These are the weeknotes,
after week of rain and sun.
End of eras approaching.
He’s come
at least,
to some of his senses.
Storms and Sunlight
It’s been nothing but apocalyptic rain followed by sudden bursts of sunshine all week. It rained on St Swithin’s Day, so I guess this is just what we’re in for this summer. Rain aside, this weekend has been very social, seeing and hanging out with various sets of friends.
This has been the last weekend in my 30s. I turn 40 this coming week, so I have a packed weekend of social events booked in, which I’m looking forward to. No big party. I’m still recovering from my 30th, which feels like yesterday. I’ve no desire to do it all again just yet, LOL. Maybe in another 10 years, after a little more life has been lived.
The last episode of 301 is also out on Saturday, I’m going to record and post it before I go to the pub in the afternoon. I can’t quite believe it was late summer 2023 when I realised, walking along the Thames that the show’s 5 minutes and 1 second format could end poetically at Episode 301. That evening, I sat down and made a spreadsheet/calculator to check the maths… and realised I could end the show on my 40th birthday too. It feels like yesterday.
So this coming week is going to involve two huge milestones.
As I said in this week’s episode, I will be completing the biggest/longest creative project of my life with a smile, and also turning 40.
It feels like I’m closing a book rather than finishing a chapter. I’m excited for all the things I want to do next. The last decade has been really crazy, sometimes awful, but also joyous, and a creative bootcamp. I feel very prepared for the next decade.
I keep thinking about this Atlantic article on Late Bloomers (not that I’m saying I am one) but the thing that sticks in the mind is this passage:
Intrinsic motivation. Most of our schools and workplaces are built around extrinsic motivation: If you work hard, you will be rewarded with good grades, better salaries, and performance bonuses. Extrinsic-motivation systems are built on the assumption that although work is unpleasant, if you give people external incentives to perform, they will respond productively.
People who submit to these extrinsic-reward systems are encouraged to develop a merit-badge mentality.
This feels very relevant. I am not, and have never been motivated by climbing ladders or merit badges. In fact thoughout my life when I’ve found myself in those environments I actively come to despise the people around me who ‘fall for it’. Good grades, getting the bonus, whatever.
Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation.
I feel like I’ve done my 40 years in the desert, and whilst I still don’t know what I want to do, In the last decade I have come to terms with who I want to be: Myself.
I have engaged in a lot of what at one point I considered self indulgence but I’m over that now. One day I will write or talk about coming to my senses in 2023 in a hut in a jungle in Thailand, but the short version is that I know who I am.
And that is all I can really ask for at this stage of my life. After a decade of storms and sunlight, I’m walking into my 40s looking for something to grab on to.
Of course, late bloomers can’t just wander forever. At some point they must grab onto some challenge that engages their powerful intrinsic drive.
Not to steady myself, but to build something new.
On The Blog:
Petz: A Little History of Little Guys
The history of ‘Little Guys’ in AI UX. Petz (1995), desktop buddies, and the design choices that shaped today’s agent interfaces.
To understand the current forms of these Little Guys that are being experimented with right now, I’m going to repurpose some of my current client research and I’ll be covering a few key examples of ‘Little Guy‘ design from the 90s and early 2000’s.
A Hundred Notes on Storydwelling continues to unfold over on my leaflet pub.
Permanently Moved
Landing Sequence
As a nearly complete project, this show represents an enormous amount of effort and discipline. It’s been a serious creative commitment. Sustaining any single format for eight years is achievement enough for me.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/07/19/2519-landing-sequence/
Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Calls
- Drafted next weeks / last EP of 301 already!!
- SLOP MACHINES editing.
- Some ‘Story Game’ work, bug fixing mostly.
- Walk and talk and a coffee, scheming about 2026 already
- Full day work at the studio
- Moar Strategy Calls
Terminal Access
Apologies for the LinkedIn link, but Scott Smith on ‘Risk-Maxxing’ posted over there the other day is excellent.
Risk-maxxing isn’t just about taking big risks. It’s about weaponizing uncertainty as a competitive tool. It involves conscious rejection of cautious, incrementalist strategies, deliberate institutional stress-testing to discover breaking points, and the creation of hyperaggressive positions that force others to adapt to your reality. And risk-maxxing’s defiance of norms means cleaning up the mess becomes someone else’s problem after you’ve moved on, or destroyed markets, systems or countries in the process.
Dipping the Stacks
Battery storage becomes biggest source of supply in evening peak in one of world’s biggest grids
A landmark event occurred in the US on Tuesday night when battery storage become for the first time the largest source of supply in the California grid, which delivers electricity to the world’s fifth biggest economy and is one of the world’s biggest grids.
Italian Brainrot and AI semiotics
And so I think the point is “foreigness” rather than “Italianness.” The reason why it is “Italianicity” is because that discourse is broadly familiar around the world (“Bulgarian brainrot” wouldn’t land the same way) and not particularly charged (“Chinese brainrot” like Donghua Jinlong or Jiafei, tends to carry a political valence, readable as ‘cultural appropriation’ or as ‘critique,’ while “Italianicity” just doesn’t fall into those same associations).
Launch of BowieNet and the First Inklings of Social Networks | Cybercultural
“I welcome all you web travellers to the first community driven Internet site that focuses on music, film, literature, painting and more, where you can interact with all the members of our adventurous new project, knowing that this is an on-growing builder, added to constantly, and that you will definitely be entertained (sometimes unwittingly).”
How the next financial crisis starts
The contagion spreads because you need insurance to get a mortgage, so as property coverage fades, so does the presence of banks. In state after state, it becomes impossible to find a bank branch. Some lenders quit the mortgage business completely. A few begin reporting big losses. And the US is not alone.
Reflections on studying Large Language Models
Since language models are close to maxing out ordinary questions of the sort one might put to them in a benchmark (and frankly, outwit almost all white collar workers when it comes to question answering), much current work focuses on agency, trying to create models that can reliably control a computer, with all the planning and reasoning involved.
Reading
I have just today finished Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood by Keith J. Hayward. The Irish Independent reviewed this book upon release last year and described it as “a joyless ‘anti-woke’ tirade”. I’m not going to argue with that, nor am I going to recommend anyone read it… But, beneath or behind the trothing ‘everyone around me should just grow the fuck up’ position of the author, the book covers a great deal of social and cultural scholarship, as well as supporting data from childhood development studies, crime etc and there is something there, somewhere. I picked up the book because I thought the title was pointing towards something I also feel, and it did indeed gesture that way.
Music
Sakanaction – Wasurerarenaino
The summertime is here which means it’s city pop o’clock once again. I’ve just been hammering all the playlists I made a few years ago during the pandemic, walking around in the sunshine. Recently added this 2019 track by sakanaction to the rotation. It’s a perfect pop song. So good.
Remember Kids:
The Wizard’s Crown remains one of the most sophisticated tactical CRPGs ever designed: a rich blend of wargaming and fantasy role-playing. SSI released a sequel called The Eternal Dagger in 1987.
Dungeons and Desktops by Matt Barton
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