This post moves from the macro to the micro. It starts with my thoughts on the “Butlerian Jihad” and the ongoing cultural reception of AI, shifts into why I think the “Social Media Winter” has become a nuclear one, and I also talk about why I’m still blogging on the open web.

I also talk about some of the bigger professional achievements and projects I’m proud of this year: cybersecurity games and on-chain interactive fiction, my “Little Guys” (AI companions) writing, and a couple of other personal bits and bobs too.

It turns out that when you stop scrolling and start thinking, there’s was a lot to say. It’s a big post. Feel free to take your time with it, and don’t forget to leave a comment below.

Culture War Iconoclasts

Genocide and other horrors aside, the most dominant thing in the cultural sphere last year was, of course, the further acceleration and cultural reception of AI. By AI of course I mean the now 9 year old technology known as the Self-attention-based Transformer. Which currently falls under the catch all word of “AI”.

I wrote an episode of Permanently Moved early in the year called “The Information Age Iconoclasm”. I still stand by that framing.

But as the year progressed the contours of the cultural divide (war) over the reception of this new technology solidified.

Butlerian Jihad

Using the term from a religious holy war Dune is quite apt, because there are supporters on both sides of the argument with both high and hard opinions that I suspect are never going to change.

More reasonable Anti-AI folks think of themselves as Neo Luddites, taking the position of being against a new technology harmful to the commonality which is fine. But in many people in the latter half of 2025 have taken on postures more akin to religious zealots. More like the iconoclasm of the Byzantine Empire than political actors.

There have been a few articles in recent weeks that to my mind put the data centre energy and water issues to bed. This one on why the zealots don’t care is also very good.

Off the top of my head there are several currents inside the Anti-Ai camp:

• The labour and consent people, who are basically saying: this is extraction; this is wage pressure; this is unlicensed training; this is enclosure of the commons.
• Artists and craft defenders, for whom the entire point is the integrity or sacredness of art; not just “I want to get paid” crowd, but “Signs and images are what make us human”.
• Environmental and infrastructure critics, who see the whole stack as an emissions and compute arms race.
• Epistemic doomers, who are worried about the infinite media machine; fraud, spam, persuasion, the corrosion of trust, the collapse of shared reality.
• There’s a moral panic; the “think of the children” contingent who treat the whole thing as a kind of cultural contamination.
  • That AI-generated media is a solvent on development and taste, that kids will be raised on slop, that nobody will learn to write, draw, read deeply, or struggle through the apprentice stages because the machine will do it for them.
    • In its softer form it’s a legitimate anxiety about education, attention, and the conditions for becoming a competent adult.
    • In its harder form it turns into a familiar reactionary posture, where “protecting children” becomes a rhetorical trump card and “no one can read and write” is a blanket story.
• Then there’s the purity wing, who are the iconoclasts proper. Taboo. Using the tool is a stain, touching it makes you complicit, and any beneficial application is still treated as contaminated by the original sin.

Things have grown so bad in this final camp that in late 2025 over on Bsky, people were expressing Anti-Ai opinions so fervently that they were effectively ‘pro-cancer’. Frothing at the mouth about the use of transformer technologies in early cancer detection. This is not a normal response to a new technology?, at least not in my lifetime so far, that’s for sure.

Speaking with friends, close friends even, who are anti-AI for their own reasons and fall across the camps listed above, their position sometimes registers to me almost as irrational as the Christian / Conservative satanic panic campaigns I experienced the tail end of first hand during the late 90s/early 00s. The difference, of course, being that the Satanic Panic was a “hallucination of harm”, whereas the AI-resistance about the “harm of hallucination”. I just think that when arguments slip from ‘how do we get paid?’ to ‘this technology is inherently demonic,’ the wider movement loses its political utility and becomes a purely aesthetic exorcism.

None of my friends in this camp, I think, I hope, would go so far as to be pro-cancer. But nevertheless, the level of zealotry is really concerning. It’s also very weird interpersonally given that we agree on 80 to 90 percent on other things; politics, culture, taste in books, etc.

And to be clear, I share some of the very real concerns from across the spectrum of Anti-AI camps. And I’m also not saying that things are any better over in the the Pro-AI camp either.

It’s all hyperbolic, hype train all the time over there too. I think you can also sort the pro-AI side into a few churches, most of which are operating on some flavour of inevitability.

• The accelerationist wing doing Silicon Valley eschatology; we’re building God, history demands it, anyone resisting is a peasant with a torch.
• The aliens are here: theres a weird new thing inside of the computer and it’s talking to us.
• Competitive geopolitical realists; if we don’t do it, China will (and they will).
• Builders; who just want to see what they can do, make useful tools right now, and society will patch the harms later. (the WWW approach)
• The abundance crowd, selling a near-future where everyone gets a tutor, a lawyer, a doctor. We’ll cure cancer and live forever. Scarcity is over bro.
• Safety freaks: “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies “
• And the Vulture Capitalists who don’t have any opinion on anything beyond number go up.

The Butlerian Jihad does not have a unified front, on other side. Both are landscapes of competing anxieties. But so is the rest of the culture war too.

Thinking about the warring sides, you’d be forgiven for wanting to opt-out entirely. But unfortunately we are all, by virtue of our participation in this culture, in the present moment, in the mid morning after the dawn of the Information Age, already conscripted into the consequences of the silicon transistor. And I find my own coordinates firmly established.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am very much in the pro-AI camp, but then again I’m also pro-metaverse and pro-blockchains too. And I genuinely think that the confluence of AI, new monetary technologies and, worlds are in the medium-term the future and where all this is going.

I’m an ‘The aliens are here’ pro-AI guy. This anecdote sums my own position up I think:

Late last year I was in a meeting with a bunch of folks and got asked what I thought about AI, and I replied:

“I cannot believe that it exists. A fucking alien intelligence is arriving. It’s insane that the application of the raw transcendent qualities of mathematics to a substrate of a vast majority of all of human culture resulting in the creation of a hyper-dimensional crystal has machined into existence a monster inside of my computer.”

I realised after the words came out of my mouth that I had misread the room. They had only wanted to know what I thought about the newest version of ChatGPT.

The Information Age

I was back on New Models podcast late last year talking about forthcoming book SLOP MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE.

Here’s the promo clip, as I think it’s a useful recapitulation of some of what I wrote nearly 9 months ago in ‘Information Age Iconoclasm’.

That conversational riff is basically a shorthand for a much larger historical anxiety I’ve been chewing on for a while. We often mistake the tool for the event. But when we look back, the tool is just the spark for the fire that follows.

Everything that we know about the nature of quote-unquote modernity: nation states, well-informed citizens, and Westphalian governmental arrangements etc are post the invention of the printing press. But they are also all ideas that emerged after the end of the Thirty Years War.

The wars of religion didn’t happen after the invention technology of the printing press itself. But over the consequences of the invention of that technology.

In history class at school we’re taught that the printing press gets invented, and then 100 years later, someone stuck a pamphlet on the door of a church, and then … 8 million people died.

Would it really be so surprising to read in a history book sometime in the future about the world-changing invention of the silicon transistor, and then less than 70 years later we arrived at thinking machines… and then lots of people died?

The crystal fire of the solid state transistor was second Promethean moment for humanity. You, I and everyone alive right now are living though the early consequences of that moment. We live in the Information Age.

This invention of mathematical Self-attention-based Transformer and its consequences are downstream of the transistor. If we all like our super-fast MacBooks, iPhones, televisions, Xbox’s, then AI also comes along with it I’m afraid. And so too does the ubiquitous surveillance state, cyberpunk corporate stacks, and everything else that’s bad about the current era. It’s all bound up in our early period of living inside, and with, computational culture.

The last century saw its own fair share technological development of course. In media; photography, film, radio; television etc All of them shaped our understanding of what media ‘is’. And just as for people who lived through the advent of film or photography, it raised questions about the nature of the image, of what it is. We face those questions too.

2026 marks the beginning of the true age of infinite media machines.

And we now must face the questions that this raises. What is an image? What is a piece of text? What does it even all mean?

I guess if you don’t want to face, or bother with the question, you join the Butlerian Jihad.

But for the rest of us, the task of 2026 isn’t to smash the machines, but as I said in 2022, we need to figure out what kind of humans we intend to be while standing alongside them.

Social Media

2025 was to my mind also the year we all finally stopped calling it a “social media winter” and admitted the truth: the epoch has turned its actually a nuclear winter. The tectonics of the web have shifted and things have moved on. The short-form, text-based medium most millennials think of a ‘social media’ is over.

In retrospect, the Web 2.0 idea of Twitter, throwing the entire world into a single massive group chat seems like a fundamental category error. Once we were actually all inside in the global village, we mistook proximity for community.

I called Bluesky a “ghetto” about eighteen months ago, and despite using the platform myself, the label still sticks. These replacement platforms are all just smaller rooms built around the same flawed assumptions. I just don’t know why we are all still trying to hold “the discourse” inside an architectural framework that can’t support it. To answer my own question: Because it’s “Fun” sometimes? I guess?

For the last half-decade or so “creators” have had to live with a bifurcated consciousness. You don’t write or make anything for people; you make it for the code space you’re operating inside of.

As Kevin Munger says in his essay ‘The Youtube Apparatus” the primary audience on any platform is the algorithm. The secondary audience for anyone online is actually real human beings. (To complicate things further it’s been clear since the release of GPT 2 that LLMs are a also a kind of future audience.)

Anyways, to succeed online, you need to be legible to the code space you are inside of. To be distributed, you must obey the “physics” of the feed.

What this has lead to is a massive economic rot, the entire medium was built on an incentive structure that rewards velocity over veracity and outrage over insight.

On social media platforms attention is the main bottleneck, the friction they monetised. Platforms are incentivised to keep you on the app, not to keep you informed. In an ad-supported model, the narrative economy always selects for the “small thought” that sparks a thousand angry replies. So the incentive becomes “harvest attention at any cost”. The good news however is that LLMs exist now, and as my buddy Deepfates said recently: “The attention economy was caused by attention being scarce. When we can turn electricity into attention, the bottleneck moves as well.“

In addition to the twilight of the short-form text apps, I also get the sense we are seeing the sunsetting over short-form video too. I’ll admit that it fully still currently dominates, but its delivery mechanism is so tightly bound to the algorithmic feed and so dependent on the same bankrupt incentive structures, I think that is beginning to cannibalise itself too.

In that post about Bluesky I said that “Little text boxes produce little thoughts.”. I honestly have come to believe that you cannot have a high-functioning society when the primary medium of communication demands the truncation of the human intellect.

I highly recommend reading Jacqueline Fendt’s essay Democracy, Neo-Orality, and the Unraveling of Political Norms (thanks New Models podcast for surfacing this!)

Democratic norms are unraveling amid a deep transformation in how we know, feel, and communicate in public. This essay argues that what we are witnessing is not merely institutional decay but a shift in the epistemic and affective foundations of democratic life itself. Drawing on media theory, political communication, legal scholarship, and post-truth studies, we introduce the concept of neo-orality to describe an emerging mode of political discourse defined by immediacy, affect, narrative, and performance.

I think we might just need to write off the entire medium of short-form text for a generation. At lest for a few internet epochs anyways. This isn’t to say short-form text based ghettos will disappear. Mailing lists, blogs, newsletters, forums, all remain the old-growth forest of the web.

But the era of the short-form text based media as our primary lens for reality is finished. The new season has already begun over on Roblox and Minecraft etc. But anyone older than the very youngest of Gen Z probably won’t be participating in it. For the rest of us all we have is ‘The Great Retreat’.

In my 2023 in review post, I was already trying to articulate what lay on the other side of this collapse. Having argued since 2019 that ‘Your Attention is Sovereign,’ 2025 was the year I think that ‘The Audience’ finally realised that reclaiming that sovereignty requires a structural break from the platforms designed to monetise our distraction. They needed to change their behaviours.

Health

In 2023 I wrote about my anxiety and the effects that taking Inositol had on it. This year i have other health news to report: and quite possibly the most important news of the year. A biological plot twist I didn’t see coming.

After living with Crohn’s disease since I was 17, this year’s “big event” was my colonoscopy in November. I’ve had loads throughout my life but the results this time were different: No evidence of active Crohn’s.

When I spoke to my consultant about the results earlier this month, he said was genuinely “made up” for me, though he admitted that seeing this level of activity after 23 years of active Crohn’s is so highly unusual that we’re now both in a bit of a “now what?” situation.

When I asked about coming off the meds he was refreshingly honest, telling me “your guess is as good as mine” and said that the official guidance he’d been reading in preparation for our call was vague at best.

Because we are both in such uncharted territory, I’m going to be tapering my meds down to 1g a day (halved from 2g) while he passes my information along to the ongoing study I’ve been apart of since I was diagnosed 23 years go to help them make sense of long-term cases like mine.

Not out the woods (or the ward?) yet though, as I still have other on-going problems with my guts. He mentioned/warned that I’ll likely still need an operation for my hiatus hernia and Schatzki ring at some point in the next ten years or so, but for now the Crohn’s is taking a back seat. So regular visits to the outpatients will drop to just once a year.

On The Blog

I think my 2018 decision to re-embrace blogging as my “primary means of online communication”, remains the single best decision I’ve ever consciously made about how I behave on, and interact with, the Internet.

In 2025, thejaymo.net had a good year. I wrote 123,382 words over 104 posts. Which I just noticed (while looking up the figures in my dashboard) is actually the least amount of words since 2021 and the fewest number of posts since 2019. Not that any of that matters per-say, this isn’t a competition.

