across lanes of traffic work together to hilariously block an aggressive driver from getting ahead in the traffic I reckon there’s voice left in us yet, Australia.

Vote yes.

Show me a more “Aussie” Aussie, than this legit Aussie legend.

I'll wait.

I have a confession to make: I’ve built an Australian news website that is purely created by large language models. It’s autonomous and although I can edit, delete, and stop it, I don’t unless something bad happens.

It’s been a week so far and honestly, I prefer reading it to the other news websites that inspire it.

It’s public but I’m scared about sharing it just yet.

I’ve also been having an LLM rewrite a friend’s blog and I love it.

Flying into Sydney over the Blue Mountains from Uluru this afternoon was a visual treat

Two Google conspiracy theories proven true today:

1: Google Chrome tracks and shares your web browsing for advertising purposes:

Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a "topic" list it shares with advertisers.

2: Google Assistant shares your queries for advertising purposes: Research paper.

Podcast recommendation for the media, podcasting, and tech nerds in my circles: Really Specific Stories. It’s by @martinfeld of @HemisphericViews on “the narratives of tech-podcast fandom and the role of open RSS”. Two of my favourite episodes so far are with @marco and @jsnell.

Shane Parrish on playing the long game:

Every action is a step toward the short game or the long game. You can’t opt out, and you can’t play a long-term game in everything. You need to pick what matters to you. But in everything you do, time amplifies the difference between strategies that work in the short term and ones that work in the long term. The long game allows you to compound results. The longer you play, the bigger the rewards.

Duelling Retro Roos sighting

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together—just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

– EB White

Most of us, me included, can barely think past the next three minutes. We operate in this fear of lack, lack of good or sleep or money, that completely ignores the long arc of our life which gives us decades of evidence that we haven’t gone without yet, and all trend lines point to us being fine in the future.

That’s one of the elements of marriage I love so much.

In marriage you’re forced - by its very nature - to acknowledge that your life is far bigger than this three minute period of stress and anxiety we’re currently facing - in fact we have a whole life ahead of us, and considering that big picture, it’d be great to have someone else in it.

I’m so glad I got over myself long enough to realise that my big picture was missing you, Britt, thank you for making it so much better by simply being you.

Happy 11th anniversary xx

I’ve driven 737km today, I have 93 left, and I just want to say there needs to be a royal commission into the state of servo food in this once great nation.

I often wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda is working on a Peggy spin-off

Many thanks to the airline gods for offering up a new CEO for our national flights of Australia for make benefit glorious nation of Qantastralia! May our new blessed CEO that is the one and only decision maker in the entire organisation, no board of directors or any other executive staff. Make good our glorious airline that can now do no wrong and only make good decisions. Whoever the former CEO was, whatever their name, sexuality, or ethnicity was - I forget - may that bad person be forever gone to go lead some European airline far, far away, from our great nation.

Qantas forever!

Can anyone I know remember the name of the modern web browser for MacOS System 9? I don't know why this matters to me so much but I need to browse the web inside a virtual machine of System 9 just to feel something today while I wait for news to occur for today's Sizzle.

I'm a part of the Hobart wedding trail coming up in a few weeks. I'm expecting a great crowd to fly down and come and jump on a bus or boat and check out the Tasmanian wedding scene. My friend Nina at Isle Weddings is hosting, check out her website for more info.

You're never going to guess who Nouba interviewed.

I’m guest editing The Sizzle today. Apologies for any banana peel in the email.

I'm the guest on the most recent episode of Polka Dot Wedding's Feel Good Wedding Podcast. My audio recording isn't great because it was recorded in a small tiled Italian co-working office room, but the sentiment is great: getting married can be and should be awesome and enjoyable.

Listen on their website or in your podcast app of choice.

And thank you to Dorothy and Mary for having me :)

YouTube bringing that dad energy

Death to paper straws

Home

Can confirm, hearing the instrumental “Still Call Australia Home” as you’re settling in your seat as everyone boards, tickles an emotional muscle.

I’m in the Qantas Singapore Lounge and the waiter poured me a glass of Shiraz, a 2020 from South Australia, on the left.

I make the joke, “2020, not a good year” and then I laugh and smile back at him.

He comes back five minutes later with a 2016 cab sav (on the right) hoping that I like that better.

My comedy is wasted on these people.

Frames from Singapore

Four year old just now at our Singapore hotel as we're getting ready to go to Singapre airport: I don't want to eat here, I want to eat at 'the club at the airport'.

Someone's enjoying her dad's Platinum status a bit too much.

Luna calls cable cars “plane trains” and honestly, that’s a much better name.

When we took the kids overseas everyone told us to make sure we look after them …

Hello, Qantas my old friend

Entering the Paul Kelly stage of our Europe adventure …

Arriverderci, au revoir, aufwiedersen, hasta la vista. Yeah, every fucking city's just the same.

CDG ✈️ LHR ✈️ SIN

We're packing and getting ready for our homeward journey tonight in Paris. We've got three flights left, and the longest ones just earned us a text message from Qantas letting us know that the four of us had been upgraded to business class (RIP my points balance). We've got a few nights in Singapore left and it's back to the Southern Gold Coast after almost a year away.

