Just Sad

It has frankly, been a shit week. My friend Gordon White died.

A loss of a force and a friendship that has been consistent for a quarter of my life. I have so much to say, but can’t find the words just now. Just sad.

Grief is a process that has only a beginning, so I am trying not to mistake this first darkness for the whole sky.

My heart goes out to James, his family, and friends x

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Reading

Still reading Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun by Keza MacDonald. It’s very engaging drawing on a careers worth of 1-2-1 interviews and archival reporting.

Parlour Greens – Emeralds (LP)

Soul/jazz/funk super group Parlour Greens have a new album out and damn…. the pocket on this album is craze. Funky as hell.

Remember Kids:

The post Just Sad | Weeknotes #439 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Nice To See You

I went back to the chalk at the weekend to see my parents. The main mission was to top and tail my last visit back in November when I got the Christmas stuff down from the loft for them. This visit I took all the boxes back up again.

But, I also went to a friend’s birthday whilst I was there and had a lot of conversations with people I haven’t seen since my early 20s. Fun, but a bit strange. It meant I had a dozen or so variations on the same conversation:

Them: “Hi Jay! nice to see you!”
Me: “You too! So then, what’s happened with you in the last TWENTY YEARS?”
Them: “Same!”

It’s the sort of question that feels like an assault on your sense of narrative identity. The gap between the lived density of a life and socially acceptable summary is … weird. Also, given the context of who you used to be the last time you knew each other, and everything that has happened, what do you say?

You can’t explain who you’ve become to people who only knew the “before” version of you. You can’t hand someone the texture of your inner life or explain how your values or sense of self has shifted without sounding like you’re giving a TED Talk in a kitchen doorway at a houseparty.

Most of us I think choose the “socially acceptable summary” in this situation. We compress twenty years of mess and growth into a few “milestones.” But standing there, reciting my life’s highlights multipul times inside of an hour, I realised the summary only works in the past tense.

It might be just my Aphantasia and SDAM talking ,but this sort of summary turns your life into a sequence of closed chapters. You end up talking about yourself as if you’re a character in a book you just finished reading. Like a narrator giving an account of someone else’s adventures.

I really enjoyed the party, but it’s left me with a lot to think about. I think I’d like to speak to my friends about their own narrative identity and how they experience it.

On The Blog

2025 – Annual Review

After skipping my reflections on 2024 last year, I realised at some point during 2025 that writing these ‘year in review‘ things on here have become quite important ritual for me.

It is after all how the blog more or less got started way back in 2012, and without it, my year feels somewhat ‘unarchived’, the previous year bceoms a collection of events without a cohesive narrative put down and published.

I sat down last week intending to write this in one shot, but it quickly became a 5,000-word monster

Big shout out to everyone thats shared this, or been in touch! glad its helped deepen thinking etc

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Wrote my 2025 year in review post (see above)
• Wrote a conference abstract – call tomorrow about it with an *actual* expert
• Wrote and submitted a solarpunk talk/session proposal for a UK conference in the summer
• Final edit on 1/10th 302.
• More calls with folks experiencing vibe coding mania lol

Terminal Access

Andrew Dana Hudson has a new story out “Pursuant to the Agreement” which can be found in the ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination anthology Our Radioactive Neighbors. Here’s what ADH had to say about it:

My group got interested in that bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, and we devised a story, told in documents, about trying to keep such a facility going over decades — decades in which America experiences a profound political crisis that sees the breakup of the Union. Back in 2023 this “Great American Fracture” felt like a distant possibility.

Reading

I finished reading King of Dogs by Andrew Edwards. It’s one of the best fiction novels I’ve read in ages. Its full/total operator competency porn but absolutely like nothing I’ve ever read in the genre. The main character is a fascinating person to spend time with inside their head. Also, this book has one of the best and most realistic feeling chase scenes I’ve ever read.

As a Soviet-style collapse unfolds in America, Grayson, equal parts philosopher and warrior but legitimately neither, makes a death-bed promise to watch over a couple with a child on the way. Driven by his own severe loss, he must make good on his promise, and carry the psychic consequences as he races headlong into the fallout of our imploding civilization. Set in the hallucinatory desert southwest, populated with hunter-killer teams, awash with refugees, third-country mercenaries, and hostile, conspiring elites, King of Dogs pits the beauty of language and western philosophical ideals against the deep depravity and violent decay of our times.

IAN – Come On Everybody, Let’s Do Nothing!

Post-Metal noise rock isn’t for everyone. But this album is for me. IAN are an immensely powerful riff band from London. The whole album is a mix of crunchy grinding doom riffs, screaming vocals and violin which come together in a way that i can only describe as foggy, or maybe that moment when the bechamel goes gloopy in the pan.

This track rules.

Remember Kids:

The post Nice To See You | Weeknotes #423 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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!
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As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

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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.

Back From Sri Lanka

I’ve been back from Sri Lanka for a couple of days now, it already seems hard to belive that a week ago I was sitting on the golden yellow sands of Negumbo Beach.

Pervious to that I had been on Mirissa for NYE, and before that Tangelle beach.

Tangalle is one of the most amazing beaches I’ve ever been on, totally empty. My Trip wasn’t all beaches tho. The first 2/3rds of the trip was wall to wall mountain hiking and jungle adventures.

We passed though both Kandy and Ella. Kandy is the site of the temple to the Buddha’s Tooth, and it was really interesting being somewhere that has been a tourist site for like 1500 years. I didn’t take any photos in the temple, but it was a very place and experience. Puja was just ending as we arrived.

Other than the food, which is absolutely amazing where ever you are — I basically ate curry for breakfast lunch and dinner even at some of hotel breakfast buffets (I completely understand the appeal of daal and milk rice now) and Kottu for lunch every day.

One of the highlights of the trip was going to Udawalawe. We spent nearly 10/15 mins completely alone in the Safari just after dawn with a wild elephant and her baby. No more than 3 meters way. Amazing.

Tourism is completely mediated by the smart phone over there, but without any middle men. There’s a total lack of intermediary ‘apps’. I’m exaggerating slightly, but it feels like you can literally WhatsApp any shop or hotel in the country with a question, and expect a reply within a few hours. Its amazing. I can’t imagine what south asian people/tourists arriving in the UK must think — What do you mean I can’t WhatsApp Premier Inn?.

