Hi! My name is Josh, this me blog.
The dance of pleasing the social media algorithims of the world’s biggest companies, whilst being beat to death by strangers with their comments displeased me so now I’m here.
I wish I were the kind of person who could just live without broadcasting. But there’s an animal inside me — right down in the marrow — that keeps asking ‘can you see me?’ and silence has never once soothed it.
Years from now the people of Puglia will still talk of the strange man who came from the land down under, where women glow and the men have takeaway American coffee with cold milk. I said, "Do you speak-a my language?" and they just smiled and gave me an espresso with a cold milk drink on the side.
I reinstalled the Twitter app when X first appeared just so I could experience this firsthand, in the flesh
11:27pm Italy time and I've been slogging away for hours at the stupidest CSS thing that changed in the most recent version of the Shopify code. Felt good to feel like it was 1999 and I was a web developer again.
Any how, sugargathered.com is now open for business on Shopify, I've just spent the last (far too many months) amount of time moving it from Squarespace and implementing lots of cool things for my friends who run it.
If you want some donuts delivered to, or at an event on, the Gold Coast, I can recommend a great website.
A MacBook with a turntable instead of a keyboard? Shut up and take my money, DJ.
ABC Radio National's Andrew West interviewing Ian Buruma on in The religious and spiritual ethics of wokeness:
It's when a movement to improve certain social conditions, whether it's about race, gender, or whatever else, turns from an active effort into a rigid ideology, then you have a problem.
Ian originally wrote about wokeness in Harpers Magazine:
Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is the word itself, which has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals.
Looking forward to a future where being woke is a clearer idea and status. I'm sick of wondering if I'm a sheeple or a wolk folk, and by who's definition.
Update on the book writing: I wrote a lot and I thought it was ok, I ran it past some friends and it wasn't as good as I thought, and on further reflection it was worse.
Then I read this in Stephen King's On Writing:
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
So I'm currently reading a lot. I used to read a bit, now I'm reading a lot.
A photographer at the water park we were just at asked a family to say "Mozzarella" because I guess formaggio doesn't make a smile?
In Western Australia yesterday
Amanda Holpuch in the New York Times in June 2023:
South Koreans became a year or two younger on Wednesday after a law standardizing the way the government counts age took effect. There are three common ways to count age in South Korea, but the government has changed its civil code to recognise one: starting from zero on a person’s date of birth and adding a year at each birthday. This is the age-counting method used most often around the world, but it is a departure from the country’s most popular method, often called “Korean age.” Under that system, a person is considered 1 year old at birth, and a year is added to their age each Jan. 1. This meant that an infant born on Dec. 31 was considered 2 years old the next day.
Every extra square metre I experience on this planet I find new and wild ways that humans have figured out how to exist. Korean Age isn't the weirdest, but it's up there.
The deeper I traverse into life on Planet Earth, into fatherhood, business, weddings, photography, and friendship I am ever further interested in art, making art, and making great art.
So Matt Ruby's deviation from his normal comedic quick wit and observation Substack into this interesting read on George Michael, his coming out, connecting Freedom with Wham and his later Freedom '90, captured all of my attention today.
This whole read was just really interesting.
Sometimes the clothes, indeed, do not make the man
Michael couldn’t handle the combo of massive success and mockery. He did everything he could to make us love him, yet we still didn’t respect him. He wanted us to admire his mind, but we just wanted to stare at his butt. And that set the table for his cri de coeur: “Freedom ’90.”
Uluṟu, that beautiful monolith that captures the very essence of Australia. It's my favourite place in Australia. This iconic natural wonder is far more than an awe-inspiring spectacle - it represents the rich tapestry of indigenous heritage and gathering for ceremony.
Uluṟu is intrinsically linked with the indigenous Anangu people, serving as an embodiment of their Tjukurpa - a term that captures the moral laws, spirituality, and existence of these people. Uluṟu's formation stems from a time of ancestral beings, the Dreamtime, whose stories are etched across its vast surface in the form of petroglyphs.
For countless generations, Uluṟu has been a significant ceremonial site, bearing witness to rites of passage and important celebrations. This land, imprinted with the songs and dances of the Anangu, has been a part of their life's tapestry, from birth to death and every joy and hardship in between.
Now, imagine breathing your marriage into life here - a site resonating with tales of love, life, and dreams, where the deep-red soil has observed centuries of human connection. A marriage ceremony at Uluṟu represents a union not only between two individuals but also a communion with our shared human legacy and the ancient rhythms of this remarkable landscape.
As a wedding celebrant, my commitment at Uluṟu is to ensure that your ceremony encapsulates your story while honouring the deep-seated heritage there. In doing so, we pay tribute to the traditional custodians of this land.
Joining the long line of stories woven into this sacred land, adding our mark to the generations of human experiences that Uluṟu has borne witness to.
Photo by Heart and Colour from Steph & Kieran's elopement with The Elopement Collective.
Reed Albergotti in Semafor Technology:
Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and the navigation company TomTom released a free mapping dataset in a bid to compete with Google Maps and Apple Maps. Developers can use the data, which includes 59 million places of interest, to create their own navigation products.
If a powerfully simple mapping system like What3Words can't gain traction in a decade, I don't think TomTom can get a foot up by giving it away.
I am curious where this leaves Bing Maps though.
