"When rain falls, it flows downhill. If desired, you can collect the rain in a bucket and carry it uphill, but the natural tendency of water is to flow toward the lowest point.

Most situations in life have a tendency—a direction in which things want to flow. You can choose to go against the flow (just as you can choose to carry water uphill), but your results tend to be better when you find a way to work with the gradient of the situation.

Position yourself to benefit from the external forces at hand and you will get more from the same unit of effort. Energy is conserved and results are multiplied."

— James Clear

Name a banger more bangish than Orgy’s Blue Monday. I’ll wait.

What which craft is this? Surfing without waves!? #witchcraft #byronbay #wategosbeach #surfing

If you’re interested in joining my new rectangle scheme we just give each other the same amount of money for doing nothing. Plus we get name badges.

You know how we’d all hate a guy who annually celebrated the anniversary of that time he raped someone. Now think about January 26.

Why Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car, Timothy B Lee:

"It’s one of the most important economic mysteries of the modern world. While the material things in life are cheaper than ever, labor-intensive services are getting more and more expensive. Middle-class Americans today have little trouble affording a car, but they struggle to afford a spot in day care."

A story of hope, that the old internet might be coming back, the old internet was when the internet was a wonderland. Not a computer generated echo chamber.

Brian Koppelman:

"To an artist, rejection, at first, feels like death. That’s how personal the work is. And that’s why we’re afraid to do the work. Because then we have to show it. And then they might reject it. But rejection is only a death if you let it stop you from doing the work the next day."

The story of how five seconds of one movie changed the entire California wine industry forever. The Sideways effect:

It really bothers me that Logan City Council uses Lobster font for its entry to the region motorway signage.

What lays beneath … // Cook Island, off Fingal Head

Fingal Head this afternoon.

Was nice to visit and not have to convince a police to let me go home afterward.

A million dollar sunset over #Tugun tonight

What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was At The Center Of Life? asks The Atlantic.

A relationship is about inventing your own language, says Céline Sciamma:

“You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”

Is a LIDAR capture of a person a photograph? Wired asks what is a photograph.

This is nuts:

"CoreLogic’s Quarterly Auction Market Review shows 42,918 properties were taken to auction across the combined capital cities in the three months to Dec 2021, an 85.1% increase from the previous quarter and more than double (109.5%) the Dec 2020 figures."

I just want to get out ahead of any rumours being spread by our almost 11 month old and go on the record saying that we do feed her enough food, and some would say too much food. She’s well fed, don’t believe what she tells you.

I have issue with Apple’s Texas Hold’em game. Do they not have a graphic designer on staff? Could they not just get a photo of a bunch of Macs on a shelf in a garage from @ismh?

Sea breeze

Make taxi ranks car parks again. Return the taxi tanks to the people.

If only he’d been like a bat out of Wuhan, still here when the morning comes, when Christmas comes, when the wedding comes, the funeral comes, still here, a few years on.

“Like a bat out of hell I'll be gone when the morning comes”

If you’ve ever worried about robots rising up and taking over, have no fear, they’re a long way off.

I’ve used brooms smarter than our Roomba i7.

Toowoomba’s, Gabbinbar Homestead, on a Thursday afternoon

A Jewish scholar I once heard speak talked about how his people viewed life and death not as one season followed by another, life and then death, but that throughout your day they were states you would enter. That your decisions and thoughts and actions would take into life or death.

That for a people so obsessed with life after death and whether we could get into heaven - or if there was one at all - we could be focused on bringing heaven to earth today through our words, thoughts, and actions.

The one truth everyone that has ever existed can testify to is that you cannot stop people dying, but you can stop them living.

Who do I have to talk to about making the next Mission: Impossible movie about stolen NFTs.

Mission: Impossible - Right Click.

She turns around to tell me to make sure I take a photo of her on the scooter, “take photo of me!” My firstborn, @lunawithers.