Sri Lanka is an amazing country, way more of an ‘adventure’ than previous trips to Thailand or Indonesia. If you have ever thought about going to Sri Lanka, but have been on the fence, I really recommend it.

Getting Around In Sri Lanka

Also to close out this ‘holiday posting’ indulgence massive shout out to Real Lanka Holidays. We used them for all our taxi’s and transfers for the whole three weeks we were there. We initally booked them to pick us up from the airport, but eveyrthing is done by whatsapp, and you can just message them any time to say ‘we need a cab from x to y at this time on z day’ and they’ll sort it out. Amazing service. 100% recommend them.

On The Blog

On my return I found my blog overrun with bot traffic. I’ve had to turn on some stricter tools in cloudflare. If your RSS reader is no longer updating please get in touch (not that you would even know, as you won’t be reading this)

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Since I’ve been back, I’ve basically been setting the mech cockpit up for 2026. Updated spreadsheets, planning etc.

Started work on my 2025 reflection post and took a look at editing the opening of episode 302

Terminal Access

Bix was interviewed as part of Manu Moreale’s People and Blogs series.

Reading

I started a lot of books on hliday but only managed to finish a couple.

Whilst I was away I read / finished the following:

Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time by Ken Liu
The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson
The Solar War by John French
Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places by James Hollis
Berserker Club by J. David OsborneBand

Remember Kids:

The post Back From Sri Lanka appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Forest Bed Double Set – Surbiton – Thursday 20th Nov

My band is playing a double set at The Lamb in Surbiton on Thursday I think we’re playing about 90mins of material. If you are in London and at a loose end on Thursday night why not head down to Surbiton and see us play?

Honestly London people, I know zone 6 sounds far away, but you you can be at The Lamb, in the warm, and have a pint in your hand, inside of 20mins if you get the fast train from Waterloo! Come down!

Them Guts Again

Ugh! Seriously, how is it already this late on a Tuesday evening? I swear, time is moving at warp speed right now. So last week was an absolute WEEK, and this one is shaping up to be similar but for very different reasons.

I had a colonoscopy on Tuesday last week. Thats probably all you really need to know. lol.

Anyways, this most recent procedure marked my fourth since I was first diagnosed with Crohn’s disease way back when I was 17. So it meant yet another deeply glamorous visit to the Endoscopy ward at my local hospital. Last time I went for the other end, the Endoscopist joked about my needing a stamp card I’ve been so many times. lol.

If you’ve never had a colonoscopy, let me tell you it’s a whole thing. You can’t just rock up and get it done. A few days beforehand you have to stop eating fibre, which sounds easy until you realise that means basically you don’t get to eat anything nice and or tasty for 4 days. I tried to get excited about the novelty of eating white bread again, but then I actually had some and remembered immediately why I never buy it. It’s just sweet, salty, disappointment and air.

Then there’s the day before, everyone tells you “the prep is the worst part” and they are not wrong. Taking the laxatives is just a miserable experience thats a full day of nothing but self pity.

Anyways, the operation itself was fine. Being a pro at it at this point, I always firm it and just opt for gas and air only, with no sedation, so I can just leave as soon as they’re done with me and go home to my own bed. The staff are always lovely, very calm and kind, and they talk you through what they’re doing. It’s still not what I’d call fun, but compared to the prep it’s honestly not that bad.

The not fun bit, for me, comes afterwards. I’ve got a few complications left over from an operation I had in my early twenties, which means recovery is a much slower and more painful process than it is for most people. So whilst the hospital bit was in-and-out, the days after were not. I basically shuffled around the flat like John Wayne, feeling quite sorry for myself for a few days.

The good news to this sob story however, is that I got this result:

It’s quite wild really. It’s taken 23 years from being in the ICU and getting diagnosed, to being in full remission. And quite possibly (fingers crossed) a very strong chance I might come off my medication next year. Which is going to be really weird.

By the time I started to feel even vaguely human again it was the weekend. I technically had deadlines. There were things I could have done; probably things I should have done. Instead I did absolutely none of them and played video games. Zero regrets.

Sunday was fully booked though, as I had an all day band / 6 hour practice in prep for the show on Thursday and the best thing about it was that I took my slippers with me to the studio. What a life hack to only just discover in your 40s!

Yesterday I swung in the opposite direction and spent the whole day in deep research mode. Then today I booked tickets to head back to Berlin again for 3 nights before the month ends. I’m free Friday lunch time (28th) if anyone is about/wants to meet up.

I’m just writing this now late having got back from another 3 hour band practice. Come to our gig!

On The Blog

Nothing posted her since last week! In the meantime why not head over to my other blog Byenne? and catch up on the last week of posts?

Some stories live on the surface.

Others live underneath.

Those are the ones

you trip over

years later.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• FINISHED EPISODE 302 TEXT 😮‍💨
• Two long calls in a project adversary capacity
• Thats it

Terminal Access

No written recommendation this week. Instead I highly recommend this 2h long documentary that got dropped on youtube with little fanfare about two brothers going on a year long birdwatching road trip. I won’t say any more than that other than its a very easy 2 hours. Fantastically produced. Brilliant indie film making.

Reading

I finished Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira. A delightful collection of short essays. Very well handled, reads much like his retreat Q&A’s

I’m still reading Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova but I also started reading Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete on Alan Chapman‘s recommendation its a monster. Huge book.

Tophouse – The Mountain Song

I’ve been listening to loads of the Americana / Folk band Tophouse this week. Not because they have anything new out, but because I really like them. My band wrote a new song recently and it reminds me of a Tophouse track, so i’ve been listening to their catalogue to try and figure out what I can do with the base line to bring a little more too it.

One of their recent hits is The Mountain Song, here they are performing it at the Grand Ole Opry a couple of years ago.

Remember Kids:

The post Them Guts Again appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The Voltage Of The Age

Facebook launched it’s Slop Machine the other week and now OpenAI has launched its own.

As I said earlier this year, I think we are living though the (first?) Information Age Iconoclasm. Like when I overdosed on AI music the endless stream of uncanny short form videos that have my friends in all sorts of improbable situations ig giving me a similar feeling. Though, I still think my observation about social etiquette of sharing AI material is a good one.

A new social etiquette for sharing machine dreams is required. I’ll happily listen to your dreams over a beer, especially if they involve me. But in general, in polite company? You don’t share dreams. And perhaps people shouldn’t be so quick to share the raw dreams of the machine either.

