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.
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Keith Richards, April 1962:
Mick (Jagger) is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe.
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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.
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📷🇮🇹🏊🏼 Luna looking like she's not having fun in the water when she's truly having a ball.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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This has rocked my day. Re is its own word. It’s not short for regarding.
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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.
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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!
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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
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📷🇮🇹 Our last Monday in Puglia
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📚 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?
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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.
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This is terrible branding, design, and UX. How am I going to remember where to go to be an insufferable prick now?
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Michael Bierut:
No one will remember that it was on time, everyone will remember that it was bad.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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📷🇮🇹🚁 Fifteen of Monopoli’s best from my Mavic in Puglia yesterday
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📷🇮🇹🏖️ Torre Canne, Puglia
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One day we'll have to explain to our grandkids that we all dressed daggy now because of Elon Musk.
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Big news crew, new gender droppin
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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.
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⛪️ I did it, I finally did it. I crucified the sun.
... and other photos from the sunset over Monopoli, Puglia, this afternoon 📷🌇🇮🇹
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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?!
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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”.
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No matter how hard they try, the modern web can't escape Wordpress.
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📷🇮🇹🏖️ 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.
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I shared these words from Craig Mod a year ago today. But since then we made the choice to uproot our life in Australia, move to Mexico, then leave Mexico, travel around the USA and Europe for a while, and come home to Australia in a month's time.
I can guarantee I'm coming home changed, but like Craig, I'm also more confused than ever about why some people travel. I mean no judgement towards any of you, but I've been in Italy for a month now and it seems such a waste to leave in a few weeks. Even considering my feeling that I've barely seen or experienced anything, I still have a deeply resonating feeling that I'm selfishly taking in the culture here, and to do what with it? Just to give the girls a childhood photo album that was cooler than mine?
The romantic ideal of travel is to leave as one version of yourself and return another, changed, ‘better’ version of yourself. This trip changed me, but not in the ways you might classically expect. I’ve returned suspicious of travel, more confused than ever about why so many people travel. Unsure if most travel of the last few decades makes sense, or has ever made sense or justified the cost. It feels like some consumerist, uncurious notion of travel was seeded long ago and, like a zombie fungus, has mind-controlled everyone to four specific canals in Venice. To a single painting at the Louvre. To three streets and a square in Manhattan. To a few rickety back alleys around Gion. An eminently photogenic set of torii in Kyoto.
Regardless of my, and Craig's, trepidations of travel being an unjustified expense or impact, I'm forever changed by 2020-2022's travel-related traumas and 2023's travel adventure.
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I think this would be an awesome idea: a mashup of a reddit-like voting system with events calendar and geotagging plus some Atlas Obscura.
Basically a “cool things near me and/or happening near me soon” web app.
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Will the 2026 Commonwealth Games, originally supposed to be in Victoria, Australia, be the first ones to test the "Vancouver should be the permanent Olympic Games city" that Jonathan Fischer reignited seven years ago in Slate, of course but for the Olympic's little sibling, the Comm' Games:
That’s why the Olympics should relocate to a city that won’t just relieve the rest of the world of hosting duties for the Summer Games but of the Winter Games, too. It would have to be a place with the right climate. It would have to be a place that could afford it. It should possess something of an international flavour. It should have a proven track record. It should be located in a democratic country but not a hegemonic one. It should be Vancouver.
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📷🇮🇹 40 degrees celsius today in Martina Franca, but the second you step into the shade the temperature drops about fifteen of those bad boy degrees.
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Thought I would check on the two-year-old before going to bed ...
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A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace:
Closed Fiefdoms of the platform world, you weary giants of stocks and small talk, I come from the Pluriverse, the new home of the Heart. On behalf of the future, I invite you to join us.
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Apparently, it's wise to let people know you have things available if you indeed do have things available ... which I have neglected to do about my piece "South o' Talle" being licensed to Priints in London. It looks great on walls if you have any, any walls that is.
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I really like the tiny awards
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Much gratitude to @Mtt for designing a really nice and extremely useful Micro.Blog theme in Tiny Theme. I woke up this morning with a blog refresh on my mind, and the theme is great + he's been so helpful! In addition, thanks to @vincent for Tinylytics bringing the stats and click-kudos to my blog.
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I feel like not a day goes by that I don’t witness an even more Italian thing than I had witnessed previously. Today’s most Italian thing I’ve ever witnessed is an Italian driver beeping at a parked Italian ambulance to get out of the way as the medics attend to someone.
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It’s always easy to differentiate Italians and tourists on the streets of Puglia. Italians are in the street yelling at each other, tourists are in the streets scrolling.
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📷🇮🇹 Alberobello, Puglia
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Looks like Canon is doing five blades
