Back in London after a few days on the chalk.
The weather is fine and the decks are now clear to reach #100mph for the rest of the year.
30 Pages A Day
I was talking to an old friend at a birthday party the other week. We are both veracious readers (we became friends working at a bookshop) and we were talking about what we’ve been reading recently etc.
The conversation then turned to ‘media diet’, watching tv, films, playing video games, listening to music, podcasts, radio etc. The priorities and trade offs one has to make to fit it all in. I mean I don’t watch any TV or any Film so that means I automatically have less tradeoffs to make, but we both agreed that media is sort of seasonal.
It might not line up with any particular ‘season’ of the year but I do have periods of my life where: this was when I played this set of video games, or read a whole bunch of books about computing, or that time I got really into Disco music. And I will always I look back at 2019/2020 as the years that I binged 100+ Warhammer books. Or when I had Covid the first time and played most of the Borderlands collection for 150+ hours on my switch inside of 2 weeks.
But the constant is always reading. My friend said that since the shift to working at home, the lack of train journey has really curtailed his reading time. But was still getting though about 50 books a year. At which another friend spat their beer out a little.
When I was in early 20’s there was a year where I only read about 10 books or something which is nothing. But that year my priority was inhaling a narrative franchise thats so important and popular in Japan that its banned from being released on a weekday. I binged all the Dragon Quest games in order. 1 though 9 on my gameboy. I suspect it was well over 1000 hours of play time. It’s a questions of priorities.
My beer spitting then friend felt bad for not reading enough. But he’s spent his adult life unwinding afterwork watching films, Netflix and murdering people on Call Of Duty. He knows loads about film, like walking IMDB level knowledge. But even still, he asked us both how on earth we get though so many books.
The answer from both of us was simple: 30 pages a day = 50 books a year.
30 pages is about half an hour of reading. You can find the time if you want? A TV show is about 40mins? (I have no idea). So reading 50 books a year is one less TV show a day or 1/3 less movies over the whole year. The thing I hate about social media apps and the attention sucking design UI they have – particularly short form video – is that they suck my attention away on things that aren’t a priority – I resent it. But if you actively choose to spend time watching TikTok, or choose to watch films, or don’t read because you are doing something else that you have actively chosen to do. Then I don’t don’t feel bad about not reading. It’s a question of priorities.
I like reading, so I read. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Six Feet of England
I don’t think there is a single place in England that I know better than those 6 feet of sand in font of a shed in Broadstairs.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/08/10/2418-six-feet-of-england/
- Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
- Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
- Subscriber Zine! https://thejaymo.net/zine
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo
Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️
Forest Bed
My band is playing the Lodgchella All Dayer @ Woody’s Bar in Kingston on the 31st August. We’ll be bringing our brand of psyched-up electric folk and alt-country rock to the festival at 5.15pm. If you are around South London and up for some late August summer music come down! Just 30mins from Waterloo!
We’ll be playing quite a bit off the new album we’re about to record including our song Tangled String:
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Call with Sekret Project accomplice
- Call with games designer Rob Morgan – to catch up about his book which I read last year in draft, and we spoke about the Sekret Project
- Had a meeting about emergence of community norms and UX of interpersonal spaces
- Sat on the beach
Everything is ready now to blast into the #100mphclub next week. Yikes.
Terminal Access
Adam over at Heed Not The Rolling Wave recently wrote about an ‘Operating System For Life’ which I found real interesting. I had never heard of M.E.D.S. (Meditation, Exercise, Diet and Sleep) but I really like it! In part it inspired todays post above on 30 pages.
I was talking to a visiting friend a few months ago about their ‘systems for life’, and when they said they didn’t have a to-do system I stopped making dinner to talk at them at length about it (until CM asked me pointedly whether I was going to put the broccoli on). After continuing the conversation I realised that the topic might be more easily articulated in a blog post, which I had as a half-finished draft for ages.
Warren Ellis has a podcast/audio drama dropping soon!
The creators behind Netflix’s hit video game adaptation Castlevania are taking their talents to the audio drama format with a new podcast titled The Department of Midnight.
On The Blog
Dipping the Stacks
In the video game of life, nobody is allowed to be evil and nobody is allowed to die. There is no explicit and coherent Law, just a zillion contradictory laws so insultingly nonsensical that they seem to say: “The real Law is whatever you can get away with.”
Even Goldman Sachs, when describing the efficiency benefits of AI, added that while it was able to create an AI that updated historical data in its company models more quickly than doing so manually, it cost six times as much to do so.
My personal home on the internet | dominikhofer dot me
As someone born in the early 2000s, I only got a tiny glimpse into the internet-world before the rise of Social Media. With becoming more mature and seeing the downsides of these platforms, I became more and more jealous of the people who got to live through the early internet times. But now, with the IndieWeb, I partly feel like I’m travelling back in time and experiencing a calmer, more honest and authentic part of the web with less drama. It surely feels great!
We now live in a world of planned disasters.
The fragility of the power grid is a planned disaster — a product of the willful refusal to pursue distributed clean energy and new technologies, to spend the money to upgrade the grid itself and create better interconnection, and to include readiness for more frequent extreme weather events in operational priorities.
The Epic England Never Had: A Review of eÞanðun – Front Porch Republic
Carpenter knows how to sound like an Anglo-Saxon chronicler. I suspect that many literary scholars specialising in more contemporary fields may be unable to identify eÞanðun as the modern specimen from a lineup of translated Old English texts.
Reading
I finished Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Holis. Wow. What a book. I don’t think i’ve read a book that has had as deep an influence on me. At any other time in my life this book would have bounced right off me. But right now, at this moment, it was the perfect book to show up in my life. Christ it’s so good.
I started listening to Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story by Caroline Lucas. I haven’t got too far into it, but Lucas is arguing about the urgent need to constitute an English identity. Couldn’t agree more.
Still reading Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner
Still reading Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio
Music
SOFT PLAY – Heavy Jelly
I just got round to listening to Slaves SOFT PLAY’s new album Heavy Jelly that came out last month.
All the singles off the album over the last couple of months have been Bangers. Act Violently – about people riding scooters on pavements and people looking at their phones when walking around town. Mirror Muscles – Gym bro culture with its associated biopolitics. And of course Punk’s Dead – A song entirely made up of instagram comments after they announced their band name change. The fact that they got Robbie Williams(!) to sing the middle 8 on it is still as surprising to me now as it was when the single came out.
I’m a big fan of the song Bin Juice Disaster – it’s just a really well observed slice of life.
But I think the best track on the album is the album opener All Things. The riff is just so so good.
I think the name change has injected a new sense of urgency and life into the duo’s creative life. Fucking Punk AF.
Remember Kids:
The Cartoonist’s job is to reduce complexity, turn ideas into images, distill contradiction, mine the familiar, define tribal boundaries, and magnify emotions
Emissary’s Guide to Worlding by Ian Cheng
Newsletter 📨
Subscribe to the mailing list and get my weeknotes and latest podcast episodes, sent directly to your inbox
Leave a Reply