Tom

Living with one's parents as an adult is the therapy equivalent of dental surgery without anaesthetic ... there's blood everywhere, it's coming out of you, and you can see and feel it happening

Tim Minchin (Christchurch Grammar, nett worth twenty million): my class position is "Hobnobber Laureate"

"Stage-three tax cuts not expected to put pressure on inflation, Chalmers says"

Jim Chalmers: yeah, we all know r is greater than g, but what if it was a *lot* greater than g?

The second was that Maurice had ordered an expensive taxi for one of the Christian Brothers on a school telephone, using the teacher's name, and the driver had waited outside the school for a long period, and subsequently charged a large fee for the service.

The first was that he'd apparently objected to one of the Christian Brothers, or at least found reasons to lock this teacher in a closet, so as to be able to wag school.

Some nice anecdotes from my mother about my grandfather Maurice. As a young man in about 1930, during his equivalent of year eleven, it turns out he was expelled from Parade College for two reasons, possibly among others.

Marc Andreessen, briefly:

I love the nine tenths of the law that defends my property rights without regard for injustice, but I really hate that other tenth.

"We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” 

The "analytic" philosophy behind these screeds always, inevitably, weighs the benefits or dangers of a "black swan" against the empirical here and now.

I realised in my early forties that I'd sort of slipped over and achieved many of the modest dreams of my thirties as if by accident (running my own business, not absolutely sucking at everything, knowing about fancy things)

Welcome to the tyranny of cone-headed tech investors whose last skerrick of neuroplasticity was used up decoding Neal Stephenson novels

"we are literally making sand think"

Okay, this thing is absolutely moronic. Not even worth quote-by-quoting it really ... "an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people"

"descendents"—let's introduce the Techno-Optimists to the spell-checking tools of the 1980s, shall we? 📈

I can hardly imagine a type of animal less interested in "technology" than the humble shark 🦈

"Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die."

😂

Calling the helpdesk of my client, a large government agency, because I can obtain a full twenty-five minute pomodoro of productive time listening to their high neural effect hold music while I wait to get to the front of the queue.

Screencap of Guardian headline reads: > Pilot who tried to shut off engines says he was hallucinating on mushrooms

If you're having a shocker at work, it may help to remember there's always someone out there having a worse one …

What is everyone's favourite style guide for writing?

If comparing outcomes to ambitions, 'alumni' must be among the worst-deployed words in the English language.

I think I see 'an alumni' more often than not. And I just saw someone say 'no it's okay, you are an alumnae' …

oppressor

"[I can't believe] you give [those] people your time", it sounds like. Or perhaps it really is a compliment as … entropic … as "your thermal mass really moderates changes of temperature in the room"

Meme image from a low perspective of a white man wearing jeans and a coat, the sole of whose descending boot fills half of the image, and carries the superimposed text "It's complicated, …" in a yellow, cursive typeface.

It would be amazing if a human being could invent an Internet technology capable of handling a few thousand people simultaneously attempting to buy tickets to an event.

Yes, I'm looking at you Perth Festival.

It’s nearly Halloween so here’s a story from a few years back. It’s about a vampire whose friend has died and his inability to process that grief. I’m not really a horror writer so this is about as horror as I get.

ME: [looking around warily and concluding I should try not to disturb others in this shared space]

WOMAN OPPOSITE SPEAKING SPANISH: [launches over the phone into a furious, melodramatic verbal assault on her romantic interest, like a hail of profane bullets]

This feels like a little lesson in what it's like when someone stuffs you around in business. I've been guilty of disappointing clients on the delivery front more often than once in that six years—at least by their lights. Probably should avoid that.

I'm experiencing, after six years as an independent, my first real fuckery around a client who's dodging paying an invoice.

It's going to come good after I got crisper with my boundaries, but the cocktail of blagging, blarney and veiled disrespect, the gap in my bank account ... it's annoying.

Mason jars with handles were never cool. They're either handled glasses with an un-ergonomic screw lip or modest-sized storage jars with nearly purposeless handles. What they always are is an attempt to compensate for dysfunction following form. Actually, perhaps this means they've always been cool.