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Quite The Week

It’s been quite the week here at Jaymo Industries. The main thing is that my partner had to go into hospital for oral surgery under general anaesthetic, so the first half the week was geared toward that, the later half has been making sure she’s been ok. She’s fine btw two weeks and the stitches should fall out.

I did however manage to make it into town to catch Paul Graham Raven from VCTB blog for dinner on Friday. Despite speaking at least once a week on chat, we worked out that it was the first time we’ve seen each other IRL since he stayed out my house after an event we did a decade ago. Crazy. 0___o

Paul wrote about our evening together over at the worldbuilding.agency weeknotes which I recommend subscribing too. But I wanted to share this absolutely fire proof of life photo I took before we went our separate ways at the end of the evening!

It was really nice to see him.

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In other news, I had hoped to get a post about the creator Yaelokre out this week as they have a new song out and I want to talk about worlds as a medium though the lens of their work. I have something sitting in my drafts – I’ll probably post it during the week, or maybe it’ll be the subject of next week’s weeknotes. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I also want to write about todoist app and reaching ‘enlightenment’ status. Something that only 0.05% of users achieve.

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On The Blog:

One Thousand Days

I reached 1000 photo-a-days in a row during the week and wrote about it:

I’ve now taken a photo every single day for a thousand days. The photos themselves aren’t necessarily extraordinary—some are of simple, everyday moments, others of things I barely remember—but hitting the thousand-day mark feels significant. It’s not about the content of the pictures, but the consistency over time.

A milestone like this seems worth acknowledging.

Bringing it home

I now have two new subdomains on the blog: a link blog at links.thejaymo.net and i’ve consolidated my tumblr to tumblr.thejaymo.net.

This gathering process led me to create two new subdomains, each designed to bring ‘parts of me’ home.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Had a call with Rival – plotting….
• PROJECT ENTRY continues apace
• PROJECT DIVE was heavy on admin and light on action this week as I couldn’t find the time to do much. though I did write a big python Script (with AI’s help)
• Finished the final draft of SSRZ #011. I’ll be going for print and post out next week once the post office re-opens 🙁
• Did a lot of offline work on some long term projects that I’ve put down. I sat in a coffee shop for an afternoon whilst I was waiting for Eve to come out of surgery

Terminal Access

Ash interviewed William Dalrymple about his new book ‘Golden Road’. There’s a comment under the video that sums up how good it is: Thank you so much for this extended interview which unfortunately covered more than time allowed.

Dipping the Stacks

Electric trikes in the Philippines outpace government regulations – Rest of World

Judith Grimpula, a first-time driver with an e-trike, cannot understand the government’s opposition. A mother of four, she struggled to cobble together 37,000 pesos ($657) to buy her Super A e-trike last year, she told Rest of World. “They say we simply add to the traffic. But we don’t add to pollution, and for poor people like us, we could use the money we save from commuting to buy food instead,” the 35-year-old said, as she herded her three younger children onto her e-trike.

Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid.

The cost of solar panels is plummeting, and this will flood the power grid with cheap electricity. But that’s just Act 1. We won’t stop building solar at the limits of the grid – we’ll build a lot more.

A short guide to the Copyright Wars – TechnoLlama

The first myth is that there is a political split: maximalists are on the Right, while minimalists are on the Left

Exactly how valuable is 100 million views?

The attention economy, a term that you and I have heard again and again, solely exists as a theory that time spent looking at something is increasingly worth more as the places we spend time digitize.

Grow yr own Archivez

you could pretty much say the same thing about Spotify, right? They’re allowed to host all the music in the world and arbitrarily decide that they’re not going to pay royalties to artists that don’t get many streams, but you’d better not go to Soulseek and download those songs without paying the artists anything!

Reading

I finished Artifact Space by Miles Cameron. I know I said I was skeptical last week, but its got really good. I can see why two separate people recommended it to me. It’s that good it might deserve it’s own review post – something I’d like to do more of if I can find the time.

Aritfact Space is a sort of rags-to-some-riches-hornblower-in-space-come-opera-military-drama.

Interestingly, each chapter is sort of written episodically. The end of each chapter is a good place to stop and put the thing down – which is good because the book is enormous. This results in a heavy propulsiveness to the narrative which I appreciate. Things get set up in one chapter and then resolved in the next ‘episode’. This results in a lot of narrative arcs, sub plots and side quests all leaping over each other which is very satisfying.

Meanwhile I’m also still reading Monastic Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan and, Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen

Stars – Set Yourself On Fire (2024 Remaster)

Nothing like on of your top 10 albums of all time getting a 20th Anniversary Remaster. Set Yourself on Fire still has one of the best opening tracks of any indie album (Your Ex-Lover) and it sounds great.

It sounds like post 9/11 indie rock, it sounds like the rise of social media, pre-crash mid 00’s summers cycling in Richmond park. It sounds like horrendous breakups, mindless copy and pasting in a call centre job, it sounds like beers along the river, house parties and BBQs.

God. I can’t belive this album is 20 years old.

It sounds like this photo of me and my hipster mates looks:

It’s weird. I have listened to this album so much that I can, actually, tell it’s been remastered I can hear it. The opening of the 2004 review on pitchfork says “Stars are a pop band who sound best on a rock equalizer setting.” And that’s exactly what’s happened with this remaster. All the multilayered beauty of their orchestration is still present. It’s still not a loud album, but it now sounds like I remember it – rather than how it actually sounded.

Remember Kids:

The first thing Don J told me as we sat down for this meeting at a small café was that he had neither interest in nor the intention of teaching Westerners. Then he proceeded to ask me about my reasons for being there. “I am here because the plants have brought me here,” I answered. Then, before I knew it, I added, “I need to become a better dreamer.”

Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano