Start the thing
Let it stew
Find the energy
Pick it up
Finish the thing
Begin again tomorrow
Precious Brain Space
It’s been well over a year since I finished making an Epsiode of 301 weekly. One of the things I’ve observed in myself since then, is that having dropped a creative practice (explicitly) built around self-imposed constraints like word counts deadlines, the ‘muscle’ required to keep the cadence up has atrophied over time.
This week’s weeknotes were complete by Sunday morning; I just didn’t have anything to say up here at the top, so I didn’t post them. Now it’s Tuesday afternoon already, and tomorrow is ‘Weeknotes Wednesday’ in my todoist app, and I’ll prep everything for the next one.
There’s also not been so much a reduction in my ability to sit down and write something. I have to do a lot of writing in my life, and it’s also not to say that I haven’t been busy writing and doing other creative things: In fact Episode 303 of Permanently Moved came out this week (see below) and that runs to about ~12,000 words! I hope you check it out!
It’s the wider set of habits associated with regular writing in public that have fallen away. When I was making 301 weekly, I would think all week about what to write for the show, and in the process also generate secondary ideas that I could just spin up and talk about in my weeknotes.
Not being required to “have an idea” every week means that I am out of practice of thinking though those ideas, and storing up observations. It’s also not that I’m not having them, Ideas are extremely cheap, and my diary and Obsidian are full of them, but I have dropped out of the habit of fleshing them out as soon as they arrive. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to go back through recent brain splurges in either app to find something to re-use for a weeknote intro. Diary text has to be at least 3 years stale before I’ll look at it.
Also, with the recent site rebuild and the stripping away of a great deal of legacy issues in the admin area, I have been thinking (once again) about what a “blogging practice” actually is, or means for me. Posting here is extremely low stakes, and, of course, you can do whatever you want on the internet.
Over in my RSS reader, I’ve been following the recent spate of “blogging about blogging” discussion happening around the isles, and I’ve found them quite interesting and informative.
Here’s a few example links:
- Simon Willison on Technical Blogging
- What should a personal website be? – ratfactor
- List of things I love seeing in personal webspaces – The Folkmoss Logs
- The Overthinkers Guide to rekindle your Blogging Mojo – svbck.blog
- Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
Regarding the way that I use my site, I’m increasingly (once again) thinking that I should just POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and give up on short form social media entirely. Turn my posting here into something thats a bit more fluid and responsive. Perhaps I should try and emulate a style similar to the blogs I enjoy reading the most have?
I’m posting mountains of links allday everyday over at links.thejaymo.net, and maybe some of them deserve a little commentary now and again? You know? Anyways… As I type this, I realise that what I think I’m really doing right now, is thinking through my attitude toward ‘posting’ in general thats happened since finishing 301.
This is a general observation about how a change in cadence has downstream effects on both practice itself as well as one’s posture and motivation towards it. These week notes will hit the nine-year mark in January. One would think that I would have found a groove with it by now, but I think, as with everything, ones comfort with a routine goes in and out of personal favour.
Besides, I’ve got a lot going on away from keyboard (AFK) right now, touch wood will share it soon, so perhaps this is all just me writing to say I have other mental subroutines that are happening, eating up precious brain space.
Permanently Moved
I put episode 303 of my podcast! The second episode in the new format, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Feedback and discussion prompted by the episodes topic is starting to trickle in which is exactly what I hoped for with it’s release.
INTERNET OPERATOR
Who-or what-are you online? A profile, handle, podcast, avatar, or AI persona can be addressed, remembered, praised, criticised, and made socially present. But it is not quite identical to the person behind it.
This episode of Permanently Moved is an hour-long audio essay on digital identity, personal branding, social media, puppetry, platform culture, and AI. It argues that online identity is best understood not as performance or authenticity, but as animation: a figure brought to life through an operator, audience, and apparatus.