It has just been a good year around here though. Several posts were shared more widely than anything I’ve written in a long time, resulting in conversations and connections that were both monetarily valuable, and intellectually stimulating. Thats to my mind sort of the whole point of having a blog or a personal website: it’s yours. You can put whatever you want on it, and people might read it.

One of the biggest differences between a blog and a social feed is the nature of the “scroll”. Only a psychopath scrolls through years and years of short-form text posts back to 2020, but people occasionally will, and do! spend hours browsing this site and reading the things I’ve placed on it. Because a post is addressable.

This speaks a little to what I wrote in “The Doc Web” back in 2024, about people reading lots of your writing and then reaching out leads to extremely context-rich conversations at the point of first contact. Just recently, I met someone in the pub after a conference event who said, “Oh yeah, I know your blog. I’ve read a couple of the posts on X and Y.”

And this I think is where the whole value of producing an archive of thought online comes from, it compounds. Every post might be someone’s first contact with you. But to speak to the reaction above, you do need to write for an audience rather than the algorithm.

For a long while now, I’ve been thinking about this website the same way I talk about my podcast, Individual posts are just entries in a larger hyper-textual object I’m constructing. The object is the entire website in its entirety, not the individual posts. The whole site becomes the project, which I think is a useful way of thinking if you want to start one of your own.

I can assure you that starting a blog in 2026 will not result in a massive readership any time soon. To illustrate the scale of things, this blog gets more views a week now, than it did in the entirety of 2018. But none of that matters, the most important point is that a blog is a place to put your writing. Even Substack with all it’s built-in mechanisms for reach, faces similar challenges with disheartened early stage writers. And even then I suspect the “discovery” dial on that platform will be turned down throughout 2026.

Some of my friends with websites have, over the last year or so told me that they feel like they are the last holdouts in a ghost town, but I don’t see running a website that way at all. I feel more like a middle aged gardener out in public in the sunshine, enjoying his garden. I’m thrill whenever anyone swings by, and it feels a little like speaking to my neighbour over the fence. Everything, I feel is quite casual and informal around here.

I would however, like to note before I close that unlike social networks or Substack, running a website costs actual money. I don’t just mean the domain, but hosting fees and the other literal expenses of its existence. The fact that independent bloggers and website owners put money down to stay outside in public, out in the sunshine, I think is an important distinction that should be recognised, or mentioned more by folks with blogs.

Finally, as social media continues its retreat, one of the things I want to do in 2026 is re-engage with the long-neglected comment economy. I think it would be worth while to move beyond my own walls and leave my thoughts, comments etc on the blog posts I follow. It’s always a thrill when someone leaves a comment here, I assume the feeling is reciprocal.

A return to ‘Comment Culture’ feels like a good way of acknowledging the archipelago we’re all still building together.

Permanently Moved

I spent two whole episodes in the summer reflecting on the completion of 301 episodes of Permanently Moved at the time, and I’ve already written about what’s coming next year on the blog, so I don’t particularly feel the need to repeat all that here in my year review.

However, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everybody who has stayed a paid subscriber during the six months that I haven’t made an episode. That will change very soon (I’m working on it), but I really appreciate people’s trust and faith in me. Monetarily supporting my work and my creative output even when the feed was quiet.

The last six months, in real life have been extremely weird and wild in my personal life. The fact that all this coincided with ending the weekly production of the show, feels somehow arranged by the universe. Anyways, six months on, I definitely understand the impulse that have when YouTubers when they say they’re taking a break and then disappear for years. The grind of regular content production, while a fantastic creative exercise, is exactly that: a grind. And this applies just as much to people writing newsletters on Substack as it does podcasts etc.

I personally think my new decision to move from weekly 301 second long episodes to much longer, more deeply considered and edited pieces of work a year is probably the right cadence for the current moment. I imagine other online writers would also like to move in that direction too. Throughout the 301 episode run, I always tried to keep the subject of each episode of Permanently Moved fairly perennial, even if they were inspired by current events. I think that any any shift away from chasing the present and keeping the algorithm satisfied, and towards longer pieces, by anyone is something that would benefit culture at large.

I know several friends with quite large Substacks who publish every week because they feel they have to, and they tell me plainly that this is affecting their overall creativity. But nevertheless they still post because they feel like they have to.

So I’m still aiming for four episodes a year, along with the zines (which I’ll come to in the next section) but I already envision a situation over the coming years where shows simply drop when they’re done. All the things I make from now on will just take the size and shape that they need to be, and that might result in making more than four things a year.

But because of the economics of publishing and shipping the companion zine for each one, this is something I need to play out for a bit for my self. I need to get a sense for the time, effort, and energy columns across the balance sheet, as well as the literal cost free shipping for paid regular subscribers.

Speaking of which:

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

Start Select Reset Zine

Producing Start Select Reset zine over the last few years has become a real pleasure of mine. Because, long before the blog, podcast, and websites, I was a punk rock scene kid making zines I can only imagine what 20 or 21-year-old me would think about the production runs of SSRZ as it is today. “For a per-zine?” He would say. For a “per-zine?”

The first physical episode of the zine was titled “The Return of the Real” and that is exactly what I’m doubling down on now that I’ve had a few years of zine-making under my belt. I think I’ve gained a solid understanding of the costs associated with zines, shipping and publishing, and I’m finally ready to expand the zine into a substantial multi-page booklet—essentially serving as high-quality ‘merch’ for the show. Which was the plan from the beginning.

As I’ve mentioned, you can read about all of this in more detail elsewhere on the blog, and if you want to subscribe to support my work and secure free shipping on all future issues, you can sign up here.

I do want to be transparent however, and mention that I’m pretty sure that I’ll be putting the prices up mid-year in 2026. But only after I’ve published and shipped at least two new episodes of the podcast and accompanying issues of the zine. As I suspect that by then, I’ll be running up against the rising complexities of international postage and US customs costs, and the price will need to reflect that reality.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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.

BYENNE

I wrote about Byenne: One Hundred Notes On Storydwelling at the end of last year too. But I neglected to mention it’s a sort of sister thing to SSRZ.

Inspired after reading, Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, the initial seeds of the project began during the pandemic. Last year when I began posting them on my leaflet.pub, (A Bluesky native blogging platform), I had written about 77 of them written, and was setting aside some time every weekend, to read through spiderweb of thoughts on Worldrunning and storydwelling in my Obsidian and turn them into poems or abstract koans. Abstract compressions of thought. It was very cool to start and complete a durational publishing project inside of one year.

The 100 entries in the collection, to my mind actually represent a great deal more thought than the total word count. And I’m very pleased, personally, with the corpus, how it turned out.

Somewhere down the creative project priority list is collecting them together by theme, and I hope to put 100 Notes out as both a PDF and EPUB later on this year. By then I’ll have the pre-order mechanism properly set up; and If anyones interested I might do a short publishing run. Probably as an A6 artefact. The first thing from my nascent publishing label: Family of Giants.

Experience.Computer

I only managed to get two episodes of Experience.Computer out last year. Which is a shame because I still think the core concept and hook for the show is really strong.

Despite lack of consistent publishing, the shows downloads from month to month continue to be remarkably robust. Even with just those two new entries this year, the first 90-day download figures remain in line with Permanently Moved, which puts the show in the top 10% of podcasts globally. Which is a bit mad for a pet project.

Expect the sporadic posting schedule to continue through 2026. E.C isn’t a primary priority right now for me. I’ll simply record and release episodes as the opportunity arises. That said, if anyone has guest ideas or can make introductions to people who fit the show’s vibe, please feel free to reach out!

Experience.Computer 🔊

Experience.Computer is slow radio about high tech.
An interview show by Jay Springett about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination

The show examines how people perceive the world, and how they work with the creative tools they use to make their work with

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Consulting work is always a boom bust cycle of feast and famine, and that was certainly the case again last year. So much so as we head into 2026, finding full time employment has become priority #1 in my professional life. Which I fear might be difficult given how weird and illegible I am. As it was, the pursuit of full time employment contributed to the some of the “craziness” I mentioned earlier regarding the back half of 2025.

Nevertheless, I did get some very cool things done last year some of which I can talk about:

Off Grid: Red Team

Last year saw the play-test and the completion of a full vertical slice for a cybersecurity game I produced at the award winning UK indie developer Semaeopus. A project I’m enormously proud of.

The game involves exploring a 3D world, solving puzzles, and interacting with real-world websites, requiring the player to “hack” them. Interestingly, the sites are built in hardened Python, and they appear to the user via the browser inspector as a PHP server and are vulnerable to many of the common PHP exploits.

We originally built the tool with hiring and training in mind, but once we got it into the hands of teams within the cybersecurity industry, we realised from senior leader feedback very quickly that it would be a fantastic tool for personal development and onboarding.

Developed in collaboration with cybersecurity professionals…

The game replicates real-world scenarios while maintaining an engaging, game-first experience.

During our initial testing phase, untrained players were able to progress using real websites and techniques, showcasing the game’s authentic approach. By the end of their playthrough, they had a stronger understanding of common security risks—and how even simple precautions can significantly improve the protection of personal or professional data.

The games specific focus is on teaching people to “think like an attacker” rather than just defending from one. All the puzzles and missions in our demo level align with real-world CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK statuses and in a future iteration, it could essentially cover full compliance methodologies for SOC2 etc.

The project was extremely well received, and the whole team was very happy to receive a nomination for a Serious Games Awards in Utrecht at the end of the year. We didn’t take home the trophy, but our lead designer attended the ceremony and was able to showcase the game to key figures across the serious games industry.

You can read more about it, and watch V1 of the trailer (made after the first playtests, but before the full vertical slice was complete)

The O’Ruggin Trail

Over at archetypal.tech this year, I helped produce The O’Ruggin Trail, a parser-based interactive fiction game built entirely on the blockchain.

A satirical interactive fiction game about survival, bureaucracy, and impossible choices. Step into the boots of a licensed Trail Guide and lead a ragged band of pilgrims, outlaws, and opportunists across a fractured wasteland toward the fortified city-state of Usants.

Building a fully functioning lexer within smart contracts was a significant engineering challenge, but we got the engine stable and fully operational in the end.

We released the first part of the four-act game and held a playtest period in the Autumn. The project picked up some great momentum, including an interview with Rich and I on the Fully Onchain Games podcast and a write-up in the Bankless newsletter.

One of the key features of this implementation is that the game instances themselves are NFTs, meaning a specific playthrough can be passed from one player to another, the full game state etc.

But the “secret sauce” and the thing I’m most proud of is that upon completing the demo (and the main game), players receive access to our own editing tools to expand the story further. You can add new rooms, objects, and puzzles, and if you have NFTs from other projects like Loot or Realms / Eternum in your wallet, you can even write your own branches from rooms based on those games.

It’s all extremely novel in the world of on-chain gaming and autonomous worlds and we have some really ambitious plans if funding is acquired.

While I’m not currently active on the project, the full version should be out sometime this year. If parser-based interactive fiction is your jam, you should check it out. Its honestly a bit of a blockchain engineering marvel, and shows the level of expertise that the Archetypal team can build/impliment.

Companions

Regular readers will have noticed I wrote a lot about ‘Little Guys’ here on the blog last year. AI companions and the history of how we got here etc. There is much more to come on this front.

For the first time, I secured a research contract that had a relatively short “dark period,” after which I was allowed to write publicly about the same topics, and I’m really grateful to said team for allowing that flexibility.

The reason this gig even came about—and this brings us back to my point in the earlier section about the value of the archive—is because I was writing about AI companions and Little Guys here on my blog in 2024.

Those posts were actually surfaced by an early ChatGPT deep research search, so I effectively got a gig last year via ChatGPT. Which I think that is incredibly cool, and a total sign of the times. It’s also definitive proof of why maintaining a blog and simply posting your ideas online can be valuable.

Anyway, I have plenty more to say about Little Guys and LLM companions in 2026, particularly bout ‘putting them into vessels’ and other form factors. Which leads me to another piece of work I definitely can’t talk about, but I did get to visit a robotics lab late last year to see what they were messing with.

I saw the cutting edge of soft robotics and non-humanoid form factors with agentic LLMs living inside of them and… wow. I think the people laughing at the stupid humanoid robots currently being marketed (and they are stupid) are massively under-indexing on the real state of cutting edge robotics.

I don’t expect much of this to be productised for the consumer market just yet, but it is coming. The 90s are back, baby.

Forest Bed

On a more analog note, my cosmic country / alt-folk Americana band, Forest Bed, had a good year.

We played a bunch of shows, recorded an album, put out a new single and made a music video. It even picked up a great review in Americana UK, which was a real highlight for us.

We already have several shows booked for 2026; we’ll be playing the High Tide Festival in Twickenham this summer, and we have a gig coming up very soon —we’re playing “What’s Cookin’” on the 11th of February in Leytonstone.

It feels good to have that physical, musical outlet alongside everything else and to see ‘the boys’ on the regular at band practice, without the need for the presence of alcohol to bring us together.

Photo 365 — Year 4

I also completed another year of my Photo 365 project. That’s four years of taking a photo every single day. I think 2026 will be the final year for this particular project; five years feels like enough, especially when I realised that five years represents roughly an eighth of my life!

Nevertheless, as is tradition here on the blog, here’s some highlights from 2025.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

The post 2025 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Public Thoughts, Private Room

I sat down late yesterday afternoon (Sunday) to write my weeknotes, and for 20 minutes, nothing came down my arms, out of my fingertips, and onto the screen.

