I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world, this makes it difficult to plan the day.

— E. B. White

How it started, and how it finished

Disappointed this hasn’t come to pass yet

This article on "Afrofuturism" is so interesting, so I'll lead with the end:

The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror – The wide brown land for me!

– Dorothea Mackellar

Photos from somewhere between Exmouth and Learmonth on the Exmouth Gulf.

Drove the 90 minutes from Exmouth to photograph the sunset in Coral Bay this afternoon and also see the couple I'm marrying this weekend, and after the sun had set I found that all the local restaurants all had 90 minute waits, so I thought, I could just drive back to Exmouth for dinner.

Alas, everything in Exmouth was closed, not even a vending machine for a chocolate.

So I present to you my art from today, art quite literally made by a starving artist.

Also, regional Australia, let's have at least one kitchen open past 8pm hey?

Luckily today is the first day back from holidays for The Short Order, so I was blessed to receive a 5:30am breaky burger for dinner.

When I'm president I'm going to classify printers as terrorists

Digital incompetency truly will be the swan song of the people of the 2020s.

"The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts are grown."

– James Clear

I wrote this eight years ago on Facebook. I think it’s more valid today plus I want to preserve it on my blog:

With all of our books, albums, magazines, and letters going digital and stored outside of the physical and easily visible realm, how will our kids discover that album that dad loved, or that magazine that mum kept?

I remember that "already in our house from mum and dad" discovery being a big thing for me.

I love Led Zeppelin and Sheryl Crow because I found the album at home. I loved Nick Earl's ZigZag Street because it was sitting on a shelf in a room I was renting on the Gold Coast when I first worked for Sea FM. I discovered albums I still love because they were sitting on the music director's desk and they weren't on demo enough to give away on air. I love Smith Journal, Monocle, and Relevant Magazine because I found them on shelves, tables, coffee shops, before I ever bought them.

How will our kids discover things?

Will they rely purely on people recommending things?

Recommending culture is hard. I barely ever show other people music I like because a) I don't want them not liking it to affect my liking it, and b) it's kind of rude to assume that anyone would like anything.

Passive discovery has been such a strong driving force for hundreds of years, surely that hasn't been replaced with trending topics, Facebook shares, and retweets?

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

– Alain de Botton

It's amazing how close Google is to upsetting the iMessage monopoly and I'm betting they'll let go of the opportunity.

I've just started using Google Chat for a new project and it's actually not terrible. For someone in the Apple ecosystem, it's not far from being as good as iMessage.

They need a native Mac app that works like a Mac app, and their iPhone app needs to work in with the share sheet API, but it's close.

They're so busy fighting for iMessage to accept RCS/Google that they'll no doubt miss this opportunity to just put iMessage out of business.

The hardest thing about being a wedding celebrant is figuring out the right balance of smiley faces, exclamation marks, or periods, to end sentences in emails with.

You don't want to sound too cold, but you don't want to sound too excited. It's an art.

You know, it’s super fun and easy to take a pot shot at the Humane AI Pin, but put your hesitations aside and 1) watch the video and tell me it’s not actually kinda cool, and 2) it’s refreshing to see someone have a crazy idea and actually get it to a stage of putting a price on it.

So many big ideas never make it past a concept video. Ideas are easy. Shipping is real hard. If it was available in Aus today I’d probably give it a red hot shot because it’s just fun.

Watch out guys, the police have installed new air drumming detection cameras and if you actually can't play drums or if you're out of time with the music it's a $2000 fine.

Answering the most common question I get asked, "Do you travel for weddings?"

This is so fascinating, CT scans of real AirPods versus the fake ripoff AirPods

Sorry I missed your text, I'm currently being force-fed all of the information about the entirety of the existence of the human race, past, present, and future, through a handheld slab of glass and aluminium, and my brain stopped coping in 1995.

Old people/nerds like me: Do you have memories, or photos, of the computer software and shareware kiosks from the mid-90s in Australia.

I remember going to Video Ezy in Mackay (in the Canelands carpark to be precise) and you could BYO floppy disk or buy one from the staff, and there was a computer kiosk where you could choose which shareware programs you'd download to your 1.44MB floppy disk.

the more you K-sound now

We celebrated my moon girl's fifth birthday today and without doubt I have so much love for everyone that loves and celebrates her, but I wanted to share something I taught Luna today that is applicable to weddings as well.

Life's not a dog and pony show, we're real people with real feelings and lives and we don't need to watch another TED Talk to know that

This musical tribute to the #SydneyOperaHouse by Tim Minchin and crew is the best thing on the internet today

In my dream last night I had to explain the “bah-lark-eh” substitute teacher joke from Key and Peele to a wedding guest named Blake. So I guess weddings are back.

I love how at no point is the world left wondering what Ziggy Stardust did and if he was good at it

GM - how people apparently say good morning on social media where - globally speaking - there is no real morning or night or day.

GM - me, thinking you're talking about that car company again.

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.