So because I'm a big nerd, these are our family travel stats since we left home last September and listed our home on Airbnb:

• Photos on my phone: 10,017
• Days away from home: 354
• Flight hours: 87
• Airbnbs and hotel rooms: 52
• Flights: 50
• Airports: 23
• Cars (rented/borrowed/owned): 17
• Countries: 10
• Boats: 3
• Children: 2
• Eurostars: 1
• MacBooks that survived a glass of whisky being spilt on them: 0
• Brown hairs left on my head: -6

Michael A. Fletcher reports for ESPN that the real life story behind the Sandra Bullock movie, The Blind Side, was based on a lie.

Retired NFL star Michael Oher, whose supposed adoption out of grinding poverty by a wealthy, white family was immortalized in the 2009 movie "The Blind Side," petitioned a Tennessee court Monday with allegations that a central element of the story was a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense.

Every day I think about the fact that so much Of our culture today is built on lies. Where do we go as a people? Do we lean in to it or revolt?

I walked out of the house this morning and a man was urinating onto the street, facing in my direction, two metres away. I called out that he was disgusting and he stared at me in the eyes.

After riding a scooter across town to a store I walked upon a lady on the street bent over and attending to her monthly needs.

Just now walking to the grocery store I witnessed a man with both hands amputated smoking a cigarette, his two arms acting as two fingers.

The Parisians have really left their mark on me today.

Richard Rohr in Things Hidden:

It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean its exact opposite: into a tradition of certain knowing, presumed predictability and complete assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like.

We have 48 hours left in Paris. I'm I'm curious what your one awesome thing to do, see, eat, or photograph in Paris. We travel slow, don't travel like tourists, don't really hit the common "top 10 things to see" lists, and we're travelling with two kids, so sometimes we miss things that everyone thinks is awesome. Give me your one recommendation.

I think I’ve spent too much time in Paris this year.

I just got into an argument with another dad about which Parisian playground is the best one.

The American fool thinks the Lourve playground is the best.

Bearly made it home last night

Another chapter in the ever-growing story of how I interact with, and use, social media:

I wrote a little while ago about choosing two social networks.

I kind of have, Mastodon and Threads/Instagram/Facebook. By which I mean that the Meta platforms all blur together with crossposting and attention.

That leaves my remaining accounts from the tier list, Facebook Page, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X.

Rather than delete them, like I'd rather, I've trialled throwing them to ChatGPT.

I'm still refining the prompt, but here's what I'm asking ChatGPT 4 to do in a Zapier zap:

It starts with an instruction, or a set up which looks like this ...

You are a content producer for Josh Withers the Australian wedding celebrant, a marriage celebrant famous worldwide for creating epic marriage ceremonies for adventurous people. You believe that the best kind of marriage ceremony and wedding is an intentional one, where everyone invited is invited for a reason and with a purpose, and that everything that happens at the wedding happens with intentionality and purpose. You are not necessarily against wedding traditions but you are against wedding traditions for the sake of wedding traditions. You write and speak in Australian English, and in a classic and timeless nature but with the wit and humour of Australian marriage celebrant Josh Withers. Be funny. When talking about weddings use inclusive language, use bride only if you're talking about a female person getting married, not as the title of the wedding industry client, and explore a diverse range of topics, cultures, and kinds of people that could get married.

Then I prompt it to write a post like this ...

Write another new controversial tweet as Josh Withers, do not enclose it in quotation marks, written in the style of Australian wedding celebrant Josh Withers based off his writing online and on social media, asking a question or posing an thought about Josh Withers's wedding planning style. The tweet can be a controversial opinion about a modern, inclusive, intentional style of getting married; or an insight into modern wedding planning; or a reflection on wedding traditions of old and how they don't matter any more. Designed to illicit engagement and a response from people who see it. Take into account all interviews and responses by Josh Withers Australian wedding celebrant, and everything Josh has written on his online. Keep the message to under 280 characters. Do not start with greetings, do not use Australian slang like "G'day", do not use any hashtags. Be controversial and talk about all kinds of different wedding topics. Make each tweet different and unique.

There's a 66% chance of the zap running that every hour, and 50% of the time the content goes to Facebook.

My engagement on these existing platforms has been very low for a long time, so let's see if this moves the needle. If not, it's a fun experiment into what a LLM can do for social media.

Just a couple of Australians having a French win. Frame from last night in Paris with yours truly.

Will the Australian government send in an SAS extraction group to save Britt, the girls, and I when France loses to the Matildas in the World Cup quarter-finals today?

Did some A-grade marrying in the rain in Paris today

A Modest Proposal; For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick, by Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1729:

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl, before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value. I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I'd forgotten how nice Facebook Paper was. What was the last great UX you experienced?

My daily steps over the past seven months

I think it's beautiful that the one thing that binds us together as a global community, regardless of colour of skin, religion, where we were born or where we live, or wealth or lack of it, is how our days old street urine all smells the same everywhere.