On the one hand, this was surprising. Having written here week in, week out since January 2018, there’s always been ‘something’ to say. Some thought, some observation, some fragment of tohught to post.

Last year, I wrote at length about how this blog has been a place for ‘thinking in public‘, and that blogging in 2025 is owning and controlling one’s personal infrastructure. AA blog can be whatever you want it to be: “A blog can be a body of work. A map of obsessions. A garden. A reliquary. A trapdoor. A field report from your corner of the internet.”

People often talk about blogs as a kind of open diary. I think this is close to how I currently feel about writing here. Of course, I also make a podcast, make a zine, write here, etc. But one of the things I’m quite clear about is that this is a personal website, and my podcast is a personal podcast.

One thing I have refused is the niche. I wrote about this last year:

I have purposefully resisted the urge to ‘niche’ down. To turn this blog, or my podcast into a single subject show. Which I think/know has cost me in terms of ‘legibility’. But I don’t mind really. I’d rather be a complete person on the Internet, than a shallow slice chasing clout on a topic (Something I know that I could have done several times over the years had I wanted to)

But I realised this morning that my not having anything to say last night was because I did, in fact, have plenty of things to say. They all gushed out of me in my diary/journal this morning. But none of them were things that i would like to say on the Internet.

Over time, naturally, a blog becomes a collection an archive of public interests: In my case technology, culture, worlds, futures, Solarpunk, Saints, hardware, AI, whatever. But the key here is public. I have occasionally written on here about meditation, and people can guess from my readings section that I’m trying to make sense of a spiritual journey.

But as we all know, the internet isn’t real life, and one can never give a complete picture. Just because someone doesn’t write or post about something doesn’t mean they don’t care about it. And choosing not to write about certain things is, in a way, the opposite impulse of having a ‘niche’—of only writing about one topic.

But as we all know, the internet isn’t real life, and one can never give a complete picture. Just because someone doesn’t write or post about something doesn’t mean they don’t care about it. Something that social media I think confuses. And choosing not to write about certain things is, in a way, the opposite impulse of having a ‘niche’ and only writing about one topic.

I like that some things are just for me, and I think that’s healthy. In fact, sometimes I think or feel that people writing or talking about things that matter to me online is cringe. But I know this has far more to do with me than them. The cringe usually comes when the thing that matters becomes that person’s niche.

A blog is not—and never will be—the full contents of a mind. And proper diary remains a private room. And I’m okay with that.

In the end, the only niche here is what I choose to post online.

On The Blog

Accessions | 070525

The paperback edition of J David Osborne’s cyberpunk epic Gods Fare No Better arrived last week.

Photo-a-day for the month of April 2025

Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 4.Photo-a-day for the month of April.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• The big report is nearly finished
• Lots of notes written!
• Several meetings
• Huge break though with the meaning of life AMA

Terminal Access

I can’t recommend this Oral History of AI, and how LLM’s broke an entire field of computer science in 2019/20 enough

“On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched its experimental chatbot(opens a new tab). ChatGPT hit the NLP community like an asteroid.“

CHRISTOPHER POTTS: Somebody in our group got early access to the GPT-3 API. And I remember standing in my office, right where I’m standing now, thinking: I’m going to prompt it with some logic questions and it’s going to fail at them. I’m going to reveal that it has just memorized all the things that you’re so impressed by. I’m going to show you that this is a party trick.

I remember trying, and trying again. Then I had to fess up to the group: “Yeah, this is definitely much more than a party trick.”

Reading

I’m still reading Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation by Mark J.P. Wolf and once thats done i’m going to finish What Is a Dog? by Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger.

But after my apologia for my kindle last week and some synchronicities I started reading New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. I justify this by saying its been on my kindle for years – rather than it being a new acquisition. The book itself is alive. wow. I can see why this was a bestseller post war. It is however strange to be reading a text and be on the other side of knowing.

Viagra Boys – viagr aboys

New Viagra boys album is amazing. It’s very different subject matter to 2022’s Cave World. Instead of social commentary, it’s a reflection on the personal condition in contemporary society. The album is quite meta compared to their previous ones but there’s some real bangers on it full of sleezy riffs.

Two highlights below.

Remember Kids:

The post Public Thoughts, Private Room appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I wrote a long post last year reflecting on the 15th anniversary of this website, but let it’s ‘Sweet Sixteen‘ last month pass by unremarked.

Still, this popped up this morning: 15 years at WordPress.com.

Looking at my archives, I must have registered my wordpress account, posted my first post a month later and then not touched it again for another two years. Too busy messing about on social media 😩. For a long time, my ‘website’ and my blog lived on separate URLs. I didn’t unify them until October 2019, by which point I’d already been back blogging weekly for 18 months.

Anyway, I wrote some reflections on blogging on the train back to London after Christmas—notes for my year-in-review post that I never got round to finishing. They feel worth sharing, so here they are.

What is a blog for in 2025?

As is tradition, I spent the train ride back from The Chalk re-reading all my previous year-end posts. Each year, I’m drawn to different themes. In the past, it’s been understated comments on my mental health or state of mind. But this year, something else stood out. Written another lifetime ago, back in 2012:

the last few years i have done an end of year roundup thing on twitter. but it’s been a bit of a crazy year, so i wanted to document it somewhere a bit more concrete.

But where are all those twitter thread those threads now? How would anyone even find them? If they aren’t useful now, were they ever useful? Beyond generating the easy satisfaction of a few likes and retweets? Those posts are still out there, buried in the geologic substrata of Twitter’s database. Uncurrent and, by the logic of the ‘now,’ unimportant.

When I was getting started here, I mostly used this blog to only post a New Year’s Eve list of all the things I’d done that year, things I was proud of, etc. Many of my friends and contemporaries did the same. That simple decision by my 27-year-old self means I’ve now captured 9 of the last 12 years of my life on this blog—a decision I’m incredibly grateful for.

From the vantage point of 2025, it’s clear that even in 2012 I was already questioning the utility of social media. “A blog is more concrete“, I said. It still is.

That post from 2012 might well be the genesis of a theme that’s occupied this site ever since: my relationship with social media and the broader internet.

Going even further back, I found this:

i kinda took a break from a lot of things last year up until relatively recently. that break included spending some time away from the internet. i started a few projects and had some cool ideas – for example i was toying with the idea of doing ‘some kind’ of podcast/audio essays in place of actually writing a blog.

You know, 2012 me—you were onto something. A podcast or audio essays that double as blog posts is a brilliant idea! You should just do it. Don’t wait six more years until 2018! But when you finally make it happen, you’ll call it Permanently Moved Online—because that’s exactly how you’ll feel: moved online and unsure what to do with yourself.

It’s funny to think that even in 2012, I was taking breaks from the internet and staying off Twitter. It really is the story of my life.

10 years ago, I was already asking the same thing that many are STILL asking:

What are Blogs for? Brings me onto a major current of discussion that has been running in back channels and freely over beers this year. That discussion of the state of social media and, feelings towards it and how does one engage with it.

In 2015: Some friends have gone ‘write only’, others read only, Some have repurposed seizable personal accounts towards publishing ventures and others have gone full sekret account and time warped back to 2008 twitter. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving over to tumblr and publishing everything out to twitter ‘write only’ style too but i’m still not sure.

2015 was a major inflection point. In my memory, it’s the last gasp of the old web that everyone is now nostalgic for. Blogs lived alongside social media platforms. People still clicked links. You could drive traffic to what you were building off platform.

But I also remember the conversations in the pub in late 2015: why bother with blogs at all? Traffic was already declining, and platforms were consuming more and more of people’s time. Why have a blog when you could just build an audience micro-blogging? I asked myself the same question.

Then two more years passed, and everything was already enshittifying. January 2018, I returned here. I’ve been posting every week since.

In 2025 a blog is…

A blog is an addressable surface.
A hyperdimensional topology.

Each post sits within a web of references, tags, dates, and links—forming a layered geography of thought over time. It’s not a timeline, though it does have a feed. It’s not linear, like a newsletter archive. It’s a landscape you can traverse: sideways, diagonally, backwards. Stumble into a post from 2017 and find it speaking to something happening now, or as the author you can fall down a rabbit hole of old tags and finds a version of yourself you’d forgotten.

The only person responsible for enshittifying this website is me.
It’s the last place online where I can be self-determined and still find readers.

This year (2024), a number of people have quietly put their blogs out to pasture and moved to Substack. Some found significant financial success there and let their old domains wither on the vine. Others had already stepped away, keeping their blog as a kind of outpost—a notification hub pointing elsewhere.

It’s understandable. Platforms offer built-in audiences, easier monetisation, and the dopamine hit of instant feedback. But there’s a trade-off: you’re building a presence on rented land. You’re publishing into someone else’s box.

A blog in 2025 should be a destination.

They don’t just distribute—they accumulate. They hold time, build presence and concretise thought.

A blog can be a body of work. A map of obsessions. A garden. A reliquary. A trapdoor. A field report from your corner of the internet. It’s not just a personal publishing platform—it’s personal infrastructure.

It’s also a place to feel embedded in a wider conversation—an invisible web of peers, and island in an archipelago of friends, and fellow travellers. A blog connects you to a lineage, a neighbourhood, a commons, even if the replies come years later.

And once you realise that, it becomes clear why I keep coming back.

This space for me hasn’t become just about sharing—it’s about staying.

For the love of blarg, start a blog.

Great! Now I can delete it from my drafts. Sweet sixteen and still here.

The post Marking the Occasion :: 100425 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

For those who read this blog via RSS or follow me on any of the socials apart from Twitter, you will have noticed that the other night I tried out the new Social Notes feature in the Jetpack plugin from Automattic.

A separate microblog integrated tightly into a blog is going to be really useful thing! Simon Willison just coded one up, Molly White has had one for ages and think that here blog is the gold standard for where things should be headed for this sort of functionality.. There’s the whole Wordland thing going on and The Verge has it’s ‘hot take’ posts on the home page too.

After trying out Jetpack’s Social notes feature I think there’s some real potential here but I ran into a few issues and unexpected behaviours that I wanted to note down:

Unexpected Featured Image Behaviour

When you add a featured image to a social note, you do it inside the post body in a featured image block. This was unexpected?

In most cases in WordPress, featured images are set in the sidebar but in this case, it gets inserted directly into the body of the note?

This to me seems counter intuitive. If you’ve turned off linksharing in the sharing (see later note) in the settings, then the featured image won’t appear on social media in an embeded so it’s redundent. BIT you will see it on your blog.

Post Image Should Go in the Note, Not the Sidebar

Further to that, if you want to post an image that shows up on the social sites, you have to add the image as “attached media” in the sidebar????

That works fine for syndication. But if someone clicks through to the social post on my blog, the image isn’t there – as it’s not embedded as block.

Think about this use case:

I want to post a photo to BlueSky using Social Notes, I attach the media and write a caption in the body of the social note. I publish it.

The image and the caption appear on social media but the image doesn’t appear in the post on my site??

Example:

The post on Bluesky with image added as an attachement:

What this post looks like on my blog

This just feels weird?

I would have expected an image block to go in the body of the post – if you want to share an image on social media.

And then you set the featured image should be set in the sidebar—like how the rest of Gutenberg works.

Unexpected Title Behaviour

Social notes don’t have titles in the traditional WordPress schema–which makes sense. This used to be a problem but in 2025 most RSS readers can cope with this state of affairs.

Thing is however, the Social Notes post type admin screen does assign titles to them (the first however many characters) of the first sentence of the note:

But when Social Notes appear elsewhere in the Jetpack / WordPress UI (like Stats), all the social notes are assigned titles format like #NuMb3rs (untitled).

I think it would be better if they used the first 10–15 characters of the post content instead, maybe with “(Social Note) appended. Just having a bunch of numbers and “untitled” in the stats view isn’t very helpful.

Fallback Social Note Titles in RSS

I used some code I found on Reddit to put the social notes into my sites main RSS feed. But I didn’t like how they were styled of coming though in the RSS readers so I got Gemini 2.5 to write me this code snippet that injects “Microblog $date $time’ into the feed:

<?php

/**
 * Filter the post title in RSS feeds to provide a fallback for 'jetpack-social-note' CPTs.
 *
 * This generates a title like "Microblog [Date] [Time]" if the original title is empty for this CPT.
 * This function should be used IN ADDITION TO the function that adds the CPT to the feed query.
 *
 * @param string $title The current post title passed by the filter.
 * @return string The potentially modified post title for the feed.
 */
function thejaymo_filter_social_note_rss_title( $title ) {
    // Ensure we are processing an item within the main loop of a feed request.
    if ( ! is_feed() || ! in_the_loop() ) {
        return $title; // Return original title if not in the feed loop
    }

    // Get the global $post object to access post data like type and date.
    global $post;

    // Check if the current post object exists, is the correct CPT, AND its title is currently empty.
    if ( isset( $post ) && $post->post_type === 'jetpack-social-note' && trim( $title ) === '' ) {

        // Get the formatted date (e.g., "29 Mar 2025"). Adjust 'd M Y' if you prefer a different format.
        // See PHP date format documentation: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
        $post_date = get_the_date( 'd M Y', $post );

        // Get the formatted time (e.g., "03:32"). H = 24-hour format, i = minutes with leading zero.
        $post_time = get_the_time( 'H:i', $post );

        // Construct the new title string.
        $new_title = sprintf( 'Microblog %s %s', $post_date, $post_time );

        // Return the newly constructed title.
        return $new_title;
    }

    // If the conditions aren't met (not the right CPT, or title wasn't empty), return the original title.
    return $title;
}
// Add the filter to modify the title specifically for RSS feeds.
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'thejaymo_filter_social_note_rss_title' );

Output looks like this when you are using the pretty feeds plugin

I sort of think the ability to give it a default post title appearance should be in the settings.

