Make a heavy thing,
Put it on the wall.
Make a heavy thing,
Lay it in the ground.
Make the heavy thing.
Tie it to your name.
Let it keep you steady.
Heavy Things
Anu’s essay Make Something Heavy. over on the Working Theorys newsletter has been making waves in my media sphere this week. I saw Douglad share it, Warren picked it up, James over at Orbfic wrote about it too.
The ripples it has caused are for good reason. Anu absolutely nails the central tension so many of us feel creating work online today: the relentless pull towards the “light,” versus the deep, nagging desire to build something with real “weight.”
She calls the internet the “modern makers’ machine,” one that “does not want you to create heavy things.“
It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production.
It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. (Make slop if you have too.) Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax. And so, we oblige—everyone does. We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.
It’s hard to argue with that. We’ve all experienced the algorithmic pull to feed the machine.
I think like for many people, reading Anu’s piece has also sparked some reflections on my own use and experience of the Internet.
I sort of take issue at the idea that “Many light things don’t add up to one heavy thing.” On the surface, I get it. Tweets and TikToks are ephemeral. I said as much in my post about the rush to Bluesky and ’having some ambition’ and maybe doing something else.
But then I think about my podcast, Permanently Moved. For years, it’s been built on what I consider personally, decidedly “light” blocks: 301-second episodes, week in, week out. Yet as I approach the end of that format this year at episode 301, the full body of work feels… well, heavy. In aggregate, it’s the biggest complete creative project I’ve ever completed.
Maybe the ‘weight’ comes not just from the individual pieces, but from the sustained effort, the consistency? OTOH. Writing and producing a short essay podcast every week isn’t exactly the same as posting light tweets.
As I wrote a while back, collecting all the episodes I’ve written about worlds together into one place on Worldrunning.Guide also created something surprisingly heavy. People read the whole thing. It sparked conversations. It found its weight and its audience over time.
But all that aside, the feeling Anu describes – that gravitational pull towards heavier work – is undeniable.
As I wrote at the end of last year, Permanently Moved will be evolving in 2025. The 301-second format has served its purpose. My plan is to shift from 30-40 quick episodes a year down to maybe 4-6 much bigger, more produced pieces. More room to breathe, more space for sound design, interviews – something closer to radio.
Right now, the most satisfying, most real part of my creative life is my zine, Start Select Reset. As I said ages ago in ‘real things for real people‘, there’s an important weight to tangible objects. Holding the printed zine, knowing it exists physically in someone’s hands, is fundamentally different to posting stuff online. A deep satisfaction.
It’s because of this satisfaction, that the next phase for me (I’ve decided) is going to be integrating the new, longer podcast episodes of Permanently Moved with the zine. I want to make the zine the physical “liner notes” to the audio. 20-40 pages long that together create a single, unified, multi-format creative object. Something where as i wrote in my diary the other day think about it all, part of the work-by design-“only exists inside an envelope.”
More on this soon when I’ve decided exactly what I want to do and what it needs to be.
Anyways, to end. Anu’s point about how the real reward comes from feeling the weight of what you’ve made, and making work that needs to settle in.
Work that lasts anchors you, and maybe, just maybe, anchors someone else too. Whilst the machine demands lightness, speed, ephemerality. Our creative souls crave the weight.
And finding that balance, consciously choosing to build things with substance – feels like the real work now—and the new one too.
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On The Blog
Mar 2025 | Photo 365
I accidentally sent this out via the newsletter, so recapping that I posted my photo a day post for march here is a little redundant. Never the less! Photos #1155 through #1186 are up on the blog.
Permanently Moved
Practice Makes Progress
Rise, Artist! Forge on. Another reflection in my long running ‘Artist’ series, on why the journey matters more than the destination. Creation begets creation. Practice makes progress.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/04/05/2507-practice-makes-progress/
- Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
- Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
- Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo
Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/
Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Pushed the IF project forward another step with the help of google gemini 2.5. All systems are working now except two bugs. once they are addressed I think I’m going to write the first act (instead of bug testing with like 6k words and 20 passages).
- PROJECT ENTRY continued this week. The play test ends today. Report due by end of April.
- LONG THING 1 Finally got back to it and re-read my notes on where I left it and I *think* I have a route forward now. Know how to get it to completion
- LONG THING 2 I have decided to re-write the introduction. I want to get it to a place where it contains everything I want to say and achieve in the rest of the document. ‘The Frame’
- Finally made a content plan that takes 301 though to the end of the show. I know roughly what episodes I want to make, and when.
