Withers Without You

Tonga’s triple disaster - Expsoure:

“We felt very vulnerable because our island, Lifuka, is so low. We just ran for the highest point, the hospital. Later we were warned not to drink the rainwater as sulphate from the ash had contaminated everything.”

“We’re the Aristocrats!”

RIP Gilbert Gottfried.

“How to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations."

I don’t know how to say this without sounding a bit up my self, but I just spelled ‘poignantly’ correctly on the first go.

My fuel and drink at BP just came to $100.01, so I asked the girl behind the counter if I have a one cent discount so I could get a really nice number in my accounting software. She looked at me as if I was a crazy man.

Can we, or more to the point, will we innovate our way out of gestures at everything?

“So long as we keep choosing to create. If we keep doing what it is we do as people. We are explainers and constructors. We are creators. We are resource makers.”

– Brett Hall

Mark Fisher, in k-punk, on naming things like music genres:

“Naming is not a neutral act of referring. Naming produces surplus value, something that wasn’t already there in the first place.”

One of my favourite aspects of the world wide web and the internet, is the process upon which we find people who think the same as we do. People whose minds vibrate on a similar frequency to ours.

So I present to you: Jameson Orvis’s ‘the essence of place’

“The more I think about this label placement the more it pisses me off. Perhaps I could forgive the label for being so far from the geographic center of Brooklyn if the intersection of Brooklyn Ave and Atlantic Ave were at all remarkable. But no it’s just a random intersection along the A/C line with a 7/11 that the Google Maps label for Brooklyn just so happens to be positioned directly on top of. Why not just put it in the actual center of the borough? What purpose does this serve? Who or what algorithm is responsible? I descended a rabbit hole.”

Police in San Francisco pull over a driverless car

Kim Beazely - former Deputy PM of Australia, Ambassador to the USA, and current Governor of WA - on the general operational capacity of the United States of America:

“I think it’s brilliant the US actually works.”

Fun podcast listen at Hemispheric Views.

The difference 80km and a Ukrainian/Russian border makes in what you see on TikTok.

Just in: the new rankings for reading a book:

1. Acquire the book and read it with your eyes.
2. Acquire the book and intend to read it.
3. Listen to a podcast with the author about the book.
4. Acquire the book without intent to read.
5. Listen to the audiobook.

we’re all looking for someting, not knowing exactly what it is. then one day you’re driving toward the sunset with your window down, and wind running through your hair, as you think, “this is it, this is everything." and all you had to do, is open the window and let it in.

• jose chaves

I’ve got a hunch that this week will be the last one where Australia has a bloke named Scott Morrison as its Prime Minister. That election looms and the coalition wants someone else at the top.

And that makes the team at 6 News' interview with ScoMo even more important. Consider it an exit interview.

Now that vaccinated segregation is coming to an end in Queensland why should we give up on classism now?

I propose we start separating people based on race.

Like, I don’t want to eat at the same cafe as a really fast runner, or F1 driver.

Eight hospitality trends/opportunities that could emerge from Covid:

• Towns for remote workers
• Home swapping
• City getaways and glamping
• Coliving in lifestyle locations
• Staycations
• Neighbourhood coworkings
• Campervans
• Hosting company offsites

… Peter Fabor

2022: Mac Studio 2023: iPad Studio 2024: AirPods Sussudio 2025: iPhone Studio

Charlie Munger:

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

Steve Albini to Kurt, Dave and Chris, aka Nirvana:

“I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it.”

One month ago, on the 28th of February we enjoyed 268mm of rain and our pool and lawn met for the first time.

Today’s brought 168mm so far, enough to bring the lawn and pool back together again.

That’s after I released about 4000L onto the lawn earlier today.

It wet.

Free business idea: software that monitors your email and to-do list and tells a stranger to call you when you get through all your emails and tasks - like, just doing your job - to let you know they’re proud of you.

Hearing about Chris Rock and his mate today reminded me to watch Bel Air, the modern remake of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. It pushes The Batman way down the list in the gritty remake championships.