As you can see in the screenshot further down, posts without titles when combined with yoasts plugin means social notes appear as -thejaymo -thejaymo in the embeds on the socials.

I Was Expecting Short Links to Use My Own Domain?

You can choose to include/attach links to your social note back to your blog when it gets posted on the socials. I tried using both the short URL and the indieweb Permashortcitation settings.

The short URL ended up being a wp.me link, which I wasn’t expecting? and it also appended the UTM source settings that jetpack also applies *after* the short link? which short of defeats the propose of using a URL shorter?

The Permashortcitation link was broken and didn’t link back to my blog at all.

Everything went through wp.me, and that wasn’t clearly indicated in the settings.

The behaviour I was expecting was for Jetpack to generate a shortlink using my own domain—something like thejaymo.net/shortlink—but it didn’t. I don’t know why I thought the Jetpack would do custom link shortening on my blog. But I did!

Author Details Are Weird in the RSS Feed

For various reasons of moving hosts several times over the last 15 years. I have two logins for my blog: a WordPress login and an admin login. I post everything from my admin account, but Jetpack uses my WordPress login for Social Notes, and there’s no way to change the author.

So in the RSS feed it shows my username – rather than my nickname.
I’d prefer it to show my name/nick name on the blog, not the login username.

Need Option to Set a Default Template for Social Notes

Social Notes don’t really work with my blogs theme. They have no titles, and also may or may not have featured images.

It would be useful to set a default layout template just for Social Notes, so they appear differently on my blog from normal single blog posts. Right now, I’m changing the template manually each time before/after publishing.

That’s one extra step to remember, and if this is meant to replace posting on social media, that extra friction isn’t helpful.

I Should Be Able to Rename the SN URL?

By default, the URL for Social Notes is thejaymo.net/sn/postID. I really don’t like the /sn/ part—SN doesn’t mean anything to anyone!!

The WordPress logic is usually to use full category names in the URL. I’d like to be able to change this to actually something like /Microblog.

For example, Molly White uses /micro/.

At the very least, the URL should use /social-notes/, not /sn/ !!!

This is quite the laundry list of things I think are weird about Jetpack’s Social Notes feature as they are in March 2025. I’m sort of inclined to wait and see if any of these things change.

The main deal breaker for me right now is the weird image behaviour and the post template styling. BUT I think its a great start! Avital step toward getting me to the point where I never have to log into social media ever again.

I think I might keep using them though?
Or I might just start using this notes category more often?

The post A Note on Jetpack Social Notes appeared first on thejaymo.net.

A Rediscovered Map

One of the benefits of keeping a diary for over a decade and a half is that you can revisit your past thoughts and feelings to see what was on your mind during similar times. Every morning, before I start my day, I read my previous “on this day” entries, and after breakfast, I write in my diary. It has become a sort of ongoing dialogue across time, as sometimes I respond to things I ask myself in earlier entries.

This week, I’ve been encountering a younger version of myself through these entries, and observing how my thoughts from years ago resonate today. In Episode #11 of my podcast, way back in 2018, I read a piece titled “In a Time Like This…”, written by a friend during the winter of 2016/2017. Yesterday, on November 9th, I stumbled across something my 31-year-old self had written in 2016, in a similar vein. I had completely forgotten about it, but re-reading it the other morning I remembered writing it in one sitting, across tube and train late at night – I was in quite a dark place.

It was a cringe-worthy piece in the style of a ‘Notes Toward a Manifesto’. Yet, reading it now, in November 2024, I realise it encapsulates the approach I’ve taken toward life and how I’ve conducted myself online ever since.

The core themes of this blog, my podcast, and much of the creative work I’ve been involved in since I left social media and returned to blogging in 2018 are all present in the text. It’s striking how much of what I’ve explored since seems to trace back to this entry—which, until this week, I had totally forgotten writing. Long-time readers and followers of my blog or podcast will likely recognise these ideas too, as they’ve quietly shaped everything I’ve written, recorded, and created over the years.

Maybe these Notes were, in some sense, a personal manifesto.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2016, with only a light edit:

The above is, of course, excruciatingly cringeworthy. Yet at the same time, everything is there—a map or a landscape of ideas that I’ve spent the last eight years exploring. When I wrote those words I was probably very drunk, but as the decade has unfolded, it seems I’ve acted upon them in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

I briefly considered going through my blog and podcast archives to link every instance where these ideas have surfaced. But that felt like too much effort. Instead, I invite you to click the ‘Random Post 🎲‘ link in my nav bar. I’d wager that within three clicks, you’ll stumble upon something shaped by the thoughts above.

Looking back, this process reinforces a truth I’ve come to believe: if you want to make meaningful change, you must first be honest with yourself. Strip away the facade, the expectations of the center, and write down what you genuinely believe—what you want, what you stand for. Don’t worry about how raw or unpolished it seems. The important part is to put it out there and then act on it.

Over time, those small acts of alignment—between what you believe and how you live—will accumulate. You’ll build a body of work, a way of being, that reflects the things you care about most. And maybe, when you look back years later, you’ll see not just how far you’ve come, but how much of that journey started with the courage to start.

On The Blog:

Oct 2024 | Photo 365

Photo-a-day for the month of October 2024.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Terminal Access

Ewen dropped this debut post/podcast episode into a Discord i’m in and I can’t recommend it enough!!

Incredibly well researched and produced. Fantastic sound design. I love to hear/read anyone make work and talk enthusiastically about things they are passionate about. Give it a listen!

Reading

I smashed though a re-read of Andy Weirs ‘The Martian’ in the car back from Wales … It wasn’t as good as I remember it – at all. The main character – astronaut Mark Watney – has an extremely Reddit brained personality. Quite an unpleasant character to be around for the length of a novel – 2015 was a long time ago… This might be a rare time where I say that the movie is better than the book.

Mount Eerie – Night Palace

Wow.

Remember Kids:

The post A Rediscovered Map appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Make The Thing

Last month on the pod I made the episode ‘Make Something To Your Taste‘. People said nice things about it – even if my own aesthetic choice/taste is not to theres.

One person who liked it was Jmac on mastodon from the blog Fogknife. My episode, in part, inspired him to make a new creative work of his own – also whilst documenting the progress in public. The project is Venthuffer:

Venthuffer is a series of monologues about the Steam Deck video game console. I realized in 2024 that I have become as much of a fan of this machine as I have for any piece of digital hardware since my years of deep identification with the Apple Macintosh, when I was much younger. This discovery surprised me a little, and I wanted a space to explore the reasons for it, out loud. Here it is.

It’s very personal and wonderfully produced, can’t wait for more. The first episode is about 5mins long too! which I very much approve of as you can imagine. lol

Now listen. I love this shit. It’s really inspiring. This is what the Internet is for. Make the thing, write thing thing, create the thing, whatever you want and share it. You don’t have to participate in the walled gardened social spaces or ‘play the game’ of getting a high score on social media.

You can just create the thing, own the thing, and share the thing on the Internet.

It’s this energy you can find on the on the web is something I think people are starting to rediscover.

While you can try to play the platform game. Like YouTube if you’re making videos, it’s a lot healthier and more productive to think of it as a free video hosting service instead of a social network or a platform.

I also do genuinely think we’re seeing a shift back to the open web. I know Venkat is retiring Ribbonfarm, (an end of an era) citing that blogs are ‘over’ and putting more of his energy into Substack. But to me, his whole post feels less like a statement on blogging and more a reflection of the effort he’s invested in other platforms. Blogging isn’t over – there’s so much vitality and creativity happening outside the big platforms, and I think audiences are catching on and finally rediscovering the hyperlink.

So, here’s my encouragement: if you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, making a podcast, or building your own corner of the web, just do it. Be like Jmac. Just make the thing.

The more of us there are putting things out, the better the web will be. The more people start blogs to blog about their lives and creative work – and not try and make passive income with Adsense or whatever blogging was in danger of turning into for a minute there – the more we bring back a richness and diversity that social media often flattens.

Create what you want, in your way, and share it on your terms. The open web needs it. We all do.

On The Blog:

Blue Ant Trilogy

Over the last few months, I’ve been in conversation with Eddie Rathke from Wolf Newsletter about William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy as part of his ongoing book club. Eddie has taken on the challenge of reading all of William Gibson’s books in order this year, and I joined him for the Blue Ant Trilogy, often known as the ‘Bigend Books.’

Permanently Moved

The New Economic Entertainment

It’s all converging. Autonomous AI agents like Truth Terminal, inside of VTubers, inside of virtual worlds, fully monetised with crypto tokens which powers the interactive in-show entertainment options. Imagine if Love Island was less scripted and more like The Sims. All of course, unfolding against the backdrop of the legalisation of sports betting in the United States, further accelerating the logic of the casino fusing into social media.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/10/26/2428-the-new-economic-entertainment/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• PROJECT FORK began – All day Booksprint #1 with Rival on Tuesday
• PROJECT DIVE had a long call with partner in crime
• Catch up about PROJECT DIVE
• Full Day on PROJECT ENTRY
• Call with Sarena @ World Weaver Press

Terminal Access

Eddie Rathke wrote a great piece this week: against the algorithm. Really recommend.

You might ask why I persist, why I deliberately write about things that alienate my potential audience.

I don’t have a great reason except that I am interested in reading deeply into something, into interrogating a subject and myself, into tracing trails of memory and the way art has bled into my life and shaped who and what I am.

And I do it for an audience much larger than I ever expected to have.

If all I wanted were the numbers to go up, I’d write about politics and especially culture war.

Also, and I can’t belive I’m saying this… Check out this 2.5h conversation between 1975’s Matty Healy and Joshua Citarella. It’s absolutely fantastic. They cover so much. Its really crazy how ‘mainstream’ outlets have pulled one sentence out of this long interview and turned it into a bit of a shitstorm. I guess swifties are masters of this.

Reading

The Lays of Marie de France I burnt though all 12 narrative poems this week. Absolutely fantastic. Can’t express how good it they were, all about courtly love. Here’s the blurb:

This is a prose translation of the lais or poems attributed to Marie de France. Little is known of her but she was probably the Abbess of the abbey at Shaftesbury in the late 12th century, illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and hence the half-sister of Henry II of England. It was to a king, and probably Henry II, that she dedicated these poems of adventure and love which were retellings of stories which she had heard from Breton minstrels. She is regarded as the most talented French poet of the medieval period.

Been really inspired by this book. I think I’m going to read some more of the Knightly Tales

Still on deck: Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

Nervous Gender – Music From Hell (2023 Re-Release)

This amazing documentary on the history of West Coast Punk and the ‘Chinatown Punk Wars’ came up on my Tumblr feed the other day, as I follow the Alice Bag hashtag (previously on the blog).

Anyways about 2/3rds of the way though the documentary it brings up a band called ‘Nervous Gender’. The founders of what today would be known as the queercore movement.

Music from Hell is just that. Distorted keyboards and synthesizers with punk as fuck lyrics screaming, yelling and shouting over the top. Monsters is the opening track on the album and ROCKS hard. The album sounds as fresh now in 2024 as it did when it came out in 1981.

In fact, hearing it in back 1981 or seeing them support Psychic TV or NON in the early 80’s must have felt like an alien landing in your life. Especially when you consider that ‘The Birdie Song’ spent 7 weeks in the top 10 in 1981 in the UKt:g

Remember Kids:

The post Make The Thing appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I’ve been talking recently in a group chat of bloggers and website owners about the nature of having an online identity in the post-peak social world we find ourselves in. The social landscape is changing, and that also means there are opportunities to rethink the ‘role of the homepage.’

A couple of years ago, I wrote about How I Use the Web, and How and Where You Can Follow Me which now needs an update as I’ve decided to make some changes to the underlying infrastructure of my online presence:

Bringing It Home

I recently read Mandy Brown’s brilliant piece, Coming Home, over at A Working Library, where she talks about the importance of having a homepage and writing a blog. Two lines really stood out:

The first is about the importance of things being located within a body of work:

Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work.

And the second is about the context of that location:

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context.

For a long time, I’ve been scattered across platforms, apps, and social networks. This sense of fragmentation got me thinking: What if I brought everything back to a central hub? Tracy Durnell’s blog / homepage is somewhat of an inspiration here—it’s very comprehensive, as is Brown’s aforementioned A Working Library. That’s where the idea of taking ownership over context rather than just content came from. It’s not about hosting your material everywhere, but about how it all connects.

This gathering process led me to create two new subdomains, each designed to bring ‘parts of me’ home.

tumblr.thejaymo.net

The first act of this ‘gathering’ has been to re-house my personal Tumblr at tumblr.thejaymo.net.

I love Tumblr, and honestly, it’s my favourite social network. This move wasn’t about “owning” my Tumblr content—I could do that anywhere—but it was about creating the right environment for that content within the broader context of who I am online and this blog.

I still want to participate in Tumblr’s network, but by bringing my profile there under my own domain, I’m reclaiming the context just a little bit.

You can now follow my Tumblr from that URL and add it to your RSS readers if you like.

links.thejaymo.net

The second is a more significant change. I’ve made the decision to move away from pinboard.in as my primary bookmarking tool – despite being paid up there until 2034! After trying out several services, I’ve settled on raindrop.io as my new service of choice.

