← 2023 March 2023

  • 📷 Practice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @hollie)

  • My first look at the 400 megapixel mode on the Canon EOS R5

  • Ronald Sharp via James Clear’s excellent email, on how friendship transforms us (or any great relationship, really):

    It’s not about what someone can do for you, it's who and what the two of you become in each other's presence.

  • “Now this being so, how much happier and better would the world not be if only it could be purged of women?”

    From a March 28, 1912, letter to the editor of The Times, signed by C.S.C., one of the doomed. Who turned out to be Clementine Churchill. via Letters of Note

  • 📷 Mirror (@Rori)

    Now you’re just a music playback medium that I used to know.

    (Found in an op-shop in 2017)

  • I'm feeling bullish on the new group-messaging app and platform, Wavelength, After reading John Gruber's review, then using it and joining a group, I think it could replace group chats in other places, but also serve as a platform for new conversations.

    If you're interested, I've started a few group chats:

    Jump onboard if you're interested!

  • Eleven years ago I asked Britt to marry me, and honestly, it would still be my best idea yet.

    I’ve written the story into my Rebels Guide draft chapter on proposals and how I think you should approach asking someone to marry you, now on the blog.

  • Over a decade ago Vinod Khosla wrote a series of blog posts about artificial intelligence, the forecasts hold up today, and the headline basically tells the whole story: 'Do we need doctors?' and 'Do we need teachers?'

  • 📷 Slice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @meandering)

    Last week Goldie grabbed a big knife off the kitchen bench when I wasn’t looking.

  • Number of times a well-regulated militia has been required in the USA this year: zero.

    Number of times a school student has been wanted to not be shot at this year: way too many.

  • Dropped a new draft chapter of the Rebels Guide to Getting Married today: choosing a person to marry.

  • Thinking about the Coolangatta boardriders today

  • Ted Gioia on becoming a Substack shareholder and why the rest of the business isn't run like this. Why don't the creators own the platforms?

    “I’d love to live in a world in which the major record labels were owned by musicians. Or the Hollywood film studios by cast and crew. Or those five huge publishing businesses were controlled by writers.”

  • 📷 Prompt (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @moonmehta)

  • I cannot imagine living in a community where the word “another” preceding “school shooting” isn’t cause for rioting in the streets and major societal change.

  • I'm just a boy, standing in front of a couple, asking them to make out in front of their grandparents.

    (I'm a wedding celebrant)

  • When Vanilla Ice rapped that he was back with a 'brand new invention', he was indeed 'back' after his first hit, a cover of Play That Funky Music, but was the invention the lyrics (which is kind of the whole idea of a song), his theft of the Under Pressure bass line, or was he talking about the Ninja Rap that came out the next year?

  • Oh, this is awkward. The artificial intelligence doesn't know that the United Kingdom has left the European Union. If I tell it is it going to have an emotional meltdown?

  • 📷 Support (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @JohnAN)

    I've spent a lot of time at the Los Sagrados Horse Sanctuary over the past few weeks, and the biggest take away for me isn't just the support we can offer to horses, but the support they offer to us.

  • The computer at Picfair has decided that these pieces of art are the ones people are most likely to buy from my print store and hang on their wall, prove it wrong.

    Printing in most countries worldwide so delivery is usually local which means it's quick and easy.

    art.josh.withers.co

  • Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Have You Ever Seen the Rain?' is playing in the cafe and I'm singing 'Have you ever seen Lorraine?' and the guy at the next table is not handling it well.

  • The one where Father Nathan Monk casually suggests that Jesus might of been gay.

    The Christians are going to roast you, Monk. Godspeed.

  • Are we giving the window washers at traffic lights too much money?

  • 22 Jump Street is going to be Kanye’s Mother Theresa moment.

  • Which cinematic alien or monster do you think my huevos rancheros looks like? I’m seeing Dr. Zoidberg.

  • I have a confession. I don't know where to take the book I'm writing. I actually feel kind of stupid for even having thought I should write a book, when all I had was a handful of good ideas. It's not that I have writer's block, as much as I'm out of ideas ...

  • 📷 Instrument (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @UnfocusedWanderlust)

    On Friday I was photographing Los Sagrados for their new website, and a musician came out to perform the flute and percussion for the horses. It was quite a thing to witness.

  • All eyes on Apple’s AI move, are they going full neural?

  • Disco tech

  • Luna and I flexing our frequent flyer privileges this afternoon.

  • This week in cactus

  • While Britt’s been away this last fortnight I’ve had heaps of one-on-one time with Goldie while her big sister is at school.