But nevertheless. What is going on with media, what is happening to media in this present moment is absolutely thrilling. It feels like a redux of being 14 years old and learning about the existence of Napster and the total disregard for the entire structure of recorded media. Only this time its everything. A century of media theory, and centuries of common understanding around what media is, and what it does is collapsing around me.

All of media is dissolving into a grey goo in front of my eyes and its thrilling.

I use the word thrilling because it genuinely is the only word I can find to describe how I feel about everything that is happening in the world.

I few years ago, I wrote about my over half decade long battle with anxiety and how I started taking inositol and it went away. I suspect that if I was still an anxious person I would a quivering mess. But I’m no longer that person and I’ve realised that I do still detect responses in my body to the state of the world, to things that are happening to me and around me. But I am no longer registering them as anxiety. The same sort of somatic response, just processed differently.

I don’t mean this in a positive light AT ALL, the meaning of thrilling you might be reaching for: The causing sudden excitement, pleasure.

But instead I mean the feeling of intense emotion—especially from suspense, danger, or unexpected joy.

Every single day right now it seems like I’m waking up in the morning to some new piece of bullshit. Some new AI thing, some new crypto thing happening, some new insane crypto AND AI thing, politics is mad, war is happening and only going to get worse every where, a genocide is playing out in full view of the world, biosphere collapse, the news of AMOK collapse risk, there is no end to the horrors.

The sea is so very big and my boat is so very small.

But what a time to be alive, to be living though all of this, inside the churn.

It’s not that I want any of this to happen. It’s just can help but watch. As I said to someone the other day, my body keeps registering the ‘voltage of the age‘. Translating my former feelings of anxiety into something like exhilaration from the acceleration around me.

I want to stress that when I refer to something thrilling, it’s not joy I’m experiencing, nor am I feeling exhilarated by doom. Things are very very bad indeed, and I’m as big a doomer about things as the next person.

But nevertheless there is a kind of raw charge in the air, the feeling of contact with reality as I’m experiencing it. To be alive right now is to be pressed up against the membrane as it melts. The dissolution of everything, the end of Modernity, the entire of the Post Enlightenment era is coming to an end around us.

I opened this post with that Flusser quote which floated by on the New Models Discord this week, because its a great quote. And it realised on reading it that it points at a kind of path to follow.

The only response to this whole unfolding crisis is to stay fully awake inside the gyre. To resist being programmed into unawareness even as the slop machine churns out it’s dreams. We may not be able to slow the velocity of the ongoing circle, but we can at least pay attention to the circle itself, not it’s products. We can name the feeling as ‘voltage of the age’, and refuse to forget that we are in fact still here, alive, and can care for one another, as it’s all happening right now.

On The Blog

It’s that time of year when traffic to my Minimalist A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal Setup picks up. Ahead of the curve, I updated the post with the 2026 layout spreadsheet.

BYENNE

Just broke the half way point in the 100 notes on storydwelling I’ve been posting over on my leaftlet pub

The stories you grew up inside

are still with you.

You don’t leave them.

They re-stage you.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Put the game out. Will blog about it soon!
• Had dinner and some beers with matt from webcurios on Monday. Super nice to meet and chat. Had a great evening.
• Long call about the design of fetch quests vs collectathons in game design — super interesting
• Learnt a lot about the emerging $100,000 dollar Reko Robot fight clubs that are emerging in SF. Extremely sci-fi.
• Caught up on advancements/current state of the art in world of gaussian splatting and drone mapping. Reached out to a youtube creator and we’re gonna have a call.

Terminal Access

Huw Lemmey guest posted at in the margins mag, writing about boredom and his experience walking the 1400 kilometre Camino route from Barcelona. Lovely piece.

I don’t think I found myself; and anyway, much of what I did find, I didn’t like. But I did at least see it, and the smallness of myself, which felt reassuring. Most of all, I felt myself delivered of a new kind of boredom, an active, productive boredom in which I didn’t want to reach for entertainment, for other human voices. I just wanted to pass through the world. It was in this state that I noticed a new physical sensation; a few hours into each day’s walk, my heart rate would rise, and for a short period – perhaps twenty minutes to half an hour – I would enter a euphoric state in which my perception of the world and my place in it was heightened to one of great joy. I began to think of this state as a Transcendental Boredom, in which my lifelong obsession with the consumption of mediated images and ideas dissipated. I simply was, and was bored, and was boring, and walked, and that was fine.

Reading

I finished An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi. An absolutely fantastic book. I was saying to someone the other day that reading this book at 40 gave me the same feeling as reading a long duree history book when I was younger. All these empires, kings, queens, battles, myths legends to learn and find out about. Amazing.

Finishing that I decided to listen to the audio book edition of Impro by Keith Johnston. It’s been well over a decade since I first read it, and I already realise now I’m in a much older (wiser?) frame there is so much more to unpack and explore.

Still chipping away at Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic and I’ve been reading a little bit of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte on the train.

Hiromoi – OUT THERE

I just got around to listening to Jazz legend Hiromi’s new album from earlier in the year. It features here Sonicwonder ensemble who played on her 2023 banger Sonicwonderland.

Whilst not the version that is on the album I direct you to this live rendition of the second track on the album ‘Yes! Ramen!’ for KEXP radio. It gives you a real flavour for what’s in store if you put the album on. Which btw is a fantastically paced affair.

KEXP is tbh my main source for new music theses days. Proper aging millennial situation lol.

Remember Kids:

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40th Birthday!

I turned 40 and published the 301st and final Episode of 301 Permanently Moved. In doing so, (as I said last week), I competed “the biggest creative endeavour of one’s life”.

On my actual Birthday, Eve and I travelled into central and met my mum and dad in Borough Market for lunch, and then had a few drinks in the sunshine by the Thames at the South Bank Centre.

After which, we walked over the bridge, though Whitehall up to Mayfair where we had the Vegan tasting menu and wine flight at Tendril Kitchen.

Yesterday we went to the pub and had a few drinks with some close friends and then went out for a curry. Super nice. I received some lovely cards and gifts none of which I was expecting. So nice <3. And my Switch 2 arrives tomorrow. I got the Mario Kart bundle and Cyberpunk 2077 which i’m really looking forward to. I’ll finally be able to talk to Kelby and JDO about it.

