In the post
haste
for everything else
Shape of the new,
coming into view
Nearly Doable
As you might have seen, Issue #15 of my zine went out to subscribers last week. I can honestly report that sending physical things to people is bloody brilliant. Big thanks to everyone who’s been in touch about it.
When I first started making the zine back during the pandemic, I had some hope that this might be the direction of travel. Making and self-publishing proper physical artefacts that are connected to online work and creative projects, then sending them to people in the post.
After a long slog with the initial years of the zine, and making the podcast weeky, I can feel that ambition starting to become real. The whole enterprise hasn’t been “easy”, it is now almost doable. I can see the shape of the new format and how it plays out
I have been thinking a lot about pace and form since finishing 301 last year. I just don’t think people should need to post their creative work online every week for forever. Longer, more considered things, especially when they have a physical component, seem to be a much better shape. Combined the audio episode and the zine are asking for a different kind of attention. They suit the culture I want to live inside of, so I’m doing my bit to help make it happen for others.
Anyway. If sixteen-year-old me, or nine-year-old me for that matter, knew that at the age of forty I’d have a zine shipping around the world, with a proper print run and subscribers waiting for it to arrive in the post, he would be over the moon.
Anyways, there are still a few remaining copies of Issue #15 available on my Etsy.
Buy SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror on Etsy
This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print, material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5. Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand stamped twice, copy number and FOG logo.
This is remaining stock after the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they’re gone, they’re are gone.
£18 + shipping worldwide
CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.
On The Blog
Raindrop.io Stella Prompts for Batch Processing Bookmarks
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks@1/quoteback.jsAfter a lot of trial and error with batch processing, I realised the best approach was to call Raindrop’s MCP tool names directly using the public API documentation.
So below I’m sharing two versions of the prompt I ended up with. This prompt uses my own Raindrop setup, including collection names like thejaymo, my preferred bookmark note style, and the rules I use for deciding what goes into my public links feed. You’ll need to swap in your own collection names, tag, and review criteria before using it yourself.
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.
As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- No work this week 😩 but I pushed a whole bunch of personal work and projects forward.
- Zine stuff obviously
- Sent invitation to new Experience.Computer guest. Positive reply. Currently organising recording date.
- Sorting out last of my life admin. Tax return soon though.
Terminal Access
WEDDING PLANIC!
My friend Stef just put her first solo dev indiegame up for wishlisting on Steam!
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks@1/quoteback.jsA roguelike, deck builder about managing a wild wedding party!
Nobody wants to throw a boring party. In Wedding Planic! you arrange a deck of neurotic wedding guests to generate high levels of Craic (which is basically Irish for fun) and Drama.Guests will flee, fight and f…lirt their way around the seating plan and it is your job to create good table combos and high scoring synergies to make sure that the party survives the night and goes down in history.
Each guest has a stack of repressed personality traits that can unlock new abilities as the Craic and Drama levels rise, making every playthrough unique and wonderfully chaotic!
Win by combining guests, top table cards and wedding favours to create synergetic combos that make the wedding pop off.
For fans of wedding planning and Balatro!? I played the current build last week, and it’s really coming along. Love to buy wedding favours to juice the craic at the tables! Also, I named this game over Discord DMs one afternoon last year, when we were still working together. My dadcore pun game is so strong. hahaha.
Also, I am available to name your game any time!
Dipping the Stacks
I think AI is pushing me toward the AGPL
And the reason I’m writing this article is because there is this disturbing thought in my mind right now: should I flip 180 degrees and start licensing my future code as… no less than the “evil” AGPLv3? I have usually avoided this license, but it sounds like it is the only chance at protecting projects from slop (commercial) forks.
in a way the excited/crying tone reads more accurately to me as the death of a particular story of the era that made Jack Conte. The era-defining records of the 20th century were well compensated, and likely still will be — through playing in coffee shops for eternity and their catalogue owners brokering equity deals and partnerships with big AI. It’s everyone else who was sold a shaky premise of sustainable noodling that is imperilled by this new tech, and that betrayal has as much to do with everything that made Jack Conte as it does with new AI models.
Babestation ended up somehow both too vulgar and too timid for our modern age. It fell into a gap. I wanted to speak to the people who still worked there, outcast from our pornographic tastes. I emailed its executives asking if I could visit. They said sure.
Is social media over for creatives? Or have we just woken up to what it is?
While there’s no consensus yet amongst creatives that social media is dead, it’s increasingly clear that the old contract is. The deal used to be: post your work, build an audience, get discovered. That deal has been rewritten by algorithms optimised for advertising revenue, and the inconvenient truth is that creative professionals are the collateral damage.
🔮 The case for radical solar optimism
Solar photovoltaic panels operate on Wright’s Law: for every doubling of cumulative production, costs fall by a fixed percentage. This is a result of “learning” that happens when you make a lot of something – workers get faster, designs are refined, error rates are lower, waste is reduced and more steps get automated. The more you’ve made, the cheaper the next unit becomes. That learning rate for solar has held at 23.7% per doubling over the last 48 years, confirmed across multiple independent studies.
Fossil fuels cannot do this.
Reading
I finished the audio version of Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw. Absolutely fantatic. The man is a national treasure.
I went back to The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete 30% of the book is the introduction and now i’m actually into the main text I’m ripping though it!
Music
Bassekou Kouyate – Miri (LP)
Just this week i discovred the work of Malian musican Bassekou Kouyate a Ngoni calabash player. Man this whole album has groove. I’m so into it. Can’t stop listening though his back catalogue.
Remember Kids:
already at the dawn of this new genre of game, there were divergent practices for allowing players access to the resolution of events.
The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson
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