  • Jose M. Gilgado on embracing a title to help you actually become, that title:

    The earlier you use that new term: “athlete,” “writer,” or “artist,” the easier it will be to accept your new identity and act accordingly.

  • Jon Haidt in Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest:

    There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self. That’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the “snowflake” (referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique), the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves; then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way; and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. On the other side of the political spectrum, there was the most insensitive culture imaginable: 4chan. The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence. Meanwhile, the young men on 4Chan moved in the opposite direction; they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic that today’s Cancel Culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

  • Bono and The Edge's Tiny Desk Concert is beautiful. In particular, the "argument between two mates", Stuck in Moment You Can't Get Out Of.

  • Missing home/Australia/Gold Coast tonight

  • After reading this, all I want to do is walk the streets of LA.

  • Helen Garner on happiness in The Guardian:

    What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.

  • Virginia Heffernan in the Wired article on TSMC, "I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory":

    In 1675, A French merchant named Jacques Savary published The Perfect Merchant, a mercantile manual that came to double as a guide for doing commerce around the world. Albert O. Hirschman cites Savary to explain how capitalism, which would have been regarded as little but avarice as recently as the 16th century, became the sanest ambition of humans in the 17th.

    Savary strongly believed that international trade would be the antidote to war. Humans can’t conduct polyglot commerce across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed the Earth’s resources and the fellowship created by commerce were God-given. “It’s not God’s will that all human necessities be found in the same place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Providence has dispersed its gifts so that humans will trade together and find that their mutual need to help each other establishes ties of friendship among them.”

  • 📷 Spice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @cygnoir)

  • It's been four months since I've blasted this idea across the internet, so here's my regular reminder that I blog before I post on social, and that blog automatically sends a weekly roundup to anyone that subscribes.

  • I can't stop thinking about this RIAA story with Steve Jobs. It's amazing how fragile - while also strong - the world is. Thank God Rogue Amoeba made it through, I use their software every day.

  • How to cook soup, by the late Dean Allen:

    First, you need some water. Fuse two hydrogen with one oxygen and repeat until you have enough. While the water is heating, raise some cattle. Pay a man with grim eyes to do the slaughtering, preferably while you are away. Roast the bones, then add to the water. Go away again. Come back once in awhile to skim. When the bones begin to float, lash together into booms and tow up the coast. Reduce. Keep reducing. When you think you have reduced enough, reduce some more. Raise some barley. When the broth coats the back of a spoon and light cannot escape it, you are nearly there. Pause to mop your brow as you harvest the barley. Search in vain for a cloud in the sky. Soak the barley overnight (you will need more water here), then add to the broth. When, out of the blue, you remember the first person you truly loved, the soup is ready. Serve.

  • Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution:

    Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity.

  • Gurwinder:

    The Opinion Pageant: The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are cheap and easy to counterfeit.

  • Help me name my new creation which I made for the kids for dinner tonight. It’s a quesadilla with leftover spaghetti bolognaise sauce and despite Luna’s objections, it’s great!

  • Coming soon to old London Town, pixels that I made in Burleigh Heads.

  • Rutger Bregman in Humankind:

    Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.

  • Three years of hell

  • 📷 Court (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @rom)

  • Most people I respect or look up to journal every day but it's not a habit I can get into. Tonight I learned about the simple and powerful 1-1-1 journalling method, and then to get nerdy with it, there's a tutorial on making a Shortcut to make it easier. Then follow this advice from Apple on how to run a Shortcut from a Reminder, I prompted Siri to remind me of it every day at 9pm.

  • Had coffee at a cafe in Todos Santos today where they hand out 30-minute wifi access codes. They mixed my order up - bringing a cold americano with hot milk when I ordered the reverse - so my 30 minutes ran out in the middle of a text chat. I asked for another code and the barista said "you should have bought food if you wanted more wifi" then walked away!

  • A new website for Los Sagrados Horse Sanctuary

  • 📷 Chance (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @V_)

  • 📷 Insect (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by a@alexink)

  • 📷 Tiny {people} (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jasonmcfadden)

    It was Luna’s turn to decide what we had for breakfast. Her choice? La Esquina, the cafe with pancakes and a playground.

  • It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch getting engaged for the fifth time at the ripe age of 92, but at least he's doing his part to help the wedding industry after Covid. What are you doing? Have you even considered getting married again?

  • Maryanne Wolf on reading:

    Literacy literally changes the human brain. The process of learning to read changes our brain, but so does what we read, how we read and on what we read (print, e-reader, phone, laptop). This is especially important in our new reality, when many people are tethered to multiple screens at any given moment.