January 2022 in the Associated Press:

"A bill ... that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort”"

Jason Chatfield’s cartoon from his email today

That face when dad makes you leave the beach

South of Talle’ on a Tuesday afternoon

I’m not antistacks, I’m just saying, when you’re on the bottom of a stacks-on it sucks. It’s all well and good if you’re on the top of the stack, but the rest of us have a large weight on our shoulders, torso, legs, etc.

I've upgraded my MacBook this week to a new MacBook Pro, and a friend asked me how it was.

I said it's unnoticeable, like a good marriage celebrant, or a good real estate agent should be. That good that you don't notice.

When your computer is slow you notice, and you moan about it. When your celebrant isn't confident and delivering a great ceremony, you notice it and joke about it at the reception, and when your real estate agent is a dodgy one, you really notice, and tell all your mates.

My hope is that I'm that good that you don't notice. That I'd be like my new MacBook, so fast, efficient, and plain old good, that you don't notice how good until you think about all the other computers you've used and you realise you've got a real powerhouse of a computer in front of you.

@jkleske:

"A signal is not a trend. A trend is not a future. A future is not THE future."

The Algorithmic Trap by David Perrell:

"If you want to find emerging and under-rated ideas, stop using algorithms ... and improve the quality of what you consume."

Luna got a camera for Christmas from Uncle Harley & Ainsley, so tonight she wanted to go and make photos of planes taking off.

You couldn’t understand how proud I am of her. Her little brain astounds me and impresses me every day!

In 2022 I want to be a lot more deliberate about my inputs. Garbage in, garbage out. I'm continuing to craft my newsletters and subscriptions, detailed on my inputs page. Plus I'm now documenting books I want to read, books I am reading, and books I have read.

Small atomic changes should put make sure I'm walking down the right track.

I’m not anti-tax, I’m just saying that we don’t know the long term effects of giving these politicians half our cash. How do we know they’re not going to make stupid decisions with it?

Breaking news: Novak Djokovic wins the Australia Closed grand door slammed tournament.

When Britt and I were dating we lived in different cities the whole time as I travelled for radio work (Port Macquarie, Mackay, Cairns, Sydney, Brisbane) so we spent heaps of time at night on the phone.

We’d go outside and ask each other if we could see the moon.

Ten years on we have a daughter named Luna.

And we named her sister Goldie so we could have our sun and our moon.

Finished reading: Volcanic Winter by Mark Rutherford 📚

Currently reading: Fortune-teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels In The Far East by Tiziano Terzani 📚

"Your goals are meant to honour you, not fix you"

"As soon as you decide to do without planes, you realise how they impose their limited way of looking at things on you. Oh, they diminish distances, which is handy enough, but they end up diminishing everything including your understanding of the world. You leave Rome at sunset, have dinner, sleep a while, and at dawn you are in India. But in reality each country has its own special character. We need time if we are to prepare ourselves for the encounter; we must make an effort if we are to enjoy the conquest. Everything has become so easy that we no longer take pleasure in anything. To understand is a joy but only if it comes with effort, and nowhere is this more than in the experience of other countries. Reading a guidebook while hopping from one airport to another is not the same as the slow, laborious absorption- as if by osmosis- of the humours of the earth to which ones remains bound when travelling by train.

Reached by plane, all places become alike- destinations separated from one another by nothing more than a few hours flight. Frontiers, created by nature and history and roots in the consciousness of the people who live within them, lose their meaning & cease to exist for those who travel to and from the air-conditioned bubbles of airports, where the border is a policeman in front of a computer screen where the first encounter with the new place is baggage carousel, where the emotion of leave taking is dissipated in the rush to get to the duty free shop- now the same everywhere"

— A Fortune Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani

Proposal: Let’s drop the metaverse, and go all in on the meatverse. Less virtual reality meetings, more steak.

Dear Me,

If, in future years, anyone asks you to give advice to your sixteen year old self… don’t.

Make your own unique messes, and then work your own way out of them.

See you,

Alan Rickman