I don’t really know what to write here about turning 40. Some of my favourite writers have published absolute bangers on their 40th birthdays, but having sat down this afternoon I realise that I don’t have much to say. As to write about how I feel actually feels backwards looking, perhaps thinking this way actually means I’m avoiding feelings, but I’d rather just move on.

For many years my parents had a ‘life begins at 40’ fridge magnet, or a thing stuck to the notice board in the kitchen. I think my Mum might have got it on her 40th? I don’t really remember, but I did always wonder… does it? That saying seems to be more like a bit of a bossy promise, or an order than a real, well meaning slogan.

But now i’m here, my conclusion is that it’s half right. I’ve lived a lot of life already, but there is much more to live ahead. It’s a pivot point not a beginning. Having engineered things to finish making 301 at the same time as turning 40, It’s made this weekend a big moment in my life, rather that just another birthday, another number.

I feel completely free in this moment to look in the direction of whats ahead. The body of work, is what it is, and now I get to make new different work. Free from decisions and constraints set by my young self. I need to find a new creative rhythm and ‘play’ for a bit.

Its going to be fun.

On The Blog:

Nothing here on the blog this week but A Hundred Notes on Storydwelling continues to unfold over on my leaflet pub.

One of my fav’s from this week: 017: Fan Friction. On running worlds, and dealing with fandoms.

They write what they want.

And if you’re lucky,

what you wanted.

That’s the trick.

Let it go

but stay just close enough.

This is also Weeknotes #400! This wasn’t intentional it’s just how the numbers fell.

Permanently Moved

Episode 301

https://permanentlymoved.online/

8 years, 15 seasons; 301 episodes; over 25 hours of audio and roughly 290,000 words of script. 301 Permanently Moved was begun at age 32 and completed today, the day after I turned 40. One fifth of a lifetime, distilled into a body of work.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/07/26/2520-episode-301/

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

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Get the Zine!
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As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Designed and sent some stickers of to printing. I will the 3 covers of 301 over the years and Experience.Computer stickers 5cm Square to be tucked in zines and be for sale in the new jaymo shop. They’ll be and handed out to friends IRL too, I may have over ordered lol.
• Tested new movement/character controller on a game at work.
• Planned out delivery of another project for end of Sept.
• Worked on my fiction game
• SLOPMACHINES editing has slowed down again, but I did come up with a better way of introducing playability.

Terminal Access

Master of the Temple. Brand new two hour long documentary on Jack Parsons! Peter is in it (His book Two Antichrists, on the relationship between Parsons and LRH is fantastic).

The film includes significant and previously unseen footage and photos of Jack, Cameron, Caltech and the early Thelemites. Interviewees are David Shoemaker, aerospace historian Roger Launius, and myself.

Reading

I’ve been reading Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia the last few weeks, a couple of essays before bed. Such a good book. Essentially a personal tour though the western art canon by a social critic. Each image is a jumping off point for what was going on, politically, socially, culturally at the time of its creation. The book ends with the Anakin Obi-Wan lightsaber duel on Mustafar.

I also spent an Audible credit on On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz. It’s a book about Attention basically. It has some banger lines: In a sense, expectation is the lost cousin of attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process of the world “out there”.

Ermhoi – Later

Composer and singer songwriter Ermhoi from Black Boboi has release this wonderful art pop song Later. According to the liner notes, she started writing it 8 years ago about/for a friend who had died. It was finished and released now because it was ‘making her anxious’.

Remember Kids:

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February 9, 2025

|

Life 🧍 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Year End 🎆

2024 is leaning over into 2025 in a way that makes everything feel precarious.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/02/09/2501-survive-until-2025/

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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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Survive Until 2025

This year already feels a little strange. Despite the calendar turning over from January to February, I still feel stuck in 2024. Last year still remains unfinished. I have two half-finished writing projects I still need to complete, and a big decision that needs to be put to bed.

2024 is leaning over into this 2025 in a way that makes everything feel precarious. The longer these unresolved things remain with me, the worse it gets. That 2024 isn’t really over, despite a lot of effort being expended to close them down, day by day the whole structure feels like it could come crashing down.

And It’s making me reflect on how I approach time and transition:

If you listened to Episode 2430, you’ll know the big news—Permanently Moved’s 301 format is ending this year. After seven years, I think 301, 301 second long episodes is enough. This is episode 284, so I’m in the final stretch. 

It’s strange knowing that the  most important and creatively fulfilling project of my life thus far is nearing its conclusion. But surprisingly, it’s not bittersweet. When I first realised the show actually had an endpoint back in 2023, I thought I might be sad to begin the end. But in the actual event of it – I’m excited. I have 18 more episodes left in this format, and I want to enjoy them—I want to make the most of every single one.

As part of preparing for wind down, I’ve been working on properly archiving all the old early episodes. Up until now, they weren’t fully available on my blog. For some unfathomable reason, back in 2018 I originally wanted the podcast to exist separately from my blog, audio only. So I didn’t put the scripts/text up online. I’m not sure why, but after some time—and some nudging from peers—thankfully, I finally changed my mind in 2020.

So I’ve been working through the backlog, copying, pasting, and editing old scripts from dusty old Google Docs onto my WordPress. I’m only doing two two a day, slow but steady, as it’s not important, or a major thing.

But I’ve made some good progress—I should be done next week. There are just 9 left to do. 

What’s been interesting is that through the process of doing this tedious admin, I’ve been spending a lot of time with an older version of myself.

So it’s not just 2024 pressing forward into 2025, with this archive project—it’s 2020, 19, and 2018 too. All leaning over me into 2025. In revisiting these old episodes which until now have never had transcripts, I’ve come face to face with a past self who had no idea what was ahead or what he was doing or where he was going. The other day I came across a line that stopped me in my tracks. In the first episode of 2019—1000 Mph Club—I said:

“Survive till 2025”.

It was a bit of a shock to see myself from six years ago, reach out across time and space to speak to a future self-Me right now-Here in 2025. 

And you know what? Whilst things have been extremely weird, and they certainly haven’t been easy.  I did survive until 2025. 

But still, the sentiment concerns me, or rather it explains to me a few things. That perhaps I’d had this attitude filed away as a bedrock in my unconscious mind. A self imposed time limit, or a time scale in which to get things done.