There was a really well known wedding photographer who was talking to Britt about shooting for The Elopement Collective, and on the phone to her (my wife) he told her that he hopes she fails in business along with some other rude things.

Not long after that phone call there was a dress up wedding industry Halloween party that I knew he would be going to, so I attended in the hopes of confronting him at the event, possibly even punching him.

The good news for all is that not only do I not really punch people, but on arrival to the event I realised how stupid it would be to publicly assault someone to defend my wife’s honour.

He is still a douche - always will be - and my wife is always worth protecting, defending, fighting for. But assaulting him isn’t the answer.

Instead we send him glitter in the mail every now and then. Plus when people want to hire him I tell them how mean and horrible he is and he doesn’t get the booking.

What Chris Rock said was horrible. What Will Smith did was worse.

“Cinematic drone, standard. Polestar O₂ doesn’t just elevate the driving experience. It also allows you to record it. Housed in the rear is a cinematic drone that can lift off and land while the car is in motion. It operates autonomously, allowing the driver to select atmospheric or action-filled sequences. When the O₂ is parked, videos can be edited and shared directly from the centre display. Deploy the drone. Document the drive. And capture the fun of premium electric performance.”

The most unforgiving part of password parenting is needing to take your passwords to the gym so the other passwords don’t bully it for being weak.

That, plus the brutal murder you have to commit when someone else sees your offspring and you must change it.

Pop quiz: name a song about New York in the year 1776

Against Right Liberalism, Adrian Vermeule:

“The old right liberalism finds itself short on fresh ideas but very long on donors, dollars, second-tier publications, and institutional control.”

Please sign up for my OnlyDads. $9.99 a month for all of my best dad content.

Every ‘c’ in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently

A tourist is driving on the wrong side of the road on the Gold Coast Highway. It’s so beautiful now that the international borders are open again, nature is healing.

100% Bruce Wayne was influenced by “Son, when you grow up, would you be, the saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned?” in 2006 when My Chemical Romance dropped the The Black Parade and he was about 14 and decided to become the Batman we’re seeing in cinemas today.

In light of the Hillsong news getting around, I’ve been reading Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World by Elle Hardy on Pentecostal faith:

“A powerful and globally connected religious movement, its resurgence in the twenty-first century also represents a crisis of spirituality in today’s world—one founded on consumption and individualism that replicates the social and political chaos of our time.”

Steve de Shazer:

“Problem talk creates problems. Solution talk creates solutions.”

Substack’s idealogy by Nathan Baschez in Every:

“The history of modern publishing (can be traced) back to the decision in 1833 of a guy named Benjamin Day to offer his newspaper, The New York Sun, for a sixth the price of his competition.

His strategy was to focus on sensational journalism to get broad reach, and make up for the losses in subscription revenue through advertising.

That model has dominated media to this day, except it’s now broken, because Facebook and Google and Craigslist took all the advertising revenue.

The answer is to build a new ecosystem where individual writers or small teams offer hyper-focused subscription products that add genuine value to readers' lives, rather than merely trying to trick them into clicking.”

What a novel idea. News media that adds value instead of tricking people.

“We believe that journalistic content has intrinsic value and that it doesn’t have to be given away for free. We believe that what you read matters. And we believe that there has never been a better time to bolster and protect those ideals. Now, more than ever, publishers of news and similar content can be profitable through direct payments from readers. In fact, we are so convinced by this notion that we have started a company to accelerate the advent of what we are convinced will be a new golden age for publishing. The company is called Substack.”

March 14, 2020: The Day the World Stopped Traveling.

A morning on the Daintree River with some baby, and not-so-baby crocodiles

Can confirm, the Canon EOS R5’s eye-autofocus for animals, does not work on baby crocodiles

Strip clubs and black holes, a review of a review of the life of Stephen Hawking.

Well there goes my plans on starting an airline based around coitus once we reach cruising altitude.

“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

– Albert Camus

I uploaded 72GB of data for a project today and it only took a few hours.

I’m reflecting on that today as we berate the NBN, and government internet policy, the speed of computers, and how things are too slow, or too expensive.

The first MP3 I downloaded in 1997 went overnight.