Since Dipping the Stacks is one of the most popular parts of my Weeknotes, I thought I should do a little more with it. For a long time, I’ve had a firehose link blog (the RSS feed from my Pinboard), so it made sense to turn this into more of ‘a thing.’

I’ve been following Jason Kottke and Andy Baio for the best part of 20 years. Link blogging has a long and venerable tradition, and I’d like to join in. So I’ve created the subdomain: links.thejaymo.net.

The webpage itself should update twice a day, displaying my most recent bookmarks. However, there’s a bit of magic that happens when you subscribe to the full RSS link feed at links.thejaymo.net/feed – you get my Raindrop.io XML.

To make this work, I had ChatGPT write some Cloudflare Worker code. (For those unfamiliar, Cloudflare Workers are scripts that run on Cloudflare’s servers, allowing you to handle data like web traffic or APIs without needing your own server.) In this case, the script pulls my Raindrop.io RSS/XML feed and directs it to thejaymo.net’s links subdomain. I’m just running it in production with no idea if it’s well-written or not—lol.

This means that if I ever decide to move to another bookmarking tool, I can just update my Worker script, and subscribers won’t notice any disruption. In essence, I’ve made myself my own middleman.

I would appreciate it if those of you who previously subscribed to my full-fat Pinboard RSS feed would make the leap to links.thejaymo.net so I can check my logs and debug a few things!! Please let me know if you do subscribe, and which reader you use. Thanks!

If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll consider using some kind of syndication plugin and blogging each of my bookmarks as pages on the subdomain blog and revert back to the native WordPress RSS—but we’ll see!

Owning Context, Not Just Content

I recently built thejaymo.info which returns a super-snappy ‘link in bio’ style page—rather than using some external service. It makes me wonder: What else can I move into or under my own domain?

Owning the context seems like something that other bloggers and indieweb folks can explore, especially as more and more people are feeling fragmented by today’s social platforms. In the age of algorithm-driven feeds, reclaiming your online identity—where you decide how your content is framed and displayed—gives us back a sense of control. By reclaiming the context, I’m deciding how my content lives and breathes online. It’s not just about ‘owning’ the material itself but shaping the environment it’s in. Context influences how people perceive your work, and owning that context means aligning it with your voice, ethos, and values—without any interference.

This reflects the ethos of the decentralized web—using tools and technologies to keep things open, interoperable, and within my control.

I’m trying to take practical steps to gather everything together—social media or link-sharing—whilst still having a unified hub. It also preserves a sense of web independence—whatever that means in today’s fragmented online world—but it feels like the right move. There’s value in bringing it all home.

If you’ve been though the process of consolidating or rethinking your own online presence, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it—what tools have worked for you and what have you brought home?

The post Bringing it home appeared first on thejaymo.net.

A Complete Person

In the past week or so, I’ve been unfollowing accounts across all social platforms. I even (to my own surprise) removed some blogs from my feed reader. It wasn’t triggered by anything in particular that these accounts posted, said, or did. I just felt the need to trim down and prune the broader media ecology I’ve gathered around me.

This reminds me of what I wrote at the end of 2022 about ‘Stepping Away From Noise‘. It was a personal behavior I aimed to cultivate and embrace. Earlier this year, I expanded on that idea in a post about ‘Strategic Indifference‘—a two-step dance: one step toward what matters, one step away from what doesn’t. An advanced form of stepping away, really.

I genuinely feel like I’m nearing the end of a long period or cycle in my life. It’s been a journey of Avoiding news (something I wrote about in 2018) and taking control of my attention. There’s a great deal of froth and blather in the wider cultural and psychic domain that I simply don’t care about anymore.

I’ve managed to extract myself from the clutches of social media and learned not to have an oversized emotional reaction to things happening in the wider world that I can do nothing about. Maybe this is just getting older, but it’s been a six-year process of figuring out where I stand and who I am in relation to this vast semiotic megastructure that is culture. Learning how to feel was a first step., which evolved into a practice of say.act.feel.

One thing I’ve noticed about writing and posting online week after week, year after year, is that a body of work is produced through the work of the body. Thoughts and ideas get laid down, posted, and as time progresses, threads of thought emerge. You can only really see them all in hindsight, like when you pull on a loose thread from a jumper and it reveals how it weaves through the fabric.

Everything I post here is a draft—a way of ‘thinking in public.’ It’s a public note to self. I know that some people who consider themselves ‘writers’ struggle with the informality of this medium in practice. Even those who write a lot of Substack newsletters can fall into the trap of thinking, ‘I must have something to say.’ You can write whatever you want on the Internet most people in fact do! It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to be finished, or edited.

As of now, this blog contains over three-quarters of a million words. At the rate things are going, it won’t be long until it reaches a million. That’s a lot of thinking and writing in public. It’s a lot of documenting my life, writing about the things I’ve been thinking, doing, making, creating, reading, and listening to.

I have purposefully resisted the urge to ‘niche’ down. To turn this blog, or my podcast into a single subject show. Which I think/know has cost me in terms of ‘legibility’. But I don’t mind really. I’d rather be a complete person on the Internet, than a shallow slice chasing clout on a topic (Something I know that I could have done several times over the years had I wanted to)

I’ve gained quite a few new subscribers recently, and I often wonder what they must think of all this after stumbling upon my website. Every viewer might be a new reader. So, I try to link to other posts in newer ones (as I have above) to embed my current ‘public thoughts’ in a hyper-contextual web of older ‘public thoughts.’ Doing this makes the blog more solid, almost sculptural. It becomes a piece or place of hyper media.

I am very grateful that its all here in one place, searchable and to some extent mostly well organised by category. Even though there’s plenty I choose not to share—like a burlesque or fan dance, revealing only what I want—it still feels more authentic than anything I could ever post on social media. But then again maybe its a confused mess?

Social media, with its short-form content and fleeting interactions, just doesn’t hold my interest anymore. It lacks the depth and permanence the I value, and how I engage with the world. Here, on this blog, I can explore ideas fully, document my journey, and build something that lasts. It’s where I feel most at home online, where I can be myself—both revealing and reserved, public and private.

So, while I continue to prune and refine my digital landscape – and how I interact with it, this blog will remain a constant. This is my corner of the internet, and I’m glad it’s all here in one place.

Experience.Computer

https://experience.computer/rss

Episode 2 of Season 2 of my interview podcast went out this week. This month I lead award-winning narrative designer, and writer Meghna Jayanth through a series of imaginative exercises:

ABOUT THE GUEST

MEGHNA JAYANTH is an award-winning narrative designer, writer and speaker. Her work is focused on subverting the capitalist-colonialist fantasies, pleasures and designs that dominate the imaginaries of video games, and rethinking protagonism.

Her work includes Thirsty Suitors, 80 Days, Sable, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Boyfriend Dungeon, This War of Mine and Sunless Sea. She is currently working on All Rise, an inappropriately joyous game about climate crisis and corporate criminals.

Permanently Moved

Cathedral of Screens

Thoughts From An Apple Store

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/08/31/2421-cathedral-of-screens/

 Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/

• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Attended an AGM in advisory capacity
• Lots of SEKRET project thinking – some notes – on hold till burning man ends
• More work on the long essays/zines – nearly finished first draft of part 2
• Long call about Roblox and culture
• Recorded for Wolf pod

Terminal Access

I really enjoyed the long read Toward AI Realism by Holly Lewis in Spectre Journal. Well worth opening in a new tab and spending some time with the whole essay.

Capital is not aiming to produce self-aware machines. Firms that give little thought to the rich internal lives of their meat-bag workers probably aren’t overly concerned about developing machines with deep thoughts. The hope seems to be for obedient, cost-cutting, productive things. And also for destructive things.

StampFans

I wrote a quick note on the blog this week about physical newsletter service StampFans:

StampFans, which launched in February is another sign that the ‘Real things for real people‘ culture that I want to be a part of, create and participate in, is growing.

Dipping the Stacks

Cultural Stasis Produces Fewer Cheesy Relics like Rocky IV

are artists themselves choosing to reduce aesthetic risk-taking in their art? In an era where past and present songs all exist on the same Spotify playlist, few musical artists would want to create songs that may be ridiculed as passé a few years later. And all artists have the historical knowledge that helps them avoid mistakes of the past like Rocky IV. But this result — a lack of embarrassing relics — is what makes us feel that culture is less healthy.

Three pass writing

I don’t exactly outline, but I do write in some sort of iterative top-down way. I’d already noticed that I tend to write in three rough passes for most of my writing, both technical writing and blog posts. This isn’t some method I stick rigidly to, it just seems to work out that way for me. In practice there’s some mixing between the passes, but they’re still pretty distinct.

The World Is Assuming A Pre-War Posture

Recent talk of a new Cold War has already subsided as applied historians instead invoke the more ominous experience of rigid alliance systems in Europe being drawn into world war in 1914 by incidents at the margins of empire.

Inventing the Roleplaying Game: The First “Game Master”

Gary Gygax and David Arneson are credited as the creators of D&D in 1974, it would be incorrect to say that they created the practice of tabletop roleplaying – the roots of which trace back to tabletop wargames and board games

Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy

But, like an old iPhone battery, the vital charge that used to fuel our lives is trending precipitously downwards. Our phones aren’t solely to blame for the lack of sexy vibes in the world, but they play a central role. Nothing about our phones is sexy—from the things they allow us to do, to how they feel to use, to what they ultimately symbolize.

This wasn’t always the case.

Reading

Still reading Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

Still reading Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio

Both these books are much longer than I thought when I started them on kindle!

I needed something to switch my brain off so I finally got round to listening to the 40k book Wrath of the Lost by Chris Forrester.

This morning I was out of bed late, because I burnt through ALL of Barret Brown’ prison memoir My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir. Read it all in one sitting. Great book.

OAK – Woodfolk

Recently discovered Bristol based ‘drone folk’ band WoodFolk. Their 2024 EP OAK is fantastic. It’s very English, but the pump bellows are replaced by looped guitar drones.

Exactly the sort of music that needs to get made, and needs doing in our current era. It’s absolutely fantastic music.

Remember Kids:

The post A Complete Person appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Dog Roses

The evening is getting on here. It’s 21.45 as I sit down to write a few brief words. Then I’ll go though the launch sequence and hit publish. Then I’ll have closed out the week.

I went to see the fiddle player from my country band’s other country band, The Dog Roses.

They played two sets, so my afternoon and evening were spent hanging out with friends against a backdrop of rock and roll with a bluegrass edge. It was a good time.

Permanently Moved

A Menagerie of Models

I’ve come to think of the collection of tools I use as a kind of menagerie of models. I thought I’d share how I use them. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/08/24/2420-a-menagerie-of-models/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

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Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

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Forest Bed

This is a reminder that my band is playing the Lodgchella All Dayer @ Woody’s Bar in Kingston on the 31st August next weekend.

We’ll be bringing our brand of psyched-up electric folk and alt-country rock to the festival at 5.15pm. If you are around South London and up for some late August summer music come down! Just 30mins from Waterloo!

To celebrate 1 year since our EP came out we’ve dropped the price of the EP to pay what you want on bandcamp, and our tote bag is £7.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Sent a bunch of Experience.Computer invites
• Hours of research for the SEKRT Project
• Had dinner with Benedict from Rival Strategy
• Had a call with designer Mark Hurrell
• Worked on the SoloRPG Journalling text
  • Did the layout for part 1
  • Covers

Terminal Access

I may have to write a separate post on how good this is, but for now, SDLR over at his newsletter Scenes With Simon just posted A Fan’s Mega-IP Playbook.

Drop the over-reliance and sanctity on canon, tier production and start smaller with more teams, and stick with teams for longer on smaller scales of execution. From this, you can eventually scale to execute at much bigger levels of production with more certainty. You’re also then doing right by not only the fans, but also the creative talent.

This whole post is extremely World Running read it!

The Doc Web

I wrote a long post about my experiences publishing both PDF’s and ‘live collections’ on line and how The Doc Web acts as a kind of greynet. Not quite public, not quite dark forest.

Social media is no longer reliable for reaching an audience. But maybe there’s a weird way forward? 

Dipping the Stacks

The United States Of Cults

Yes, add up all the cults and it makes a difference. But we don’t have one cult with the power of network television or terrestrial radio in the last century. Things have changed, but the sensibility of the public and the news media has not.

The Internet Is Not Boring, You Are – by Felix Futzbucker

Adults are bored because they’ve forgotten how to play, how to explore, how to engage with the world around them. They’ve outsourced their curiosity to algorithms, their creativity to AI, their sense of wonder to VR headsets.

Why Anthropic’s Artifacts may be this year’s most important AI feature: Unveiling the interface battle | VentureBeat

By creating a space where AI-generated content can be easily edited, refined, and incorporated into ongoing projects, Anthropic is bridging the gap between AI as a tool and AI as a teammate.

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine

Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually see an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.

Why bigger isn’t better: towards small scale worlding

All of the friends and artists I mentioned above fit into this definition of “Worlding.” Rather than just living inside of our single Big World, they are energized to put effort into creating smaller, simulations of worlds that they can call their own.

Reading

I burnt though Spook Country this week by William Gibson, in preparation for the next discussion on Wolf Pod with Eddie Rathke.

Still reading Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

Still reading Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio

Infinite Exile – The Archaic Epidemic

With late summer coming on and the first edge of autumn in the air I needed something that fits my mood. The Archaic Epidemic’s new album Infinite Exile ticked the box.