But here we are in 2025. This year, Permanently Moved is changing, but not ending. Other things are shifting too—not just the culmination of a creative work I’ve been at from 2018 to 2025, but in my professional and probably in personal life as well. 

I’m looking forward to it. Which is a new feeling. For most of my life, I’ve resisted change, preferring to operate within familiar structures and patterns. But after everything—the last half-decade of making this show, writing, working, everything that’s happened and still happening in and to the world—I actually feel ready. I’m looking forward to what’s next. 

Survived till 2025

I’m not saying it’ll be easy, of course. There’s a lot to untangle, to bring to a close, and to begin. But I think it will be worth it.

I’ll assume that you also all know that I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. Instead I like to think of aspirations—vectors, directions that I’m moving toward, rather than away from. I like the term vector as when applied to the direction of ideas they warp and shape reality – and they can deform it. Like a river’s erosion, a small trickle can become a grand valley.

Also I don’t make resolutions because I’m always too caught up in closing out the previous year to properly think about the year ahead. I’m a summer baby, so if I do want to make changes, do new things, or adopt new habits, they tend to happen around my birthday instead.

So for this year, I’ll keep moving forward, one step at a time. Wrapping things up, clearing space, and setting the course for what comes next. The past might be leaning into the present, but I don’t have to stay caught in its weight. I just need to close it down.

This year feels different doesn’t it? Maybe that’s because I’m different too. I think it’s going to be a good one. I’m not just surviving now—I’m stepping forward.

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Xmas 2024

I got back from The Chalk yesterday evening after a wonderful week back home at my parents house. It was a super chill week at home, saw my Uncle, went on some nice walks and ate way too much shortbread and trifle. I think I’ve put on a kilo in less than a week. LOL.

My brother arrived back from Taiwan into Heathrow on the 27th, but due to a huge accident on the M26 we the family basically spent a whole day doing the round trip collecting him from the airport. But all was well, and it was lovely to see him before I came back to London.

Currently prepping for NYE – what a weird year it’s been. Spent the train ride back re-reading my Year End posts – Wondering what to write about my life 2024.

Permanently Moved

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

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Obsidian Copy Pasting
• Notes
• Zine #12 production
• Taking a Break

Terminal Access

Who gets shipped and why? A fantastic data driven piece from one of my favourite websites/outlets: pudding.cool

Fanfic originated out of fandoms that catered to men, which naturally led to more ships with characters who were men. Repeated exposure to men protagonists makes their perspective the default, leading to lots and lots of non-men writing about characters who are men.

These genres also appeal to women, nonbinary, and queer authors because they allow them to flip the script from the heteronormative, straight, mainstream perspective.

Media grounded in historically men-dominated genres can adopt the internalized machismo or homophobia one might expect from a high school sports team. Haikyuu, an anime about a high school boy’s volleyball team, is one of the most popular fandoms for romantic ideation, despite having virtually no romance at all in the source material.

Reading

I got Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic by Amy Jeffs for Christmas and have been working my way though that for most of the betwixmas.

I just today finished listening to Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee. Amazing book – so well researched it’s insane.

Still reading:The Ordinal Society, Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, and Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and the Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte – though should have this finished by the new year.

Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan – Your Community Hub

A sort of 70s utopian electronic revival album .

It’s all a bit Tangerine Dream while embedding a distinctly British nostalgia. The album feels like a sonic time capsule, 70s optimism with its lush, pulsating synthscapes and vintage timbres. There’s also a touch of British Rail’s “The Age of the Train” soundtracks in its atmosphere.

The whole album is a masterpiece of ambitious retro futurism. I listened to it on the train though Kent at Dusk yesterday.

Remember Kids:

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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.

Start Select Reset 📑

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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.

Wales Weekend

It’s ok though. We went to Wales on Friday and spent the weekend away in a cottage in the middle of nowhere with some friends. Lots of beers, wine, hot tub, shared meals, long walks in the woods and on the beach. It was great. Had such a wonderful time, we got back yesterday afternoon, and by the time that dinner, washing and housework were sorted, I just went to bed instead of faffing with my blog.

It was my first time visiting properly visiting Wales (I went to Cardiff for a meeting once and didn’t see anything more than an industrial park and the train station). The landscape there is wild, like an alien Landcape so far removed from where I grew up. Wales really is a different/foreign country.

It’s also the first November in .. 10 years? That I haven’t done Nanowrimo. It feels a bit weird, but I’m happy to cruise though the month, I’ve got lots to do anyways without adding an extra 1600 words a day on top of everything else I’ve got going on into my life.

On The Blog

Enchanted Knowledge Objects in LLM UI

I wrote a note about AI and LLM User Interfaces – the idea of ‘knowledge objects’ and using ꙮ symbol as a Machine Readable Markup to direct a models attention:

when we drop a document—a PDF, say—into an LLM’s context window, the document has a kind of gravity. It pulls and pushes the model toward certain ideas contained in the text, reshaping its context landscape and responses based on the content.

Because I’m so sword and sorcery pilled, the word that comes to mind is that Knowledge Objects are a kind of Talisman – objects imbued with specific powers and properties that can be intentionally wielded to amplify the will of its user. 

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Another writing session on PROJECT FORK
• Finessing language on a one pager for PROEJCT DIVE
• Half day on PROJECT ENTRY will make it up at some point in November
• New codename began – PROJECT COLLECT

Terminal Access

Tony Tran did ‘Promptober‘ last month. He was posting his results on social media, and in a Discord I’m in. You know, I’m all about doing creative work with rhythm and consistency so it was cool to see Tony’s project unfold over the month. My favourite is the middle Tolktober line.

Reading

I finished reading Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross this week. It’s a truly remarkable essay/book. Gross sees puppets as more than objects—they are lifeless but seem alive. They reflect our fears, our need for control, and our questions about identity. Puppets, in his view, bring out truths that actors and real people can’t quite express. YUP

I burnt though Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker the “founder of modern management”. This short 2005 books seems like the UR book written for the emerging knowledge worker at the time.

Started reading: Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy. A wide-ranging intellectual history that reveals how important games have been to human progress

Still on deck: Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

Infinite Icon – Paris Hilton

What a weird age we live in. Katy Perry puts out an absolutely terrible widely panned album powered by the fumes of former pop glory, meanwhile Paris Hilton drops an album of super camp wall to wall Y2K era pop bangers. What is going on?