Two years ago this week, we were all walking into the last normal week we’d see in a while. We were so innocent and unaware.

auDA is celebrating the 36th birthday of .au today, a few weeks away from the launch of .au direct.

One of my earliest memories of .au is how expensive Melbourne IT’s prices were compared to .com so my employer at the time decided a .au.com domain name was the better bet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the current disaster situation north and south of our home in flood devastated areas and how “the government” isn’t doing anything. I don’t think I want a government to do things. Governments have historically not achieved anything close to what regular people have.

I’d like you and I to do things, instead of putting our faith in a bureaucracy structured around a democratic election. The incentives are out of whack, and our want for “them” to do something doesn’t help the political process. It gives them easy wins by promising money but not delivering, and easy opportunities for a photo and a handshake whilst helping no-one.

I think it would be much more powerful for our communities to find their common unities, for those communities to band together with finances, services, love, care, hugs, cooking, whatever is needed. Not to wait for a old white guy in the capital city to help us, for us to help ourselves. Outsourcing care to those people gets us nowhere except for more taxes and less care with less help.

We’ve been outsourcing caring to government for too long. They don’t do it well.

We asked the government to look after our poor and we got Centrelink’s robodebt. We asked the government to look after our health and we got the last two years of whatever 2020-2021-2022 was. We asked the government to look after our financials and we got the GFC, current house prices, and ZIRP (zero interest rate policy). We asked the government to regulate the media and we got nightly news bulletins that somehow are the same length every night, and newspapers that hold power in government, not holding government to account. We asked the government to come and help in the floods and we got a PR and social media marketing campaign. We asked the government to lead and we got Scotty from marketing.

Let’s stop asking the government to do things, and ask ourselves to do things, ask each other to do things. It might be scary, but let’s be vulnerable, let’s ask for help. Let’s be real.

The government is good at building roads and collecting rubbish. The government isn’t good at care, love, or help.

James Greig in Stop making the Ukraine war about you:

“Social media isn’t necessarily the source of this tendency, but it has accelerated the impulse for people to be obsessed with their own subjectivity; unable to process global events outside of the prism of their own emotional reaction and the relatively minor ways they are affected.”

A solid amen to Arne Bahlo on his article: You’re using email wrong.

“If I look at my inbox, it’s a joy.”

Just attended my eight court mediation hearing because of Covid cancelling someone’s wedding plans. If you ever want to feel sad come shout me a beer or eight and I’ll tell you the stories.

The Hustle via Kyle Westaway:

“Sixty percent of IKEA purchases are impulse buys. And IKEA’s own creative director has said that only 20% of the store’s purchases are based on actual logic and needs.

How does IKEA trick you into buying more stuff? (1) Store layout. Inside, customers are led through a preordained, one-way path that winds through 50-plus room settings. The average IKEA store is 300k sq. ft.—the equivalent of about five football fields—and their typical shopper ends up walking almost a mile. This forces wider product exposure, creates a false sense of scarcity and creates mystery. (2) Low prices. IKEA often follows a “price first, design later” philosophy: It starts with a price target—say $6.99 for a new stool—then reverse-engineers the design process to meet that goal. IKEA seems to adhere to a “survival of the fittest” pricing model: If a product’s price can’t be reduced over time, it tends to get discontinued. (3) The IKEA Effect. We have a cognitive bias wherein we place a higher value on items we build ourselves, regardless of the quality of the end result. (4) Cafeteria. A survey of 700 shoppers found that those who ate at the food court spent an average of more than two times more on home furnishings than those who didn’t.”

Evan Armstrong:

“There is perhaps no more colossal waste of human potential than Netflix. An algorithmic content feeding tube, designed by Silicon Valley engineers to deposit dopamine into our lizard brains at the exact point that we would churn, Netflix’s final form will be a pair of wires shoved directly into our eyeballs giving us personally crafted reality television. I love it.”

Most advice is people’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice.

“I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.”

Kurt Vonnegut in a letter to his daughter, Nanette. 20th November 1971.

