ricphillips.bsky.social

Wish You Were Here starts playing on the cafe sound system…. …and suddenly I’m walking by the river watching you laugh at the rain on your face. The hardest thing about grief is the way it ambushes you. The thousands of little landmines hidden in the everyday. #grief #loss

One the harder things about grief: If I have a sad dream about Chrissie I wake up feeling crushed and desolate. If I have a happy dream about her, it’s worse. #grief

So I just scrolled through about 500 opinions on property prices in Australia. Way over half were blaming immigrants. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It’s ideal growing conditions for the hard right.

He left out a critical point: open protocols. I know it’s dry but it’s the whole game. Twitter is closed. Mastodon and BlueSky are open (and even Meta/Threads is toying with interoperability.) Email providers can’t control email. Musk could never have subverted an open platform

Some mornings are just harder than others.

Twitter is the world’s burger joint/chip shop/kebab truck at 1am on Friday night where the drunk shit head’s who thought by some miracle they’d get laid demonstrating how loud they could belch congregate to yell racist obscenities and cat-call bar staff just trying to get home.

I just realised I am looking at years before I can enjoy opening The Guardian over my morning coffee for a catch-up-with-the-world moment. I wonder how many other Australians are going to start deliberately looking away just to protect our peace of mind

FFS I am a mid sixties male - but seeing Dick Smith go full grandpa Simpson ranting about renewables makes me soooooo wish we could be rid of all these arrogant old men who think they everything about everything

Good morning America. Welcome to the oligarchy.

This is the first day since winter ended that I have left for my morning coffee without a jacket.

This is brilliant - such a shame it will only work for a little while…. #AI “I've taken to answering the phone ‘Potato’ instead of ‘Hello’, because a human will go ‘What?’ and a robocall will fail to determine what language it should start its script in.”

I’m getting quite tired of seeing the current US political landscape characterised as ‘not normal’. Historically increases in nativism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism are strongly related to increased inequality. The situation in the US could not be more normal.

Spotted this… “You can find …. along with a special forward by author James S.A. Corey, exclusively at ...” James S. A. Corey is nom de plume used by authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck for co-written sci-fi. Co-writing product reviews under that name is a smidge sketchy.

They gave a Nobel Prize in literature to a singer, and they gave a Nobel Prize in physics to computer scientists. I predict next year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry will go to Heston Blumenthal.

Saw this in The Guardian and “Yes!” A million times “Yes!” #grief #loss

Anyone on BlueSky? How are you finding it?

Window of a vacant store near me. The internet is many things - some good. But it certainly has earned the epithet, ‘apotheosis of ignorance’.

Dear @guardiannews sub editors, when did ‘abolishment’ replace ‘abolition’?

“Labelling Trump’s lies as ‘disputed’ on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds” From @GuardianAus ….

It’s been 2 years and 3 months since Chrissie died. Yesterday I had a particularly vivid memory of her. And for the first time, my first reaction was to smile. The pain and the tears soon followed. But for the first time in over two years, the smile came first. #grief #loss