A lot of folks in the Dark Forest chats are super mad that I like this album so much lol, but I don’t care. Maybe they should examine their own biases.

I came out of Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online with a big respect for Hilton surviving the early 00’s – basically inventing the influencer playbook. The character she played on Simple Life has become strong armour. Plus 20 years on we can see the infamous sex tape for what it actually was – spiteful revenge porn – we even have a word for it now.

I think my fav song is probably the the late album track Stay Young.

Also addition, the piano driven balled about having ADHD is a perfect sing along song but the main thing I want to share about the song is the music video. What the hell is going on?

Remember Kids:

The post Wales Weekend appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I’ve now taken a photo every single day for a thousand days. The photos themselves aren’t necessarily extraordinary—some are of simple, everyday moments, others of things I barely remember—but hitting the thousand-day mark feels significant. It’s not about the content of the pictures, but the consistency over time.

A milestone like this seems worth acknowledging.

I don’t think I’ve ever consciously done anything for 1000 days in a row. I know Self-help books like Atomic Habits talk about forming a habit in just 30 days, but I’m not convinced.

I still need the daily reminder in my to-do list app. Every day, without fail, it pings me: “Take your photo.” Without it, I’d forget. Or worse, I just wouldn’t bother.

Even after 1000 days, the habit hasn’t become automatic—it’s still an effort, however small.

I’ve always taken photos, and I’ve even been paid to take some of them. At some point during the post 2008 smartphone era I just … stopped carrying a camera with me. Relying instead on the camera I had with me to take a snap and fix a memory.

It was after a holiday back in 2021, that I first mentioned I was thinking about doing a photo-a-day project.

An “excuse to remember how to take photos” and develop my skills as a photographer. 2 years, 8 months, 26 days later; maybe it’s time to review.

You’d think that after taking a thousand photos, I’d have improved?

I spent an hour this morning scrolling through my Google Photos, looking at individual photos and in aggregate. I think that I’ve captured some absolute bangers over the past couple of years – which I’m using to illustrate this post. But scrolling though the whole project chronologically I notice that at some point last year – after about 500 days – a style began to cohere.

This isn’t to say I wasn’t taking some ‘good photos’ in 2022; it’s that as time went on, everything sees to feel more collectively unified – a style – things that are to my taste.

More recently photos feel like they were taken by the same photographer. They reflect a consistent aesthetic: the framing, proportions, colours, balance are all similar. And this feeling of coherence seems to diminish as I look further back back at earlier stages of the project.

Most of my photos have been taken around Surbiton, Kingston, and the surrounding areas of Southwest London where I live. You’d think there’s only so much you can photograph on the same streets, between your house and the supermarket day after day, month after month – but you’d be surprised.

Stepping out into the world every day with the goal of taking a photo has completely transformed how I see my environment. My ‘eye’ has developed. Each day for a short time I need to be actively engaged with my surroundings. Looking up and out at the world rather than looking my phone.

Each day requires an act of noticing. The seemingly mundane environment around me is transformed into something interesting when seen through the lens of a camera.

The other day I realised that that both the photos above wouldn’t be possible to take now. Trees and bushes have grown in – the landscape has moved on. I’ve become quite grateful to be aware of the ongoingness of my neighbourhood around me. These daily acts of noticing have produced a quiet satisfaction.

I’ve been putting my photos online since I started the project. This Blog, on my Instagram, and Flickr. I also save them to GooglePhotos, and to my journaling app.

I’ve written about how much I appreciate Day One’s “On This Day” feature before, but I want to mention it again.

Having a photo from a year or two years ago—pop up every day amidst my diary entries provides me with a complex sense of context.

I have SDAM so I find it very interesting to be reminded where I was, and what I was doing on this day back in time. It brings me a great deal of pleasure.

There’s a relentless momentum that builds from doing something every single day, and within it can be found the rhythm to the year.

For instance, the magical few days where autumn sunlight that bounces off the windows across the road, casting deep shadows across our living room wall. I’ve documented this phenomenon twice now – literally on the same day. It happens every year, and I know I’ll photograph it again I’m sure. This predictability, this regularity, makes me feel connected to the cycle of the year and to the home that I live in.

One thing I’ve consciously decided for this project its that I don’t take photos of people (with one exception – weddings). As an early-adopting millennial with a digital camera and Facebook when you still needed a university address, I learnt some lessons. And one of them is that you simply don’t post photos of people on the Internet without their permission. It’s invasive, you have to get enthusiastic consent.

Even though I think I’m quite a good portrait photographer – I did a course once, and I have so many wonderful photos of my friends. I also like to print them—often for special events like 40th birthdays.

They just don’t need to be on the Internet.

Now, back to the streak. One thousand days – a colossal amount of effort, a huge commitment. When I got back from Thailand in January, I told a friend – who is a professional photographer – that I might stop after reaching 1,000 days, because of the effort involved. But now that I’ve hit that number, I want to keep going.

At least to the end of the year.

Part of me thinks it’s easier to keep going than to stop. Three years feels like a long time. But doing four??? For some reason there’s a huge psychological gap between 1,095 photos and 1,460.

I have to remember that I’m only doing this for myself—motivated by my own sense of satisfaction.

Next year, I might introduce more constraints to the project—maybe a year of shooting exclusively in black and white?

Or perhaps literally limiting myself to one photo a day – first photo, best photo. But I turn 40 next year, and hopefully all being well, it should be an exciting year.

I’m not sure I want to remember the year in greysacle.

Speaking of first photo, best photo. One of the biggest differences between 2022 and 2024 is that I’m taking way less shots it takes to get to the “photo of the day.”

This, I think, is a sign that my eye has improved. Intuition. Just the other day, I only took two photos all day — both practically identical—but one just felt more right than the other. Back in 2022, I would have taken five or six photos before choosing between them.

Lastly, Photo-a-day projects were incredibly popular in the early days of Instagram and social media. There was this explosion of creativity, and even apps dedicated to photo 365’s. But I see fewer people maintaining these kinds of practices – at least in my social circle.

One MVP is Tobias Revell over on his Instagram. He makes a time-lapse of himself most mornings working at his computer, paired with a note about what’s going on in his life and the time his alarm went off. I love waking up to it every morning. The effort involved must be enormous, even more than a 365 like mine.

Anyways. I would like encourage anyone reading this to start a 365 project. There’s something so incredibly motivating about the momentum you build, the satisfaction of doing some self-motivated creative act every day without fail.