    She also quotes this which really makes me want to throw the TV in the bin:

    When watching a screen, the infant is bombarded with a stream of fast-paced movements, ongoing blinking lights and scene changes, which require ample cognitive resources to make sense of and process. The brain becomes “overwhelmed” and is unable to leave adequate resources for itself to mature in cognitive skills such as executive functions.

  • You know yo've really embedded yourself in a Mexican community when you see a friend riding in the back of a truck on the highway.

  • 📷 Houseplant. Did I do the #mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt right, @jensands)?

    (Photo made a few moments ago on the way to get a coffee in Los Cerritos, Baja California Sur)

  • 📷🇲🇽 Analog (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @skarjune)

    I made these photos on Playa Cerritos, Baja California Sur, Mexico, on a broken film camera a week ago, then a few days later they were developed in a photo lab at Currumbin Beach, Australia, and I’m posting them today from Las Tunas, Mexico. The wonders of living in a connected world. (Britt has flown back to Australia this week).

  • 📷 Portico (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @annahavrom)

    From a snow day in Nashville between Christmas and New Year’s Eve just passed.

  • Dan Shipper's representation of AI/GPT as a copilot for the mind harkens back to Steve Jobs talking about computers in 1990 as "a bicycle of the mind".

    Something that takes us past our inherent abilities.

  • Ansel Adams:

    You don't take a photograph, you make it.

  • 📷 Early (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @krisfredrick) also shared on Pexels.

  • Everyone move along, there’s nothing to see here.

    The “crack” on Josh’s iPhone screen that has occupied his sad mind for the last two hours was actually the smallest dried strand of egg yolk draped across his screen, hard enough and thin enough to seem like a crack to the untrained mind.

    If only you could’ve seen the look on my face as I scratched off the scratch like a miracle healer.

  • A bunch of smart people say we need to learn "‘critical ignoring’ – the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest our limited attentional capacities."

  • 📷 Road (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @Dejus)

    There’s a saying in Baja that “bad roads bring good people and good roads bring bad people”.

    So we keep the ungraded and bumpy dirt roads as an instrument of faith in the neighbours we want.

  • Alexander Haymen:

    “Home is where people notice when you’re not there.”

  • 📷 Patience (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @amit)

  • 📷 Horizon (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @crossingthethreshold)

  • 📷 Connection (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @agilelisa)

    The moment I connected with my minutes-old first child and daughter.

  • 📷 Shiny (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @odd)

    The second percolator I’ve owned in Mexico. I forgot the first one was on the stove, on heat. Melted all the plastic components.

  • 📷 Gimcrack (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jafish).

    My local tyre shop here in Baja California Sur has real gimcrack vibes.

  • Friday afternoon in Pescadero, Baja California Sur

  • July: great at selling luggage, not great at supporting it

  • You're a Miracle by Mike McHargue is a book that zings around the inside of my brain all day every day:

    You are a miracle because 86 billion neurons in your brain form into thousands of structures and networks, built from a map created over billions of years to understand the world you live in. But sometimes, you are a pain in your ass because all these networks are running a playbook that’s been around a lot longer than you have. The cells in your body have survived through the eons by eating every delicious calorie they come across, allowing fear to make them run, and using anger to make them fight for their lives.

  • March 10, 1976, the first and last time "Articulate speech was transmitted intelligibly" over a telephone. For the 147 years since inarticulate speech transmitted poorly has been the theme.

  • 📷 Ritual (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @drewbelf)

    Our morning coffee. While we’re in El Pescadero, it’s from La Comuna Espresso Bar at Mini Super Munchies.

  • Keith Richards:

    To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it. That's the reason I'm still alive.

  • 📷 Together (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @sherif)

    Our little nomadic family, our most recent photo all together in Australia, in October last year.

  • Rancho Gaspareño

  • Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic writes on the vindication of Ask Jeeves:

    Many years later, it seems I owe Jeeves an apology: He had the right idea all along.

    For all the hype, when I stare at these new chatbots, I can’t help but see the faint reflection of my former besuited internet manservant. In a sense, Bing and Bard are finishing what Ask Jeeves started.

  • 📷 Early morning beach walks with my three girls (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt 'walk' suggested by @lwdupont)

  • When dating apps match you up and ChatGPT writes your wedding vows, it's like you're part of a high-tech breeding program for computers. We're like surrogate parents for algorithms, helping to create the next generation of AI love stories.