Extreme riffs with beat downs so heavy they hurt, double pedal fast and blast drums, and yappy and deep vocal exchanges. The whole thing is chaotic from start to finish. They remind me a bit of Shadow of Intent but not as symphonic as all that – which is unsurprising as the album is mixed and produced by Christian Donaldson from Suffocation.

Anyways. If you like to punish yourself, this is a great album to get you’re ears around:

Remember Kids:

The post A Dog Rose Hello appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Back Again

This post is coming to you (back) from it’s new (old) host.

After 5 years I’ve moved back in with Automattic and wordpress.com. A three year hosting plan with them was the same price (at the steep discount the offered) as a 2 year plan with my old host. Plus, I get a whole bunch of paid Jetpack features thrown in that I was paying for on top of my hosting plan. I was also sick of some complicated issues I was having on the admin side of things i’ve been having for a while – so here we are.

Apologies are in order to folks reading via RSS, I know you all got a vomit of posts in your readers during the week – nothing ever goes completely to plan! I must share this – Automattic did my migration for me for free. They ran into issues with the move and since they are the experts they fixed them. They also fixed some very broken slow saving and editing posts issues I’ve had on the admin side for over a year, ever since my old host moved from LAMP to Nginx.

Moving a 14 year blog isn’t easy – which is why I’m super glad they did it for free and not me LOL. But the level of customer support I got from them was absolutely top notch. The fact they managed to fix all the admin crashes and slow saving is a miracle. Not a bad word to say about the experience at all. Right now I’m in mind to say that if people are self hosting, and have renewals coming up, actually have a look at the WordPress business level plan.

You get Github deployments, a staging site, realtime server monitoring, logs access, SFTP/SSH access, phpmyadmin sql access, edge caching and more. everything you need.

Running a website costs money. I don’t think people talk about this enough.

Anyways, I’m not going to shill Automattic any further as I’m still cross about their nickel and dimeing approach else where in their business. But I will say that these business practices were an influence on my decision on moving back to the motherships orbit and find some cost savings.

A Weeknotes Note

A note to people who read the newsletter:

Now I’m back on WordPress I seem to have some more settings in my newsletter admin screen(?) but maybe it’s just that I haven’t looked into it for a long time. Either way, I’m going to focus a little bit more on the email newsletter side of things.

I’m aware that email subscribers have been suffering though weird layouts and strange broken grey boxes for years… So I’m going to work these long term issues and I hope I will get resolved over the next few posts as I tweak things.

Folks reading via Apple mail should have already have seen an vast improvement (Thanks Tobias for the head up!).

I seem to now have the option to add a ‘read more’ link to emails. Whats going to happen is that notebook/rss club posts will stay as RSS only, other posts you might be interested in will be sent with short except with ‘read more’, and the podcast and newsletter will go out as full emails as normal.

How does this sound to you? You can now reply directly to me by email with your thoughts!

Permanently Moved

Shaping Thought

The games designer seeks to influence the structure of thought. Manipulating the kinds of thoughts the player thinks while playing the game.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/08/17/2419-shaping-thought/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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

• Going to be working 1 day a week on a cool education project for a bit – I think. Waiting to see contracts etc.
• Saw some buddies and hug out in their new office
• Drinks with Tobias Revell in town
• Worked on Sekert Project
• Wrote a whole bunch of world running notes.
  • Some of which became this weeks pod
• Wrote a big long note to self about ‘the doc web’ and post social publishing
• Added 10 more slides to the master book planning projects
• Wrote some more about journalling games

Terminal Access

Over on his blog, Wayne continues to document his geophysical art practice PhD, which involves being buried alive. A recent post recounted experiments of being buried in his garden with a snorkel.

Second, believing (correctly) that I will never be able to predict the exact onset of an earthquake I myself did not cause, and that if I am to ever catch a wild quake, I’ll have to fish for it patiently from within the earth, I needed to work out a reliable breathing system to remain underground for longer, much longer, than the two minutes or so I had managed wearing no protection but pool googles and an N95 mask the first time Deb Chachra buried me entirely.

Talking Pattern Recognition

Dipping the Stacks

The Long-Term Impact of Gamergate – by M L Clark

There’s something crushingly immature about the idea that all our broader political systems could have been brought low by such a tangled mess of petty resentments lurking in gaming communities, and given malevolent form through just a few online forums where most people post silly memes and watch cat videos.

With Goals, FAST Beats SMART

Goals can drive strategy execution but only when they are aligned with strategic priorities, account for critical interdependencies across silos, and enable course corrections as circumstances change. If these conditions aren’t met, every employee could achieve their individual goals, but the organization as a whole could still fail to execute its strategy.

Are animals conscious? We’re finally realising that many species are | New Scientist

Science is at last confirming what many people have long suspected – that mammals, birds and perhaps some invertebrates have elements of consciousness

Sustainable Queer Farm in Guerneville Fighting Climate Change – Thrillist

“We created this impossible checklist of things we wanted, and we found this incredible spot in Guerneville that checked all the boxes,” explains Schwanz. The spot, a degraded piece of land once (over)used as a horse property and conveniently located in a queer town, presented a ripe opportunity to imprint their climate activism and share it with others.

Electric mopeds grow in Mexico City, but regulation lags – Rest of World

Many distributors hawk electric mopeds as electric bicycles, but users like Javier García, a clothing retailer, disagree. “As an [electric] bicycle, it’s hard [to ride],” he told Rest of World. “It’s heavy, difficult, and you can’t last a kilometer” pedaling on it.

Reading

I finished reading Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story by Caroline Lucas. It’s a really good book, an exploration – or collecting together mythic elements we might use to constitute an English identity for the 21st Century.

Still reading Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

Still reading Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio

Beabadoobee – This Is How Tomorrow Moves

You know what? This is album is fricking great. She played round here on Thursday launching the album so I could have gone to see her! Unfortunatly zoomers zoomed and got all the tickets – which is a same.

Beabadoobee is everywhere right now, bringing guitars to play during brat summer. Ever Seen is my fav song on the album. I love the organ/synth lines and the plucked steels all the way though.

Rick Ruben did a great interview with her going though the album track by track if this is your sort of thing:

Remember Kids:

The post Back Again appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Weeknotes

The good Tracy Durnell wrote about why they write #weeknotes earlier this week and I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, especially as this edition reaches the 350 milestone. Also, a big thanks to Tracy for shouting this very blog in the post! *waves at new readers*.

I’m going to pull the same quote as Paul did also writing about Tracy’s post:

Weeknotes are a means to shape my own behavior. Headings serve as prompts: knowing I have a slot in the template waiting for me to fill in on Fridays is a reminder — and motivation — for me to do things that I value but might not make time for (like listen to new music). Because I design my own format, weeknotes reinforce my priorities.

This is it exactly it – Bang on.

I went back and looked at my first proper #weeknotes from 2018 and tried to put myself in the headspace I was in back then. I started these #weeknotes back then to track and externalise my goals in public. Funnily enough the post is called ‘Minister of My Own Labor’. If headings serve as prompts as tracy says then the structure of these #weeknotes with which you are all so familiar now is there already:

A bit of narrative essay up to – LOL I’m talking about how I hate news and trying to disconnect from social media (nothing changes), I write about what work I’d done that week as I was setting myself up as a freelancer, I talked about what I was reading and I wrote about what music was good. It’s all there.

I seem to remember that I was inspired to write and format my #weeknotes from Dan Hon’s Things That Caught My Attention Newsletter, and Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations. I also remember that I put the music section at the bottom because I listen to a lot of music and I think its important to share ones taste in such matters at every possible opportunity.

As the years slipped by and my audience grew my #weeknotes sort of morphed into a newsletter. Sections have come and gone but the core of it has stayed the same. I’ve often thought about giving these #weeknotes a snappy name, making it a newsletter, but then they would become something else – and I’m fine with it how it is. This is my blog, my little home page on the Internet that also sends emails when I choose to send them.

But ultimately the important thing is that my #weeknotes are still achieving the thing I wanted them to back when I started them. Just like Tracy:

Weeknotes let me externalize my internal goals. I’ve had trouble sticking to goals I’ve set for myself in the past, with external accountability being a much more powerful driver. They provide gentle accountability through publishing them publicly. Committing to publishing gives me a specific time to do them and helps me follow through on actually completing the weeknotes.

It feels like #weeknotes have been a thing ‘forever’ but Matt Webb(!) wrote the first proper #weeknotes back 2009 – which is quite late in the blogging era!

Matt wrote about the pre-history of #weeknotes in 2018 and it’s has always been interesting to me that they emerged from companies – ones that people with existing blogging practices working at them obviously – they created a sort of public transparent diary for a shared project – which I really appreciate.

Another well known UK tech bod Matt Jukes wrote about ‘The Why of Weeknotes‘ back in 2017 whilst still being a tech / project based thing personal #weeknotes were emerging at the time. (Btw Jukes’ article also mentions Dan and Warren as inspirations)

Like anything blogging benefits from practice and I just wanted the discipline of a weekly commitment. I certainly didn’t expect anyone to read them — they were / are a very selfish format of writing — introspective to a fault. When everyone else has been about the ‘quantified self’ I was more about ‘qualitative self’ 🙂

Personal #weeknotes have taken over the baton in many places around the blogosphere (though I always write #weeknotes at work when I’m managing a project of any sufficient duration) and my own #weeknotes have now been running for 6 years, which is a lot of weeks – 350 of em! LOL. But Matts three elements I think still hole true across the spectrum who’s writing them and why:

However the weeknotes format has evolved, I think three qualities endure:

• some kind of rhythm. Obviously. Weekly? Probably. Possibly. Aspirationally anyway.
• a feeling of being in the middle of things. The rhythm helps with that: a regular sampling frequency means you don’t just report on projects and ideas when they’re finished, which is the normal temptation. Benefit: the “work in progress” feeling encourages others to jump in.
• written by an individual. The person with the conch might change week to week, but in my view the single perspective is vital. Individuals have fully rounded interests: yes this person is reporting on projects, but they’re also alive with feelings, and oh by the way they’ve also gone out and got ice creams for the office because it was hot this week.

I’ll add a last: the joy of weeknotes is just as much in the writing as the reading.

Aside from Tracy’s blog, here are some of the #weeknotes that are currently active in my RSS reader:

• Doug Belshaw
• Adam Englebright
• Giles Turnbull
• Neil Williams
• Garrett Coakley
• Benjy Stanton
• Paul Graham Raven

If you write #weeknotes and read mine please comment with a link below!

PermanentlyMoved

Summer Doings

What I’ve been up to and where I am elsewhere on the web this summer

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/08/04/2417-summer-doings/

• Solarpunk Is Dreaming Green: https://youtu.be/Xq16vAsB18Q
• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• My Zine! https://thejaymo.net/zine

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Went for drinks with Matt Webb
• Went for drinks with Mat in my band
• Long call and a meeting about the Sekret Project
  • Lots of ‘Notion dumping’
  • Steelmanning objections to the idea. took all day
• Call with Goblin from tonk.gg
• Did some consulting on Vtubers – wild that this blog post is still literally paying dividends.
• Started reading/researching internal family systems as its very important for game design reasons.

Terminal Access

Following Robert Downey Jr’s return the MCU as Dr Doom Simon de la Rouviere did a really cool exploration of worlds and audience types. Any blogpost that has a 2×2 like this in it is OK by me!

The audience is actively present outside the story.

This is where I put RDJ’s recasting as Dr. Doom. Even if there’s an eventual in-universe reason (somehow it’s a Tony Stark variant or something), it treats a usually passive awareness in cast choice as now actively engaging its audience. The audience is present in the story through a strange meta-attachment to the story itself. Regardless of what the in-universe explanation is (or isn’t), fans will relate to their feelings of OG RDJ as Iron Man. It’s not breaking a 4th wall, but some 5th wall, because it asks the story to not only leave its domain into the audience, but to bring it back into the story. The audience isn’t just present, but has become a conduit.

On the Blog

History of Computing Books

I blurbed and wrote up a long list of all the history of computing books i’ve read over the last few years

Dipping the Stacks

How Actors Remember Their Lines | The MIT Press Reader

In the course of studying the poem, he came to a deep understanding of Milton. Said Basinger: During the incessant repetition of Milton’s words, I really began to listen to them, and every now and then as the poem began to take shape in my mind, an insight would come, an understanding, a delicious possibility.

Tech Reviewers Write Reviews for Each Other, Not for the Public

It’s similar with CPUs/SoCs and laptops – marketing and reviews overemphasize performance to a degree that just doesn’t match the lived experience of most consumers.

The Paradigm Wars—Part 3: A Wrench in the Fabric of Reality: a new paradigm?

I offer the following hypothesis: we are living through—and part of—a paradigm break between those on the side of ‘the machine’—the matrix of man-made, techno-pharmacological dominance of nature, culture, mind, body, soul and spirit—and those for whom this mechanistic paradigm has reached its end.

The lawsuit that could bring reggaetón to its knees

According to the legal complaint, the defendants have sampled and “mathematically copied” for decades what in the meantime had become the Dem Bow rhythm.

Teenagers Incur Unpayable Emotional Debt by Living at the Speed of Light

We’re always grieving because there’s no time to just be. No customs tie the world together. No culture is shared except that of distraction and addiction. We can’t sit in silence or solitude because there’s this constant buzzing noise and we’re never alone even if we always feel lonely.

Reading

I enjoyed Steve Lyons’ Death Korps of Krieg book Siege of Vraks so much I burnt though ‘Dead Men Walking’. It was very Warhammer 40k, explosions. Grimness. Death.

