Sun cuts the room
New gold and new shadow.
I watch bright things unfold themselves.
The heart,
a window,
flings open.
I Watch Bright Things Unfold Themselves
I wrote the little poem at the start of this post in my phone earlier this week, sitting in a coffee shop. The sun is now out, and we’re heading into a heatwave here in London.
I watch bright things unfold themselves.
I’m really pleased with it as a sentence, I love the rhythm of it when you say it out loud.
Thats all I really have to report this week … that I like a single sentence that I wrote.
Sometimes just the one is enough!
You should watch this talk by Anne Carson given for the LRB last year. It’s deeply moving and full of wisdom. Nominally it’s about losing control of her handwriting due to Parkinson’s disease.
Though in true Carson style, it’s not just about handwriting. She effortlessly speak on art, poetry, history, and philosophy. It’s really about: life, creativity, and how we keep going even when everything is getting harder. Though the lens of her personal struggle, she explores big questions: who we are, how we stay ourselves when our bodies change, and how we keep creating meaning even as we face ageing and loss.
It’s one of the most honest talks I’ve ever heard. It never tips into sentimentality however tempting that must have been in earlier drafts.
On The Blog
Accessions | 230425
The cards for Downcrawl 2E a game by designer Aaron A. Reed finally arrived!
Permanently Moved
Surface Without Substance
As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, the world will continue to thicken with surfaces with signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/04/26/2509-surface-without-substance/
- 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
- Re wrote intro to SLOP MACHINES – new edit required to harmonised voice and tone
- Punted WRITING THE IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT to June
- Made some more systems progress on METIS III. Nearly ready to just .. write the story.
- PROJECT ENTRY calls.
- Got asked by my former co-founder to write up some of our learnings about putting LLMs in MUDs. Tentative essay title: HARD WORLDS FOR LITTLE GUYS
Got a super busy week next week. Need to go to Essex!
Terminal Access
Kei Kreutler published a great essay on the history of Appalachian Mountain Clubs their internal governance and treasury policies and what we can learn from them.
However, the ongoing maintenance huts required led to changes in the relationship between the overall organization and its local chapters. Maintenance costs relied on collecting 30% of annual membership dues from local chapters, yet they often resisted sending these dues to the AMC headquarters in Boston. In 1947, the Delaware Valley Chapter temporarily withheld 40% of collected fees to fund local shelter repairs.[3] The AMC Board of Directors responded by creating a matching fund program where chapters could retain half of excess annual membership dues if they met certain benchmarks
Dipping the Stacks
Why Is Everyone Obsessed With Chat Interfaces?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this: why does every app, tool, and platform seem to be adding a chat interface?
Here’s What Makes Jubensha Different
Jubensha is about distributed cognition and group sensemaking – acquiring information, discussing it to develop intelligence, and making decisions. Sensemaking is a part of many forms of gameplay, but in Jubensha, it is gameplay.
the main headline here for me is that only 0.14% of total on-chain transactions are designated to be illicit or criminal. Sure, of course, it may be billions of dollars but, when you consider the total cryptocurrency values today is around $3 trillion, it’s small beans. Sure, it’s $40 billion, but that’s just 0.14%.
A decade of tokenization experiments in music: Where do we go from here?
In 2017, as Bitcoin approached its first $20,000 peak and Ethereum enabled a new wave of tokenization experiments, Mat Dryhurst published an essay that captured the revolutionary potential many saw in blockchain technology.
The Deliberate Academic Forgetting of Carl Jung
Jung’s great crime was not that he was wrong. His crime was that he was right in ways that couldn’t quite be contained within the confines of contemporary methodology. He dared to suggest that perhaps the human psyche was more akin to Dante’s Divine Comedy than to a mechanistic flowchart. One can hardly imagine a more grievous offense against our current intellectual orthodoxy.
Reading
I finally finished with Metaverse by Matthew Bal Its a really good book. I’m curios about the paper back version being completely re-written. If I see it anywhere cheap I think I’ll pick it up.
AND I’ve only got about 30 pages to go tonight and I’ll finish Saints by Amy Jeffs!
Music
Y – Y EP
Despite being a cosmic country band, my band Forest Bed have has the privilege of supporting a ton of brilliant young jazz musicians and thie rbands. It’s via one of thoes musicians on social media I discovered London based band Y.
After watching the video of them live at the Lexington below. I really wanna go see them play live. It’s all a big mix of Japanese Jazz fusion, Hardcore punk drums and really angular riffs.
They are apparently part of a much bigger wave of ‘Post Brexit Pop’ i’m here for it. Kinda wanna start another band and make some my self. LOL
Remember Kids:
When you’re born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you’re lucky as you travel forward through time, you’ll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light.
Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith
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