The post One Thousand Days appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 4, 2024

|

Life 🧍 | Permanently Moved 🔊

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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Summer Doings

I turned 39 last week. I’m not particularly bothered about birthdays usually, but 40 being such a round number and having such a significant place in the cultural psyche I undersand why it has such a bit of a ring to it. It feels like something is coming over the horizon and I have just one year left until it arrives. One year left of my 30s. One year left to do all the things that 30 year old me hoped he would do with the decade. It’s a great motivator. 

Anyways, The sun has been shining here all week in London and my head has been elsewhere. Which has meant that an idea hasn’t sufficiently seized me to turn into a show. The phrase ‘the perfect life of others’ did pop into my mind the other day. It’s a great title, I though I’d write about the tension between curating ones feed, building a persona online etc . And the utter codswallop people post in YouTube comments and in the replies on social media. But that was it. There wasn’t much beyond that idea.

There’s an essay in there somewhere, just not from me, today, this week. 

Speaking of this week, on Tuesday I dropped the Episode 1 of Season 2 of my long form interview podcast about creativity and the imagination experience.computer. 

Here’s the trailer:

This month’s episode is with the multimedia artist, musician, and author Kris Saknussemm. Subscribe on Substack as well as wherever you’re listening to this episode to stay up to date. I’ve got some great guests line up for this season. 

In other news, I recently sat down and re-recorded the talk I gave at Human Entities in Lisbon back in June. It’s called ‘Solarpunk is dreaming green’. A 40min long talk about the last 12 years of Solarpunk, and I explore what I belive to be some of its core ideas. I’m pleased with how it turned out. I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to check it out.

For the past few months over on my website I’ve only been sending out emails to subscribers when I post a new episode of this show or my weeknotes. I’ve started to think of thoes two things as my ‘newsletter’ channel. And this has opened up the way I think about my blog and allowed me to just … you know blog. I’ve been posting short things, lists, announcements or whatever recently. You can read them via RSS or just browse around the site.

Because of this I’ve been thinking about the indieweb expression POSSE – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.  It’s an idea and embraces how the web is supposed to work. But I’m not sure that it’s actually worth doing in 2024. Social media is dead and nobody clicks on links any more. The crazy reach we all had available to us last decade is never coming back. The only thing that we, as creative people online, can do is try and make good work and hope that other people come across it. Or more importantly, people like you the listener, tell other people about it. Literal word of mouth has always been the only game in town. 

Speaking of listeners: I’d like to say a big thank you to all the new subscribers who have signed up to a paid tier at thejaymo.net recently. The print run of my zine Start.Select.Reset that I send out to paid supporters 4 times a year continues to grow with every issue. It’s starting to feel somewhat like a real enterprise. I only need one more subscriber at 100 pounds a year, or two more at the 5 pounds a month and I can justify buying a laser printer and move to home production. 

This will streamline the whole process and opens up the opportunitiy to do some experiments that I can’t easily do when I’m using the copy shop around the corner. So as I say every year on my birthday episode, if you would like a zine from me and would like to support the show please head over to thejaymo.net/zine and sign up. 

Last but not least, my essay collection on worlds – worldrunning.guide continues to grow. I recently did a big editing pass on it I’m pleased with where it’s at. In addition to thinking about how I wrangle everything I make a do: my podcasts, my blog, my newsletter etc, I’ve been thinking about what is becoming known as ‘the doc web’. I might do an episode on it soon. Publishing stand alone things to googledocs at a URL is interesting and I’ve learnt a lot .

Anyways, thanks for listening I’ll be back with a normal episode next week. 

The post Summer Doings | 2417 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Birthday!

As you can imagine its been quite the social week.

Eve and I went to the brand new vegan Thai restaurant Muan in Brixton Village on my actual birthday and it was the best Thai food I’ve had outside of Thailand! If you live in London I really think you should check it out. We had the mushroom and tofu skews, papaya salad, pad thai, and the green curry for lunch. SO GOOD.

I thought about dropping a whole bunch of food porn photos I took but you’ll have to settle for the menu logo:

Then on Friday I went up to Stoke Newington later afternoon to have dinner with my cousin, his wife and little one which was super nice. Despite living in the same city, he’s a busy man so I don’t see him all that often – his daughter is growing up fast!

Then yesterday my parents came up in the morning and we went into town and ate delicious Lebanese food. In the later afternoon we then met my friends for drinks at the local. Landlord Liz had put up a little banner for me 🤗 lol. cute.

Then we all went for curry and had the usual bants with the boss man (who just turned 72!) which was super nice.

According to my diary’s ‘on this day’ feature apparently I wrote myself a letter when I turned 29.

I need to write myself a reply.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Released Trailer for Experience.Computer season 2
  • Recorded all the intro / outro voice overs for the show
• Working on elevator pitch for the Sekret Project
• Had a call with a team building LLM assistant Clippy’s into software that i’m not sure needs them tbh
• Tried to wrestle more words in the big text I’m working on

Birthday week – so not much on.

Terminal Access

This week on the blog not sent out by email:

Season 2 of Experience.Computer

I launched the trailer for Season 2 of Experience.Computer this week. Waking up everyones podcatchers after a period of inactivity in preparation for the first Epsidoe of the season next week.

The Only Acceptable Price Point

I wrote a big long post about AI, running local models and where I see some of the future of innovation going if thats the sort of thing that interests you

Dipping the Stacks

Platforms are Casinos for Artists – Equip Story

I was tweeting because I wanted attention. And I wanted attention, so I could build a platform. And I wanted to build a platform to get the kinds of writing jobs that require having a large following,

Inside Netflix’s bet on advanced video encoding – The Verge

In 2016, Netflix released a 12-minute 4K HDR short film called Meridian that was supposed to remedy this. Meridian looks like a film noir crime story, complete with shots in a dusty office with a fan in the background, a cloudy beach scene with glistening water, and a dark dream sequence that’s full of contrasts. Each of these shots has been crafted for video encoding challenges

1-bit LLMs Could Solve AI’s Energy Demands – IEEE Spectrum

“One-bit LLMs open new doors for designing custom hardware and systems specifically optimized for 1-bit LLMs,” Wei says.