I inhaled the audio book of A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age this week. So good.

In one of those weeks where I’m in between finishing books. I have A lot on the go right now:

• Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Holis
• Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio
• Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner
• I also read a short novella as a test reader that someone sent me.

Fatal Attraction – Katie Malco

My old friend Katie Malco unfortunately has seen her rehearsal studio burn down. She and a lot of other people have lost all their equipment.

Putting this fundraiser link here incase anyone is feeling generous.

Here’s a video of her new single recorded in one of the empty parts of the the lock up days before the fire:

The full single features Laura Stevenson and has a great video.

Remember Kids:

The post Weeknotes 350 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Somewhere Inside The Network

Warren and Pete posted some thoughts on my recent show about ‘Surface Flatness‘. Both of them had some great points, and I, like they, said in various variations have some ‘half baked thoughts’.

Warren I think agreed with the diagnosis but rejected the prescription(?). Instead of my call for activist RVTRN to creating hypermedia, he brought in the idea of the flâneur:

The flâneur concept is not limited to someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a “complete philosophical way of living and thinking”, and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s essay “Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile”.[31] Taleb further set this term with a positive connotation referring to anyone pursuing open, flexible plans, in opposition to the negative “touristification”, which he defines as the pursuit of an overly orderly plan.

And (I think) suggests that rather than making hypertexts we should embrace and enjoy ourselves exploring. Making unplanned horizontal journeys across the web. Which is sort of where we were in 2019 the last time there was some Inter-Isle blog dialogue on a similar subject – waldenpoding. I’m with him 100% on the gogglebox analogy though. We can just leave the walled gardens of platforms to the sort of people who enjoy themselves at theme parks.

Leave ’em to it. Network tv isn’t all of broadcast culture, just as the big platforms aren’t all of internet culture, and all that shit is still hyperlinked. Leave the platforms to it. Go for a walk and report your notes.

Pete on the other hand, influenced by his recent 90’s zine archiving project, came at the flatness from a different angle:

I was really struck when going through my 1990s zines at the diversity of style and content compared with the homogeneity of whatever we might define as online culture, and I think this comes from a comparative paucity of interconnectivity and shared language across all zines. You’d see tropes evolve in pockets but nothing on the scale of memes like the Wojak characters. The internet is like water – it flows along the fastest route and wants to become an ocean, which is maybe antithetical to sustaining weird edgelands culture.

I need to think about all this further to be honest. ‘Blogging’ despite the uptick in the medium and hobby post web 2.0 social media meltdown is basically still dead. All the energy: the return to long form thoughts in public, comments, ‘writing’ etc could be happening on the open web. Instead it’s happening inside of the walled garden of Substack. A platform that has ‘bottled up blogging’ and platformitized it with two important features regular blogging doesn’t do very well: Recommendations/discoverability and number go up subscriber mechanics.

My initial attempt to connect both Warren and Petes responses however goes something like this.

Let us imagine our internet flâneur upon logging on is like a drop of water falling from the sky. We hit the ground at our starting point, and our journey across the web is the route the water flows. If left to our own devices in the current landscape we will reach the ocean and the flatness as quickly as possible

One of the big memes about water in Permaculture is ‘slow it, spread it, sink it‘. Meaning you want to slow the decent of water across a landscape as much as possible, spread it out, sink as much as you can before it leaves your land. Keyline design is all about slowing and moving water from the valleys back out the ridges – hydrating and enriching the whole ecosystem.

Perhaps this is what blogs are about? The more generous you are with links to other peoples ideas, the more you engage in dialogue with others, the more embedded the post becomes within the vast hyper structure we ‘call the web’. You provide an opportunities to further the length of other peoples journey. If you’re lucky you can add 2/3/4 more hops across the web, before you hit the ocean.

Which between all of us (bloggers and writers on the open web in general), we provide a calmer pond, and create an slower moving eddys around ideas and communities. Enriching the ecosystem due to the slower movement.

Coming back to this after a break AFK I’m now thinking that there is something important about the circulation of ideas themselves – not just people – in a hyperstucture made with hypertext. On social media thoughts / memes / funny quips / hot takes are made important by their acceleration towards the ocean as quickly as possible. More RT’s and shares = more better.

But on the open web, and to a lesser extent on Substack, creating stable hyper dimensional networks, sculptures, and lattices of thought, are more important.

I’m reminded of Tensegrity

Tensegrity, tensional integrity or floating compression is a structural principle based on a system of isolated components under compression inside a network of continuous tension, and arranged in such a way that the compressed members (usually bars or struts) do not touch each other while the prestressed tensioned members (usually cables or tendons) delineate the system spatially

The idea is fully expressed somewhere inside the network of links and discussions between people. Not anywhere in particular.

I swear someone like Rebecca Blood wrote about this 25 years ago in her book The Weblog Handbook. But skimming my kindle, I don’t seem to find it.

IRL

My friend Anna Bingham has a current show at 1 Paved Court in Richmond, London.

She is showing her current ceramic work and paintings, as part of the galleries White Noise Take Over. We went to the private view during the week.

I love seeing my friends work on show:

Permanently Moved

The Origins of Modern Bureaucracy

Where did modern bureaucracy come from? Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, the Father of the Military Academy, or the ‘man who made West Point’. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/07/07/2414-the-origins-of-modern-bureaucracy/

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Subscribe to my zine
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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Lunch with Cade from NDC
• Spent all day with @_deepfates … plotting
• Election running around
• Writing
• Had a brief, but very useful conversation with Paul Czege
• Surprise brthday dinner for/with Scheme Boy!
• Approached some folks about doing some work but no dice 🙁

Terminal Access

I was on AgitatorPod recently talking to Kelby about Hit Parade of Tears, the second Izumi Suziki anthology from Verso. It was a great chat. Kelby is really holding the fort whilst co-host JDO is away on summer break.

Dipping the Stacks

Who are we talking to when we talk to these bots? | by Colin Fraser | Medium

But digging deeper, one encounters some nagging follow-up questions about ChatGPT’s account of itself. A language model is a very specific thing: a probability distribution over sequences of words. So we’re talking to a probability distribution? That’s like saying we’re talking to a parabola. Who is actually on the other side of the chat?

Folksong is the art of hard labour, not of environmentalism | Aeon Essays

Folk songs are workers’ songs, and if you look at human history our work has been to chop, dig, scour, subjugate, hunt, harness, seize and plunder. It’s the work of innumerable human hands and, as we’ve gone about this work, in the woods, in the hills, on the open sea, folk music has been our soundtrack.

Can I have your attention please? – time spent offline

It’s not up to you to decide if psychic energy is used, it is used, but, and this is the best part, the most freeing, life-affirming, delightful fact, it is up to you to decide, to choose, how your attention is used. You can choose, daily, moment to moment, what you pay attention to and in the process create the reality you desire: A world mostly good; People mostly delightful; You, too, like most people, mostly wonderful.

Your choice, your reality.

Coming of Age in the 21st Century – by Tomas Pueyo

Neither the biological nor the intellectual rites of passage into adulthood prepare children for the technological world. If the Church is so adamant about warning against temptation, how does it not help children deal with the technological temptations of doomscrolling, fake news, or cyberbullying?

Death of the Blockbuster or Birth of a New Hollywood?

When TikTok is banned, Hollywood will need to meet the emerging youth with something smart and relevant. It must learn how to stop worrying and love the mind. It seems to have already stopped worrying and love the bomb.

Reading

I finished Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the ‘Weird Cult’ by David S. Wills. Its a super in depth biography and shows just how deep its influence had on his life and work. The cut up method directly falls out of his interest in scientology. I also love little anecdotes like ‘during the same time this essay was being written Burroughs was engaged in a magical war to curse his local coffee shop’

I finished Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz. Unlike Chayka’s Filterworld Lorenz focuses on the people and personalities of social media and its development. A couple of take aways include: Paris Hilton GOAT, Twitter has always been fucking it at every single turn, bloggers did it all first. The hangover from the idea of ‘Selling out’ into the 00’s did weird things to people’s brains on the early on. Just as Joanne’s book’s subtile is How a Person Became a User I sort of feel somewhere in Extremely Online is another book How a Friend Became a Follower.

Still reading  Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis. Dear lord what a book.

I have been reading a mountain of non-fiction recently so cleansed the pallet with some Warhammer. I’m reading the Horus Heresy Anthology Tallarn. Once I’m done with it I’ll be starting my re-read of Gibson’s the Blueant Trilogy for discussion on Wolf Podcast.

Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window – Cole Pulice & Fire-Toolz

Never in a million years would I thought that Cole Pulice and Fire-Toolz would make a collabo track – but here we are. This track is wild. Its not the wall to wall noise you would usually find on a Fire-toolz track. Instead we hear strange emo vocals over distorted guitar, and very laid back melodic electro pop. Then Pulice arrives on the track with a blistering sax solo. Great stuff. Can’t wait for the new album!

Who cares about mainstream pop music when you can listen to stuff like this?

Remember Kids:

The post Somewhere Inside The Network appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Not The Sort Of Person I Want To Be Online

It would be so so easy for me to open my blog editor every week and vent and rant about the state of the world. About how crazy everything is, how detached and divorced from reality so much of the media is, how the Internet isn’t real life. But I don’t.

Back in 2018 I made an episode of 301 called ‘removed excess salt‘ it was an ‘angry rant about having opinions on gammons’. At the time I said the following about it:

I really am not very happy with the podcast this week. Both with its content and execution. I didn’t have a hook or a topic when I started which hasn’t been the case since i started marking like 25 weeks ago – ish.

It is an interesting that this week I experienced the feeling of ‘knowing you can put something out and not like it at all’ but nevertheless you hit publish and it’s out there in the world.’

I actually feel really good about the fact i did that, even if the episode itself i think its meh. I’m going to be really focusing some reflection time in on this for the week.

In retrospect this episode was a turning point in my relationship to ‘posting stuff on the Internet’. The first is that its ok to put stuff out on the Internet that your not 100% happy with. If you worry about it you’ll never post anything. The second came a few weeks later when I made another episode at the end of 2018 and never put it out. It was another rant. After making/editing it I decided that it didn’t add anything productive to any conversation so I never put it out.

It’s not that I wasn’t 100% happy with ‘the lost episode’ its that it was entirely negative content. Was of no value at all to anyone.

Now, lets acknowledge that a large proportion of the Internet’s bread and butter content is being negative and scathing about things for clicks, likes and attention. But I honestly think being negative about things all the time is unhealthy. Both for the creator and the audience. And at the end of the day that’s not the sort of person I want to be IRL or online. I’ve been that person and it did me no favours.

It was that around the time of excess salt, which was after my first year back blogging weekly and making Permanently Moved that I decided that I wanted my website to be my homepage on the World Wide Web. If you wan’t to know what I’m up to head to my website.

On the one hand this was a massive strategic error as it was exactly the time that the social platforms started to turn the dial down on referral traffic – a trend that got progressively worse during the pandemic era – and now if you have a blog you can basically ignore social media as a place to drive people to your site.

On the other, going back to blogging multiple times a week in 2018 was the best decision I’ve ever made. I was in a conversation recently and ‘I wrote about this on my blog back in 2021, here’s the link/social proof’ was a far more powerful line than ‘I tweeted about this‘ at the time.

Which was the main argument in one of my most popular posts Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog

That smart important take blasted out in a Twitter thread is going to quickly sink down though the chummy social media seas into the deep never to be seen again. Yes, some people might bookmark It. Others might bookmark the thread reader version. But this is no substitute for hauling those important thoughts out of the private social seas on to dry land of your own Blogging Island. Safe. Permanent. Secure. And most importantly – Linkable and Searchable.

I don’t want to be part of a negative Internet, so I choose not to add to it. I don’t see any value in doing cynicism as a service. There’s enough negativity out there without me piling on. Instead, I aim to post things that I think is going to be beneficial for both my readers and myself.

I want to only have things online that I can stand by. The thoughts I’ve had in public should be useful to me and others 3/4/5 even 10 years down the line. Referenced, revisited, and built upon. I don’t write anything here thats written specifically for clicks and likes. Which being negative an Internet cheat code for.

Of course it’s nice when other people do link to my writing and when people share my blog with others – it’s always a thrill – and of course I’m interested in growing my audience online – who isn’t?

I bring all this up not to blog about blogging, but because I want to reflect on social media for a moment. I’ve been more and more disconnected from it for quite some time now.

But – to echo a friend in a similar position in my DMs this week – When I do log in to social media to ‘check the post’ I glimpse the feed in the same way as you see a moment of linear programming when you turn on the TV before the games console boots.

And it just seems all so mad. An alternate bizarro world of negativity, full of ranting and raving. I can’t belive I marinated myself in it all for so so long. It doesn’t matter what platform either. Take your pick: Bluesky, Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, and to a far less an extent (ironically) Tumblr are all full of unhinged over-posters and vicious swarm outrage and petty beefs. Its wild.

I don’t ever want to participate in (or tolerate) that sort of behaviour in the online spaces I frequent. So I’ll just keep blogging here. In fact I’m doubling down on ‘the personal website vibes‘. If you want to ever know what I’m up to, you’ll know where to find me online, I’ll be here.

To everyone who has found me here. Wether you reads this blog via e-mail, web browser or rss a really big thank you.

I Have An Ask

This website is not sustainable.

Blogging and making stuff online is expensive.

I very rarely make this direct an ask on my blog perhaps I should more often.

