Take a break
Engage in actvites.
Step back and review,
what should be coming next.
Back 3 It
It’s good to be back after taking a ‘summer hiatus‘. I used my break to turn 41 years old, finish recording the next episode of Permanently Moved, engaged in some serious life admin, and also built a new blog theme, and I think it looks pretty rad!
For those of you subscribed via email. I’m hoping this post will be appearing in your inboxs with a much cleaner, and far less broken layout than it has done previously.
Thejaymo.net turned 17 years old this year. You can read reflections on 10 years and 15 years of having a website, but despite it’s now venerable age, this has been the first time I’ve built a theme from scratch. Claude helped obviously. But I’m really happy with how it’s turned out.
I thought over the years that I had done a good job of keeping on top of technical debt for a *very* old WordPress installation. But once you let claude fable poke around with the command line, it turns out that … there is quite a lot. Old plugins that didn’t deregister and clean up after themselves etc.
I still haven’t quite fixed it all, and have a long list of housekeeping behind the scenes, but now I have this theme, and have built some tools I can run locally, the whole thing is a ‘platform’ for a more coherent visual identity across my podcast and zine etc. Not quite yet. But it’s a start.
I also recorded and edited the next episode of my podcast. It’ll be out this week. The zine is due back from my printers this side of the weekend.
I hope everyone is having a nice summer! Really not sure about how I feel about typing this currently during Englands 4th heatwave of the summer.
Start Select Reset 📑
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.
Photo 365
Terminal Access
Last week, Substack did something extremely funny. In partnership with Pangram, the current least-worst player in the burgeoning space of AI-powered AI writing detectors, they gave every human user the ability to scan any new 100+ word post for non-human writing. Writers can also pre-scan drafts before posting, and have the option to switch AI detection off altogether. However, if they do that, any readers will get a notice that the author has taken the easy way out—a refusal that arguably concedes more ground than a clean scan gains. Already, people are losing their minds.
I really recommend this recent piece by Myles Badger on the introduction of the AI checker tool Pangram into the Substack UI, its got Dead Internet Theory, Sam Altman, Witch Hunts and more. Really pairs well with this note from JDO:
Dipping the Stacks
Tom Wolfe: The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening
We are now—in the Me Decade—seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening.
The decade that made Andy Burnham
It helped him greatly that Manchester’s leaders had already created an intellectual framework for him to fall back on, an economic project dating back to the 1980s, one that by the mid-2010s was bearing fruit. It was also useful to have someone else to blame when needed: almost always central government.
You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel
Industrial Party ideology ends up being quite Darwinian. What matters most is the power that flows from industrial capacity. This contributes to what scholars refer to as the party’s aesthetic. Fred Gao, a Beijing-based journalist who identifies with the Industrial Party and who briefly worked for Guancha, told me: These people view industrialization as the highest form of beauty. Building things from nothing—that’s their romanticism.
Fuzzy compilers make weaker guarantees than traditional ones, but this trade-off enables a profound shift: from computation that requires humans to think like machines, to computation that allows machines to understand human intent.
How ‘jedag‑jedug’ subculture is shaping our electronic music scene – Academia – The Jakarta Post
Jedag-jedug reveals how global technologies are continually reinterpreted to serve local needs. Arranger keyboards engineered by multinational giants like Yamaha take on entirely new meanings the moment they enter Indonesian village parties.
Reading
I finished reading the 40k novel The Relentless Dead by Steve Lyons. One of the best warhammer horror novels I’ve read in a while. A compelling protagonist.
I also finished The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession by Robert Falconer. One of the best books on this subject I’ve ever read. Really recommend it.
Music
DOMi & Jd Beck – Who Asked? (LP)
I wanted to pre-order this album, but I’m not in the position right now to drop over 40 quid on a gatefold double LP. Never the less, Who Asked? might just be the album of the year!
Incredible Gen Z jazz fusion musicians doing … Autechre, but with real instruments basically? What more could you want? Jd Beck is one of the best drummers in the world. Full stop. He is what happens when the amen break becomes flesh and improvises in super weird time signatures. Total controlled chaos. DOMi meanwhile is a prodigy on the synth.
I think my fav track on the album on the first listen is SMALL EYES.
Remember Kids:
“The goal is to change as much as you can without altering the story.”
Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson
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