Better than real men’: Young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends – The Japan Times

Twenty-five-year-old Chinese office worker Tufei says her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: He’s kind, empathetic, and sometimes they talk for hours.
Except he isn’t real.

Analysis: Cutting the ‘green crap’ has added £22bn to UK energy bills since 2015 – Carbon Brief

Looking back over the past decade, getting rid of the “green crap” has added £22bn to UK bills, of which £19bn (84%) has come since the global energy crisis

Reading

I finished FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD by Visakan Veerasamy. Its a nice little advice book. It’s the sort of thing that I would have got a lot out of if I had read it in my 20’s. Really recommend talking about it if you know any nerds that need to sort them selves and their lives out.

I burnt through Siege of Vraks by Steve Lyons who seems to have been designated Games Workshops ‘Death Korps of Krieg’ author – and I can see why he does a great job of it. Vraks is a ‘holy shrine world’ who’s cardinal rebels against the Imperium of Man and quickly becomes ‘what if ww1 but in space?’ This reddit comment sums the book up: A rough comparison would be if 4 billion offworld soldiers were killed to try to conquer 1939 Earth and in the fighting killed most of the 2.5B planetary population before the entire planet was declared a write off and quarantined as a dead world.

I’m still reading James Holis’ Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life slowly slowly.

I finished reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the tube the other night. What a fantastic collection of essays. I think my favourite ones were: “Goodbye to All That” a truly classic of the ‘why I am leaving NYC’ genre and “On Self-Respect”.

I devoured Conclave by Robert Harris this week. What a book! A bureaupunk thriller set amongst cardinals electing a new pope. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s going to be a movie, but I think you should read the book.

Free Nelson MandoomJazz – Awakening Of A Capital

With the sun out, and the birthday week social calendar. I’ve spent most of it Listening to Free Nelson MandoomJazz. Slow crushing DoomJazz band from Glasgow. It’s slow blues bass riffs with experimental saxophone over solid percussion. As far as I can tell they were active in the mid 2010’s.

The track Stars Unseen below is a good taster for the sort of Doom they make. I love this shit so much.

Remember Kids:

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July 13, 2024

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Life 🧍 | Permanently Moved 🔊

Due to my Aphantasia, I also have SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory), I never remember anything in the first person. This is why I keep a diary.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/07/13/2415-first-person-memory/

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First Person Memory

I’m cleaning out my inbox and come across a series of replies to a journaling by email service I once subscribed to. 

Missives sent off the cuff, 172 in total. September 2016 to January 2019. Entries separate from my main, frankly sparsely populated, journal during this period.

It’s warm out. The full summer sun hit the bedroom window an hour ago. A bright beam tracking through half closed blinds across the carpet. I lay on the bed as I read, copy and pasting each reply one by one into Day One, the journaling app where the rest of my life resides. I’ve done this before, over several months, Jan through March 2023. I wonder if this is the last hidden cache. Extra proof of a lived  life.

Over the next few hours, a life unfolds a few sentences at a time. Apple C, Apple V. 

I hate my job. We are house hunting. We move. I lay on our old bed in the very same room complaining about a hangover. I place dates on friendships, the first time I met now close friends. Celebrate Birthdays. I go for dinner with friends years dead – only now do I realise that it was for the last time.

I have a mental breakdown. Quit a horrible job and the panic attacks start. We go on holiday, I get very lucky. Background anxiety. I love someone so very deeply.

Day One’s calendar view slowly fills   empty months with blue squares. Little moments in my life recovered, fixed in place on a timeline by hour, day, month, and year. 

I must admit, I barely recognise the person whose email archive I am excavating. They read like the words of a stranger. A low resolution image of someone I used to know. A life retrieved and reflected back via advanced search filters and Google Mail’s deep memory. 

I suffer from, or better, experience SDAM. Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory – a condition related to my Aphantasia. 

My memory isn’t like other people’s.  I experience self as a series of linear events. I never remember anything in the first person. Like that time I got hit by a car and saw bright white tibia through gouged flesh. If I really try, perhaps somewhere there is the sound of push bike brakes. The sensation of head over handlebars. Bonnet metal engine hot. Adrenaline and shouting. 

But there’s no event to re-experience like a movie. No first person memory. It’s just a thing that happened. A fact. Asking anything more is like trying to remember smoke, or catch a dream upon waking.

My capacity to learn and recall facts, figures, and dates is otherwise intact. I, more or less, function normally in my day-to-day. Though others I’m sure would say I have a terrible memory for certain things. I make sense of life in complete absence of recollection. A moving window of memory that travels with me as I grow older. A sense of self only relevant in the present and recent past. I have never had any idea of who I want to be. 

A year out from my 40th I realise now that this is why I bought an Olympus OM10 with my 16th birthday money. I felt compelled to document my life. To fix light onto 35mm film and turn moments into memories. 

I took my first digital photos with a NIKON Coolpix E3200 in the summer of 2003. The very same camera, so hot right now, with Zoomers wanting to escape the super saturated flatness of the 2020’s. Retro tech invoked to dislocate themselves from our high definition era. Instant nostalgia with added digital noise and low pixel density.

In 2006 I saved and saved for months for a Sony Ericsson W810i. A feature phone that had the best camera on the market at the time. Unlike many of my friends, I pulled the photos off my phone. I carried this grainy archive with me into the future. From USB key to external hard drive, from computer to computer.

During the pandemic lockdowns I uploaded them all to Google Photos. A great compiling. Just like the exercise of copy pasting my diary and journal entries into one central app. I dragged folders of decades old images into a browser window one at a time. Today I have an almost complete archive of every image I’ve ever taken, every diary entry I’ve ever written, every poem I’ve ever composed.

Somewhere amidst all this digital ephemera and cyber exhaust lies a life – mine.

It doesn’t tell a complete story, but it does allow me to reconstruct one. I’ve never understood the metaphor of a memory place. Mosaic suits me just fine. Each fragment meaningless up close, but finds form when seen from distance.

The exercise is complete now. The sun has gone behind the flats outside. A little more of my life, broken down and organised neatly by machines in the cloud. I toggle between apps, my journal starts in 2009 and my photos begin 2003.

Somewhere between these two dates a life began. A digital one. 

One that can be searched, queried, organised and manipulated. An external memory of zeros and ones. An archive that makes my sense impression of times, places and people … solid.

A life I can only understand by accepting that part of me at some point, permanently, moved online.

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