Keith Richards, April 1962:
Mick (Jagger) is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe.
I've been having problems for years where my iPhone would have no space left, yet seemingly actually have space left. I've always felt like it was an iCloud photos library problem. So I finally downloaded originals to my Mac and I am now convinced Photos is the problem.
📷🇮🇹🏊🏼 Luna looking like she's not having fun in the water when she's truly having a ball.
The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), "drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.", looking at reconstructions of beer consumption from the middle ages to the pre-industrial era this was only a slight exaggeration. When estimating consumption from the amount of beer provided to soldiers, convicts, and workers or reconstructing consumption from tax revenues on beer we see that the average person consumed about a liter of beer a day, this is around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.
Better times, ya know
Do I get my eye scanned by Worldcoin when I’m in Paris in two weeks or do I just share my genitalia size here in public instead?
The ATO is cool with scammers ripping off $557m in MyGov identity fraud. A whopping $557m has been stolen off the ATO and people entitled to a tax refund by scammers in the last two years.
If the Aussie Tax Office is ok losing half a billion dollars, I've just realised that I have spent about that on uniform laundry last year.
Matt Mullenweg on Apple and 1.0 products back in 2010:
Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise! I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.
This has rocked my day. Re is its own word. It’s not short for regarding.
Imagine being the butt of this line in a news report "The launch of the eye-scanning cryptocurrency project Worldcoin" and you're also the guy standing behind the main brand name related to a technology the world is shit scared of, and just thinking everything is fine.
Matt Levine on "Leon Smuk", from X:
I guess my question is, what was he paying for? Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away); he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did!
I'm looking for an erratic egotistical billionaire to trust my savings and family's future to, if you can recommend anyone, slip into my DMs
📷🇮🇹 Our last Monday in Puglia
📚 After backing and reading Renai Le May’s The Frustrated State it felt like Australian governments had completed, achieved the highest level of information technology incompetence. COVID proved me so very wrong, but then today Anthony Agius writes in The Sizzle:
Services Australia has cancelled a project to create a calculator for Centrelink entitlements, after spending $191m on it over 3 years. Incredible incompetency for such a basic thing the government needs.
How many millions of dollars can the Australian government flush until we actually get real upset?
When people talk about how the 80s were better I want to remind them that there was a character on TV whose name was Gordon Shumway, called himself Gordon Shumway, but everyone called him ALF because audiences and cast stupidly needed the reminder that the alien looking dude was an alien life form.
This is terrible branding, design, and UX. How am I going to remember where to go to be an insufferable prick now?
Michael Bierut:
No one will remember that it was on time, everyone will remember that it was bad.
Starting to feel a little bit alone over here in Italy. Trying to get some Aussie work done and it looks like Telstra cuts you off from WiFi calling after your SIM card hasn't been on an Australian Telstra tower for seven months. Google Fi was three months.
A birds eye view of Martina Franca, in southern Puglia, where we've been hanging out this month.
In these photos, happening at the same time, is a funeral procession, a dance contest, and an opera, amongst whatever else the 49,000 residents are getting up to.
There's also two 360 photos of Martina Franca in this embed, a higher and lower shot, look for the hotspots when you're scrolling around.
I've just finished reading Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P. W. Singer, recommended by my favourite Cybersecurity Guard, @qldnick 📚
It was a compelling and enjoyable read, and honestly, a refreshingly human conclusion that somewhat settles its disturbing and frightening chorus of a society a few years ahead of where we are today struggling with the effects of advancing technology.
Never go into battle with a bot you can’t trust and never trust a bot you don’t know how to snuff out.
The largest truth in this fictional read is that fear always takes the wheel, especially for those who have apparently been listening to the guy who said not to fear.
This is Luna, pitching you her idea for her new TV show. If you are a TV producer, Luna would like to sit down and talk about you buying the rights to her show.
Please, no tyre-kickers.
📷🇮🇹🚁 Fifteen of Monopoli’s best from my Mavic in Puglia yesterday
📷🇮🇹🏖️ Torre Canne, Puglia
One day we'll have to explain to our grandkids that we all dressed daggy now because of Elon Musk.
Big news crew, new gender droppin
Doing the right thing is always the right thing
If you're interested in learning more about Tony Bennett's activism, take a look at this story from NBC, which covers his civil rights work. Bennett walked at Selma beside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., having been invited by the late, great Harry Belafonte.
⛪️ I did it, I finally did it. I crucified the sun.
... and other photos from the sunset over Monopoli, Puglia, this afternoon 📷🌇🇮🇹
This might be a silly question for an old nerd to ask, but for those that know the answer, why is the book he famously write in prison, 'The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick', not really listed as a book by him on his website etc? Also, the only eBook version I can find is on Kindle. Why?!
Derek Sivers in The past is not true:
Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present. We think of the past like it’s a physical fact - like it’s real. But the past is what we call our memory and stories about it. Imperfect memories, and stories built on one interpretation of incomplete information. That’s “the past”.
No matter how hard they try, the modern web can't escape Wordpress.
📷🇮🇹🏖️ Family day at the beach at Cala Maka. The beach is apparently/allegedly called Torre Canne Nord Prima della Casa Grigia, which translated from Italian means, North Canne Tower Before the Gray House, which is the most romantic beach name I've ever read.
Good luck ever naming a beach better than that.