In the next few weeks, my website hosting is going up, my podcast hosting is going up tp, plus the software I use for making podcasts is enshittifying and the licence costs are about to double for the same level of experience AND earlier this year I had to pay a copyright strike for sharing meme on my blog. It cost me nearly two months rent and lots of stress.

If you like my non-negative online writing or have ever found something of value in my work. Please consider subscribing to thejaymo.net and supporting it.

If you subscribe before Wednesday 26th then you’ll catch the print run of Issue #10 of my postal zine Start Select Reset.

Permanently Moved

Surface Flatness

Don’t you think that the surface of the Internet feels super flat right now? I don’t just mean it’s UX but the whole internet.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/06/22/2412-surface-flatness/

Support the show! 
Subscribe to my zine
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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• AW Floating Worlds drinks in Central London
• Pre-call for a podcast I’m going to be on
• Recording an episode of Agitator with Kelby tonight
• Returned to my mediation book for the first time in months and did an edit pass on the first 6-8k words
• Worked on SSRZ issue #10 – posting this week!
• Noodling on the business idea

Terminal Access

Loved this essay from Alan Jacobs last month on the idea of the ‘Attention Cottage’

We think we should be living in the chaotic, cacophanous megalopolis and retreat to our cottage only in desperate circumstances. But the reverse is true: our attention cottage should be our home, our secure base, the place from which we set out on our adventures in contemporaneity and to which we always make our nostos.

Dipping the Stacks

Traveling At The Speed Of The Soul – NOEMA

Of the three stages of a pilgrimage — departure, initiation and return — the last is the least examined and perhaps most important.

We’ve Gotta Play SOMETHING – Aftermath

Marjaa: The Battle Of The Hotels | Mayssa Jallad | Ruptured Records

“Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels” is a concept album born of the idea of merging singer/songwriter Mayssa Jallad’s two vocations: music and urban research/architectural history. Written in collaboration with producer Fadi Tabbal, the music builds upon Tabbal’s spatial approach to sound and Jallad’s research on Beirut’s Hotel District.

Flying planes with JavaScript | are-we-flying

Instead, we’re writing a web page that can control an autopilot running in JS that, in turn, controls a little virtual aeroplane. And by “little” I actually mean “most aeroplanes in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020” because as it turns out, MSFS comes with an API that can be used to both query and set values

Writers and talkers and leaders, oh my! | everything changes

Talkers need to recognize that not everyone loves to think out loud, and that giving space for writing is part of what it means to make use of the best brains around you. Writers need to remember that writing isn’t some perfected ideal of thinking and that making space for the messy, chaotic, and improvisational work of talking things out is often exactly what a team needs to create change. Whichever mode you prefer, it’s not feasible to abstain from the other; doing good, collaborat…

Reading

The only book I finished reading this week is Close Your Mouth: Buteyko Breathing Clinic Self Help Manual by Patrick McKeown. The second breathing book of the year. Its good. I found the focus on breath holds on the exhale to build up carbon dioxide tolerance very interesting.

Apart from that i’m still chugging away on

Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds by Joseph Laycock. Its about D&Ds relationship to the satanic panic

As I’m spending less and less time on the Internet for recreation these days my desire to read is only increasing, so in a fit of madness I started three new books this week 😬

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis
Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the ‘Weird Cult’ by David S. Wills
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik

The only one that I’ve finished is Dealers of Lightning. It’s a short compact history and tbh is one of the most frustrating computer books I’ve read. Xerox PARC is a major lesson in corporate inertia and conservatism.

Charli xcx – The girl, so confusing version with lorde

Look, the new Charli xcx album is great. A real moment in her career, vindication maybe, the product of a lot of hard work. There’s not much to say about it other than bravo.

The track The girl Is one of my favourites and there was a lot of speculation online about who it was about, what beef is this, is she talking about Lorde? Then in a crazy move this week the remix dropped and features Lorde! Wild.

OG track Charlie: Lorde do u hate me??
Remix track Lorde: Girl i have DEPRESSION

It’s such a wild move. Love it.

Remember Kids:

The post Not The Sort Of Person I Want To Be appeared first on thejaymo.net.

TABlog 1

Idea for TABlog is to semi-regularly list the open tabs I have open, and explain why. I haven’t read them yet, so I can’t comment on their content, but I figure we all have reasons for keeping tabs open and around.

Here’s the 3 questions:

How many tabs do you have open right now?
What are they?
And why do you have them open?

I’m sure this isn’t a new idea, but I think its cool. I wanna know what Tabs you have open too. If you post one one of these on your own blog let me know in the comments or fire a webmention.

Excluding the tab I’m writing this post in I have 4 tabs open.

Which is actually a lot for me. Todays tabs are whats left over from the last few days of being on the web. Here’s whats on deck:

Designing Neural Media

I haven’t seen K IRL since just before the pandemic, so it’s been a long while. I’m looking forward to watching their talk on Neural Media. Sterling linked it on his new(ish) Art Maker blog the other day.

I listened to K’s discussion with the New Models crew a few weeks ago, and I’m interested to hear more/a deep dive in the presentation on their McLuhan-esq four phases of media: Broadcast, Immersive, Network and now Neural.

Models All The Way Down

Apparently this piece/essay has been online for a while, but it’s new to me and instantly knew I wanted to give it my full attention the moment I scrolled down. I love visual essays and obviously I’m interested in the topic. I’m a sucker for pages that look like this and really want to do something like this myself.

On Trust Infrastructure

Arnaud spoke at the Floating Worlds zine launch conference the other month. His Trust Infrastructure essay came up in conversation on Wednesday several times. I glanced over it when it came out, but didn’t give it my full attention. But since it seems to have influenced a lot of people, I’m going to read it to find out why.

How to think in writing

I skipped over this in my RSS reader when it came out on the 25th of April because .. TLDR. But I’ve seen it linked to twice this week on different Discords. I think its a long exploration of the argument ‘Writing helps you think more clearly’. Gonna have to read it to find out.

Permanently Moved

Going Deep

There’s a word we used to use in the 1980’s and 90’s to describe a user with such a deep understanding of a technological-system. A Wizard.

Tetris players have gone so deep, and become such powerful wizards, that they can avoid the end of the world. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/05/04/2407-going-deep/

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Subscribe to my zine
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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• More work on P2 of writing the impossible object essay
• Recorded another episode of Experience.Computer for S2
• Met with the boys from Tonk.GG
• Joined a couple of group calls tail end of this week celebrating the launch of redstone and following the on-chain games news.
  • Laughed at a lot of DeFi farmers
• Had a lot of conversations with people following up from last weeks podcast.

I’m open for work.

Terminal Access

MagLite Solitaire LED Upgrade

A few years ago Eve got me a MagLite Solitaire AAA torch for Christmas. I recently came across an LED conversion kit for it.

Friends and pals over at 0xSalon just published the script (and an in-line glossary of terms) of their theatrical project THE BLACK HOLE OF MONEY. A play about Bitcoin and proof of work that premiered at click festival Denmark 2022:

Spanning the entire 21st century, we are guided by our narrator—a time-travelling cowboy—across multiple parallel timelines originating from present day events. Bitcoin mediates a game of chicken between capital, ecology and the humans who scramble to coordinate and respond to the crises it creates. Characters represent the principal stakeholders in the Bitcoin economy, and their emissaries. Faced with Earth’s quickening deterioration, Earth’s unwitting protagonists can adopt various strategies: acceleration of the quest for limitless energy, attempt to tame Bitcoin with regulation, conducting insurrectionary uprisings, or acquiescence to the new machine god. 

Wild to me that a Salon/Reading group can generate enough escape velocity to do something like this post pandemic. Why isn’t there anything like this in London?

To answer my own question: RENT AND LACK OF SPACE

Dipping the Stacks

DSM Disorders Disappear in Statistical Clustering of Psychiatric Symptoms

many classic DSM disorders do not emerge as identifiable syndromes in these analyses.

Age of Empires (or, How Microsoft Got in on Games) The Digital Antiquarian

The arrival of Age of Empires signaled a new era of interest and engagement with games by the most daunting single corporate power in the broader field of computing in general.

A Playable Documentary of the Best Game Designer You’ve Never Heard Of – CNET

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, a whole playable documentary-meets-game-archive created by Digital Eclipse

Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone – Our World in Data

This gap is a problem. 60% of workers in low-income countries are employed in agriculture, arguably the most weather-dependent sector. Most are small-scale farmers, who are often extremely poor.

Here’s Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever

If lobbying your grocery managers sounds like a futile effort, look at the changes that have rippled through the tomato industry as breeders re-embrace heirlooms.

Reading

I finished ‘Voice of the whirlwind‘ by Jon Williams. The 1987 follow up novel to the cyberpunk classic Hardwired. Like the first novel in the series, it holds up extremely well compared to other books of the era. I can only describe it as The Expanse+Altered Carbon+Hardwired. Must have blown the domes of people when it came out that’s for sure.

I finished Cal Newports ‘Slow Productivity’. It was alright. Didn’t really wider issues is have with personal organisation. But did enjoy the Missions, Projects, Goals, Tasks taxonomy.

Still reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. Its a bit of a slog, but i’m only reading one chapter a night so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I smashed though the audio book of Kyle Chayka’s newest book Filterworld. It’s really good. A wide-ranging book looking at the effects the last 15 years of algorithmically mediated culture as shaped society and culture. I don’t think it contains anything ‘new’ to the sorts of people who read this blog, but its nice to have it all in one place and valuable book to point other people toward. I liked show the Chayka repeatedly returns to airspace and coffeeshop culture in every chapter.

The Doober – Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes

I’ve been listening to this collab album between Jazz saxophonist Gendel and Bassist Wilkes.

The whole album is absolutely amazing. The whole album has this wonky nostalgic vibe. Like you’re listening to jazz from the future sent back in time. I really don’t know how to describe it. Other than I like it. A lot.

Remember Kids:

The post TABlog 1 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Blogging is a medium, and within that medium there are styles of blogging – well covered 22 years ago I The Weblog Handbook!

With the death of Web2, I’ve been feeling the need to change my own style of blogging for a while. Make my site/domain the only place I really post to on the Internet.

Over the last few years – Colin Walker quipped in an email a while ago – thejaymo.net is a blog that’s ‘stable with a clear sense of identity’. The reason for that stability has been technical rather than though any design of my own.

For as long as this blog has existed, I’ve used the Jetpack plugin to generate an email version of my posts that gets zapped to people subscribed via email as a ‘newsletter’.

But the definition of newsletters and what is expected from an email subscription/notification has changed dramatically over the last half decade. And along side that cultural change, so has changed the number of people subscribed to this blog via email. As my email list grew, so did my anxiety about the sorts of things I was writing and posting to my blog.

Peoples inboxes are a private space and should be respected. I didn’t want to suddenly change my ‘communication style’ and flood people’s inboxes with emails when they had come to expect a certain stability of receiving my podcast, weeknotes + other occasional posts via email. That just felt like a massive breach of trust.

BUT! Jetpack have just introduced a ‘post only‘ function! Which – with this test post – should mean that this post should only appear on my blog and in my RSS feed, and not get zapped into peoples inboxes.

For people subscribed to my blog via email, nothing is going to change. The stable cadence of podcast and weeknotes emails will be maintained. The only major change will be the addition of a new section to my weeknotes, linking to posts I’ve made (if any) during the week.

But for those of you subscribed via RSS there’ll be more casual posts from me incoming. Bare with me as I develop and explore what I want to do.

RSS Club started on the Indieweb in late 2022, with Dave Rupert leading the charge:

Congratulations on joining a secret society! If you’re reading this, that means my message has been transmitted successfully. This post is only available to you, Reader, through the ancient peer-to-peer syndication medium of RSS. I hope you are enjoying reading it in your Web 2.0 era feed reader.

RSS club has some rules:

1st rule of RSS Club is “Don’t Talk About RSS Club”.

2nd rule of RSS Club is “Don’t Share on Social Media”.

3rd rule of RSS Club is “Provide Value”.

Don’t talk about it. Let people find it. Make it worthwhile.

But I’m not exactly one for rules:

Some RSS Club bloggers hide their RSS only posts from the front end of their site entirely. I won’t be doing that.

And as always, if you ever see anything of value here feel free to link to it or share it!

What RSS Club (for me) really means, is a bifurcation of my online readership into newsletter subscribers and rss subscribers.

Long time bloggers (You know who you are) are reading this in your RSS readers right now probably thinking: *wait what Jay’s making a big song and dance about posting more on his blog and the big deal is that some of those posts won’t be sent out as emails ?*

And you’d be correct. I’M FREE.

Until the the other day, I have been technically unable to post more on my blog without fear of spamming peoples inboxes.

Plus, as long time readers will know I LOVE RSS: Here Are Some Posts About RSS. At the end of the day. I just wanna post more, and having those posts flow out into RSS readers and not into your email. Besides it’s what RSS is for after all, taming the firehose.

RSS is a more casual feed destination than email or social media. It’s lack of stats or any kind of feedback is just what I need now that i’m flying blind on that front. I’ll press publish and it’ll goes out onto the blog and out to my RSS. Nice.

Speaking of RSS. I recently installed Matt Webb’s pretty-feed-v3.xsl on the site.

It’s restyled my RSS/Atom feed, making it friendly for humans viewers. It’s also cool that includes a link to his fantastic resource aboutfeeds.com.

As a totally not technical person I ended up installing Matthias Pfefferle‘s pretty feeds plugin from github and i’m really happy with it.

Anyways, here’s to my new found freedom from email notifications 🍻

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