Kevin is listening through every album of every band he loves:

“Even the great treasure of music can seem dull at times. I’ve found that giving over real considered time to an artist’s work has taught me so much–about art, about creative decisions and really just about how we all get up in the morning and have to make that day happen in a way that it mattered.”

This Eater story of how a New York restaurant took the unpopular route of closing on Saturdays plus they increased profitability is the kind of business I want to create and run.

We often presume to understand restaurant economics because we know what a chicken breast costs at the supermarket. “I could make this dish at home for $5,” goes the refrain. Could we?

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.”

– Henry Ford

Deep cuts for Nikon photographers

Why You’re Christian, by David Perell:

“If you believe in human rights but don’t believe in God, you need a logical explanation for why they’re self-evident.”

Todays a good day to announce that we’re extending the pool and colouring it the same colour as the lawn

Friday 13 Mar 2020, and the ABC quotes an F1 fan in its report on the Melbourne F1 Grand Prix being cancelled:

“Are you going to close schools and supermarkets and everywhere else where people gather?”

Eric Karjaluoto on the fallacy of individual wins and benefiting from the one force that every great business success has leveraged: The Wave:

Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile; he rode the assembly-line wave.

Mary Kay Ash didn’t invent cosmetics; she rode the direct-sales wave.

Andrew Carnegie didn’t invent steel; he rode the building wave.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers; he rode the digital wave.

Anita Roddick didn’t invent soap; she rode the ethical business wave.

Larry and Sergey didn’t invent search; they rode internet wave.

Chip Wilson didn’t invent stretchy-pants; he rode the yoga wave.

Jeff Bezos didn’t invent book sales; he rode the ecommerce wave.

Chuck Klosterman on the 90s:

“It feels as though the 1990s weren’t just the last decade of the 20th century but sort of the last decade, period — the last decade with a fully formed and recognizable culture of its own.”

David Ogilvy:

“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”

“Wonderful things can happen when your brain is empty.”

– Maira Kalman

What ever happened to the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention?

Crime in Tugun: Cromulent. A new issue of The Tugun Pause is in inboxes.

“Whatever you are, be a good one.”

– Abraham Lincoln

Most of you wouldn’t know about the disappointment I carry that my first personal computer was a 486SX and not a 386DX. All my friends had 386s and my dad rented a Packard Bell with a 486SX.

It’S TWOSDAY! Tuesday 22/2/22.

Guy in a Palm Beach cafe this morning:

“Anything north of Mermaid Beach is Logan, love”

Dear Vanessa Carlton,

Despite your willingness to walk a thousand miles to see me, I regret to inform you that you cannot fall into the sky.

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”

– Charlie Munger

If NCIS: Sydney can get off the ground

Blue Heelers: New York. Surry Hills, 2010. ER: Covid Ward. Buffy the Prime Minister Slayer. Law & Order: W.A. Unit. JAG: Garden Island. Grey’s Anatomy: Brisbane-Team. 3rd Rock From The Border. Everybody Loves Dan Andrews. The Ibrahim’s. It’s Always Sunny in Adelaide. Orange Is The New Black (a travel program about going to Orange, NSW).

And I just want to point out without bringing too much attention to myself, that Sweden, Poland, Israel, Germany, India, France, Chile, the Czech Republic, Canada, Finland, and the god damned United States of America have had their own versions of The Office.

The Office (Australian TV series).

Successful Man 2022 BC: Killed animal for family to eat.

Successful Man 2022 AD: I’ve emptied three of my four email inboxes and there’s only seven emails left in that one so they can wait til tomorrow because it’s almost 11pm.

Good and new music alert: Ben Abraham - If I Didn’t Love You

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.”

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?

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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?”

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.

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.”

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.

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”

I’ll probably do your wedding for free if you walk down the aisle to Goldfinger’s cover of 99 Red Balloons.

Thinking about Citipointe Christian College in Brisbane this afternoon …

“Bless those who persecute you. Don’t curse them; pray that God will bless them. Be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with each other. Don’t be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people.

And don’t think you know it all!”

‭‭An excerpt from Romans‬ , chapter 12:14-16‬ from the New Living Translation.