Terminal Access
I’d like to once again to direct your attention to Paul Graham Raven’s writing. This time an essay original published at Raptor Velocity, but re-published this week over at worldbuilding.agency.
nowhere to go but further in: a hypothesis of fandom intensity
Returning to our table of Pratchett fans, things play out slightly differently. Rather than reaching moments of epistemological closure and comfort via the touchstone of history, the questions of the n00b will instead encounter moments of WTF and sensawunda. Rather than “because Victorian-era London”, for instance, they’ll reach “because Death is a person”, or “because the Discworld is not only flat, but supported by four cardinal elephants stood on the back of a giant turtle”. Further questions (which will likely be of the general form “wait, what, why?!”) will only result in further revelations which demand further explanations. There is no point at which “that’s just how it is/was” can work quite as it does for the Holmes novitiate, namely as an appeal to a reality which is shared beyond the borders of the franchise and its fandom.
To the contrary: with Pratchett’s world (or Tolkien’s, or the world of Sailor Moon, or whatever world it might be) ontological questions can only be answered by reference to sources within the franchise and/or fandom. More simply, you can’t learn more about Discworld without reading more Discworld, or engaging with secondary literatures or fandom discourses which are, in essence, an extension of it.
Dipping the Stacks
In this way, Life and Egregore Consciousnesses lean toward situational, while God and AI Consciousness lean toward intrinsic. Human Consciousness is at a midpoint, bridging instinctual response and self-directed thought.
Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control)
We must realize that, at its core, procrastination is about emotions, not productivity. The solution doesn’t involve downloading a time management app or learning new strategies for self-control. It has to do with managing our emotions in a new way.
Culture Has No Name for This Cursed Vibe. It’s Everywhere | Artnet News
The most obvious reason that culture brims with the melting-together of the goofy and the horrible is because undeniably stupid stuff really is crashing into the very serious news in undeniably disturbing ways.
It’s Hulk Hogan at the RNC. It’s the $TRUMP memecoin. It’s the rebrand of the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America” competing for headline space with actions terrorizing millions of people and threatening to crater the economy. It’s Elon Musk’s branding his government-austerity operation as DOGE.
A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter | NOEMA
If we can let go of the idea that the only locus of intelligence is the human brain, then we can start to conceive of ways intelligence manifests elsewhere in biology. Call it biological cognition or biological intelligence — it seems to manifest in the relationships between individuals more than in individuals themselves.
Cultural diets don’t just offer ideas, information, and entertainment—they shape our personalities as much as our own lived experiences. The question of “what are you consuming?” is deceptively massive and not just in a High Fidelity, record shop snob kind of way. And I don’t mean the obvious stuff, like getting radicalized by Noam Chomsky or Luigi’s Goodreads account. This isn’t about taste-policing or performative intellectualism. I don’t even mean using culture to signal identity, although culture certainly forms it.
Because the question isn’t just What are you watching, reading, listening to?
It’s Who is it turning you into?
Reading
I’m still trying to finish all the things. Didn’t actually finish anything this week but made lots of progress with Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Should be done by the end of next week. I’m really enjoying it now.
I finished Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy. Absolutely fantastic book and allows me to frame and think about what I want to say in Web Was a Sidequest.
I picked up and finished When Things Stick: Untangling Your Body from Old Patterns by Sue Jie Choi again, which I set aside a year ago as it wasn’t the book I thought it was. Its got some interesting descriptions of somatic awareness in there. Whilst I understand their inclusion, I don’t like ebooks that contain links out to videos on vemio (of all places) that don’t load very quickly.
Music
Tunng – love you all over again
I finally got round to listening to Tunng’s new album. Their 2007 album good arrows soundtracked the financial crash for me and I have a real soft spot for them. love you all over again is their best album in ages. Wonderful melodies, poetic lyrics and quirky textures.
They are ‘doing their thing’ on this new album and doing it really well. Sounds like spring.
Remember Kids:
Pythagoras believed in reincarnation and stopped someone beating a dog because he recognised in its barking the cries of a friend. A better man would have stopped it upon recognising in its barking the cries of a dog.
Heart of the Original by Steve Aylett
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