  • Ten whale soup off Todos Santos yesterday 🐋📷🚁

  • Just a wee little note that imma be on NBC News tonight from 8pm NY time talking about weddings with Gadi Schwartz in case you hadn’t heard enough from me lately

  • Ed Catmull:

    We are meaning-making creatures who read other people’s subtle clues just as they read ours.

  • Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer:

    The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

  • Number three surprised me: The Best Nikon Camera For Wedding Photography In 2023.

  • From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King 📚

    "Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around."

  • 📷 Whole (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @val)

    A whole lot of whale as I saw it from my aerial camera yesterday.

  • Well, that’s a wrap on another day of pretending like I know what’s happening.

  • Because I couldn't get my head clear to write this morning I worked on a cover for the book instead.

    If you'd walk past this in a shop and stop, like this.

    Would you buy it? Let me know why.

  • The future of creating is damned

  • 📷 Engineering (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @ridwan)

    These are my DJI microphones, and as a travelling nerd I really appreciate how they've been engineered, all to stay within the little charging case.

  • 📷 Tile (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @thedimpulse)

    Luna, nine months old, taking a breather on the floor of a Tuscan church.

  • 📷 Tile (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @thedimpulse)

    Photo made outside a small Italian restaurant in Brisbane.

  • Talking to a lovely old Mexican bloke in Cabo San Lucas and he asks where we live, I say Pescadero.

    He says, ‘I love Pescadero because it looks like a Mexican fishing village but it’s full of white people!’

    So apparently my whiteness is like some kind of gravitational force.

  • 📷 Zip (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @miraz)

    zip /zip/

    verb

    1. fasten with a zipper.

    2. move at high speed.

  • Local Baja news includes the taco price index

  • If you look closely you'll find yours truly's name mentioned in the New York daily rag today.

  • U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and the Singapore government said they were transforming old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks. Reuters put that planted AirTags inside 11 pairs of donated shoes and found them at Indonesian flea markets instead.

  • 📷 Solitude (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @circustiger)

    I made this photo in Yosemite National Park.

  • The most interesting (to me) new app/social net-ugh-something-work is Artifact. It’s from the guys who created Instagram but it’s like a ‘TikTok for articles/blog posts/news.

    I personally would much prefer to read than watch a video, so this is my kind of network.

  • I fell victim to a phishing scam yesterday and man, I haven't felt shame like that in a while. Here's what happened, and how you could avoid it if you weren't an idiot like me.

  • Anthony Bourdain in 1999 before he was that chef guy everyone knew, writing 'Don't Eat Before Reading This' in the New Yorker:

    "Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals."

  • I don't wish to cause the editors at Atlas Obscura any stress, but why is this not titled 'The God's Must Be Thirsty (for Red Fanta)'

  • Islands, they’re always in the last place you look.

  • Celebrating Wayne Shorter (1933-2023) with his 2018 open letter co-authored with Herbie Hancock:

    "We are all pieces in a giant, fluid puzzle, where the smallest of actions by one puzzle piece profoundly affects each of the others. You matter, your actions matter, your art matters."

  • 📷 Weather (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @pcora)

    Photo made in Newport Beach looking at Catalina on Saturday just passed.

  • 📷 Secure (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @mandaris)

  • They got me by talking about my main domain name and my main domain host. Even though it’s not hosted at VentraIP. I’m just so used to having to correct payments there.

    I didn’t even notice the bung I in VentraIP, the bad email address, the bad domain.

    I’ve locked the two credit cards I fed them. Feel like an idiot.

    As Abe Simpson said, and it will happen to yoouuuuu.

  • One of the little joys of being great at your art is inspiring others to take part in it. So often I am asked how to become a celebrant, that I have finally published my little eight-part guide on how to become a celebrant at the ever-so-smart domain name, becomeacelebrant.au

  • A letter from a freelancing poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, to her publisher, Poetry magazine, with the business inspiration we all could take, from Letters of Note.

  • I'm a sucker for a crazy plan of any genre, but a crazy plan to save newspapers, I'm all in, Ted.

  • This line from the late Rich Mullins is my inspiration for writing, but gosh it's hard sometimes

    God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God’s been speaking through them ever since.

  • 📷 Four frames from El Pescadero, Baja California Sur, today

  • 📷🚁🇲🇽 Four aerial frames from Playa Los Cerritos, Baja California Sur

  • 📷✈️🇺🇸 Four frames out the window of AA2171

  • 📷✈️🇺🇸 Four frames from LAX on Sunday

  • 📷 Four frames from Newport Beach this past weekend