301 done.
Parents, lunch, river.
Friends, Cards,
curry, Switch.
Work behind me.
Forward, unbound.
40th Birthday!
I turned 40 and published the 301st and final Episode of 301 Permanently Moved. In doing so, (as I said last week), I competed “the biggest creative endeavour of one’s life”.
On my actual Birthday, Eve and I travelled into central and met my mum and dad in Borough Market for lunch, and then had a few drinks in the sunshine by the Thames at the South Bank Centre.
After which, we walked over the bridge, though Whitehall up to Mayfair where we had the Vegan tasting menu and wine flight at Tendril Kitchen.
Yesterday we went to the pub and had a few drinks with some close friends and then went out for a curry. Super nice. I received some lovely cards and gifts none of which I was expecting. So nice <3. And my Switch 2 arrives tomorrow. I got the Mario Kart bundle and Cyberpunk 2077 which i’m really looking forward to. I’ll finally be able to talk to Kelby and JDO about it.
I don’t really know what to write here about turning 40. Some of my favourite writers have published absolute bangers on their 40th birthdays, but having sat down this afternoon I realise that I don’t have much to say. As to write about how I feel actually feels backwards looking, perhaps thinking this way actually means I’m avoiding feelings, but I’d rather just move on.
For many years my parents had a ‘life begins at 40’ fridge magnet, or a thing stuck to the notice board in the kitchen. I think my Mum might have got it on her 40th? I don’t really remember, but I did always wonder… does it? That saying seems to be more like a bit of a bossy promise, or an order than a real, well meaning slogan.
But now i’m here, my conclusion is that it’s half right. I’ve lived a lot of life already, but there is much more to live ahead. It’s a pivot point not a beginning. Having engineered things to finish making 301 at the same time as turning 40, It’s made this weekend a big moment in my life, rather that just another birthday, another number.
I feel completely free in this moment to look in the direction of whats ahead. The body of work, is what it is, and now I get to make new different work. Free from decisions and constraints set by my young self. I need to find a new creative rhythm and ‘play’ for a bit.
Its going to be fun.
On The Blog:
Nothing here on the blog this week but A Hundred Notes on Storydwelling continues to unfold over on my leaflet pub.
One of my fav’s from this week: 017: Fan Friction. On running worlds, and dealing with fandoms.
They write what they want.
And if you’re lucky,
what you wanted.
That’s the trick.
Let it go
but stay just close enough.
This is also Weeknotes #400! This wasn’t intentional it’s just how the numbers fell.
Permanently Moved
Episode 301
8 years, 15 seasons; 301 episodes; over 25 hours of audio and roughly 290,000 words of script. 301 Permanently Moved was begun at age 32 and completed today, the day after I turned 40. One fifth of a lifetime, distilled into a body of work.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/07/26/2520-episode-301/
Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Designed and sent some stickers of to printing. I will the 3 covers of 301 over the years and Experience.Computer stickers 5cm Square to be tucked in zines and be for sale in the new jaymo shop. They’ll be and handed out to friends IRL too, I may have over ordered lol.
- Tested new movement/character controller on a game at work.
- Planned out delivery of another project for end of Sept.
- Worked on my fiction game
- SLOPMACHINES editing has slowed down again, but I did come up with a better way of introducing playability.
Terminal Access
Master of the Temple. Brand new two hour long documentary on Jack Parsons! Peter is in it (His book Two Antichrists, on the relationship between Parsons and LRH is fantastic).
The film includes significant and previously unseen footage and photos of Jack, Cameron, Caltech and the early Thelemites. Interviewees are David Shoemaker, aerospace historian Roger Launius, and myself.
Dipping the Stacks
The “collar flip”….what if class politics shifted in the UK?
Automation and AI exposure has created a new category of privilege or lack of it, which basically compounds the problem with Western democracies. Which is Nietzsche’s idea of multi-dimensional resentiment (I call this the “Nietzschean Trap”). Everyone is feeling like they are losing, and has some legtimate claim to make this case.
The unfixable road that was vanished
A recurring theme of this Substack is that the root cause of a large number of things that are broken in Britain is that nobody takes ownership of.
The Safest Path to Stable Climate is Designing New Plants
In the baseline public consciousness, despite a little recent progress, “GMOs” are still often considered a simple bad, and their avoidance is an obvious necessity for the ecologically literate, especially GMOs placed in natural environments such as forests. So biotechnological methods, such as that of the Salk Institute, that have shown efficacy but would only ever work if a significant portion of photosynthetic carbon, either in agricultural or wildland systems, were fixed by their plants, are unlikely to be viable without changes in public understanding.
I am disappointed in the AI discourse
I am not claiming that ChatGPT is an amazing search engine. What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear. It’s more that both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true.
And that’s what real taste is: a deep internal coherence. A way of filtering the world through intuition that’s been sharpened by attention.
Reading
I’ve been reading Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia the last few weeks, a couple of essays before bed. Such a good book. Essentially a personal tour though the western art canon by a social critic. Each image is a jumping off point for what was going on, politically, socially, culturally at the time of its creation. The book ends with the Anakin Obi-Wan lightsaber duel on Mustafar.
I also spent an Audible credit on On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz. It’s a book about Attention basically. It has some banger lines: In a sense, expectation is the lost cousin of attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process of the world “out there”.
Music
Ermhoi – Later
Composer and singer songwriter Ermhoi from Black Boboi has release this wonderful art pop song Later. According to the liner notes, she started writing it 8 years ago about/for a friend who had died. It was finished and released now because it was ‘making her anxious’.
Remember Kids:
“Don’t trouble yourself; I shall not talk soft nonsense to you!” “That sounds like ‘C’s’ writing! Is it?” was asked quickly. “My style must be very peculiar to be so readily detected,” Clem said to Nattie, laughingly; then replied on the wire, “If you will sign I will tell you.” “Em.” “Ah!” said Clem, and immediately acknowledged himself.
Wired Love / a Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer
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