It’s also rapidly becoming *the most* downloaded show on launch in the first 30 days. I’m not sure if the show has grown since I finished 301, and put 302: Monsters In The Mirror out earlier this year. But the show as a whole has continued to get a constant stream of downloads every day in between, so who knows?
I am very much enjoying being on a ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’ production schedule, Its refreshing given what I’ve written above. But I’m also particularly pleased with the print edition of this episode. It turned out really nice, I had them do no overprinting on the blacks etc.
The zine announcement post will be out this week. It’s already been posted to UK based subscribers, and International subscribers (with the exception of EU) will also go out this week.
If you aren’t a subscriber and would like to grab a copy of either of the print editions for Monsters In the Mirror, or the latest episode you can find them in my Etsy.
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
I highly recommend this newest piece from Sam Kriss reflecting on the Jason Ardy story and the media etc.
In my weaker moments, I got swept up in it too. Maybe it’s worse that I was obsessively following the Arday news with the permanent pained expression of someone who’s doing something bad but also feeling bad about it, as if that somehow makes up for things. ‘I really hope he’s holding up ok,’ I’d say, while flicking from one news story to the next. But the longer it went on, the more powerful the bad taste in my mouth started to get.
Dipping the Stacks
Saving the world from bad ideas: the continuing failure of food ecomodernism | Chris Smaje
Agriculture is the only major sector that at present is significantly energised directly by zero cost and zero carbon sunlight. Yet just at the time when we need renewable electricity to do the heavy lifting of the global economy, advocates of bacterial food for mass nutrition are effectively implying we should use all current renewable electricity, and more, for food production that can otherwise be energised directly by sunlight.
The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic
Reading has never been natural. Humans have no innate cognitive machinery designed to string letters into words and connect them to their real-world analogues. To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition.
There is simply no incentive for corrective action in the current podcasting landscape, with its lucrative revenues and surging political capital. Nobody who benefits from the status quo has any particular reason to upset the apple cart. As soon as it was made, Rogan’s claim about the mass child rape was lost in an unending stream of equally fanciful, hysteria-inciting claims. But what’s the big deal, anyway? He’s not a journalist, bro. He’s just a podcaster.
The Millennial Midlife Crisis is Going to be a Barbell
The boomer crisis was an appetite problem, wanting things you weren’t supposed to want or trying to reinvent yourself because you just got a divorce. This cohort’s midlife crisis may be the slow discovery of what you do when the wanting goes quiet. I think that’s why the barbell forms in the first place. Strip out raw appetite and what’s left is discipline on one end, ritual on the other.
The Fourth Death Of Star Trek – Kyle Mackenzie Sullivan
The most successful eras of Star Trek did not emerge from chasing trends or forcing audiences into new platforms. They emerged when the franchise understood who its audience was, embraced the storytelling that best expressed its identity, and made that storytelling as broadly accessible as possible.
Reading
I finished Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer. I said last week that ‘I can see why it won all those awards’. But having finished it, I’ve decided that I think it’s a bit of a Marmite book. I don’t particularly feel all that compelled to pick up the next book in the series or find out what happens next?
If you feel otherwise lmk. Blog comments are open for 5 days.
Music
Nebular – Martha Skye Murphy // Roy Montgomery (LP)
Martha Skye Murphy is one of my favourite British musicians. New *anything* from her means an immediate must listen. I only found out about her collaborator, experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery, after I finished the whole LP. Listening to it on the train back from the chalk looking out the window.
This album sounds like it is named celestial, atmospheric, nebular. The vocal lines soar above the guitars and atmospherics, often just suggestions at words and rhythm, lots of breaths too. The voice as an instrument rather than vehicle for meaning. Where lyrics to appear they sit inside the soundscape rather than above it. Amazing album, recommended for autumn walks I think.
Remember Kids:
We can change not only our behavior but how we define ourselves. When we put ourselves in a box marked “That’s not me,” we ensure that we’ll never get out of it.
Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter
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